PRINCETON, N. J. % SM/. £ BV 4225 .J333 Jacox, Francis, 1825-1897. Traits of character and notes of incident in Bibl >^/';: -.)-J:^ r,-*- v--^-^*^ '>,*5^ (^1 ■^f •'•• *^-* ^H^ % . .. I ^i/i? r^-^":- /^- TRAITS OF CHARACTER NOTES OF INCIDENT IN Mihlt ^torg. FRANCIS JACOX, AUTHOR OF '• Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts,''^ '■'■ Bible Mttsic^^ '•''Aspects of Authorship,''^ '■'• Cues from all Quarters^'' ^c. ' That from all books the Book of books may gain, He ming:le-mangles sacred and profane ; Quotes Swift with DANIEL ; Byron with SAINT PETER ; EZEKIEL with the Eng-Ush Opium-eater ; Hood with Habakkuk ; Crabbe with ZECHARIAH ; Landor with JOB, and Lamb with JEREMIAH ; The prophet Samuel with his namesake Pepys ; Bunyan and Jean Paul with th' APOCALYPSE ; King Solomon with Shakspeare, Scott, Racine : ESTHER with Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene ; With Moses, Dryden, Dante, Doctor Donne ; 'Accomplishd St. John' with Divine SAINT JOHN." NICIAS FOXCAR. HODDER AND STOUGHTON, 27, Paternoster Row. 1873. BUTLKR & TaNNHR, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. PREFATORY. This volume may be described as, in effect, another and an enlarged series of Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts. What difference there is, consists mainly in something more like unity in the design and method in the arrangement. The NOTES " OF INCIDENT are indeed interspersed with the TRAITS OF CHARACTER ; but the order of time is, for the most part, observed throughout. F.J. CONTENTS. PAGE Prefatory iii Fellow-Creatures with the First Man . . . . i Genesis ii. 19. Derided Foreboders 18 Genesis xix. 14. Old Age next Neighbour to Death 24 Genesis xxvii. 2. A Tale of Twelve 35 Genesis xlii. 13. A Life Bound up in a Life 44 Genesis xliv. 30. A Flood of Tears 56 Genesis xlv. 2, 14, 15 ; Lamentations i. 16; ii. 18 ; iii. 48, 49. A Chosen Burial-Place .71 Genesis xlvii. 29, 30. Unstable as Water 83 Genesis xlix. 4. Wave-like Waverers : A Sequel to " Unstable as Water ". . 91 James i. 6, 8. Gratitude a Source of Resignation 103 Job ii. 10, Gideon's Three Hundred out of Thirty-two Thousand . 107 Judges vii. 6. CONTENTS. PAGE Summoned by Name 114 I Samuel iii. 4-10. The Stripling of Bethlehem Flouted by the Giant of Gath 126 1 Samuel xvii. 42. Absalom : Beautiful and Bad 133 2 Samuel xiv, 25. Longing for Rest 147 Psalm Iv. 6, 7. Old King David in the Field 162 2 Samuel xxi. 17. Jezebel : Bold, Bad Woman 188 1 Kings xxi, 5 seq. ; 2 Kings ix. 30 seq. Hezekiah's Exposition of his Treasures .... 205 Isaiah xxxix. i, 2. A Kingdom's Peace Insured for a King's Life . , .212 Isaiah xxxix. 7, 8. Insatiable 218 Isaiah Ivi. 11; Proverbs xxx. 15. A Garden Grave 226 2 Kings xxi. 18, 26 ; St. John xix. 41, Dust to Dust : Unwept, Unhonoured 238 Jeremiah xxii. 18, 19. Gedaliah : Fatally Unsuspecting 244 Jeremiah xl. 16 ; xli. 2, Pained Remembrance of Pleasures Past . . . .261 Lamentations i. 7. MoRDECAi : Unbending before Upstart Power . . . 267 Esther iii. 2. A Would-be Exterminator 279 Esther iii. 6. Esther's * If I Perish ' 284 Esther iv. 16. Malignant Mischief-makers 293 ' Psalm Iii. 3-5, CONTENTS. PAGE Like them that Dream 302 Psalm cxxvi. i ; Acts xii. 9. 'About Thirty Years of Age' 312 St. Luke iii. 23. Pretence-made Long Prayers 326 St. Mark xii. 40. Fearless and Defiant 338 St. Luke xviii. 2, 4. Pontius Pilate, the Governor . . . . . . 350 St. Matthew xxvii. ; St. John xviii., xix. Devout Soldier 364 Acts x. 2-7. The Voice of Herod and the Voice of the Mob . . 377 Acts xii, 22. Litigious 385 I Corinthians vi. 7. Childishness Present, Childhood Past 398 I Corinthians xiii. 11. The Inconsequent Creature, Man 408 Romans vii. 15, 19 seq. Recognised Fellowship in Suffering 418 1 Peter v. 9. Asking Amiss 430 St. James iv. 3. Forsaking the House of Prayer : * As the Manner of Some is ' 439 Hebrews x. 5. The Cloak left at Troas by Paul the Aged . . . 464 2 Timothy iv. 13. In a Moment, in the Twinkling of an Eye . . . 473 I Corinthians xv. 52. Index 485 i\ " Jy '--'c: ' Oj:, ck:^. TRAITS OF CHi%.CTESf' | — ^^"^^^^ FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. Genesis ii. 19. THE term Fellow-creatures is by prescriptive usage limited to those of human race. Our Fellow-lodgers, or some such patronising phrase, is the sort of term we apply to the brute ..creation. But at least the brute race are our fellow- creatures in having been created. And once upon a time the fellowship was closer than now. It is deHcate ground, that of the Garden of Eden ; and thankfully to be foreborne in these pages is all question of how far the sacred narrative is literal, and that, again, of the participation of animals in the result of man's fall. Enough, here and now, that we read of every beast of the field and every fowl of the air being brought to Adam, and of Adam giving to each a definite and abiding name. So far, at least, the narrative suggests conditions of intercourse hardly to be realised now. There is no hint of shrinking or mistrust on either side ; none of any let or hin- drance to frank and loyal intercommunication. We see his fellow-creatures with the first man, in fellowship amicable enough at any rate for him, presumably, to have so far studied the nature of each, as to give it an appropriate because characteristic name. That in them he did find society of some sort, fellowship to some extent, is seemingly implied in the statement that of all to whom Adam had given names, there was not found an help-meet for him. Made a Httle lower than the angels him- self, these, his other and humbler fellow-creatures, were made a little too low for him. Eve must be made to be on his level. Nevertheless, with these, his browsing, grazing, flying, fellow-creatures, he had fellowship of a sort. B 2 FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. He could not, for instance, have appreciated the point of Cowper's Hne about Alexander Selkirk finding their tameness a something shocking : " The beasts that roam over the plain My form with indifference see ; They are so unacquainted with man, Their tameness is shocking* to me," Whether the original instinct of brutes was to be afraid of man or familiar with him. Archbishop Whately would not undertake to say ; though he avowed his belief that the fear of man is the implanted instinct ; it being plain, at any rate, that either the one or the other — wildness or tameness — must be an implanted, and not an original instinct. He cited as universal the agreement of travellers, that when they have gone into a country hitherto apparently unvisited by man, neither bird nor beast exhibited fear, the birds perching familiarly on their guns, or standing still to be knocked on the head. " After the country has been for some time fre- quented, not only individual animals become afraid of man, but their offspring inherit that fear by instinct." Mr. Coventry Patmore's epistolary dame compares the way in which certain * In Hood's poem of The Hmmted House, we see the rabbits frisking about, leisurely and bold, as if they knew their enemy was banished ; while — " The wary crow, the pheasant from the woods, Lulled by the still and everlasting sameness, Close to the mansion, like domestic broods. Fed with a 'shocking tameness'." As if arrested by a charm, the eyes of Arthur Philipson, lost among the Swiss mountains, in Scott's Anne of Geierstein, remain bent on the lammer- geier, or Alpine vulture, which sits and gazes at him from the pinnacle of a crag not four yards from the tree in which the young man holds his pre- carious station. The near approach of a creature not more loathsome to the human race than averse to come within their reach, may well seem ominous to him. Was it, he speculated, a native vulture of the rocks, whose sagacity foresaw that the rash traveller was soon destined to become its victim? And was he doomed to feel its beak and talons before his heart's blood ceased its course? Had he already lost the dignity of humanity, the awe which the being formed in the image of his Maker inspires into all inferior creatures? For there the obscene bird sat and gazed at him, without displaying any of the apprehension which the fiercest animals usually entertain from the vicinity of man. FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 3 frank, unsophisticated natures, described by him, behave to that of the lower orders of creation on a desert island : " Greeting mankind, as I've heard say That wild things do, where beasts of prey Were never known, nor any men Have met their fearless eyes till then." Gilliatt, in Les Travailleurs de la Mer, alone on his barren rock, finds the sea-birds fearless of his presence. The very change in his face, says the author, with a touch of suggestive malice, "gave them confidence ; he had lost resemblance to men, and taken the form of the wild beast." So with Robert Penfold, in Mr. Charles Reade's Foul Flay : "The sea-birds walked quietly about him, and minded him not." He comes upon a roan-coloured pigeon, with a purplish neck, perched on his sick comrade's foot ; the bird, shining like a rainbow, " cocked a saucy eye at Hazel, and flew up into the air a few yards ; but it soon appeared that fear had little to do with this move- ment, for after an airy circle or toss, he fanned Hazel's cheeks with his fast-flapping wings, and lighted on the edge of the baler, and was for*^pping." Enoch Arden, stranded on an isle, the loneliest in a lonely sea, was not so badly off for sustenance : soft fruitage there was, nuts of the very biggest, and nourishing roots ; " Nor, save for pity, was it hard to take The helpless life, so wild that it was tame. " It is for a Robert Burns, at the plough-tail, 7iot on a desert island, to make his amende honorable to the field mouse he has disturbed, "wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie," in such terms as these : "I'm truly sorry man's dominion Has broken Nature's social union, And justifies that ill opinion Which makes thee startle At me, thy poor earth-born companion, And fellow-mortal." The fellow-creatureship is here, at least, frankly and hu- manely recognised. 4 FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. The sight of a redbreast chasing a butterfly moved Words- worth to the rather far-going reflection, that, — *' Could Father Adam open his eyes, And see this sight beneath the skies, He'd wish to close them again." This is in allusion to the penultimate book of Paradise Lost, where Adam points out to Eve the ominous sign of the eagle chasing " two birds of gayest plume," and the gentle hart and hind pursued by their enemy. Wesley maintained that the very foundations of the nature of animals were turned upside down at the fall of man; whatever evils inferior creatures endure or inflict upon each other being assigned as a conse- quence to that catastrophe. He argued, that, as man is de- prived of his perfection — his loving obedience to God, so brutes are deprived of their perfection — their loving obedience to man, the far greater part fleeing from his hated presence, others setting him at defiance and destroying him when they can, while a few only retain more or less of their original dis- position, and still love and obey him. Nor only death, ac- cording to Wesley (prae-scientific, iiot prescient, in matters geological), came upon the whole creation in consequence of the first transgression, but all death's train of preparatory evils, pain, and ten thousand sufferings ; and not only these, but all the irregular passions, all the " unlovely tempers," which in man are sins, and in brutes are sources of misery. " Inferior creatures torment, persecute, and devour each other, and all are tormented and persecuted by man." Byron's Lucifer re- minds his Cain that — *' war with all things, And death to all things, and disease to most things, And pangs, and bitterness, these were the fruits Of the forbidden tree. Cain. But animals, — Did they too eat of it, that they must die ? Lucifer. Your Maker told ye, they were made for you. As you for Him. You would not have their doom Superior to your own ? Had Adam not Fallen, all had stood. FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 5 Cain. Alas, the hopeless wretches ! They too must share my sire's fate, like his sons ; Like them, too, without having shared the apple ; Like them, too, without the so dear-bought knowledge." An sesthetical critic objects to Sir Edwin Land seer's painting of Van Amburgh and his Beasts, as a bad subject in itself, — the shrinking, retreating, cowed animals forming an unpleasant study; for one would wish to see them in their wilder or nobler natures; and so poor a figure is made of the tamer, that one feels angry with the lions and tigers for being afraid of him. A happier subject is suggested for a picture of this kind in the hymn to Aphrodite, where the goddess descends on Ida, and all the savage beasts come fawning about her, when, with a motion of her hand, she dismisses them to pair in the forests. Such noble animals, crouching in obeisance and wilhng servitude to a divinity, to beauty, and to innocence, are materials for a picture of a finer sentiment ; for this taming, the objector urges with some force, reduces the dignity of the brute, without raising the man. Una, with her milk-white lamb and all but lamb-like lion, is a symbolical theme upon which we have all sorts of varia- tions. Innocent girlhood, in friendly communion with crea- tures y^r^ natures, is a standard subject in suggestive literature. Now we have John Wilson, in his Eve?img in Furness Abbey, describing the ways and means of a darling daughter ; ' * Thou firom infancy Hast loved the timid race ; most sweet to thee To stand and look upon the hind at play In shady places with her fawns, and soon They all will learn to look upon thy face With fearless love, nor shun thy noiseless feet Along the moss-sward underneath the boughs So mossy of the over- arching oaks." Now we have the author of the Earthly Paradise, in his tale of the fostering of Aslang, to the age of sweet seventeen bearing the buffets of a hard mistress in silence, and gladdening all about her as she goes forth goat-tending in the spring-tide : — 6 FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. " The red-throat jay Screamed not for nought, as on her way She went, light-laughing at some thought ; If the dove moaned, 'twas not for nought, Since she was gone too soon from him, And e'en the sight he had was dim For the thick-budding twigs." Markworthy in many ways is Wordsworth's Clifford, to whose *' side the fallow deer Came, and rested without fear ; The eagle, lord of land and sea, , Stooped down to pay him fealty." The poet indited a sonnet to the address of the sparrow in the woods of Rydal which pecked at his lip, besides perching on his person, as he lay musing there. "^ Another sonnet he started from Philoctetes in the Lemnian isle, upon whose form couched like some monumental figure, or upon whose dread bow unbent, ** Some wild bird oft might settle, and beguile The rigid features of a transient smile, Slackening the pains of ruthless banishment. * * * * * Yea, veriest reptiles have sufficed to prove To fettered wretchness, that no Bastile Is deep enough to exclude the light of love. Though man for brother man has ceased to feel." St. Francis \ is duly commemorated in another of his poems * In his notes, Wordsworth proposes as doubtful the question, whether the bird in this instance was aware that his attentions were bestowed upon a human, or even a living creature. But a redbreast, he adds, will perch upon the foot of a gardener at work, and alight on the handle of the spade when his hand is half upon it. Jhis he had seen. t Walter Savage Laudor has this passage in one of his letters about that favourite dog of his, and inseparable companion in trudging the streets of Bath, Pomero : "He barks aloud at all — familiarly, not fiercely. He takes equal liberties with his fellow-creatures, if indeed dogs are more his fellow-creatures than I am. I think it was Saint Francis de Sales who called birds and quadrupeds his sisters and brothers. Few saints have been so good-tempered, and not many so wise." — Forster's Life of Landor, "• 433. FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 7 — how with beast and bird (stilled from afar — such marvel story tells — by casual outbreak of his passionate words, and from their own pursuits in field or grove drawn to his side by look or act of love humane, and virtue of his innocent life), ** He wont to hold companionship so free, So pure, so fraught with knowledge and delight, As to be likened in his followers' minds To that which our first parents, ere the fall From their high state darkened the earth with fear. Held with all kinds in Eden's blissful bowers." The white doe of Rylstone will occur to many readers of Wordsworth, — stopping in mid career, from among the rushing troop, — drawing softly near to the Lady Emily, laying its head on her knee, and looking up into her face with a look of pure benignity, mindful of other years. Not that the Lady Emily partakes of the fawn-like nature of Hawthorne's Donatello ; who, by the way, is described as growing up the playmate of all woodland creatures. Himself says, " You would have laughed to see the friends I had among them ; yes, among the wild, nimble things that reckon man their deadliest enemy. How it was first taught me, I cannot tell ; but there was a charm — a voice, a murmur, a kind of chaunt — by which I, called the woodland inhabitants, the furry people, and the feathered people, in a language that they seemed to under- stand." ^ At an earlier period we have a glimpse of him in the * Of this he gives Kenyon a specimen, uttering a sound that seemed t o fill the air, yet with no obtrusive clangour — the sound being of a murmur- ous character, soft, attractive, persuasive, friendly — a broad dialect, such as might have been the original voice and utterance of the natural man, before the sophistication of the human intellect formed what we now call language ; and in which dialect, broad as the sympathies of nature, the human brother might have spoken to his inarticulate brotherhood that prowl the woods or soar upon the wing, and have been intelligible, to such extent as to win their confidence. How the loss of this faculty is by Donatello himself ascribed to his fall from innocence, — is it not with subtle suggestiveness told in the romance of Monte Beni ? Again, of Dred, in another American book of note, we read, that the amusement of his vacant hours was sometimes to exercise his peculiar gifts 8 FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. woods, lying at full length on the turf, while the green and blue lizards scruple not to scramble over him with their small feet, and the birds alight on the nearest twigs and sing their little roundelays, unbroken by any chirrup of alarm, — recognising him, may be, as something akin to themselves, or else fancying that he was rooted and grew there ; for these wild pets of nature dreaded him no more in his buoyant life than if a mound of soil and grass and flowers had long since covered his dead body, converting it back to the sympathies from which human existence had estranged it.* No claim has Donatello to utter the lament of Shakspeare's Helena, ** No, no, I am as ugly as a bear ; For beasts that meet me run away for fear." But until he is overtaken with a fault,— nay, a crime, — he has little else than this creature-sympathy in common with the Margrave of A Strange Story, whom we see familiarizing himself with deer and cattle, which group round him quite tame, and feed from his hand.f Nor is Margrave the only criminal hero of Lord Lytton's to whom this congeniality is attributed. Of Eugene Aram, for instance, musing in tranquil over the animal creation, by drawing towards him the birds and squirrels from the coverts of the forest, and giving them food. A more benignant exercise of the peculiar gift than is predicable of honest old Tiff, in the same story ; at whose volition, all sorts of wild game, squirrels, rabbits, coons, and possums, appeared to come with pleasure and put themselves into his traps and springes ; so that where another man might starve. Tiff would look round him with unctuous satisfaction, con- templating all nature as his larder, where his provisions were wearing fur coats, and walking about on four legs, only for safe keeping till he got ready to eat them. , * " A bird happening to sing cheerily," — this is on yet another occasion, — "Donatello gave a peculiar call, and the little feathered creature came fluttering about his head, as if it had known him for many summers. — ' How close he stands to nature ! ' said Miriam, observing this pleasant familiarity between her companion and the bird," etc. — Transformation, ch. ix. Cf. chapters viii. and xxy'n., />assim. + *' In another moment he was half hid under the drooping boughs of a broad lime-tree, amidst the antlers of deer that gathered fondly round him . . .. I think I see him now as I saw him then : a white doe, that even my presence could not scare away from him, clung lovingly to his side, looking up at him with her soft eyes." — A Strange Story, ch. xlix. FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN, 9 forest glades, we read that, as he roamed onward, " even the wild birds seemed to feel, by a sort of instinct, that in him there was no cause for fear," and therefore did not stir from the sprays that overhung his path. In salient contrast with the experience of Shakspeare's Helena is that of the laureate's CEnone : *' Melhinks I must be fair, for yesterday When I pass'd by, a wild and wanton pard. Eyed like the evening star, with playful tail Crouch'd fawning in the weed." Shakspeare himself is the subject of a modern poet's picture, in his Plea for the Midsuminer Fairies, where wild things neither fear nor astonish him, even the timid hares going frankly near him, and the dappled does, without one start, and their fawns, in hereditary confidence,* — while neither wrens forsake at his footfall their nests among the leaves, nor speckled thrushes flutter far apart. So too when he goes the nimble squirrel's visitor, that brown hermit brings his hoarded nuts, — " Nor yet shall bees uncase their jealous stings, However he may watch their straw-built huts." Manuel Phile, who takes a good place among the Greek Christian Poets of Mrs. Browning, has some verses on what his translator calls "a Philhellenic species of heron," with a nice ear for the Attic dialect ; for, " If some barbarian bark approach the shore, They hate, they flee, — no eagle can outsoar ! But if by chance an Attic voice be wist, They grow soft-hearted straight, philhellenist ; * As in the French roman of the Lady of Monsoreau, who was familiar, as a girl, with the deer in the vast forests of the Duke of Anjou, — some of them even coming to her call, and one, "a doe, my favourite. Daphne, would come and eat out of my hand. — One spring I had missed her for a month, and was ready to weep for her as a friend, when she reappeared with two little fawns. At first they were afraid of me, but seeing their mother caress me, they soon learnt to do the same." — Ch. xiii. lo FELLOW-CREATURES WLTH THE FIRST MAN. Press on in earnest flocks along the strand, And stretch their wings out to the comer's hand."* There is in the Idylls of the King emphatic record of a queenly nature, which not only drew, magnet-like, the rustiest iron of old fighters' hearts, but which beasts themselves would worship : " camels knelt Unbidden, and the brutes of mountain back That carry kings in castles, bow'd black knees Of homage, ringing with their serpent hands. To make her smile, her golden ankle-bells." The River-god, in Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, promises his sweet charge, Amoret, " Not a fish in all my brook That shall disobey thy look. But, when thou wilt, come sliding by. And from thy white hand'take a fly." And he bids the privileged maiden, likewise, '* Do not fear to put thy feet Naked in the river, sweet ; Think not leech, or newt, or toad, Will bite thy foot, when thou hast trod." Wordsworth, in his Prelude, sketches one whom *' Birds in the bower, and lambs in the green field, Could they have known her, would have loved." But the potential mood has a gratuitous aspect, when the indicative, with its actual verities, has been so well worked by him and by other poets. Lilian Ashleigh, in the prose romance, is pictured beneath a willow, the birds dropping * A more auspicious greeting than the like semblance of it that welcomes Odysseus and his companions to Circe's realm, — *' Where mountain wolves and brindled lions roam, (By magic tamed,) familiar to the dome : With gentle blandishment our race they meet. And wag their tails, and fawning lick their feet." Not their own feet, as the structure of the other half of the line might imply, in the English of Mr. Pope's coadjutors. FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. ii from the boughs on the turf around her, so fearlessly that one alights amid the flowers in the little basket at her feet ; and the picture is typical enough to be trite. The son of the painter of it gives us a younger figure, cast in the same mould. " I know now, little Ella," says he, *' Why the blackbird in our laurel bowers Spake to you only ; and the poor pink snail Feared less your steps than those of the May shower. It was not strange these creatures loved you so, And told you so. 'Twas not so long ago You were yourself a bird, or else a flower." Mark again, in the typical instance of Gentleman Waife's child Sophy, how when her small foot once treads the sward, had she been really Queen of the Green People, sward and footstep could not more joyously have met together : how the grasshopper is said to have bounded, in fearless trust, upon the hem of her frock, and was tenderly caught by her, and how the gay insect, dear to poet and fairy, seemed to look at her from that quaint sharp face of his with sagacious recognition, l"esting calmly on the palm of her pretty hand ; and how, when he sprang off, little moth-like butterflies, pecuflar to the margins of running rivers, quivered up from the herbage, fluttering round her. Guy Darrell, in the same story, has, or seems to have, a spell of attraction over the swans on his lake, which claim his notice " with a low hissing salutation,^' sailing swiftly towards him when they descry him from afar \ and while he communes with them, after his sort and theirs, a tame doe, catching sight of him from her covert at a distance, comes in light bounds to his side, and pushes her delicate nose into his drooping hand."^ It is a young fawn that Mr. Disraeli m.akes * When Lady Montfort pays her shrinking visit to the Manor-house, as she winds her way through the stillness of its venerable groves, a heavy sigh of hers is said to rouse from its bed among the fern the same doe that Darrell had tamed into companionship ; and, stealing close to the saddened woman, the creature touches her very dress. "Doubtless, as Darrell's companion in his most musing hours, the doe was familiarised to the sound of sighs, and associated the sound with the gentlest notions of humanity." — What will He do with It 1 Book ix., chap. i. 12 FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. the first to follow Essper George, when that quaint worthy- amuses himself, if not Vivian Grey as well, by imitating the peculiar sound of every animal they meet. Various birds are attracted almost as soon, and even a squirrel perches on his horse's neck. When the two travellers come to a farm-yard, anon half-a-dozen horses follow Essper George in the road.* " How marvellous is the sympathy which exists between some persons and the brute creation !" exclaims another notable novelist, who professes to think, in the case of one heroine, early in a long series of heroines, that horses and dogs under- stood every word she said to them, — that they worshipped her from the dim depths of their inarticulate souls, and would have wilHngly gone to death to do her service. One interested gentleman observes all this with an uneasy sense of bewilder- ment, and takes to wondering whether these creatures are wiser than their masters, and so recognize some higher attri- butes in the girl. Were she mean, or cowardly, or false, or impure, he cannot beHeve. the mastiff would love her as he does ; nor can he think that in that case his thorough-breds would let her hands caress their velvet nostrils : the dog would snarl, and the horses would bite, as such animals used to do in those old days when they recognized witchcraft and evil spirits. " What an atmosphere of happiness she created about her wherever she went ! How joyously the dogs barked and leaped at sight of her, straining their chains in the des- perate effort to approach her ! How fearlessly the thorough- bred mares and foals ran to the paddock-gates to bid her welcome, bending down their velvet nostrils to nestle upon her shoulder, responsive to the touch of her caressing hand !" The contributor to the Saturday Review of a series of essays * *' A dog rushed out to seize the dangerous stranger, and recover his charge ; but Essper gave an amicable bark, and in a second the dog was jumping by his side, and engaged in earnest and friendly conversation." The pigs are next drawn to his side, and then three or four cows are seduced from keeping their appointment with the dairymaid. Broods of ducks and chickens are ready comers, while a flock of stately geese issue in solemn pomp from another gate of the farm-yard, and commence a cackling conversation with the delighted Essper. — Vivian Grey, Book vi., chap. ii. FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 13 on young womanhood, which won the attention they deserv^ed, makes it a characteristic of the "nymph" that (hke Essper George) she can imitate the sounds of animals for the most part with wonderful accuracy, and that she is fond of all animals, and fears none. We see her passing through a field thronged with wild-looking cattle without the least hesitation, and making friends even with the yelping farm-dogs that come snapping and snarling at her heels. In winter she is to be seen feeding the wood-birds by flocks, and always taking care that the horses have a handful of corn or a lump of carrot when she goes to see them, and that the cows are the better for her visit by a bunch of lucerne or a fat fresh cabbage-leaf. " The house beasts show their pleasure when they hear her fleet footsteps on the paved yard ; and her favourite pony whinnies to her in a peculiar voice as she passes his stable door. These are her friends, and their love for her is her reward." The Yolande of the Huguenot Family is prettily sketched, making friends with the whole stock at Corner Farm, till the great mild Juno eyes of the oxen look into hers with a familiar greeting, and the plaintive bleat of the sheep becomes an appeal for sympathy, instead of an utterance of terror; and the fancy sketch goes on to show her intent on coaxing the Norfolk hawk from the " holt " of ash and alder, the bittern from the ''lode," the gulls and terns from the nearest " broad." No attentive reader of The Cloister and the Hearth, a book that requires and will repay more than one attentive reading, will have forgotten the hermit in his cave making friends of the little birds, and com- forted in his great sorrow by their timely companionship, till his cell seemed illuminated by joy. A wonderful tamer too of animals, this Gerard Eliassoen, — of squirrels, hares, fawns ; and in particular of one presumably untamable mule, supposed by the parish to be possessed with a devil. He encloses a paddock, from which he drives all the sons of Cain with threats of excommunication, for on this spot of ground there should be no murder, he resolved. He tames leverets and partridges, and little birds, and hares, and roe-deer. He finds a squirrel with a broken leg, which with infinite painstaking 14 FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. he sets, and during the cure shows his patient repositories of acorns, nuts, chestnuts, etc. ; and this squirrel gets well, and goes off, but returns to visit him in hard weather, and brings a mate, and next year little squirrels are found to have imbibed their parents' sentiments ; and of all these animals each generation is tamer than the last ; and herein is seen the clue to the triumphs of mediaeval hermits in taming wild animals. What struck Darsie Latimer most in the domain of his excellent Quaker friend, Joshua Geddes, was the quantity and the tameness of the game. The hen partridge, as Miss Geddes and Darsie drew near, scarce abandoned the roost at the foot of the hedge where she had assembled her covey, though the path went close beside her ; and the hare, remaining on her form, gazed at them as they passed, with her full dark eyes, or, rising lazily and hopping to a little distance, stood erect to look at them with more curiosity than apprehension. In answer to Darsie's expression of surprise at the extreme tame- ness of these shy and timid animals, Miss Geddes tells him that their confidence is the result of protection in the summer and relief during the winter. " They are pets," she said, " of my brother, who considers them as the better entitled to this kindness that they are a race persecuted by the world in general. He denieth himself," she added, " even the com- pany of a dog, that these creatures may here at least enjoy undisturbed security." Enjoy it accordingly they did ; and in his enjoyed assurance of this, verily Joshua had his reward. And Scott was painting from the life when he painted both the man and the characteristic fact — crotchet, whim, hobby, call it what we please. Rousseau piqued himself on the liking manifested towards him by the pigeons, and he would spend hours at a time in teaching them to trust him. A very difficult bird to tame and to teach confidence, he affirms the pigeon to be; and all the greater the /mdos claimed by Jean Jacques for succeed- ing in inspiring his window visitors with such confidence in him that they followed him whithersoever he went, and FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 15 let themselves be taken whensoever he would. At last he could never make his appearance in the garden or yard but instantly two or three of them were on his shoulder or his headj and their attentions of this kind became so pressing, and ce cortege became si incommode, that he was obliged to check their familiarity. But he ever took a singular pleasure in taming animals — those in particular which are wild and timid. It seemed to him a charming thing to inspire them with a confidence which he never betrayed or abused.* His desire was to have them love him while they remained absolutely free. He carried on the like system of tactics with bees, and with like success. Mr. Froude declares " all genuine men " to be objects of special attraction to animals (as well as to children); and in his biographical sketch of Bishop- Hugh of Lincoln, he recounts the " very singular instance " of the liking shown for that prelate by the big swan of Stone Manor, usually so un- manageable and savage : the bishop knew the way to his heart; fed him, and taught him to poke his head into the pockets of his frock to look for bread crumbs, which he did not fail to find there. Ever after, it is said, he seemed to know instinctively when the bishop was expected, and flew trumpeting up and down the lake, slapping the water with his wings ; and on the arrival of his right reverend friend, he would strut at his side, and sometimes follow him upstairs. It was a miracle of course,-)- adds the biographer, to the general mind, though explicable enough to those who have observed the physical charm which men who take pains to understand animals are able to exercise over them. Coleridge is the " noticeable man with large grey eyes," who, in the well-read description by his brother bard, would * Tous les animaux se defient de I'hoinme, et n'ont pas tort ; mais sont-ils surs une fois qu'il ne leur veut pas nuire, leur confiance devient si grande qu'il faut etre plus que barbare pour en abuser." — Rousse3,u : Les Cofi- fessions, livre vi. f Many were the miracles first and last imputed to Bishop Hugo ; but he himself ' * thought little of miracles, turned his back on them for the most part, and discouraged them, if not as illusions, yet as matters of no consequence." — A Bishop of the I2th Century. t6 fellow-creatures with the first man. entice a congenial comrade to share his outdoor idlesse, the two together being as happy spirits as were ever seen : *' If but a bird, to keep them company, Or butterfly sate down, they were, I ween, As pleased as if the same had been a maiden-queen. " Professor Lowell would have made a happy third, — even if he had quizzed them afterwards, and himself. His essay on his Garden Acquaintance told us how all the birds looked on him as if he were a mere tenant-at-will, and they were landlords. "With shame I confess it, I have been bulHed even by a humming-bird." Scarce a tree of his but has had, at some time or other, a happy homestead among its boughs. " I love to bring these aborigines back to the mansuetude they showed to the early voyagers, and before (forgive the involuntary* pun) they had grown accustomed to man and knew his savage ways." Savage Landor had anything but savage ways with the creatures ferce naUircE on his estate, whether at Lanthony or at riesole ; and proud he was to assert in octosyllabics his good fellowship with the good creatures in question, all and sundry : " Cares if I had, I turned those cares Toward my partridges and hares. At every gun and dog I heard Ill-auguring for some truant bird Or whiskered friend of jet-tipt ear, Until the frightened eld limpt near. These knew me, and 'twas quite enough." Not that he had the sympathies, and so the insight, quite exceptionally developed in his contemporary. Dr. William Elford Leach, the distinguished naturalist, who succeeded so well in evoking affectionate trust from the brute natures he studied, and who was noted for his " power to tame the most savage beast or poisonous viper, with either of which he would play with impunity." f A recent biographer of Saint * But was it, could it be, in the nature (and art) of it, involuntary ? + "We are told of its being his constant habit at one time to have with him a wolf of a very ferocious temper, but which always obeyed and followed him in his walks, and which on one occasion, while in Paris, FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 17 Francis of Assisi, discussing the extraordinary power over the lower animals ascribed to him in all the accounts we have of him, observed that such a gift has certainly been possessed by many who laid no claim to supernatural powers, and is asserted in our day to be hereditary in her family by a personage so little like him as the famous novelist, Georges Sand. As though it were not all myth about Kilmeny making friends and associates of the wild beasts of the hill — the wolf playing blithely around her, the lordly bison lowing and kneeling to her, the hind tripping to her over the evening dew, and the dun deer wooing her lily hand, and buzzard and corby hurry- ing to the tryst, and blackbird and eagle together, — " And the tod, and the lamb, and the leveret ran ; The hawk and the hem attour them hung, And the merle and the mavis forhooyed their young ; And all in a peaceful ring were hurled : It was like an eve in a sinless world." That looks like Paradise regained ; at least, it goes far to reproduce Milton's picture of what might be seen in Eden ere yet Paradise was lost, in his picture of the first fair couple, linked in happy nuptial league : " About them frisking played All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase In wood or wilderness, forest or den ; Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw Dandled the kid ; bears, tigers, ounces, pards. Gambolled before them ; the unwieldy elephant To make them mirth, used all his might and wreathed His lithe proboscis." Fellow-creatures with, and not without fellowship with, the higher than primus inter pares, the facile princeps of them all, the first man. remained waiting for three hours at the entrance of the Jardin des Plantes, with the fidelity of a common dog, while its master went into the grounds. Hardly the sort of loiterer which the local police would bid Circulez done, monsieur. 1 8 DERIDED FOREBODERS. DERIDED FOREBODERS. Genesis xix. 14. THE warning voice of Lot, assuring guilty Sodom of impending doom, was, even to those of his own house, by affinity, but as the event proved true sons of Sodom, and loyal to her to the last, a voice that croaked without occasion, a vox et p7'CEterea nihil. He seemed as one that mocked unto his sons-in-law. It is the way of the world. Now when much time was spent, and when sailing was now dangerous to the ship of Adramyttium, which sailed for Italy with St. Paul on board, and certain other prisoners, in charge of Julius, a centurion of Augustus' band, oif the fair havens, the Apostle admonished those in authority, and said unto them, " Sirs, I perceive that this voyage will be with hurt and much damage, not only of the lading and ship, but also of our lives." Nevertheless, the centurion believed the master and the owner of the ship, more than those things which were spoken by Paul. It is the way of the world. The ante-Diluvian world had its Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and heeded him not while the ark was a-building. Troy had its Cassandra; and a proper croaker and a veritable bore Troy thought her. Only a bewildered, distraught (Enone has a mind to " rise and go Down into Troy, and ere the stars come forth Talk with the wild Cassandra, for she says A fire dances before her, and a sound Rings ever in her ears of armed men. " Her, in the words of Tryphiodorus, Apollo made to be a true prophetess, and yet to find none to believe her prophecies : " ^r\v yap ^ XirbWwv 'AfJLip&repov fidvTLv t ayaObv Kal diriaTov ^drjKe." As Chamfort says, in his Afaximes et Pensces^ *'Le role de rhomme prevoyant est assez triste ; il afflige ses amis, en leur annon^ant les malheurs auxquels les expose leur imprudence. DERIDED FOREBODERS. 19 On ne le croit pas ; et, quand ces malheurs sont arrives, ces memes amis lui savent mauvais gre du mal qu'il a predit." Cassandra goes into exile after Troy is fallen, but her fate is a dismal one. A critic has said of the Agamemnon^ of ^schylus, that the masterpiece of that great tragedy is the introduction of Cassandra, who accompanies the king of men, and who, in the very hour of his return, amidst the joy and pomp that welcome him, is seized with the prophetic inspiration, and shrieks out those ominous warnings, fated ever to be heard in vain. Scarcely has the prophetess withdrawn, when we hear behind the scene the groans of the murdered king, and anon Clytem- nestra is seen standing stem and lofty, by the dead body of her lord. The critics "have dwelt too much on the character of Clytemnestra — it is that of Cassandra which is the master- piece of the tragedy." In a latter-day tragedy on the same subject, that Clytemnestra which was the first poem published by the son of the critic just quoted, the captive Cassandra figures imposingly and impressively : — ' ' Her heavy-fallen hair down her white neck (A dying sunbeam tangled in each tress) All its neglected beauty pours one way. 1 Her looks bend ever on the alien ground, As tho' the stones of Troy were in her path. And in the pained paleness of her brow Sorrow hath made a regal tenement." In Shakspeare's Troilus and Cressida^ she would have all Trojans cry, lend her ten thousand eyes, and she would fill them with prophetic tears : — *' Virgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled elders, Soft infancy, that nothing canst but cry, Add to my clamours ! Let us pay betimes A moiety of that mass of moan to come." But only Hector is wrought upon, or owns to be so, by these " high strains of divination " in his sister; and in an after scene he too is inexorable to her appeals, when Cassandra foresees his fall, and with it the fall of Troy ; and when even Priam shares her foresight, and backs her entreaties, " hke a prophet DERIDED FOREBODERS. suddenly enrapt," to tell him that the day is ominous. Says Troilus, — " This foolish, dreaming, superstitious girl Makes all these bodements, " A picture for all time is that painted by Josephus, of the son of Ananus, who, day and night in the narrow streets of the doomed city went along, repeating with a loud voice his burden of woe to Jerusalem and the Temple ; who uttered no remonstrance when severely beaten, but still went on reiterating his fearful message of woe ; who, when led before the Roman governor, Albinus, and scourged till his bones could be seen, uttered neither shriek of pain nor prayer for mercy, but raising his sad and broken voice as loud as he could, at every blow cried out — "Woe, woe to Jerusalem!" All the four years that intervened before the war, this rustic Jesus, son of Ananus, paid no attention to any one, nor even spoke, except- ing the same words of " Woe, woe to Jerusalem ! " It was during the siege that he suddenly cried out, " Woe, woe to myself ! " and was struck dead by a stone from a balista. Heartily laughed at, according to the Scottish legend, was Thomas the Rhymer, for the prediction he had uttered that the sixteenth day of March, in a memorable year for Scotland, should be the stormiest day that ever Scotland had witnessed. All the heartier was the laughing when the day continued as it began, remarkably clear, mild, and temperate. The laughing was at its height, when an express brought to the Earl of March the news of King Alexander's death, from the stumbling of his horse on the sea-coast of Fife (betwixt Burntisland and Kinghorn, the spot being still known as the King's Crag). "There," said the derided seer, "that is the storm which I meant ; and there was never tempest to bring worse luck to Scotland." The foreboding was not falsified, but all too truly confirmed the repute of the Rhymer as True Thomas. Now, says Mr. Froude, describing the state of things in 1532, " the Nun of Kent grew louder in her Cassandra wailings." She had an interview with the King on his return through DERIDED FOREBODERS. 21 Canterbury from the Continent, to try the effect of her Cassandra presence on his fears. Many are they that set up for Cassandras. Even a Mistress Afra Behn incHned to claim* the dignity, when the frivolous court of Charles II. gave no credit to her discovery of the intention of the Dutch to sail up the Thames and Medway ; a neglect to their fair envoy (at Antwerp) which made her renounce politics from that time forth. My Lord Chester- field, wTiting, in 1759, on the gloomy prospect of affairs in Germany, remarks, not without cause to show for it, " I have, as you know, long foretold the now-approaching catastrophe ; but I was Cassandra." Chateaubriand complacently records his prediction that France wished to imitate England, and that Lewis the Sixteenth would perish on the scaffold. " Ferron was struck by my prediction : it was the first I had ever uttered. Since that time, I have made a great many others quite as true, and quite as little listened to." None found he to adopt towards hwi the style of Hamlet to his father's ghost : — ' ' If thou art privy to thy country's fate, Which, happily, foreknowing, may avoid, Oh, speak ! " The historian of the United Netherlands, describing how difficult Germany was to rouse in behalf of the Protestant league, speaks of the "jeremiads" of old John of Nassau as growing louder than ever at this crisis, but his voice was of one crying in the wilderness: the wrath to come of that horrible Thirty Years' War, which he was not to witness, seemed to inspire all his prophetic diatribes ; but there were few to heed them. The history of the conquest of Granada commemorates the sensation produced in the Alhambra, at the time of the expedition of Muley Aben Hassan against the fortress of ■* Dryden's young favourite, Mistress Anne Kilhgrew, wrote a copy of verses, of which the concluding couplet is voted "excellent" by Leigh Hunt :— '* I willingly accept Cassandra's fate, To speak the truth altho' believed too late." 22 DERIDED FOREBODERS. Zahara, by a voice that rose from the midst of the obsequious crowd, and burst like thunder upon the ears of the Moorish monarch, — proclaiming, " Woe ! woe ! woe ! to Granada : its hour of desolation approaches ! The ruins of Zahara will fall upon our heads : my spirit tells me that the end of our empire is at hand ! " All shrank back aghast, and left the denouncer of woe standing alone in the centre of the hall. He is described as an ancient and hoary man, in the rude attire of a dervish : age had withered his form without quenching the fire of his spirit, which glared in baleful lustre from his eyes. By the Arabian historians he is called one of those holy men termed santons, who passed their lives in hermitages, in fasting, medita- tion, and prayer, until they attained to the purity of saints and the foresight of prophets ; by Fray Antonio Agapida, " a son of Belial, one of those fanatic infidels possessed of the devil, who are sometimes permitted to predict the truth to their followers ; but with the proviso that their predictions shall be of no avail." Like the stormy petrel of the song : — " O'er the deep, o'er the deep, Where the whale, and the shark, and the sword-fish sleep, Outflying the blast and the driving rain, The Petrel telleth her tale — in vain ; For the mariner curseth the warning bird Who bringeth him news of the storms unheard. Ah ! thus doth the prophet of good or ill Meet hate from the creatures he serveth still ; Yet he never falters." To the same hand that penned these lines we owe the picture oi The Prophet :— "Time flew :— sad Wisdom from his heart arose, And touched his brain ; And he stood up, 'midst all a Prophet's woes. And spoke, — in vain ! He spoke : — men hearken'd to his piercing cry, With smiles, with scorn ; But the dim Future felt his threatenings nigh. And shook, — unborn ! " What the stormy petrel is in Barry Cornwall's song, the DERIDED FOREBODERS. 23 swallow is in ^sop's fable — the swallow that warns the other birds of the nets to be made of the flax sown in the farmer's field, if they haste not to pick up the seed, and destroy it. The swallow is slighted, and the flax appears above ground. Again she warns the feathered tribes of their impending danger, and would have them pluck the plant in the bud; but they neglect her warnings, and the flax grows up into the high stalk. Yet again she urges them to attack it, for even now it is not too late. " But all that she could get was to be ridiculed and despised for a silly pretending prophet." Hence came about the departure of the swallow from the society of unthinking birds, and her abode among the dwellings of men. La Fontaine does not omit to pair her off with Cassandra : — " Les oisillons, las de Tentendre, Se mirent a jaser aussi confusement Que faisaient les Troyens quand la pauvre Cassandre Ouvrait la bouche seulement." The moral of the French fabulist is, that " Nous n'ecoutons d'instincts que ceux qui sont les notres, Et ne croyons le mal que quand il est venu." For only of application to the " simply meek " is Wordsworth's apostrophe to authentic presentiments : — ' ' When some great change gives boundless scope To an exulting nation's hope, Oft, startled and made wise By your low-breathed interpretings, The simply-meek foretaste the springs Of bitter contrai'ies. " Schiller has made Cassandra the subject of a ballad at once stirring and suggestive. Glad hands in Troy prepare the banquet, while her ear is spell-bound in dismay at the mournful steps of gods retreating, to return no more. ' ' And men my prophet-wail deride ! The solemn sorrow dies in scorn ; And lonely in the waste I hide The tortured heart that would forewarn. 24 OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. Cursed with the anguish of a power To view the fates I may not thrall, The hovering tempest still must lower — The horror must befall. " OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. * Genesis xxvii. 2. IT came to pass, that when Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see, he called Esau his eldest son, and said to him, '' Behold now, I am old, I know not the day of my death." Because he was old, he knew that he might die any day. So indeed may the youngest. But the old have one foot already in the grave, simply because they are old ; and they know that the end may come to- morrow, must come soon. That Isaac was pensively disposed, constitutionally; that he was of a meditative habit even in early life ; may be inferred from what is told us of him on the eve of marriage, that he went out to meditate in the field at the eventide.* * Those who are familiar with the li'^erature of the first Methodists may recall a passage in Whitefield's controversy with Wesley : "I have a garden near at hand, where I go particularly to meet and talk 'with my God at the cool of every day." The biographer of the Rev, William Grimshaw relates how zealously that rather eccentric pastor " endeavoured to suppress the generally prevailing custom in country places during the summer, of walking in the fields on a Lord's day, in the evening, in companies. He not only," writes his panegyrist, "bore his testimony against it from the pulpit, but reconnoitred the fields in person to detect and reprove the delinquents." For he no more gave them credit for being peripatetic musers in the gloaming, after Isaac's sort, than he would have done in Bosola's case, when that night-bird is asked, in Wel^ster's tragedy, how he comes a-field in the dark, and answers, *' I came to say my prayers." The aged Christian convert of Pompeii, in the classical romance of its last days, is more to the purpose : "And now," said he, rising at length, as the sun's last ray died in the west, " now, in the cool of twilight, I pursue my way towards the Imperial Rome." "But the night is chill for thine age, my father, and the way is long," etc. "Kind son, night and solitude make the ladder round which angels cluster, and beneath which my spirit can dream of God. . . . The stars are the Scriptures of Heaven, the tokens of love, and the witnesses of immortality. Night is the pilgrim's day." OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. 25 Of such a habit we have a type in Jonathan Edwards, whose deepest feeHngs are naturally expressed when he describes his pleasure in walking *'in a solitary place in his father's pasture," and tells us how he often used to "sit and view the moon in continuance," and gaze his fill on the starry hosts, " to behold the sweet glory of God in these things ; in the meantime singing forth with a low voice my contem- plations of -the Creator and Redeemer." Wordsworth's auto- biographical poem, the Prelude, is somewhere characterized by Mr. Frederick Robertson as a noble work, that had made his eyes fill again and again, not by its pathos, but by its lofty tone and translucent purity; a severe work, worthy of patriarchal times, when men went out into the fields to meditate at eventide, and disciplined their spirits by the pure influences of rock, hill, stream, forest, twilight, and darkness, and that too, as in Isaac's case, on the eve of marriage. The father of the faithful, in the fulness of his faith in the promise, considered not his body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old. Isaac, his son, did consider his body as well-nigh dead, when he made provision for his son's birthright — considered it as well-nigh dead, for, being old, he knew not the day of his death; and that which decayeth, by waxing old, is ready to vanish away. Jeremy Taylor takes occasion to show, in a funeral sermon, that infancy is as liable to death as old age, and equally exposed to danger, and equally incapable of a remedy; with this only difference, that old age hath diseases incurable by nature, and the diseases of childhood are incurable by art ; and both the states are the next heirs of death. This only difference, however, makes all the difference. A Maucroix at fourscore years old may well, and perhaps wisely, say of each day bestowed upon him by Heaven, that — " II n'appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu'a moi, Et celui de demain n'appartient a personne." But no such reasoning avails to weaken the force of what 26 OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in one of her letters, calls the " good Enghsh proverb," Young people may die, but old must. Gibbon demurs, in a foot-note to his autobiography, to Buffon's conclusion, drawn from our disregard of the possibihty of death within the four-and-twenty hours, that a chance which falls below or rises above ten thousand to one, will never affect the hopes or fears of a reasonable man. The fact is true, he admits ; but our courage he alleges to be the effect of thoughtlessness, rather than of reflection. If a public lottery were drawn for the choice of an immediate victim, and if our name were inscribed on one of the ten thousand tickets, should we, he asks, be perfectly easy? Among the secondary seeming distinctions that yet so sharply demarcate between youth and age, Elia forcibly dwells on age's jealousy of inroads on its dwindling allotment of time : it has fewer sands in its glass to reckon upon, and cannot brook to see them drop in endlessly succeeding impertinences. " The growing infirmities of age manifest themselves in nothing more strongly than in an inveterate dislike of interruption." While youth was, we had vast reversions in time future ; now, ''we are reduced to a present pittance, and obliged to economize in that article. We bleed away our moments now as hardly as our ducats. We cannot bear to have our thin wardrobe eaten and fretted into by moths." We feel all too feelingly the difference between the monosyllables may and must, in the matter of death, as defined in the adage already cited. Vividly picturesque is Chaucer's image of Old Age, as indeed so much of his imagery is — " Eld the hoar, that was in the vaunt ward, and bare the banner before death." John Locke, in a letter written by him when turned of seventy, professes himself cheerful in his retrospect and prospect, and thus touches on the unknown residuum of his days : "Whether it be a month or a year, or seven years longer, the longest any one out of kindness or compliment can propose to me is so near nothing when considered, and in respect of eternity, that if the sight of death can put an end OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. 27 to the comforts of life, it is always near enough, especially to one of my age, to leave no satisfaction in living." The may and the must of the proverb are indirectly discriminated, by the bard of Olney in his letter to his cousin on Lady Cowper's death : " She had reached those years that are always found upon the borders of another world. . . . Your time of life is comparatively of a youthful date. You may think of death as much as you please (you cannot think of it too much), but I hope you will live to think of it many years." In arguing that it is length of time that makes attachment, the late Frederick Robertson observed that we become wedded to the sights and sounds of this lovely world more closely as years go on; young men, with nothing deeply rooted, are prodigal of life; it is an adventure to them, rather than a misfortune, to leave their country for ever. But with the old man it is like tearing his own heart from him. "And therefore it is, that when men approach that period of their existence when they must go, there is an instinctive lingering [as when Lot quitted Sodom] over things which they shall never see again. Every time the sun sets, every time the old man sees his children gathering round him, there is a filling of the eye with an emotion which we can understand." Longfellow likens the shadows of the mind to those of the body : in the morning of life they all He behind us ; at noon we trample them under foot ; but in the evening they stretch long, broad, and deepening before us. Are not, then, he asks, the sorrows of childhood as dark as those of age? Are not the morning shadows of life as deep and broad as those of evening. Yes, is the answer ; " but morning shadows soon fade away ; while those of evening reach forward into the night, and mingle with the coming darkness." When Ion in the bloom of youth lets fall the significant sentence, whether he live or die, — " Die !" exclaims his father, " I am old." But Adrastus is assured, — *' Death is not jealous of thy mild decay, Which gently wins thee his : exulting Youth 28 OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. Provokes the ghastly monarch's sudden stride, And makes his horrid fingers quick to clasp His shivering prey at noontide." Caraffa, again, in Lander's tragedy, is told that his days are numbered, and answers, "All men's are." Fra Rupert replies, " But some are not notcht off like schoolboy's days anxious to see his parent." Shakspeare's Gremio asks, " And may not young men die, as well as old ? " but it does not go far to dispose of Tranio's objection concerning him, "That's but a cavil ; he is old, I young." The comparative position of youth might be expressed in Hotspur's statement as- to supply : "Looks he not for it?" the old man, for death. "So do we," says Vernon, as the young may say. But " His is certain, ours is doubtful." Hotspur rejoins, We that are young may die soon, and may live to be old. He, the greybeard, has lived to be old, and so has lived his life, and now lives under suiferance, with peremptory and prompt notice to quit. But the pithiest summary of the question is perhaps that in the four lines uttered, two apiece, by prince and abbot in The Golde7i Legend: '^Frmce Henry. We must all die, and not the old alone ; The young have no exemption from that doom. Abbot. Ah, yes ! the young MAY die, but the old must ! That is the difference." According to the accepted chronology, it would seem that Isaac himself lived some forty years after the time that he said he was old, and therefore knew not the time of his death, when it might overtake him on the morrow, or not for a few years yet. But he would be wise in time, and leave nothing unprepared. For he felt that he was failing, breaking ; he felt the chill of age overshadowing him, and he knew from what quarter that cold wind blows ; he knew that old age is next neighbour to death. Men vary, according to constitution or temperament and character, in their computations of the OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. 29 commencing epoch of old age.* Burns, who died in his thirty-eighth year, is known to have felt the approach of age before he had reached the noon of life, and by a kind of presentiment of his o^vn premature decline, he had noted down forty-five as the evening of life's closing day : "When ance that five-and -forty's speel'd, See crazy, weary, joyless eild, Wi' wrinkled face, Comes hostin', hirplin'-, owre the field, Wi' creepin' pace." When Whitefield returned from America to England for the last time, Wesley is said to have been struck with the change in his appearance: ''he seemed," says he in his journal, "to be an old man . . . though he has hardly seen fifty years; and yet it pleases God that I, who am now in my sixty-third year, find no disorder, no weakness, no decay, no difference from what I was at five-and-twenty, — only that I have fewer teeth and more grey hairs." Perthes writes : — " Certainly the age beyond fifty brings mth it peculiar dangers . . . but I am still of opinion that a sterling man is not complete till old age. In my own case, I cannot complain of too much age, but rather of too much youth " ; and he * Asked what he calls the periods of decay, Cagliostro answers, — The natural periods : in a state of nature, man's strength increases until thirty-five years of age ; it then remains stationary until forty ; and from that time forward it begins to diminish, but almost imperceptibly till fifty ; then the process becomes quicker and quicker to the day of his death. But, "in our state of civilization, when the body is weakened By excess, cares, and maladies, the decadence begins at thirty-five." "After fifty," says Burke, "man becomes every year more sensible to the period of debility and decreptitude, and the maladies that precede a final dissolution. '■'■ Non mm qualis eram,^^ writes Swift from Dublin to Pope, in 1723. " I left you in a period of life when one year does more execution than three at yours." Six years added to forty-five "is not a trifle," protests Turner the painter, in one of his bargaining letters, respecting engagements in hand and the time they would take. ' ' This baiting, my good friend, " writes Carrick to Colman, in his worry and weariness, "is no joke after forty." Sir William Farquhar emphatically assured the first Lord Malmesbury that Pitt died " of old age " at forty-six, as much as if he had been ninety. 30 OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. declared that in presence of so many old young people, he often feared there was in him something of the wandering Jew. The author of an essay on Growing Old, specifies twenty-eight, thirty-five, and forty-eight as marked years, on reaching which one still feels young ; and adds, " many men honestly think that sixty-five or sixty-eight is the prime of life." In another of his essays, having to deal with the welcome we are apt to accord to the month of October, when its early days are fine, pleasing ourselves with the beHef that October is one of the finest months in the year, and that we have many warm, bright, still days before us, the same writer observes, that in all this we, of course, are conscious of practising upon ourselves a cheerful, transparent delusion ; even as the man of forty-eight often declares that about forty-eight or fifty is the prime of life. M. Charles de Bernard is at once eloquent and malicieux on the subject of the culminating point of life, — when first some light symptoms of decline play off a sort of prelude to that concert of gloomy avertisse?fients, and sombre foreshadowings, that each succeeding year makes more sonorous, more me- nacing, more to be dreaded, and the last movement of which leads straight to the tomb. Wrinkles begin to furrow the brow, which expands as the locks become thinner all around; and, according to difference of temperament, the figure either insensibly s'evide com?iie celle des viedailles consulaires, or waxes gross and double-chinned and rotund exceedingly. When a man has once put his foot on this terrain mcline, certain in- voluntary signs afford proof of his having all at once discovered a new horizon. For awhile, he every morning " passe en revue la douzaine de fils d'argent qui ornent chacune de ses tempes, en poussant, s'il croit s'apercevoir que le chiffre augmente, une interjection que je n'ecrirai pas." He seems, like il penseroso, in one of Barry Cornwall's dramatic fragments, to confront Old Age, and look upon him, in himself, face to face ; fore- casting and foretasting that later stage when his lean limbs go tottering, and his tongue stammers forth sadness ; when from his eyes the light of love and intellect is quenched and gone, — OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. 31 " And everything about him, body and mind, Tells a foul tale of Time." Helas ! helas ! fai dnqnanfe a?is, is the refrain of a regretful chanson of Beranger's on his fiftieth birthday, in which he counts up his wrinkles (or rather they are too many for him), and complains that " A cet age, tout nous echappe ; Le fruit meurt sur I'arbre jauni," and enumerates among the contingencies of vieillesse such maiix cuisants as gout, and blindness, and deafness, that everybody makes fun of; and then, "Ciel ! j'entends la Mort, qui, joyeuse,* , Arrive en se frottant les mains. A ma porte la fossoyeuse Frappe " — with a knock that will make itself heard, will be answered,— will not be put off with a Not at Home. Hasten, my friend, writes Landor to Sir W. Napier, the work begun, — " For daily dimmer grows our sun, And age, if further off from thee, Creeps on, though imperceptibly. Some call him slow, some find him fast, But all he overtakes at last, Unless they run and will not wait, But overleap life's flower- turned gate." John Evelyn thankfully enters in his diary, on October 31st, 1665, this memorandum : — "I was this day 45 years of age, wonderfully preserved, for which I bless God for His infinite goodness towards me." He lived on for upwards of forty years from that birthday. So did Henry Crabb Robinson, who, some forty-seven years before he died, complained in his diary of a depressing sense of the early decay of his faculties, — with little reason enough. Thomas Hood writes in 1844: — " To-day is my birthday— forty-five— but I can't tell how old I feel, enough to be your grandfather at least, and give you advice," he tells his doctor. At the same age we find Wash- 32 OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. ington Irving writing to Mr. Brevort : — " Your account of yourself is particularly encouraging, ' that you might pass your- self off for a fresh bachelor of 35/ • . . . I must confess I think I am beginning to wear old as doth a garment, and am gradually increasing in the belt. However, I begin to grow hardened and shameless in the matter ; " which might be the worst sign of all. As Robert Herrick has it, in perhaps the most familiar of his lyrics, — " That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer ; But, being spent, the worse, and worst Time shall succeed the former." We are old fellows, it is said, from the moment the fire begins to go out. And when is that ? Forty-five is old age's accepted termi?tus a quo, " I don't mind much," says the medical Autocrat of the Breakfast-table, " those slipshod lines Johnson wrote to Thrale, telling her about life's declining from thh'ty-five ; the furnace is in full blast for ten years longer." The Romans are accordingly said to have come very near the mark, in making the age of enlistment reach from seventeen to forty-six years. Crabbe's Tales of the Hall contain a realistic picture of the gradual onset of senescence. Forty-five plus one is the date. " Six years had passed, and forty ere the six, When time began to play his usual tricks ; The locks once comely in a virgin's sight, Locks of pure brown, displayed the encroaching white ; The blood, once fervid, now to cool began, And Time's strong pressure to subdue the man. I rode or walked as I was wont before. But now the bounding spirit was no more ; A moderate pace would now my body heat ; A walk of moderate length distress my feet. ****** I ceased to hunt ; my horses pleased me less — My dinner more ; I learned to play at chess. My morning walks I now could bear to lose, And blessed the shower that gave me not to choose : OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. 33 In fact, I felt a languor stealing on ; The active arm, the agile hand, were gone ; Small daily actions into habits grew, And new dislike to forms and fashions new. I loved my trees in order to dispose ; I numbered peaches, looked how stocks arose ; Told the same story oft — in short, began to prose." The same is the tone of Colonel Morley's confession in the novel. He owns to beginning to decry the present and laud the past — to read with glasses, to decide from prejudice, to recoil from change, to find sense in twaddle, — to know the value of health from the fear to lose it, — to feel an interest in rheumatism, an awe of bronchitis, — to tell anecdotes, and to wear flannel. Alfred Hagart reverts with a sigh to the time when he thought a man old at thirty : now he strives to think that he is not old at sixty, — having himself slid into the zone of grey hairs and bald pates and portentous paunches ; and he strives to make himself as comfortable as he can. " But it won't do. The afternoon may be pleasant enough, but it is nothing like morning." So with Hawthorne in his reflections on how early in the summer comes the prophecy of autumn — earlier in some years than others — sometimes even in the first weeks of July. There is a half-acknowledged melancholy, he goes on to say, resembling the feeling prompted by this recog- nition of the waning year, "when we stand in the perfected vigour of our life, and feel that Time has now given us all his flowers, and that the next work of his never idle fingers must be — to steal them, one by one, away." To apply Wordsworth's lines : — " Summer ebbs ; — each day that follows Is a reflux from on high, Tending to the darksome hollows Where the frosts of winter lie. " He who governs the creation, In His providence, assigned Such a gradual declination To the life of human kind. " Alexander Pope, who had been, as one of his biogra- D 34 OLD AGE NEXT NEIGHBOUR TO DEATH. phers has it, a precocious man and philosopher at sixteen, was, at forty-six, old, querulous, and decaying. " His health failed gradually, and infirmities crept upon him." His letters from that period onwards lay stress on the power every change of weather had to affect him ; on his eyes failing him ; on his being by evening, not dead, indeed, but stupid and somnolent, so that at the hours when most people indulge in company he was tired out, found the labours of the day sufficient to weigh him down, and was fain to hide himself in ' bed, as a bird in his nest, much about the same time. John Foster's letters during the closing year of his fifth decade and the opening ones of his sixth, are largely interfused with allusions to accumulating tokens of old age. Just on the turn of fifty he writes : — " It is sometimes only through the absolute force of dates, that I can believe I have advanced so far toward old age. But (should life be protracted) it will not be long before other mementoes than those of mere chronology will powerfully press upon me. Indeed, in the article of sight (so important especially to a person whose business is among books and writing), I am of late receiving strong admonition every day and hour." Later again : " Now that I have reached my fifty-third year, I am very often admonished and reminded of the decline of life. The mere time is such an admonition ;" but he also finds in the breaking, if not broken, health of the last two or three years, a strong and constantly returning re- inforcement of it. The miscellaneous poems of the author of Gehir abound in such expressions as this : — "When we have panted past life's middle space, And stand and breathe a moment from the race, These graver thoughts the heaving breast annoy : ' Of all our fields how very few are green ! And ah ! what brakes, moors, quagmires, lie between Tired age and childhood ramping wild with joy.' " Walter Savage Landor had not overpassed by much the half of his long life's course, when he indited the epigram. A TALE OF TWELVE. 35 ** I, near the back of Life's dim stage, Feel through the slips the draughts of age. Fifty good years are gone : with youth The wind is always in the south." But, once that five-and-forty's past, how apt the wind is to shift to due east, or east-nor'-east, and stick there ! F A TALE OF TWELVE, Genesis xlii. 13. ROM the land of Canaan came Joseph's brethren to Egypt to buy food. Charged to tell Joseph who they were, to clear themselves of the suspicion of being spies come to see the nakedness of the land, " Thy servants are twelve brethren," was the answer of the ten, — " the sons of one man in the land of Canaan ; and, behold, the youngest is this day with our father, and one is not." Benjamin absent, and Joseph dead, or believed to be dead. Yet the tale the ten men tell is a tale of twelve. We be twelve brethren, though one is not. There is a touch of patriarchal simplicity, of the childhood of the " world's age, in this tale of twelve. Naturally, one is re- minded of a famous ballad of modern times. The word "death" never enters into the philosophy of Confucius, nor on common occasions is it used by the Chinese, as Barrow tells us. Mr. Dallas affirms that under the eye of heaven there is not a more touching sight than that presented by Oriental artists when they enter the tombs to protest against dissolution. Some of the elder races of the world, as he says, arranged the homes of the dead as if they were homes of the living, with panelled walls and fretted ceilings, elbow chairs, footstools, benches, -vvine-flagons, drinking-cups, oint- ment-phials, basins, mirrors, and other furniture. " By paint- ing, by sculpture, by writing, they had the habit, as it were, of chalking in large letters upon their sepulchres. No Death." And this he says in immediate reference to that little poem of 36 A TALE OF TWELVE. Wordsworth's, We are Seven,'^ which is founded on our natural inability to compass the idea of death. " We are seven," was the persistent answer of the little girl whom Wordsworth met within the area of Goodrich Castle, in the year 1793, when the poet objected to the childish reasoner that two out of the seven in family being, on her own showing, dead and gone, she was out in her arithmetic, and ought to have returned five as the sum total. Eight years old was that little cottage girl, wildly clad, curly-headed, with a rustic, woodland mien, but altogether of a beauty that gladdened the poet who met her on the banks of the Wye ; and there was real interest in the question he put to her. How many brothers and sisters had she ? " How many ? seven in all," she said. * Something more than a mere numerical resemblance to which may have been noted, by readers who frequent the byways as well as highways of current literature, in a little poem called The Last of the Family, by a sweet singer, with perhaps no great depth of voice, except that it comes from the heart : " Maggie was twenty-and-two years old, Her heart was cheerful and brave and strong ; She'd bright brown eyes that sweet stories told, And voice as gay as a pleasant song : Yet Maggie was left in the world alone. With six dear names on a churchyard stone. " She often told me about her dead. With chastened voice but unclouded brow, As though from some holy book she read. Whose writer had grown more holy now ; Yet her laugh rang out in our girlish mirth. As if there was not a grave on earth. " We parted last on a summer night, Under a sky like a golden sea, And as she gazed on the glorious sight. She softly said, ' What must Heaven be !' I think that the angels heard the sigh, For her morning brightened beyond the sky. * ' She'd worn her cross as it were a crown, And lo ! a crown did the cross become : For none to leave in our little town. Was none to miss in the Heavenly Home — A perfect household before the Throne, And seven names on the churchyard stone." A TALE OF TWELVE, 37 "And where are they? I pray you tell." She answered, ' Seven are we ; * And two of us at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea. *' Two of us in the churchyard lie, My sister and my brother ; And, in the churchyard cottage, I Dwell near them with my mother." Her numbers are wrong, and her questioner tries to put her right. If two are in the churchyard laid, then is five the right number, not seven. But the little maid persists in the fiiU number; and shape his demur how he may, urge his objections how he can, the poet is met again and again with the assurance, as one who better ought to know, " O master, we are seven." St. Paul would have said she was right, is the remark of Dr. Boyd, of St. Andrew's, in a sermon on " the Family in Heaven and Earth " : — If you had asked the Apostle, how many there were in a Christian family of which five were in this world and two with Him of whom the whole family is named, he would have said. Seven. He would,f asserts his expositor, have sided with the little girl who, in reckoning up her brothers and sisters, did not forget the dead ones. In the earliest of George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, there is a churchyard sketch of a poor curate's large family of little children gathered round their mother's open grave ; and the sensations of the infant group are truthfully and tenderly touched upon. Patty, the eldest, is described as the only one of all the children who felt that mamma was in that coffin, and that a new and sadder life had begun for papa and herself : pale and trembling, she clasped his hand more firmly as the coffin went down, and * How different in tone, accent, and import, though so nearly the same in words, is the strain of Byron's white-haired prisoner of Chillon, — ' ' We were seven, who now are one, Six in youth, and one in age." +'* It is quite certain that he thought, that though the dark stream of death parts believers on earth from believers in heaven, it breaks no tie of grace or of nature." — Sunday Afternoons at the Parish Church of St. Andrew's, p. 280.- 38 A TALE OF TWELVE. gave no sob. Fred and Sophy, though but two or three years younger, and though they had seen mamma in her coffin, seemed to themselves to be looking at some strange show. What should they know of death ? " They had not learnt to decipher that terrible handwriting of human destiny." Dicky had rebelled against his black clothes ; and now, though he had heard Nanny say that mamma was in heaven, he had a vague notion that she would come home again to- morrow, and say he had been a good boy for submitting to the black clothes, and let him empty her work-box. *' He stood close to his father, with great rosy cheeks and wide-open blue eyes, looking first up at Mr. Cleves," who was reading the burial service, and then down at the coffin, and thinking he and Chubby would play at that when they got home. Children do not admire each other's simplicity, observes an essayist on that quality; but we admire it in them, because what is uttered without thought or intention in the child is full of meaning to us. In this writer's judgment, it was more than a simple, it was probably a stupid, little girl that kept reiter- ating, "We are seven;" but the words suggested deep meanings to the poet. Mr. de Quincey has remarked, that the child in this little poem, although unable to admit the thought of death, yet, in compliance with custom, uses the word : " The first that died was little Jane." But the graves of her brother and sister she is so far from regarding as any argument of their having died, that she supposes the stranger simply to doubt her statement, and she reiterates her assertion of their graves as lying in the churchyard, in order to prove that they were living. Beside those graves she would eat her supper of summer evenings, and knit her stockings, and hem her kerchief; there would she sit, and sing to them that lay below. That authentic voice, argued Wordsworth, " which affirms life as a necessity inalien- able from man's consciousness, is a revelation through the lips of childhood." Elsewhere the little poem is recognised as bringing into day for the first time a profound fact in the abysses of human nature — namely, that the mind of an- infant A TALE OF TWELVE. 39 cannot admit the idea of death, cannot comprehend it, " any- more than the fountain of light can comprehend the aborigi- nal darkness." In the words (translated ones) of Leopold Schefer — "Easier to him seems life than ABC, So willingly he sees funereal trains, Admires the garland laid upon the coffin, Beholds the narrow, still, last house of man, Looks in the grave, and hears, without a fear, The clods fall down upon the coffin lid," You may, as Rousseau observes, teach children the name of death, but they have no idea of what it is ; they fear it neither for themselves nor others; they fear suffering, not death. There are exceptions, of course; such as one of Sydney Smith's children, in delicate health, who used to wake suddenly every night, " sobbing, anticipating the death of parents, and all the sorrows of life, almost before life had begun;" and Mrs. Gore pictures one such in little Selina, wistfully watching beside her dying mother's bed, and forestalling the worst. " To children, the grave is usually too incomprehensible a mystery to be terrible. That those who are here to-day disappear to-morrow, strikes them no more than any common departure on a journey. But Selina had been more painfully instructed. Selina, having seen tears shed for weeks, and months, and years, over the image of one who, because he was dead, returned no more, understood the full force of the evil awaiting her." There is a little girl in one of Lord Lytton's fictions, whom her father visits at the French nunnery from time to time, and who, ''whenever monsieur goes," one of the nuns records, " always says that he is dead, and cries herself quietly to sleep ; when monsieur returns, she says he is come to life again. Some one, I suppose, once talked to her about death : and she thinks, when she loses sight of any one, that that is death." In the same story, we read of two brothers, the younger a mere child, that " Philip broke to Sidney the sad news of their mother's death, and Sidney wept with bitter passion. But children — what can they know of death ? Their 40 A TALE OF TWELVE. tears over graves dry sooner than the dews." Addressing his daughter Edith, then ten years old, Southey says : — "Thy happy nature from the painful thought With instinct turns, and scarcely canst thou bear To hear me name the grave. Thou knowest not How large a portion of my heart is there ! " Second childhood, and something short of that, has its one- ness of reckoning with the little maiden on the banks of the Wye. " But as to the children, Annie, they're all about me yet," says the grandmother in Mr. Tennyson's poem. "Pattering over the boards, my Annie who left me at two, Patter she goes, my sweet little Annie, an Annie like you : Pattering over the boards, she comes and goes at her will, While Harry is in the five-acre, and Charlie ploughing the hill, "And Harry and Charlie, I hear them too — they sing to their team : Often they come to the door in a pleasant kind of a dream. They come and sit by my chair, they hover about my bed — I am not always certain if they be alive or dead." Ever has been, and will be, admired Steele's picture of a bereaved family, with the children sorrowing according to their several ages and degrees of understanding. "And what troubled me most was, to see a little boy, who was too young to know the reason, weeping only because his sisters did." Still more simply told and touching is Steele's own retrospect of earliest grief. This was on the occasion of his father's death, when little Dick was not quite five years old; and much more amazed he was at what all the house meant, than possessed with a real understanding why nobody was willing to play with him. Sir Richard remembered how he went into the room where the body lay, and saw his mother sit, weeping, alone by it ; how he had his battledore in his hand, and fell a-beating the coffin, and calling papa; having, he knew not how, some slight idea that papa was locked up there. Mary Lamb illustrates the same topic in the first of her stories of Mrs. Leicester's School, where the little girl takes her newly-arrived uncle straight to the churchyard, as " the way to mamma." So does Caroline Bowles (Southey) in her A TALE OF TWELVE. poem of the Child's Unbelief, where a heart-sore elder is troubled by the little one's prattHng about the lessons to be learnt for a dead mamma to hear, when she comes by-and-by. "Yet what, poor infant, shouldst thou know Of life's great mystery — Of time and space — of chance and change — Of sin, decay, and death ?" Then, again, we have in John Gait a description of a child's first impression of death in the house. " On the bed lay the covered form of a mysterious thing, the sight of which filled my infantine spirit with solemnity and dread. The poor girl, as she looked on it, began to weep bitterly. I, too, wept, but I knew not wherefore ; and I clung to her, overwhelmed with the phantasma of an unknown fear." Mr. de Quincey records the commencement of his acquaintance with mortality, in the removal of his nursery playmate and sister, Jane. Yet, in fact, he knew little more of mortality, he says, than that Jane had disappeared. She had gone away, but perhaps she would come back. "Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance ! Gracious immunity of infancy from sorrow disproportioned to its strength ! I was sad for Jane's absence ; but still, in my heart, I trusted that she would come again. Summer and winter came again — crocuses and roses; why not little Jane?" In the Old Curiosity Shop, there is a suggestive picture of some children playing in a rustic churchyard. They have an infant with them, and they lay it down, asleep, upon a child's grave, in a little bed of leaves. " It was a new grave — the resting-place, perhaps, of some little creature, who, meek and patient in its illness, had often sat and watched them, and now seemed to their minds scarcely changed." A late clerical essayist, once frequent in his contributions to Blackwood, feelingly describes a village funeral — that of Farmer Q 's good ^vife, the good mother to his large family ; and how " the children, from sixteen years of age downward, were variously affected ; the elder weeping ; a middle one, probably a pet, sobbing loudly ; others, below, with a fixed look, as if surprised at the strangeness of their situation. But the childish play of 42 A TALE OF TWELVE. the youngest, who could not, perhaps, conceive what death was, was such a vindication of the wisdom and goodness of Providence that tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, that I have often since had the scene before me." That poor child, Mr. Eagles reflects, required unconsciousness of this world's miseries, which, fully and deeply felt, would have torn its weak frame, and nipped the life in the bud ; and, therefore, perma- nent sensibility was denied, and is denied to all such. He professes to have never seen the awfulness of death, and the ' newness and sportiveness of life, so brought together. " The occasion was death, and the child was at play with it, and unhurt ; and I thought of the passage, ' The weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's den.' " Take, again, Dr. John Brown's account of his earliest remembrance of household sorrow. He was taken to his mother's funeral, in the quiet little churchyard of Symington. He had been, he says, ever since the death, in a sort of stupid musing and wonder, not making out what it all meant. He knew that his mother was said to be dead ; he saw that she was still, and laid out, and then shut up, and didn't move ; but he did not know that when she was carried out in that long black box, and they all went with her, she alone was never to return. Then, too, we have a record, by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, of his first acquaintance with the shadow of death ; his memory dimly recalling the image of a little girl, a school- mate, " whom we missed one day, and were told that she had died. But what death was, I never had any very distinct idea, until one day I climbed the low stone wall of the old burial-ground, and mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long, narrow hole, dug down through the grim sod, down through the brown loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man seen through an opening at one end of it." When the lid was closed, and the gravel and stone rattled down pell-mell, and the mourners had gone, and left their dead one behind, then our boy-gazer felt he had seen death, and should never forget him. But this is a stage A TALE OF TWELVE. 43 in advance of the unbelief of childhood. More in keeping with the spirit of We are Seven is that passage in one of the Twice-told Tales of Dr. Holmes's gifted friend and com- patriot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, where we see a comely woman, with a pretty rosebud of a daughter, come to select a grave- stone for a twin-daughter, who had died a month before : the mother calm and woefully resigned, fully conscious of her loss ; " but the daughter evidently had no real knowledge of what death's doings were. . . . Her feelings were almost the same as if she still stood side by side, and arm in arm, with the departed, looking at the slabs of marble. . . . Perchance her dead sister was a closer companion than in life." A twin- sister might thus be warranted in saying, in death as in life, " We are one^ "Couldst thou believe me dead? Thy living sense Mistook itself. Howe'er the spirit deems, Death cannot lie in life's experience." William Etty, the painter, describes in his diary a visit to the home of four little motherless children, one of whom wnmg his heart by her eager inquiries why mamma did not come back. Told that she was gone to heaven, " Why does she not write, then?" asked the wistful little girl. Etty was as willing and cordial a consoler as one in Wordsworth, who *' patted tenderly The sunburnt forehead of a weeping child, A little mourner, whom it was his task To comfort. . . . . . . * This blossoming child,' Said the old man, ' is of an age to weep At any grave or solemn spectacle, Inly distressed or overpowered with awe, He knows not wherefore ; but the boy to-day Perhaps is shedding an orphan's tears.' " So with Duncan's orphans in The Lady of the Lake: — " His stripling son stands mournful by, His youngest weeps, but knows not why. " The first in Mrs. Browning's fourfold aspect of life is of an 44 A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. age when the worst recorded change was of apple dropped from bough ; and of the shadow of death there was as yet not the shadow of a shade : — "Then the loving took you up Soft, upon their elder knees, — Telling why the statues droop Underneath the churchyard trees, And how ye must lie beneath them. Through the winters long and deep, Till the last trump overbreathe them, And ye smile out of your sleep . . . Oh, ye lifted up your head, and it seemed as if they said A tale of fairy ships "With a swan- wing for a sail ! — Oh, ye kissed their loving lips For the merry, merry tale ! — So carelessly ye thought upon the Dead," — And so inconceivable at that epoch of existence was the bare imagination of Death, A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. Genesis xliv. 30. JUDAH'S eloquence in pleading with his unknown brother Joseph, not to detain from their fond father the lad Benjamin, who was the darling of his old age, urged the too certain event of the patriarch's death of a broken heart, if Benjamin returned not safely to his roof. Those grey hairs would, all too surely, be brought down in sorrow to the grave, if the lad were kept from him, — " seeing that his life is bound up in the lad's life." Take the one, and you take the other too. Even deprive Jacob of the daily sight and sense of Ben- jamin's life, and you take his own. The two are bound up together. Already had the brethren assured Egypt's viceroy that the lad could not leave his father ; for if he should leave his father, his father would die. He had left him, at their A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. 45 instance j but they felt that their father's very life was now in their hands, and that upon the viceroy's decision hung the final issue to Jacob of life or of death. For here was where he had *' garnered up his heart; Where either he must live, or bear no life ; The fountain from the which his current ran, Or else dried up." Apply Corneille's lines, " Que vivre sans vous voir est un sort rigoureux ! c'est ou ne vivre point, ou vivre malheureux ; c'est une longue mort." As with Gyges in ancient story, so devoted to, so wrapped up in, so absorbed by, the presence of his wife, — " That he no longer lived, save in the life " which her full-flowing existence poured on his. Or, as with the subject-object of Shakspeare's sonnets, — "You are my all-the- world," " None else to me, nor I to none alive," " You are so strongly in my purpose bred, That all the world besides methinks are dead. ***** ** But do thy worst to steal thyself away, For term of life thou art assured mine ; And life no longer than thy love will stay, For it depends upon that love of thine." Imlac admonishes the pining and repiningprincess, in Rasselas, against increasing the burthen of life by a voluntary accumula- tion of misery ; the weariness of life will continue or increase when her loss of Pekuah shall be forgotten : that she has been deprived of one pleasure is, he suggests, no very good reason for rejection of the rest. " Since Pekuah was taken from me," she rephes, " I have no pleasure to reject or retain." To have no one to love or trust, is to have little to hope ; it is to want the radical principle of happiness. Dr. Thomas Brown, in his analysis of the " Immediate Emotions," lays stress on the relation of the object lost to all the plans which have engaged us, and all the hopes which we have been forming, as a very abundant source of the misery which is felt in a recent 46 A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. affliction. These plans and hopes seem now all frustrated, and our whole life, as it were, in those feelings which alone constituted life to us, suddenly rent or broken. To be bereaved of his children was, to Jacob, to be bereaved indeed. Joseph he mourned as dead, though the death was not a positively ascertained fact. Benjamin, if detained in Egypt, he would mourn as absent ; and it seems that to Jacob, in his old age, absence and death differed not with the difference a modem poet assigns to them. Wordsworth's Solitary, in his description of his own and his wife's feelings upon the decease of their children, exclaims — " Absence and death, how differ they!" Absence and death — to apply another exclamation in Words- worth— ' like, but oh, how different ! ' Yet so like, in the estimate of some, that the distinction is practically without a difference. One of the biographers of Olympia Morata, ex-' patiating on the pangs of that parting scene with her mother, whom she was never to see again, quotes a fragment from a letter of her old friend's. Curio Curone, written to the elder lady several years afterwards, in which he recurs to the sorrows of that time : " The pangs of that departure must have been even as the pangs of death, when you felt that probably in this life you would never see her again. And truly," he adds, "you might well feel that the separation of death was not very different from that caused by so great a distance." Painful partings of this sort are justly said to be always most painful to those who are left behind — the necessity of action, and the excitement of going forth to meet new scenes and new fortunes, bracing the nerves and giving diversion to the grief of those who are gone. A meditative poet has put this reflection into verse : — " Oh, you Are happier than I, for you have change And motion, and a prospect of things new Awaiting you wherever you may range ; But I am left in the old spots of gladness, So desolate now, to fret myself to madness. A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. 47 *' Into this dead-house, for I call it dead Now you are gone, you did put life and light, And youthful laughter." Mrs. Jameson professes to have had no friend worthy of the name whose absence was not pain and dread to her ; " death itself is terrible only as it is absence." The presence of those whom we love, she hails as a double life ; while absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death. In one of Southey's letters to his deaf friend, Grosvenor Bedford, the recent decease of an old fellow-collegian and endeared associate is thus referred to : " You will miss him in your thoughts, for deafness must make you live much with the absent, as I do because of my retirement. Probably you would be less in my mind were I to see you daily than you are now, when something or other continually leads me to recollec- tions of which you form a part. Indeed, I have now attained an age, and, what is better, a state of mind, w^hich makes me think of the absent and the dead with the same sort of feeling, the same complacency, the same affection; only with more tenderness of the dead." A couplet of Pope's will nearly express this state of feeling : — " Absent or dead, still let a friend be dear; A sigh the absent claims, the dead a tear." Byron contends, in an unpublished poem, that " The absent at'e the dead— for they are cold, And ne'er can be what once we did behold ; And they are changed, and cheerless — or if yet The unforgotten do not all forget, Since thus divided — equal must it be If the deep barrier be of earth or sea." Chateaubriand declares that the death of friends is to be reckoned, not from the moment when they die, but from that of our ceasing to enjoy their society. And Campbell exclaims — " Absence ! is not the soul torn by it From more than light, or life, or breath? 'Tis Lethe's gloom, but not its quiet — The pain, without the peace of death !" 48 A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. It is noted of the wives of fishermen on the islands that fringe the west coasts of Holstein and Sleswig — " a hardy, simple-minded people, of Frisian extraction," and whose position and occupation have given a " somewhat serious cast to their character and habits " — that they generally attire them- selves in black during the absence of their husbands, as though recognising the practical identity of absence and death. The lover in Mr. Coventry Patmore's poem indirectly argues to the same effect : — *' I reached the Dean's. The woman said, ' Miss Churchill's out.' *Had she been dead,' I cried, ' 'twere much the same to me, Who go this very night to sea.' " But the majority of reflective minds, endued with ordinary sensibility, will acquiesce in the justness of Wordsworth's sharp- drawn line of demarcation, "Absence and death, how differ they !" As persons, to use a simile of Mrs. Inchbald's, enjoy the consciousness of having in their possession some valuable gem, though circumstances prevent, and ever will prevent, their wearing or airing it; so the assurance that a beloved friend is living, however far away,* and however unlikely to be ever seen again, is utterly distinct in its consoling tendency from the desolating conviction of his being dead and gone. Still more does the distinction hold when there remains an indefinite hope of reunion between living absentees. A popular essayist accounts it sad enough when those who sat in infancy by the same fireside, and prayed at the same parent's knee, must fight the battle of life far apart, each bearing cares and ^ knowing men that the other will never see nor know. And yet, he goes on to say, " though half the world be the space that parts them, and years have passed on since last they met, while they remain in this life the means of communication are * Jane Eyre exclaims, on hearing Mr. Rochester spoken of as yet alive, — ** Gladdening words ! It seemed I could bear all that was to come — what- ever the disclosures might be — with perfect tranquillity. Since he was not in the grave, I could bear, I thought, to learn that he was at the antipodes." — jfane Eyre, ch. xxxvi. A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. 49 not cut off; and it is at least possible that they may meet again. But the parting which death makes is absolute and complete." Rousseau calls the idea of death, in this aspect, so terrible {si affreuse), that any and every other idea is mild in comparison ; and such an idea is that of absence, however distant in space, and however prolonged in time. One of the most eminent of American divines makes it clear how differed absence from death in his regard, when he writes to a friend, who, far away, is to him very present : " Do you not know what it is to have a kind of latent remembrance of friends, even when they are not directly present to the mind? We have a secret consciousness of their existence, which makes the world a brighter spot to us. A light comes from them, as from the sun, when other things are thought of." The reflection indeed is applicable, in a degree, to the absent dead themselves. Just as the absent may be considered as dead, by the sad and sombre-minded, so by the buoyant in hope and faith may the dead be considered as only absent. " Let us cease to be disquieted for their absence who have but retired into another chamber," says one of the mortal immor- tals in Landor's Pentameron. As Gabriel, hopelessly absent and undiscoverable, to Evangeline, now declining in the vale of years, — *'He had become to her heart as one who is dead, and not absent," so to believing affection the dead and gone become as it were but living absentees. But this is only in some cases, not common ones ; and perhaps possibly only in some minds, not common ones either. Swift expresses the very sentiment of Wordsworth's distinc- tion, so deep-drawn, between absence and death, when he writes from Ireland to Pope, touching the deaths of Gay and the Doctor, which, he says, " have been terrible wounds near my heart." " Their living would have been a great comfort to me, although I should never have seen them ; like a sum of money in a bank, from which I should receive at least annual interest " — in the shape of a letter at any rate once a year. E so A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. Pope, again, opens a paragraph in one of his letters with the words, "Absence is a short kind of death." But between the longest absence and death he would have been prompt to recognise how great the difference. So was another prince of letter-writers among our standard poets — William Cowper. In an epistle in prose to that Joseph Hill, Esq., to whom he addressed an ever-memorable epistle in verse, the bard of Olney thus expresses himself on the broad as deep distinction between absence and death : " While our friends yet live inhabitants of the same world with ourselves, they seem still to live to lis ; we are sure that they sometimes think of us ; and however improbable it may seem, it is never impossible that we may see each other once again. But the grave, like a great gulf, swallows all such expectations; and in the moment when a beloved friend sinks into it, a thousand tender recollections awaken a regret, that will be felt in spite of all reasonings, and let our warnings have been what they may." Absence implies life, and while there's life there's hope. Absence may be, and is, a type of death — a foreshadowing of death. But to identify them is passable only by poetical licence. Where a life is bound up in a life, broken confidence may be more veritably fatal than death itself. When love is razed out of life, the " ruins of all else loom dismal in the darkness ;" all hope seems stricken from the future, as a man " strikes from the calculations of his income the returns from a property irrecoverably lost." When amidst the confidence of the heart, as a student of its passions has said, there starts up the form of perfidy, and he learns that, day after day, the life entwined with his own has been a lie and a stage-mime, — what he feels is less the softness of grief, or the absorption of rage, than a horror that appals. " The heart does not bleed, the tears do not flow, as in woes to which humanity is commonly subjected; it is as if something that violates the course of nature had taken place." And in his home, the ablest man, we are sadly reminded, the most subtle and observant, can be as much a dupe as the simplest. Hawthorne- says that the young and A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. 51 pure are not apt to find out the miserable truth of the actual existence of sin in the world, until it is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some trusted friend. Some mortal, whom they reverence too highly, is commissioned by Providence to teach them this direful lesson; and Adam falls anew, and Paradise, heretofore in unfaded bloom, is lost again, and closed for ever, with the fiery swords gleaming at its gates.* Of all the agonies in life, that which another master of prose fiction declares to be most poignant and harrowing — that which for the time most annihilates reason, and leaves our whole organ- isation one lacerated, mangled heart — is the conviction that we have been deceived where we placed all the trust of love. "The moment the anchor snaps, the storm comes on — the stars vanish behind the cloud." We have cited Hnes (p. 45) in which Othello bewails the assumed treachery. Shakspeare's Leonato resembles him in his bitterness of grief, as well as in the delusion that has occasioned it : — " But mine, and mine I loved, and mine I praised, And mine that I was proud on ; mine so much That I myself was to myself not mine, Valuing of her; why she oh, she is fallen Into a pit of ink !" If equally clamorous, less sincere is the complainer in Mr. Tennyson's Idylls, who claims to have been stabbed through the heart's affections to the heart, seethed like the kid in its own mother's milk; and henceforth the course of life, that seemed so flowery to her with one for guide and master, only one, becomes the sea-cliff pathway broken short, and ending in a ruin — nothing left, but into some low cave to crawl, and there weep life away. Simpler and heartier is the utterance of another idyll : — ** Not to be with you, not to see your face — Alas for me then, my good days are done. " * " Her dearest friend, whose heart seemed the most solid and richest of Hilda's possessions, had no existence for her any more ; and in that dreary void, out of which Miriam had disappeared, the substance, the tmth, the integrity of life, the motives of effort, the joy of success, had departed along with her." — Transformation, ch. xxiii. 52 A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. So with Talfourd's Halbert : must he give up all, and yet live on ? No human hope remains for him, if this be blasted. Constancy he had sought among the rocks, and thought he had found it : — ' * One exquisite affection took its root, And strengthened in its marble ; — if you tear That living plant, with thousand fibres, thence, You break up all ; my struggles are in vain, And I am ruin ! " Robert South takes this to be the sure, infallible test of love, that the measure of its strength is to be taken by the fastness of its hold. " Benjamin was apparently dearest to his father, because he was still kept with him, while the rest of his breth- ren were sent from him. He was to him as the apple of his eye, and therefore no wonder if he could not endure to have him out of it." Ni que je vive enfin si je ne vis pour toi, and one might add, si je vis sans toi. Or, as Racine's Titus has it, " Je sens bien que sans vous je ne saurais plus vivre." Little avails it to moralize with an old English moralist on the fact, that certainly they can never live in quiet, who so entirely give themselves up to particular objects. When in one object we place all our hopes and cares, what do we, he asks, but, like foolish merchants, venture all our estate in one bottom ? " It is not good to bring ourselves to that extreme necessity, that the failure of one aim should leave us destitute." Des Comines, in Scott's novel, essays in vain to reconcile the French king to an abandonment of the scheme on which his heart is set, — reminding him, to no purpose, that every wise man, when he sees a rock giving way, withdraws from the bootless attempt of preventing the fall. Lewis protests that this now imperilled scheme has been the favourite scheme of his whole life — that he has fought for it, watched for it, prayed for it, and sinned for it. He cannot, will not, forego it. " Philip des Comines, — think, man, think ! — pity me in this extremity — thy quick brain can. speedily find some substitute for this sacrifice — some ram to be offered up instead of that project which is dear to me as the patriarch's only son was to A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. 53 him." Philip's pity is piteously implored, — for he, at least, should know, that to men of judgment and foresight, the de- struction of the scheme on which they have long dwelt, and for which they have long toiled, is more inexpressibly bitter than the transient grief of ordinary men, whose pursuits are but the gratification of some temporary passion. The house built upon the sands, the loftier it is, and the more it has cost in the building, all the more emphatically great is the fall of that house, when the rains come down upon it and the floods rise against and, in Bible phrase, clap their hands against it, and fall it must. " Aussitot I'edifice s'ecroule, emportant tout le fruit de vos sueurs, tant de devouement, tant de sacrifices, et votre cceur ni votre vie ne savent plus ou se prendre." The contrast drawn by Lewis between his own chagrin, as pre- sumably unique, and the transient grief of ordinary men, is a commonplace in the characteristics of our common nature. Cicero's answer, alike to Sulpicius and to all his friends, when they sought to rouse him from despondency almost to despair at the loss of Tullia, and reminded him of his own precepts for the afflicted, was, that his case differed from all the examples which he had been collecting for his own imitation, of men who had borne the loss of children with firmness ; since they lived in times when their dignity in the State was able, in great measure, to compensate their misfortune. But he had lost the only comfort that was left to him. In the ruin of the Republic, he had still, in Tullia, somewhat always to recur to, in whose sweet conversation he could drop all his cares and troubles ; but with her was gone all that made life yet worth the living. "All but this I could have borne," is the exclamation of Mackenzie's Savillon, when Julia is taken from him, as he believes, for ever ; the loss of fortune, the decay of health, the coldness of friends, might have admitted of hope : here only was despair to be found, and he had found it. " She was so interwoven with my thoughts of futurity, that life now fades into a blank, and is not worth the keeping." How could Philip, in The Mill on the Floss, be resigned to the loss of the one thing which had ever come to him on earth with the 5+ A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. promise of such deep joy as would give a new and blessed meaning to the foregoing pain — the promise of another self that would lift his aching affection into the " divine rapture of an ever-springing, ever-satisfied want?" Catherine Earn- shaw, in her wild way, or in Ellis Bell's (and that is Emily Bronte's) wild way, says of Heathcliff, that if all else perished, and he remained, she too in him should continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger ; she no longer should seem a part of it. To live but for one, to dream of but one, to exist by the remembrance of that one, to Hsten for his very breath, because his breathing is more to your existence than your own ; to devote, as another impassioned mistress of fic- tion words it, " your whole nature, your aspirations, your hopes, your thoughts, your whole soul" — to surrender all, to cast all at the shrine of one object, and to know that suddenly it is withdrawn from you, and you may never see it more, — whoso has been spared such an anguish, is assured that his or her burden in life has not been great. " Quand j'etais absolument seul," writes a devoted student of the heart, — of his own at least, and in particular, — "mon coeur etait vide.; mais il n'en fallait qu'un pour le remplir. Le sort m'avait ote . . . celui pour lequel la nature m'avait fait. Des lors j'etais seul ; car il n'y eut jamais pour moi d'intermediaire entre tout ei rien." He was evidently all she had to love in the world, is Mr. Carlyle's comment on Friedrich Wilhelm's mother, when parting with her one son — that "rugged creature" being inex- pressibly precious to her. For days after his departure she kept solitary, and soon afterwards she died; and among the papers she had been scribbling (for meanwhile she indulged in her own sad reflections without stint), there was found one slip with a heart sketched on it, and round the heart " parti " (gone) : " My heart is gone," and with it her life. There either she must live, or have no life. So of Maynard Gilfil and his lost Cate- rina we read, in one of George Eliot's scenes of clerical life, that in her he had not lost the object of a few months' passion, but the being who was bound up with his power of loving, as A LIFE BOUND UP IN A LIFE. 55 the brook we played by or the flowers we gathered in child- hood are bound up with our sense of beauty. For years, the thought of her had to him been present in everything, like the . air and the light ; and now she was gone, it seemed as if all pleasure had lost its vehicle. Of Venetia's father we are told, when his heart melted to his daughter, after long estrangement and separation, that his philosophical theories all vanished, and he felt how dependent we are in this world on our natural ties : " nor did he care to live without her love and pre- sence." For the affection of both wife and daughter his heart now yearned to that degree, that he could not contemplate existence without their active sympathy. Virginius, in the play, calls the tie of fatherhood a thing so twined and knotted round his heart, that, break it, and his heart breaks with it. Virginia has long before delivered herself of a parallel passage, when they try to make out Virginius not to be her father : — " Virginius, my dear father, not my father ! It cannot be; my life must come from him ; For, make him not my father, it will go From me. I could not live an hour an he were not My father." In another play by the same dramatist we have the Prince of Mantua exulting in his return to his native city, and to the wife within its walls {The Wife is the name of that play) : — " Dear Mantua, that twice has given me life ; Once in the breath which first I drew in it, Now in the gift, without the having which That breath were given in vain ! . . . For never speed me Heaven, if life seems life. Until I stand in her sweet sight again. " Young's Alonzo, in the Revenge, declares of his lost Leonora that to him she was all — his fame, friendship, love of arms, all stooped to her : — " Deep in the secret foldings of my heart She lived with life, and far the dearer she, " Milton's Adam protests in his hour of darkness, that should God 56 A FLOOD OF TEARS. create another Eve, yet loss of this one would never from his heart. If death consort with her, death is to him as life. To lose her, were to lose himself. Had she not already, and all too lately, said of Adam, — " So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life "? That was at the dread crisis of the Fall. When the time came for that part of the penalty to be enforced which involved exile from Eden, her clinging to her husband was the same, if ex- pressed in accents sadder and more subdued : — ** But now lead on ; In me is no delay ; with thee to go Is to stay here ; without thee here to stay Is to go hence unwilling ; thou to me Art all things under Heaven, all places thou." A FLOOD OF TEARS. Genesis xlv. 2, 14, 15. Lamentations i. 16 ; ii. 18; iii. 48, 49. WHEN Joseph, as Egypt's Viceroy, lifted up his eyes, and saw his brother Benjamin, his mother's son, he *' made haste ; for his bowels did yearn upon his brother : and he sought where to weep ; and he entered into his chamber, and wept there." And when, soon afterwards, he made him- self known unto his brethren, after those long years of cruel separation, he wept aloud, so that, although Joseph had taken the precaution of shutting out every stranger while he made himself known to his brethren, yet the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard the loud weeping of their lord. And when Joseph had ended his discovery of himself to those of his own blood, he fell upon his very own brother Benjamin's neck, and wept ; and Benjamin wept upon his neck. *' Moreover, he kissed all his brethren, and wept upon them." The tears of men were not thought unmanly in those old A FLOOD OF TEARS. 57 times. A flood of tears, if only there was meet occasion for it, was accounted nothing to be ashamed of, but the reverse. To the Psalmist, his tears were his meat, day and night. Rivers of waters ran down his eyes because men kept not God's law. And were not his tears in the bottle of his Maker ? The prophet Jeremiah's eyes wept sore, and ran down with tears, because the Lord's flock was carried away captive. Let his eyes run down with tears night and day, and let them not cease, for the vir- gin daughter of his people was broken with a great breach, and with a very grievous blow. " For these things I weep : mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water." " Let tears run down like a river day and night \ give thyself no rest : let not the apple of thine eye cease." " Mine eye runneth down mth rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people. Mine eye trickleth down, and ceaseth not, without any intermission." Esau, the rough hunter and robust man of the field, cried with a great and exceeding bitter cry, when he found himself defrauded of his father's blessing ; and hfting up his voice, he wept, as only strong men can weep, who are sim- ple and natural as well as strong. When he and his supplant- ing brother met again, long years after, impetuous Esau ran to meet hesitating Jacob, and embraced him, and fell on his neck, and kissed him, and they wept, both of them, and were not ashamed. When Joseph was reported dead, his father Jacob rent his clothes, and mourned for him many days, and would not be comforted by all his sons and all his daughters when they rose up to comfort him, but protested that mourn he would to the last. Thus his father wept for Joseph. How Joseph wept in after days we have seen. And the time would fail to tell, except by reference in passing, of King David's tears for Absalom ; of Elisha's prophetic tears in presence of Hazael, who was moved to inquire, " Why weepeth my lord ? " — of Hezekiah weeping sore, in prospect of death ; of Peter weeping bitterly, in all the bitterness of remorse ; of the elders of Ephesus all weeping sore, as they fell on Paul's neck, and kissed him, and bade him, so reluctantly, so remonstrantly, a last farewell. And at the grave of His friend, "Jesus wept," 58 A FLOOD OF TEARS. so wept that the Jews could not help exclaiming, " Behold, how He loved him ! " As Elisha, too, wept prophetic tears because he foresaw the evil that Hazael would do to the children of Israel, setting on fire their strongholds, and slaying their young men with the sword, and dashing their children against the stones ; even so did the Son of Man, when He was come near Jerusalem, and beheld the city, weep over it, in prevision of the coming days when it should be laid even with the ground, and when not one stone of it should be left upon another. Tears, idle tears, He knew not what they mean ; but tears, as from the depth of some divine despair, rose at His heart and gathered to His eyes, in thinking of what Jerusalem might have been, and in thinking that all too soon Jerusalem would be no more. In Mrs. Browning's criticisms upon, and translated speci- mens of, the Greek Christian Poets, passing mention is made, and no more, of Nonnus of Panopolis, the poet of the Dipny- siaca, a work of some twenty-two thousand verses, on some twenty-two thousand subjects, shaken together, who "flourish- ed," as people say of many a dry-rooted soul, at the commence- ment of the fifth century. His paraphrase, in hexameters, of St. John's gospel thus traduces what his translator designates "the two well-known words, bearing on their brief vibration the whole passion of a world saved through pain from pain " — traduces them, consistently with his imputed gift of doing all that a bald verbosity can do or undo, to quench the divinity of that divine narrative : *'They answered him, ' Come and behold.' Then Jesus himself groaned, Dropping strange tears from eyes unused to weep." Mrs. Browning has no patience with such a paraphrase. "Un- used to weep ! " she repeats. " Was it so of the man of sor- rows ? O obtuse poet ! " Tears celebrated in story and song — the tears of strong men, brave men, rough and rugged men — some tiny efilux, in homoeopathic globules, of the mighty whole, will more than fill, will overflow, a chapter such as this. A FLOOD OF TEARS. 59 The first thing, it has been said, which astonishes an EngHsh schoolboy, on being introduced to Homer, is the abundant tears which are shed by the noblest heroes of the story ; nor does this display of feeling appear to have been thought by their contemporaries then, or by their fellow-countrymen in after ages, as less suitable to their characters and positions, than to those of Andromache or Cassandra. Menelaus weeps. Ulysses weeps " on the smallest provocation." Achilles rises before us, pacing the beach, "bathed in tears of anger and disdain," as Pope ventures in his translation to call those tears of which, says he in his Notes, " a great and fiery temper is more susceptible than any other " — but which, with studied respect to the hero's dignity. Homer, it is assumed, makes him retire to shed where no eye shall see the effusion, no tongue blab of it. Agamemnon weeps, and that openly, profusely, before his assembled peers : " down his wan cheek a briny torrent flows." Phoenix weeps, ere appealing to Achilles to relent : " down his white beard a stream of sorrow flows." And when Patroclus to Achilles flies, ** The streaming tears fall copious from his eyes ; Not faster, trickling to the plains below, From the tall rock the sable waters flow." An effusion so redundant as to excite his friend's curiosity concerning the grief '* That flows so fast in these unmanly tears. No girl, no infant whom the mother keeps From her loved breast, with fonder passion weeps." Villehardouin, Joinville, and the old chroniclers generally, are similarly frank and explicit in recording the tears of their heroes. As Sainte-Beuve says of Joinville : " Toutes les fois que ses heros et chevaliers auront peur ou qu'ils verseront des larmes, il le dira." Let us glance at some of the many instances to be found in Shakspeare of men in tears. Flavius, for example, faithful old steward of Timon, who is even moved by the sight. Timon at the mouth of his cave spurns visitors and suppliants 6o A FLOOD OF TEARS. of every degree, and is for spurning Flavins with the rest — rejecting off-hand his profession of being " an honest poor servant " of Timon's. If that's what he is, then Timon knows him ; never had honest man about him ; all he kept were knaves, to serve in meat to villains. Flav. " The gods are witness, Ne'er did poor steward wear a truer grief For his undone lord, than mine eyes for you. Tim. What, dost thou weep ? — Come nearer ; — then, I love thee. Because thou art a woman, and disclaim'st Flinty mankind ; whose eyes do never give. But thorough lust, and laughter. Pity's sleeping : Strange times, that weep with laughing, not with weeping." That tragedy of the life and death of Timon of Athens closes with the reading of his self-written epitaph, on the grave- stone where he lies newly entombed " upon the very hem of the sea." Alcibiades reaches it, and thus apostrophises the departed : " Though thou abhorr'dst in us our human griefs, Scom'dst our brain's flow, and those our droplets which From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye On thy low grave, on faults forgiven." Lear, deprived of fifty of his followers at a clap, within a fortnight of abdication, by the elder of the daughters in whose favour he abdicated, and otherwise insulted under her roof, is as mad with himself for weeping, as with her for giving him such cause to weep. ' ' Life and death ! I am ashamed That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus : That these hot tears, which break from me perforce. Should make thee worth them. — Old fond eyes, Beweep this cause again, I'll pluck you out ; And cast you, with the waters that you loose. To temper clay." This is but the close of the first Act. The second closes with the pronounced coalition of the sisters against their sire. A FLOOD OF TEARS. 6i If Goneril had previously struck off fifty of his followers at a clap, she now demands of him what need he has of five-and- twenty, ten, or five. What need one? is Regan's adjoined query. And that breaks the father's heart. He appeals to the heavens to touch him with noble anger, not with melting tears : " O, let not women's weapons, water-drops, Stain my man's cheeks ! " And anon, amid a paroxysm of stifling wrath and anguish, turning to his daughters, " unnatural hags," with incoherent, inarticulate threats of unheard-of revenges, Lear exclaims : " You think, I'll weep ; No, I'll not weep : — I have full cause of weeping ; but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I'll weep. — O, fool, I shall go mad !" And he keeps his word. Mad he becomes, and the ravings of his madness move to tears the disguised Edgar and sightless Gloster : Lear. "If thou [to Gloster] wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes. I know thee well enough ; thy name is Gloster : Thou must be patient ; we came crying hither. Thou know'st, the first time that we smell the air, • We wawl, and cry When we are born, we cry, that we are come To this great stage of fools." CoUatinus and Lucretius emulate each the other's passion first of words and then of tears : "This windy tempest, till it blow up rain, Held back his sorrow's tide, to make it more ; At last it rains, and busy winds give o'er. Then son and father weep with equal strife. Who should weep most, for daughter or for wife," In the old ballad which tells of a bloody field as e'er was fought on summer's day, when, of King Arthur's " own party, only himself escaped there," except Duke Lukyn and Bedevere 62 A FLOOD OF TEARS. the butler — this expressive stanza catches (sometimes to dim) the eye : "And when the king beheld his knights, All dead and scattered on the mould, The tears fast trickled down his face, That manly face in fight so bold." Tears are, however, accounted a phenomenon in men, which in women they most certainly are not. Mr. Slick calls it easy enough to stand a woman's tears, " for they weep like children, everlastin' sun-showers ; they cry as bad as if they used a chestnut burr for an eyestone ;" but, he adds, in his ironical way, " to see the tear drawn from starn natur' of man, startin' at the biddin' of generous feelin', there's no standin' that." But the tears of a man bring with them no comfort, as do those of the softer sex, remarks Mr. Trollope, when he flings Harry Norman on the sofa, ''forgetting his manhood and bursting into tears. . . . He was a strong tall man, and it was dreadful to see him thus convulsed." The elderly lady who has to soothe him, has to play the same part by another manly or unmanly weeper, later in the tale, where we see the said Mrs. Woodward watching Charley Tudor for a while in silence, as she " saw big tears drop from his face on to the dust of the path on the further side. There they came rolling down, large globules of sorrow. Nothing is so painful to a woman as a man in tears, and Mrs. Woodward's heart was wrung to its very core." It may be easier work, dealing with a man who has no scruple about exhibiting his grief; like Voltaire, for instance, who " fondait bonnement en larmes " where Mme. du Chatelet giggled to stifle a good cry — " car il n'a pas de honte, lui, de paraitre sensible." Not to his mind, in this respect, any more than to Rousseau's own, would be the avowal of the afllicted husband as pictured, by his wife's death-bed, in Jean-Jacques' super-sentimental fiction, when surprised into tears : " Je ne croyais pas mes yeux faits pour en repandre. Ce furent les premiers depuis ma naissance, ce seront les derniers jusqu'k ma mort." Tears of this critical, exceptional character it is that Lord Lytton puts into, or draws A, FLOOD OF TEARS. 63 from, the eyes of his Last of the Tribunes, at the collapse of his career : — '* Tears, springing from no weak and womanish source, but tears from the loftiest fountain of emotion ; tears that befit a warrior when his owti troops desert him, a patriot when his countrymen rush to their own doom, a father when his children rebel against his love ; tears such as these forced themselves from his eyes, and relieved — but they changed — his heart." The differential element in tears, depending on temperament and occasion, character and circumstance, might be largely illustrated from the works of this author. Suffice it, at this stage of our zig-zag progress, to refer to one other example in another mood — that of Ernest Maltravers, newly fatherless. His face buried in his hands, he "■ sobbed like an infant. It was an easy matter to bring tears to the eyes of that young man : a generous or a tender thought, an old song, the simplest air of music, sufficed for that touch of the mother's nature. But the vehement and awful passion which belongs to mankind when thoroughly unmanned — this was the first time in which the relief of that stormy bitterness was known to him." We seem to recognise in him as much of a feminine disposition, as of a masculine one in the Marian Halcombe of a later fiction, whose tears (she bears record) flow less easily than they ought— coming almost like men's tears, with sobs that seem to tear her in pieces, and that frighten every one about her. The tears of man, says Wordsworth, in various measure gush from various sources ; gently overflow " From blissful transport some — from clefts of woe Some with ungovernable impulse rush ; And some, co-eval with the earliest blush Of infant passion, scarcely dare to show Their pearly lustre — coming but to go ; And some break forth when others' sorrows crush The sympathising heart." But, in his admiration of the demeanour of young Edward VI., when constrained to sign the death-warrant of Joan of Kent, Wordsworth goes on to assert that — 64 A FLOOD OF TEARS. **Nor these, not yet The noblest drops to admiration known, To gratitude, to injuries forgiven — Claim Heaven's regard like waters that have wet The innocent eyes of youthful monarchs driven To pen the mandates nature doth disown." Scott's preference among the varieties is for another kind : *' Some feelings are to mortals given, With less of earth in them than heaven ; And if there be a human tear. From passion's dross refined and clear, A tear so limpid and so meek. It would not stain an angel's cheek, 'Tis that which pious fathers shed Upon a duteous daughter's head. And as the Douglas to his breast His darling Ellen closely pressed, Such holy drops her tresses steeped. Though 'twas a hero's eye that weeped." " C'est una belle chose qu'un homme de bien et severe, qui pleure," says Diderot, bethinking him of his own father, who welcomed him at the gate with tears, the day he returned from the Jesuits' college, laden with prizes. Byron, on the other hand, frankly opines that, as compared with women's tears, " there is something when man's eye appears Wet, still more disagreeable and striking: A woman's tear-drop melts, a man's half sears. Like molten lead, as if you thrust a pike in His heart to force it out, for (to be shorter) To them 'tis a relief, to us a torture." Not but that Byron's sternest heroes, such as they are, can weep on occasion : Conrad, for instance : " his mother's softness crept To those wild eyes, which like an infant's wept : It was the very weakness of his brain. Which thus confessed without relieving pain. None saw his trickling tears — perchance, if seen. That useless flood of grief had never been — " which reads rather like a bull : but let that pass. Scott's THE TEARS OF BEARDED MEN. 65 heroes indulge in a good cry without much compunction, when the fit takes them. The veteran Douglas of another poem than that already quoted, makes a sort of attempt to resist what Sir Hugh Evans would call a great dispositions to cry ; but soon gives in, and has it out : "In answer nought could Angus speak: His proud heart swelled well-nigh to break : He turned aside, and down his cheek A burning tear there stole. His hand the monarch sudden took, That sight his kind heart could not brook. . . . . . . And while the king his hand did strain, The old man's tears fell down like rain. To seize the moment Marmion tried, And whispered to the king aside : — * Oh ! let such tears unwonted plead For respite short from dubious deed ! A child will weep at bramble's smart, A maid to see her sparrow part, A stripling for a woman's heart : But woe awaits a country when She sees the tears of bearded men. * Then, oh ! what omen, dark and high, When'Douglas wets his manly eye ! ' " As closed the sorrowful lay of Thomas the Rhymer, " Then woe broke forth in murmurs weak, Nor ladies heaved alone the sigh ; But, half ashamed, the rugged cheek Did many a gauntlet dry." Tom Robinson, Mr. Reade's convict, who found it never too late to mend, was first won over to try, or (so to speak) was first moved to an amendment, by the tears that Mr. Eden, the chaplain, shed for him and with him. " The good man and the bad man mingled some tears through the massy [prison] door." Anon, "the bad man wept abundantly; to him old long-dried sources of tender feeling were now un- * Of these two fine lines, a scholarly critic has said, that they would apparently have been unintelligible to the gallant besiegers of Troy. F 66 ARE THE TEARS OF MEN UNMANLY? locked by Christian love and pity. To both, these holy drops were as the dew of Hermon on their souls." ** O lachrymarum fons tenero sacros Ducentium ortus ex animo ; quater Felix in imo qui scatentem Pectore te pia Nympha sensit. " Chateaubriand would make out that Savary became of sinister importance to Napoleon, simply from having seen the First Consul weep at Marengo. Men who stand alone in the world ought, this author contends, to mistrust their tears, which place them under the dominion of ordinary men. ** Tears are one of those weaknesses by means of which he who witnesses them can render himself master of the resolves of a great man." Andrea of Hungary, in Mr. Landor's trilogy, owning himself " unmanned " by the calamity that has cut off, so suddenly, amid their pranks and joyances, Caraffa and CaraccioH, — the queen-mother protests against the phrase, and reads him a lecture on the manliness of an honest man's honest tears : ** Speak not so, my son ! Let others, when their nature has been changed To such unwonted state, when they are called To do what angels do, and brutes do not, Sob at their shame, and say they are unmanned ; Unmanned they cannot be ; they, are not men. At glorious deeds, at sufferings well endured, Yea, at life's thread snapped with its gloss upon it, Be it man's pride and privilege to weep." Are the tears of men unmanly ? " Tears are no proof ot cowardice. Trim. I drop them ofttimes myself, cried my uncle Toby. — I know your honour does, replied Trim, and I am not ashamed of it myself" Milton speaks of "tears such as angels weep;" and in another place, describing the previsions the first man had of human maladies, calamities, and despair, he asks, ** Sight so deform, what heart of rock could long Dry-eyed behold ? Adam could not, but wept, BECOMING AND UNBECOMING. 67 Though not of woman bom. Compassion quelled His best of man, and gave him up to tears. " Hartley Coleridge rules that tears seldom become a man, unless they come unbidden strangers to his eyes. A full- grown blubberer, he says, with great greenish-grey goggles, swimming in his own pathos, like half-cold calf's-foot jelly, soaked in his drizzling tenderness for his own dear self, makes one ashamed of humanity. But your Respectable, adds Hartley — who is treating of " your Respectable " in the capital essay, Shakspeare a Tory and a Gentleman — is seldom lachry- mose. That is a remark which may serve as reminder of a passage in Mr. Dickens's Tale of the Marshalsea. " Still highly respectable at bottom, though absurd enough upon the surface, Young John took out his pocket-handkerchief, with a genuine absence both of display and concealment, which is only to be seen in a man with a great deal of good in him, when he takes out his pocket-handkerchief for the purpose of wiping his eyes." Young John is not respectable in Hartley's sense of the term, as initialised with a capital R. Rosalind, in man's attire, will weep, let Celia say what she pleases; and *'Do, I pr'ythee," rejoins Celia; "but yet have the grace to consider that tears do not become a man." But there are plentiful passages in Shakspeare which go to prove it is no way unmanly to weep for a good or a great cause. Lewis the Dauphin expressly characterises as " honourable " the "dew" that "silverly makes progress "on Salisbury's cheeks, while yet avowing his wonder and concern at it : " My heart hath melted at a lady's tears, Being an ordinary inundation ; But this effusion of such manly drops, This shower, blown up by tempest of the soul, Startles mine eyes. . . . Lift up thy brow, renowned Salisbury, And with a great heart heave away this storm : Commend these waters to those baby eyes That never saw the giant world enraged," &c. The death of the Duke of York among those who fought 68 MEN'S TEARS IN SHAKSPEARE. with Harry on Saint Crispin's day, is described to the king with tears by Exeter, fresh from the field : it forced, the narrator says, *' Those waters from me, which I would have stopp'd, But I had not so much of man in me, But all my mother came into mine eyes, And gave me up in tears . K. Hen. I blame you not ; For, hearing this, I must perforce compound With mistful eyes, or they will issue too.'* Cranmer in tears is admired of a later Henry : " Look, the good man weeps ! He's honest, on mine honour. . . . He has strangled his language in his tears," and is too full-hearted, therefore, to thank his sovereign. Will Csesar weep ? is the whisper of bystanders and lookers- on, when Octavius is parting with his sister, the April in her eyes : Eno. *' Will Caesar weep ? Agr. He has a cloud in's face. Eno. He were the worse for that, were he a horse ; So is he being a man. Ap". Why, Enobarbus ? When Antony found Julius Caesar dead, He cried almost to roaring : and he wept When at Philippi he found Brutus slain." But Enobarbus has no notion of such goings-on. Antony was troubled mth a rheum that year, and that was all. Never be- lieve in anything beyond that, until he, Enobarbus, is caught weeping too. Well, the whirligig of time brings round its revenges ; and, later in the play, Enobarbus is caught weeping, or something very like, by his own avowal. For, remonstrating with Antony in so taking leave of his followers that their eyes run over, the bluff veteran exclaims, " What mean you, Sir, To give them this discomfort ? Look, they weep ; And I, an ass, am onion-eyed ; for shame, Transform us not to women." Antony's own capacity for tears is indicated in the other tragedy, when he turns from his lament over Caesar's body to receive a MARK ANTONY; ROMEO; LAERTES. 69 messenger from Octavius, and notes the shock the man betrays at sight of the piece of bleeding earth : "Thy heart is big, get thee apart and weep. Passion, I see, is catching ; for mine eyes, Seeing those beads of sorrow stand in thine, Begin to water." Friar Lawrence essays to check the tumults of Romeo's grief, by bootless appeals to his manhood. Nurse had previously tried to shame him, as he lay " there on the ground, with his own tears jnade drunk," and telling how she left JuHet lying in the same "piteous predicament," "blubbering and weeping, weeping and blubbering. Stand up, stand up ; stand, an you be a man." While the Friar follows on with the reproach, " Thy tears are womanish ;" and fairly styles him, on that account, " unseemly woman, in a seeming man ! " But there is more of philosophy in Laertes's style, when told of his sister's death by drowning — the conceit in the first line rather marring the natural earnestness of the others : "Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, And therefore I forbid my tears : But yet It is our trick ; nature her custom holds. Let shame say what it will : when these are gone, The woman will be out." Adam Smith asserts that he always appears, in some measure, mean and despicable, who is sunk in sorrow and dejection upon account of any calamity of his own j the weakness of sorrow never appearing in any respect agreeable, except when it arises from what we feel for others more than from what we feel for ourselves. But he allows that a son, upon the death of his father (" an indulgent and respectable father," at least), may give way to it without much blame — his sorrow being chiefly founded upon " a sort of sympathy with his departed parent ;" into which humane emotion w e readily enter. The Father of Political Economy could hardly do less, after austere Cato's approval of Juba's tears in such a case : Juba. " My father's fate, In spite of all the fortitude that shines -JO RIGHTS OF MAN AS TO TEARS. Before my face in Cato's great example, Subdues my soul, and fills my eyes with tears. Cato, It is an honest sorrow, and becomes thee." It is to the honour of grufif reprovers of an honest sorrow — to the honour of their feeUngs, not of their consistency — that they," sometimes in the act of blaming, are overcome too : ** And blame ye, then, the Bruce, if trace Of tear is on his manly face, . . . Blame ye the Bruce ? — his brother blamed, But shared the weakness, while ashamed. With haughty laugh his head he turned. And dashed away the tear he scorned." By what Belford feels, at Clarissa's forlorn distress, which he so wishes Lovelace could have witnessed instead, he avows himself convinced, that a capacity of being moved by the woes of our fellow-creatures is " far from being disgraceful to a manly heart." "My heart and my eyes gave way to a softness of which (though not so hardened a wretch as thou) they were never before so susceptible." " Nay, my friend," says the stout sailor to Scott's Lovel, when the latter entrusts to him a farewell billet, — digesting a temporary swelHng of the heart as he speaks, — " never be ashamed for the matter — an affectionate heart may overflow for an instant at the eyes, if the ship were clearing for action." Manly Colonel Guy Mannering could not restrain his tears at seeing the change in his old friend, the Laird of Ellangowan ; and his evident emotion at once gained him the confidence of the else friendless Lucy Bertram. When Dominie Sampson, again, came to recognise in the full-grown stranger from the East his well-remembered little Harry Bertram, he threw himself into his arms, pressing him a thousand times to his bosom in convulsions of transport, which shook his whole frame, — sobbed hysterically, and, at length, in the emphatic language of Scripture, lifted up his voice and wept aloud. Colonel Mannering had recourse to his handkerchief; Pleydell made wry faces, and wiped the glasses of his specta- cles ; and honest Dinmont, after two loud blubbering explo- A CHOSEN BURIAL-PLACE. 71 sions, exclaimed, " Deil 's in the man ! he's garr'd me do that I haena done since my auld mither died." Shallow judges of human nature, Lord Lytton pronounces those to be, who think that tears in themselves ever misbecome .a man. Well did the sternest of romance writers, in his judg- ment, place the arch distinction of humanity, aloft from all meaner of heaven's creatures, in the prerogative of tears. "Sooner mayest thou trust thy purse to a professional pick- pocket than give loyal friendship to the man who boasts of eyes to which the heart never mounts in dew." But then the caveat is enforced, that when man weeps he should be alone — not be- cause tears are weak, but because they should be sacred. A CHOSEN BURIAL-PLACE. Genesis xlvii. 29, 30. WHEN the time drew nigh that Israel, a sojourner in Egypt, must die, — after seventeen years' sojourning there, out of the hundred and forty-seven of Jacob's whole life, — he called his son Joseph to him, and made him swear, with all formality and solemnity in the manner of the oath, that a last resting-place should be found for the patriarch in his own land and among his own kindred. "Deal kindly and truly with me ; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt. But I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their burying-place." And Joseph said, " I will do as thou hast said." And Jacob said to the Viceroy of Egypt, " Swear unto me." And he sware unto him. And Israel bowed him- self upon the bed's head. He could now pray God to let His servant depart in peace. The author of the epistle to the Hebrews tells us that by faith Jacob, when he was a-dying, blessed both the sons of Joseph, and worshipped upon the top of his staff; and immediately he adds that by faith Joseph, 72 CHOSEN BURIAL-PLACES. too, when he was dying, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel, and gave commandment concerning his bones. For Joseph took an oath of the children of Israel, as his father had done of him, saying, "God will surely visit you, and ye shall carry up my bones from hence." Faith in the covenant of promise, as touching the land of promise, appears to have been foremost in the thoughts and aspirations of both sire and son ; but we may also credit both with a natural yearn- ing to lay their bones beside the bones of their fathers, and to be at home at last. Such was the natural yearning of aged Barzillai when he was for going a little way, and not more than a little way, over Jordan with the king, the day he was fourscore years old ; and so soon as he should have gone that little way, he would fain know himself free to return : " Let thy servant, I pray thee, turn back again, that I may die in mine own city, and be buried by the grave of my father and of my mother." It was a main point in the punishment denounced against the man of God that came from Judah to prophesy to Jeroboam, and that was deluded into disobedience in the discharge of his office, that his carcass should not come unto the sepulchre of his fathers. But the injunction of the remorseful old prophet by whom he had been misled, in regard to his own burial, bespoke anew the pangs of self-reproach as well as friendly interest which led him to mourn earnestly over the stranger he had buried in his own grave. " And it came to pass, after he had buried him, that he spake to his sons, saying, "When I am dead, then bury me in the sepulchre wherein the man of God is buried ; lay my bones beside his bones." Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, as the Opium- eater has it, from public notice ; they court privacy and soli- tude; and, even in the choice of a grave, will sometimes voluntarily sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man : thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Wordsworth) "humbly to express a penitential loneliness." Curiously CURIOSITIES OF CHOICE. 73 various and whimsical enough are some of the instances of choice on record. Such as the choice by an ancient Scandina- vian woman of the crest of the hill above Broadford in Skye, where a cairn of stones marks her burying-place, her wish being, local tradition says, to be laid high up there, that she might sleep right in the pathway of the Norway wind. But this was simply a genuine attachment to her Scandinavian home j and the wind that blew from it being the nearest thing to it she could secure at the last, secure that she would, to whistle or to wail, as the case might be, over her grave. Socrates, it seems, resented the affectionate concern of the friend who asked where he should deposit his remains, — as implying a dishonourable supposition that he could be so mean as to have regard for anything, even in himself, that was not imperishable. Not so Themistocles, whose monument indeed long existed in the forum of Magnesia, but whose bones are said, by his own desire, to have been borne back privately to Attica, and to have rested in the beloved land that exiled him from her bosom. My Lord Chesterfield, towards the close of his course, is quite Socratic in his indifference. "All I desire for my own burial," he writes to his daughter-in-law, " is not to be buried alive ; but how or where, I think, must be entirely indifferent to every rational creature." That highly irrational triumvir, the Roman Antony, left very particular directions that, if he died in Rome, his body shoXild be carried in pro- cession through the forum, and afterwards conveyed to Alex- andria to Cleopatra. The bower of Laura was Petrarch's elect resting-place; "for never could my spirit find a stiller port after the stormy wind." Mary of Gueldres, queen of James II. of Scotland, chose for a resting-place, as a sanctuary of safety and repose, the church she had founded in Edinburgh, in 1446, at the east end of the North Loch. For 400 years her ashes lay undisturbed in the beautiful church of the Holy Trinity ; but that spot now resounds the noise and turmoil of a railway station, before which the royal foundation had, in this railway age, to give way. So with pious Lady Glenorchy, whose interment took 74 BURIED BY CHOICE IN CHURCH. place, by her own direction, in the church she had founded, immediately in front of the pulpit : upon this spot she had fixed as "a place of security and safety, where her mortal femains might rest in peace till the morning of the resur- rection." But there too the warning signal of the railway whistle was heard all too soon \ the site of the church was in request for the North British Railway, and Lady Glenorchy's chosen last long home proved to be neither a last nor even a long one. Beatrice Cenci desired to be buried in the church of San Pietro in Montorio, at the foot of the high altar, adorned by Rafaelle's picture of the Transfiguration, which had been an object of so much interest to her in life. Elizabetta Sirani's wish is Eng- lished in a recent poem : Guido Reni's tomb is before her mind's eye ; and when the end is come, " There, by his tomb (our master's) let me lie, Somewhere, not too far off; beneath the dome Of our own Lady of the Rosary : Safe, where old friends will pass ; and still near home !" Stephen Harding enjoined that his remains should not rest in the vaults of his cathedral at Dijon, or any of the more stately abbeys of his land, where, as the historian of Latin Christianity words it, "there were lordly prelates or chapters of priests to celebrate daily the splendid masses with their solemn music for his soul : " his desire was, that they should rest in the humble chapel of Citeaux, blessed by the more prevailing prayers of its holy monks. In after ages Citeaux, become magnificent, was the burying-place of the Dukes of Burgundy ; but it is a question with Dean Milman whether, over their gorgeous marble tombs, such devout and earnest supplications were addressed to Heaven as by the simple choir of Stephen Harding. Few of our poets, it has been remarked, appear to have left any particular directions about their graves. Donne's design for his strange monument for old St. Paul's, is often quoted ; and so is the Prior prevision : " Mat, alive and in health, of his tombstone took care." Swift expressed a wish on paper to QUIET RESTING-PLACES. 75 be buried in some dry part of St. Patrick's * cathedral. Pope would not be buried in Westminster Abbey, but with or near his " dear parents at Twickenham." Gray desired to be laid by his " dear mother, in the churchyard of Stoke Pogeis ... in a coffin of seasoned oak, neither lined nor covered." Beattie had early in life deprecated for himself the marble tomb within massive walls, darksome and desolate : ** Mine be the breezy hill that skirts the down, Where a green grassy turf is all I crave, With here and there a violet bestrown, Fast by a brook or fountain's murmuring wave ; And many an evening sun shine sweetly on my grave." He must have had the churchyard at Lawrencekirk in his mind when he wrote these lines. Later in life he became fond of an ancient burying-ground near Peterhead, amid the links of St. Fergus, where he delighted to take his solitary meditative walks ; and at this time he used to tell his friends that here he wished his remains might be laid. But after losing both his sons, and their interment at Aberdeen, his choice was to be laid beside them when his time should come, "rather than beside the greatest monarch upon earth." Francis Jeffi-ey, in one of his latest letters, described a visit he had just made to the Dean Cemetery (on the road from Edinburgh to his charm- ing retreat at Craigcrook), and which he found "resonant with blackbirds," and looking invitingly peaceful and cheerful. " I rather think I must have a freehold there," he writes, " though I have sometimes had a hankering after a cubiculum under those sweet weeping willows at Amwell, if one should be called away from the vicinage." To a favourite niece he pointed out, within two months of his death, the very spot in the Dean Cemetery where he said it gave him pleasure to believe he should be laid. It was Ebenezer Elliott's prayer to be buried where the grass is green, where daises, blooming earliest, linger * Yet a confidential letter of his to Dr. Sheridan contained the singula request that the Doctor would accompany his body as far as Holyhead, to see it interred there ; **for I could not willingly lie in a land of slaves." 1^ VILLAGE CHURCHYARD AND SCHOOL. late to hear the bee his busy note prolong. Hartley Coleridge professed to have no particular choice of a churchyard ; but he would repose, if possible, where there were no proud monu- ments, no new-fangled obeHsks or mausoleums, heathen in everything but taste, and not Christian in that. Nothing that betokened aristocracy, unless it were the venerable memorial of some old family long extinct. "If the village school adjoined the churchyard, so much the better." His brother surmises that in writing this, Hartley had in his mind's eye an image of the quiet resting-place where actually he is laid, in the grave marked out by Wordsworth (close by his own), near a group of trees and a little beck that feeds the lake with its clear waters, — one entrance to the Grasmere churchyard being by a lych-gate, under which you pass to the village school. The clause in favour of children has its echo in the expressed hope of a living popular author, that, when he dies, he may be laid in a very quiet churchyard in Kent, known to him of old, where some one who cared for him has for long years past been mouldering away peacefully, where the clergyman's blind white pony will browse, and " where the children will come and have famous games — their silver voices and pattering feet upon the velvet turf" making out a pleasant noise. A clerical essayist tells us of a father, " an important member of a very strait sect of the Pharisees,'' whose child, when dying, begged to be buried, not in a certain foul old hideous churchyard, but in a cheerful cemetery that was dear to him; the request being made by the poor little creature with all the energy of terror and despair. But the strait Pharisee in question refused the dying request, pointing out with polemical bitterness to the child that he must be very wicked indeed to care at such a time where he was buried, or what might be done with his body after death. Our clerical authority denounces the man roundly and soundly as an " unnatural, heardess, stupid wretch," whom he would like to see tarred and feathered. " The dying child was caring for a thing about which Shakspeare cared ; and it was not in mere human weakness, but ' by faith,' diat Joseph, when he was a-dying, gave commandment concerning his TRODDEN UNDER FOOT OF MEN. jy bones." The father seems to have resembled little old Lady Lovat, if in nothing else, in her supreme indifference to the disposal of her remains. When asked by her son if she wished to be placed in the burial-vault at Beaufort, she said, " 'Deed, Archie, ye needna put yoursel to ony fash about me, for I dinna care though ye lay me aneath that hearthstane." Human sympathies take more kindly to the old wife of the Glasgow shoemaker in Dean Ramsay's story, who held her husband by the hand, when she was dying, and appealed to him earnestly, as she had been a gude wife to him, to grant her last request : " John, ye maun promise to bury me in the auld kirkyard at StraVon, beside my mither. I couldna rest in peace amang unco folk, in the dirt and smoke o' Glasgow." " Weel, weel, Jenny, my woman," said John, soothingly, " we'll just pit ye in the Gorbalsyfr^/, and gin ye dinna lie quiet, we'll try you syne in Stra'von." The old father in Hartley Coleridge's Leonard and Susan, is like-minded with the appealing deprecator of the Gorbals : — *' But my poor limbs — far from the reverend dust Of my dead ancestry — without a chaimt, Hatchment, or hearse, or green memorial sprigs Of shivered box-wood, and sweet rosemary, Must soon be earthed up in a vulgar grave." During his sojourn in the West Indian island of Nevis, the late Henry Nelson Coleridge was gratified by the comparatively rural aspect of the Charlestown churchyard (recalling the "sweet solemnity of a country churchyard in England"), and the absence of any of those enormous vaults above ground, which, he says, disgrace the burying-places in the colonies, in beauty inferior to limekilns, and in pride beggaring a mausoleum. Vaults, whether above ground or below, are to many strong- minded as well as simple-minded folk, an offence and a mistake. Saint Swithin's last request was to be buried in the churchyard of Winchester, and so buried as to be trodden under foot of men and pervious to the dews and showers of heaven : " ubi cadaver et pedibus praetereuntium et stillicidiis e coelo roranti- bus esset obnoxium." John Evelyn admired in his father-in- 78 OVERSHADOWING TREES. law (Sir Richard Browne) the special injunction to be buried in the churchj^(^r^ under the south-east window of the chancel, — " he being much offended at the novel costome of burying every one within the body of the church and chancel, that being a favour heretofore granted only to martyrs and greate persons ; this excesse of making churches charnel-houses being of ill and irreverent example, and prejudicial to the health of the Hving," — as even then the denizens of populous regions were beginning to find out. Evelyn himself is emphatic in his expression of desire to " lay my bones and mingle my dust with my fathers," in what he calls " our dormitory in Wotton church," in his dear native county of Surrey. It is a characteristic ending for the Man of Feeling, as Mac- kenzie portrays him, that he should desire to be buried in a certain spot near the grave of his mother. This is a weakness, says his author, but one universally incident to humanity : it is at least a memorial for those who survive : for some indeed a slender memorial will serve ; and the soft affections, when they are busy that way, will build their structures, were it but, as this author somewhat oddly suggests, " on the paring of a nail." Harley was buried in the place he had desired. It was shaded by an old tree, the only one in the churchyard. '' I have sat with him in it and counted the tombs. The last time we passed there, methought he looked wistfully on the tree : there was a branch of it that bent towards us, waving in the wind; he waved his hand, as if he mimicked its motion. There was something predictive in his look : perhaps it is foolish to remark it ; but there are times and places when I am a child at these things." The Rev. Julian Young, in his memoir of his father, the celebrated tragedian, while describing the thirteen months of unbroken wedded happiness enjoyed by his parents, tells us how his mother's eye was caught, in one of their many country strolls, by a weeping birch-tree in Prest- wich churchyard ; and how, with a kind of prescience, the young wife (JuHa Grimani, who counted five Doges of Venice on the family roll) begged to be buried under the shade of that tree. In his sixtieth year we find Washington Irving writing to W. IRVING; M. R. MITFORDj W. S. LANDOR. 79 one brother his wishes as to the place of interment of another, as a thing that lay very near his heart, for he too hoped, some day or other, to sleep his last sleep in that favourite resort of his boyhood, the woody height adjacent to the old Dutch Sleepy Hollow church. Ten years pass, and he describes to a correspondent the scene he had thus secured, among the Beck- man woods, and commanding one of the most beautiful views of the Hudson ; the spot chosen being on the southern slope, with evergreens set out around it, and shaded by a grove of young oaks. There had he seen the remains of his family gathered together and interred, where they could not be dis- turbed ; and a vast satisfaction he felt it to be, to have rescued them from the restless city, where nothing is sacred. Byron's lines had occurred to him when he was selecting this place of sepulture : — * ' Then look around, And choose thy ground, And take thy rest." And now with serene complacency he was looking forward to being gathered at last to a family gathering-place, where his dust might mingle with the dust of those most dear to him.* Mary Russell Mitford writes to her life-long friend, Mr. Harness, in her last illness : " Swallowfield churchyard. . . . has only one objection — that my father and mother He in Shenfield church, and that there is room left above them for me. But I greatly dislike the place where the vault is— just where all the schoolboys kick their heels." Walter Savage Landor took leave of Italy with a sigh at not laying his bones there : — *' I did believe, (what have I not believed ?) Weary with age, but unopprest by pain, To close in thy soft clime my quiet day And rest my bones in the Mimosa's shade . . • For we are fond of thinking where to lie When every pulse hath ceast, when the lone heart * *' I have marked out a resting-place by my mother's side, and a space is left for me there." — Letter to Mrs. Storrow, Sept. 29, 1853. 8o A CORPSE TRA VELLING POST. Can lift no aspiration . . . reasoning As if the sight were unimpared by death, Were unobstructed by the coffin-lid, And the sun cheered corruption ! Over all The smiles of Nature shed a potent charm, And light us to our chamber at the grave." Kellerman left his heart to be buried in the field of Valmy, where the first great battle was fought in 1792, in which the Allies were repulsed. Marshal Bliicher's request was to be buried, without any parade, in a neighbouring field to his Silesian chateau, by the roadside, under three linden trees. (By the roadside it was Virgil's desire to be buried, on the Via Puteolana, at the second milestone from Naples.) Napoleon's dying request at St. Helena was that his body " might finally repose on the banks of the Seine, among the people he had loved so well." But meanwhile he desired to be interred in the small hollow, called Slanes Valley, where the waters of a fountain, shaded by weeping willows, meanders through verdant banks of tchampas — a plant which, says the Sanscrit Chronicle, notwithstanding its beauty and perfume, is no favourite, because it grows upon the tombs. Chateaubriand closes the introduc- tion to his Memoires d'outre-tombe with an assured anticipation of reposing on the shore of that sea he had loved so dearly. Should he die out of France, he requested that his body might not be brought back to his native country until fifty years had elapsed from its first inhumation. The idea of a corpse tra- velling post filled him with horror ; but dry and mouldering bones are easily transported. They would feel, he character- istically says, less fatigue on that last journey than when he dragged them hither and thither, burdened with the load of his cares and sufi"erings. The late Bishop Lonsdale disap- proved and often, his biographer tells us, derided the carrying of bodies long distances to be buried, except where the person dying has expressed a strong wish for it, or where there are public reasons for having the religious ceremony of the burial of the dead performed in some particular place, out of consi- deration for those among whom a man of consequence has OUT-OF-THE-WA V BURIALS. 8i lived ; not because it signifies whether he leaves his body " to be turned into corruption " in one place rather than another.* He was just the man, however, — and in him the bishop never absorbed or exhausted the man, — to relish, as a story, what we are told of General Lee, that cashiered commander who died at Philadelphia in 1782, and who left this injunction in his will : " I desire most earnestly that I may not be buried in any church or churchyard, or within a mile of any Presbyterian or Anabaptist meeting-house ; for since I have resided in this country I have kept so much bad company while living, that I do not choose to continue it when dead." Something in the spirit of Timon of Athens, when professedly sick of this false world and on the point of leaving it : " Then, Timon, presently prepare thy grave ; Lie where the light foam of the sea may beat Thy gravestone daily," George Glanville, Evelyn's brother-in-law, dying in the 84th year of his age, willed his body to be wrapped in lead and carried down to Greenwich, there put on board ship, and buried in the sea between Dover and Calais, about the Goodwin sands ; " which was done on the Tuesday or Wednesday after [April, 1702]. This occasioned much discourse, he having no relation at all to the sea." Much discourse indeed might the whims of men provoke in this respect. Lord Camelford has his remains buried under an ash-tree on a Swiss mountain ; and Sir Francis Bourgeois has a little mausoleum built for him in the college at Dulwich, where he once (as Hazlitt records the occasion) spent a pleasant, jovial day with the master and wardens. But these occasional fancies are excursive from the main line : the mass of men desire to He where their early associations fixed their young regard. Etty's constant wish through life was to set up his rest within the confines of his beloved minster * " It seems necessary to remind some people," Mr. Denison remarks, " that the person buried is not present at his own fmieral, and that the Burial Service does not say 'We therefore commit Aim — but his body—io the ground ;' and that that body will never be his again, but another, ' a spiritual body.' " — Life of John Lonsdale, Bishop of Lichfield, ch. iii. G 82 A CHOSEN BURIAL-PLACE. (York). And the author of Caxtoniana refers fondly to the little lake at the bottom of his own park, on the banks of which he loitered out his schoolboy holidays, and (could he but hallow their turf as Christian burial-ground) would desire to choose his grave. Urn-burial has its Christian advocates ; but it would lead us too far to enter on the vexed question of cremation. Suffice it here to quote a little poem from the Russian, happily ren- dered by Lady Charlotte Pepys : — " In sculptured tomb I would not rest, with vain magnificence around, Shut out from those I love the best, and trusted to the death-cold ground. Nor would I be embalmed and lie a check on all their headless glee, Of life a ghastly mockery, in annual spectacle to be. ,Nor would I choose (though that were gain) 'neath the old yew beside the stream, That spot where shadows of our fane fall 'thwart the moon-beams' silver gleam. There, it is true, the thought of me oft in each gentle heart might rise, And still, whene'er they came to pray, win a soft glance from those dear eyes. I would not in their garden lie, though nearer to their daily life. Though there, with sweetest minstrelsy from those dear lips, the air be rife. No ! let me rather shrink away, till by the spicy flame consumed ; Then let a hand beloved lay mine ashes in a fold perfumed. And this the warm and beating heart for ever on its pulses wear ; So might I still my loving part in all its joys and sorrows bear ! " Some there are, says Wordsworth's SoHtary in the churchyard among the mountains, who, drawing near their final home, and much and daily longing that the same were reached, would rather shun than seek the fellowship of kindred mould. And that churchyard has its examples, lured thither even by the studied depth of privacy of the Genius of the hills, — whether '' unhappy alien hoping to obtain concealment," or whatever other kind of fugitive from familiar fellowship. Mr. Browning's Paracelsus is a type in bold type, of this sad-hearted seclusive- ness. In his farewell words to Festus the unhappy man says — and his words are unfathomably sad : ' ' I give the fight up ! let there be an end, A privacy, an obscure nook for me. UNSTABLE AS WATER. 83 I want to be forgotten even by God ! But if that cannot be, dear Festus, lay me, When I shall die, within some narrow grave, Not by itself — for that would be too proud — But where such graves are thickest ; let it look Nowise distinguished from the hillocks round, So that the peasant at his brother's bed May tread upon my own and know it not." UNSTABLE AS WATER. Genesis xlix. 4. UNSTABLE as water, how could Reuben excel ? Excel- lence involves elements of constancy, conditions of stability. But what stability is there in water ? The house built on the shifting sea-sands — we know what came of it. But the sands are more stable than the sea — than the waves of the sea, at least ; and he that wavereth is like the waves of the sea. Unstable as that troubled water, he shall not excel. In the great affairs of the world, especially in the revolutions which change its condition, the one thing needful, says Lord Brougham, is a sustained determination of character ; a mind firm, persevering, inflexible, incapable of bending to the will of another, and ever controlling circumstances, not yielding to them, Cicero, for instance, could never have risen to emi- nence in the Revolution of France, any more than he could have mingled in the scenes which disgracefully distinguished it from the troubles of Rome. Decision of character is a topic of oft recurrence in the Historical Sketches ; the want of it is illustrated in Lord Thurlow, for example, who in all questions of political conduct is characterized by the later Chancellor as "exceedingly irresolute;" so that Pitt found him a colleague wholly unfruitful in council, though always apt to raise diffi- culties, and very slow and undecided. " The Whigs, when he joined them, soon discovered how infirm a frame of mind there lay concealed behind the outward form of vigour and decision." 84 SWIFT, INFLEXIBLE DECISION. Eldon's far more pronounced repute for indecision, on the bench at least, is excused by his admirers as a frequent accompaniment of the most acute and penetrating intellect, which often seems undecided, not because it sees Httle, but because it sees so much, that, instant decision is impossible. *' Decision of character, the quality of all others the most im- portant for success in life, often arises from the will being more powerful than the judgment ; and the opposite side disre- garded." Men and soldiers, as Mr. Carlyle says, love swift inflexible decision, even when they suffer by it. " As indee is not this fundamentally the quality of qualities for a man?" A quality which, he admits, taken by itself is next to nothing, since inferior animals, asses, dogs, even mules have it ; yet, in due combination, the indispensable basis of all. Balzac ascribes to one of his heroes cette vivacite meridionak which forbids a Frenchman of the South to abide in any uncertainty whatever ; a quality which they of the North call a defect : if, say they, it was the occasion of the brilliant fortune of Murat, it was also the cause of his death. Suvorov has been blamed for want of deliberation j* nevertheless he is one of the few generals on record who never lost a battle. Pope Zephyrinus (a.d. 202-219), unstable as water, how- could he excel in the pontificate ? In Latin Christiafiity he is characterized as " of unsettled principles ; embracing adverse tenets with all the zeal of which a mind so irresolute was capable." He was now a disciple of the Noetians (who held the extreme Monarchian doctrine, if not Patripassianism itself), now of Sabellius ; and was constantly being driven back by his fears, or confusion of mind, to opposite tenets, and involved in the most glaring contradictions. So through his long episcopate there was endless conflict and uncertainty. The time was out * His quickness of decision was incidentally observable in the short and laconic style of his orders ; and a studied conciseness is said to have marked his conversation. ^ He used to say that the whole of his tactics consisted in the magic words, Stupai i bey! "Advance and strike!" — an instance of the rhyming laconics he affected both in table-talk and letter- writing. PAINS OF IRRESOLUTION. 85 of joint, and that Holy Father was scarcely the Coming Man to set it right, nor was the hour at hand for the promulgation of the latter-day dogma of infallibility. The instability of Zephyrinus would have surrounded the dogma with difficulties not a few. La Bruyere thinks it hard to decide whether irresolution makes a man most unhappy or contemptible ; and a graphic sketch he draws of such a man, — not really a single character, but several, multiplying himself as often' as his tastes and pur- poses change. At each moment he is what he was not the moment before, and will not be the moment after : he succeeds himself. And therefore, in another phase of the verb, he never succeeds at all. A late philosophic writer contrasts the career of those who preserve a steadiness of taste and purpose, not to be suddenly altered by any of the vicissitudes of life, with that of others who bend to every impulse, and fluctuate with every variation; who seem to possess a constant susceptibility of being influenced mth ardour towards any object which happens to strike the imagination : for a short time the chase is kept up with a vigour and enthusiasm which amaze the ordinary class of mortals, and leave competition at a distance ; but their preternatural energy soon relaxes, and ultimately dies away, till it is revived by some other caprice, and starts off" in a new direction. Well says Samuel Bailey, that happiness must be held on a precarious tenure by a man who is thus subject to the opposite influence of inconsistent attractions, and who is continually liable to have his tranquillity ruffled and his pur- poses disturbed by some novel event or contact with some new character. "With a mind full of associations which can be acted upon by impulses the most contrary, he is the slave of circumstances, which seem to snatch the giifdance of his con- duct out of his own hands, and impel him forward till other events overpower their influence, and, having usurped the same ascendency, exercise the same despotism." The friends made by such a man are many, and hardly one of them kept. Friendship is with him an intermittent fever, and after the hot fits come the cold. Virtue only is stable, observes Dn Thomas 86 FICKLE IN FRIENDSHIP. Brown, because virtue only is consistent; and the caprice which, under a momentary impulse, begins an eager intimacy with one, as it began it from an impulse as momentary with another, will soon find a third, with whom it may again begin it, with the same exclusion, for the moment, of every previous attachment (so true is Rousseau^s remark on these hasty starts of kindness, that he who treats us at first sight like a friend of twenty years' standing, will very probably, before anything like twenty years are past, treat us as a stranger, if we have any im- portant service to ask of him). "Some fickle creatures boast a soul True as the needle to the pole, Their humour yet so various — They manifest their whole life through The needle's variations too, Their love is so precarious." Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the Opposi- tion nominally had for its chief Frederick Prince of Wales ; but the influence was nominal only ; for, says Earl Stanhope, " so weak and fickle had been his conduct to all parties, that even the near approach of a throne could not make him an object of respect." The same historian refers to the parliamentary wit and rising statesman of that day, Charles Townshend,* as * Whom Walpole in one letter stigmatizes as a "poor toad," to be pitied for the distracting effects upon himself of his own complex manoeuverings, *' all tearing him or impelling him a thousand ways, with the addition of his own vanity and irresolution " (Walpole to Lord Hertford, Jan, 27, 1765). In another he thus remonstrates with his friend Conway (and if ever Horace had a friend he cared for, it was Harry Conway) : " Pray stay where you are, and do some good to your country. . . . You have engaged and must go through. ... I have no patience with your thinking so idly. ^ would be a reflection on your understanding and character, and a want of resolution unworthy of you " (Nov. 29, 1765). It was going to Italy from which Walpole would dissuade the Marshal. As editor of Maoris Diary, Earl Russell may have felt a passing inclination, if not to suppress, at least to take exception to, some passages in which the writer seems to impute as characteristic a tendency to vexatious irresolution on the part of his noble friend. Thus, Sept. 13. 1821 : " Lord John came to take leave of Bessy. Told him that, as I knew he liked to change his mind, he must not be particular with me, as to his promise of going with me [to England, from Paris] ; he seemed, however, POLITICAL INDECISION. 87 kept back by fickleness and unsteadiness of purpose. Of an entirely different complexion is the uncertainty complained of by Lord Brougham in Mr. Windham, as not only impairing the effect of his oratory, but diminishing his usefulness and injuring his reputation as a statesman. " For he was too often the dupe of his own ingenuity; which made him doubt and balance, and gave an oscitancy fatal to vigour in council, as well as most prejudicial to the effects of eloquence, by breaking the force of his blows as they fell." So his " hesitating dis- position " //^disposed him to be a leader, and tended to make him a follower, rather than an original thinker or actor ; as if, says his critic, he felt some rehef under the doubts which harassed him, in thus taking shelter under a master's wing, and devolving upon a less scrupulous balancer of conflicting reasons the task of trimming the scales and forming his opinions for him. " Our douhts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt." The Duke of Newcastle, — Smollett's duke, Walpole's, Macaulay's, — is a signal type of the forcibly-feeble irresolute man. He is pictured in 1757, at a ministerial crisis, in the agonies of irresolution \ sometimes his ambition and sometimes his fears predominated ; and whatever he said one day he was sure to unsay the next. Again, that Earl of Loudoun whom he sent to Canada as Commander-in-Chief, against Montcalm, for whom he was no match, shared all too largely in the duke's defect. Indecision, says Earl Stanhope, was the ruling fault of his, as of most weak characters. " He is like St. George upon the signposts," said a Philadelphian to Dr. Franklin, " always on horseback, but never advances." Gibbon depicts the dis- decided upon it." — 15th. " Had a note from Lord John to say he has changed his mind about going. This uncertainty rather a fault. . . . Called upon Lord John, who seemed, after a little conversation, to be half inclined to change again. Bid me, at parting, not give him up." — 17th. " Saw Lord John, who says he is now determined to go, if I will wait for him till Saturday." On the 23rd, go he did. INFIRMITY OF RESOLUTION. tress of the Emperor Valens when no longer guided by the wisdom and authority of his elder brother, and required by the ambassadors of the Goths to give an instant and peremptory decision as to their appeal : " he was deprived of the favourite resource of feeble and timid minds ; who consider the use of dilatory and ambiguous measures as the most admirable efforts of consummate prudence." Like the Greek sovran in a modern-antique play, — ' ' He has a wavering nature, easily Unpoised, and trembling ever on extremes. * * * # The flower of his love never bloomed upright, ' But was a parasite that loved to lean On stronger natures, winning strength from them." Schiller's English biographer discerns in him a consistency in action, and a firm coherence in character, which the change- ful condition of his history rendered of pecuhar importance : his resources, his place of residence, his associates, his worldly prospects, might vary as they pleased ; the purpose of his life did not vary, but was ever present with him, to nerve every better faculty of his head and heart, to invest the chequered vicissitudes of his fortune with a dignity derived from himself. " The zeal of his nature overcame the temptations to that loitering and indecision, that fluctuation between sloth and con- suming toil, that infirmity of resolution, with all its tormenting and enfeebling consequences, to which a literary man,^ work- ing as he does at a solitary task, uncalled-for by any pressing tangible demand, and to be recompensed by distant and dubious advantages, is especially exposed." Unity of aim,f aided by ordinary vigour of character, will generally ensure perseverance; a quality, adds Mr. Carlyle, "not ranked * William Collins, the poet, is typical in this respect, His great fault, says Johnson, was irresolution ; many were the works he designed, but the frequent calls of immediate necessity broke his scheme, and suffered him to pursue no settled purpose, t Rothscliild's advice to young Buxton was, ** Stick to your brewery, and you will be the great brewer of London, Be brewer, and banker, and merchant, and manufacturer, and you will soon be in the Gazette'^ CARLYLE ON COLERIDGE. among the cardinal virtues, but as essential as any of them to the proper conduct of life." The weakest living creature, he asserts, can, by concentrating his powers on a single object, accomplish something ; while the strongest, by dispersing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. * In another of Mr. Carlyle's biographies a memorable picture is given of the :i resolute " literary man," in the person of Samuel Taylor Coleridge — emphatically in his person, as indicative of character and mental habit. " The face was flabby and irresolute. . . . The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute j expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking, he rather shufiled than decisively stepped ; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden-walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both." A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely much- suffering man : altogether what his critic elsewhere calls a foiled potentiality. Excel, in a manner, Coleridge undoubtedly did; but the excellence was ever of a kind to suggest how much greater it might have been, with stability at the base of his character. Being unstable, he did not, his genius and possibilities considered, excel. The excellence, of a rare degree and choicest kind, was potentially present; he had it in him; but the outcomings were shortcomings, the upshot was a mortifying disappointment of legitimately great expecta- tions. The latest gospel in this world, according to the Clothes- Philosopher of Weissnichtwo, is, " Know thy work and do it." Know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules. We have Mr. Emerson's word for it, that each * " The drop, by continual falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock ; the hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind. Few men have applied more steadfastly to the business of their life, or been more resolutely diligent than Schiller." — Life of Schiller^ Part II. 90 UNSTABLE AS WATER. man has an aptitude born with him to do easily some feat impossible to any other. " Do your work. I have to say this often, but nature says it oftener." Blessed is he who has found his work, Mr. Carlyle exclaims, or proclaims; let him ask no other blessedness. " He has a work, a life-purpose ; he has found it, and will follow it." Chanter^ ou je m'ahuse^ est ma tdche ici-bas^ was B Granger's device. " Pol meo animo omnes sapientes Suum officium sequum est colere, et facere," is the whole duty of man, or thereabouts, as understood by " the man in the play," as the phrase goes, in Plautus. Persius is philosophically didactic on the duty of sticking to one's ascertained duty ; of having an object in life, and pursuing it. " Est aliquid quo tendis, et in quod dirigis arcum ? An passim sequeris corvos, testave, lutove, Securus quo pes ferat, atque ex tempore vivis ?" * That ex tempore living is just the converse of living for all time. Its objects change with every day of its fickle course. It turns with every turn of the tide. Unstable as water, one's name shall be written in water. The Abbe d'Ohvet says at the close of one of his artistic studies, that the fine arts attract large numbers of students and devotees, of whom by far the greater part, however devoted their application, will never achieve anything like excellence ; while such as do excel, are able to do so in one kind only. Happy they who know what that one kind is ! But he reckons it as rare, perhaps, to know one's talent as to have a really definite and defined talent at all. M. de Sacy winds up one of his critico-historical disquisitions with a characteristic Courage f Thus Englished by Dr. Brewster : ** Say, hast thou fixed some certain mark in view? This, do thy levelled shafts alone pursue ? Or vagrant follow'st thou, with pelting clay, Each random crow that fortunes in thy way ? Does thy life one determined scope avow. Or looks thy thought no further than the now?" Satires of Persius, iii. 60. WAVE-LIKE WAVERERS. 91 done ! by way of self- communing, not to say self-satisfaction : Let me \vrite criticism and biography ; that is my vocation. And it is something to know what one can do, and to confine one's self to the doing of it — de s'y renfermer. So the late W. Lovell Beddoes sought to fortify himself in his literary pursuits by reflecting that a man must have an exclusive passion for his art, and all the obstinacy and self-denial which are combined with such a temperament, an unconquerable and always-enduring will, always working fonvard to the only goal he knows ; and such a one, he insists, must never think that there is any human employment so good (much less suspect that there may be not a few better), or so honourable for the exercise of his faculties. "All my life long," says Philip van Artevelde, ** I have beheld with most respect the man Who knew himself, and knew the ways before him, And from among them chose considerately, And, having chosen, with a steadfast mind Pursued his purpose." A commentator upon which passage has remarked how true it is, that, attractive though versatility be, concentration of energies upon some one good work is the master-key to the honour and respect of our fellows. WAVE- LIKE WAVERERS. A SEQUEL TO ''UNSTABLE AS WATER" James i. 6, 8. THE self-designed epitaph of a modern poet, " His name was writ in water," might stand for that by which the name of Reuben is noted for all time, — unstable as water. The instability, and the similitude, may remind us of a precept and a similitude in a canonical epistle j where whoso lacketh wisdom is enjoined to ask it of God, and to do so "nothing wavering ; for he that wavereth [diaKpivonevos) is like a wave WAVE-LIKE WAVERERS. (kXvScovi) of the sea, driven with the wind, and tossed." Let not f/mf man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord. And the Apostle adds, that a double-minded man is unstable (aKaTdcTTaTos) in all his ways. The blight of Reuben is upon him, so that he shall not, cannot excel. St. Paul uses the wave-like phrase, where he speaks of those who are tossed to arid fro (KkyBcoviCofieuot) and carried about with every wind of doctrine (Eph. iv. 14). The image is, as in the prophet Isaiah, of the troubled sea, when it cannot rest. Nay, a smooth sea has its ripples. The ebb and flow of the tide imply wavelets at least, and these imply perpetual unrest. The wavering mind may vary in degree with the degrees of agitation on the surface of the sea ; and he that wavereth may be like the wavelet that just ruffles that surface, or he may be like a billow that is driven with the wind, and tossed. Either way a waverer, he is either way wave-like. Irresolution is figured under images the most diverse. A victim to it likens himself, in an old play, to a heavy stone, rolled up a hill by a weak child : he moves a little up, and tumbles back again. We all, it has been said, feel a vigorous will to be a fine thing ; and it is well called a stroke of nature in " the man in the play " (another man and another play), to hate a bird that does not know its own mind ; so wearisome is it to be with people without any will of their own. " Voli- tion is life : no one can be really great, whatever his other powers, without it." He shall not excel. Scott characterizes James the First as so utterly devoid of " firm resolve," which another Scottish bard has called " the stalk of carle-hempe in man," that even his virtues and good meaning became laugh- able, from the whimsical uncertainty of his conduct.* It is of * In Peveril of the Peak Sir Walter lays stress on the capricious instability of character of the second Duke of Buckingham, and tells how discarded statesmen, and what would now perhaps be called Cave-of- Adullamites of all sorts, besides servile tools of administration and political spies, all regarded the Duke's mansion as neutral ground ; sure, that if he was not of their opinion to-day this very circumstance rendered it most likely he would think with them to-morrow. A more subtle if not elaborate study of the unstable man is seen in Sir CLARENDON ON CHARLES IL 93 James the Second that Clarendon is ™tmg when he says, comparing him with his elder brother Charles, that if the Duke, as he then was, seemed to be more firm and fixed in his resolutions, it was rather from an obstinacy in his will than from the constancy of his judgment, which was more subject to persons than to argument, and so as chaneagble at least as the King's ; "And from this want of steadiness, and irresolution (w^hencesoever the infirmity proceeded), most of the misfortunes which attended either of them or their servants who served them honestly, had their rise and growth." On a later page Clarendon professes that what gave himself most trouble, and many times made him wish himself in any private condition separated from the Court, was " that unfixedness and irresolu- tion of judgment " which was natural to all the royal family "of the male line," and which " often exposed them all to the importunities of bold, and to the snares of crafty men." His references to his own royal master in particular, the second Charles, are often couched in such terms as these : " The King seemed very much troubled and irresolute;" — "presenting to his Majesty his irresoluteness," his "receding from what he had so positively resolved to have done;" — he "promised them to be firmer to his next determination ; "— " The King gave no other answer than that he had proceeded too far to retire, and that he should be looked upon as a child if he receded from his purpose," etc. Receded he had, more than once or twice too often, and already looked upon as a child he was, accord- ingly ; for of this sovereign lord the king it was written, by an antedated epitaph, " Whose word no man relies on." How expressive is the account given by the Cardinal de Retz of the faiblesse of Monsieur, Gaston, Duke of Orleans. We are William Ashton, in whose resolutions a stranger even, if at all obsei-vant, can scarcely fail to discover something vacillating and uncertain, though not until after long and intimate conversation with him on topics of pressing and personal interest : "an infirmity of purpose, arising from a cautious and timid disposition, which, as he was conscious of its influence on his mind, he was, from pride as well as policy, most anxious to conceal from others." Too distinctively his daughter inherits this infirmity of purpose ; for thereby hangs a tale— the tale of the Bride of Lammermoor. 94 THE REGENT ARRAN. shown the various degrees and stages of it, and are as it were told to tell them off one by one : " II y avait tres-loin chez lui de la velleite a la volonte, de la volonte a la resolution, de la resolution au choix des moyens, du choix des moyefis a V applica- tion. Mais ce qui etait de plus extraordinaire, il arrivait meme assez souvent qu'il demeurait tout court au milieu de Vapplica- tio7t" The Regent Arran is another type of the utterly irresolute and therefore quite incompetent statesman. His infirm character rendered him a pliant instrument of the English policy ; and he was described by English intriguers, episcopal and civilian, as " a soft God's man, that loved well to look on the Scripture/' Coleridge somewhere asserts that indecisiveness of character, though the effect of timidity, is almost always associated with benevolence. Mr. Froude speaks of Arran as one " whose feeble understanding swayed under every transient impulse." *' The imbecile Arran," he says on another page, could play no part but that of the wind-vane marking the changes in the air- currents. And elsewhere again : " Arran had the vice, so rare in a Scotchman, of weakness. The necessity for action para- lysed in him the power to act." When urged to activity,* for instance, by Henry VIII., in 1543, he issued proclamations; he talked of raising twenty thousand men ; he would bring the Queen into Blackness ; he would meet the Cardinal (Beatoun) in the field ; but, meanwhile, he did no one of these things : he sat still, and waited upon events, and laboured to inflict his own inaction on the English. The firm foot is that which finds firm footing, says Archaeus ; the weak falters, though it be standing upon rock. Necker, in whom, and to whom a characteristic /^/z^x d' indecision was fatal, has himself retraced, * Compare the account given by another historian, a Scotch one, of the vacillating and contradictory poHcy of our Edward II. with regard to Scotland, in 1308, which afforded every advantage to so able an adversary as Bruce. Orders for the muster of his army, which were not enforced; commissions to his generals, which were presently countermanded ; promises to take the field in person, which were broken almost as soon as made ; directions to his lieutenant in Scotland to prosecute the war with the greatest vigour, followed by instructions to purchase a truce ; — such is the picture of the imbecility of the English king, as presented by the public records of the time, and from them copied by Mr. Tytler. MONTAIGNE'S A VO WAL, 95 in one of his Pensees, the torments of irresolution, from which the irresolute man can only gain deliverance by submitting himself to haphazard or else to some whimsically devised rules which have at any rate the merit of being fixed. What he in the most pronounced way admired in the First Consul, to whom, on the road to Marengo, Necker was presented at Geneva, was that strength of will in which he was so deficient, and which he now declared to be the prime essential for the governor-in-chief of a great empire. Napoleon won his admiring, almost amazed, homage by his decision of character, and that siiperbe volonte which grasped all, governed all, subdued all, even itself. Not many are ingenuous enough to confess with Montaigne, though with ampler cause for the confession than he had, — " I \\dll not omit this further blemish, however unfit to be pub- lished, namely, my irresolution ; a defect highly incommodious in the transaction of the affairs of the world." He avows himself to be good for nothing but to follow, suffering himself to be easily carried away with the crowd : "I have not confidence enough in my own strength to take upon me to command and lead ; I am very glad to find the way beaten before me by others." A popular English essayist takes the most hopeless of confessedly undecided people to be those who appear totally unable to form any opinions of their own, and are therefore dependent upon those of others ; and who are apt to refer each trifling difficulty, each doubtful question, to every fresh person with whom they come in contact, and are influenced in turn by each ; so that no sooner have they heard and approved of one opinion, and, apparently, determine to act upon it, than they turn to the next person they chance to meet for his advice ; and, as very naturally may happen, a different counsel being given, they are thrown on a precisely different track till a third adviser may again alter their course. Now, if "in the multitude of counsellors there is safety," it must certainly, we are to bear in mind, imply these counsellors in full conclave, not singly and in succession. " There is nothing more dangerous than this dependence on every fresh opinion, and receiving the impression of each, just as water reflects every 96 MORAL AND MENTAL INDECISION successive object which passes over its clear surface, and retains no lasting image from any." The natural results of this perilous practice are shown to be complete destruction of self-depend- ence and self-respect, and a fatal inconsistency and changeable- ness of purpose and conduct. Such a character is designed in the Prefect Pompeianus in A7tto7iina, — a short, fat, undignified man, on whose aspect was legibly impressed the stamp of indo- lence and vacillation : " You saw, in a moment, that his mind, like a shuttlecock, might be urged in any direction by the efforts of others, but was utterly incapable of voHtion by itself." It may probably, however, be true, as alleged, that indecision comes in for a good deal of undeserved contempt merely because few people are at the pains to discriminate between the two very different sources from which it springs ; for there is an indecision of the moral and an indecision of the intellec- tual nature, and though the two are in themselves as distinct as they well can be, they are in their results so similar that they- are too commonly confounded, and each has to bear the praise or dispraise really due to the other. The indecision which is due to a defect in the moral nature, is illustrated in the case of persons (especially, but not exclusively, young persons) whose whole happiness in life seems to hang upon the approbation of others, — even to the extent of their clothes. As an example, humorously exaggerated of course, we are referred to Mr. Toots and the overwhelming difficulty he experienced in deciding whether he ought or ought not to button the last button of his dress-waistcoat. " Having formed no fixed principles of art, or having at least no confidence in his ability to apply them to dress-clothes, Mr. Toots weakly took his tone from his fellow- guests, and, as each arrival displayed a fresh arrangement of buttons, was kept wildly playing upon his waistcoat, as if it had been a musical instrument." The sartorial illustration recalls a passage in the diary of the late Mr. William Collins, where he seeks to impress upon himself how great a waste of time the habit of determining the course of action would prevent ; how great, too, is the debility of mind consequent upon the worries of continuous hesitation, — all rendered the more vexing from MARSHAL CONWAY'S IRRESOLUTIONS. 97 the fact that, in general, the things about which the mind has the greatest doubt, are either above its powers or beneath its notice. For his instance of the latter : " A man orders a coat; he is in doubt about the colour ; perhaps he says, ' I will wait a few days,' " — during which the execrable coat " so frequently interrupts his more useful cogitations, that he orders one at last of (most likely) a colour he hates, merely to get rid of the sub- ject." Had he in the first instance, wistfully muses the moral- izing painter, determined on it before he set about anything else, his mind would have been in a " more clear and proper state to receive other ideas." Indecision of this sort may well be rated as a poor sort of quality enough, deserving all the contemptuous pity which decided people heap upon it, and having its root in fear — the undue fear of what our neighbours may think or say of us. As from Dickens is quoted Mr. Toots, so from Macaulay is cited the vigorous sketch of another type of the character in Marshal Conway, who, " afraid of dis- obliging the King, afraid of being abused in the newspapers, afraid of being thought factious if he went out, afraid of being thought interested if he stayed in, afraid of everything, and afraid of being known to be afraid of anything," is presented as a laughable mixture of great physical courage with the weakest moral timidity. Another historian speaks of Conway as "at all times irresolute in his manner and tortuous in his phrases ;" and remarks upon one celebrated speech of his, that it was " significant of his mental confusion, and his almost infantine helplessness." There was a well-invented story spread about to satirize Conway's " irresolutions," as his fast friend Horace Walpole has it, in whose Last Journals the story is to be found : it is, that Conway went with Charles Fox and others 'to Breslau, the conjuror, who told visitors what card they had thought of. He told all the rest directly ; but when Conway presented himself, Breslau said, " Oh ! here is something very odd ! Sir, you have not fixed upon a card : you first thought of the knave of clubs, then of the ace of hearts, and then of the nine of diamonds, but you have not deter- mined on which." Clarendon's character-study of Colepepper H VARIETIES OF INDECISION. includes the emphasized mention of his being so irresolute, and having a fancy so perpetually working, that after a con- clusion made, he would the next day, in the execution of it, and sometimes after, raise neiv doubts and make new ob- jections; which "always occasioned trouble and sometimes produced inconvenience." But in Sir John's case, the inde- cision may be perhaps more properly considered intellectual than moral ; and there is an intellectual indecision which, as analysts of both kinds have discerningly explained, is related to the moral nature as the result of excessive conscientious- ness, not of undue fear about the opinions of others. Rapid decision may be a proof rather of weakness than of strength ; the mere faculty of keeping the mind fairly balanced between two or more courses implying a certain degree of intellectual power which some are wholly without. Whately complains that there are " persons who can no more refrain from deciding immediately, and with full conviction, on one side of a ques- tion, than they could continue to stand after having lost their equilibrium, like the famous tower of Pisa." Self-satisfied people, it has been said, decide easily, for the simple reason that, be their decision what it may, it is sure to please them. Goethe's English biographer notes in him a singular hesitation in adopting any decisive course of action — singular, in a man so resolute and imperious when once his decision had been made. This Mr. Lewes calls the weakness of imaginative men. However strong the volition, when once the volition is set going, there is, he observes, in men of active intel- lects, and especially in men of imaginative, apprehensive intellects,* a fluctuation of motives keeping the volition in abeyance, which practically amounts to weakness ; and is only distinguished from weakness by the strength of the volition when let loose. Goethe, who was aware of this peculiarity, is * As of purely intellectual indecision, Lord Eldon is the accepted type ; so, of that indecision which is partly the result of a subtle intellect, partly the result of a self-torturing conscience, a Saturday Reviewer proposes Mr. Gladstone as a familiar instance. VACILLATING TEMPER. 99 said to have attributed it to his never having been placed in circumstances which required prompt resolution, and to his not having educated his will.* A habit of thinking for himself is one which may be acquired by the solitary student ; but, Sir A. Helps maintains, the habit of deciding for himself, so indispensable to a man of business, is not to be gained by study. Decision, he says, is a thing that cannot be fully exer- cised until it is actually wanted, " You cannot play at decid- ing. You must have realities to deal with." It is true, he agrees, that the formation of principles requires decision, but this of a kind which depends upon deliberate judgment ; whereas, the decision which is wanted in the world's busi- ness must ever be within call, and does not judge so much as it foresees and chooses; and this kind of decision is to be found in those who have been thrown early on their own resources, or who have been brought up in great freedom. While essay-writing lasts, there never will be wanting essays to point the moral of indecision of character, and to trace to this one fatal defect, — this vulnerable point, which, " like the heel of Achilles, renders the perfection of the rest of the organization of no avail," — the melancholy spectacle of talents wasted, opportunities of rising in the world thrown away, and the fairest prospects blighted. Again and again, with one essayist on the subject, may we and do we see persons whose characters seemed adapted for posts of eminence, whose talents and energy and attractive qualities are alike fitted to win confidence and love, fail in the hour of trial, and sink into obscurity or disgrace, from the " weak vacillation of pur- pose which spoils the best-conceived plans, and disappoints the sanguine expectations which their known capabilities have justly excited." How much greater might Queen EHzabeth have been, but for that strangely vacillating temper which comes out so very strongly in Mr. Froude's History. Her life- long irresolution on the subject of her marriage may have been * But his biographer believes the cause to have lain much deeper, — iu the nature of psychological actions, not in the accidents of education. loo FRIVOLOUS AND VEXATIOUS. only part of her general character ; but in her treatment of Mary Stuart this fault is seen to come out with tenfold strength, because, as one severe critic allows, the circumstances were such that the wisest statesman might well doubt and change his mind. Even Cecil might almost in that matter have set up a plea to adopt the style of Ben Jonson's Kitely : — " T am a knave if I know what to say, What course to take, or which way to resolve. My brain, methinks, is Hke an hour-glass, Wherein my imaginations run like sands, Filling up time ; but then are turned and turned ; So that I know not what to stay upon, And less, to put in act." Fiction delights in full-length, kit-kat, profile, and other por- traiture of irresolute people, in all their genera and species. It may be a life-likeness in a few simple strokes, with the characteristic coming out indirectly, as in the Mr. Woodhouse* of Miss Austen's Emma, or her Harriet Smith \ in the same * For instance : "Mr. Knightley called, and sat some time with Mr. Woodhouse and Emma, till Mr. Woodhouse, who had previously made up his mind to walk out, was persuaded by his daughter not to defer it, and was induced by the entreaties of both, though against the scruples of his own civihty, to leave Mr. Eaiightley for that purpose. Mr. Knightley, who had nothing of ceremony about him, was offering, by his short decided answers, an amusing contrast to the protracted apologies and civil hesi- tations of the other," etc. — Emma, chapter, viii. + Witness her hesitations and vacillations in the milliner's shop, until Emma joins her at the " interesting counter," and tries, with all the force of her own mind, to convince her that if she wants plain muslin, it is of no use to look at figured ; and that a blue riband, be it ever so beautiful, will never match her yellow pattern. At last it is all settled, even to the destination of the parcel. "Should I send it to Mrs. Goddard's?" the milliner asks. "Yes — no — yes, to Mrs. Goddard's, Only my pattern gown is at Hartfield. No, you shall send it to Hartfield, if you please. But then, Mrs. Goddard will want to see it. And I could take the pat- tern gown home any day. But I shall want the riband directly ; so it had better go to Hartfield — at least the riband. You could not make it into two parcels, Mrs. Ford, could you?" "It is not worth while, Harriet, to give Mrs. Ford the trouble of two parcels," interposes Emma. "No more it is," assents Harriet. , " No trouble in the world, ma'am," protests the milliner, " Oh, but indeed," exclaims Harriet, "I would much rather have it only in one. Then, if you please, you shall send it all to Mrs. Goddard's. I do not know— no, I think, Miss Woodhouse, I may just as Af/SS AUSTEN'S 'PERSUASION: tale j or again the Anne Elliott pictured, however mistakenly, by Captain Wentworth, in the same writer's admirably finished story oi Persuasion."^ Or, say, the Richard oi Bleak House ^ vacillating between the study of medicine at Mr. Badgers, and that of law in Mr. Kenge's office : as soon as he has it in his power to leave Mr. Badger at any moment, he begins to doubt whether he wants to leave him at all. "He didn't know, he said, really. It wasn't a bad profession ; he couldn't assert that he disliked it j perhaps he liked it as well as any other — suppose he gave it one more chance !" Whereupon he shut himself up for a few weeks, with some books and some bones, and seems to be acquiring a considerable fund of information with great rapidity. But his fervour, after lasting about a month, begins to cool ; and when it is quite cooled, begins to grow warm again. His vacillations between law and medi- cine last so long, that the half-year is gone before he finally well have it sent to Hartfield, and take it home with me at night. What do you advise ?" " That you do not give another half-second to the sub- ject. To Hartfield, if you please, Mrs. Ford," " Ay, that will be much best," says Harriet, quite satisfied ; "I should not at all hke to have it sent to Mrs. Goddard's. " — Chapter xxvii. * As the Captain walks with Louisa in the hedge-row, on a ^'^^nter day, he expatiates on her superiority to her sister (Anne) in decision of character. It is the worst evil, he reflects, of too yielding and indecisive a character, that no influence over it can be depended on. You are never sure of a good impression being durable : everybody may sway it. " Let those who would be happy be firm. Here is a nut," said he, catching one down from an upper bough, "to exemplify: a beautiful glossy nut, which, blessed with original strength, has outlived all the storms of autumn. Not a puncture, not a weak spot anywhere. This nut," he continued, with playful solemnity, "while so many of its brethren have fallen and been trodden under foot, is still in possession of all the happiness that a hazel nut can be supposed capable of." Then retui-ning to his former earnest tone — " My first wish for all whom I am interested in, is that they should be firm.' — Persuasion, chapter x. There comes a time, nevertheless, when Anne, the presumed victim of persuasion, who has overheard this hedgerow homily, wonders (see chapter xii.) whether it ever occurs to Captain Wentworth now, after new experi- ences of character, to question the justness of his previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantages of firmness of character ; and whether it might not strike him that, like all other qualities of mind, it should have its proportions and limits. It can hardly, she thinks, escape him to feel that a persuadable temper may sometimes be as much in favour of happi- ness as a very resolute character. 102 MAKING UP ONE'S MIND. separates from Mr. Badger, and enters on an experimental course of Messrs. Kenge and Carboy ; for all which wayward- ness he takes great credit to himself, as being determined to be in earnest "this time." Mrs. Gaskell, in Ruth, contrasts the excellent practical sense of Miss Benson with the intellec- tual indecision of her winsome, and devout, but (of the two) less mascuhne, brother \ he being so often perplexed by the problems of life, that he lets the time for action go by ; while she keeps him in check by her clear, pithy talk, which brings back his wandering thoughts to the duty that lies straight before him, waiting for action.* Quick, resolute action in the next step of Life is all she requires, while he deliberates, and trembles, and often does wrong from his very deliberation, when his first instinct would have led him right. To have made up one's mind, is asserted by the author of Doctor Jacob, with an exemplification accordingly, to be certainly one of the readiest specifics for mental serenity. Ulysses is cited as beyond question a miserable man while swaying between in- dulgence and duty in the island of Ogygia, but assuredly able to sleep soundly enough when he had once given the word. Off and away. Philip van Artevelde can give evidence as an expert, to the same effect : — *' And take this with thee for thy comfort too — That man is not the most in tribulation Who, resolute of mind, walks his own way, With answerable skill to plant his steps. Men in their places are the men that stand, And I am strong and stable on my legs." * A sufficiently differing contrast is that made out by Scott between the Earl of Leicester and his unscrupulous master of the horse, when the hour is come to decide on the fate of Amy Robsart. Varney professes attach- ment to "the noble, the lofty, the high-minded Leicester," as he has known him hitherto. But the abject lord who stoops to every adverse circumstance, whose judicious resolves are scattered like chaff before every wind of passion, him Richard Varney declines to serve ; accounting himself as much above him in constancy of mind, as beneath him in rank and fortune. And Varney is alleged to speak thus without hypocrisy ; for, though the firmness of mind which he boasted was hardness and impene- trability, yet he really felt the ascendency which he vaunted. — Kenilworth, chapter xxxvii. ONE-SIDED ESTIMATE OF LIFE. 103 GRATITUDE A SOURCE OF RESIGNATION. Job ii. 10. OVERTAKEN with loss upon loss, sorrow upon sorrow, the man of Uz called to mind amid his calamities the redundance of bygone prosperity. Bygone it might be alto- gether j yet would he keep it gratefully in remembrance. Let not such bygones be bygones. This man had been in sub- stance and success the greatest of all the men of the East. He was now in trouble, cast down very low, taking his session among the ashes, and scraping himself there with a potsherd. Yet his answers to the foolish woman, his wife, who urged him to repine and rebel, was the simple note of exclamation, What ! should he receive good at the hand of God, and should he not receive evil ? A clerical poet, not very long since taken from among us, thus refers to the habit men have of reckoning up their trou- bles much oftener than their mercies, and of failing to balance accounts in any account-taking of this sort : "Dials count sunbeams — man, each cloud that lowers : Thou who complainest of life's stormy ray, Say, hast thou numbered thy serener hours — God's little kindnesses of every day. Which often blessed thee, e'en in thine own way ? Thou hast not. Evil makes a mighty noise, But Good is silent. Yet 'twere well to weigh Remembered sorrows with forgotten joys : Oh, yet reverse thy plan ! Restore Life's equipoise ! " The working out of that little sum in practice, in the practice of daily life, might make us practical arithmeticians to some purpose. The days of joy, observes Henry Mackenzie, are not more fleetly winged in their course than the days of sorrow ; but we count not the moments of their duration with so scrupulous an exactness. In Hawthorne's suggestive allegory of the Christmas Ban- quet, the two trustees or stewards of the fund, to whom is I04 BALANCED ACCOUNTS entrusted the duty of inviting the guests, are described as " sombre humorists/' who made it their principal occupation to number the sable threads in the web of human life, and drop all the golden ones out of the reckoning. Human nature, as Owen Feltham puts it, is more sensible of smart in suffering, than of pleasure in rejoicing, and " pre- sent endurances easily engross our thoughts. We cry out for a little pain ; while we only smile for a great deal of con- tentment." The arithmetic of his quaint contemporary, " hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton," is not, nor ever has been, greatly in vogue, that whoever " has one good year in three, And yet repines at destiny, Appears ungrateful in the case ; And merits not the good he has." That benign scholar of the old school. Doctor Harrison, in Fielding's ripest and humanest fiction, closes a long letter of admonition and advice to the Booths by one exhortation to this effect : "Do not, my dear children, fall into that fault which, the excellent Thucydides observes, is too common in human nature, to bear heavily the being deprived of the smaller good, without conceiving, at the same time, any grati- tude for the much greater blessings which we are suffered to enjoy." Dr. Moore's Zeluco is at a loss to comprehend the philo- sophy of his reckless, easy-going, scampish acquaintance, Bertram, who takes his losses so quietly, or, indeed, compla- cently,— the loss, for instance, of four hundred dollars being declared by him to have been " one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me," — for it obliged him to pinch so hard to make it up, that he has thought himself in affluence ever since. Zeluco tells him he is a philosopher, and bears mis- fortunes with great fortitude. He has hardly any misfortunes to bear, Bertram replies. True, he has lost nearly seven thousand dollars in the space of a month. But he could never have had the misfortune to lose, if he had not first OF SORROW AND JOY. 105 had the good fortune to win them. That is his way of looking at the matter ; and even a blackleg may point a moral. That is not the usual way, Zeluco hints, in which men calcu- late their own misfortunes. It is the fair way, however, re- joins Bertram; "for the most fortunate man that ever existed will be proved to be unfortunate if you throw out all the lucky incidents of his life, and leave the unlucky behind." Strange, in the superlative degree, must have been the life-long destiny, or strange, and strangely sombre, the disposition and tempera- ment of him or her who can say, with the octogenarian duchess in Shakspeare, — " Eighty odd years of sorrow have I seen, And each hour's joy wrecked with a week of teen."* Ovid tells us ("6"/ numeres anno,^' etc.) that if we count the fine days and the cloudy ones throughout the year, we shall find that the sunny ones are in the majority. The keeping of a diary has been urged for this reason, among others, that it helps to prevent the diary-keeper from coming to beHeve him- self an exceptional sufferer. The present worry or trouble that is weighing him down, seems to him of long standing; he believes his low spirits to date very far back, until, turning to his diary, he finds that only two days ago he was " merry as a cricket " with the friend that came to see him. " After heavy rain has fallen for four or five days, all persons who do not keep diaries invariably think that it has rained for a fort- night. If keen frosts last in winter for a fortnight, all persons without diaries have a vague belief that there has been frost for a month or six weeks." Hazfitt somewhere observes, that if our hours were all serene, we might probably take as little note of them as the sun-dial does of those that are clouded. It is the shadow thrown across, he says, that gives us warning of their flight ; otherwise, our impressions would take the same undistinguishable hue, and we should scarce be conscious of our existence. * Grief. io6 A GRUMBLER SAYING GRACE. Shelley once said to Leigh Hunt, during a walk together in the Strand, " Look at all these worn and miserable faces that we meet, and tell me what is to be thought of the world they appear in?" His companion's reply was, "Ah, but these faces are not all worn with grief. You must take the wear and tear of pleasure into the account; of secret joys as well as sorrows." In Auerbach's picturesque story of Christian Gellert, we have a grumbling rustic, in Dub en Forest, rising before daybreak from his bed to go out and brave wind and rain, and we overhear his repinings at his lot, — bitter murmurs at so wretched an existence, — his broken rest by night, and by day a ceaseless round of strenuous toiling, while others fare so differently. But we see the weary woodman's wife cheerily light the fire and set about making ready her husband's por- ridge ; and meanwhile he looks at a book lying open on the table, and this one verse in it he is fain to read again and again, till he has laid it to heart : " Accept God's gifts with resignation, Content to lack what thou hast not, In every lot there's consolation, There's trouble, too, in every lot." " It is true," says the woodman softly to himself; and he adds aloud, " it's all there together, short and sweet." He takes off his cap, folds his hands, and repeats the words before eating his smoking porridge. His wife wonders at this grace. He calls the verse real God's words, and thinks they must be those of a saint of old. His wife tells him they are Gellert's, the great Professor, of Leipzig ; and thereby hangs the tale of " Gellert's Last Christmas." To be counted by multitudes are they who turn away from the many blessings and compensations of their lot, "to dwell and brood upon its worries;" who, as it has been said, persistently look away from the numerous pleasant things they might contemplate, and look fixedly, and almost constantly, at painful and disagreeable things. " Every petty disagreeable in their lot is brought out, turned ingeniously in every possible light, and exaggerated to the highest degree." They seem to find a grim satisfaction in sticking the thorn in A SIMPLE SUM IN PRACTICE. 107 the hand further in ; and although their lot has its innumerable blessings, at these they will not look. A homely moraHst bids us try to define a worry, to measure its exact size, as a sure way to make it look smaller. He has great confidence in the power of the pen to give most people clearer ideas than they would have without it ; accordingly, to one with a vague sense of a vast number of worries and annoyances in his lot, he re- commends this course : to sit down, take a large sheet of j^aper and a pen, and \vrite out a list of all his annoyances and worries. One so doing is assured that he will be sur- prised to find how few they are, and how small they look. " And if on another sheet of paper you make a list of all the blessings you enjoy, I believe that in most cases you will see reason to feel heartily ashamed of your previous state of dis- content." The reminder is added, that even should the cata- logue of worries not be a brief one, still the killing thing — the vague sense of indefinite magnitude and number — will be gone : almost all numbers diminish by accurately counting them. So, in fine, the simple siiiii i7i practice of which this chapter treats, is the counting off of blessings against troubles, the balancing of accounts between worries and comforts. A prac- tical summing up may be found in the words of good old Gonzalo, to shipwrecked prince and peers on the desert land : *' then wisely, good sir, weigh Our sorrow with our comfort." GIDEON'S THREE HUNDRED OUT OF THIRTY- TWO THOUSAND. Judges vii. 6. MIDI AN was not to have it in her right to say that she had been subdued by a crushing force of overwhelm- ing numbers, when Jerubbaal, who is Gideon, pitched the camp of Israel beside the well of Harod. The people he io8 DISMISSING THE FAINT-HEARTED. led were too many, and he was divinely enjoined to bid every fearful soul in their ranks return, and depart early from Mount Gilead. Twenty-two thousand took the hint, and hied them away. Ten thousand remained. These were yet too many, their leader was instructed; and a sifting process was set in action, which was to reduce the grand total by nine thousand seven hundred more. Three hundred alone lapped of the water, putting the hand to the mouth, and these alone were the elect of war ; the rest of the people bowed down upon their knees to drink water, and were rejected, disallowed, dismissed. "And the Lord said unto Gideon, By the three hundred men that lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into thine hand ; and let all the other people go every man unto his place." There is no king, or kingdom, saved by the multitude of a host. Long before Gideon's time, the officers of the host had been enjoined to make the same appeal that he made, to faint- hearted and therefore unserviceable warriors, who were better away from the ranks they but helped to dishearten — " What man is there that is fearful and faint-hearted ? let him go and ^return unto his house, lest his brethren's heart faint as well as his heart." Wishes Westmoreland, in the French wars and on the day of Agincourt, more men from England ? Not so the King. ** No, my fair cousin ; If we are marked to die, we are enough To do our country loss ; and if to live, The fewer men, the greater share of honour. * * * O, do not wish one more : Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, thro' my host, That he which hath no stomach to this fight, * Let him depart ; his passport shall be made, And crowns for convoy put into his purse : We would not die in that man's company That fears his fellowship to die with us." * Alexander, on entering Hyrcania with a detachment of his host, told such as desired to depart to do so, with his consent, — but at the same time FORCE OF A FAITHFUL FEW. 109 Bar-cochab is said to have had two hundred thousand men, who, to prove their boldness and courage, had cut off, each man, one of his fingers. " But how," was the query of one oracular in speech and in authority, "how will you try the prowess of these mutilated men? He who cannot ride full speed and pluck up, as he passes, a cedar of Lebanon by the roots, let him be discharged." When the Carthaginians, under the command of Hasdrubal and Hamilcar, marched at furious speed against the Corinthians, intent on driving the Greeks entirely out of Sicily, the Syra- cusans were, by Plutarch's account, struck with such terror at their prodigious armament, that scarce three thousand, out of ten times that number, took up anns and ventured to follow Timoleon. The mercenaries were in number four thousand, and of them about a thousand gave way to their fears when upon the march, and turned back, crying out that Timoleon must be mad or in his dotage, to go against an army of seventy he called the gods to witness that they deserted their king when he was conquering the world for the Macedonians, and left him to the kinder loyalty of the few friends that would still follow his fortune. Eumenes, again, retiring to the fortress of Nora, with only a few hundred men left, gave free leave to all such as listed to depart, and dismissed them with marks of good-will. So, again, Caesar, on undertaking the defence of the Gauls against the Germans, called together the young nobles who cared more for free living than hard fighting, and told them before all the army, they were at liberty to retire, and needed not to hazard their persons against their will. For his part, he would march with the tenth legion only against these barbarians, etc. See Plutarch, Lives of Alexander, Eumenes, and Caesar. Of Leonidas at Thermopylae it has been said, that he was contented to possess the monopoly of glory and of death. The laws of the Spartans forbade them to fly from the enemy, however numerous. So Leonidas and his countrymen determined to keep the field ; the Thespians alone volun- tarily remaining to share his fate. If he detained also the suspected Thebans, it was rather as a hostage than as auxiliaries ; and the rest of the confederates precipitately departed across the mountains to their native cities. Myronides, resolved on confronting the Boeotians at CEnophyta with his comparatively small force, refused to delay his march until the arrival of reinforcements that were significantly slack to join him. In their delay he read an omen of the desire of the loiterers to avoid the enemy. And this general faith, as also his practice, was, "Better rely upon a few faithful, than on many disaffected." no THE FEWER THE BETTER. thousand men with such a mere handful of braves. " Timo - leon considered it as an advantage that these cowards dis covered themselves before the engagement ; and having en couraged the rest, he led them on " to battle, and to victory. The answer of Pelopidas, when told that Alexander of Pher^e was advancing against him with an overwhelming army, was, "So much the better, for we few shall beat so many the more." It became him to adopt the spirit as well as the style of the hero in Xenophon, who said that each and all must so exert themselves that each might consider himself the chief a^ent in victory : Ourco yjpr] noclVf oircos eKaaros TLS iavTw ^vveiaeTiu Tr]s VLK-qs airtcbraros aiv. Bahram, hailed by popular prediction as the deliverer of Persia, when he found (a.d. 590) that no more than twelve thousand soldiers would follow him against the enemy, pru- dently declared, that to this fatal number Heaven had re- served the honours of the triumph. Alp Arslan, at the critical period of his struggle against the Emperor Romanus Diogenes (a.d. 1 071), after a devout prayer, and tears freely shed at the loss of so many faithful Moslems, proclaimed a free permission to all who were desirous of retiring from the field. *' And give them leave to fly that will not stay, And call them pillars, that will stand to us," is the counsel of Shakspeare's Clarence, on the battle-field of Towton ; all in the spirit of the Fifth Harry, exultant in being "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;" and by his enthusiasm winning over wistful Westmoreland to wish no longer another man from England : — ** JVesf. Perish the man whose mind is backward now ! JC. Hen. Thou dost not wish more men from England, cousin ? West. God's will, my liege, 'would you and I alone, Without more help, might fight this battle out ! K. Hen. Why now thou hast unwish'd five thousand men ; Which likes me better, than to wish us one." Changarnier, at Mansourah, with his battalion reduced to three hundred men, — Gideon's number, — formed them into a ELIGIBLE ELIMINA TION. 1 1 1 square, in front of the foe, and said, " Come, my lads, let us look those fellows in the face ; they are six thousand, we are three hundred, so the game is equal." iVnd he made his game accordingly, and won as he meant, though a ball reached him in the middle of his square. '* What if our numbers barely could defy The arithmetic of babes, . . Yields everything to discipline of swords? Is man as good as man, none low, none high ?" Only by Hibernian computation is one man as good as an- other, and better too. Pizarro, refusing to obey the order of the new governor of Panama to return from his daring enterprise, drew a line on the sand with his sword, and desired such of his men as chose to remain with him to cross to his side ; thirteen only of his hardy veterans had the courage to do so. But his was the sort of optimism that inspired D'Artagnan to prefer ten men to the twenty, and the thirty, and the forty, and upwards, he had previously reckoned upon associating with himself in a service of special hazard : " I reduce myself, then, to ten men ; in this way I shall act simply and with unity ; I shall be forced to be prudent, which is half success in an affair of the kind I am now undertaking : a greater number might, perhaps, have drawn me into some folly." " Monseigneur le Mare'chal," was Conde's smihng reply to De Grammont's plaintive enumeration of their scanty disposable forces, "it is with small armies that great battles are won." Wordsworth's Norton is strong in faith that his very weakness shall be strong in the field : " How oft has strength, the strength of heaven, To few triumphantly been given ! " The dismayed query of Telemachus, can he and his sire alone in furious battle stand against that numerous and deter- mined band ? is answered off-hand by Odysseus : " What need of aids, if favoured by the skies?" Froissart says of the Black Prince in his Spanish campaign, that he ''might have had foreign men-at-arms, such as 112 WINNOWING THE CHAFF. Flemings, Germans, and Brabanters, if he had chosen it ; but he sent away numbers, choosing to depend more on his own subjects and vassals than on strangers." When William of Normandy was pushing his way over the "backbone of England," through pathless moots and bogs, down towards the plains of Lancashire and Cheshire, his soldiers from the champaigns of sunny France, could not, in Canon Kingsley's words, "face the cold, the rain, the bogs, the hideous gorges, the valiant peasants. . . . They prayed to be dismissed, to go home. — 'Cowards might go back,' said William; *he should go on.' If he could not ride, he would walk, ^^^o- ever lagged, he would be foremost."* "Let them go all," exclaims Oroonoko in the play, — " We were too few before for victory, We're still enow to die." The Earl of Leicester is favourably described by the his- torian of the United Netherlands, as taking a manful and sagacious course at starting, in his enterprise of 1585. Those who had no stomach for the fight he ordered to depart. Those who had the wish or the means to buy themselves out of the adventure he allowed to do so; "for the Earl was much disgusted with the raw material out of which he was expected to manufacture serviceable troops." Much winnowed, the small force might in time become effective. A later page in that history relates how the heart of the Dutch admiral, Jacob Heemskerk, danced for joy at sight of the Spanish fleet, so far superior to his own in size of vessels, weight of metal, and number of combatants. "The more he was over-matched, the greater would be the honour of victory." How then could he wish for one man more ? * Compare the style of the so-called Last of the English. Hereward harangues his followers : — ** He that will depart in peace, let him depart, before the Frenchmen close in on us on every side and swallow us up at one mouthful." Not a man answers, " I say it again : He that will depart, let him depart." They stand thoughtful. Winter speaks at last for himself and Ramsay: "If all go, there are two men here who stay, and fight by Hereward's side as long as there is a Frenchman left on English soil," etc. — Ilerewai-d, chap, xxiii. HISTORICAL INSTANCES. 113 In preparing for the battle of Culloden, the Duke of Cumberland, apprehensive of the behaviour of his troops, made a speech to them in person, telling them how grieved he was to make the supposition that there could be a man in the British army reluctant to fight. But if there were any here who would prefer to retire, whether from disinclination to the cause, or from having relations in the rebel army, he begged them in the name of God to do so, as he would rather face the Highlanders with one thousand determined men at his back, than have ten thousand with a tithe who were luke- warm. An earlier crown prince, of Shakspeare's painting, in like tone harangues his troops on the plains near Tewkesbury, supposing the possible presence of a coward in their ranks, and yet scouting the supposition, as unworthy of them and of himself : — " I speak not this, as doubting any here : For, did I but suspect a fearful man, He should have leave to go away betimes ; Lest, in our need, he might infect another, And make him of like spirit to himself. If any such be here, as God forbid ! Let him depart before we need his help." Just before restoring the combat, and repairing the effect of Scindiah's repulse, at Poonah, by finally routing the Peishwa's troops, the spirited Holkar bade all who did not intend to conquer or die, to return to their wives and children. On hearing of the proposal of some of his officers, instead of attempting the reHef of Saragossa, in 1808, to retire to Valencia, Palafox assembled his troops, and after expatiating with fervour on the glorious task which awaited them of delivering their country, offered to give passports to all who wished to leave the army ; but such was the ascendency of his intrepid spirit, that not one person, it is recorded, left the ranks. The Czar Alexander sought to animate the patriotism of his people, in 181 2, by the assurance that they stood alone in the contest, and would share with none the glory of success. Napoleon, a week before the battle of Leipsic, — in the middle I 114 SUMMONED BY NAME. of which three Saxon brigades went over to the enemy, — bade those of his troops who were indined to withdraw from him, to do so at once. Wellington was in hourly expectation of a battle, when he (Nov. 12, 18 13,) sent at once all his Spanish forces, except Murillo's division, which alone had behaved properly, out of France — depriving himself, by this vigorous and rigorous measure, of twenty-five thousand now experienced soldiers, at a time when he was in imminent need of them. But the effect, in the long run, if their loss, was his and his army's and his country's gain. Told by one of his officers that some amongst his guard have fallen off at seeing him outnumbered thus, what says Philip van Artevelde in the play ? " Is'tso? Why, wherefore should I wish that it were not ? The more faint hearts fall off the better, sir ; So fear shall purge us to a sound condition." SUMMONED BY NAME. I Samuel iii. 4-10. THE child Samuel was laid down to sleep, when the divine summons by name reached him, and he, running to Eli, as though the voice had been Eli's, answered, " Here am I." Again the supernatural voice aroused him : '^ Sam.uel !" And again he arose, and went to EH, and said, "Here am I, for thou didst call me." Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, neither was the word of the Lord revealed to him. But it was now about to be revealed, and for that purpose was he again and again summoned by name. That summons by night, and by name, was never to be forgotten by him. Nor is it ever forgotten by those who read the story of his life. It is, as VC were, the consecration, and the prophet's dream; only the dream is of God, from God : oWp eVrt Aioy. Like an earlier seer, he heard the words of God, if not yet he saw the vision MYSTIC VOICES OF THE NIGHT. 115 of the Almighty. He heard a voice that EH could not hear ; and the time drew nigh for all Israel, from Dan even to Beer- sheba, to know that Samuel was established to be a prophet of the Lord. Fiction has made large use of the spell wrought on the fancy by a personal summons by name, mystical in accent, and to all semblance coming from afar. Milton makes impressive men- tion of — ' ' aery tongues that syllable men's names On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses." Thomas Hood notes it as a curious fact, but one which must be familiar to almost every man's experience, that under cir- cumstances of intense anxiety and excitement, the power of the organs of hearing (as well as of sight) will become ex- tended to a very extraordinary degree. To the eager watcher and hstener, he says, distant objects and sounds are distinctly perceptible, far beyond the range of any other eye or ear \ and the expectant literally receives intelligence as supernaturally exclusive as the announcement to the mourner in the ballad : — * * I hear a voice you cannot hear, That says I must not stay ; I see a hand you cannot see. That beckons me away. '' ■ The wonders of the night season are the theme of another popular writer, who takes occasion to ask his reader if he never heard an unaccountable scream in the night — one sud- den, piercing, agonizing shriek — coming whence, who can say ? Was it caused, he speculates, by the sharp knife of the doctor, by the dagger of the assassin, by the word of doom, by the sting of long-suppressed remorse? Or is it but fancy — the reaction of nerves too quickly soothed — " a fancy such as musing in bed leads you to beheve that your own name has suddenly been pronounced imperatively, sharply, distinctly, close to your very pillow, and when telling you of a weird companionship you feel conscious of complete isolation ?" Mrs. Craik, in one of her tales, describes the seeming floating ii6 SUMMONED BY NAME. above a heroine's storm of passion, of an audible voice, just as if the mind of one she knew to be thinking of her, then spoke to her mind, with the wondrous communication of sym- pathy in dreams : a communication which " appears both pos- sible and credible to those who have felt any strong attachment, especially that one which for the sake of its object seems able to cross the bounds of distance, time," etc. The heroine in question has an experience of this kind, which neither at the time nor afterwards she can ever account for : "while* she lay weeping across her bed, she seemed to hear distinctly, just as if it had been a voice gliding past the window," a sound of words which made a crisis in her life. Adam Bede calling to Dinah by name, as he stands within three paces of her on the hill side, is at first taken by her for a more spiritual, less palpable appellant : she starts without looking round, &,s if she connected the sound with no place. " ' Dinah ! ' Adam said again. He knew quite well what was in her mind. She was so accustomed to think of impressions as purely spiritual monitions, that she looked for no material visible accompaniment of the voice." The late Alexander Smith, in his one work of prose fiction, pictured an aged spinster lady asleep in her easy-chair, her nephew \vriting a letter near at hand, in which employment he suddenly hears his aunt call out, " Yes. Coming ! '' and looking up, sees her sitting bolt upright, Ijer shawl fallen off her shoulders, her hands trembling, and an alarmed look in her eyes. " Who called my name, John ? Did you ? Did you hear anything ? " No one had called her, he says. But she had heard her name called distinctly, and the sound was ringing in her ears yet. " I was called by name as if from a great distance, and the voice was a voice I know, or have known. What can it have been?" John suggests that his aunt has been dreaming perhaps, and only fancied it. Miss Kate lies back again in the cushioned chair, and before long, instead of the look of alarm, a strangely serene smile covers her face ; the eyes close, and an almost infantile repose smoothes the furrows of careworn age ; and she may be overheard murmuring to herself, " I knew your voice, Richard, across the wastes of READINGS IN ROMANCE. 117 seventy years. ... I am coming, Richard." She tells others afterwards that she heard this voice calling her name as distinctly, that night, as she had heard him long ago calling it from the red sunset cliffs behind her home, or from the boats in the bay, in the years when she was happy. And she knew his voice, and awoke, crying, " Yes, I am coming." The mother, in Mrs. Gaskell's story, who is all but drowned in crossing the sands near Morecambe Bay, hears her baby crying for her at home, miles away, above the gurgling of the rising waters, as plain as ever she heard anything. Mr. Hawthorne, in his Blithedale Romance, makes much of Priscilla having the air, at times, of one who hears her own name spoken at a distance, and is reluctant to obey the call. " All at once she paused, looked round about her, towards the river, the road, the woods, and back towards us, appearing to listen, as if she heard some one calHng her name, and knew not precisely in what direction. "' Have you bewitched her?' I exclaimed. — * It is no sorcery of mine,' said Zenobia ; ' but I have seen the girl do that identical thing once or twice before. Can you im- agine what is the matter with her?' — 'No; unless,' said I, * she has the gift of hearing those " airy tongues that syllable men's names," which Milton speaks of.' " On another occasion Priscilla is in full talk with Miles Coverdale, and suddenly, as before, there comes that unintelligible gesture which is indica- tive of her being a listener to a distant voice. The mysterious Professor is at the bottom of the mystery,* if we accept his * Something after the sort of Lord Lytton's Strange Story, where Margi-ave's rod is by hypothesis charged with some occult fluid, that runs through all creation, and can be so disciplined as to establish communication wherever life and thought can reach to beings that live and think. So at least the mystics of old would presumably explain what perplexes the antobiographer ; who is in possession of that slight wand, light as a reed in his grasp, by means of which Margi-ave sends his irresistible will through air and space ; and by means of which its present possessor essays to sum- mon Margrave, knowing not his whereabouts, but exercising a concentrated energy of desire that its influence shall reach him and command him ; as it does. * ' And a voice was conveyed to my senses, saying, as from a great distance, and in weary yet angry accents — ' You have summoned me ! Wherefore ? ' " (Chapter Ixi.) ii8 HAWTHORNES ''TRANSFORMATIONS alleged ability to make Priscilla hear the desert wind sweeping over the sands as far off as Arabia, the while she is sojourning in a New England village — hear too the icebergs grinding one against another in the Polar Seas, or the rustle of a leaf in an East Indian forest. In another, riper, richer book from the same pen, we have Kenyon the artist, on the battlements at Monte Beni, feeling a " strange pull at his heart-strings," a pull that could not have been more perceptible, if all the way be- tween these battlements and Hilda's dovecote in Rome had stretched an exquisitely sensitive cord, which, at the hither end, was knotted with his aforesaid heart-strings, and at the remoter one was grasped by a gentle hand. " His breath grew tremulous. He put his hand to his breast ; so distinctly did he seem to feel that cord drawn once — and again, and again, — as if there was an importunate demand for his presence. Oh for the white wings of Hilda's doves, that he might have flown thither, and alighted at the Virgin's shrine !" It is not until some eight chapters later in the story that we get to the other end of the cord. Then we read how one summer afternoon Hilda leaned upon the battlements of her tower, and looked over Rome towards the distant mountains, whither Kenyon had told her that he was going ; and " Oh that he were here !" she sighed ; " I perish under this terrible secret ;* and he might help me to endure of it. Oh that he were here ! " That was the afternoon, we are reminded, when Kenyon felt Hilda's hand pulling at the silken cord that was connected with his heart-strings, as he stood looking towards Rome from the battlements of Monte Beni. If it was not a summons by name, it was as good in effect. On the night that Gerard, the father of Erasmus, in Mr. Charles Reade's fifteenth-century tale, throws himself into the Tiber, Margaret, his wife, and now newly a mother, lies weak and ill at Rotterdam, dispirited at the strange and strangely- prolonged absence of her husband. If only Gerard were here to see their first-born ! She had endured well enough his absence * Of Miriam's complicity in crime. C. READBS ''CLOISTER AND HEARTH." 119 in her sorrow ; but it seems to her so hard he should not share her present joy : " Prithee, prithee, come to me, Gerard ! dear, dear Gerard !" And she stretches out her feeble arms. Now Catherine, Gerard's mother, is tending her at the time ; and at these words of piteous appeal she bustles about, but avoids Margaret's eyes ; for she cannot restrain her own tears at hearing her own absent child thus earnestly addressed. — Presently, however, turning round, she finds Margaret looking at her with a singular expression. "Heard you nought?" "No, my lamb. What?" "I did cry on Gerard, but now." "Ay, ay, sure I heard that." "Well, he answered me." " Tush, girl ; say not that." " Mother, as sure as I lie here, with his boy by my side, his voice came back to me, 'Margaret!' So. Yet methought 'twas not his happy yoicq^ But that might be the distance. All voices go ofi" sad-like at a distance." Be that as it may, the voice soothes Margaret, and makes her feel, with his boy by her side, new-born, as if she had never felt a pain or known a care. Now the author winds up the chapter in question with these significant words : " That very night Gerard flung himself into the Tiber. And, that very hour she heard him speak her name, he cried aloud in death's jaws and despair's, "'Margaret!' " Account for it those who can. I cannot." A parallel passage, — though relating this time to the sense of vision, not of hearing, — occurs later in the same work, where Margaret's father, the old physician, lies a-dying. Gerard's continued absence is an afflictive perplexity to them all ; and the old man is suggesting feebly all sorts of faint conjectures as to his possible whereabouts. Gerard may be in prison, he hints, or forced to go fighting for some king, or sent to Con- stantinople to copy books there, or gone into the Church after all. "Ah, mother," whispers Margaret to Catherine, "he doth but deceive himself as we do." Ere she could finish the sen- tence, we are told, a strange interruption occurred. A loud voice cried out, what Mr. Reade prints in larger type — but in this place let italics serve: ''I see him. I see hi??t." And the I20 SUMMONED BY NAME. old man with dilating eyes seemed to be looking right through the wall of the house. "/;? a boat; on a great river; coming this way. Sore disfigured ; but I knew him. Gone ! gone ! all dark." The darkness is that of death. But the previous flash of light is to be understood as preternatural, and as re- vealing a true vision. Dying men are known to have a strange sight, Margaret says, in after days. And in point of fact, Gerard is to be understood as really being, at the time in question, in a boat, and on the Rhine, and " sore disfigured " from the Gerard of old times, by the tonsured head, emaciated frame, and distinctive vesture of a Dominican friar. If we turn to Mr. Dickens for an illustration, we may find it in his latest completed work, when Lizzie Riderhood starts up abruptly from deep stillness, and opens the door, and says in an alarmed tone, "Father, was that you calling me?" And again, "Father!" And once again, after listening, " Father ! I thought I heard you call me twice before !'' No response. Words never to be answered, those, upon the earth- side of the grave. For anon we are told how the wind sweeps jeeringly over Father, whips him with the frayed ends of his dress and his jagged hair, running nimbly through that and his beard, as the corpse lies stretched upon the shore. Better remembered, perhaps, for so much turns upon it, and so much is made of it, is the summons by name that reaches Jane Eyre in the moonlit room of the hill-side parsonage — the voice being that of her blinded, sick, suffering, mutilated old master, in his far-away home. Vividly is the story told how her heart was beating fast and thick, so that she heard it throb, when suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to her head and extremities ; the feeling, though not like an electric shock, was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling : it acted on her senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor, from which they were now summoned, and forced to wake; and accordingly they rose expectant ; eye and ear waited, while her flesh quivered on her bones. What has she heard ? what does she see ? her one companion in the room inquires. She has JANE EYRE AND ROCHESTER. 121 seen nothing; but she has heard a voice somewhere cry — " Jane ! Jane ! Jane !" nothing more. What is it ? she gasps ; and she might have said, "Where is it?" for it did not seem to be in the room, nor in the house, nor in the garden ; it did not come out of the air, nor from under the earth, nor from overhead. And it was the voice of a human being— a known, loved, well-remembered voice — that of Edward Fairfax Rochester; and it spoke in pain and woe, wildly, eerily, urgently. " I am coming !" she cried. " Wait for me ! Oh, I will come !" She flew to the door, and looked into the passage : it was dark. She ran into the garden : it was void. " Where are you?" she exclaimed. The hills beyond Marsh Glen sent the. answer faintly back, "Where are you?"— She hstened. The wind sighed low in the firs ; all was moorland loneliness and midnight hush. " Down, superstition 1 " was her comment, as that spectre rose up black by the black yew at the gate : " ' This is not thy deception, nor thy witchcraft : it is the work of nature.' She was roused, and did — no miracle — but her best." Next morning Jane tries to analyse the inward sensation of last night with all its unspeakable strangeness ; she recalls the voice she had heard, again questioning whence it came, as vainly as before ; it seemed in herself — not in the external world. She asks. Was it a mere nervous impression — a delusion? She could not conceive or believe : it was more like an inspira- tion. The wondrous shock of feeling had come, she says, " like the earthquake which shook the foundations of Paul and Silas's prison ; it had opened the doors of the soul's cell, and loosed its bands — it had wakened it out of its sleep, whence it sprang trembling, listening, aghast ; then vibrated thrice a cry on my startled ear, and in my quaking heart, and through my spirit." At a later period, when Jane Eyre and Rochester are reunited, the subject is mooted of that strange midnight sum- mons ; he tells how, one night, in the intensity of his longing for her presence, the words broke involuntarily from his hps, "Jane! Jane! Jane!" Aloud he spoke them; and if any listener had heard them, he must have thought the speaker mad, such was the frantic energy with which he pronounced 122 SUMMONED BY NAME. them. A New England author, not inferior to Currer Bell in popularity, to say nothing of power, surmises as a haply may- be, that souls once intimately related have ever after an abnormal gift of affecting each other — a gift that neither absence nor death can annul. How else, it is asked, can we interpret those mysterious hours, in which the power of departed love seems to overshadow us, making our souls vital with such longings, with such wild throbbings, with such unutterable sighings, that a little more might burst the mortal band ? Is it not deep calling unto deep ? the free soul singing outside the cage to her mate, beating against the bars within ? But this is taking us beyond the veil ; and absence and death, how differ they! as Wordsworth exclaims. The subject reminds us of another verse of his : — " Such rebounds our inward ear Catches sometimes from afar — Listen, ponder, hold them dear ; For of God — of God they are." Star to star vibrates light : may soul to soul strike through a finer element of her own ? asks or suggests the laureate in his poem of Aylmer's Field: — ''So, — from afar, — touch us at once? or why That night, that moment, when she named liis name, Did the keen shriek, ' Yes, love ; yes, Edith, yes,' Shrill, till the comrade of his chambers woke, And came upon him half-arisen from sleep, . . . His body half flung forward in pursuit. And his long arms stretched as to grasp a flyer." To Mary Scudder, in The Minister's Wooing, musing on the drowning of James Marvyn in the cruel sea, a vague shudder- ing of mystery gives intensity to her reverie : she has a kind of shadowy sense of a throbbing and yearning nature that seems to call on her — seems surging towards her with an im- perative protesting force that shakes her heart to its depths. "Mary even for a moment fancied that a voice called her name, and she started, shivering. Then the habits of her positive and sensible education returned at once, and she came OMINOUS VOICES FROM AFAR. out of her reverie as one breaks from a dream." This is no romance of Hero and Leander ; nor indeed is the drowning man a drowned one after all, as in the story of old, by modern poet re-told, of Leander, when — *' Under the ponderous sea his body dips, And Hero's name dies bubbling on his lips. * * * * "And hark ! — a grieving voice, trembling and faint, Blends with the hollow sobbings of the sea j Like the sad music of a siren's plaint, But shriller than Leander's voice should be, Unless the wintry death had changed its tone, — • Wherefore she thinks she hears his spirit moan. *' For now, upon each brief and breathless pause Made by the raging winds, it plainly calls On Hero! Hero!" Mr. Crabb Robinson repeats in his Diary a story told him by Charles Becher, of his being one night awakened by a sound of his brother's voice crying out that he was drowTiing, and it afterwards appeared that the brother w^as drowned that night. Of such cries, interpreted as warnings of the listener's own impending doom, story and history have many to tell ; such mystic sounds as may be typified in a stanza of Wordsworth's, — " That unintelligible cry Hath left him high in preparation, — Convinced that he, or soon or late, This very night will meet his fate — And so he sits in expectation ! " That Napoleon was a Corsican bom and bred should be taken into account when recalling what M. de Segur tells us of him at the date of the expedition to Russia, that often he was to be seen half reclining on a sofa, plunged in profound medi- tation— from which state of reverie he would suddenly awake with a convulsive start, and utter an exclamation, fancying he heard himself named, and crying out — " Who is calling me ?" For the Corsicans, like all mountaineers, as Mr. Merivale observes, are superstitious; their solitary valleys are full of 124 SUMMONED BY NAME. visions, and omens, and "airy tongues that syllable men's names;" and the dead are believed to assemble at midnight under the windows of those about to die, in the spectral habit of the Frati della Misericordia, and go through the mimic show of raising and carrying a bier; and they will also call the living by name, but no one dares answer, for whoever answers is doomed soon to join them. The Corsican Buona- parte however did dare. Talfourd illustrates a like superstition in the Scottish Highlands, in his tragedy of Glencoe. In the first scene Donald hurries in, demanding, — " Is not Mac Ian here ? I came to meet him, Roused from my bed by such a piercing cry As rarely syllables a human name." Angus has the same tale to tell : a fearful summons from a shrill voice, between the tempest's gusts, has called him to meet his chief. So with Halbert, who " shivers as with ague," for he has " heard again old Moina's voice " as he walked in mist that clung round him like a shroud ; each cliff, pillar, and cavern echoed back the words, till they appeared to fill the glen with sound : " 'twas no delusion ; surely as you hear my voice, I heard them." So in the Hellenics of Landor, — " A shriek was carried to the ancient hall Of Thallinos ; he heard it not ; his son Heard it, and ran forthwith into the wood," etc. Readers of Balzac's Etudes PhilosopJiiqiies may remember how the antobiographer in La Peaii de Chagrin seemed, at one crisis in his strange eventful history, to hear the voice of his dead mother, caUing him by name : " Je ne sais quelle puissance faisait retentir vaguement mon propre nom dans mon oreille, au milieu d'un bruit de cloches." Are we not all familiar. with the story of Samuel Johnson, under the influence of that disease which made his senses become morbidly torpid, and his imagination morbidly active, at one time standing in fixed gaze on the town clock without being able to tell the hour ; at another, distinctly hearing his mother, who was many THE RESPONSIVE '' ADSUM." 125 miles off,* calling him by his name? The pathetic ^(/j-z^;;^ / of fine old Colonel Newcome has its parallel in the " Here !" of Cooper's aged Leather-stocking, when the dying trapper, who had remained motionless for an hour, and whose eyes, when occasionally they opened, seemed to fasten their gaze on the clouds of a grand sunset, suddenly rose upright to his feet, supported on either side by his watchful friends, and then with a military elevation of his head, he uttered the monsyllable responsive to a summons audible to him alone. The dying May-Queen of Mr. Tennyson's poem, (which artfully suggests what is natural to account for the supernatural, and artistically blends the two,) all in the wild March morning has heard the angels call : — " It was when the moon was setting, and the dark was ©ver all; The trees began to whisper, and the wind began to roll. And in the wild March morning I heard them call my soul. ****** I thought that it was fancy, and I listened in my bed, And then did something speak to me — I know not what was said ; For great delight and shuddering took hold of all my mind, And up the valley came again the music on the wind." * Peter Pindar paraphrases the Piozzi version of a dead, not merely a distant, mother; Madame is made to say in the Town Eclogue, — ** In ghosts the Doctor strongly did believe; , ■ And pinned his faith on many a liar's sleeve ; He said to Doctor Lawrence, ' Sure I am I heard my poor dear mother call out " Sam !" I'm sure,' said he,/ that I can trust my ears : And yet my mother has been dead for years.'" Bozzy and Piozzi, part ii. 126 THE STRIPLING OF BETHLEHEM THE STRIPLING OF BETHLEHEM FLOUTED BY THE GIANT OF GATH I Samuel xvii. 42. OUT of the camp of the Philistines went their champion, GoHath of Gath; his height six cubits and a span; his head protected with a helmet of brass, and his person with a coat of mail weighing five thousand shekels of the same metal, and greaves of the same upon his legs, and a target of the same between his shoulders. Bold as brass, himself, emboldened by the dread his defiances caused in the camp of the Israelites, out he went from the camp of the Philistines, spear in hand, his shield-bearer going before him; for forty days, twice a day, he went forth and renewed his note of defiance. Let Israel choose a man for themselves, and let that man come forth like a man, and fight with him, Goliath of Gath. But all the men of Israel failed to find manhood enough for that. All of them when they saw the Philistine of Gath, and heard his challenge, fled from him, and were sore afraid. But the day dawned for the youngest son of Jesse the Bethlehemite to accept the giant's challenge, stripling and mere shepherd though David might be. When the Philistine that day went out from the camp, what went he out for to see ? A stalwart warrior, of inches equal to his own ? No such thing. Not even a man, in age, or growth, or aspect. It was a man that Goliath challenged to come down to him, and behold a boy ! So, when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he disdained him : for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. " Choose you a man for you," had been the terms of Goliath's challenge to the men of Israel, " and let him come down to me." " Give me a MAN, that we may fight together." This stripling, fresh from the sheepfold, with his pastoral staff in his hand, and his sling, and his smooth stones out of the brook in a shepherd's bag, and other arms of offence or defence absolutely none, — was this the nearest approach to a man that the men of Israel FLOUTED BY THE GIANT OF GATH. 127 could offer? Was the giant of Gath, then, a dwarf, that he was to be put off with a mere boy ? Was he a dog, that that boy came to him with staves? And the PhiHstine cursed David by his gods. " AX\' avZpo. XPV> K^^ (rCb[xa yeuvrjcrrj fiiya, AoKelv ireaecv B,v, kup airb afXLKpod KaKov," as the Grecian prince has it in Sophocles. Goliath's despised antagonist might greet him in the style of another warrior in the same play, — sling and stone allowed for, — " KaV ;^iXds apKeffai/XL (rfiop(po% e'C-qv fxaWov •^ fcaXos KaKOS. Deformis sim potius quam pulcher mahis. — One of Fielding's handsome scoundrels is thus described : "Nature had certainly 144 BRIGHT FACE AND BLACK HEART. wrapt up her odious work in a most beautiful covering." His- torians of Scotland stigmatize the Master of Gray, the favourite of young James VI., as carrying a heart as black and treacher- ous as any in that profligate age, under an exterior which was pre-eminently beautiful, though too feminine to please some tastes.* A perfect traitor should, according to the painter in Roinola, have a face which vice can write no marks on — lips that will lie with a dimpled smile — eyes of such agate-like brightness and depth that no infamy can dull them — cheeks that will rise from a murder and not look haggard. Without taking upon him to say, at first sight, that the young stranger, Tito, is a traitor, the painter does say that Tito has a face which would make him a more perfect traitor if he had the heart of one, which is saying neither more nor less than that he has a beautiful face, informed with rich young blood, that will be nourished enough by food, and keep its colour without much help from virtue. '' Say what thou wilt, Piero," replies Nello, as the bright-faced young stranger takes leave of them, " I shall never look at such an outside as that without taking it as a sign of a loveable nature. Why, thou wilt say next that Lionardo, whom thou art always raving about, ought to have made his Judas as beautiful as St. John ! " The barber would have been all for rehabilitating Caesar Borgia : and, simply as barber, how could he have withstood Absalom and his head of hair? Mr. Herbert Spencer avows himself unable ever to have accepted the commonly expressed opinion, that beauty of cha- racter and beauty of aspect are unrelated; and he objects to those who hold this theory the incompleteness of their conviction, inasmuch as whenever they find a mean deed com- mitted by one of noble countenance, they manifest surprise — a fact he takes clearly to imply that underneath their professed induction lies a still living conviction at variance with it. But * Tytler says of him, at the last: "None lamented his disgrace; for although still young in years [1587] Gray was old in falsehood and crime. Brilliant, fascinating, highly educated, and universally reputed the hand- somest man of his time, he had used all these advantages for the most pro- fligate ends." — History of Scotland^ vol. iv., ch. vi. HANDSOME SCOUNDRELS. 145 Zeluco may be taken as a type of only too numerous a class. " His person," says his author, ''was finely proportioned ; and although some people who pretended to skill in physiognomy asserted that they could detect the indications of ill-nature and of a vicious disposition in his countenance ; yet, in the general opinion ... he was a very handsome man," Particularly of that opinion was the Signora Rosolia, — described as one of those young ladies who, when they greatly approve of a man's face and figure, are inclined to believe that every other good quality is added thereunto. Like Zeluco's mother, she saw his mind in his visage ; " and as this was fair and regular, she fondly believed it to be a faithful index of the other." Whereas Zeluco stands forth the most unmitigated rascal, per- haps, in universal fiction. The rebuke of Odysseus to Antinoiis begins with this very proper personality : " souls, like that in thee, 111 suit sucli forms of grace and dignity." Than Milton's Belial, " a fairer person lost not heaven ; he seemed for dignity composed and high exploit ; but all was false and hollow," and his thoughts were mean, and himself to vice industrious, but to nobler deeds timorous and slothful. In Dante's image of Fraud, " His face the semblance of a just man's wore, So kind and gi'acious was its outward cheer ; The rest was sei-pent all." Mr. Wingrove Cooke tells us of a notorious American criminal whose trial he witnessed at Hongkong for piracy and murder, that while his name, Eli Boggs, would do for a villain of the Blackbeard class, he was in form and feature like the hero of a sentimental novel. The face of the handsome lad whose name had been for three years connected with the boldest and bloodiest acts of piracy, was. one " of feminine beauty. Not a down upon the upper lip ; large lustrous eyes ; a mouth, the smile of which might woo coy maiden ; affluent black hair, not carelessly parted ; hands so small and so L 1 46 ' THE BE A UTEO US-E VIL: delicately white that they would create a sensation in Belgravia : such was the Hongkong pirate, Eli Boggs." Virtue is beauty, says one of Shakspeare's Antonios — the sea-captain of Illyria, not the merchant of Venice : ' * but the beauteous-evil Are empty trunks o'erflourish'd by the devil." It is in the same play {Twelfth Night) that Viola thus addresses another sea-captain, whom, after inspection, or by intuition, she has made up her mind to trust : " And though that nature with a beauteous wa Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee I will believe thou hast a mind that suits With this thy fair and outward character. " The first two lines have a flavour of the Rara est adeo concordia forma Atqiie pudicitice. of Juvenal. Or compare the lines of Prudentius : ** Os dignum seterno nitidum quod fulgeat auro, Si mallet laudare Deum ; cui sordida monstra Praetulit, et liquidam temeravit crimine vocem." To Shakspeare again. " O Hero ! what a Hero thou hadst been," exclaims the abused if also abusive Claudio, " if half thy outward graces had been placed above thy thoughts, and counsels of thy heart ! But fare thee well, most foul, most fair ! " The Antonio of Venice moralizes on a villain with a smiling cheek, like goodly apple rotten at the core : " O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath !" Juliet has a flood of ab- horrent apostrophes for the slayer of her cousin : " O serpent heart, hid with a flow'ring face ! Did ever a dragon keep so fair a cave ? Beautiful tyrant ! fiend angelical ! ^ Dove-feather'd raven ! wolvish-ravening lamb ! Despised substance of divinest show ! Just opposite to what thou justly seem'st, A damned saint, an honourable villain ! — O nature ! what hadst thou to do in hell, When thou didst bower the spirit of a fiend In mortal paradise of such sweet flesh ? LONGING FOR REST. 147 ^Yas ever book, containing such vile matter, So fairly bound ? O that deceit should dwell In such a gorgeous palace ! " Very flat after such an outburst will sound the lines of Clarice in Corneille : *' Le dedans parait mal en ces miroirs flatteurs ; Les visages sont souvent de doux imposteurs. Que de defauts d'esprit se couvrent de leurs graces ! Et que de beaux semblants cachent des ames basses !" But we are getting far away from Absalom, and of him it is time to take leave. Be this done in a couplet from Dryden, of which the phrase in Shakspeare about " paradise of sweet flesh " reminds us : it is from the Absalom and Achitophel, and descriptive of the beautiful rebel — call him David's son or the tuart's, which you will : *' His motions all accompanied with grace, And Paradise was opened in his face." LONGING FOR REST. Psalm Iv. 6, 7. WITH a heart sore pained within him, with open war against him in front, and treacherous friends behind his back, the Psalmist's weariful aspiration is, " Oh that I had wings like a dove ! for then would I fly away and be at rest. Lo, then would I wander far off and remain in the wilderness." So would he hasten his escape from the windy storm and tempest. Versed in those statutes which were his songs in the house of his pilgrimage, he must have appreciated to the full every recurring promise to the footsore wanderers in the desert, that the Lord their God would give them rest; that a sab- batical rest remaineth for the people of God; that His presence should go with them, and Himself give them rest ; that the day should come when they might offer sacrifices of rest to 148 • A VERY ABYSS OF PEACE. Him who had given them rest from their enemies, rest for the sole of their foot, rest for jaded Hmb and weary heart. The rest wherewith He causeth the weary to rest. The rest which satisfies those who hitherto have gone about seeking other rest and finding none. For they which have beheved do enter into rest; they not only enter in but abide, dwell, in resting- places. There the weary be at rest. This is our rest for ever, say they, and here will we dwell. This is the rest wherewith He who alone can, causeth the weary to rest. Well may they long for it, and for the dove's wings that might carry them to it ; for then at once, and then and there once for all, flying away, they would be at rest. Then are they glad when, at last, and because, they are at rest ; and so He bringeth them unto the haven where they would be. De Quincey somewhere speaks of that vision of rest, of saintly repose from strife and sorrow, towards which, as to their secret haven, the profounder aspirations of man's heart are in solitude continually travelling. Father Newman is eloquent on that "very abyss of peace" into which Christ, as our forerunner, has entered, " that place of peace which is all in all," where is no voice of tumult or distress, but a deep stillness — stillness, that greatest and most awful of all goods which we can fancy — that most perfect of joys, the utter, pro- found ineffable tranquilHty of the Divine essence. Here are we tossing upon the sea, he says, and the wind is contrary. But the Master has entered into His rest. And, " oh, how great a good will it be, if, when this troublesome life is over, we in our turn also enter into that same rest ; if the time shall one day come when we shall enter into His tabernacle above, and hide ourselves under the shadow of His wings !" Many are the days when, as another divine, equally in earnest, but of an utterly different school, expresses it, the spirit gives way, and we wish " that all were over — that we could lie down tired, and rest like children, from life-^that the hour was come when we could put down the extinguisher on the lamp, and feel the last grand rush of darkness on the spii-it." The poet confesses THE BALM OF REST. 149 to having once adored the bright unwearied sleepless sun, and to have wished to emulate his course, undisturbed and uninter- rupted by rest or night : "But no-w, — since I have heard and seen The many cares that trouble life, The evil that requiteth good, The benefits not understood, Unfilial, unpaternal strife, The hate, the tie, the bitter jest, I feel how sweet are night and rest ! " Apostrophizing the happy season of childhood, Herr Teufelsdrockh speaks of the young spirit as awakened out of Eternity, and ignorant of what we mean by Time, untaught as yet in the secret of Vicissitude : in a motionless universe it tastes, what afterwards in this quick-whirling universe is for ever denied us, the balm of rest. " Sleep on, thou fair Child, for thy long rough journey is at hand ! A little while, and thou too shalt sleep no more, but thy very dreams shall be mimic battles ; thou too, with old Arnauld, wilt have to say in stern patience : ' Rest ? Rest ? Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in?'" The day dawns quite soon enough when our Clothes-Philosopher has to pitch his tent under a cypress-tree, and records the stern experiences of life, planted down by memory in his imagination, and rising there to a whole cypress-forest ; and thus his musings wander towards and linger with those who have left him behind in the world of strife and struggle, not forgetting others left behind with him still : '' O ye loved ones, that already sleep in the noiseless Bed of Rest, whom in life I could only weep for and never help ; and ye who, wide-scattered, still toil lonely in the monster-bearing desert, dyeing the flinty ground with your blood, — yet a little while, and we shall all meet there, and our Mother's bosom will screen us all ; and Oppression's harness, and Sorrow's fire- whip, and all the Gehenna Bailiffs that patrol and inhabit ever-vexed Time, cannot henceforth harm us any more !" The very weary can sometimes, in the extreme of weariness, incline to favour the doctrine of Buddhism, that existence is, ISO LONGING FOR REST. upon the whole, a restless, insecure, unhappy thing, to escape from which is the consummation of felicity, albeit the only way of escape that Buddhism professes to teach is the path to Nirvana. Probably few men live as long as Leigh Hunt, and work anything like as hard, who do not, at some time or other in their course, feel something of what he expresses in a letter to an intimate friend, where he says that he has suffered so much of late that, what with biliousness in his blood and sorrow at his heart, he often seems as if he had nothing to do but to lie down, and sleep himself, if he could, away. That, however, may not be, he adds : his duties, his cheerful principles and religion, everything, forbid it. The old man is like young Jane Eyre, when, looking back at the bed she ha(J left, and hopeless of the future, she wished but this — that her Maker had that night thought good to require her soul of her while she slept ; and that her weary frame, absolved by death from further con- flict with fate, had now but to decay quietly, and mingle in peace with the soil of the wilderness she was in. Life, how- ever, was yet in her possession, with all its requirements, and pains, and responsibilities : the burden must be carried, the want provided for, the suffering endured, the responsibility fulfilled. In quitting St. Ebbe's, Oxford, for Trinity Chapel, Brighton, in 1847, the late F. W. Robertson professed to be going to a place from which he shrank, but was resolved on trying to do his work. His life, if he might judge by the decline he felt of mental accuracy and strength, and the weakening of nerve, had got more than half-way, and the rest was down-hill. The half-way house seemed behind him ; and if Brighton were to be but another form of the Cheltenham he had discarded, home could not, he felt sure, be very far off — the last, long home. He was getting very tired. And the complexion of his spontaneous thoughts at his time he described as increasing the contemplation of rest. " Rest in God and Love. Deep re- pose in that still country where the mystery of this strange life is solved and the most feverish heart lays down its load at RESTLESS WAVES AND CENTRAL CALM. 151 last." * Elsewhere he speaks of that deep awful rest which is the most endearing of all the attributes of the life that shall be — the rest which is order instead of disorder — harmony instead of chaotic passions in jar and discord, and duty instead of the conflict of self-will with God's loving will. The intense torture of his last illness (im.puted to an abscess in the cerebellum) must have quickened his longings for the rest he could describe so well. His biographer tells us where he was laid to rest, — in a hollow of the Downs he loved so dearly, where the sound of the waves may be heard in the dis- tance ; a sound that, to one standing by his grave, may seem a fair and fitting requiem ; for if the inquietude of the sea was the image of his outward life, its central calm is the image of his deep peace in the peace of God.t A friend once observed of him in his prime, that his very quietude was like the quietude of the ocean, seemingly at rest, but traversed and stirred by a thousand currents. His very calm was a hurricane. Lady Byron used to say of him. J Sir Walter Scott incidentally remarks that the undisturbed repose .of which we are so tenacious when duty or necessity compels us to abandon it, is precisely what we long to exchange for a state of excitation, as soon as we may prolong it at our own pleasure. In effect, you have only to say to a man, " remain at rest," and you instantly inspire him with the love of labour. To work, ever to work, is the * Some years later he writes down his sense of gratitude to an author, one of whose books had afiforded him refreshment and solace in a season of weariness and depression — had " soothed and invigorated one day of a way- worn, tired being in his path to the Still Country, where the heaviest-laden lays down his burden at last, and has Rest." — Life and Letters, vol. i., p. 251. He goes on to thank God that there is rest — many an interval of saddest, sweetest rest — even here where it seems as if evening breezes from that other land, laden with fragrance, played upon the cheek and lulled the heart. + " He sleeps Avell; and we, who are left alone with our love and his great result of work, cannot but rejoice that he has entered into his Father's rest." — Life of Rev. F. W. Robertson., vol. ii., p. 239, X In an exposition by him of Genesis xxii. (Abraham's trial), one para- graph runs : ' ' Trials do not become lighter as we go on. ' After these things.^ What! no repose? Is there no place of honourable repose for the Emeritus? No. Harder, and yet harder trials. For the Christian soldier there is no rest except in the grave. — Vol. ii., p. 340. 1S2 'REP OS AILLEURS: primary law of some natures — of Sainte Aldegonde, for instance, Avho in earliest youth adopted the device Repos ailleurs, Rest in the world to come, not in this ; and was faithful to it all his days. Mr. Lothrop Motley's account of the' indefatigable Marnix, whom death surprised at hard work, closes with this sentence : ''At the age of sixty he went at last to the repose which he had denied to himself on earth — ' Repos ailleursy The idea of action is indeed so essential to our notion of plea- sure, that Hobbes, while he places the felicity of this life in action, denies it repose, and declares that the joys of the next world, are to us upon earth utterly incomprehensible, par- taking so much of rest, as in Scripture they are said to do. And of course, as Mr. Dallas agrees, Hobbes is quite right, if by repose we are to understand what the Malmesbury philoso- pher understands — the stoppage of movement— "desire at an end, sense and imagination at a stand." But this is scarcely the Scriptural or a sensible idea of rest. Repos ailleurs meant something more than that to Mendelssohn when, towards the last, he only replied to entreaties to spare himself, instead of labouring on with eager haste and burning zeal, after serious illness had set in, " Let me work on — for me too the hour of rest will come." And again : " Let me work while it is day. Who can tell how soon the bell may toll?" Meanwhile, the law of labour was his law of love. Novalis gives expression to his Sehnsucht nach dem Tode in words like these : ** Gelobt sey uns die ew' ge Nacht, Gelobt der ew' ge Schlummer ! Wohl hat der Tag uns warm gemacht, Und welk der lange Kumnier. Die luste der Fremde ging uns aus. Zum Vater wollen wir nach Haus." To such a seJnisucht Luther gave frequent expression in his closing days. In December, 1544, for instance, he speaks of himself as old, useless, and very weary : " I have finished my journey. . . . I am weary of life, if this can be called life." Later again : " There is nothing in tota vita which gives me WEARY AND WORN-OUT. 153 pleasure : I am utterly weary of life. I pray the Lord will come forthwith, and carry me hence." To his dear Probst he writes that, although overwhelmed with age and weariness, old, cold, and half blind, he is not permitted as yet to take his repose, but longs for it wearily. Prompted by other motives were the similar longings for the last rest uttered, while comparatively young and lusty, by Robert Burns ; as where he writes to his father, as early as 1781, that he is quite transported at the thought, that ere long, perhaps very soon, he shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains, and uneasinesses, and disquietudes of this mortal life ; " for I assure you I am heartily tired of it ; and, if I do not very much deceive myself, I could contentedly and gladly resign it." Seven years later he makes this entry in his common-place book : " I am such a coward in life, so tired of the service, that I would almost at any time, with Milton's Adam, 'gladly lay me in my mother's lap, and be at peace.'" Later again his longing finds utterance in the pathetic cry of the old ballad — *' O that the grave it were my bed, My blankets were my winding-sheet, The clocks and the worms my bedfellows a', And O sae sound as I should sleep !" The negress in the American story catches at the words, " Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest," calling them good words, and asking who said them, and venting a' wish that she knew where to find Him : " I would go ; 'pears like I never should get rested agin. . . . At nights it's 'most midnight 'fore I can get my supper ; and den 'pears like I don't turn over and shut my eyes 'fore I hear de horn blow to get up, and at it again in de mornin'." The dying factory-girl in Mrs. Gaskell's North and South used to think once, that if she could have a day of doing nothing, to rest her — a day in some quiet place Hke that Margaret Hale tells her of — it would maybe set her up. But now she has had many days of enforced idleness, and is just as weary of them as she used to be of work. " Sometimes I'm so tired out I think I cannot enjoy heaven without a piece of rest 154 ' WARTE NUR, BALD RUHEST DU AUCH: first. I'm rather afeard o' going straight up there without getting a good sleep in the grave to set me up." As though to recover her strength, after she was gone hence, and should be no more seen. — Madge Wildfire is sad to think of her " puir bit doggie," as she saw it lying dying in the gutter : " But it's just as weel, for it suffered baith cauld and hunger, when it was living, and in the grave there is rest for a' things — rest for the doggie, and my puir bairn, and me." Rest for all things. Ueber alien Gipfehi ist Ruh began the lines Goethe wrote in pencil on the walls of the wooden hut at Ilmenau, in the prime of life ; and they end with, " Wartenur, bald Ruhest du auch." Just before he died he re-visited the hut, and read the lines over again, and recalled the past, and wiped the tears from his eyes at the recollection, and repeated the last line, Ja^ warte mir, bald ruhest du auch — Yes ; wait but a little, thou too wilt soon be at rest. The rest, says his biographer, was nearer than any one expected. There was not long to wait. Denn auch fiber erne klei?ie Weile so wird kojfijnen, der da ko7mnen soil, ujid 7iicht verziehen. Is it not so written in the Epistle to the Hebrews? Mr. Thackeray's fine old French Comtesse declares for her part, in a calm old age, that when the end comes with its great absolution, she shall not be sorry. '' One supports the combats of life, but they are long, and one comes from them very wounded ; ah, when shall they be over ? '' Romola is described towards the end of her troubled course as weary of this stifling crowded life, and longing for that repose in mere sensation which she had sometimes dreamed of in the sultry afternoons of her early girlhood, when she had fancied herself floating naiad-like on the waters ; and afterwards we read of the imagination of her- self gliding away in a boat on the darkening waters as growing more and more into a longing, as the thought of a cool brook in sultriness becomes a painful thirst. When Mr. Charles Reade takes leave of his Triplet, in a brief sentence recording the year of his death, he does so in the expressive words, — REST FOR THE WEARY. 155 "i\nd I, who laugh at him, would leave this world to-day, to be with him ; for I am tossing at sea — he is in port." What says Mr. Browning's art-philosopher among old pictures in Florence ? — " When a soul has seen By means of Evil that Good is best, And through earth and its noise, what is heaven's serene. When its faith in the same has stood the test- Why, the child grown man, you burn the rod. The uses of labour are surely done. There remaineth a rest for the people of God, And I have had troubles enough for one. " Bidding Gordon good-night, Schiller's Wallenstein suggestively says, " I think to make a long Sleep of it ; for the struggle and turmoil Of this last day or two was great. . . . Take care that they awake me not too early." That is in the fifth act of a tragedy, and the tragedy is Wallen- steins Tod. The worn-out warrior's injunction is of a kind to recall the strain of quite another speaker, of clerical origin, — ' * I am as one Whom an officious hand disturbs in sleep. When he lies drinking rest after long toil, And panteth for the slumber of a year To wipe away some heavy day's turmoil." Who, it has been asked, has not felt his heart echo to that saying of the brilliant Frenchwoman's, half intended as a point, but carried by nature, against the very will of the speaker, into a homely and most touching truth : "At times I feel the want to die as the wakeful feel the want to sleep " ? Worn, wearied, and sated, who has not felt the want expressed by this "the justest of similes" ? Charlotte Smith, looking for 7'epos ailleurs^ is fain to fancy it in the moon, whose mild and placid hght sheds a soft calm upon her troubled breast, and evokes a sonnet from it : *' For, oft I think, fair planet of the night. That in thy orb the wretched may have rest ; 156 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS. The sufferers of the earth perhaps may go, Released by death to thy benignant sphere, And the sad children of despair and woe Forget in thee their cup of sorrow here. Oh that I soon may reach thy world serene, Poor wearied pilgrim in this toiling scene." Drawing a long sigh, the dying woman in Dred says thought- fully, dweUing on the word of promise Tiff has read to her from the gospel,* " Rest, rest, rest ! Oh, how much I want it! . . . Don't talk to me any more now, I'm getting sleepy. There, there, now give me rest, please do." Of Margaret, in Land at Last, we read that "Rest, only rest," that was her craving : let her once more be restored to her ordinary strength, and then let her rest until she died. " Ah, had she not had more than the ordinary share of trouble and disquietude, and could not a haven be found for her at last ? " L>e profundis is the draught of sighs in Mrs. Browning's poem, of that name, — the sighings of a life-prisoner for release from life's prison-house — asking and praying *' Only to loose these pilgrim-shoon, (Too early worn and grimed) with sweet Cool deathly touch to these tired feet, ' Till days go out which now go on. " Only to lift the turf unmown From off the earth where it has grown, Some cubit space, and say, ' Behold, Creep in, poor Heart, beneath that fold, Forgetting how the days go on. ' " What harm would that do ? Green anon The sward would quicken, overshone By skies as blue ; and crickets might Have leave to chirp there day and night While my new rest went on, went on." Crabbe has a crabbed sketch of the worn-out hedger and ditcher, who asks why yet he lives, when he desires to be free * It is a repeat of a parallel passage on the same text, in fact, and from the same pen, in another tale, already cited (p. 153). ACHING BONES OF WEARY ELD. 157 at once from life and life's long labour: friendless he believes himself to be, and he can help none ; then let his bones beneath the turf be laid, and men forget the wretch they would not aid : "Thus groan the old, till, by disease oppress'd, They taste a final woe, and then they rest." God sends His servants to bed when they have done their work, is one of Fuller's quaint sayings. And this is a subject upon which, as Southey has remarked, even Sir Richard Blackmore could write with a poet's feeling, in the lines be- ginning, " Thou dost, O Death, a peaceful harbour lie," — and which go on to tell how in Death's arms the weary lie down to rest: " Cripples with aches* and with age opprest, Crawl on their crutches to the Grave for rest. Exhausted travellers that have undergone The scorching heats of life's intemperate zone, Haste for refreshment to their beds beneath, And stretch themselves in the cool shades of death. Poor labourers who their daily task repeat, Tired with their still returning toil and sweat, Lie down at last ; and at the wish'd-for close Of life's long day, enjoy a sweet repose. " Did the reader, the general reader, ever read Sir Richard Blackmore before ? — if indeed he has read him now. Not more weary the veteran field-labourer of Blackmore and Crabbe, in his way, than monarchs many, in theirs, than grandees many more, in theirs. The old king in Ethwald: A Tragedy feels himself sinking under the burthen of years and cares : full many a storm on that grey head has beaten, and now, on his high station he stands — ' ' Like the tired watchman in his air-rock'd tower. Who looketh for the hour of his release. I'm sick of worldly broils, and fain would rest With those who war no more. " * A word of two syllables ; as in the disputed yet scarcely disputable line, by John Kemble's pronunciation made so noteworthy, in Shakspeare's Te7npest. 158 AWAITING THE SIGNAL OF RETREAT. King Edward II., in Marlowe's historical drama, tells the Abbot, *' Good father, on thy lap Lay I this head, laden with mickle care. Oh might I never ope these eyes again, Never again lift up this drooping head. Oh never more lift up this dying heart ! The Revolution had not yet asserted its hour and power of darkness when Louis the Sixteenth exclaimed, on leaving the grave of his attached minister, Vergennes, " Happy were I, might I repose in peace beside him ! " What says the old king on the tower in Uhland's ballad ? " My hair is grey and my sight nigh gone ; My sword it resteth upon the wall ; Right have I spoken, and right have I done : When shall I rest me once for all ? *' O blessed rest ! O royal night ! Wherefore seemeth the time so long, Till I see yon stars in their fullest light. And list to their loudest song?" So, but with a pagan difference, does Wordsworth glance, in one of his sonnets, at the veteran Sertorius, that great leader, sick of strife and bloodshed, who so longed in quiet to be laid in some green island of the western main. What poet, indeed, excels Wordsworth in the impressiveness of his tributes, first and last, to the sublime attractions of rest ? For instance, there is his mountain recluse, confessedly aweary of the tra- verses and toils of life, its perplexing labyrinths, abrupt precipi- tations, and untoward straits, all which the earth-born wan- derer having passed, he must again encounter, just as the river, that other earth-born wanderer, must, after brief respite here and there : *' Such a stream Is human life ; and so the spirit fares In the best quiet to her course allowed ; And such is mine, — save only for a hope That my particular current soon will reach The unfathomable gulf where all is still." UNIVERSAL INSTINCT OF REPOSE. 159 And elsewhere what other yearning, asks he, was the master tie of the monastic brotherhood, upon airy rock or in green secluded vale, collected from afar in undissolving fellowship ? — what but this, " The universal instinct of repose, The longing for confirmed tranquillity, Inward and outward ; humble, yet sublime : The life where hope and memory are as one ; Where earth is quiet and her face unchanged Save by the simplest toil of human hands Or seasons' difference ; the immortal Soul Consistent in self-rule ; and heaven revealed To meditation in that quietness ! " To the wilderness the Psalmist would wing his flight, were the wings of a dove his. " Lo, there would I get me away far off, and remain in the wilderness." The isolated calm of the desert, its even savage seclusion, were as a spell to that troubled spirit, tossed with tempests and not comforted. Not of the wilderness thought he as we think of it when we read how Jesus was led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil — albeit when the devil leaveth Him, behold, angels came and ministered unto Him; or again, when we read how the possessed Gadarene, which had devils long time, and wore no clothes, neither abode in any house, but in the tombs, was driven of thed evil into the wilderness. Rather the Psalmist thought of it as the Son of David did, when He said to the disciples in the flush of excitement and exertion, " Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest awhile;" for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. And so they departed into a desert place by ship privately. How often the Latin poet's aspiration is breathed by other lips — ** O quis me gelidis in vallibus H^mi Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra?" "Ah, Montalais ! Ah, Malrome !" sighed a worn-out French i6o SIGHS FOR SECLUSION. marshal, "Quand m'envelopperai-je tout entier de votre quietude si douce, loin des affaires, des soucis et (^es hommes ! " Southey breathes the wish, in his earlier days, " Oh for a snug island in the farthest of all seas, surrounded by the highest of all rocks, . . . secluded from the worst of all possible monsters, man ! " In his Hymn to the Penates he had versified and diversified the wish : " And loathing human converse, I have strayed Where o'er the sea-beach chilly howled the blast, And gazed upon the world of waves, and wished That I were far beyond the Atlantic deep, In woodland haunts, a sojourner with Peace. " Cicero had his retreat at Astura, that little island so sequestered and solitary, covered with a thick wood, in whose shady aisles he used to find repose when aweary of the strife of tongues, his own included. You may make a solitude and call it peace, if you like, some one has shrewdly said ; but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the result of such a choice of life would be discontent, irritation, and immovable gloom. The time is past when men who were grieved with the iniquities of their kind, disgusted with the hollowness of society, or perplexed with the enigmas of human destiny, followed the "fashionable or pious usage" of quitting so unsatisfactor}^ a scene, and retiring to solitude and meditation. Mrs. Agassiz, in the book on Brazil which bears on the title-page her hus- band's name conjointly with her own, speaks more than once of the melancholy which is produced by the magnificent scenery she describes; and a reviewer on this side of the Atlantic allows that the vast impenetrable forest solitudes are no doubt oppressive after a time ; but he is fain to add, that a poor cockney, who upon the whole has abundant opportunities of familiarity with his own race, feels his mouth water for a moment, and has a temporary misgiving as to the advantages of civilization. " He is conscious of a half-desire to pack up his portmanteau and be off, to sling his hammock in the midst of the forests and beside the inexhaustible streams of the DA YD REAMS OF DESERT LIFE. i6i mightiest river on earth" (the Amazons). Overwrought minds in faiUng bodies now and then "Dream of such spots, when they have said their prayers, — Or some tired parent, holding by the hand A child, and walking tow'rds the setting sun." Even a gentle recluse poet, whose views of the world were but glimpses through the loop-holes of retreat, could sigh forth his " Oh for a lodge in some vast wilderness, a boundless con- tiguity of shade !" Pope follows, that is imitates, Dr. Donne, when he satirically prays to be borne quickly hence, to whole- some solitude, the nurse of sense, where contemplation prunes her ruffled wings. If age had tamed the passions' strife, and fate had cut his ties to life, the author of Marmioiiy at the time of writing that poem, would have thought it passing sweet to dwell by lone St. Mary's silent lake, and rear again the chap- lain's cell, " Like that same peaceful hermitage Where Milton longed to spend his age. 'Twere sweet to mark the setting day On Bourhope's lonely top decay," etc. In some such mood, but in another tense, or time of life, spoke Wordsworth's Youth from Georgia's shore, when he talked to Ruth of green savannahs, and endless lakes, each with its fairy crowd of islands, that together lie as quietly as spots of sky among the evening clouds : " How pleasant, then," he said, " it were, a fisher or a hunter there, in sunshine or in shade to wander with an easy mind, and build a household fire, and find a home in every glade !" But he wanted a com- panion, as definitely and as explicitly as Childe Harold, when uttering his — *' Oh that the Desert were my dwelling-place, With one fair spirit for my minister ! " and when dilating on the pleasure there is in the pathless woods, and the rapture there is on the lonely shore. Earlier stanzas in the Pilgrimage depict a soft quiet hamlet of a kind that seems made for those who have felt their mortality, and sought M i62 SECLUSION, IN SEASON, OUT OF SEASON a refuge from the cares of life, " in the deep umbrage of a green hill's shade," living henceforth in a sort of calm languor, which " hath its morahty," though it may look like idlesse to the superficial observer; for, ** If from society we learn to live, 'Tis solitude should teach us how to die." Dr. Channing found the greatest attraction of his summer re- treat to consist in the shelter it secured him from all the collisions of life ; and sometimes, when embosomed in that entire seclu- sion, seeing nothing around him but the beautiful order of nature, and hearing only its sweet sounds of winds, and woods, and waters, he would say, " It is good to be here," feeling as if a paradise were spreading around him, so that he shrank from the thought of entering again the field of strife and opening his ear to new notes of discord. But then he would remind himself that the virtue which flies to the shade when God gives a work to be done in the world, which puts away anxiously every painful sight and sound, is not the virtue of Christianity ; nor was it his belief that the greatest happiness, even in this life, is secured by escaping from its conflicts. Well he knew, and taught, that Christianity indeed recommends and promises peace to its followers; but he also knew and ta.ught that this peace is of inward origin, growing from the root of a vigorous piety ; not that which is infused into us by scenes of outward tranquillity — a peace the world cannot give, even less than it can take away. OLD KING DA VID IN THE FIELD. 2 Samuel xxi. 17. KING DAVID was old and within a year or two of his death, when his presence in the field, to wage war against the Philistines, at serious risk to his life, to say nothing of his failing strength (for in this last campaign David " waxed faint"), occasioned a peremptory protest on the part of his OLD KING DA VI D IN THE FIELD. 163 attached followers against his ever again imperilling in battle a life so dear to them and to Israel at large. In this battle the aged monarch was all but despatched by the " new sword " of the giant, and giant's son, Ishbi-benob \ who, if he veritably- called Goliath his father, must have exulted in dealing a mortal stroke that should, after long years, avenge his death. Mortal the stroke of Ishbi-benob, with his new sword, and his spear of three hundred shekels of brass in weight, must infallibly have been, had not the stalwart arm of Abishai the son of Zeruiah interposed, to succour David and to slay the PhiHstine. *' Then the men of David sware unto him, saying, Thou shalt go no more out with us to battle, that thou quench not the light of Israel." The sight of an aged prince eagerly heading his army and jealous of leadership, not loving his life to the death, but prompt to be foremost in the fray, is safe to challenge interest wherever it is to be met with in history, sacred or profane — mythical, classical, mediaeval, or modern. There is King Tarquin him- self, despite his burthen of years, riding in front of the Latins in full armour ; and when he descries the Roman Dictator marshalling his men at the Lake Regillus, riding at him^ — only to be wounded in the side by Postumius, but rescued by the Latins. There is the old King of Numidia, Massinissa, when past ninety years of age, charging like a boy of nineteen at the head of his cavalry. Poorly would that indomitable grey- beard have thought of the Caliph in Tasso, who, when he " grew unfit for war through age, Then sheathed his sword, and laid aside his shield ; Though yet his warHke mind he laid not down, For his great thirst of rule, praise, and renown." It was after Agesilaus was eighty years old that he led an army into Egypt, to assist the Egyptians in their revolt against the Persian king. Antigonus was much of the same age when he determined to fight that decisive battle against Lysimachus which, however, was not then to come off. Seljuk, founder of the Tartar dynasty that went by his name, is said (but what would Sir Cornewall Lewis say, or Mr. Thoms ?) to have been i64 MARTIAL VIGOUR IN EXTREME OLD AGE: killed at the age of 107, in a skirmish on the frontiers of Samarkhand. Quoting Beranger's dictum, that almost all the good workmen live long, Mr. Emerson adds, that if the life be true and noble, we have quite another sort of seniors than the "frowzy, timorous, peevish dotards who are falsely old," — namely, the men who fear no city, but by whom cities stand ; who appearing in any street, the people empty their houses to gaze at and obey them : as at " My Cid, with the fleecy beard," in Toledo ; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him (but what thinks Mr. Freeman of Barbour, and of Barbour's Bruce?); or as blind old Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty-four years, storming Constantinople at ninety-four years, and after the revolt again victorious, and elected at the age of ninety-six to the throne of the Eastern Empire, which he declined, — dying Doge at ninety-seven. John of Brienne stands forth in Gibbon a stal- wart presence, kindling the expectation of Greeks and Latins as commander of the army of the Church ; so much they " admired his martial aspect, his green and vigorous age of four-score years." Abu Jahl is a name of note in the biogra- phies of Mahomet — a warrior of the desert, of three-score years and ten, who still retained the fire, and almost the vigour and activity of youth, combined with the rancour of old age. To the same times belongs that still more ancient and far more decrepit warrior, Doraid, the chief of the Joshmites, alleged to have been upwards of a hundred years old ; meagre as a skeleton, almost blind, and borne in a litter on a camel's back. Andrew Doria at eighty-five sallied out to sea* again, to attack his old enemies the Turks, who were ravaging the coast of Naples. Then again there is the King of Bohemia, at Crecy, old and blind, charging on horseback with his knights, a forlorn hope. * Christian Drakenberg was only sixty-eight when he was captured on a voyage from Hamburg to Spain by Algerine pirates; but then, after con- tinuing in slavery for sixteen years, the old gentleman, now aged eighty- four, made his escape from Aleppo, and went home to take part in the war between Denmark and Sweden. And take part in it he did, to some pur- pose. Nor did he take leave of the Danish navy until he had mimbered his ninety-first year. OCTOGENARIAN, NONAGENARIAN, 165 The famous Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, was upwards of eighty when he attacked the French entrenchments at Chatillon in T452, and so feeble, says Monstrelet, that he was obliged to ride a small hackney, when all the rest of his force had dis- mounted j but riding from rank to rank he inspirited his men to fresh efforts, till a ball from a culverin struck down his horse, and a Frenchman slew him as he lay beneath it. D'Aubusson, the grand master of the order of St. John of Jerusalem, was far advanced in old age when he undertook the command of the league against the Sultan. The historian of the conquest of Peru graphically sketches the veteran Carbajal sleeping in his saddle, as well as eating and drinking there, at eighty years of age, and seeing his followers tire one after another, while he urged on the chase of \var, like Biirger's Wild Huntsman, as if endowed Avith an unearthly frame, incapable of fatigue. Another American historian tells us how reluctant were the Spaniards to march, in 1593, except under old Mondragon, who was nearly of the same age as the century, and had done much of the hardest work of it, and fought in most of its battles ; and how, being now turned of ninety, he thought best to keep house in Antwerp Castle. But not for good. He might be characterized in Racine's words as — ' ' Ce coeur nourri de sang, et de guerre affame, Malgre le faix des ans. " Writing of him two years later, when intent on trying a fall with Prince Maurice, who was in his cradle after the now wizened little Christopher had come to be known as the " good old Mondragon," Mr. Motley observes : " Christopher IMon- dragon was now [1595] ninety-two years old. Not often in the world's history has a man of that age been capable of per- sonal participation in the joys of the battle-field, whatever natural reluctance veterans are apt to manifest at relinquish- ing high military control. But Mondragon looked not wath envy, but with admiration, on the growing fame of the Nassau chieftain, and was disposed, before he himself left the stage, to i66 MONDRA GON A T NINETY- TWO. match himself with the young champion." His announced in- tention of crossing the Rhine was scouted by his army as a foolhardy scheme ; but the general had not campaigned a generation before, at the age of sixty-nine, " at the bottom of the sea," and waded chin-deep for six hours long of an October night in the face of a rising tide from the German Ocean and of an army of Zeelanders, to be frightened now, as his officers and men alike seemed to be, at the "summer aspect of the peaceful Rhine." A picturesque figure the " wizened little old man " presents, walking with difficulty by the aid of a staff, but armed in proof, with plumes waving gallantly from his iron headpiece, and with his rapier at his side, making for the river's edge, — then taking his seat in a chair placed there for the purpose, and swearing not to rise from it till the last man of all his host should have crossed the stream. Alone he planned his expedition across the country from Antwerp, alone he insisted on crossing the Rhine, alone he outwitted the famous young chieftain of the Netherlands, counteracting his subtlest policy, (and Maurice could be very subtle,) and setting the counter-ambush by which the prince's choicest cavalry were cut to pieces, and one of his bravest generals, Count Philip, slain. " So far could the icy blood of ninety-two pre- vail against the vigour of twenty-eight." This was Mondragon's last feat of arms; within three months of it he died.* One might say of him, with Shakspeare's Kent, " The wonder is, he hath endured so long : he but usurped his Hfe." But there was in him a fund of vitality resembling that ascribed to * " Strange to say, this man — who had spent almost a century on the battle-fiekl, who had been a soldier in nearly every war that had been waged in Europe during that most belligerent age, who had come an old man to the Netherlands before Alva's arrival, and had ever since been constantly and personally engaged in the vast Flemish tragedy which had now lasted well-nigh thirty years — had never himself lost a drop of blood. His battle-fields had been on land and water, on ice, in fire, and at the bottom of the sea, but he had never received a wound." Nay, more ; he had been blown up in a fortress (Danvilliers), where all perished save his wife and himself, — the " ancient couple " being dug up from the ruins without a bruise or a scratch. — Mojley, History of the United Netherlands ^ vol. iii., p. 342 ; of. pp. 259, 336, 341. PERSONAL RISK UNDULY DARED. 167 Cooper's veteran hero, who seemed to bid defiance to all the usual attacks of human infirmities; and whose attenuated frame, though evidently so near its dissolution, still stood like the shaft of seasoned oak, dry, naked, and tempest-riven, but un- bending and apparently indurated to the consistency of stone. To how many of the hoary warriors we have been citing, would apply what York says of aged Salisbury, when he calls him — *' That winter lion, who in rage forgets Aged contusions and all brush of time ; And like a gallant in the brow* of youth, Repairs him with occasion." Recklessness in personal exposure to peril in battle, what- ever the age of the commander, is a topic admitting of copious illustration. Godfrey's impetuosity and recklessness of risk, in Tasso, are the occasion of grave remonstrance on the part of aged Raimond, who deprecates his eagerness to be first to scale the breach, and his forgetfulness of the ruin that loss of him might bring upon his host : ** My lord, your life with greater care protect, And love yourself because all us you love ; Your happy life is spirit, soul, and breath Of all this camp ; preserve it then from death. " To all which the royal crusader answers, that a secret vow is upon him, ** Not as a captain here this day to stand And give directions, but with shield and sword To fight, to win, or die for Christ my Lord." Oest magnifique^ mats ce n^est pas la guerre — not war, at least, in the sense a general is expected to take and follow out. There was something more of logic in the plea proffered by Gustavus Adolphus, when tenderly reproached by his great Chancellor, Oxenstiern, for the rashness with which he exposed his own person (but his army also) to superior numbers : " Far be the charge of rashness from me, on whom rest so many souls, and a cause so important. But the time will come when * That is, height. i68 GUSTA VUS ADOLPHUS AT L UTZEN: duty will command me to follow the caution and wearying delays of a Fabius;" and what better means, he argued, of suppressing the impatience, without cowing the courage of his army, could he furnish, than a proof positive from his past character, that foresight and a commanding genius must have dictated his forbearance ; for that timidity could have no share in it? Joan of Arc, in Schiller, is even more proof against remonstrance than Godfrey in Tasso, as relying on a Divine inspiration which follow blindly she may, and obey implicitly she must. La Hire in vain implores her to be satisfied with pointing out the path of conquest to the host, and, if she will, to bear the banner before them ; but not to wield arms herself, and so tempt a fatal stroke in the melee. He is peremptorily silenced : ** Who dares impede my progi-ess ? Who presume The Spirit to control which giiideth me ? Where danger is, there must Johanna be." In an after scene the Maiden is missed by her fellow-soldiers ; and one chieftain answers another's inquiry by telling how, not long before, he saw her banner wave amid the thickest of the hostile ranks ; and Dunois exclaims, " Alas ! where is she ? Evil I forebode : Come, let us haste to rescue her. I fear Her daring soul hath led her on too far ; Alone she combats in the midst of foes, And without succour sways before the throng. " To recur to the salient historical instance of Gustavus Adolphus. His intemperance of courage, in exposing his person in action is accounted by Mr. Herman Merivale a greater sin than his intemperance in anger : no prayers, no representations, could wean him from his constant habit of taking the foremost place in time of danger. And yet, like the Napiers, he scarcely ever went into serious action without being hit. His fate at Liitzen is therefore described as only in accordance with this habitual disregard of sterner duty : he perished in a blaze of glory, which by its very excess of light dazzles the historical inquirer, and "converts into a martyrdom HJS INTEMPERANCE OF COURAGE. 169 that which was in truth both an error and a crime." There have been generals, the same writer observes, as prudent as brave, who have nevertheless risked their lives by daring exposure, deliberately, because the rallying of a broken army, or the necessity of personal presence at a menaced spot, seemed to require it. But Gustavus, it is contended, had no such excuse ; his Smalanders needed no such prodigality of life to encourage them in the charge ; his place was not at their head, but at that of his whole army. *' He ran on almost cer- tain death, in the mere animal spirit of valiant intoxication, like the Berserkar of old, or the savage Malay. ' Died Abner as a fool dieth?'" The visitor to Liitzen, as he stood by the Swedes' Stone, is supposed to put this question, and to feel his enthusiasm damped by the reflection that Gustavus, had he sur- vived the victory, might probably have brought the war at once to a successful termination ; and that the sixteen years of misery which followed were due to that momentary yielding to the furious impulse of a noble but uncontrolled nature. Personal rashness, observes another historical critic, — in his comment on the lamentable results of the death of Gustavus, — is generally regarded with tolerance ; but no man has a right unnecessarily to expose the cause of his country to the risk of an encounter which might become a private or a subaltern. " Many a noble undertaking has collapsed with the fall of some indispensable representative." Apart, however, from this grave contingency, let us glance at some of the names of note in story, whose personal valour was unduly personal in its self-assertion. There is Cyrus at the battle of Cunaxa, rejecting the en- treaty of Clearchus to keep to the rear, and committing what Plutarch calls the error of rushing into the midst of the greatest danger without care or caution. There is Pyrrhus charging with the most dashing vigour, and personally foremost in the hottest of the engagement. There is Lysander, in Plutarch's phrase, throwing away his life ingloriously, like a common soldier or desperate adventurer. There is Chabrias, exposing his life "with a boldness ungoverned by discretion," and so losing it at last. There is Callicratides, disregarding the I70 COURTING PERIL IN THE FRAY. soothsayer's appeal, and telling him Sparta was not bound up in one man ; whereas he did virtually comprehend the whole force in himself, as commander, " so that he was no longer a single person, when such numbers must perish with him." There is Pelopidas, in his last battle, sacrificing both his safety and his duty as a general, by giving way to passion, and spring- ing forward a great way before his troops, too far for them to rescue him alive. There is Marcellus again, without any urgent occasion, and without that enthusiasm which often hurries men beyond the bounds of reason in time of danger, unadvisedly exposing himself, and dying, " not like a general, but like a spy," by the hands of mercenary scouts. There is Mardonius at Plat^a, on his white horse, foremost of a band of a thousand chosen Persians, too conspicuous by his valour; for "at length the rash but gallant leader of the Asiatic armies received a mortal wound," and his death was the general signal of defeat and flight. There is Constantine at Verona, victorious, indeed, and congratulated by his officers on so important a victory, but also by them addressed with what Gibbon terms some respect- ful complaints, such as the most jealous monarchs will listen to without displeasure. " They represented to Constantine, that, not contented with performing all the duties of a commander, he had exposed his own person with an excess of valour which almost degenerated into rashness ; and they conjured him for the future to pay more regard to the preservation of a life in which the safety of Rome and of the empire was involved." There is Julian before the citadel of Perisabor, signalizing his personal valour amid extreme peril, to a degree which " can seldom be exerted by a prudent general." At a later day the like exposure cost him his life — that day of battle when, fore- most in every danger, he animated the pursuit with his voice and gestures, — his trembling guards in vain reminding their fearless sovereign that he was without armour, and conjuring him to consider himself, spare himself, save himself. There is the Emperor Manuel at the siege of Corfu, standing aloft on the poop of his galley, opposing his buckler against volleys of darts and stones ; nor could he have escaped inevitable death, DUTIES OF A COMMANDER. 171 had not the Sicilian admiral enjoined his archers to respect the person of a hero. It is a Scottish historian who, in describing the desolating progress of Edward I. beyond the Forth in 1304, is prompt to record the fact that the English king, although his advanced age might have afforded him an excuse for caution, exposed his life with an almost youthful rashness.* Ten years later, when a second Edward was in the field, Bruce was earnestly remonstrated with by the Scottish leaders for the rash manner in which he courted a fatal stroke ; but his estimate of the remonstrances would appear to resemble that of Tasso's hero again, in like case, when veteran counsellors uttered the en- treaty,— " But lest you be endanger 'd, hurt, or slain, Of all your cares take care yourself to save ; By you this camp doth live, doth win, doth reign. Who else can rule or guide these squadrons brave?" A dashing figure the Kurfiirst Albert, that "Achilles of Ger- many," makes in Mr. Carlyle's records of the House of Bran- denburg— a tall, fiery, tough old Elector, plunging in alone, his Ritters being rather shy. in one of his eight victories, or " furious successful skirmishes," — laying about him hugely, and hanging by a standard he had taken, till his life was nearly beaten out. Of James IV. at Flodden, history tells how, in his ardour, he forgot that the duties of a commander were dis- tinct from the indiscriminate valour of a knight ; how he placed himself in the front of his lances and billmen, and charged, and fell. While Surrey, in the opposing centre, "mindful of his duty," kept himself as much as possible out of the deadly brunt of the conflict, and was able to watch its progress and to give each division his instant help, the Scottish king is blamed as acting the part of Richard or Amadis, more intent * Upon one occasion, when the king's horse backed and fell with his master, some of the soldiers, seeing his peril, ran in and forced Edward down the hill towards the tents. This was during the siege of St. Andrews. 172 DARING TO A FAULT. on the display of his individual bravery and prowess, than eager for the defeat of the foe. While awarding great praise to Alexander Farnese for his exertions at the battle of the Kowenstyn, and the attack upon the bridge, in 1585, Philip of Spain censured him affectionately for so rashly exposing his life. Professing to want words to render due thanks for all the Duke of Parma had been doing, his sovran recommended him earnestly, however, to take better care of his personal safety, " for that is of more consequence than all the rest." Next year, Farnese had a narrow escape at the siege of Neusz, twenty miles below Cologne, when he impatiently advanced to the battery of the Italian regiment, and a shower of balls rattled about him, so that his men were terrified at the danger, and a cry arose in the town that " Holoferneso," as they nicknamed him, was dead, — though, strange to relate, as the historian of the United Netherlands relates the matter, Alexander was quite unharmed, and walked back to his tent with dignified calmness and a very frowning face. So with Prince Maurice, who, very frequently, in the course of his early campaigns, was formally and urgently requested by the States-General not to expose his life so reck- lessly, and who, before he was twenty-five, had received wounds which, but for fortunate circumstances, would have proved mortal, because he was unwilHng to leave special operations on which much was depending to other eyes than his own.* In the annals of the same war figures Henry of Navarre, " for- getting as usual, in his eagerness for the joys of the combat, that he was not a young captain of cavalry with his spurs to win by dashing into every mad adventure that might present itself, but a king fighting for his crown, with the welfare of a whole * "Although his method of war-making differed as far as possible from that of the Bearnese [Henry IV.], yet the two had one quality in common, personal insensibility to fear. But in the case of Henry, to confront danger for its own sake was in itself a pleasure, while the calmer spirit of Maurice did not so much seek the joys of the combat as refuse to desist from scientific combinations in the interests of his personal safety." — J. L. Motley, History of the United Nether lands ^ vol. iii., p. loi. COMMANDERS AND SELF-COMMAND. 173 people depending on his fortunes." In the remarkable skir- mish of Aumale (1592), the King of France, by his constitu- tional temerity, and what Mr. Motley terms his " almost puerile love of confronting danger for the danger's sake," was on the verge of sacrificing himself, with all the hopes of his house and of the nobler portion of his people, for an absolute nothing. At St. Seine, in 1595, we see him again flinging himself, like a young lieutenant, with a mere handful of cavalry into the midst of the fight, "by one of those mad reckless impulses which made him so adorable as a soldier, and yet so profoundly censurable as a commander-in-chief" The Marquis Spinola, again, was the subject of frequent animadversion on the part of the Spanish Government and the royal generals com- manding-in-chief, for his reckless habit of exposing himself to unnecessary danger. Sir Walter Scott has remarked, in the case of that Marquis of Argyle whom he " dare not stigma- tize with poltroonery," remembering the composure and dignity of his death, that when the still voice within a man's own breast which tells him that his life is of consequence to him- self is seconded by that of numbers around him, who assure him that it is of equal advantage to the public, history affords many examples of men more habitually daring than Argyle, who have consulted self-preservation when the incitements to it were so powerfully increased. The young Prince of Orange, our William III., so conducted himself in the defeat at Senefife, in 1674, as to win from the veteran Conde the generous testi- mony, that in everything he had acted like an old captain, except only in risking his life too much like a young soldier. Addison apostrophizes an appeal to Marlborough, amid the storm and stress of his Campaign : ** Forbear, great man, renown'd in arms, forbear To brave the thickest terrors of the Avar, Nor hazard thus, confused in crowds of foes, Britannia's safety and the world's repose ; Let nations, anxious for thy life, abate This scorn of danger and contempt of fate : Thou livest not for thyself; thy queen demands Conquest and peace fi cm thy victorious hands ; 174 AN ARMY'S SAFETY BOUND UP Kingdoms and empires in thy fortune join, And Europe's destiny depends on thine." Prince Charles Edward, at Preston, was bent on going foremost into the enemy's Hnes ; and though, as Dr. Chambers said, his courage has been " most absurdly challenged," it re- quired urgent remonstrance to dissuade him. At Falkirk, too, he had to be implored by the army not to hazard his person by that active collision with the enemy for which, as at Preston, he was eager. Frederic the Great was with difficulty per- suaded to quit the field at the lost battle of Kolin, when his troops, again and again driven back with frightful carnage, could no longer be led to the charge. His staff-officers were constrained to expostulate with him : " Does your majesty mean to storm the batteries alone?" On the other hand, at his first battle (Molwitz), losing his self-possession, he had listened all too readily to those who urged him to save himself. At the defeat at Kunersdorf, in 1759, Frederic the Great had been urged to quit the field before the rout became universal; but he resisted the entreaty, and made it a matter of duty to remain. Two horses were killed under him that day, and a gold case which he carried in his pocket was crushed by a musket-ball. Of Washington, in 1777, one of his officers writes : " Our army love their general very much, but they have one thing against him, which is the very little care he takes of himself in any action." At the battle of Novi it was the com- plaint, or the boast, of both sides, that their commanders them- selves, regardless of life, could not refrain from leading in person to the charge, as if their duty had been that of merely heading grenadier battalions. Nelson at Trafalgar would not be dissuaded from displaying on the quarter-deck those insignia on his breast which, his officers urged, must obviously expose him to certain death from the enemy's marksmen. Ney at Elchingen seemed to court death throughout the day : hap'pier had he found it then, and thus. At Caldiero, Massena and the Archduke of Austria respectively charged at the head of their reserves, exposing themselves as freely as the commonest soldiers. Mortier, at Diirrenstein, was in vain implored by his IN A COMMANDERS LIFE. 175 officers to get on board of a bark on the river, and make his way to the other side. Leave his comrades he would not ; and his personal safety, while repeatedly encompassed by the Russian grenadiers, he seems to have owed to the vigour and dexterity with which, as an English historian says, he wielded his sword. At the battle of St. Pierre, Soult hurried to the front, and exposed his life like the meanest of his followers. At that of St. Rothiere, the Emperor Alexander hazarded his life in the thickest of the fight. At that of Vauchamps, Blucher stood in the front of the squares, in hopes of falling before he saw utter defeat. He was induced to turn his horse's head by the appeal of one of his aides-de-camp : " If you should be killed here, do you really* think history will praise you for it?" At Montereau, Napoleon rejected the remon- strance of his old cannoneers of the Imperial Guard, who, when the whistle of the Austrian balls sounded close over their heads, besought the Emperor to retire from the front, — with the assuring assurance {courage, mes amis!) that the bullet which had its billet for him was not cast yet. Only, perhaps, a Frenchman could have hit on so charac- teristic a device, — and only, perhaps. Frenchmen can appreciate to the full the success of it, — as that by means of which M. de Jaucour prevailed on Marshal Broglie to withdraw from bootless peril. In vain had all the Marshal's friends used every effort to induce him to retire, and no longer to affronter tin danger , inutile. At last M. de Jaucour drew near, and whispered in his commander's ear : " Monsieur le mare'chal, bear in mind, bethink that if you are killed, it is M. de Routhe who will take the command." Now M. de Routhe was le plus sot of his lieutenants-general. M. de Broglie, struck with the peril which thus menaced the army, at once withdrew. And this, of course, he would do with grace, and not like the old king in Mr. Tennyson's Medley, when, clashing his iron palms together with a cry, he declared himself intent on mingling in the melee : ** But overborne by all his bearded lords With reasons drawn from age and state, perforce He yielded, wroth and red, with fierce demur." 176 BORNE IN LITTER TO THE FRAY. It is stirring to mark how some choice spirits, in their capacity as leaders in the field, will never leave the field till life leaves them, or at least until their strength utterly fails them ; and then it is not flesh and heart that fail them, but flesh only ; heart remaining so strong, and spirit so willing, when flesh is so weak. If they can no longer stand, or sit on horseback, they will be borne in litter to the fray, like Shak- speare's " stout Pendragon," who, ' ' in his litter, sick, Came to the field, and vanquished his foes." Or like Shakspeare's '^courageous Bedford," who, himself ''sick, in a chair," cites that example, and inspirits himself by it, " undaunted spirit in a dying breast," when Talbot would fain bestow the old regent-duke in some better place, " fitter for sickness and for crazy age" than the battlements of belea- guered Rouen. We turn back to old times to think of Agesi- laus, prostrate with his wounds at Chaeronea, but refusing to retire to his tent, till he had been carried through all his battalions, and had seen the dead borne off upon their arms. And of Nicias forcing himself, as Plutarch says, beyond what his health would allow, to attend most of the actions in person, — though often, " when his distemper was very violent," obliged to keep his bed in the camp. Or of Camillus, " unable to contain himself," leaping from his bed to rally his routed forces. Or again, of Alexander, all but mortally wounded in ndia, but, while carried in a litter, subduing a large tract of country, and taking a number of cities. So with Eumenes, " extremely ill, and forced to be carried in a litter," but even thus carrying all before him, and it, — for we must not forget that formidable litter, any more than Antigonus could, who made it a jest indeed, yet in sad earnest; for the look of it was almost enough, as a " caution" to those whom it concerned. Perseus has due, or more than due, credit in Plutarch for refusing to absent himself from action when disabled by the kick of a horse and altogether in a bad way; mount another he would, and charge, without a breastplate, at the head of the LAID UP, NOT TO BE LAID BY. 177 phalanx which Paulus yEmiUus had to confront. Of Severus, and his invasion of Britain, history tells how, notwithstanding his advanced age (for he was above threescore), and his gout, which obliged him to be carried in a litter, the Emperor trans- ported himself in person to that remote island, and endured the austerity of a Caledonian winter, at the cost too of some fifty thousand of his Romans, upon whom the concealed ambuscades of the Caledonians so fatally told. Gibbon makes proper mention, in his narrative of the Lazic war, of that Persian generalissimo, distinguished among the heroes of the East by his wisdom in council and his valour in the field— Mermeroes, whose* advanced age, and the lameness of both his feet, could not diminish the activity of his mind, or even of his body ; '' and whilst he was carried in a litter in the front of battle, he inspired terror to the enemy and a just confidence to the troops, who, under his banners were always successful." A foeman worthy of his steel he found in that Roman general, Bessus, who, seventy years old, was the first of six thousand Romans who mounted the scaling-ladders at the second siege of Petra (a.d. 551). Then again one calls to mind Richard Coeur-de-lion in the camp of the Crusaders, himself borne down by a grievous malady, and carried to the trenches in a litter, but animating all around him to vigour in onslaught. Debilitated as Edward I. was towards the last, to the last he kept to the field in his litter, or only quitted the fitter for horse- back, under the delusion that he was better, and that he might, as he did, ofi'er up that litter in the cathedral at Carlisle — a delusion fatal in its effects, for within a few days the stern soldier-king breathed his last. About the same time his arch- foeman, the Bruce, was also carried in a litter, being too weak to mount his horse ; and when, excited by what seemed a military afiront on the part of the Earl of Buchan, he insisted on rising from his litter and called for his horse and arms, despite his friends' remonstrance he mounted his steed, and, supported by two men on each side, led on his soldiers in person to a furious and successful attack on Buchan in full force. David Il.^at the disastrous battle of Durham (1346), N •178 DISABLED COMMANDERS after being grievously wounded by two arrows, — one of which pierced deep, and could not be extracted without great agony, — persisted in remaining on the field and inciting to further efforts and endurance the few that were left around him. One- eyed Ziska lost his remaining eye at the siege of Raby ; but for all that he continued to head his troops,* in front of whom he was carried in a cart, he arranging the order of battle according to the description of the ground made by his ofhcers. Cervantes was suffering from intermittent fever at the time of the battle of Lepanto — he being then a volunteer under Colonna, who commanded the Papal forces against the Turks ; but he took an active part in the .combat, which left him maimed for life. That Emperor of Morocco whose terri- tories Don Sebastian of Portugal so memorably invaded, Muly Moluc, was at that time wearing away with a distemper which he himself knew to be incurable ; so far spent indeed he was with sickness, as Addison tells the story, that he did not expect to live out the whole day when the last decisive battle was given ; but, to avert fatal contingencies to his realm, in case of his dying before the war should be ended, he commanded his principal officers, in case of his expiring during the engage- ment, to conceal his death from the army, bidding them ride up to the litter in which his corpse would be carried, as if to receive orders from him, just as usual. Before the battle opened he was carried through all the ranks of his army in an open litter, and exhorted them, as they stood drawn up in array, to fight valiantly for their faith and their homes. When he found the battle going against him, the dying man threw himself out of his litter, rallied his army, and led them on to the charge, with a vigour that turned the tide of success, and ensured a complete victory to the Moors. But as soon as ever he had secured a rally, finding himself utterly spent, he was * Two Spartans of the three hundred of Thermopylae, Eurytus and Aristodemus, had been allowed to sojourn at Alpeni, as suffering from a severe disorder in the eyes ; but Eurytus, hearing of the contest, made his helot lead him into the field, and with the immortals under Leonidas he too fell. BORNE IN LITTER TO THE FRAY. 179 replaced in his litter ; then laying his finger on his mouth to enjoin secrecy to his staff, he died within a few moments, in that significant posture. Raleigh, at the storming of Cadiz, had to be carried on shore with a splinter wound in the leg which lamed him for life ; but he returned on board within an hour, despite the agony of pain, for there was no admiral left to order the fleet. Alexander Farnese, at the siege of Caudebec, near Rouen, received a musket-ball between the wrist and the elbow, and the wound bled profusely ; but for some time the Duke kept the matter concealed, not indicating by a word or by the movement of a muscle that he had been hurt, so intent was he upon carrying out the immediate object in view. The result was a dangerous fever, with symptoms of gangrene; and a new commander became necessary for the nonce. About the same time we read of old Prince Ranuccio having himself dragged out of bed, suffering as he was, and brought on a litter into the field, where he was set on horseback, '' trampling on wounds and disease, and, as it were, on death itself," says the historian, that he might by his own unsurpassed keenness of eye and quickness of resource protect the army which had been entrusted to his care. Historians dispute with vivacity whether Wallenstein at Liitzen was in a litter or on horseback, with his stirrup wrapped up in silk to alleviate the pressure on his gouty limb. Dear to old salts used to be the memory of that Admiral Benbow, whose right leg was smashed to pieces in action by a chain-shot, and who was carried below, but very soon ordered his cradle to be brought up on the quarter-deck, so as to keep up his interest in the fray, if not his entire con- trol of it. At the battle of Fontenoy, the French general-in- chief, Marshal Saxe, though suffering from dropsy, for which he had undergone the operation of tapping three days before, was borne in a litter to the scene of strife ; and we English know only too well what came of it. A generation previously. Marshal Villars, at the battle of Malplaquet, had been wounded early in the day, and endeavoured to direct the troops from a litter, but fainted, and was borne from the field. i8o AGED, INFIRM, AND WOUNDED During the whole of the dreadful retreat from Prague, in 1742, Marshal Belleisle, crippled with rheumatism, and unable to either walk or ride, was carried in his coach or sedan to all parts where his presence was necessary. Personally he recon- noitred and pointed out the roads, and superintended all the details of the march. Colonel Gardiner was so weak that he had to be carried forward from Haddington in a post-chaise, when he urged an instant attack on the Highlanders (at Pres- tonpans). Dr. Stevenson made a name by the enthusiasm with which he insisted on sitting for days together, in his arm- chair, as one of the guards of Edinburgh, at the Netherbow Port, bedridden though he long had been from age and disease. " I could easily," said brave old Lord Balmerino, in his last speech, " have excused myself taking arms on account of my age; but I never could have had peace of conscience if I had stayed at home, when that brave Prince was exposing himself to all manner of dangers and fatigues both night and day." At Hochkirchen, Marshal Keith, whom the first roar of the guns roused from sleep, and who was instantly in the front of the battle, received a dangerous wound, but refused to quit the field ; and the " noble exile," as Macaulay calls him, was in the act of rallying his broken troops, when an Austrian bullet terminated his chequered and eventful life. Count Diebitsch, at Austerlitz, was badly wounded in the right hand, but would not quit his place, and took his sword in his left, for which the Czar gave him a sabre of honour. At Eylau, where he commanded the left of the French, Marshal Augereau, though seized with sudden illness and fever, had him- self tied upon his horse, and remained to the last in action. At Laval, during the Vendean war, M. de Lescure, then lin- gering on the bed of death, insisted upon being carried in a litter through the Breton ranks, and sharing in the perils that confronted them. His example told : at Savenay, soon after, all the wounded who could sit on horseback were led out to the fight. At the battle of the Nile, Admiral Brueys was nearly cut in two by a cannon-ball, but refused to be carried below, and died on his quarter-deck, exhorting his men to fight to the COMMANDERS IN THE FIELD, i8i last.* At Kinburn, the Russian troops fell into disorder and panic when they missed Suvarrow, who was wounded ; but that energetic commander leapt from the litter in which he was being carried, mounted, all bleeding as he was, on horseback, and exclaiming, " My children, I am yet alive," rallied them to renewed resistance and conquest. During the passage of the Danube in 1809, Massena was grievously bruised by a fall from his horse ; and the army was fearful, says Pelet, that his power- ful aid would be wanting on the field of battle (Wagram) ; but he appeared there on the following day in an open carriage, and then it was that Napoleon, seeing his endurance of pain and exposure to the fire, exclaimed, " Who would fear death when he sees how the brave are prepared to die ! " Prince Bagrathion was severely wounded at Borodino, and forced to dismount, but refused to quit the field, and was an eager and excited spectator of the action while life remained. At the battle of Vittoria, the Spanish general, Murillo, was wounded, but kept his ground ; while Colonel Cadogan, after receiving his death wound, insisted on remaining on the field, to watch with dying eyes the advance of his Highlanders along the ridge whose summit he had just reached when he fell. At Busaco, in 181 1, Sir Charles Napier was terribly wounded in the face; and memorable was his meeting, in his bandaged con- dition, with the litter of branches, covered with a blanket and borne by soldiers, which contained his brother George, with a broken limb, and anon another litter, in which lay his brother William, declared to be mortally hurt. " Charles looked at the spectacle which met him at the end of a ninety miles' ride, and rode on into the fight." It has been well said, that well might Wellington relish talking of "my colonels" the Napiers. General (then Captain) Changarnier, in one of his battles in Algeria, was struck by a ball on the shoulder, and supposed to be mortally wounded ; but he would not quit the field : alight- * We read in Gordon's History of the Greek Revolution, of Andreas Miaulis, on a critical occasion, when the sailors refused to embark, ordering himself to be carried in his litter, ill as he was, on board his brig ; and the men at once followed. 1 82 OLD KING DAVID IN THE FIELD. ing for a moment, he had the ball extracted, again led his column, and led them to victory. If the army of old King David in the field were loth to see him expose a life so precious, and therefore urged entire retire- ment now that he was stricken in years, none the less must they have ever prized in him, and been drawn towards him by, his readiness to share their hardships, and fare alike as they fared, and risk what they risked, and be as one of them, — a soldier every inch of him, if also every inch a king. He was the man to admire that refusal of Bathsheba's grievously wronged husband, to live delicately, even for the nonce, while the army he belonged to were roughing it. Uriah would not take his ease under his own roof,* while Israel and Judah abode in tents, and his lord Joab and other servants of King David were encamped in the open fields. Uriah would not go down to his house, to eat and drink and be well lodged, while his brethren-at-arms were enduring hardships as good soldiers ; but he must needs approve himself a good soldier too, and sleep at the door of the king's house, not so much as enter within his own. Plutarch is observant of Artaxerxes, that the gold and purple and jewels which he wore (valued at twelve thousand talents) were no let or hindrance to his bearing the same fatigues and hardships with the meanest soldier in his army. So with Agesilaus : among so many thousands of sol- diers as he had, there was scarce one who had a worse or a harder bed than he. Alexander, in dire distress with thirst, would not drink from a helmet filled with water in which those around him, alike bearing the burden and heat of the day, could not share. In his Life of Caius Marius, the most genial * Compare what Gibbon relates of Amir, the son of Aidin, in the four- teenth century: "By a peculiar strain of delicacy, the gentle barbarian refused, in the absence of an unfortunate friend [Cantacuzene], to visit his wife, or to taste the luxuries of the palace ; sustained in his tent the rigour of winter, and rejected the hospitable gift [of rich apparel and a hundred horses], tliat he might share the hardships of two thousand companions, all as deserving as himself of that honour and distinction. " — Roman Empire^ ch. Ixiv. C^SARS ON THE TRAMP. 183 of biographers takes, or rather finds, occasion to remark that to a Roman soldier no pleasanter sight could there be, than that of his general eating the same dry bread which was his fare, and lying on a mean bed, and helping his men in drawing a trench or throwing up a bulwark. It inspired his troops with new courage when they saw Pompey, at the age of fifty- eight, going through the whole miHtary discipline, in, heavy armour, on foot. Cato (Uticensis) won the hearts of his men by marching with them afoot over the sands of Africa, or rather before them, for he was ever foremost. Caesar, at the head of his army, walked oftener than he rode ; no doubt, as De Quincey says, by way of example, and to express that sympathy with his soldiers which gained him their hearts so entirely. It was commonly on foot that the Emperor Hadrian was to be seen, throughout his progresses, at the head of his legions, marching steadily with them twenty miles a day, and always bareheaded, and careful to make himself familiar with their black bread, their lard and cheese, their sour wine or vinegar. Severus, as Gibbon words it, " insinuated himself into the con- fidence and affection of his troops" by marching on foot, and in complete armour, at the head of his columns, — well satisfied to share the hardships of the meanest among them all. That other Severus, Alexander, shared whatever fatigues he was obhged to impose (for the luxury of the army itself imposed such obligations). Zenobia would sometimes march for miles together on foot with her men. The Emperor Cams, when the Persian ambassadors obtained an audience, was found by them seated on the grass, at supper, composed of a piece of stale bacon and a few hard peas. The reluctance of his troops to cross the Rhine a third time, is said to have soon yielded to the persuasive eloquence of a leader who, as Julian did, himself shared whatever fatigues and privations he imposed. " In every useful labour, the hand of Julian was prompt and strenu- ous ; and the imperial purple was wet and dirty, as the coarse garment of the meanest soldier." He always contented him- self with such food as a hungry soldier would have disdained. The Emperor Majorian led the way across the Alps in a severe i84 ROYAL COMMANDERS winter, himself on foot and in complete armour, sounding with his long staff the depth of the ice or snow, and encouraging the Scythians, who complained of the extreme cold, by the cheerful assurance that they should find heat enough in Africa by-and-by. The Emperor Manuel, when in the field, slept in the sun or in the snow with equal indifference — effeminate and self-indulgent as he seemed in time of peace ; on a campaign he tried in the longest marches the strength of his men and horses, and " shared with a smile the abstinence or diet of the camp." The Norman duke, Robert Guiscard, was uniformly the foremost in every danger, as in every fatigue the last and most patient. Of him might his men well say what is said of Basil, in the first of Joanna Baillie's Plays on the Passions : — " yd Soldier. How pleasantly he shared our hardest toil ! Our coarsest food the daintiest fare he made. dfth Sold. Ay, many a time i' the cold damp plain has he With cheerful count'nance cried, ' Good rest, my hearts ! ' Then wrapp'd him in his cloak, and laid him do-woi E'en like the meanest soldier in the field." The soldiers who followed William of Normandy from the plains of sunny France across pathless moors and bogs to the plains of Lancashire and Cheshire, could ill face the cold, the rain, the bogs, the hideous gorges, and prayed to be dismissed, to go home. "Cowards might go back," William said, "he should go on." If he could not ride, he would walk. Whoever lagged, he would be foremost. And cheered by his example, as Mr. Kingsley pictures the advance, the army at last de- bouched upon the Cheshire flats. Had not William made himself one of them, and the hardiest of them all? When Edward I. encamped on the heath near LinHthgow (1298), each soldier slept on the ground, using his shield for his pillow, and the King lay down with the rest, — the horses beside them, as Hemingford graphically puts it, tasting nothing but cold iron, champing their bits. ' ' The rudest warrior, when he sees his King Bear hardship and privation like the meanest, Will patiently endure his own hard lot," ROUGHING IT IN THE FIELD. 185 says a martial spirit in Schiller. " Why should I complain of danger, when I see the crown of my sovran as much exposed as my cap !" was the exclamation of the grenadiers whose confidence Kaiser Joseph won by his sharing their hardships and fatigues, as well as dangers j for he too slept on the bare ground, and led reconnoitring parties, and skirmished with the advanced posts. In one of the despatches of Alexander Far- nese, Duke of Parma, from the Netherlands, in 1585, describing the very hard work of his men in building forts under fire (and under water too, sometimes), we read of the fatigue and anxiety being incredible, not a man being able to sleep at night, not an officer or soldier but was perpetually mounting guard : " But they are animated to their hard work by seeing that I share in it, like one of themselves." So with the Marquis Spinola, who, nearly twenty years later, commanded in Parma's place. Ac- customed though he had been, his whole life long, to beds of down, he was as ready now to "lie in the trenches, with a cannon for his pillow, as the most iron-clad veteran in the ranks," and became at once noted as seeming to want neither food nor sleep. Balboa was noted for always taking the lead in danger and fatigue, and being the last to enjoy rest and comfort. In the disastrous retreat of 1635, Turenne, who had sold his plate to procure provision for his men, kept up their spirits by mixing familiarly with them, and sharing his provisions with them. Had it come to a limited helmet-ful of water, he would have done what we have seen Alexander do in Asia, or what Addison makes Cato the younger do in Africa, as he and Sempronius together remind the revolting ranks : ^^ Cato. Have you forgotten Libya's burning waste ? . . . Who was the first to explore the untrodden path, When life was hazarded in every step ? Or, fainting in the long, laborious march, When on the banks of an unlooked-for stream You sunk the river with repeated draughts, Who was the last in all your host that thirsted? Sempr. If some penurious source by chance appeared, Scanty of waters, when you scooped it dry, And offered the full helmet up to Cato, 1 86 ROYAL COMMANDERS Did he not dash the untasted moisture from him ? Did he not lead you through the mid-day sun And clouds of dust ? did not his temples glow- In the same sultry winds and scorching heats ? Cato. Hence, worthless men, hence ! and complain to Caesar You could not undergo the toils of war, Nor bear the hardships that your leader bore." Peter the Great, during that ineffective campaign of his in Shirvan, which cost him so many men from the intolerable heat, was at least sedulous in sharing their fatigues, trudging at the head of them in a dimity waistcoat and white night-cap. Mr. Carlyle's account of Friedrich Wilhelm in the Rhine campaign of 1734, includes emphatic record of his declining Prince Eugene's invitation to lodge in head quarters, under a roof and within built walls, preferring a tent among his own people, and taking the common hardships; with great hurt to his weak health, as was afterwards found.* Whatever the army of the Young Chevalier had to bear, Prince CharUe took a share in their privations : he lived hardly, slept on the heather by their side, marched at their side across moor and hill, watched late and rose early, as the chroniclers testify, like a man to the man- ner bom. On his way south, traversing the long plains cheerily on foot (for he had given up his carriage to an aged follower), sometimes at the head of one clan, sometimes of another, in the Highland dress, and with his target slung over his shoulder, he " would not even stop to eat, but snatched his dinner when he could, threw himself lightly on whatever bed might be possible — the open field, if no better was to be had — and slept till four o'clock in the morning, when he was astir again." It was the boast of his adherents, that the Prince could eat a dry crust, sleep on pease-straw, take his dinner in four minutes, and win a battle in five. General Elliott lived eight days on four ounces of rice a day, during the siege of Gibraltar, it being his con- stant rule to submit himself to whatever privations had to be borne by others. * "About the middle of August, Friedrich Wilhelm went away, — health much hurt by his month under canvas, amid Rhine inundations," etc. — Hist. 0/ Fred. II. ^ vol. ii., pp. 517, 520. ROUGHING IT IN THE FIELD. 187 ^sthetically disposed as may have been the usual life of Joseph II, at Vienna, when he was out with his troops he sur- passed them all, we are told, in activity : rain, tempests, long and fatiguing marches, he disregarded alike. Even in the " desperate circumstances," as Alison calls them, which ter- minated the military operations of the siege of Genoa, Massena by his firmness kept up the spirits and overawed the murmurs of his men ; eating the same coarse and scanty fare (a daily pittance, say, of four or five ounces of black bread, made of cocoa and rye, and odd pilferings from the ransacked shops), and, as the soldiers said, keeping his boots in reserve as a real piece de resistance^ to be fairly shared with them, ere ever he would hear talk of surrender. Old Platoff would sleep sound on the damp earth, or on a layer of snow, and never think of quarrelling with his quarters. Napoleon lost ground with his men by the contrast observable during the Moscow campaign between their privations and his comforts ; for although he could, on occasion, share and share alike w4th them, and although during the Moscow retreat he relinquished his car- riages to the wounded, and marched on foot in the midst of his staff, these were the exceptions to a rule ; for, as a rule, the Emperor's personal comforts during a campaign were studied and ensured to a fastidious degree of precision. Marshal Lefebvre, in the same expedition, for the most part accom- panied his corps on foot, sharing every suffering and exposing himself to every danger in common with the private soldiers. But Napoleon, earlier in his career, distinguished himself by the same community of endurance; in 1805, for instance, during the Austrian campaign, he shared in the rudest weather the rudest fare of his rudest recruit : in vain, says Bignon, was he expected by the authorities at Augsburg, and magnificent preparations made for his reception ; he slept in the villages, surrounded by his staff, in the humble cottages of the peasants. So again in 1806, on the eve of the battle of Jena, he wrapped himself in his cloak, and shared the frigid bivouac of the soldiers on the summit of the Landgrafenberg. The Duke of Brunswick of that stirring time won the hearts of his followers JEZEBEL : BOLD, BAD WOMAN. by his fulness of fellowship in their fatigues and privations. Such eicample is very telling, very taking, with rank and file. When Shakspeare's Harry the Fifth, at Agincourt, bids good morrow in the camp to old Sir Thomas Erpingham, but sug- gests, with kindly consideration for age, that a good soft pillow for that good white head were better than a churlish turf of France, — " Not so, my liege," the cheery veteran replies ; " this lodging likes me better, since I may say. Now lie I like a king." Like the king, his king. It is of a later king of Eng- land that, in another play of Shakspeare's, the note of interro- gation is put, — and it is a note of admiration too, "... But why commands the king That his chief followers lodge in towns about him, While he himself keepeth in the cold field ?" JEZEBEL: BOLD, BAD WOMAN. I Kings xxi. 5 sq. ; 2 Kings ix. 30 sq. JEZEBEL shines in her very wickedness beside the weaker wickedness of her hesitating husband, Ahab. She is every inch of her a bad queen ; while he, as a byA\^ord among bad kings, is yet a poor creature after all. She can will resolutely, and carry out her will unflinchingly ; which he can not. Of her one is reminded by the Carathis in Vathek: " This princess was so far from being influenced by scruples, that she was as wicked as woman could be; which is not saying a little, for the sex pique themselves on their superiority in every competition." Even in the hall of Eblis, nothing appals the dauntless soul of Carathis \ and Eblis himself welcomes her as a princess whose knowledge and whose crimes have merited a conspicuous rank in his empire. Jezebel, as posterity reads and accepts her character in Scripture, has her historical types in such perversions of womanhood as Gibbon depicts in the wife of Gallus, the Empress Constantina,— though she, indeed, is described as not a woman, but one of the infernal furies, CHARACTER OF KING AHAB. 189 tormented with an insatiate thirst of human blood ; instead of employing her influence to insinuate the mild counsels of pru- dence and humanity, she exasperated the fierce passions of her husband ; and as she, in genuine Gibbonese, " retained the vanity, though she had renounced the gentleness of her sex," a pearl necklace was esteemed an equivalent price for the murder of an innocent and virtuous nobleman. Worthy to rank with her, and yet above her, was the famous Brunehaut — against the vices of whose court Columban had to wage a noble strife, in the spirit of Elijah against Jezebel. Brunehaut is de- scribed by Milman as ruling the young king Thierri, of Burgundy, through his vices ; and as ruling her grandson's realm by the ascendency of that strong and unscrupulous mind which for above forty years had raised her into a rival of that most famous, or infamous, Fredegonde, her rival in the number of her para- mours and the number of murders which she had perpetrated. To Jezebel she may be compared even in the piecemeal dis- posal of her remains, for, exposed on a camel to the derision of the camp of her enemy. King Clotaire, Brunehaut was tied to the tail of a wild horse, and literally torn to shreds.* Of Ahab Dr. Chalmers cannot but think, that, with all his wickedness, he had a certain susceptibility or facility of temperament, which somewhat serves to abate our indignation against him. His mild treatment of Elijah, and his yielding compassion for Ben- hadad, are quoted as instances. The heaviness or dejection of spirit which came upon Ahab after the denunciation of the prophet, is noted as another manifestation of his susceptibility. Chalmers holds him to have been the subject or victim of a resistless pathology, which, while it made him the slave of the worst, also brought him occasionally under the sway of the better emotions. This view of Ahab's character is taken to be confirmed by the narrative of his dealings with Naboth. There is covetousness, for instance, to which he gave way ; there is * "What wonder," exclaims the historian of Latin Christianity, "that in such days men sought refuge in the wilderness, and almost adored her- mits like Columban !" Another reminder of Elijah. I90 ARAB AND JEZEBEL: also wounded pride, to the mortifying sense of which he gave way in deep and helpless dejection, there being within him no counteractive energy by which to surmount and get the better of it. With no energy on the side of conscience to overcome his covetousness, neither had he energy on the side of daring and aggressive wickedness, to revenge himself for the affront which he had suffered and enable him to trample on the offender. But this energy which he wanted. Dr. Chalmers goes on to say, "was abundantly made up for by Jezebel. She got his consent to use his name for anything. In his passiveness he laid no obstacle in the way of the most enor- mous atrocities, though he had no aggressiveness for the perpe- tration of them." Ahab only permitted, Jezebel perpetrated. She it was who wrote the letters, and sealed them, and sent them, and all to compass a most diabolical iniquity — in which, too, she succeeded by the subornation of false witnesses — so that, as the author of Horcz Bibliccz Qiiotidiance sums up the indictment against her, Jezebel, with unfaltering step, through the fourfold guilt of deceit, and perjury, and robbery, and murder, got Ahab installed in full possession of the vine- yard upon which his heart was set. As there are Shakspearean commentators who take Lady Macbeth, from certain incidental allusions, to have been a small, slight creature in her physical presence, so has the speculation been hazarded, that Ahab's energetic wife was a little woman. As a rule, we are told, the little woman is brave. When the lymphatic giantess falls into a faint or goes off into hysterics, she " storms, or bustles about, or holds on like a game terrier, according to the work on hand." Judith and Jael, it is allowed, were probably large women : the work they went about de- manded a certain strength of muscle and toughness of sinew. But "who can say that Jezebel was not a small, freckled, auburn- haired Lady Audley of her time," full of the concentrated fire, the electric force, the passionate recklessness of her type ? Regan and Goneril, according to the essay on Little Women, might have been beautiful demons of the same pattern. Why should Ahab's spirit be so sad, and he eat no bread, HE FALTERING, SHE UNSCRUPULOUS. 191 because the» refusal of Naboth the Jezreelite to part with his vineyard sent the king home heavy and displeased? Why should Ahab be cast down and put about by such a trifle as that ? If he had no spirit, had he not a wife ? And was not that wife a woman of spirit ? Had she not a will of her own, and a way of her o\vn, in all such matters ? And where there was a will of hers, would there not easily be a way? She would give him the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite. Pity but he had the dash and daring of his wife ! "Dost thou now govern the kingdom of Israel?" And if not, why not? Art thou a king then ? King or no king ? No king at all, unless thou govern as well as reign. Jezebel will show how Naboth may be disposed of straightway. So, "Arise, and eat bread, and let thine heart be merry. / will give thee the vineyard of Naboth the JezreeHte." The self-accusing prince in Shakspeare avows such " A stanchless avarice, that, were I king, I should cut off the nobles for their lands ; Desire his jewels, and this other's horse ; And my more -having would be as a sauce To make me hunger more ; that I should forge Quarrels unjust against the good and loyal, Destroying them for wealth. " And this was Jezebel's cue. As in Rome's day of trouble and proscription under Sulla, when the many sacrifices to resent- ment and revenge were few compared with those who fell on account of their wealth; so that it was a common saying, "His fine house was the death of this man, and his gardens of that." There is about Lady Macbeth a more than shadowy resem- blance to the unscrupulous wife of Ahab ; and her "Are you a man?" is a proper parallel to Jezebel's "Dost thou now govern the kingdom of Israel?" To apply the remonstrant appeal of another Shakspearean woman of spirit,* though in this case, happily, not of the same spirit, — ' ' Alas, it is the baseness of thy fear That makes thee strangle thy propriety," * Or of one, again, in Landor's Gebir: " And canst thou reign ? . . . Yield empire, or comply." 192 SPIRITLESS HUSBAND, DARING WIFE. or, diso^vn thy property ; for Ahab's property, to all intents and purposes, Jezebel already accounted the Jezreelite's vineyard to be. "Oh that you bore the mind that I do!" exclaims another reckless instigator, impatient of a shilly-shallying superior. Si vir es, i. Gibbon tells us of the trembhng Emperor Justinian, when his competitor, Hypatius, supported by the multitude, had the means to expel him from place and power, and when a secret resolution was already formed, in the Byzantine palace, to convey to some safe retreat the Emperor and his family, in one of the vessels that lay ready at the garden stairs, — that Justinian was lost, if the bold bad woman " whom he raised from the theatre, had not renounced the timidity as well as the virtues of her sex.'' For, in the midst of a council then held, where Belisarius himself was present, Theodora alone displayed the spirit of a hero ; and she alone could save the Emperor from the imminent danger, and from his unworthy fears. If flight, she said, were the only means of safety, yet should she disdain to fly ! And the firmness of the woman restored the courage to deliberate and to act. Compare again what we read of Anna Comnena, — that, stimulated by ambition and revenge to conspire against the life of her brother, when the design was prevented by the fears or scruples of her husband, she passion- ately exclaimed, that nature had mistaken the two sexes, and had endowed Bryennius with the soul of a woman.* Cicero got to be very tired indeed of the appeals to his manliness, against overwhelming dejection, — especially when it was his wife that sought to rouse his courage, ut animo sit magna. Terentia, indeed, was a woman whose " masculine energy,'' as the Dean of Christchurch puts it, must have been oppressive to his less resolute character. Addison, in a number of the Freeholder^ quotes with a relish the traditional words of Boadicea to her * M. Philarete Chasles accredits Anna with a pronounced faculty for expressing herself, on occasion, avec nne franchise bnitale. " On n'ignore pas que, mecontente de la froideur et de la lachete feminine de son mari, Nicephore Bryennius, elle lui reprocha ce defaut d'energie virile en termes si naiifs et si nets, que nous rougirions de les rapporter." — Etudes sur VAii- tiquite: Des Femmes Grecques. LHOMME-FEMME: ELLE ET LUI. 193 men of war, " I, who am a woman, am resolved upon victory or death ; but as for you, who are men, you may, if you please, choose life and slavery." When Henry, the last of the Valois, on the memorable day of the Barricades, sat crying from morn- ing to night in the Louvre, the Queen-mother scolded him for his tears and his indecision. "This is no time for crying," said Catherine. " And for myself, though women weep so easily, I feel my heart too deeply wrung for tears. If they came to my eyes, they would be tears of blood." Of equally masculine spirit was the Princess of Cambray, who, in 1595, after her husband (Balagny) had fled, endeavoured to arouse the mu- tineers to a sense of duty or shame — she who night and day had gone the rounds of the ramparts, to animate the garrison, and with her own hands had fired the cannon against the enemy's works. This heroic Renee was sister of Bussy d'Amboise; and Mr. Lothrop Motley refers to Balagny as a poor creature with a heroine for a wife. When all was lost at Cambray, it was wdth bitter reproaches on her husband's pusillanimity, with tears and sobs of rage and shame, that, spurning the idea of capitulation, Renee refused all food, and there an end. ^gisthus, in the Clytemnestra of Owen Meredith, is for flight, though the queen taunts him bitterly \\dth rank cowardice : " Now, by Apollo, be a man for once ! Be for once strong, or be for ever weak !" Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible, in the words of Shakspeare's York ; but she stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, re- morseless : "O tiger's heart, wrapp'd in a woman's hide!" The chronicler of celebrated crimes tells us of Beatrice Cenci, far as she was from the Jezebel or Clytemnestra type, that when the sbirri shrank from slaying her sleeping father, she in- dignantly reproached them with their womanish scruples : their cowardice nerved her hand, she said, and she, puny girl, would undertake what was too much for them, to the manner born and bred. " Go, coward," said Ali Pacha's mother to the young man, when he returned to Tepelene one day without either spoil or arms, from an expedition in which he had been o 194 HHOMME-FEMME: forced to fly: "Go and spin with the women," — and she held out to him a distaff as she spoke, — " that suits you better than the use of arms." She had long before this equipped herself in warrior's array, and, heading the chiefs of the Albanian moun- tains, after losing her husband, gave battle to the enemies of her house. In the veins of this energetic woman the blood of Scanderbeg is said to have flowed. As a gentler and more refined type of imperial or imperious womanhood, shining by contrast with the irresolution and weakness of male kindred who ought to command, the last Queen of the French may be named, Marie AmeHe, who, when the crash came, and the last of the Bourbon kings displayed a weakness which, says a friend of the House of Orleans, "was all but abject," thus shone by contrast, in all the dignity of a woman and the daughter of a hundred kings. We may, it is admitted, be sceptical as to the heroic words, of which more 1,han one version is recorded, by her addressed to the trembling and disheartened Citizen King ; but there can be no question that, in whatever form the protest was spoken, the Queen of the French, in her last hour of sove- reignty, passionately and indignantly combated the notion of abdication. " In that melancholy collapse of spirit and duty, the only man in the Orleans family was a woman." Not, how- ever, that she is represented as being, either by nature or taste, a heroine of the melodramatic form associated with the name of the Queen of Naples ; for at least she held her own place to be on her knees, but she would have a man do a manly part, and a king a kingly. Typical of a homeHer order of domestic relations are George Weston and his wife in the novel, where we see the former, for instance, at an agitating crisis, collapsing under the shock, and tremulously wiping the perspiration from his bald forehead, while he shakes his head to his wife with a piteous gesture, as if to declare his inability to comprehend her. With an effort Mrs. Weston recovers herself — such an effort as only great women or wicked women are capable of, — and then her outcry is, " Oh, you men ! What big silly babies, what nervous crea- tures you are!" It is the style of Juletta in Beaumont and ELLE ET LUL 195 Fletcher's Amazonian play, where Clarinda speaks of certain men's "base poor fears :" " Ay, that makes me hate them too : — If they were but manly in their sufferance ! " Compare the style of a latter-day tragedy, in which a Roman citizeness warns Roman citizens, should a deprecated event ensue, never more to expect from their wives and sisters the titles of husbands and brothers, " Or anything that doth imply the name Of men — except such men as men should blush for." In miscellaneous fiction we may glance at Esther, in the Prairie^ demanding, "Have I a man among my children?" and following it up by showing her stalwart sons "what the courage of a frontier-woman can do." The Anne of Austria of Vingt Ans aprh bids Mazarin " Leave me ! You are not a man !" and his muttered response comes, " It is you who are not a woman ;" much in the spirit of Smollett's terrified painter, " I do behave like a man ; but you would have me act the part of a brute." Mrs. Proudie's appeal to the bishop is, "Why do you not rally, and go to your work like a man?" And elsewhere : " I'll tell you what it is, my lord ; if you are imbecile, I must be active. It is very sad that I should have to assume your autho- rity ." " I will not allow you to assume my authority," he plucks up spirit enough to assert. But she resumes her argument : " I must do so, or must else obtain a medical certificate as to your incapacity. . . . I, at any rate, will do my duty." She seems to ask, with Wordsworth's Oswald, "Are we men, or are we baby spirits ?" Divest her of her professionalism, and she might have been the heroine of that story, familiar among lawyers, which tells how an Old Bailey barrister was challenged by a learned friend in consequence of a dispute in court ; and, being unable to muster resolution either to fight or refuse to fight, he invented the expedient of leaving the letter of challenge on the table of a room which he quitted as his wife entered it. Returning hastily, he picked up the letter, and hoped that his wife had not read it. Yes, she had ; and he must fight, she said. 196 now UNDIVINE A THING We have seen, in the opening paragraph of this paper, how Beckford takes occasion to point his description of Carathis as being as wicked as woman could be, by the comment how much is impHed in such a saying, since " the sex pique them- selves on their superiority in every competition/' Albany has some reason to tell Goneril that ** Proper deformity seems not in the fiend So horrid as in woman," — for already have she and Regan wrung from him the excla- mation, "Tigers, not daughters, what have you performed!" Note, again, that when cruel Cornwall bids fetch forth the stocks, and vows that as he has life and honour, there shall Kent sit till noon, — "Till noon!" echoes the more cruel Regan; " till night, my lord ; and all night too." Had it been one of the elder daughters of Lear, King of Britain, instead of the one daughter of Cymbeline, King of Britain, with whom Leonatus Posthumus had had to do, a better right he might have claimed to rail as he did at the supremacy of womankind in miscellane- ous naughtiness : — *' For there's no motion That tends to vice in man, but I affirm It is the woman's part : Be it lying, note it, The woman's ; flattering, hers ; deceiving, hers ; Ambitions, covetings, changes of pride, disdain, Nice longings, slanders, mutability, All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows, Why hers in part, or all; but rather, all." Margaret of Anjou has her measure taken much after the same pattern by captive York : she wolf of France,* he calls her to her face, but worse than wolves of France : — ** Whose tongue more poisons than the adder's tooth ! How ill-beseeming is it in thy sex To triumph like an Amazonian trull, Upon their woes whom fortune captivates ! * Constance, wife of Robert le Sage (or le Devot), is sometimes com- pared with Margaret, just as King Robert is with Henry VI. Constance it was who, with characteristic ferocity, struck out the eye of one of the sufferers condemned for heresy, in a.d. 1022, — formerly her own confessor, — as he passed her on his way to the stake. A WOMAN MA V BE MADE. 197 But that thy face is, visor-like, unchanging, Made impudent with use of evil deeds, I would assay, proud queen, to make thee blush." La Bniyere says, " Les femmes sont extremes : elles sont meilleures ou pires que les hommes." Prison warders of their own sex declare female prisoners of the worst kind to be far more wicked than the male criminals; and it is held that, were it not for their comparative incapacity to organize concerted action, the management of them would probably be beyond the power of man or woman either. Such books as the Prison Matron's Female Life in Prison^ with its records of woman brutalized by crime, savagely ferocious, furiously and violently vindictive, slily and coldly malicious, brazened and hardened irreclaimably, teach us how z^;^divine a thing a woman may be made ; and they go far to justify some of the scathing lines of Juvenal, about modem instances of Medea and Procne and the like : — " Minor admiratio summis Debetur monstris, quoties facit ira nocentem Hunc sexum ; et rabie jecur incendente feruntur Praecipites : ut saxa jugis abrupta," etc. In another satire his argument is, that vindictiveness is an essentially feminine quality, since it implies a basely timorous spirit : woman joys to wreak the keenest vengeance ; for the sex is weak : vindictd nemo magis gaiidet, qiiam foemina. The Agamemnon of the Odyssey is made to say, in English at least : — " O woman, woman, when to ill thy mind Is bent, all hell contains no fouler fiend ! " A couplet almost reminding one of the closing stanza of News in the poems of a Wanderer : — ** The Devil, my friends, is a woman just now ; Tis a woman that reigns in hell."* * Compare the exclamation of Moliere's Sganarelle, en sortant de Vaccablement dans lequel il etaitplonge : — " Cette ruse d'enfer confond mon jugement ; Et je ne pense pas que Satan en personne Puisse etre si mechant qu'une telle friponne." 198 WICKED MEN OUTDONE The Ebenezer Elliston whose last speech and dying words are preserved in Smith's Miscellanies, bore testimony, in sight of the gallows, of the sort of women who had been his ruin, that " they are ten times more bloody and cruel than men."* Has not Cicero said that many motives will urge men to one crime, but that one passion will impel women to all crimes? True, the Alceste of Moliere is a misanthrope, indeed is Le Misan- thrope, misogyny included {biefi efitendu) ; but this is his style of assurance to CeHmene : — " Que le sort, les demons, et le del en courroux, N'ont jamais rien produit de si mediant que vous." Prince Charles Edward in his latter days professed to have studied men closely, and to know them so well, that, were he to live and study till fourscore, he could scarcely know them better; "but as for women," he adds, "I have thought it use- less, they being so much more wicked and impenetrable."-j- The wizards in Goethe's Walpurgisnacht are made to say, by an odious comparison of themselves with the witches, — ** Like house-en cumber'd snail we creep, "While far ahead the women keep. For when to the devil's house we speed, By a thousand steps they take the lead." Nor can we, with some, give Goethe credit for penning in another of his plays a vindication of women, touching the charge of cruelty, by the eloquent lips of Pylades, — inspired perhaps by the presence and the influence of his friend's sister, Iphigenia in Tauris : — " A man, the very best, with cruelty At length may so familiarize his mind, * The atrocities of the Reign of Terror in France give horrible confir- mation of this. "Witness Prudhomme's Crimes de la RevohUion^ iv. 69 : "La plupart de ces atrocites furent commises par des femmes;" it is to the mutilation of corpses, the exposing them to kitchen fires, the disembow- elling them, etc., etc., that he, a Republican eye-witness, refers. So again Duval : " Et c'etaient des femmes qui avaient execute sur ces cadavres la etendus ces degoutantes mutilations." — Souvenirs de la Terretir, ii. 129. + Ungenerous and ungrateful words, these are deemed by Earl Stanhope ; who says that surely, as the Prince wrote them, the image of Flora Mac- donald should have risen in his heart and restrained his hand. BY WICKED WOMEN. 199 His character through custom so transform, That he shall come to make himself a law Of what at first his very soul abhorr'd. But woman doth retain the stamp of mind She first assumed. On her we may depend In good or evil with more certainty. " For the drift of the argument rather is, that woman may be more steadfastly cruel than man, if cruel she be at all. If cruel at all, he seems to say, then cruel altogether, and once for all. What did the wanton say ? muses Merlin in the Idylls of the King, in reference to Vivien's words about his sex not mount- ing as high as hers : — " ' Not mount as high !' we scarce can sink as low : For men at most differ as heaven and earth, But women, worst and best, as heaven and hell." In another of the Idylls we have a description of some, " whose souls the old serpent long had drawn down, as the worm draws in the withered leaf and makes it earth,'' and who — ' ' hiss'd each at other's ear What shall not be recorded — women they, Women, or what had been those gracious things, But now desired the humbling of their best."* Cicero's oration for Cluentius lays open what has been called * Like the wretched railer in Aurora Leigh, whom we see, and over- hear, cursing at a window, herself rouged upon the angular cheek-bones (so far Jezebel-like in point of place, posture, and paint), kerchief torn, thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth ; to whom, in return, Aurora looks up, and only replies, " The dear Christ comfort you. . . . You must have been most miserable to be so cruel. " How cruel a refined, fas- tidious woman can be, the same poem intimates in a subsequent description of Lady Waldemar : — '* How she talked To pain me ! woman's spite ! You wear steel-mail ; A woman takes a housewife from her breast, And plucks the delicatest needle out As 'twere a rose, and pricks you carefully 'Neath nails, 'neath eyelids, in your nostrils," etc. Mrs. Browning could have written by the page with equal vigour on Mr. Thackeray's text, that there are some meannesses which are too mean even for man: "woman, lovely woman alone, can venture to commit them." Many women, good women, never will forgive the author of Vanity Fair his addiction to apophthegms of this flavour. 200 GHPflfN 'An'ANTQN a scene of such complicated villany, by poisons, murder, in- cest, suborning witnesses, corrupting judges, as the poets them- selves have never figured in any one family ; all contrived by the mother of Cluentius against the life and fortunes of her son. "But what a mother I" Cicero exclaims ; " a woman hur- ried along bhndfold by the most cruel and brutal passions ; whose lust no sense of shame restrains; . . . who acts with such violence that none can take her to be a woman ; with such cruelty, that none can take her for a mother ; one who has confounded not only the name and the rights of nature, but all the relations of it too ; in short, who has no- thing left in her of the human species but the mere form." In connection with his vehemence of invective against woman- hood practically unsexed, one recalls, in regard of the vindic- tive spirit she displayed, Fulvia's treatment of the head of the murdered orator. Cicero had denounced the iniquities both of Clodius, her late husband, and Antony, her present one ; and Fulvia, when Cicero's head and hands, hewed off by Antony's band of ruffians, arrived at Rome, drove her hair-pin through the tongue that had been unsparing of the guilty. Her very womanish display of very unwomanly spite is worthy of that Marchioness of Argyle who, with her son's (Lord Lome) marriage party, stood out on the balcony of Moray House to see the great Montrose pass, on his way to death, and who while her companions shrank back in discomposure before the serene gaze of the doomed nobleman, so far forgot herself, and tried to ruffle him, as to spit upon him as the executioner's cart moved on below. The women of Rome, observes Dean Milman, with an eye to the infamous Theodora, seem at successive periods seized with a kind of Roman ambition to surpass their sex by the greatness of their virtues and of their vices. In man, says Hartley Coleridge, many virtues sometimes consort with a giant vice, as we read in the book of Job that there was a meeting of the sons of God, among whom Satan found entrance ; but in woman, the dominance of any one evil passion is as " the abomination of desolation sitting where it ought not;" or as 'ArPIOT'EPA, KAK'H rVN'H. 20I the unclean spirit in the empty house, that took thither seven spirits worse than itself, and dwelt with them. A critic of Lady Macbeth, who regards her as a female shape of her hus- band,— his shadow in the other sex, an example of the different effects produced upon the differing sexes by the same passion, — remarks, " The better the sex, the worse are the evil conse- quences ;" and that even as a female infidel of the scoffing sort, or a female debauchee, is incomparably worse than one of the masculine gender, so is it with a female murderer — one drained of all the feelings of humanity by the prevalence of a bad am- bition, ^laop XeaivTjs Koi yvvaiKos oiiJLOTrjs, One Greek gnome has it j and another runs, QrjpuiV cnrdvTcov dypitOTepa, KaKrj yvvT], It was a Queen of France that, at the time of the battle of Courtrai (a.d. 1302), urged the French, when they were killing the Flemish boars, not to spare the sows. She would have them spear the men, and sj>if the women : U^ apros quidem, hoc est viros, hasfis, sed sues verutis confodereiit. This royal wife of Philip the Fair is the heroine of the horrible Tower of Nesle legend ; by whom the students she lured thither were flung into the river beneath. Worthy of such parentage was Isabella, the murderous wife of our Edward II. Froissart gives the revolting details of her behaviour in making Spencer undergo, before the windows of her palace, those fiendish mutilations which preceded the executioner's coup de grace. The " savage Agnes," daughter of the Emperor Albert I., gazed with transport on the beheading of sixty-three retainers of a family concerned in, or believed to have connived at, the as- sassination of her father ; and during this slaughter she is said to have repeatedly exclaimed, in words taken from the Legend of Saint Elizabeth, "Now I bathe in May-dew!" a proverb expressing the most rapturous defight. It was with great diffi- culty she could be prevailed upon to spare the lord of Eschen- bach's infant child, whom the soldiers of her party, moved by waiHngs she heard unmoved, rescued from her hands at the instant she was about to strangle it. There are passages in history, ancient and modern, that go far to enforce acquiescence in Chaucer's graphic assertion, — 202 PAR EST LEjENjE ** There nys i-wis no serpent so cruel, When men tred on his tail, ne half so fel. As womman is, when sche hath caught an ire ; Vengeans is thanne all that they desire." An old chronicler tells us of the women of Liege, that, armed and dressed Hke men, they harassed and oppressed Treit and the neighbouring districts " more than ever men did." When we come to the French Reign of Terror, we are constantly- meeting, in the pages of even the Revolution's most pronounced admirers, with such sentences as these : " Fifty women, freed from the Conciergerie, lent their hands to these tortures, and surpassed the men in their ferocity." The women of the people were the first to applaud the shamelessness of He'bert. " If the women do not mix in it," said Mirabeau to the emissaries of the insurrection of October 5, " there will be nothing done." He knew, observes Lamartine, that the fury of women, once inflamed, rises to excess, and seeks an outlet in profanations which surpass the audacity of men. Observers of character and incident in France in the troublous days of 187 1, agreed in describing the women, both in Paris and at Versailles, when violent at all, as more cruel and violent than the men ; and the recent experience of France has been taken to show that the acrimony of political contests would be greatly increased if women were invited to take part in the struggle. " Les fem- mes," says Sabbatier de Castres, " sont encore plus extremes que les hommes quand I'esprit de cabale les conduit." Men, says a Saturday Reviewer, are the gentler sex, except in dealing with domestic and private calamities. We know of o\d.furens quid femina possit. And " whether your unsexed female is disporting herself by firing the first shot at an Orange pro- cession in New York (187 1), or pouring petroleum into houses full of women and children at Paris," she is " sure to be more violent and more mischievous than the worst of her male ac- complices." The same French historian who most frequently and forcibly exposes the loathsome cruelty of the lowest order of Frenchwomen during the Revolution, is emphatic in record- ing the implacable vindictiveness of a higher class of them at ET MULIERIS CRUDELITAS. 203 the Restoration. He describes some of the highest rank as insatiable in their demands for blood : it would seem, he says, that generosity is the companion of force, and that the weaker the sex is, the more it is pitiless.* The administrators of the law are often heard to say that no offenders brought before them are so audacious as depraved women ; + and it has passed into a proverb, Mrs. Gore reminds us, that "A shameless woman is the worst of men." Readers of The Last of the Barons may remember the bad eminence occupied in that historical fiction by a choir of timbrel-girls, upon whose bronzed faces the ineffable, unmistakable seal of vice had been set, and to whose eyes had never sprung the tears of compassion or woman's gentle sorrow; whose very voices half belied their sex — so harsh they were, and deep, and hoarse. " Womanless, through the worst vices of women," they seemed to stand between the sexes like foul and mon- strous anomalies, made up and fashioned from the rank de- pravities of both. There is a scene of violence and riot in which they take the leading part — described as a scene the she-fiends revelled in ; for dear are outrage and maUce, and the excitement of turbulent passion, and the thirst of blood, to *' those everlasting furies of a mob — under whatever name we know them, in whatever time they taint mth their presence — women in whom womanhood is blasted." The Caxtonian es- sayist discusses the popular saying that a bad woman is worse than a wicked man; and, "if so," partly he takes it to be because women, being more solitary, brood more unceasingly * If Mari2 could have her way, that plague of a child, Topsy, should be sent out and thoroughly whipped: "I'd have her whipped till she could not stand." " I don't doubt it," is St. Clare's reply. " Tell me of the lovely rule of women ! I never saw above a dozen women that wouldn't half kill a horse, or a servant either, if they had their owoi way with them, — let alone a man." Par est Ucbjicb et mulieris crudelitas. + After paying a tribute to the character of Irishwomen of the lower class, such as carry on street traffic in London, as unquestionably more chaste than the corresponding rank of English birth and breeding, the author of London Labour has this remark to add : ' * When the unedu- cated Irishwoman, however, has once fallen into licentious ways, she is, as I once heard it expressed, the most ' savagely wicked' of any " (i. 458). 204 NO WICKEDNESS LIKE over cherished ideas, whether good or evil ; partly also for the same reason that makes a wicked gentleman, who has lost caste and character, more irreclaimable than a mcked clown, low-born and low-bred — namely, that in proportion to the loss of shame is the gain in recklessness ; but principally, perhaps, because in extreme wickedness there is necessarily a distortion of the reasoning faculty ; and man, accustomed from the cradle rather to reason than to feel, has that faculty made more firm against abrupt twists and lesions than it is in woman j where virtue may have left him, logic may still linger ; and he may decline to push evil to a point at which it is clear to his under- standing that profit vanishes and punishment rests ; while woman, once abandoned to it, finds sufficient charm in its mere excitement ; and regardless of consequences, where the man asks, " Can I ?" raves out, " I will !" Thus man, as Lord Lytton reads him, and differentiates him, may be criminal through cupidity, vanity, love, jealousy, fear, ambition ; rarely in civilized, that is, reasoning Hfe, through hate and revenge ; for hate is a profitless investment, and revenge a ruinous speculation. " But when women are thoroughly depraved and hardened, nine times out of ten it is hatred or revenge that makes them so." And so made, too nearly do they justify the misogynic adage — -feris ojnnibus immanior, mala imdier. Richardson has made a point, in each of his three fictions, of urging the fact that bad and cruel women are, as such, worse and more cruel than men of that character. As a student of character he indites the reflection ; and he piqued himself on being an advanced student of woman's character in particular. He makes his Pamela exclaim, in consternation at the wicked- ness of Mrs. Jewkes, " Oh, what a black heart has this poor wretch ! So I need not rail against men so much ; for my master, bad as I have thought him, is not half so bad as this woman." Miss Grandison, again, lifts up her hands and eyes as she reads the letter of Mrs. O'Hara, and declares her to verify the words of the wise man, " There is no wickedness like the wickedness of a woman." Of the treatment of Clarissa Harlowe by her degraded, derisive, utterly depraved house- THE WICKEDNESS OF A WOMAN. 205 mates, the narrator indignantly exclaims, " Insolent devils ! — how much more cruel and insulting are bad women even than bad men !" and later on, another correspondent has only too good reason for the remark, " By this letter of the wicked man it is apparent that there are still wickeder women." When Jeanie Deans is brought by the footpads to the old bam by night, and the hag who admits them wants to know of the fellows what, in the name of all that is unnameable, they have brought the wench there for, and why they did not strip her and turn her abroad on the common, — " Come, come. Mother Blood," says one of the men, " we'll do what's right to oblige you, and we'll do no more \ we are bad enough, but not such as you would make us — devils incarnate." Meg Murdockson is one instance in Sir Walter of surpassing wickedness in woman, so that men of her own grade cry shame upon her. In Lady Ashton he elsewhere paints an almost equally hard, unscrupulous, and unrelenting woman, in another class of life, and therefore, of manners. And her he describes as surviving all the unhappy persons whose ruin was the effect of her im- placable resolve, and as never to the last evincing the slightest symptom of either repentance or remorse. HEZEKIAH'S EXPOSITION OF HIS TREASURES. Isaiah xxxix. i, 2. THE King of Babylon's envoys, charged wnith a message of congratulation to the King of Judah, on his recovery from an almost fatal sickness, were welcome to, and cordially welcomed by, the royal convalescent. "And Hezekiah was glad of them, and showed them the house of his precious things, the silver, and the gold, and the spices, and the precious ointment, and all the house of his armour, and all that was found in his treasures : there was nothing in his house, nor in all his dominion, that Hezekiah showed them not." Evidently his heart was in the display of his treasures ; and the strangers 2o6 THE EARTHLY TREASURES would become tired of seeing, before he would be of showing, them. Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also. Good king, exceptionally good king, as Hezekiah was, his heart was, in this matter, not right in the sight of God ; and a dreary- doom upon his house was the penalty of his complacent pomp. And who shall say how far that intense deprecation of death, that passionate clinging to life, to which he had given pathetic utterance in his prayer for recovery from sickness — may not have been influenced by the delight in worldly pomps and vanities, and the cherished indulgence in a taste for treasures, which came out so signally, and, for his descendants, so dis- astrously, on the occasion of Merodach-baladan's mission ? What said Dr. Johnson to Garrick, when the prosperous actor was taking him over his mansion and showing him all the rich accumulation of treasures, whether in the way of present or purchase, it contained? "Ah, Davy, Davy, these ^are the things that make a death-bed terrible !" We are told of that great Mahmoud the Gaznevide, who was the first Mohammedan conqueror to enter India, that in the last days of his life, when a mortal disease was consuming him, and he himself knew that no human means could arrest its course, he ordered all his costHest apparel, and his vessels of silver and gold, and his pearls and precious stones, the inestimable spoils of the East,* to be displayed before him — the latter so numerous as to be arranged in separate cabinets according to their colour and size. " It was in the royal residence which he had built for himself in Gazna, and which he called the Palace of Felicity, that he took from this display, wherewith he had formerly gratified the pride of his eye, a mournful lesson ; and in the then heartfelt conviction that all is vanity, he wept * "The Orientals exceed the measure of credibility in the account of millions of gold and silver, such as the avidity of man has never accumu- lated ; in the magnitude of pearls, diamonds, and rubies [for instance, a ruby of six pounds three ounces] , such as have never been produced by the workmanship of nature." — Gibbon, Roman Empire, ch. Ivii. IT IS SO HARD TO QUIT. 207 like a child. ' What toils,' said he, '■ what dangers, what fatigues of body and mind have I endured for the sake of acquiring these treasures, and what care in preserving them, and now I am about to die and leave them ! ' " In this same palace, adds Southey, he was interred, and there it was that his unhappy ghost, a century aftenvards, was believed to wander. Wordsworth has an occasional Sonnet on perilous times, such as " strike monied worldlings with dismay ; Even rich men brave by nature taint the air With words of apprehension and despair . . . Riches are akin To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death." Father Newman explains death to be an unwelcome topic to the rich and powerful, because it takes from them those comforts which habit has made necessary to them, and throws them adrift on a new order of things, of which they know nothing, save that in it there is no respect of persons. Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, in a letter to a clergyman, quotes Wesley's saying, on being called upon, by Act of Parliament, to give an account of his plate, in order to be taxed, "I have five silver spoons; they are all I have, and all I mean to have, while my poor neigh- bours want bread." That, adds the baronet, is the spirit which becomes a minister. " Will you say, twenty years hence, to Death, when he pays you a visit, ' I built this house — by the confession of all men a parsonage in the purest taste ; I selected these pictures \ observe the luxuriance of the trees I planted ; just do me the favour to notice the convenience of this library, and the beauty of the prospect from that window'?" etc. Swift's True and Faithful Narrative contains more than one characteristic hit on " the reverend clergy," and their demean- our in time of peril: "the degrees of apprehension and terror could be distinguished to be greater or less according to their ranks and degrees in the Church " — the higher their rank, and the richer their benefice, the greater was- their fear. And among the Dean's minor poems is a copy of verses entitled The Parson! s Case, in which a poor curate, in rent cassock and / 2o8 HIGH LIVING, HARD DYING. threadbare gown, deep in debt, overwhelmed with nursery- demands, hungry and cold, is well-nigh wishful for the grave. "But now should Fortune shift the scene, And make thy curateship a dean ; Or some rich benefice provide, To pamper luxury and pride ; With labour small, and income great ; With chariot less for use than state ; With swelling scarf and glossy gown, And licence to reside in town ; ***** With haughty spouse in vesture fine, With plenteous meals and generous wine ; Would 'st thou not wish, with so much ease, Thy years as numerous as thy days?" Adam Smith's theory of sympathy is effusive on such a topic as this. What pity, we think, that anything should spoil and corrupt so agreeable a situation ! We could even, says he, wish these happy proprietors immortal ; and it seems hard to us that death should at last put an end to such genuine enjoyment. " It is cruel, we think, in nature, to compel them from their exalted stations, to that humble but hospitable home which she has provided for all her children." And if we think so, much more they : if we, by mere force of sympathy, as spectators, — much more they, by sheer personal interest, as principals. All vast possessions, — to apply Pope's imitation of Horace, — ^just the same the case whether you call them villa, park, or chase ; alas, will they avail ? ** Link towns to towns with avenues of oak, Enclose whole towns in walls, 'tis all a joke! Inexorable Death shall level all. And trees, and stones, and farms, and farmer fall." And the greater the fall of the farm, the greater the fear of the farmer. Epictetus, in the Imaginary Conversation with Seneca, pointedly tells that wealthy philosopher, that where God hath placed a mine. He hath placed the materials of an earthquake. " A true philosopher," replies Seneca (himself, on Landor's showing, a sham one), "is beyond the reach of THE 'GOOD THINGS' OF THIS LIFE. 209 fortune." " The false one thinks himself so," rejoins Epictetus : " Fortune cares little about philosophers ; but she remembers where she hath set a rich man, and she laughs to see the Destinies at his door." " Ease and pleasure," said Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, when near his end, " quake to hear of death ; but my life, full of cares and miseries, desireth to be dissolved." The opening paragraph of M. Jules Simon's elaborate treatise on La Religion Naturelle^ concerns those who are taken up with the ways and means of good living, of getting the most they can out of life, this life, — all but ignoring another, any other : "ils s'occupent de bien vivre et de ne pas songer a la mort ;" thus occupied, death takes them off their guard, overtakes* them unawares, and finds them pre-occupied with the " good things " that make it sweet to live and terrible to die. " La derniere heure les trouve tout remplis de la pensee, de I'amour des steriles biens qui vont leur etre ravis pour jamais." No man, as South has it, can transport his large retinue, his rich furniture, and his sumptuous fare, into another world : nothing of all these things can continue mth him then, but the memory of them. "And surely, the bare remembrance that a man was formerly rich or great, cannot make him at all happier there, where an infinite happiness or an infinite misery shall equally swallow up the sense of these poor felicities." It may indeed, adds the preacher, contribute to the man's misery, and heighten his anguish, to reflect upon his abuse of all that wealth with which the good providence of God had entrusted him. AppHcable to rich worldHngs in general is what a Spanish poet says of a Spanish grandee in particular — " The countless treasures of his care Hamlets and villas green and fair, His mighty power, — What were they all but grief and shame, Tears and a broken heart, — when came The parting hour !" * * "Manrique, as Englished by Longfellow. Is it hypercritical to note the seeming ambiguity of green villas ? 2IO DYING MAZARIN CLINGING TO LIFE. Madame de Sevigne commends her daughter as having, in her last letter, said something "incomparable" on the freedom taken by death in breaking in upon worldly prosperity; and she finds a solace for those who are not among fortune's favourites, since to them death is less bitter. "C'est ce qui doit consoler de ne pas etre au nombre de ses favoris ; nous en trouverons la mort moins amere." Musing on the com- parative bluntness and unreserve with which the poor tell the sick poor, at once and without any circumlocution, that they will never get over it — whereas to the richer, and above all to the very rich, the proximity of death is a tabooed topic, — an ecclesiastical essayist asks, " Is it that the shock is less to the poor, that they have fewer objects in this world for which life might be desirable?" As Montaigne says of the poor — a propos of one " now digging in my garden that this morning buried his son" — how many desire to die, or at least die without alarm or regret ! The very names by which they call diseases " sweeten and mollify the sharpness of them : the phthisic is with them no more than a cough, the dysentery but a looseness, a pleurisy but a cold ; and as they gently name them, so they lightly endure them." L'Abbe Galiani says, " on n'est attache a la vie qu'en proportion des plaisirs qu'elle nous procure. J'entends a pre'sent pourquoi les paysans meu- rent tranquillement et voient mourir les autres stupidement." It is a Mazarin who holds on to Ufe with the frenzied grasp of one whom death is coming to rob of all he counts dear. Sainte-Beuve describes the dying Cardinal as tefiant a la vie by all the thousand ties of the possesseur vulgaire who clings fast to the treasures he has amassed. * Brienne relates how he one day saw and heard moribund Mazarin in his gallery of art, bewailing the advent hour of separation. Brienne heard him approaching, by the sound made by his slippers, the feeble * Mazarin's great predecessor, Richelieu, wrote of Luynes, that his death "lui sembla d'autant plus rude, qu'outre qu'elle est amere, comme dit le Sage, a ceux qui sont dans la bonne fortune, il prenait plaisir k savourer les douceurs de la vie, et jouissait avec volupte de ses contente- nents." 'IL FAUT QUITTER TOUT CELA: 211 shuffle of one in mortal languor. Brienne hid himself behind the tapestry, and listened as the master of the palace moaned forth a querulous II faut quitter tout cela I * Then turning to gaze on another object of art, the dying prince of the Church added, — " And that, too ! I must leave that, as well ! Oh, the pains I have been at to collect these things ! How can I resign them without regret ? — I shall never see them where I am going." Je ne les verrai plus ouje vais. Brienne professes to have heard these piteous words very distinctly, and to have been so touched by them that he could not refrain from a deep sigh, which betrayed his presence to Mazarin. "Who's there?" asked his Eminence, — and on finding who it was, the Cardinal, in his furred night-robe, and with night-cap on head, bade Brienne help him along to his library, where, resuming the train of thought which now absorbed him, and refusing to enter upon affairs of state, he thus addressed, partly his com- panion, partly his beloved pictures : " Look, my friend, at this beautiful piece by Correggio, and this Venus of Titian's, and this niatchless Deluge by Carracci. . . . Ah ! mon pauvre ami, I must take leave of all these. Farewell, dear pictures, to me so dear, and that have cost me so much !" His Eminence is eminently a trite text for the moralist who, with Blair, con- templates the Grave : " How shocking must thy summons be, O Death ! To him that is at ease in his possessions ; Who, counting on long years of pleasure here, Is quite unfurnish'd for that world to come. In that dread moment, how the frantic soul Raves round the walls of her clay tenement, . . . How wishfully she looks On all she's leavinir, now no lontrer hers !" * A French critic finds or takes occasion in his review of the career of Madame Pompadour, who died at forty-two, to contrast her demeanour in the prospect of death with that of Mazarin. " Quand il lui fallut, a Page de quarante-deux ans, quitter ces palais, ces richesses, ces merveilles d'art amoncelees, ce pouvoir si dispute, si envie, . . . elle ne dit point com- me Mazarin avec soupir, // faiit quitter tout cela ! Elle envisagea la mort d'un oeil ferme," etc. 212 HEZEKIAH'S COMPLACENT CONTENT. A KINGDOM'S PEACE INSURED FOR A KINGS LIFE. Isaiah xxxix. 7, 8. HEZEKIAH'S pride went before a fall; but the catas- trophe was deferred. All the treasures he had been so eager to display before admiring envoys were to be carried away by the foreign spoiler, and nothing left. His sons too should be taken away, to become the degraded creatures of the king of Babylon. And the glory of Judah should depart, and that fair realm at large be desecrated by the stranger. It was a gloomy prospect. But the king took comfort in the assurance that not till after he was gone should the kingdom be brought low. The kingdom's peace was insured for the king's life ; and, however selfishly or narrow-sightedly, the king was therewith content. "Then said Hezekiah to Isaiah, Good is the word of the Lord which thou hast spoken. He said more- over. For there shall be peace and truth in my days." The piety of submission may underlie the king's speech. But near the surface there runs a current of complacency not the most generous or patriotic. Though good men are often taken away from the evil to come, says old Sir Thomas Browne, in his CJwistian Morals, and "though some in evil days have been glad that they were old, nor long to behold the iniquities of a wicked world, or judgments threatened by them ; yet is it no small satisfaction unto honest minds, to leave the world in virtuous well-tem- pered times, under a prospect of good to come, and continua- tion of worthy ways acceptable unto God and man. Men who die in deplorable days, which they regretfully behold, have not their eyes closed with the like content ; while they cannot avoid the thoughts of proceeding or growing enormities,* displeasing * The venerable Chancelier de I'Hopital, on the eve of the St. Bartholo- mew massacres, said of, or to, them to whom his hoary head was a bore — que ma vieillesse ennuie, — " Quand je regarde tout autoiir de moi, je serais bien tente de leur rdpondre, comme un bon vieil homme d'eveque, qui portait, comme moi, une longue barbe blanche, et qui, la montrant, disait : 'Quand 'APRES MO I LE DELUGE: 213 unto that spirit unto whom they are then going, whose honour they desire in all times and throughout all generations." Aprh moi le deluge^ — a mot ascribed to Prince Metternich, but due to Madame de Pompadour, — is a saying the reverse of divine in inspiration and purport ; but well in keeping with a time and a people when, *' As each new surge o'er some old landmark broke, Wit smiled, and took the deluge as a joke." Henry III. of France, in the words of Mr. Lothrop Motley, " lived a life of what is called pleasure, careless of what might come after, for he was the last of his race." The English am- bassador, Stafford, expressed -much compassion for the French in the plight in which they found themselves : " Unhappy people ! to have such a king . . . who careth not what cometh after his death, so that he may rove on while he liveth." Mr. Froude holds it to have been impossible that visions of a troublesome future should not float at times before the minds of such men as Warham and Fisher: they could not, to his thinking, have been wholly deaf to the storm in Germany, and they must have heard something of the growls of smothered anger which for years had been audible at home, for all who had ears to hear. "Yet if any such thoughts at times did cross their imagination, they were thrust aside as an uneasy dream, to be shaken off like a nightmare, or with the coward's consola- tion, ' It will last my time.' " John May, the historian, says of one class, in his account of the state of the nation after Charles the First's dissolution of his third Parliament, — "Ano- ther sort of men, and especially lords and gentlemen, by whom the pressures of the Government were not much felt, who enjoyed their own plentiful fortunes with little or insensible detriment, looked no further than their present safety and pros- perity, while other kingdoms were embroiled in calamities, and Germany sadly wasted by a shajp war,'' etc. Clarendon has a cette neige sera fondue, il n'y aura plus que de la boue.'" The prevision was sad as the Apostle's, who knew this, that after his departure should grievous wolves enter in among the Ephesian fold, not sparing the flock. 214 LOVING CARE FOR FUTURITY. Spanish Charles in hand when he writes, "But the drowsy temper of that monarch . . . extended so far only as to prepare a stock of peace that would last during his own time,* that, he saw, would be very short, and to leave his dominions and his infant son to shift for themselves when he was dead ; and it was an unhappy maxim of that State, that it was the best husbandry to purchase present peace and present money at how dear interest soever for the future." It takes a Charles the Great to at once foresee and deplore the ills that shall come when he is gone. The story runs, that, towards the close of his life, Charles the Great one day gazed, from the sea-shore, on the far-away ships of the Normans, and found his eyes dim with tears as he gazed. For these pirates seemed to him the destined destroyers of the gigantic task he had spent his hfe in accomplishing. His apprehension was, that, after him, Europe must fall again into the chaos from which he had with so much labour drawn her; and his previsions were, in part, realized by the conflicts which ensued on his decease, and by the disinte- gration of his vast empire. Sir Arthur Helps considers that almost the greatest test of wise men being in power, is that they are anxious to provide successors. This loving care for futurity he takes to be an equal proof of their goodness and their sagacity ; while, as regards their own renown, surely that man's life must be pronounced a great failure whose purposes die with him. " This is why many a potent conqueror seems now so small a person in our eyes." Alcidon, in D'Urfe"s L'Astree, is * Lord Macaulay makes it a special point of censure in his review of the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole, that knowing, as that minister did, the state of the Scotch Highlands, and constantly predicting, as he was, another insurrection in that part of the empire, yet, during his long tenure of power, he never attempted to perform Avhat was then the most obvious and pressing duty of a British statesman, to break the power of the chiefs, and to estab- lish the authority of the law through the furthest comers of the Island. "Nobody knew better than he, that, if this were not done, great rnischiefs would follow. But the Highlands were tolerably quiet in his time. He was content to meet daily emergencies by daily expedients ; and he left the rest to his successors." The result being, that they had to conquer the Highlands in the midst of a war with France and Spain, because he had not regulated the Highlands in a time of profound peace. Ne songer gu'^ soi et au p-esent, source d'errein- dans la politique^ La Bruyere writes. 'AFTER ME THE DELUGE: 215 taxed with having, by his intercourse with princes, caught their natural trick of caring for the present only, and of being indif- ferent to what may occur after they are gone, always provided their own lease of power runs smoothly out. " Vous ne vous souciez guere de ce qui pent advenir lorsque vous n'y serez plus, pourvu que, tant que vous y demeurerez, vous y serez sans incommodite." M. Arsene Houssaye, who alleges of womankind in general that they live emphatically in the present, and that their reign is from day to day, affirms of such women of genius in particular as have sought to govern the world, that never have they contemplated the clouds of a distant horizon, but have confined their outlook to their o^vn immediate surroundings, and have never been able to fix their eyes on what was remote from their cherished present. " Madame de Pompadour disait comme Louis XV., Apres moi le deluge P'' In which celebrated saying of Mdme. de Pompadour, however, Sainte-Beuve descries at any rate an uneasy recognition of the storms that were gathering over her head.* The real, if not the avowed, principle of the constitutional changes ^vrought by Sylla, is declared by Dean Liddell to be, "A quiet life while I last, and after me the Deluge." Once, it is said, when the fine before quoted by Tiberius, " After my death perish the world in fire," was recited to him ; " Nay, in my life-time," was what Dean Merivale calls his fiendish reply. Ben Jonson preserves, after his scholarly or pedantic wont, the original quotation, when he makes Tiberius say to Sejanus, in the tragedy named after the latter, — " While I can live, I will prevent earth's fury : 'E/ioO davovTos yaia /xix^t^toj Tri'pt." Mr. Pearson, in his History of England during the Middle Ages, affirms of our King John, that never, probably, was there an English sovereign who would " more cordially have endorsed the Roman tyrant's wish : — ' When I am dead, let the earth be consumed in fire.' " Gibbon says of Caracalla, whose * " II semblait que la marquise eut le sentiment de tout ce qui s'amonce- lait d'orages la-haut sur sa tete, quand elle disait : Apres moi le deluge!''^ 2i6 'IT WILL LAST MY TIME: prodigality left behind it a long train of ruin and disorder, that if that worthless tyrant had been capable of reflecting on the sure consequences of his own conduct, he would perhaps have enjoyed the dark prospect of the distress and calamities which he bequeathed to his successors. Too many there may be, Sir Thomas Browne says, of Nero's mind, who, if their own turn were served, would not regard what became of others ; and when they die themselves, care not if all perish. " But good men's wishes extend beyond their lives, for the happiness of times to come, and never to be known unto them." Herr Sauerteig (we know the man and his communication) is fervid in denouncing what he calls the foul sluggard's comfort, " It will last my time." Here is one of his vehement apostrophes to such sluggards — conceived in the spirit of that prophet who was among the herdmen of Tekoah, and who denounced woe to them that were at ease in Zion, and that put far away the evil day, — "Thou foul sluggard, and even ^\^i {Fauhfizer^ ja Dieb) ! For art thou not a thief, to pocket thy day's wages (be they counted in groscJmi or in gold thousands) for this, if it be for anything, for watching on thy special watch-tower that God's city (which this His world is, where His children dwell) suffer no damage ; and, all the while, to watch only that thy own ease be not invaded, — let otherwise hard come to hard as it will and can ? Unhappy ! It will last thy time ; thy worthless share of an existence, wherein nothing but the Digestion was real, will have evaporated in the interim : it will last thy time ; but will it last thy eternity? Or what if it should not last thy time, but take fire, and explode, and consume thee like the moth?" Sauerteig and his Springtviirzel are full of such obstinate ques- tionings, suggestive at all seasons of the world's history, but specially so at some. One of Bishop Berkeley's biographers, rating the Walpole Government for their cold obstruction to his Bermuda College scheme, — "What was that to Walpole, or to the slumbrous prosaic nation over which he ruled ?" — a college scheme, trans- atlantic and transcendental, with only ideal advantages, mere possibilities of influence and evangelization, — this admirer of SELFISH TENANTS FOR LIFE. 217 the philosopher and censor of the minister gives expression to the conjecture, that a generation later (with the North American provinces in a state of revolt), that Utopia in the Summer Islands, had it been planted, might have been of use to Eng- land. " But there have been few statesmen in our island of more generous temper than that of the Jewish king, who was satisfied that there should be peace in his time." Bolingbroke has his fling at " those of the clergy who make religion a trade, who regard nothing more than the subsistence it affords them, or in higher life the wealth and power they enjoy by the means of it," and who, accordingly, may and do "say to themselves, that it will last their time." Like the Turks, in the matter of house-building, as described by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose letters from the East explain that every house at the death of its master being at the grand- signior's disposal, no man cares to make a great expense, which he is not sure his family will be the better for. "All their design is to build a house commodious, and that will last their lives ; and they are very indifferent if it falls down the year after." Or like the farmer in Mr. Peacock's Meliiicourt, whose practical philosophy finds this idiomatic expression : " Things be in a consumption, zure enough, but they'll last my time vor all that ; zo I eats my beef-steak, and drinks my ale, and lets the world slide." Philosophic poetry idealizes this coarse realism into a more refined type, but the difference is mainly on the outside : " He who performs the journey of to-day Cares not if yesterday were shower or sun : To-morrow, let the heavens be what they may, And what recks he ? — his wayfare will be done : Heedless of what hereafter may befall, He lives his life, to whom this life is all." 2i8 'GREEDY DOGS, WHICH I INSATIABLE. Isaiah Ivi. ii; Proverbs xxx. 15, N the greatest of the greater prophets we read of " greedy- dogs which can never have enough." Among the words of Agur the son of Jakehwe read of the horse-leech having two daughters, whose insatiate, insatiable cry is, " Give, give/' Shak- speare's lachimo characteristically speaks of the cloyed will as "That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, That tub both filled and running." As with the " ingrate " in Lucretius, — ingratam naturam pascere semper, Atque explere bonis rebus, satiareque nwiquavi. Out and outspoken is the style of the great Emperor Frederick II., upbraiding the Pope (Gregory IX.) with his illimitable greed : " But thou having nothing, and yet possessing all things, art ever seeking what thou mayest devour and swallow up ; the whole world cannot glut the rapacity of thy maw, for the whole world sufficeth thee not" Gregory might be bracketed, for this bad eminence of his, with Philip the Fair of France, whose coffers were always filling, never full, and who, for purposes of plunder, respected wealthy Christians no more than wealthy unbelievers : his " insatiable rapacity " is a commonplace in history. As Milman says of him, every race or community possessed of dangerous riches having in turn suffered the ex- tortionate persecutions of Philip, that avarice which had drained the Jews, the Lombards, and laid his sacrilegious hands on the Church, was only too prompt, when temptation offered, to confiscate the riches of the Templars. He seemed a most unroyal exemplar of ''that beast" at whom Dante exclaimed, *' So bad and so accursed in her kind, That never sated is her ravenous will" — the will of ravening dogs, such as, in the Psalmist's phrase, go about the city, there wander up and down for meat, and grudge if they be not satisfied, — which they never are, never can be ; it is the nature of the beast. CAN NE VER HA VE ENO UGW 2 1 9 " All wide-expanding their voracious jaws, Morsel on morsel swallow down unchew'd, Unsated, through mad appetite for more ; Gorged to the throat, yet lean and ravenous still." Herodotus in his liveliest way tells us how Alcmaeon, being invited to the coast of Sardis, and granted leave by Croesus to go into the treasury and take as much gold as he could carry away on his person at one time, put on the largest tunic he could find, so as to make a capacious fold, and (as Mr. Swayne words it) the roomiest buskins ; how he first stowed his boots with the gold dust, and then packed his clothes with it, and then powdered his hair with it, and lastly took a mouthful of it, and came out of the treasury, " dragging his legs with diffi- culty, and looking like anything rather than a human being, as his mouth was stopped up, and everything about him in a plethoric state." It was like Croesus to be highly amused,'"^ and to give his grasping guest what he had taken, and as much again. Mary of Guise, as Dowager Queen Regent, " dealing with " the Earl of Angus for citadels, plied him with pleas as he sat feeding a falcon which sat upon his wrist, until, addressing the bird, but leaving the Queen to make the application, he mut- tered, "Thedeil's in this greedy gled; she will never be fu'." Without seeming to notice the hint, the Queen continued to press her importunities until she got a very uncourtly rebuff, once for all.f Amyot is virtually forgiven his rapacity for his * Had the good-natured prince given his guest a lesson at all, one can fancy it would have been in the easy-going vein of the Ingoldsby moral : — " Learn not to be greedy ; and when you've enough, Don't be anxious your bags any tighter to stuff, . . . Nor turn every thought to increasing your store, And look always like Oliver asking for more." + Dodwell, the learned non-juror, possessed an estate in Ireland, the main income from which he generously allowed a kinsman to enjoy, only reserving for himself such a moderate maintenance as sufficed for his inex- pensive habits of life — the frugality of plain living and high thinking. But his kinsman got to grumble at the subtraction of even this pittance ; and a proper lesson he was taught, by his benefactor resuming his property and marrying. INSATIABLE GREED. wit in excusing it, when, upon asking from Charles IX. yet another abbacy, in addition to several already held by him, the king demurred to granting the application : " Did you not once assure me that your ambition would be quite satisfied with a revenue of a thousand crowns ?" " True, sire," replied the Bishop of Auxerre, Grand Almoner of France, and abbacy- holder wholesale, "but there are some appetites which grow as you feed them." Man's heart, moraUzes Young, " eats all things, and is hungry still ; * More, more ! ' the glutton cries, for something new So rages appetite." There are those unreasoning, or at least unreasonable, askers, of whom Pope says that, * ' Who ask and reason thus, will scarce conceive God gives enough while He has more to give." Inveterate wolf! is Dante's apostrophe to Avarice, "whose gorge ingluts more prey than every beast beside, yet is not filled, so bottomless thy maw." One woe denounced by Micah the Morasthite is, " Thou shalt eat, but not be satis- fied." As with the i?nprobce divitice of the heathen poet : cre- scunt ; tamen . . . nescio quid semper ahest. " Te semper inops agitet vexetque cupido." In a sermon on the odious sin of ingratitude. South affirms the only voice of that sin to be. Give, give ; but when the gift is once received, he adds, then, like the swine at his trough, it is silent and insatiable. In a word, he defines the ungrateful person as a monster which is all throat and belly, a kind of thoroughfare, or common sewer, for the good things of the world to pass into ; and of whom, in respect of all kindnesses con- ferred on him, may be verified the observation on the lion's den — plenty of footmarks betokening an abundant entrance, not one of egress. Mr. Motley's portrait of that crapulous, licentious, shameless commander, the Duke of Mayenne, is of one " covetous and greedy beyond what was considered decent even in that cynical age," — the duke receiving subsidies and alms with both hands from those who distrusted and despised ILLIMITABLE APPETITE. 221 him, but could not eject him from his advantageous position, that of ostensible leader of the League. This was the man who was notorious for spending more time at table than the Beamese in sleep, and who was so fat that he was said to require the help of twelve men to put him in the saddle again whenever he fell from his horse — an approximate resemblance to the desperate case of Humpty-Dumpty in the nursery-ballad, in whose instance all the king's horses and all the king's men were of no avail. The historian of the United Netherlands declares of the "infinite capacity for pecuniary absorption," manifested by the grandees of that age, that it makes one's brain reel, and enlarges one's ideas of the human faculties in certain directions. Philip of Spain knew his man when he thus wrote to the Archduke Ernest with reference to Mayenne : " You must try to keep him dependent on me, not giving him any more money than is necessary to prevent him from falling away entirely ; for to content his appetite completely, there is not a fortune in the world that would suffice." He was just the sort of man of whom it might be said, as of quite another insatiable spirit it has been said, that were you to make him a present of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, all of your own mere grace and favour, purely and simply a free gift, he would be instant with a request to have the Isle of Man thrown in too, for a potato garden. There are Irishmen, an EngUsh publicist said, when discussing the prospects of the Land Bill as a healing measure, who, if England gave them the whole terrestrial globe, would swear by the harp of Erin that they would go off into space unless they got the moon too. Some take by sea and some by land, quoth old Dunbar, and never from taking can hold their hand till they be " tyit up to ane tree." Some would take all their neighbour's gear, disdainful of Dunbar's cautionary refrain, Li taking should discretion he. *' Some wad tak' a' this warld on breid ; * And yet not satisfied o' their need, Thro' heart unsatiable and greedie." * In the whole breadth of it. SOUTH ON COVETOUSNESS. There cannot be a greater plague, says an old divine, than to be always baited with the importunities of a growing appe- tite. "Beggars are troublesome, even in the streets as we pass through them ; but how much more when a man shall carry a perpetually clamorous beggar in his own breast, which shall never leave off crying, Give, give, whether a man has anything to give or no." Such a one is Hkened to a man with a numerous charge of children, with a great many hungry mouths to be fed, and little or nothing to feed them with. What greater misery than for a man to have a perpetual hunger upon him — his appetite growing fiercer and sharper amidst the very objects and opportunities of satisfying it? This is to have such a " dropsy upon the soul," that the more it takes in, the more it may ; hke a drunkard that drinks himself athirst, and is driven to drink more because he has already drunk too much. Graphic after his wont is South's picture of Covetous- ness, as so great and voracious a prodigy, that it will not allow a man to set bounds to his appetite, though he feels himself stinted in his capacities ; but impetuously pushes him on to get more, while he is at a loss for room to bestow and a heart to enjoy what he has already. The preacher pictures men with open mouth flying upon the prey, and catching with such eagerness as if they could never open their hands wide enough, nor reach them out far enough, to compass the objects of their boundless desires. " So that, had they (as the fable goes of Briareus) each of them one hundred hands, these would all of them be employed in grasping and gathering, and hardly one of them in giving or laying out ; but all in receiving and none in restoring; a thing in itself so monstrous, that nothing in nature besides is like it, except it be death and the grave, — the only things I know which are always robbing and carrying off the spoils of the world, and never making restitu- tion." The prophet Habakkuk speaks of one who enlargeth his desire as hell, or the grave. The grave is one of the things signalized by Agur as never saying. It is enough, and that cannot be satisfied, but gathereth unto him all nations, and heapeth unto him all people. The traditional figure of Alexan- 'HE WEPT FOR WORLDS TO CONQUER: 223 der the Great is a stereotyped text in the matter of conquering the world, and then weeping for want of other worlds to conquer. He is a type for all time with the satirists: now Butler :— " The whole world was not half so wide To Alexander, when he cried, Because he had but one to subdue. As was a paltry narrow tub to Diogenes." Now Byron : — " Though Alexander's urn a show be gro\vn On shores he wept to conquer, though unknown — How vain, how worse than vain, at length appear The madman's wish, the Macedonian's tear ! He wept for worlds to conquer — half the earth Knows not his name, or but his death and birth And desolation ; while his native Greece Hath all of desolation, save its peace. He * wept for worlds to conquer ! ' He who ne'er Conceived the globe he panted not to spare ! With even the busy Northern Isle unknown. Which holds his urn, and never knew his throne." To Anaxarchus is ascribed the occasion of these tears, he having instructed Alexander in his doctrine of an infinity of worlds ; " whereby Alexander, it seems, was brought out of opinion with his geography, who before that time thought there remained nothing, or not much, beyond his conquests ;" which puts another gloss on the raison a^etre of the tears — hinc nice, lachrymce. Addison, in his Italian travels, remarks upon " a beautiful bust of Alexander the Great," in the famous gallery at Florence, " casting up his eyes to heaven with a noble air of grief or discontentedness in his looks. I have seen two or three other antique busts of Alexander in the same air and posture, and am apt to think the sculptor had in his thoughts the conqueror's weeping for new worlds." In one of his Spectators, Addison moralizes on ambition as per- haps filling the mind for a while with a giddy kind of pleasure, but such a pleasure as makes a man restless and uneasy under 224 ALEXANDER WEEPING it, and does less to satisfy the present thirst than to excite fresh desires, and set the soul on new enterprises.* For how- few ambitious men there are who have got as much fame as they desired, and whose thirst after it has not been as eager in the very height of their reputation as it was before they be- came known and eminent among men ! '• There is not any circumstance in Caesar's character which gives me a greater idea of him, than a saying which Cicero tells us he frequently made use of in private conversation, 'That he was satisfied with his share of life and fame.' " Se satis vel ad natiiram, vel ad gloriam, vixisse. Like one object in Wordsworth's musings near Aquapendente, ' ' upon its front Bearing the world-acknowledged evidence Of past exploits, nor fondly after more Struggling against the stream of destiny,t But with its peaceful majesty content." Fontenelle's Phryne tells Alexander, that if he had only con- quered Greece, the neighbouring islands, and perhaps some part of Asia Minor, and constituted them into one State, nothing could have been better contrived or more reasonable ; but to be always running without knowing whither, to be always taking cities without knowing why, has — well, Phryne puts it mildly — " displeased many sensible persons." Such a sensible person was Seneca, who, in his chapter (in the Morals) on a happy life, puts the question. What matters it how far * " An ambitious man," writes Horace Walpole, "must be divested of all feeling but for himself The torment of others is his high road to hap- piness. Were the transmigration of souls true, and accompanied by con- sciousness, how delighted would Alexander or Croesus be to find themselves on four legs, and divested of a wish to conquer new worlds, or to heap up all the wealth of this." — Letters, vol. vii., p. 400. t Of the Alexander of our nineteenth century, as Napoleon is often called, M. Villemain observes, in reference to his implied necessity de reconimencer une campagne aggressive, that " ce jeu terrible d'accumuler les ennemis et les obstacles, pour les abattre d'un plus grand effort, n'est pas toujours heureux. II ne va pour ainsi dire qu'a la jeunesse du genie et de la for- tune ; et probablement il se serait use pour Alexandre lui-meme, si le vainqueur de la Perse et de I'Inde eut dure plus longtemps." — Villemain : Souvenirs Contemporains, p. 325. FOR NEW WORLDS TO CONQUER. 225 Alexander extended his conquests, if he never got to feel satisfied with what he had? Every man wants as much. as he covets, and labour lost it is to pour into a vessel that will never be full. Ambition of the Alexandrine metre " propounds matters even impossible when it has once arrived at things beyond expectation." " Alexander," says the same old master of morals in another place, " was possessed with the madness of laying kingdoms waste. Beginning with Greece, where he was brought up, he enslaved Lacedaemon and silenced Athens ; and not satisfied with destroying the cities which his father, Philip, had either conquered or bought, he " made himself the enemy of human nature, and like the worst of beasts, he wor- ried what he could not eat." This may be a culpably and calumniously one-sided and distorted view of him men call the Great \ but it is only with the mere fact of his insatiate and insatiable nature that we are here concerned. He is a type of his kind. And so, of the self-same kind, however differing in degree, is the Joab Hunter commemorated by the Clock- maker of Slickville, who — that is Joab, not Samuel — " whipped every one that darst try him, both in Slickville and its vycinity, and then sot down and cried like a child, 'cause folks were afeard of him," and there was nobody left for him to fight. And, of course, with him, to fight meant to whip. " Si les liommes pouvaient s'entendre ! Mais non : tant qu'il trouve un voisin, Tout homme a le coeur d' Alexandre, Et, prince ou bourgeois, veut etendre Ou son royaume ou son jardin." So muses the modern French poet, Lebrun. So too, in one of his Divine Poems, that not too divine poet, Edmund Waller :— " The world's great conqueror would his point pursue, And wept because he could not find a new ; Which had he done, yet still he would have cried, To make him work until a third he spied. " 226 A GARDEN GRAVE. w A GARDEN GRAVE. 2 Kings xxi. i8, 26 ; St. John xix. 41. HEN the time came for Manasseh, King of Judah, to sleep with his fathers, he was buried in the garden of his own house, in the garden of Uzza. Some think this was the place where Uzziah was buried — who, sleeping with his fathers, was buried with his fathers in the field of the burial which belonged to the kings ; for they said. He is a leper. Bishop Patrick echoes the surmise of the speculative, that penitent Manasseh may have desired to be buried here, as unworthy, because of his manifold sins, to be laid in the com- mon sepulchre of the kings of Judah. Amon, his son, however, who walked in all the bad ways that Manasseh had walked in, but failed to follow him in the paths of penitence and peace, was also buried in the sepulchre in the garden of Uzza ; without any token of the choice or motive attributed to his father. Be there choice in either case, or not — be there motive as alleged, or none — the incident is in itself markworthy, and by the chronicler of the two kings' reigns is evidently considered such, that alike Manasseh, King of Judah, and Amon his son and successor, were buried out of the ordinary course, in a garden grave. Naturally the place of burial reminds one of the most memo- rable of all interments. The New Testament as well as the Old has its signal record of a garden grave. He that was wounded for our ' transgression, and bruised for our iniquities, — He, the despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief — is said by the prophet to have made His grave with the wicked and with the rich in His death. The reference is assumed, rightly or wrongly, to point, in the last clause at least, however the penultimate one may be interpreted, to that rich man of Arimathea, named Joseph, who also himself was Jesus' disciple, and who begged of Pilate the body of Jesus, and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn out in the rock. So St. Matthew tells us ; and from St. John we learn, that in the place where Jesus was crucified there was 'IN THE GARDEN A SEPULCHRE: 227 a garden ; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus, therefore, because of the Jews' preparation-day ; for the sepulchre was nigh at hand. " This is no place of graves," exclaims Dr. Hanna, as he looks around; "here rise around us no memorials of the dead ; you see but a single sepulchre, and that sepulchre in a garden." He calls it a strange mingling, this, of opposites, the garden of life and growth and beauty circling the sepulchre designed for death, corruption, and decay. " Miniature of the strange world we live in. What garden of it has not its own grave ? Your path may, for a time, be through flowers and fragrance ; follow it far enough, it leads ever to a grave." * Henry Melvill expatiates on the choice of the spot by Joseph of Arimathea, as a highly significant circumstance. He might, in constructing a tomb for himself, have done so in some distant place, which he only occasionally visited ; whereas he constructed it in a garden, to which he would frequently resort — in which he took his daily walk, and wherein he was wont to calm and refresh his mind with the rich foliage of the trees and the sweet blossom of the flowers. "He prepared his own tomb in a garden ; a garden — nature's grave" (for if flow^ers bud and blossom, they also wither and die) — " a garden, the scene of nature's resurrection." What a mixture does it present — a garden in the place of crucifixion, and a sepulchre in the garden ! "Strangely are joy and grief blended in human life, and in Christian experience. ' 1 wdll sing,' saith the Psalmist, ' of mercy and judgment' Of mercy, 'in the place where he was crucified there was a garden.' Of judgment, 'and in the garden a sepulchre.' " The text admits of fanciful applications as well as of practical improvement ; but what further notes on the general topic may here be added, will touch simply on * " But this sepulchre in this garden suggests other and happier thoughts. It was in a garden once of old — in Eden, that death had his first summons given, to find there his first prey ; it is in a garden here at Calvary that the last enemy of mankind has the death-blow given to him — that the great Conqueror is in his turn overcome." — The Last Day of our Lord^s Passion. By Wm. Hanna, LL.D., fifth edition, pp. 330. 228 GARDEN GRA VES. what is implied of rural tranquillity and repose in the mere fact of a garden grave. Laid to rest within the then lonely and romantic cemetery of the Protestants in Rome, — an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies, — the poet of Efidyinioii was taken leave of by a greater poet with the reflection, that it might make one in love with death, to think one should be buried in so sweet a place. In a letter written from Abergavenny, early in his life, Sir Samuel Romilly de- scribes with much interest, as entirely novel to him, the "very poetical and very affecting " custom the poor people had there, of visiting the churchyard on Palm Sunday morning, with a little harvest of violets and primroses gathered at dawn, to strew over the graves of their kinsfolk gone before ; while some who had happily lost no near relation or friend, decked the graves of strangers ; so that hardly a grave was without its decoration of affection or respect. " I came here soon after this ceremony had been observed, and was surprised, on walking through a churchyard, to find in it the appearance of a garden." The dearer it made to the visitor from our great city this dear island home, with such memorials of what Sydney Dobell calls — " the unforgotten dead, In quiet grave-yards, willowed seemly round, . O'er which To-day bends sad, and sees his face," as in some unfathomed lake, for ever calm. Round the church above the Lake of Lucerne there is a burying ground skirted by cloisters, through the arches and apertures of which, as Mr. Trollope has described the scene, they who walk or sit there look down immediately upon the blue water, and across the water upon the frowning menaces of Mount Pilate. " It is one of the prettiest spots in that land of beauty ; and its charm is to my feeling enhanced by the sepulchral monuments" around. Pointed is the contrast Nigel's raw-boned Scotch serving-man draws between even a city churchyard such as St. Cuthbert's and those of London." " There are dainty green graffs in SQUALID CITY CHURCHYARDS. 229 St. Cathbert's kirkyard," quoth Richie MonipUes, who had often, lang syne, made his night-quarters there when he came home late, and found the West Port closed, — " where ane may sleep as if they were in a down bed, till they hear the laverock singing up in the air as high as the castle, whereas, lo and behold, these London kirkyards are causeyed with through- stanes, panged hard and fast thegither. . . . Dead folks may sleep yonder sound enow, but deil haet else." As for squalid churchyards, north or south, a north country divine is emphatic and iterative in his denunciation of the " mangy, weedy, miserable-looking pound" which was until recently a too familiar type; "ghastly, weedy, neglected, accursed- looking spots," he elsewhere calls them, "where stupidity has done what it can to add circumstances of disgust and horror to the Christian's long sleep." Mr. Dickens was more than equally emphatic, outspoken, iterative, and reiterative on the subject. In one of his earliest books he pictures a poor, mean burial-ground in London — a dismal place, raised a few feet above the level of the street, and parted from it by a low parapet-wall and an iron railing ; a rank, unwholesome,* rotten spot, where the very grass and weeds seemed, in their frowsy growth, to tell that they had sprung from paupers' bodies, and had struck their roots in the graves of men sodden, while alive, in steaming courts and drunken, hungry dens. " And here, in truth, they lay, parted from the living by a little earth and a board or two — lay thick and close — corrupting in body as they had been in mind — a dense and squalid crowd." In a much later work, he glances shudderingly at a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and ob- scene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the living. " Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would * Coleridge, in The Friend^ refers to the churchyards in most of the German cities, and too often, he feared, in those of our own country, as not less injurious to morality than to health — their darkness and loneliness tempting worse spirits to roam in them than those whose nightly wander- ings appalled the believing hearts of our brave forefathers. A horrible incident of this sort darkens his pathetic nan-ative of the sorrows of Maria Schoning of Nuremberg. 230 CITY CHURCHYARDS. reject as a savage abomination, and a CafFre would shudder at, they bring our dear brothers departed,* to receive Christian burial." With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate — with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on Hfe — in such a spot ^' they lower our dear brother down a foot or two : here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption : an avenging ghost at many a sick-bed side : a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together," And among his later miscellaneous essays may be remembered a characteristic one by the same writer, entitled " The City of the Absent," — city churchyards being avowedly a favourite retreat with our uncommercial traveller ; and at all times of his life a favourite theme, however repulsive in itself, and however loathsome the details on which he elected to dilate. One such churchyard, he calls that of Saint Ghastly Grim ; and he owns to the attraction of repulsion it had for him, by' midnight and in bad weather, as well as in the full, remorseless, glaring, blabbing light of day. Such a yard it is not that Mr. Charles Reade describes, " in that part of London called ' the City,' " — in one of the shady little streets that look like pleasant retreats from the busy, noisy world ; yet are strong- holds of business : '^ Here, in the heart of the City, was wedged a little nistic church, with its churchyard, whose bright green * " He was put there," says Jo, the crossing-sweeper, to the veiled lady visitor who peers after nightfall through the locked iron gate, to the bars of which Jo is holding, as the two look in. "Where? Oh what a scene of horror!" — "There!" says Jo, pointing. "Over yinder. Among them piles of bones, and close to that there kitchin winder. They put him in wery nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to get it in. I could unkiver it for you with my broom, if the gate was open. That's why they locks it, I s'pose," giving it a shake. . . . "Is this place of abomination consecrated ground?" the lady asks after a while. — "I don't know nothink of consequential ground," says Jo, staring hard at her, — " Is it blessed?" — "Which?" says Jo, in the last degree amazed, — "Is it blessed ?" — " I'm blest if I know," says Jo, staring more than ever ; "but I shouldn't think it warn't. Blest ?" repeats Jo, something troubled in his mind. "It aint done it much good, if it is. Blest? I should think it was t'othered myself. But /don't know nothink !" — Bleak House, ch. xvi. AMONG THE TOMBS. 231 grass first startled, then soothed and refreshed the eye, in that wilderness of stone ; an emerald set in granite." A sufficient and exceptional contrast, this last, to the type stigmatized by John Evelyn, at Norwich, just two centuries before, where he observed that " most of the churchyards (tho' some of them large enough) were filled up with earth, or rather the congestion of dead bodies one upon another, for want of earth, even to the very top of the walls, and some above the walls, so as the churches seemed to be built in pits." Not these the kind to attract and retain as frequent visitors such haunters of church- yards as the elder Humboldt, whose " great affection " for them, he avows, never let him wiUingly pass one without visiting it.* Especially was he fond of those planted with large old trees ; and in even one large old tree on such a spot he found a great charm. The sight of the fresh blooming life blended to his solace and delight with the thought of the dead slumbering beneath.t Leigh Hunt says of the dead, in a small sequestered village, that they seem hardly removed from their own houses ; the last home seems almost a portion of the first : the clergy- man's house often has the churchyard as close to it as the garden ; and when he goes into his grave, he seems but re- moved into another room ; gone to bed, and to his sleep. He has not " left." He lies there with his family, still ready to waken with them all, on the heavenly morning. This, how- ever, as the author of The Old Court Suburb remarks, in his comment on the aspect of the (old) parish churchyard of Ken- sington, abutting so closely on the public way, is a feeling which * The taste is common to divers and diverse natures, O'Keeffe, the dramatist, was as pronounced a haunter of churchyards as Wilhelm von Humboldt ; but the main interest to him was to take note, or notes, of the ages recorded on the tombstones ; for, ' ' the healthiness of the place may be guessed at by the longevity of its inhabitants. ... I remember at St. Peter's, a village about three miles from Margate, I saw the greatest number of seventy, eighty, and ninetys." — Recollections of yohn O'Keeffe, ii. 184. t "The most beautiful churchyard of this kind, which I have seen, was one in Konigsberg, in Prussia, in which there are long avenues of large and beautiful lime-trees," etc. — Baron W. von Humboldt's Letter's to a Lady, No. Ix. 232 QUIET RESTING-PLACES. it is difficult to realize in a bustling town. " In some moods of the mind, the juxtaposition is very painful. It looks as if death itself were no escape from the turmoils of life/' — as if the noise of (iarts and cries were never to be out of one's hearing ; and he is convinced upon the whole, that, whether near to houses or away from them, the sense of quiet is requisite to the proper idea of the churchyard ; quiet, — the thing farthest removed from cities, and what we imagine to pervade all space, and the gulfs between the stars, — is requisite to make us feel that we are standing on the threshold of heaven. "The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres ; And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound, Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs, ****** * ' And mingling with the still night and mute sky, Its awful hush is felt inaudibly. * ' Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild. And terrorless as this serenest night : Here could I hope, like some inquiring child Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep," * Of such a spot writes Southey, in The Doctor^ that a hermit who might wish his grave to be as quiet as his cell, could imagine no fitter resting-place. Of such a spot writes Mr. Austen-Leigh, in describing what was for twenty-five years the residence of his gifted aunt,— Steventon, with its " little spire- less fane, just seen above the woody lane," standing alone, far from the hum of the village, and within sight of no habitation, except a glimpse of the grey manor-house through its circling green of sycamores, — the consecrated ground teeming, beneath its south wall, with sweet violets, both purpte and white ; " one may imagine," he says, " for how many centuries the ancestors of those little flowers have occupied that undisturbed, sunny nook ; and may think how few living families can boast of as ancient a tenure of their land :" large elms protrude their rough * hhelley : A Sumtner- Evening Churchyard. (Lechdale, Gloucestershire.) CHURCHYARD AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. 233 branches, old hawthorns shed their annual blossoms over th^ graves ; and there is a hollow yew-tree, at least coeval with the church of the eleventh century; a spot, in short, that altogether " has in it something solemn and appropriate to the last resting- place of the silent dead." The garden aspect is paramount in Campbell's vignette of a Gothic church, with its beautiful though sepulchral surroundings, — ' ' For there nor yew nor cypress spread their gloom, But roses blossomed by each rustic tomb," Of field-flowers it is, or rather to them, the same poet says, in the last line of his stanzas to those wildings of Nature, " I wish you to grow on my tomb." Green is Wordsworth's typical Churchyard among the Mountains, beautiful and green, ridge rising gently by the side of ridge, a heaving surface, almost wholly free from interruption of sepulchral stones, and mantled o'er with aboriginal turf and everlasting flowers. In his sonnets on the River Duddon, the Kirk of Ulpha suggests the thought, " how sweet were leisure ! could it yield no more than 'mid that wave-washed Churchyard to recline, from pastoral graves ex- tracting thoughts divine ; or there to pace, and mark the sum- mits hoar of distant moon-lit mountains faintly shine, soothed by the unseen River's gentle roar." A burying-ground near Langholm e, on the banks of the Esk, is pictured by him in another sonnet, where — *' Proud tomb is none ; but rudely sculptured knights, By humble choice of plain old times, are seen Level with earth, among the hillocks green : Union not sad, when sunny day-break smites The spangled turf, and neighbouring thickets ring With Jubilate from the choirs of spring ! " Nor was Wordsworth the man to grudge the sound of gladsome voices ascending from the rural school, close to the silent neigh- bourhood of graves, in his Prehcde picture of a grassy church- yard that hung upon a slope above the village school. He was the man, however, to deprecate right earnestly the crowding together of our dead in the "busy, noisy, unclean, and almost grassless churchyard of a large town," which he would contrast, 234 CEMETERY FLOWER-BEDS. to its cost, with the still seclusion of a Turkish cemetery, in some remote place, and yet further sanctified by the groves of cypress in which it is embosomed. He insisted, indeed, that when death is in our thoughts, nothing can make amends for the want of the soothing influences of nature, and for the ab- sence of those types of renovation and decay which the fields and woods offer to the notice of the serious and contemplative mind. The cemetery at Woking was made Judge Haliburton's text for a disquisition on the comparative merits of the modern cemetery. Approving of it, he cannot admire it. He considers it a necessary provision for the relief of a great city, since intramural burials are found to be destructive of health ; but there is nothing of the attraction of the old rural churchyards ; and the more you decorate these modern cemeteries, the more repulsive they become, — rare exotic trees and shrubs, gay flowers, and the tricks of landscape gardening being out of keeping with the place. These trickeries of art may avail to make us forget that we are wandering through the city of the dead, the last resting-place of mortality ; and yet there is some- thing in the tombs, urns, and tablets around us, that destroys the illusion of ornamental pleasure-grounds. " It is neither a burial- place nor a garden : it is too gay and smiling for the one, and too lonely and melancholy for the other. Our reflections are diverted by the gaudy parterres, and our enjoyment destroyed by the mementoes of death. Bridal flowers desecrate the tomb ; and headstones, with learned or rustic inscriptions, label the rhododendrons and azaleas." Mr. de Quincey once remarked upon the cathedral cemetery at Bangor, as the most beautiful in the whole kingdom ; but the beauty was scarcely appropriate : it was the beauty of a well-kept shrubbery, and not of a ceme- tery : it contrived to look smiling and attractive by the entire dissembling of its real purposes. Hawthorne makes his New Adamand Eve visit the cemetery of Mount Auburn, and with light hearts tread along the winding paths, among marble pillars, mimic temples, urns, obelisks, and sarcophagi, sometimes pausing to contemplate these fantasies of human growth, and sometimes GRASS AND MARBLE. 235 to admire the flowers wherewith kind Nature converts decay into loveHness. Writing to Southey from Tours in 18 14, Walter Savage Landor says : " I live in a tower, with a large and shady garden, where I intend to be buried, if I die here." Allan Cunningham's w^ish was, to be laid where he should " not be built over ;" where the wind should blow and the daisy grow upon his grave. As he would not be built over, so neither would he be bricked in. No vault for him, and such as him. It was after a visit to Westminster Abbey, that Burke, describing in a letter the awe he felt among the tombs, went on to say, *' Yet after all, do you know I would rather sleep in the southern comer of a little country churchyard, than in the tomb of the Capulets." He adds a wish, however, that his dust should mingle with kindred dust. The good old expression, '' family burying-ground," had something pleasing in it to him. His aspiration is echoed by a country parson of note, who asks, What can surpass the beauty of green grass and green trees ? and exclaims, " Amid such things let me Hve ; and when I am gone, let green grass grow over me. I would not be buried beneath a stone pavement, not to sleep in the great Abbey itself" The Miriam of Transforviatio7i declares it to be a good state of mind for mortal man, when he is content to leave no more definite memorial than the grass, which will sprout kindly and speedily over his grave, if we do not make the spot barren with marble. And she thinks it will be a fresher and a better world, when it flings off this burthen of stony memories, which the ages have deemed it a piety to heap upon its back. George Herbert, on the text of church monuments, preaches to the same effect : he is one who will " gladly trust," he says — ' ' My body to the school, that it may learn To spell his elements, and find his birth Written in dusty heraldry and lines ; Which dissolution sure doth best discern, Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth. These laugh at Jet and ]\Iarble, put for signs, To sever the good fellowship of dust, And spoil the meeting." The ideal pictured by James Montgomery, of the burying- 236 CITY AND RURAL GRAVEYARDS. place of the Patriarchs, in The World before the Flood, is a scene sequestered from the haunts of men, — the little heaps ranged in comely rows, with walks between, trodden by friends and kinsfolk, who dressed with duteous hands each hallowed sod : " No sculptured monument was taught to breathe His praises whom the worm devoured beneath ; * # # * * There no dark cypress cast a doleful gloom, No blighting yew shed poison o'er the tomb ; But, white and red with intermingling flowers, The graves looked beautiful in sun and showers ; Green myrtles fenced it, and beyond their bound Ran the clear rill with ever-murmuring sound. 'Twas not a scene for grief to nourish care, It breathed of hope, and moved the heart to prayer." Speaking of city graveyards, where the mounds, covered with rank grass, rise high above the level of the flags, — and with which last homes no feeling of rest is connected, lying as they do in the midst of life-traffic, — Holme Lee can yet imagine some, wishful to think that they have not quite done with the stir and the turmoil, the loves and hopes of existence, pre- ferring to moulder where old acquaintance may give their tomb- stone a thought and a glance in passing by, rather than in a still country nook, where the sun, and winds, and rains of heaven can alone light upon them for evermore. Such a se- cluded spot, for example, as the deserted kirk-yard on the east end of Lochlea, where lies the Scottish poet Ross, author of the Fortu7iate Shepherdess, — a fortunate shepherd he, too, in find- ing such a resting-place, exclaims a critic who is familiar with it, and who lovingly describes the trees that cast their " calm or musical shadows " over the graves, — the old castle near at hand, '' silent in its age;" the dark lake, with the bare mountains sink- ing sheer down upon its waters ; only two human habitations in sight ; and all combining to make the scene the " very loveli- ness and grandeur of desolation." Mr. Thackeray somewhere describes a convent cemetery with its many hillocks, the gentle daisies springing out of the grass over them, while beyond the walls you have glimpses of life and the world, and the spires GARDEN OF THE DEAD. 237 and >gables of a city ; a bird alights on a grave, and flies away presently with a leaf in its mouth ; and the visitor anon takes a little flower off the hillock, and kisses it, and goes his way, like the bird, back into the world again, — musing on that silent receptacle of death, with its tranquil depth of calm, out of reach of tempest and trouble. Not away flies the bird in a parallel passage of an American story, which glances from aUttle church- yard to the river below, and to hills cut in purple distance melt- ing far into the east ; the air thick with perfume ; golden bees hanging giddily over the blush in the grass : in the low branches that sweep one grave, the object of the visit, a little bird has built her nest. The bird-dweller completes the rural aspect of the scene ; and to some lookers-on, worn and torn with the wear and tear of city life, such a bird, however homely and common in itself, might seem a bird of paradise, and that gar- den of graves a Garden of Eden, in despite of the graves ; sug- gestive at least of Eden restored, of Paradise regained as well as lost. A very garden of graves is the ideal churchyard of the Chronicles of Clover7iook : there are no cypresses, no weeping willows, no " undertaker yews," but sweet, ordorous shrubs and orange-trees, with bud, blossom, and the ripe fruit ; types of those who lie below. To a garden grave, Southey commits lylonnema, in his Tale of Paraguay : " They laid her in the Garden of the Dead ; Such as a Christian burial-place should be Was that fair spot, where every gi-ave was spread ' With flowers, and not a weed to spring was free ; But the pure blossoms of the orange-tree Dropt like a shower of fragrance on the bier ; And palms, the type of immortality, Planted in stately colonnades appear, That all was verdant there throughout the unvarying year." 238 DUST TO DUST: DUST TO DUST: UNWEPT, UNHONOURED. Jeremiah xxii. 18, 19. JEHOIAKIM, the son of Josiah, king of Jerusalem, of a bad life was to make a bad end. For this was to be the ending of it as the prophet foretold, with the emphasized warrant or authority of a " Thus saith the Lord." When the time should come for Jehoiakim to die, none should lament for him, saying, "Ah, my brother !" or "Ah, lord!" or "Ah, his glory ! " Unwept he should die, and unhonoured should his burial be — even the burial of an ass, drawn and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.* That man is esteemed to die miserable, says Jeremy Taylor in the Holy Dying, for whom no friend or relative sheds a tear, or pays a solemn sigh. " I desire to die a dry death, but am not very desirous to have a dry fwm-al :^ some flowers sprinkled upon my grave would do well and comely ; and a soft shower to turn those flowers into a springing memory or a fair rehearsal, that I may not go forth of my doors as my servants carry the entrails of beast." Jeremy the Christian preacher would have been of one mind with his namesake the Hebrew prophet, in that respect. *' But some so like to thorns and nettles live. That none for them can, when they perish, grieve," says Edmund Waller in a translation of some French lines on fading flowers as a type of frail humanity, — we dying in our autumn, as the flowers in theirs ; and as their leaves lie quiet on the ground, missed only by those who loved them, " so in the grave shall we as quiet be, missed by some few that loved our company," unless indeed like thorns and nettles we have lived, and then to be missed is only in the sense of relief Now and then in history we come upon an instance of such * Into the historical difficulties connected with a literal fulfilment of this prediction, we may here well decline to enter. See the commentators on the passage, or avoid seeing them, — whichever may be best. t Italics in orig. UNWEPT, UNHONOURED. 239 a bad ending as that of Pompeius Strabo, hated by all parties for his selfish rapacity, whose body the Senate allowed to be dragged through the streets with a hook. Of Cirina, one his- torian of Rome writes, that " he died, disliked rather than detested by most men, regretted probably by none." Pizarro, the Conqueror of Peru, perished like a wretched outcast : " There was none, even," in the expressive language of the old chronicler (Gomara), ''to say, God forgive him!" When Charlotte Corday had struck Marat to the heart, the piercing cries of his mistress were an astonishment to her, so incredible had she deemed it that such a man could be loved or regretted by a single fellow-creature. But Byron's note of exclamation, "Ah, surely nothing dies but something mourns!" has its echoes in history : — *' When Nero perish'd by the justest doom Which ever the destroyer yet destroy 'd, Amidst the roar of liberated Rome, Of nations freed, and the world overjoy'd, Some hands unseen strew'd flowers upon his tomb : Perhaps the weakness of a heart not void Of feeling for some kindness done, when power Had left the wretch an uncorrupted hour." But even here the mourning itself was secret, the mourner un- seen, unknown. Dean Swift, in his History of England, gives all proper emphasis to the bad ending that William Rufus made * — how the Red King's corpse was carried to Winchester in a cart, hurriedly and ignominiously, there to be buried the next day, "without solemnity, and, which is worse, without grief" Remembering the prestige attached to the great name of Gustavus Adolphus, it is almost startling to be told of hiifi — not by any cynical Dean of St. Patrick's, or publicist of the Louis Veuillot type, but by soberest of sober historians, that albeit the hero-king died esteemed by all, even by his enemies, he was lamented by no one, not even by those whom he had saved : the Roman Catholics rejoiced over the fall of their * ' ' Few among the worst of princes have had the luck to be so ill beloved or so little lamented." — Swift, Hist, of England. 240 NOT A TEAR FOR THE DEAD. powerful adversary ; and the Protestants, who now thought themselves strong enough without his help, were glad to be freed from a master whom they envied and suspected. One might apply, under reserve, the words of La Bruyere in de- scribing a certain dignified and impressive but unlamented decease : "II a commence par se faire estimer, il finit par se faire craindre. Get ami, si ancien, si necessaire, meurt sans qu'on pleure/' But between the political application and the personal the distinction is one not without a difference that may be felt. A presumably inveterate gambler, and prospectively a ruined one,* is reminded by a caustic philosopher at the close of an unsparing epistle, that if he cannot live, he can die ; and that dying, he will have this consolation : if he has steadily and inexorably vindicated the character of a gamester, his death will inflict no pang upon a single creature left behind him ; and he may find pleasing solace in the reflection that he never did the world a greater service than in now quitting it. Of handsome, useless, worthless James Conyers we hear in the story which describes his violent death, that of all who read an account of it in the newspapers, there was not one who shed a tear for him, not one who could say, " That man once * The ruined one in Mr. Thackeray's grim story, who shoots himself in bed, and is found lying there in a great pool of black blood, has this for his epitaph, and this only : " Regardez un peu," said his landlady to the lookers-on, "messieurs, il m'a gate trois matelas, et il me doit quarante- quatre francs. " This was all his epitaph : he had spoilt three mattresses, and owed the landlady four-and-forty francs. In the whole world there was not a soul to love him or lament him. His best " friend " and inti- mate owns with shame that for this old school acquaintance, the chum of his early days, the merry associate of his recent ones, he had ■' not a tear or a pang," And mark the significant ending, the post mortem, of the Gambler's Death : He was nailed, testifies Michael Angelo Titmarsh, "into a paltry coffin, and buried at the expense of the arrondissement [Paris], in a nook of the burial-ground beyond the Barriere de I'Etoile. . . The three men who have figured in this history acted as Jack's mourners, and wo'e almost drunk as they followed his coffin to its resting- place. . . . After the ceremony was concluded, these gentlemen were very happy to get home to a warm and comfortable breakfast, and finished the day royally at P^-ascati's." — Paris Sketch Book. WITHOUT A SINGLE FRIEND, 241 stepped out of his way to do me a kindness." Ellis Bell's Catherine exclaims to Heathcliff : ''You are mis-erable^ are you not ? Lonely, like the devil, and envious, like him ? Nobody loves you — nobody will cry for you when you die ! I wouldn't be you ! " Catherine spoke , with a kind of dreary triumph. Not many chapters later we come upon the grim record of Heathcliff's death, who^ after all, has one mourner,, and that is " poor Hareton, the most wronged, . , , He sat by the corpse all night, weeping- in bitter earnest. He pressed its hand,, and kissed the sarcastic, savage face that every one else shrank from contemplating." Hawthorne has a suggestive tale of an elderly man, harsh in features and expression, who ordered a stone for the grave of bis bitter enemy,, mth whom he had waged warfare half a lifetime, to their common misery and ruin. The secret of this phenomenon, is explained to be, that hatred had become the sustenance and enjoyment of the poor wretch's soul ; it had supplied the place of all kindly affections ; it had been really a bond of sympathy between himself and the man who shared the passion ;. and when its object died, the unappeasable foe wa;s the only mourner for the deadL Only too cheap and plentiful are such types of character as Mr. Thackeray gave us in Captain Prior,, ^vith his coarse swagger and his Jerem.y Diddierism in the matter of petty loanS). for whom, when he died, only two people in the v/orld were sorry, his daughter Elizabeth, and his wife, who still loved, the memory of the handson^ young man who- had wooed and won her. Mr:. Trcllope's Attorney-general,. Sir AbraJiam Haphazard, bright a;s a diam.ond, and as cutting, but also as unimpressionable, is described as- knowing every on^ whom to know ^vas a.n honour, but without having a. single friend, the meaning of which word was unknown to- him except in its parliamentary sense : as a man of wit,, he sparkled among the brightest at the dinner-tables of political grandees ; glittering sparkles fell from him everywhere indeed, as from hot steely, but no heat ; no cold heart wa& sver cheered by warmth from, him^ no unhappy soul ever dropped a portion of its burden ai 242 ALL ALONE AT THE LAST. his door. " And so he glitters along through the world, the brightest among the bright ; and when his glitter is gone, and he is gathered to his fathers, no eye will be dim with a tear, no heart will mourn for its lost friend." The gentlemanly- George Pauncefort of another novelist of note, utters in the handsomest of rooms and surroundings, and to the best-bred of good hsteners, the lament : " There is scarcely a ruffian who ever went out of the debtor's door who has not been regretted more truly by some one or other than ever I shall be regretted." The Scrooge of Mr. Dickens's first Christmas story is badly off in the same way, though on other accounts \ and when he dreams of himself as dead, it is only to hear pleasantries in chit-chat at his expense, such as one chatterer's comment on its being likely to be a very cheap funeral, " for upon my Hfe I don't know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?" Which another jester won't mind doing if a luncheon is provided ; but he must be fed, if he makes one. Further on we read how the old miser, by hypothesis a corpse, lay in the dark, empty house, with not a man, woman, or a child to say, he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearthstone : " What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think." But in an agony he implores the shadowy presence that attends him to show one living creature, if one be there, that feels emotion caused by his death. Is he to be an exception to the rule of our old English proverb, that when the devil is dead, he never wants a chief mourner ? In James Montgomery's picture of the ideal burying-place of the Patriarchs, it is noteworthy that " not a hillock moulder'd near that spot, By one dishonour'd, or by all forgot ; To some warm heart the poorest dust was dear, From some kind eye the meanest claim'd a tear." But this was in the World before the Flood ; and many of us UNLOVED, UNLAMENTED. 243 now-a-days would incline to say, nous avons change tout cela. It is a commonplace in modern biography, such a passage as this in a letter of Malone about the late Lord Southwell (1766): " So worthless a man, that I beHeve he has not left many wet eyes after him. It appears pretty plain how friendless he must have been," etc. Or such as Southey's memento of Miss Trewbody as entombed in the Cathedral at Salisbury, with a panegyrical epitaph, inscribed on a marble shield supported by two Cupids, who bent their heads over the edge, shedding marble tears larger than grey peas, and something of the same colour : " These were the only tears which her death occasioned, and the only Cupids with whom she had ever any concern." Or such as the notice written by Frederick Perthes of the funeral of Duke Augustus of Saxe-Gotha, half a century ago, — " a melancholy spectacle, no sympathy shown by high or low, town or country. The domestic servants the only mourners, and the duke's favourite cock, which was almost always with him night and day, alone looked solemn and tragical." What says that brawny spearman, Earl Doorm, in one of Mr. Tennyson's Arthurian idylls, to the drooping damsel he finds in tears in a corner of his hall, and whom to see weeping makes him mad : — " Good luck had your good man, For were I dead who is it would weep for me ? " Or what, again, the tyrant Adrastus, in Talfourd's tragedy, when Ion stands by his couch, knife in hand, and bids him, if there is a friend whom he would, dying, greet by word or token, to speak his last bidding : — ** Adras. I have none on earth. If thou hast courage, end me ! Ion. Not one friend ! Most piteous doom !" Agolanti, again, in Leigh Hunt's Legend of Florence, is roughly forewarned of a coming day when he shall take to his bed, friendless and forlorn ; when even — " The nurse that makes a penny of your pillow, And would desire you gone, but your groans pay her, 244 GEDALIAH: FATALLY UNSUSPECTING. Shall turn from the last agony in your throat. And count her wages, '^ Out of that bad dream of his, in his tent, on the eve of Bosworth field, Shakspeare^s Richard starts in affright, and counts his wages : — " Guilty! guilty'! I shall despair. —There is no creature loves me i And, if I die, no soul will pity me : — Nay, M^herefore should they ? since that I myself Find in myself no pity to myself.'' I GEDALIAH: FATALLY UNSUSPECTING. Jeremiah xl. i6; xli. 2. T might almost be called a time of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, for the remnant of His captive people, the short time of Gedaliah's rule over them. He encouraged them to dwell in the land. Jeremiah the prophet came to Gedaliah, and dwelt with him among the people that were left in the land. And in answer to the good-hearted governor's summons to all and sundry, to rest with confidence under his protection, and to cultivate their garden-gi-ounds in peace, none daring to make them afraid, we read that " even all the Jews [that were in Moab, and among the Ammonites, and in Edom, and that were in all the countries] returned out of all places whither they were driven, and came to the land of Judah, to Gedaliah, unto Mizpeh, and gathered wine and sum- mer fruits very much." But it was all too brief a gleam of summer-tide. Ishmael the son of Nethaniah was bent on taking the governor's life; and the design was fully made known to the governor by one who besought his sanction for anticipating the blow. Not merely was Gedaliah peremptory against Johanan's offer to cut off the would-be assassin, but he pooh-poohed the existence of any such project of assassination. He seems to have thought, good easy man, too kindly of GENEROUS INCREDULITY. 245 human nature in general, and of Ishmael in particular. Why- should Ishmael owe him a grudge ? Or, if he did, or fancied fee did, yet what ground was there for suspecting the man, beyond Johanan's heated fancy? So "Gedaliah the son of Ahikam said unto Johanan the son of Kareah, Thou shalt not do this thing: for thou speakest falsely of Ishmael." As though this Ishmael v/ere like the typical one of old, against whom was every man's hand; but unlike him in his hand being against every man, — or indeed against any man, — at all events, against the one man whose life, Johanan alleged, he was bent on taking. Let Ishmael alone; there was no harm in him. Johanan might mean well; but neither did Ishmael m.ean ill. To suspect him of foul play, was to do hira foul wrong. Whether, if Gedaliah had given credence to Johanan's word of warning, he would also have connived at Johanan's device of bloodshed, secretly and swiftiy to be carried out, may be, •and may here remain, an open question. Enough for the purpose of these notes, that he would lend no ear to the warn- ing, that he would give no heed to what he accounted a false alarm; and that the generous incredulity was fatal to him, Free access to him was still, as before, the privilege of Ishmael and his conspirators ; 3.nd at once they made use of it They ate bread together in Mizpeh. And it would appear as if the •conspirators took that opportunity of slaying their host For, " then arose Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and the ten men that were with him, and smote Gedaliah the son of Ahikam with the sword, and slew him whom the king of Babylon had made governor over the land," And it was the second day after the slaying of Gedaliah before any man knew of it. To be slain at table, whether as host or as guest, adds even a blacker shade to the black shadow of death by violence. The perfidious advantage taken of the confidence then and there pledged, by the mere fact of sitting at the same board together, and together breaking bread, and perhaps pledging each the other in cups of wine that maketh glad the heart of anan, — other murder may be strange, and must be foul; f/iis, — 246 SLAIN AT TABLE. " Murder most foul, as in the best it is ; But this most foul, strange, and unnatural." At table fell worthless, wicked Amnon, at the signal of his brother, worthless, wicked Absalom. With confidence came the doomed libertine to the sheep-shearing feast in Baal- hazor, to which Absalom, to make sure of him, had invited all the king's sons. "Now Absalom had commanded his servants, saying, Mark ye now when Amnon's heart is merry with wine, and when I say unto you, Smite Aranon ; then kill him, fear not; have not I commanded you? be courageous, and be vaHant." Evidently their master was prepared for at least some show of reluctance to fulfil such a behest as this. But they were compliant; and the servants of Absalom did unto Amnon as Absalom had commanded. So again with Elah, the son of Baasha, who reigned over Israel in Tirzah for two years. His servant Zimri, captain of half his chariots, conspired against him as he was in Tirzah, drinking himself drunk in the house of Arza, steward of his house in Tirzah, where Zimri went in and smote him, and killed him, and reigned in his stead. Had Zimri peace, who thus slew his master ? It was at a banquet in Jericho that Ptolemy, the son-in-law of Simon the Maccabee, contrived basely to assassinate him and his elder son; the younger, John Hyrcanus, eluded the assassin's toils, and by escaping frustrated his devices, much as the escape of Fleance marred the manoeuvres of Macbeth. Sesostris, after his return from his conquests in Asia and Europe, was invited by his brother, whom he had left viceroy in Egypt, to a banquet, together with his family; and wood being heaped all round the building, the host set fire to it; and if Sesostris effected a very narrow escape, it was only by sacrificing two of his six sons, as Herodotus tells the story, and using their bodies to bridge the circle of flame. In Herodotus too we read of the seven ambassadors sent from Persia by Megabazus to the Macedonian court of King Amyntas, who were by that sovran entertained at a feast, and there, while heavy with wine, assassinated by his son. MURDERED FEASTING. 2^7 The prince, like Absalom, believed himself to have good cause to show, and would have justified himself in the tone of Sciarrha in the play : ^^ Flo. And in your crowned tables And hospitality, would you murder them ? Sci. Yes, and the reason wherefore they were murder'd, Shall justify the deed to all posterity." In his cups slew Alexander Cleitus in his cups. To a feast was Sertorius invited by Perpena, who saw no possibility of openly attacking one who never appeared without an armed body-guard ; to that feast, ostensibly given on account of some victory gained by one of his lieutenants, Sertorius went, and at it he was treacherously murdered by the conspirators. Amleth, prince of Jutland, nominally the original of Hamlet, prince of Denmark, at the feast which was given in honour of his return after prolonged absence, kept himself sober, while zealously plying all the nobles with drink ; and while they lay about, he is said to have loosed a curtain made by his mother which hung about the hall, and, letting it fall on their prostrate bodies, fastened it tight by pegs to the ground, and set the building on fire. When Gibbon, has to relate how the too credulous prince, Gabinius, king of the Quadi, was persuaded to accept the pressing invitation of MarcelHnus, " I am at a loss," he says, " how to vary the narrative of similar crimes ; or how to relate, that in the course of the same year [a.d, 374], but in remote parts of the empire [under Valentinian], the inhospitable table of two Imperial generals was stained with the royal blood of two guests and allies, inhumanly murdered by their order, and in their presence;" the fate of Gabinius and of Para being the same, although the cruel death of their sovran was resented in a very different manner by the servile temper of the Armenians, and the free and daring spirit of the Germans. In the case of the royal Armenian, it was to the subtle prudence of Count Trajan that the execution of the bloody deed was committed ; by him Para was invited to a Roman banquet, which had been prepared with all the pomp and sensuaHty of the East : the hall resounded with cheerful 248 BANQUET MASSACRE. - music, and the company was already heated with wine, when the count retired for an instant, drew his sword, and gave the signal of the murder.* It was as he rose from supper that Gratian, the brother of Valentinian (who made vain entreaties, "pious and pressing," for the corpse), was de- livered into the hands of the assassin by the agent of Maximus (a.d. 383). Milman expatiates on the crime of Leo the Thracian, in treacherously murdering Aspar the Patrician, and his son, to whom he owed his throne : the murder took place at a banquet in the Imperial palace, — the "execrable perfidy" being vindicated to a large part of the Emperor's subjects, because Aspar was an Arian. Odoacer, again, either the victim of treachery, or, as the historian of Latin Christianity admits the alternative, his own treacherous designs, but anticipated by the superior craft and more subtle intelligence of Theodoric, was assassinated at a banquet. -l" After a reign of thirty days on the throne of Carthage, Gontharis was stabbed at a banquet, by the hand of Artaban (a.d. 545). Fourscore of the Moorish deputies, who, at Leptis, sought to renew the alliance of their tribe with Rome, were massacred at the table of Sergius, the governor. The voice of fame, as Gibbon words it, has accused the second Otho of a perfidious and bloody act, the massacre of the senators, whom he had invited to his table under the fair semblance of hospi- tality and friendship. % Midway in the previous century, the * "A robust and desperate barbarian instantly rushed on the king of Armenia ; and though he bravely defended his life with the first weapon that chance offered to his hand, the table of the Imperial general was stained with the royal blood of a guest and an ally." — Gibbon, Roman Empire, ch. xxv. f "After some days had been devoted to the semblance of joy and friendship, Odoacer, in the midst of a solemn banquet, was stabbed by the hand, or at least by the command, of his rival," — Gibbon, chap, xxxix. \ This bloody feast is described in Leonine verse in the Pantheon of Godfrey of Viterbo, whose evidence, however, is, as Gibbon allows, ** reasonably suspected " by Muratori. One of Gibbon's editors notes how the story, having once found its way into Chronologies, is repeated by them for authentic fact. In that of Blair, for instance (1844), *' Otho II. mas- sacres his chief nobility at an entertainment to which he had invited them" (sub anno 981). FA TAL FESTIVITIES, 249 voice of fame commemorates, or the stigma of infamy brands, the promiscuous massacre of fourscore of the Ommiades, who, yielding to the faith or clemency of their foes, were invited to a banquet at Damascus : the board was spread over their fallen bodies, and the festivity of the guests, we are told, was en- livened by the music of their dying groans. It was at supper- time that the Caliph Motawakkel was "cut into seven pieces" by the alien guards whose service he had enHsted. Dante introduces, in the Inferno^ that Friar Alberigo who, having quarrelled with some of his brotherhood (the Frati Godenti^ Joyous Friars), under pretence of a wish to be reconciled, invited them to a banquet, at the conclusion of w^hich he called for the fruit — d. signal for the assassins to rush in and despatch those whom he had marked for destruction. * Celebrated in papal history is the sumptuous repast at which Benedict XIII. entertained (1403) the trembling Cardinals, who dared not disobey his summons. The story goes, that in the midst of the festivity was heard the clang of arms, and soldiers were seen with their gleaming halberds taking their stations in silence. " The Cardinals sat in speechless terror. But Bene- dict desired only to show his power; at a sign they [the soldiers] withdrew. The feast went on ; but if a dark tradition be true, his mercy confined itself to churchmen. Two centuries and a half afterwards the ruins of a hall were shown, in which the Pope had given a banquet of reconciliation to some of the principal burghers of Avignon, and then set fire to the building and burned them all alive." f Only too famous, — and that means infamous,— in Scottish history is the inveigling of the Douglas brothers to Edinburgh Castle, as guests of the young king, James II., himself unaw^are of the design of his un- scrupulous guardians ; at whose bidding the head of a black bull was placed on the table, — known by the Douglases for a sure menace of imminent death ; and in vain the Earl and his * Hence the proverbial saying in Italy, of one who has been stabbed, that he has had some of Fra Alberigo's fruit (Gary). f Bouche, Hist, de Provence, ii. 432 ; Sisniondi, Hist, de France, xii, 380. — Mihnan, Hist, of Lat. Christ., vi. 49. 250 SLAIN A T TABLE. brother sought to escape their fate by leaping from the table in the desperation of dismay. Not actually slain at table, they were hurried to the court-yard after a helter-skelter mock trial, and beheaded off-hand. A proud descendant of the Douglases is made, in The Abbot, to cast it in the teeth of her prisoner at Lochleven, Mary Stuart, that the captive Queen's ancestor, the second James, in defiance of the rights of hospi- tality and of his own written assurance of safety, poniarded the brave Earl of Douglas with his own hand, and within two yards of the social board, at which he had just before sat, the King of Scotland's honoured guest. This was at Stirling, in 1452, when that King was no longer under tutors and governors, but his own master, though in another sense (and a deeper one) not master of himself. In the penultimate act of Schiller's Wallensteinstod one of the conspirators against the Duke of Friedland and his associates thus dismisses one dark design for another and a darker : — " We meant to have taken them alive this evening, Amid the merry-making of a feast, And keep them prisoners in the citadel. But this makes shorter work." The last act opens with these instructions from the same Imperial agent to his subordinate : "Find me twelve strong dragoons, arm them with pikes, — Conceal them somewhere near the banquet-room, And soon as the dessert is served up, rush all in And cry — ' Who is loyal to the Emperor ?' I will overturn the table, whilst you attack Illo and Terzky, and despatch them both." At supper was Charles of Duras secured by Louis of Hungary: At dinner was Count Egmont (so often warned and in vain) made prisoner, together with Count Horn, by their unscrupu- lous host, the Duke of Alva. Lost labour was the love's labour of William of Orange to save his friend. A prudent man fore- seeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished. But to turn from the manner of Gedaliah's death, to the VOID OF SUSPICION. 251 mani>er of the man himself as conducing to it, — his unsus- pecting spirit, that evrjOeta which betokens no guile, and which may signify in excess the characteristic of the dove, when that excess becomes, as such, a defect. For, to be wise as serpents is equally enjoined by Divine monition with the being harmless as doves. Difficile aliquem sicspicatiir malum qui bonus est, says a remembrancer of St. Chrysostom's remark, that no good man is inclined to think evil of another. " Un coeur noble ne peut soupgonner en autrui La bassesse et la malice Qu'il ne sent point en lui." Sir Peter Teazle can enforce the sentiment in his credulous appreciation of Joseph Surface : " Oh, my dear friend, the goodness of your own heart misleads you. You judge of others by yourself." And Joseph, whose whole stock-in-trade of morality is made up of cut-and-dried sentiments, is of course ready with a ditto to match : " Certainly, Sir Peter, the heart that is conscious of its own integrity is ever slow to credit another's treachery." Such a knave as this maxim- monger would probably be included in that category of knaves of which Dr. Whately affirmed, that they can, by the nature of them, form no notion of a nobler nature than their own^ — like the goats in Robinson Crusoe's island, who saw clearly everything below them, but very imperfectly what was above them j so that Crusoe could never get at them from the valleys, but when he came upon them from the hill-top, took them quite by surprise. An honest man, Bacon's Annotator contended, has this advantage over a knave, that he understands more of human nature : for he knows that 07ie honest man exists, and * A cunning man is generally a suspicious one, in Judge Haliburton's judgment, and is as often led into error himself by his own misconcep- tions, as protected from imposition by his habitual caution. The Old Judge, as he called himself, illustrated this in the instance of Mr. Slick, who always acted on a motive, and never on an impulse, and who, con- cealing his real objects behind ostensible ones, imagined eveiybody else to be governed by the same principle of action ; and therefore frequently deceived himself by attributing to others designs that never existed out of his own fancy. 252 THE OVER-SUSPICIOUS concludes that there must be more; and he also knows/ if he is not a mere sim-pleton, that there are some who are knavish ; but the knave can seldom be brought to believe in the ex- istence of an honest man. " The honest man may be deceived in particular persons, but the knave is nire to be deceived whenever he comes across an honest man who is not a mere fool." And impossible of beHef as it may be to the successful knave, the honest man he has victimized would not, even at the worst, exchange dispositions with him. Better trust and be betrayed, thannever trust at all. Though far from dove-like or guileless is the speaker in Schiller's trilogy, what he says is to the purpose : *■* True, I did not suspect \ Were it superstition. Never by such suspicion t' have affronted The human form, oh may that time ne'er come In which I shame me of the infirmity ! . . , This, this, Octavio, was no hero's deed ; T'was not thy prudence that did conquer mine ; A bad heart triumph'd o'er an honest one. No shield received the assassin stroke ; thou plungedst Thy weapon in an unprotected breast — Against such weapons I am but a child." Plutarch winds up his account of Agis, the first king of Lacedemon put to death by the ephori, with the comment, that his friends liad more reason to complain of him than his foes, for saving Leonidas, and trusting his associates, in the undesigning generosity and goodness of his heart. ** By the pattern of his own heart he cut out The purity of theirs," as Perdita has it. The man who is himself void of malice, and cherishes a conscience void of offence, is the slower, as St. Gregory Nazianzen says, to suspect ill of others : ro yap KaKiai e\ev6epov, Kol v7io(^opa)'^^-v/riter, " sont une source de peines, et I'e'poque du bonheur de la vie commence au moment ou elles finissent." Dr. Holmes describes his Dudley Venner, the father of Elsie, as stronger in thought and tenderer in soul than in the first fresh- ness of his youth, when he counted but half his present years; LA CRISE DE QUAE ANTE ANS. 317 he had entered that period which marks the dedine of men who have ceased growing in knowledge and strength : from forty to fifty a man must move upward, or the natural falling oft in the vigour of life will carry him rapidly downward.* Luther pronounced one's thirty-eighth year a specially evil and dangerous one, bringing many heavy and great sicknesses, for which he had astrological and transcendental reasons to allege. For his own part, he, in another place, as he " came nearer and nearer to forty years," thought with himself, " Now comes an alteration." He had mystical interpretations of the fact that neither St. Paul nor St. Augustine preached above forty years. That same forty is a note-worthy number in holy writ. Isaac was forty years old when he married, and so was his elder son, Esau. At forty Moses returned to Egypt. At forty was Ishbosheth made king. Za crise de qimi-ante ans is a pet theme with literary Frenchmen in general, and French physiologists in particular. " C'est, pour les deux sexes, un veritable age climaterique," says Cabanis, of the turnf of forty. Just turned forty, the late Earl of Dudley was able to report to his intimate correspondent, the Bishop of Llandafi', his gradual recovery from a dismal state of nervous depression and agitation : life was no longer a burthen, and he had recovered sufficient self-command not to be a burthen to others. But notwithstanding this partial recovery, he could not help suspecting that a somewhat darker shade was to be spread * " At a period of life when many have been living on the capital of their acquired knowledge and their youthful stock of sensibilities, until their in- tellects are really shallower and their hearts emptier than they were at twenty. ... At this time his inward nature was richer and deeper than in any earlier period of his life," etc. Elsie Venner, ch. xx. t " Vers la quarante-deuxieme annee il se fait, pour I'ordinaire, un changement qui dissipe en grande partie les maladies dominantes jusqu'a- lors, et qui les remplace par des maladies nouvelles." — Rappoi'ts dii Phy- sique et du Morale t. i, § iv. As a familiar illustration of the former set of changes, take what Sir Samuel Romilly says of himself in a letter to Mr. Roget : " My physician tells me that I shall have better health as I advance further in life : so that, unlike most men, I may regard the revolution of time and the approaches of old age as desirable." — Letta'S of Sir S. Romilly, vol. i. let, 4. 3i8 LA CRISE DE QUARANTE ANS. over the remainder of his Ufe. " Up to a certain period hope triumphs over experience — after that, experience gradu- ally extinguishes hope. One sees pretty clearly the best that can come of this life — and that this best is not very good." The life of each individual, in Michelet's words, has its autumn, its warning season, when all fades and withers ; a sort of spu- rious maturity that often comes sooner than 7'ipe age ; and at this point it is that man sees obstacles multiply around him, his hopes failing, and the shadows of the future enlarging by degrees in the waning day. Arrived at the confines of middle age, says Lord Lytton, there is an outward innovation in the whole system ; unlooked-for symptoms break forth in the bodily and in the mental frame. He calls it " that period of existence when a man's character is almost invariably subject to great change ; the crisis in life's fever, when there is a new turn in our fate." From his youth onwards Rousseau had fixed on his fortieth year as the signal for retirement from active life ; and when the time came he found that zme grande revolutio7i venait de sefaire in him, and that a new moral world revealed itself to his gaze. Bernardin de St.-Pierre experienced a like crise ;'^ and so did M. Daunou, in the shape of one of those nervous maladies which, " coi'ncidant avec un age qui est critique aussi pour Thomme," are apt to efi"ect a change in the tone of character and to hHser quelqiie chose en nous. Le'opold Robert, says a biographer, was attacked, like other choice spirits {natures d'eiite), by the so-called " maladie de quarante ans," and succumbed to it. Madam Dudevant has been said to give us to understand' very plainly, that after the age of at most forty, people have nothing better to do than go and hang themselves ; middle life, with her, being a period when the craving for pleasure continues without the power of gratifying it. The many interests, aspirations, and alacrities of youth, its keen pursuits and its fresh friendships, which fill up the * Concerning which M. Sainte-Beuve discourses in the Portraits Litte- raires, telling us of the maladie misanthi-opique, the miserable etat which St.-Pierre describes, that " c'est la crise de quarante ans, que bien des organisations sensibles subissent." (ii. 120.) MIDDLE-AGED. 319 measure of life, and make the single heart sufficient to itself — it is when these things have partly passed away, observes Sir Henry Taylor, and when life has lost something of its original brightness, that men begin to feel an insufficiency and a want ; and he quotes the remark made to him by a Roman Catholic priest, as the result of much observation of life among his brethren, that the pressure of their vow of celibacy was felt most severely towards forty years of age. Well may Boileau take critical account of the opening of his ninth lustre, as he reckons it : " maintenant, que mon age. " Bientot s'en va frapper a son neuvieme lustre." Falstaff indeed speaks of " us youth," despite his um\ieldy paunch and his white hairs. But forty * is by some accounted distinctively within the range of absolute youth; and it is a little piquant to find the old author of The Book of Quinte Essence declaring of that invaluable spirit, that it will bring back the old feeble man to the " first strengthe of youthe," and thus dating the epoch of that first strength : " Withinne a fewe dayes he schal so hool that he schal fele him selfe of the statt and the strengthe of xl yeer, and he schal have greet ioie that he is come to the statt of youthe." But nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower, as in life's morning march when our bosoms were young. The Hebrew prophet's cry is. Woe is me ! when they have gathered the summer fruits ; his soul desires the first ripe fruit ; and better in some respects the bud than the fruit, the blossom than the bud. " When I was young? — Ah, woeful when ! Ah ! for the change 'twixt Now and Then ! * * * * :^ O ! the joys that came doAvn shower-like, Of friendship, love, and liberty, Ere I was old. * ' ' My youth is waning, and has been nigh upon these seven years, I being now in my forty-eighth," says Sir Thomas Lucy, in Lander's Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare. 320 LAPSE OF YOUTH. Ere I was old ? Ah woeful Ere, Which tells me Youth 's no longer here ! O Youth ! for years so many and sweet, 'Tis known that Thou and I were one, I'll think it but a fond conceit — It cannot be that Thou art gone !" We say, with Paracelsus, '' Time fleets, youth fades, hfe is an empty dream." Tis the mere echo of time ; and he whose heart beat first beneath a human heart, whose speech was copied from a human tongue, can never recall when he was living yet knew not this. Nevertheless, long seasons come and go, till some one hour's experience shows what naught, he deemed, could clearer show ; and ever after an altered brow, and eye, and gait, and speech attest that now he knows the adage true, " Time fleets, youth fades, Hfe is an empty dream." Pisistratus Caxton ends a chapter of his memoirs with the record of a crisis in his career, when he felt a revolution in his existence, and knew that it was his youth and its poet-land that were no more, and that he had passed, with an unconscious step,' which could never retrace its way, into the hard world of laborious man. Nulla vestigia retrorsum. Swift indeed has declared that nowise man ever wished to be younger; and a French inaxime says, " II est des hommes qui menent un tel deuil dans leur coeur de la perte de la jeunesse, que leur aima- bilite n'y survit pas." To apply a line of Keble's, " The Man seems following still the funeral of the Boy," and always €71 deuil for it. There are some people, Mrs. Gaskell has remarked, who im- perceptibly float away from their youth into middle age, and thence into declining life, with the soft and gentle motion of happy years ; while others there are who are whirled, in spite of themselves, down dizzy rapids of agony away from their youth at one great bound, into old age with another sudden shock ; and thence into the vast calm ocean where there are no shore-marks to tell of time. *' We mind not how the sun in the mid-sky Is hastening on ; but when the golden orb Strikes the extreme of earth, and when the gulfs TAKING LEAVE OF YOUTH. Of air and ocean open to receive him, Dampness and gloom invade us ; then we think Ah ! thus it is with Youth. Too fast his feet Run on for sight ; hour follows hour, the feast, The revel, the entangling dance, allure, And voices mellower than the Muse's own Heave up his buoyant bosom on their wave. A little while, and then . . . Ah ! stay with me ! When thou art gone. Life may go too ; the sigh That follows is for thee, and not for Life." If there was a day marked on which youdi ceases and age , commences, Walpole would call that the day of one's death ; . the first would be the death of pleasure, the other is only the i death of pain ; and is that such a grievance ? the gouty Epicu- rean asks. Life is too short, complains Madame de Sevigne in one of her letters ; scarcely have we taken leave of youth when we find ourselves in old age. Ten years later, in another letter, Madame strenuously forbids her daughter to speak of her youth as gone,* for that is to make Madame Mere too old. Sainte- - Beuve observes of Madame Necker, that, unHke most women, she was untroubled by regret for youth when fled or beauty faded ; yet one day we overhear a sigh escape her, wh^n she counts her years as thirty-five, and seems to find herself in a new world, and is at a loss to decide whether her departed youth has been a dream, or whether it is now that the dream of life is beginning. But in her case the resources of mature life were already prepared. Not to such as her would apply Mrs. Gore's reflections on eight-and-thirty as so terrible an epoch in the life of a woman of fashion ; the struggle between departing youth and coming age being then of agonizing in- tensity : " a little older, and the case becomes too clear for dispute. At forty, she gives up the field, allowing that Time has * "Je vous defends de parler encore de votre jeunesse comme d'une chose perdue ; laissez-moi ce discours ; quand vous le faites, il me pousse trop loin, et tire a de gyandes consequences." — A Mme. de Grignan, 17^ juin, 1685. Y. 322 THE FIRST GREY HAIR. the best of it. But, for the five preceding years, those years during which, though no longer pretty, a woman may be still handsome, the tug of war is terrific." * A woman, we are assured, never prizes her beauty half so much as when it is for- saking her ; never appreciates the full value of raven locks until it is enforced by the contrast of the first grey hair. Hawthorne's Monsieur du Miroir is an allegory to the purj^ose, of masculine appHcation ; the iter's double in the mirror being his excellent friend and frequent associate until youth is on the wane, when the two become estranged : if they chance to meet, and it is chance oftener than design now, each glances sadly at the other's forehead, dreading wrinkles there, and at temj^les whence the hair is thinning away too early, and at the sunken eyes, which no longer shed a gladsome light over the whole face. Hartley Coleridge accounts it but the captious inference of witlings and scoffers, that attributes to mere sexual vanity that superstitious horror of encroaching age, from which the wisest are not always free : it may be that they shrink from the reflection of their wrinkles, not as from the despoilers of beauty, but as from the avant-couriers of dissolution. Happy they who see through these tokens of autumn into another life's unfading springtide. Like Evangeline, when " Each succeeding year stole something away from her beauty, Leaving behind it, broader and deeper, the gloom and the shadow. Then there appeared and spread faint streaks of grey o'er her forehead — Dawn of another Hfe, that broke o'er her earthly horizon, As in the eastern sky the first faint streaks of the morning." M. Arsene Houssaye somewhere speaks of cette heiire mau- 7'aise du soldi conchant\ de la jeunesse ; when, as Gray words it. * In the writings of George Sand we have a beauty watching the decay of her charms, as line by line, and tint by tint, they fade before her very eyes, and screaming, as well she may, observes a cool English critic, at the sight of a wrinkle ; and we have others greedily reckoning the period that remains to them for possibly inspiring passion, and flying from life when the hope leaves them. t It was while contemplating a magnificent sunset in Rome that Henri Beyle (De Stendhal) was afflicted as by some sudden calamity by the re- DEPARTURE OF YOUTH. 323 " On hasty wings thy youth is flown, Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone." Youth, averred one of Madame d'Arblay's favourite equerries, is the only season of possible happiness, and, that once flown, nothing but pain, mortification, and sorrow remains for mortal man. Walter Savage Landor insists that " The days of our youth are not over while sadness Chills never, and seldom o'ershadows, the heart." The author of Cecil is forward to allow that some men at five-and-thirty are, like oaks and yews at a century, still in their infancy; but a Cis Danby, a rake in his teens, becomes at forty " a very fooHsh fond old man," more foolish and more fond than Lear at double the age. Horace Walpole at fifty writes to George Montagu, " I can bear the loss of youth heroically, provided I am comfortable, and can amuse myself as I like." A year later again, to the same correspondent, he says he " can submit to it with a good grace. There is no keeping off age by sticking roses and sweet peas in one's hair, as Miss Chudleigh does still." M. de Tocqueville at forty-seven cannot describe to a friend " the melancholy reflections that occur to me on youth that has passed away so quickly, and on old age which is approaching." "With what ill-omened rapidity," he exclaims in another letter of an earHer date, " life is beginning to pass ! If I am not mistaken, this is a proof that youth is fled for ever, and that the impressions produced on the mind are becoming fainter ; for life is measured by the number of impressions that remain graven on the memory." Byron makes this entry in his Journal : " I shall soon be six- and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty -five ? '*0 Gioventu! O Primavera ! gioventu dell' anilo. O Gioventu ! primavera della vita ! " membrance that in three months' time he would be fifty years of age ; so entirely was he of one mind with the Greek poet, that ' ' Bien insense est I'homme qui pleure la perte de la vie, et qui ne pleure point la perte de la jeunesse." 324' YOUTH GOING AND GONE. At five-and-twenty Jane Taylor regretted the departure of youth ; but another decade of years quite reconciled her to being as old as she then was, though " many a gay lady of five- and forty retains more of youth than I do." She would once have rehshed, though perhaps she could never have written them, the Wanderer's stanzas on his twenty-fourth year ; some of them at least, such as — " What a thing ! to have done with the follies of Youth Ere Age brings its follies ! — tho' many a tear It should cost to see Love fly away, and find Truth In one's twenty-fourth year. ** The Past's golden valleys are drain 'd. I must plant On the Future's rough upland new harvests, I fear. Ho ! the plough and the team ! Who would perish of want In his twenty-fourth year." To Aurora Leigh there came a morn when she stood upon the brink of twenty years, and looked before and after — *' And, old at twenty, was inclined to pull My childhood backward, in a childish jest To see the face oft once more, and farewell ! " Too veritably a poetess to be really old at twenty ; though by that age, for some, youth has all but departed ; long before they are, in Byron's phrase, getting nigh grim Dante's " obscure wood," that horrid equinox, that hateful section of human years, that half-way house, that rude hut, whence wise travellers drive with circumspection life's sad post-horses o'er the dreary frontier of age, and, looking back to youth, give one tear. (The rhyme tells, albeit the verse be printed as prose.) " Of all the barbarous Middle Ages, that which is most barbarous s the middle age of man," Byron elsewhere affirms : " Too old for youth — too young, at thirty-five. To herd with boys, or hoard with good threescore, — I wonder people should be left alive ; But since they are, that epoch is a bore." As different as the man Wordsworth from the man Byron, RETROSPECT AND REGRETS. 325 is the strain of The Prelude from that of Don Juan ^ in reference to the age in question : "Four years and thirty, told this very weeh, Have I been now a sojourner on earth, By sorrow not unsmitten ; yet for me Life's morning radiance hath not left the hills. Her dew is on the flowers." One of Charlotte Bronte's letters begins, " I shall be thirty- one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream ; and very little use have I ever made it. What have I done these last thirty years ?" The plaint is in the tone of that symboHcal autobiographer in Hawthorne's looking-glass story, who gazes on his mirrored self, that other self, as a record of his heavy youth, wasted in sluggishness, for lack of hope and impulse, or equally thrown away in toil that had no wise motive and had accomplished no good end j and who perceives that the tran- quil gloom of a disappointed soul has darkened through his countenance, where the blackness of the future seems to mingle with the shadows of the past, giving him the aspect of a fated man. In Rojnola^ only a keen eye bent on studying Tito Melema, after his return to Florence, can mark the certain amount of change in him which is not to be altogether accounted for by the lapse of time : it is that change which comes from the " final departure of moral youthfulness.'^ The lines of the face may continue soft, and the eyes pellucid as of old ; but something is gone — something as indefinable as the changes in the morning twilight. *' Time has not blanched a single hair That clusters round thy forehead now ; Nor hath the cankering touch of care Left even one furrow on thy brow. But where, oh ! where 's the spirit's glow, That shone through all — ten years ago ! * I, too, am changed — I scarce know why — Can feel each flagging pulse decay ; And youth, and health, and visions high. Melt like a wreath of snow away. 326 'ABOUT THIRTY YEARS OF AGE: " Time cannot sure have wrought the ill ; Though worn in this world's sickening strife, In soul and form, I linger still In the first summer month of life ; Yet journey on my path below, Ah ! how unlike ten years ago ! " But the reminder is wholesome, that the recollection of the •spring of life being gone, occasions melancholy only because our views are so much confined to this infancy of our existence; and that to cultivate an intimacy with the circumstances relating to its future stages is the only wisdom; for this alone can reconcile us to the decaying conditions of mortality. Frederick Perthes somewhere says, that between youth and age there is a wall of partition, which a man does not perceive till he has passed it ; the transition being generally made in middle life, but passing unnoticed amid the necessary cares and labours of one's calling. Rightly he takes the discovery to be a stimulus to action, not a plea or pretext for languid reverie and unavail- ing regrets. Ever to be noted is the pregnant fact, that when our Lord began to be about thirty years of age, then began His work in earnest. His ministry in public. To many, that age is the signal for selfish indulgence in regrets. To Him it struck the hour of hard work — work that should cease but in death. I PRETENCE-MADE LONG PRA YERS. St. Mark xii. 40. N the audience of all the people was this warning given, to beware of the scribes, by One who taught as having authority all His own, and not as the scribes, — to beware of them, the long-robed, smooth-spoken, self-seeking, pretentious dissemblers, " which devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayers." Short work they made of widows' houses; and their way of compensation was to make their prayers long. MANTIS RELIGIOSA. 327 Dryden's great satire has a vigorous couplet to the purpose : *' Thus heaping wealth, by the most ready way Among the Jews, which was — to cheat and pray." In another part of it we come upon another portrait of a like professor : "Blest times, when Ishban, he whose occupation So long has been to cheat, reforms the nation ! Ishban, of conscience suited to his trade, As good a saint as usurer ever made." La Bruyere holds that " Ton peut s'enrichir dans quelque art, ou dans quelque commerce que ce soit, par I'ostentation d'une certaine probite." Let the probity be piety, and things go better still — for a time. " Why should not piety be made, As well as equity, a trade. And men get money by devotion, As well as making of a motion," etc., asks Butler in his Miscellaneous Thoughts. He is full of such pe7isees. A godly man that has served out his time in holiness — this is another of them — may set up any crime ; " as scholars, when they've taken their degrees, may set up any faculty they please." More familiar are the lines in Hudibras : " Bel and the Dragon's chaplains were More moderate than these by far : For they, poor knaves, were glad to cheat, To get their wives and children meat ; But these will not be fobb'd off so. They must have wealth and power too ; Or else with blood and desolation They'll tear it out o' th' heart o' th' nation." Worthy of study, on ethical grounds as well as entomological, is that species of the Mantis family of purely carnivorous insects, which rejoices in the name of Mantis religiosa, being regarded with religious reverence by the natives of the countries it inhabits, on account of its occasionally assuming the attitude of prayer. This, however, naturalists tell us, is the position in which it Hes in wait for its prey ; the front of the thorax being 528 'CHEAT AND PRAY: • elevated, and die two fore legs held up together, like a pair of arms, prepared to seize any animal that may fall within their reach. " Holy Will, holy Will, there was wit in your skull, When ye pilfer'd the alms o' the poor ; The timmer is scant, when ye're ta'en for a saunt, Wha should swing in a rape for an hour." So judges the author of Holy Willie's Pi'ayer. Swift pitches . one stanza of his Neiv gate's Garland in much the same key : ' *' Some by public revenues, which pass'd through their hands. Have purchased clean houses and bovight dirty lands : Some to steal for a charity think it no sin, ' Which at home (says the proverb) does always begin. But if ever you be Assign'd a tmstee, Treat not orphans like masters of the Chancery ; But take the highway, and more honestly seize." In a memorable ode, Thomas Hood invites us to behold yon servitor of God and Mammon, who, binding up his Bible with -his ledger, blends Gospel texts with trading gammon, *' A black-leg saint, a spiritual hedger, Who backs his rigid Sabbath, so to speak, Against the wicked remnant of the week, A saving bet against his sinful bias — * Rogue that I am,' he whispers to himself, ' I lie — I cheat — do anything for pelf. But who on earth can say I am not pious V " 'Mr. Thackeray's John Brough, managing director of the Inde- pendent West Diddlesex Insurance Company, is punctilious about, having his family to prayers every morning at eight precisely; not that his author (who was even severe against hasty charges of hypocrisy) would call him a hypocrite because he had family prayers : " there are many bad and good men who don't go through the ceremony at all, but I am sure the good men would be the better for it, and am not called upon to settle the question with respect to the bad ones ;" and there- fore a great deal of the religious part of Mr. Brough's behaviour is designedly passed over : suffice it, that religion was always on MAKING A TRADE OF PIETY. 329 his lips ; that he went to church thrice every Sunday, for a show making long prayers. He belonged to what MoHere calls " ces gens qui, par une ame a Finteret soumise, font de deVotion metier et marchandise." A pronounced example figures in Mr. Tennyson's Sea Dreams — that story of a city clerk whose face would darken, as he cursed his credulousness, " And that one unctuous mouth which lured him, rogue, To buy sti-ange shares in some Peruvian mine ;" which oily rogue the impoverished dupe in vain strove to bring to an account, and in vain plied with the demand to be shown the books : "When the great Books (see Daniel seven and ten) Were open'd, I should find lie meant me well ; And then began to bloat himself, and ooze All over \Adth the fat affectionate smile That makes the widow lean, ' My dearest friend, Have faith, have faith ! We live by faith,' said he; * And all things work together for the good Of those' — it makes me sick to quote him — last Gript my hand hard, and with ' God-bless you' went. . . . My eyes Pursued him down the street, and far away, Among the honest shoulders of the crowd, Read rascal in the motions of his back, , And scoundrel in the supple-sliding knee." So false, he partly took himself for true; whose pious talk when most his heart was dry, " Made wet the crafty crowsfoot round his eye ; Who, never naming God except for gain, So never took that useful name in vain ; Made Him his catspaw and the Cross his tool. And Christ the bait to trap his dupe and fool ; Nor deeds of gift, but gifts of grace he forged, And snakelike slimed his victim ere he gorged ; And oft at Bible meetings, o'er the rest Arising, did his holy oily best. Dropping the too rough H in Hell and Heaven, To spread the Word by which himself had thriven." A younger poet has painted for us a banker, well-known as 330 SPECIOUS SERVITORS OF wearing the longest-phylacteried gown of all the rich Pharisees England can boast of — who "knew how to quote both the stocks and the Scriptures, with equal advantage to himself and admiring friends, in this Cant Age." Cynics have nothing better to call him than "that specious old sinner, who would dice with the devil and yet rise up winner" — and before the smash comes, one shrewd observer is convinced that old Ridley's white waistcoat, and airs of devotion, have long been the only ostensible capital on which he does business. "But Heaven forgive me, if cautious I am on The score of such men as, with both God and Mammon Seem so shrewdly familiar." Such men, in a lower range, as Elder Stephen Grab, of Beech- meadows, — "a pious man; at least he looked like one, and spoke like one too," as far as the looking it and speaking it can be enforced by " a face as long as the moral law, and p'rhaps an inch longer, and as smooth as a hone," with a tongue moving so " ily on its hinges, you'd a thought you might a trusted him with ontold gold," at least if you didn't care whether you got it again or no. But the Elder is a representative man, at best, of those who " believe in special ways o'prayin' an' convartin';" " The bread comes back in many days, an' butter'd, tu, for sartin ; I mean in preyin' till one busts on wut the party chooses, An' in convartin' public trusts to very private uses." Macaulay once asked pardon for detaining the House of Commons with the story, from a Spanish novel, of a wandering lad, a sort of Gil Bias, who is taken into the service of a rich old silversmith, " a most pious man," who is always telling his beads, who hears mass daily, and observes the feasts and fasts of the Church with the utmost scrupulosity. The silversmith is always preaching honesty and piety. " Never," he constantly repeats to his young assistant, " never touch what is not your own ; never take liberties with sacred things." Sacrilege, as uniting theft with profaneness, is the sin of which he has the deepest horror. One day, while he is lecturing after his usual fashion, an ill-looking fellow comes into the shop, with a sack BOTH GOD AND MAMMON. 331 under his arm. " Will you buy these ?" says the visitor, and produces from the sack some church-plate, and a rich silver crucifix. "Buy them !" cries the precisian : "No, nor touch them; not for the world. I know where you got them. Wretch that you are, have you no care for your soul?" " Well, then," says the thief, " if you will not buy them, will you melt them down for me?" "Melt them down?" responds the silversmith, "that is quite another matter." He takes the chalice and the crucifix with a pair of tongs ; the silver, thus in bond, is dropped into the crucible, melted, and delivered to the thief, who lays down five pistoles, and decamps with his booty. The young servant stares at this strange scene. But the master very gravely resumes his lecture. " My son," he says, " take warning by that sacrilegious knave, and take example by me. Think what a load of guilt lies on his con- science. You will see him hanged before long. But as to me, you saw that I would not touch the stolen property. I keep these tongs for such occasions. And thus I thrive in the fear of God, and manage to turn an honest penny." And no doubt the silversmith enjoyed among his neighbours a reputation equal to that ascribed by the goldsmith in Shakspeare to a pre- sumably most honest adventurer : ^^ Alerchant. How is the man esteem'd here in the city? Angela. Of very reverend reputation, sir, Of credit infinite, highly beloved, Second to none that lives here in the city ; His word might bear my wealth at any time," Scott's Trumbull of Annan is in semblance a perfect speci- men of the rigid old Covenanter, who will not admit Alan Fairford on Saturday night till prayers are over. " They're at exercise, sir," the visitor is told, and he overhears from within the uphfting of a Scottish psalm. When Mr. Trumbull at last presents himself, it is with his psalm-book in his hand, kept open by the insertion of his forefinger between the leaves ; and he austerely demands the meaning of this unseasonable interrup- tion, A secret sign, or password, is enough to relieve the old dissembler of all this fatigue of dissimulation, while it moves him 332 SPECULATING IN DEVOTION to utter or mutter *' a plague of all fools that waste time,— could you not have said as much at first ?" What cares John Selden to see a man run after a sermon, if he covets and cheats as soon as he comes home ? "I'm not sure, after all, about this religion," says Mr. Shelby to the slave-trader j "the country is almost ruined with pious white people ; such pious politicians as we have just before elections — with pious goings on in all departments of Church and State, that a fellow does not know who'll cheat him next." " Truth is very beautiful, no doubt," morahzes Mr. Isaac Smirk, "but if stark-naked truth was always to stand behind a counter, I should like to know who'd go into the shop. I know the value of truth as well as any man. ... As for what you stupidly call lies, I always looked upon them as necessary tools for business. . . Six days for business, and the seventh for religious duties. . . . I always proved that the false weights had been substituted by a malicious servant. The fines were certainly never returned to me ; but there was not one well-disposed person of the Sunday congregation — and twice a day did I appear in my pew, reserving my evening of rest to look over my books — not one of them who did not believe in my innocence." The Pious Editor's Creed in the Biglow Papers includes this clause, or article : " I du believe in prayer an' praise To him that hez the grantin' O' jobs, — in every thin' thet pays, But most of all in cantin' ; This doth my cup M^ith marcies fill, This lays all thought o' sin to rest, — I don't believe in princerple, But, O, I du in interest." As for " princerple," of the kind glanced at, " comment," as Aurelly exclaims in Beaumarchais, " un principe d'honnetete les arreterait-il, eux qui n'ont jamais fait le bien que pour tromper impunement les hommes !" Must we believe, with Michelet, in regard of Lewis the Eleventh and his charitable donations, that speculating in devotion, often taking the saints and Our Lady for partners, keeping an open account with LONG ROBES AND LONG PRAYERS. 333 them, and trading for mutual profit or loss, he thought by charities of the kind, by petty sums in advance, to secure their interest for some capital stroke? Ferdinand of Aragon's Catholic faith was observed to be marvellously efficacious in advancing his temporal interests : Brantome, Guicciardini, and Machiavelli alike glance at this trait of devotion par ypocrisie; and Prescott shows how scrupulously the king's most objec- tionable enterprises were covered with the veil of religion. Says Waller, " Seeming devotion does but gild a knave, That's neither faithful, honest, just, nor brave ; But where religion does with virtue join, It makes a hero like an angel shine." South refers to the Pharisees of our Saviour's time as by Him represented as "the very vilest of men, and the greatest of cheats" : we have them, says he, amusing the world with pretences of a more refined devotion, while their heart was all the time in their neighbour's coffers. And the "great tools, the hooks or engines, by which they compassed their worst, their wickedest, and most rapacious designs, were long prayers. Prayers made only for a show or colour ; and that to the basest and most degenerous sort of villany, even the robbing the spital, and devouring the houses of poor, helpless, forlorn widows. Their devotion served all along but as an instrument to their avarice, as a factor or under-agent to their extortion. A practice which, duly seen into, and stripped of its hypocritical blinds, could not but look very odiously and ill-favouredly ; and therefore, in come their long robes, and their long prayers together, and cover all." And South takes the plain truth of it to be, that neither the length of the one nor of the other is ever found so useful, as when there is something more than ordinary that would not be seen. This was the gainful godli- ness of the Pharisees ; and he avows his behef, after good observation, that we shall hardly find any like the Pharisees for their long prayers, who are not also extremely like them for something else. The length of the prayers which rapacious scribes made for 334 PROLIXITY IN PRA YER. a show, is obviously mentioned as rather an aggravation than a mitigation of their offence. To pray without ceasing is an apostohc injunction ; but what it enjoins is, that ever prayer- ful spirit which is quite compatible with a deliberate impatience of prolix utterances and diffuse verbiage. Long prayers may be an abomination to Him that heareth the prayer. God is in heaven, and man upon earth ; therefore let man's w^ords be few. The Son of Man, who passed w^hole nights in prayer to God, — whatever interpretation we may put on the original words, — uttered this pregnant caution in His Sermon on the Mount : " But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do ; for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them : for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of,' before ye ask Him."^ And then came a form of prayer, provided for all * The rule is of obvious application in the matter and manner of what we call " saying grace." Half a dozen words, or fewer, heartlessly gabbled over, or apologetically mumbled under one's breath, may be essentially formal — a mere form, and nothing better, without a particle of devotion about them, without the faintest spirit of thanksgiving. But so, in effect upon others, if not in the intent and purpose of the spokesman, may be half a dozen sentences, spun out into what is known by tradition as a long grace. Good taste goes for something after all in society, when the interests of true piety are concerned. In his discourse "against long extemporary prayers," Dr. South remarks that a person ready to sink under his wants, has neither time nor heart to rhetoricate or make flourishes : "No man begins a long grace when he is ready to starve : such a one's prayers are like the relief he needs, quick and sudden, short and immediate : he is like a man in torture upon the rack, whose pains are too acute to let his words be many, and whose desires of deliverance too impatient to delay the thing he begs for, by the manner of his begging it." Elia's famous essay on Grace before Meat suggests a seeming impertinence in interposing a religious sentiment when the ravenous orgasm is upon you : " it is a confusion of purpose to mutter out praises from a mouth that waters." Would Elia then have Christians sit down at table, like hogs to their troughs, without remembering the Giver ? No, he would have them, he protests, sit down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like hogs. " Or if their appetites must run riot, and they, must pamper themselves with delicacies for which east and west are ran- sacked, I would have them postpone their benediction to a fitter season, when appetite is laid ; when the still small voice can be heard, and the reason of the grace returns — with temperate diet and restricted dishes." What he maintains is, that gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for thanksgiving — that the proper object of the grace is sustenance, not relishes ; daily bread, not recondite dainties ; the means of life, and not GARRULITY IN SAYING GRACE. 335 time, — " After this manner therefore pray ye," — even in the terse, compact, comprehensive form of the Lord's Prayer. the means of pampering the carcase. It is in some sort a parallel passage to the one just now quoted from South, that in which Elia professes to be theoretically no enemy to graces, but practically owning that (before meat especially) they seem to him to involve something awkward and unseason- able— the moment of appetite being, perhaps, the least fit season for that exercise. Montaigne on his travels found matter for note-taking and book-making in the fact that when he dined with the Cardinal de Sens, "the blessing and the grace, both very long, were said by two chaplains, who made responses to each other, in the same way as in the Church Service." Monsignor's grace before meat was pitched in a quite different key from that, the key- note of which Ben Jonson struck in perhaps his most characteristic comedy of manners, where we have "an old elder come from Banbury," who " puts in at meal tide, to praise the painful brethren," and "says a grace so long as his breath lasts him." " Dost thou ever," quoth Quarlous to Winwife, "think to bring thine ear or stomach to the patience of a dry grace, as long as thy table-cloth ; and droned out . . . till all the meat on thy board has forgot it was that day in the kitchen ?" In the Diary of the Rev. John Ward, of Stratford-upon-Avon, occurs this entry: "Because conventicles were forbidden in Scotland, one there said grace of an hour and a half long, so couching a conventicle in it." The national usage of long graces, at least in some quarters, is a subject of frequent allusion by Burns ; as in the verse — ' ' The auld Guidmen, about the grace, Frae side to side they bother. Till some ane by his bonnet lays. And gies them't like a tether, Fu' lang that day.' Or as in the Dedication to Gavin Hamilton : " Leara three-mile prayers, and half-mile graces, wi' weel-spread loaves, an' lang, wry faces." Or as in the first stanza of the Address to a Haggis, " Weel are ye worthy o' a grace as lang's my arm" — at which words Sir Walter Scott, in repeating them, would extend his arm over the haggis, a dish after his own heart in the days of his prime. In those days it was, at a dinner of the Abbotsford Hunt, that Dominie George Thomson (himself an eager sportsman) would, as Mr. Lockhart describes it, ' ' favour us with a grace, in Burns's phrase, ' as long as my arm, ' beginning with thanks to the Almighty, who had given man dominion over the fowls of the air and the beasts of the field, and expatiating on this text with so luculent a commentary, that Scott, who had been fumbling with his spoon long before he reached' his Amen, could not help exclaiming as he sat down, ' Well done, Mr. George ! I think we've had everything but the view holla ! ' " In the Haggis poem of Burns it is observable that when grace is said after meat, the very shortest possible form is muttered by the over-crammed master of the feast : " Then auld guidman, maist like to rive, Bethankit hums. " The one word in Burns's italics is seemingly identical with the two which Mrs. Gore indicates in small capitals, when she thus writes of a dinner in 336 GARRULOUS GRACE-SAYING. unwonted company, and of a grace of unwonted longitude, in her Me77ioirs of a Peeress : "Unaccustomed to the jargon of people of their class, I confess that their familiar adaptation of scriptural language appeared to me little short of blasphemy ; nor could I help admiring by \vhat copious replenishments of Sir Obadiah's East India Madeira, Mr. Bumptext repaid himself for the grace in many sections, wherein is diffused the simple thanksgiving before meat, expressed IN two WORDS by wiser Christians." Dr. Holmes is careful to make one of his venerable pastors eschew all verbiage when summoned at a dinner-party by that ' ' peculiar look which he understood at once, as inviting his professional services ; " the good old man is described as uttering a few simple words of gratitude, very quietly, — much to the satisfaction of some of the guests, who had expected one of ' ' those elaborate effusions, with rolling up of the eyes and rhetorical accents, so frequent with eloquent divines when they address their Maker in genteel company." It is of New England the Doctor is treating, be it remem- bered ; not of Old. And perhaps it should be added, of New England when it was newer than it is now; that is to say, older ; only not Old. Edward Irving says in an Ordination charge, ' ' Our fathers would not break bread without a solemn word of prayer which would weary a congre- gation in these times." The Presbyterian chaplain at Sir Duncan Camp- bell's castle of Ardenvohr, delays Dugald Dalgetty's assault on the huge piece of beef that smokes on the board, until the conclusion of a very long grace, betwixt every section of which the famished Rittmaster handles his knife and fork, as he might have done his musket or pike when going into action, and as often resigns them when the prolix chaplain commences another clause of his benediction. When Old Mortality is with difficulty prevailed upon to join his host, Jedediah Cleishbotham, (is it not written in the Tales of my Landlord ?) in a single glass of liquor, and that on condi- tion that he shall be permitted to name the pledge, he prefaces the latter (to the memory of Kirk martyrs) with a grace of about five minutes. When Lady Peveril in person marshals Major Bridgenorth and Alice to the separate room where ample good cheer is provided for them, it is emphatically noted that she ' ' had even the patience to remain while Master Nehemiah Solsgi-ace pronounced a benediction of portentous length, as an introduc- tion to the banquet," — her presence indeed tending to make his prolusion last the longer, and become more than usually intricate and involved, inas- much as he felt himself debarred from rounding it off with his \vonted petition, pungently alliterative, for deliverance from Popery, Prelacy, and Peveril of the Peak. Dominie Sampson, called upon by his patron to say grace, ' ' did accordingly pronounce a benediction, that exceeded in length any speech which Mannering had yet heard him utter." (According to Miss Mannering, some twenty years later, the creature ' ' pronounces a grace that sounds like the scream of the man in the square that used to cry mackarel.") Old Joseph, in Wuthering Heights, shrewdly conjectures that Catherine and Heathclifif are staying away from the supper-table in order to avoid hearing his protracted blessing : ' ' And on their behalf he added that night a special prayer to the usual quarter of an hour's supplication before meat," and would have tacked another to the end of the grace but for a decisive interruption. The veteran was a relic of what Scott calls the righteous period, *' When folks conceived a grace Of half an hour's space, And rejoiced in a Friday's capon." SPOILT SUPPER AND GRACELESS TEA, 337 Not that the eighteenth century, or its immediate predecessor, monopolized this conception — conception is a blessing, as Hamlet says. The author of Harold, describing a banquet under the royal roof of Edward the Con- fessor, is careful to tell us that, hungry as were the guests (William of Normandy and Odo of Bayeux included), it was not the custom of that holy court to fall to without due religious ceremonial. The rage for psalm- singing was then at its height in England ; psalmody had excluded almost every other description of vocal music ; and it is even said that great festivals on certain occasions were preluded by no less an effort of lungs and memory than the entire songs bequeathed to us by King David. "This day, however, Hugoline, Edward's Norman chamberlain, had been pleased to abridge the length of the prolix grace, and the company were let off, to Edward's surprise and displeasure, with the curt and unseemly preparation of only nine psalms and one special hymn in honour of some obscure saint, to whom the day was dedicated." This performed, the guests resumed their seats, while Edward murmured an apology to William for the strange omission of his chamberlain, thrice repeating ta himself, deprecatingly, "Naught, naught — very naught." The late Mr. Irving has been cited in the foregoing paragraph, as glancing at the impatience of degenerate to-day's men with what our fathers looked for as a matter of course. Of him a story is told by the Rev. Edward Craig, formerly of Edinburgh, who met him at a supper-party, some of the guests at which had three miles to walk home after that meal ; before the commencement of which, however, the host requested the gi-eat preacher, then lionizing in the North, to read the Bible and expound. This he did, and without a sign of nearing an end until midnight. " The supper was of course either burnt up or grown cold. When the clock struck twelve, Mr. P. tremblingly and gently suggested to him that it might be desirable to draw to a close. ' Who art thou,' he replied, with prophetic energy, * who darest to interrupt the man of God in the midst of his administrations?'" He pursued his commentary, it seems, for some time longer, then closed the book, and waving his long arm over the head of his host, uttered an audible and deliberate prayer that his offence might be forgiven him. But possibly Mr. Craig did not care to paint his picture in faint water-colours. In his inimitable way, Elia relates his once drinking tea in company with two Methodist divines of different persuasions, one of whom, before the first cup was handed round, put it to the other, with all due solemnity, whether he chose to ' ' say anything." The reverend brother replied that it was not a custom known in his church (before tea) ; and in this courteous evasion the other acquiesced for good manners' sake, or in compliance with a weak brother, so that the supplementary or tea-grace was waived alto- gether. Lamb speculates on the spirit with which Lucian might have painted two priests, of his religion, playing into each other's hands the compliment of performing or omitting a sacrifice — the hungry god, mean- time, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils hovering over the two flamens, and (as between two stools) going away in the end without his supper. 338 FEARLESS AND DEFIANT. FEARLESS AND DEFIANT, St. Luke xviii. 2, 4. HEAR what the unjust judge saith : "I fear not God, nor regard man." Fearing nothing, is his device. Few- things are nobler than fearlessness proper. But there is such a thing as fearlessness improper, fearlessness to a fault. It is the devout man alone who can be bold — be bold and be not too bold ; fearless in a good cause, but defiant only of evil ; so that he may boldly say, ''The Lord is my helper, and I will not fear what man shall do unto me." He both fears God and regards man ; but he so fears God as not to regard the menaces or machinations of wicked men. To fear God, is the first article in the whole duty of man. And he is best pre- pared to fear not what man shall do unto him, who makes it his law of life, and a law of love, to serve God with reverence and godly fear. '' The Lord is my light and my salvation ; whom shall I fear ? the Lord is the strength of my life ; of whom shall I be afraid ? . . . Though an host should en- camp against me, my heart shall not fear ; though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident." Fearlessness like this comes of the fear of God, and depends for very existence upon it ; grows with its growth, strengthens with its strength, declines with its decline. Fearlessness that is not the result of godly fear, may discover or assert itself in a variety of forms. Besides the defiant recklessness of the unjust judge, there is the fearless- ness that arises from sheer stolidity, from mere incapacity to realize the nature or the extent of imminent peril. Dr. Croly observes of the singular presence of mind found in some men in the midst of universal perturbation, — which is one of the most efl'ective qualities of our nature, and is commonly at- tributed to the highest vigour of heart and understanding, — that it is not always deserving of such proud parentage ; it is some- times the child of mere brute ignorance of danger, sometimes of habitual ferocity, sometimes of madness — of the fierce energy that leads the maniac safe over roofs and battlements. STOLID AUDACITY. 33q " Quand plus d'un brave aujourd'hui tremble, Moi, poltron, je ne tremble pas." But that may only indicate how inferior the poltron is to. the hrave in clearsightedness as well as in constitutional courage. There may be, as Mr. Carlyle says, an absence of fear which arises from the absence of thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and stupid fury : " We do not value the courage of the tiger highly. . . . The tiger before a stro?iger foe — flies : the tiger is not what we call valiant, only fierce and cruel." In another of his works the same writer recognizes in a certain notorious French adventuress " a strength of transcendent audacity, amounting to t]je bastard- heroic," yet accounts her the furthest in the world from a brave woman. AVithout intellect, imagination, power of attention, or any spiritual faculty, how brave were one, he exclaims, — "with fit motive for it, such as hunger!" How much might one dare, by the simplest of methods, by not thinking of it, not knowing it ! Shakspeare's Orleans will not accredit the English with any but stupid brute courage : if they had any apprehension, they would run away from him; and his reply to a companion's remark, that the island of England breeds very valiant creatures, their mastiffs being of unmatchable courage, is the exclamatory, " Foolish curs ! that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear, and have their heads crushed like rotten apples. You riiay just as well say, — that's a valiant flea, that dares eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion." "Just, just," assents the Constable of France, — it is on the eve of Agincourt, — " and the men do sympathise with the mastiffs in robustious and rough coming on, leaving their wits with their wives." One of Byron's battle pictures includes the figure of " a mere novice, whose Mere virgin valour never dream'd of flying, From ignorance of danger, which indues Its votaries, like Innocence relying On its own strength, with careless nerves and thews." Discoursing of the possibility of some virtues coming to a 340 IRRA TIONAL FEARLESSNESS. man through personal defects, Montaigne instances firmness in danger and contempt of death, as often to be found in men for want of well judging of such matters, and not apprehend- ing them for such as they are. Want of apprehension, and sottishness, he goes on to say, are apt to counterfeit virtuous effects ; and he quotes what an Italian nobleman once said in his hearing, to the disadvantage of his own nation : that the subtilty of the Italians and the vivacity of their conceptions made them far foreseeing of danger, and prudently precaution- ary in guarding against it ; whereas the Germans and Swiss, a heavier and thicker-skulled race, had not the sense to look about them., even then, when the blows were falling about their ears. * " Raw soldiers rush into danger with much more precipitation than after they have been well beaten." A pretty kind of valour, exclaims Ben Jonson's Practice, in the discussion on certain varieties of that virtue, real or reputed ; such a valour as is due merely to ''an indiscreet presumption,'^ or again to " a dull, desperate resolving, In case of some necessitous misery, or Incumbent mischief; narroAvness of mind,. Or ignorance, being the root of it." Coleridge philosophizes somewhere on the scope of the pro- verb that fortune favours fools; as where safety and success are the actual result of ignorance of danger and difficulty; which ignorance precludes the despondence that might have kept the more foresighted from undertaking the enterprise, as well as the depression which would retard its progress, and those overwhelming influences of terror in cases where the vivid perception of the danger constitutes the greater part of the danger itself.* Captain Booth is probably speaking for Fielding himself when he professes to think, after much personal observation, that the courage as well as cowardice * As where, to take Coleridge's own illustration, men are said to have swooned and even died at the sight of a narrow bridge, over which they had ridden the night before in perfect safety ; or at tracing their footmarks along the edge of a precipice which the darkness had concealed from them. VARIETIES OF COURAGE. 341 of fools proceeds from not knowing what is or what is not the proper object of fear; so that he would account for the ex- treme hardiness, or fool-hardiness, of some men, in the same manner as for the terrors of children at a bugbear : the child knows not but that the bugbear is the proper object of fear, the blockhead knows not that a cannon-ball is so. The courage of despair is another illegitimate \'uriety. Milton's Moloch, the fiercest spirit that fought in heaven, now fiercer by despair, rather than be less than the greatest, cared not to be at all ; with that care lost, ** Went all his fear ; of God, or hell, or worse, He reck'd not." Satan's fearlessness is of another t5^e. Hell trembles at the stride of Death : the undaunted Fiend what this new monster may be, admires, not fears. Created thing he fears not When Rosinberg asks Frederic, in the play, " Hast thou no fear?" and to the question in return, "What dost thou mean?" rejoins, "Hast thou no fear of death?" the younger man's reply is, — *' Fear is a name for something in the mind, But what, from inward sense, I cannot tell, I could as little anxious march to battle. As when a boy to childish games I ran. Ros. Then as much virtue hast thou in thy valour As when a child thou hadst in childish play. The brave man is not he who feels no fear. For that were stupid and irrational ; But he whose noble soul its fear subdues, And bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from. " Do we not know, to apply the image of another dramatist, the noble steed will start aside, scared lightly by a straw, a shadow, a thorn-bush in the way, " while the dull mule plods stupidly down the dizziest paths?" There are such things as fears of the brave,* as well as follies of the wise. That great * Porthos, "the bravest of the brave," is fain to own that every man has his day, and that there are certain days when one feels less pleasure than upon others in exposing oneself to a bullet or a sword-thrust. Not 342 ANOMALIES IN COURAGE. active courage in opposing danger, and great repugnance to passive endurance and unknown change which are indepen- dent of our exertions, are perfectly consistent, is a point which Joanna BailHe has taken pains to illustrate in more than one of her Plays on the Passions. As she reminds us in a preface, soldiers who have distinguished themselves honourably in the field have died pusillanimously on the scaffold, just as, on the other hand, men brought up in peaceful habits, who, without some very strong excitement, would have marched with tre- pidation to battle, have died under the hands of the execu- tioner with magnanimous composure. " A man actively brave, when so circumstanced that no exertion of strength or bold- ness is of any avail, finds himself in a new situation, contrary to all former experience ; and is therefore taken at a greater disadvantage than men of a different character." In her prose tragedy of The Dream, men marvel at the change wrought within so short a time on the bold and gallant Osterloo, and speculate as to the cause of it. " Have I not told thee, Morand," says a monk, "that fear will sometimes couch under the brazen helmet as well as the woollen cowl ?" " Fear, dost thou call it?" answers Morand: "Set him this moment in the field of battle, with death threatening him from a hundred points at once, and he would brave it most valiantly." Benedict prevents the monk from replying, with a "Hush, brother!" and the soldier, with a "Be not so warm, good lieutenant ; we believe what thou sayest most perfectly. The bravest mind is capable of fear, though it fears no mortal man. that he believes he shall ever die from either of these. In that case, a friend submits, Porthos is afraid of nothing : ah, but water perhaps ? No ; Porthos swims like an otter. Of a quartan fever, then? Not at all. But there is one thing of which, he confesses, he is "horribly afraid," and that is politics. He dreads Cardinal-Ministei-s and their manoeuvres, for he has known both Richelieu and Mazarin of old. So with the Dagobert of an equally popular French roman. ** I have never feared death — I am not a coward — and yet I confess, yes, I confess it, these black robes frighten me." Of Marshal Simon, in another volume, we read, that in spite of his natural intrepidity, so nobly proved by twenty years of war, the ravages of the cholera overwhelmed him with involuntary dread. FEARS OF THE BRAVE. 343 A brave man fears not man ; and an innocent and brave man fears nothing." "Ay, now you speak reason," quoth Morand; " call it fear then, if you will." Not so ready to acquiesce in Benedict's reasoning is the Imperial ambassador, who will not hear of Osterloo and fear coupled together, until he shall find the lion and the fawn couching in the same lair. He would have been as impatient, haply, to hear a latter-day divine declare it to be pure nonsense to talk about being incapable of fear ; for though you may regard fear as unmanly and un- worthy, and may repress the manifestations of it, the state of mind which follows the perception of being in danger, is fear ; and as surely as the perception of light is sight, so surely is the perception of danger fear. The thoughtful man recognizes the peril, admits that he shrinks from it, and takes pains to protect himself, but will run risks whenever duty requires it. " This is the courage of the civilized man, as opposed to the blind, bull-dog insensibility of the savage. This is courage — to know the existence of danger, but to face it nevertheless." It appears in manfully facing risks which are inevitable, but not in running into needless peril, with " young rifleman fool- hardiness." Uncle Toby is told by Trim, ''Your honour fears not death yourself," and answers, " I hope, Trim, I fear nothing, but the doing a wrong thing." And the Corporal caps Obadiah's praise of his Captain as a kindly-hearted gentleman, with a heart as soft as a child for other people, by affirming him to be as brave a one too as ever stepped before a platoon ; one who would march up to the mouth of a cannon, though he saw the lighted match at the touch-hole. M. Edgar Quinet, in an appreciative analysis of one of the old chanso7is de geste about Roland and Oliver, " deux paladins de Charlemagne," especially admires " le tremblement de ces deux hommes invincibles devant le seraphin desaraie." Scott makes Contay, '• brave as he was in battle," tremble outright at the frantic rage exhibited by Charles of Burgundy. In Woodstock he describes Colonel Everard, who so often had braved death in the field of battle, as experiencing the agony which fear, indefinitely caused, imposes on the brave man, 344 FEARLESS AND DEFIANT. acute in proportion to that which pain inflicts when it subdues the robust and healthy. It being found impracticable to arrange a personal meeting between Elizabeth of England and Henry IV. of France, shortly before her death, the rumour ran that the great king, whose delight was in battle, and who had never been known to shrink from danger on dry land, was appalled at the idea of sea-sickness, and even dreaded the chance of being kidnapped by the English pirates. The boast of Gestas, the " mauvais larron " or bad thief, as contrasted with the " bon larron," the good or penitent one, in the old French Mystery of the Passion, starts very much in the style of the unjust judge, in his soliloquy : " Je ne crains rien, ni Dieu, ni diable, Ni hom, tant soit epouvantable." It is the bad eminence of Jehoiakim and his retainers, that when the words of the roll were read, and burnt, they were not afraid, nor rent their garments, neither the king nor any of his servants that heard all these words. The Sea-king, in the Saga of King Olaf, contemptuously rejects the offer of the latter : " Neither fear I God nor Devil ; thee and thy Gospel I defy;" and defiantly he dies — bitten to death by the adder his foemen force to glide between his distended jaws : " Sharp his tooth was as an aiTow, As he gnawed through bone and marrow ; But without a groan or shudder, Raud the Strong blaspheming died." Evelyn cannot record in his Diary without something of ad- miration, in the older and larger sense of the word, the un- concerned way in which Col. Vrats, the " execrable murderer " of Mr. Thynn, "went to execution like an undaunted hero;" and how " Vrats told a friend of mine who accompanied him to the gallows, and gave him some advice, that he did not value dying of a rush, and hoped and believed God would deale with him like a gentleman. Never man went so uncon- INACCESSIBLE TO FEAR. 345 cerned to his sad fate." Odysseus could not have more com- placently chanted his couplet, ** Let ghastly death in any form appear, I see him not, it is not mine to fear." Balfour of Burley, setting his foot on Bothwell's body as he fell at Drumclog, and a third time transfixing him with his sword, bade him " Die, wretch, die ! die, blood-thirsty dog ! die as thou hast lived ! die, like the beasts that perish — hoping nothing — beHeving nothing," "And fearing nothing!" said Bothwell, collecting the last^ effort of respiration to utter the defiant last words, and expiring as soon as they were spoken- Bertram in Maturin's tragedy is rated by the Prior much as Bothwell in Scott's novel is by the Puritan : ** Oh, thou art on the verge of awful death, . . - But terrors move in thee a horrid* joy, And thou art harden'd by habitual danger Beyond the sense of aught but pride in death. " It is the distinctive trait of the celebrated Treize ho??imes in Balzac, that they are ^' inaccessibles a la peur, n'ayant tremble ni devant le prince, ni devant le bourreau, ni devant I'inno- cence." Adrastus in the tragedy fires up at the bare mention of fear: " Fear! dost talk Of fear to me ? I deem'd even thy poor thoughts Had better scann'd their master. Prithee tell me In what act, word, or look, since I have borne Thy converse here, hast thou discem'd such baseness As makes thee bold to prate to me of fear?" In Macaulay's poem of Tii'zah and A/iirad, when a strange horror comes on all present at the marriage feast, and the far-famed harp of gold drops from Jubal's trembling grasp, and the bride clings to the bridegroom, frantic with dismay, " and the corpse-like hue of dread Ahirad's haughty face * Horrid is so weU-wom a phrase in the dramatic works of Maturin's time, and earlier, as to be a worn-out one. The constant use of it is a blemish in Joanna Baillie's Plays on the Passions. 346 ABSOLUTE FEARLESSNESS. o'erspread," even the tigers to their lord retreat, and couch and whine beneath his feet ; — ' * All hearts are cowed save his alone Who sits upon the emei-ald throne ; . . . For on the soul of the proud king No terror of created thing From sky, or earth, or hell, hath power." Craignez encor la foiidre, says Corneille's Dom Arias to the Count, who rt-^X\^^ Je r atiendrai sans peu7' ; and a further me- nace only produces the line : " Qui ne craint point la mort ne craint point les menaces." Gibbon says of the bold declara- tion made by Honorius, that his breast had never been susceptible of fear {iiec me timor impulit ullus), that it did not probably obtain much credit, even in his own court. That emperor was not altogether of Philaster's temperament, who never yet saw enemy that looked so dreadfully, but that he thought himself as great a basihsk as he ; nor beast that he could turn from ; and who, besought to hide himself from a redoubtable and hostile prince, so indignantly scouts the sug- gestion : ' * Hide me from Pharamond ! When thunder speaks, which is the voice of Jove, Though I do reverence, yet I hide me not." Of him is testimony borne to the arrogant princess, " Fear, madam ! sure, he knows not what it is." Admiral Lord Howe once said, but perhaps it was in his haste, " Frightened, sir ! I never was frightened in my life." The word "fear" was not in his vocabulary, says the Countess Brownlow of Lord Castle- reagh. It has been said of the Napier brothers, five in all, that, strong as was the family likeness among them in every salient point of intellectual and moral character, the one quality which chiefly marked them all, and separated them from the rest of the world, was their absolute fearlessness of nature. Admiring critics regret in them the want of that repose of nature which ought to accompany fearlessness. But each brother of the five might set up as sound and strong a claim as John Knox himself to the eulogium uttered over that FEMININE FEARLESSNESS. 347 reformer's grave, "There lies one who never feared the face of man." They would, either of them, all of them, have been hail fellow, well met ! with that Dutch colonel. Van Gieselles, of whom the historian of the United Netherlands quaintly says, that, in his defence of the Polder Fort, he was ready to fight the west wind, the North Sea, and Spinola at any moment, singly or conjoined. Catherine II. of Russia has been spoken of as fearing nothing, not even madness, and gentle from that very absence of fear. Romancers revel in reproducing "souls feminine" of this masculine order. Miss Manuel, in Never Foj'gotten, answers grave warnings with a flash of fire from her eyes direct to the forewamer's face, and with the reply : " I have a strong constitution, and fear nothing." Mrs. Ireton Bem- bridge, in Black Sheep, avows herself "not at all clever," "only courageous— 'plucky,' your English ladies call it, I think, in the last new style of stable and barrack-room talk. I am that ; I don't think that I could be afraid of anything or any one." When Henry Warden admonishes Queen Mary to work out her salvation with fear and trembling, "I cannot fear or tremble," replies the Queen; "to Mary Stewart such emotions are unknown." "I don't know what fear is," Miss Forrester assures the Count ; " It would be well for some men if they could say the same." And we are told of the Count, that, although no coward, — there she wronged him, — a cold instinctive shudder did, nevertheless, come across him as, walking away, he recalled the expression of that woman's eyes. Woman's appreciation of absolute fearlessness on man's part, and her impatient scorn of any womanish weakness of spirit in him, is illustrated in Beaumont and Fletcher's Amazon play, T/ie Sea-Voyage^ where Crocale expatiates on the in- domitable manliness of her prisoners, who meet all sorts of cruelties like pleasures. "Have they not lives and fears?" asks Clarinda. And Crocale's answer is, — ' ' Lives they have, Madam ; But those lives never linkt to such companions As fears or doubts are. " 348 FEARLESS AND DEFIANT. An altar, for human sacrifice apparently, is reared, and " hor- rid music " is heard, " infernal music, fit for a bloody feast," and the prisoners deem it prepared to kill their courage, ere soul from body is parted. But let the dispensers of death do their worst : " They that fearless fall, deprive them of their triumph." Each prisoner is primed to say with Seleucus in another of the partners' plays, — '* If my death be next, The summons shall not make me once look pale." The Argantes of Tasso's epic confronts the last enemy with like assurance — defiant in death, and against it : "Argantes died, yet no complaint he made, But as he furious lived he careless dies ; Bold, proud, disdainful, fierce, and void of fear, His motions last, last looks, last speeches were." In this resembling the dead warrior, of whom we have a glimpse in a later canto — when Vafrino finds the grass be- smeared with drops of blood, and him whose life has thus drained away : " his face to skies He turns, and seems to threat, though dead he lies." A face to gaze on with less of horror, but perhaps equal interest, is that of Crescentius, as depicted in a modern lyric — in whose eye there was a quenchless energy, " A spirit that could dare The deadliest form that death could take. And dare it for the daring's sake." Moore's Mokanna is among the sinister specimens of the fearless and defiant : " He knew no more of fear than one who dwells beneath the tropics knows of icicles." Shall we heap together a mass medley of miscellaneous samples from prose fiction? There is Mr. Trollope's Burgo Fitzgerald, for instance, of whom, as he quietly boasts, no one could say that he was afraid of anybody or of anything. From Sir Walter Scott come examples by the dozen. Michael Turnbull tells De Walton, in Castle Dangerous ^ that he has no more EXAMPLES FROM SIR WALTER SCOTT. 349 fear in facing whatever that English governor can do^ than he has in levelling to the earth it grows upon, the sapling which, suiting the deed to the word, he strikes with his battle- axe from a neighbouring oak-tree. " Fear ! " exclaims El Hakim, in The Talisman^ when Sir Kenneth asks him in the desert what he fears from yonder Christian horsemen : "Fear!" repeating the word disdainfully, "The sage fears nothing but Heaven." The parting words of the Hermit of Engaddi to the Grand Master are, — "And for thee, tremble!" "Tremble!'^ replied the Templar, contemptu- ously, "I cannot if I would." That other Templar in Ivanhoe, Brian de Bois-Guilbert, is characterized by Cedric, on the word of returning warriors from Palestine, as a hard- hearted man, who "knows neither fear of earth nor awe of heaven." Front-de-Boeuf alleges of him that he recks neither of heaven nor of hell. With a volley of Dutch oaths Dirk Hatteraick swears it shall never be said that he feared either dog or devil. To Bertram's whisper to Dandie Dinmont, in the same story, not to be afraid of Meg Merrilies in her cavern, " Fear'd ! fient a haet care I," says the dauntless farmer, " be she witch or deevil ; it's a' ane to Dandie Dinmont>" Cleveland tells Noma, in The Pirate^ to call forth her demon, if she commands one ; — " I have been long in- accessible both to fear and to superstition." A man that, like him, has spent years in company with incarnate devils, can scarce, he takes it, dread the presence of a disembodied fiend. One other example of Sir Walter's fearless wrongdoers we have in the titular Earl of Etherington, who thus touches on his correspondent's allusion to possible misgivings and disquietude : "Do I not fear the future? Harry, I will not cut your throat for supposing you to have put the question, but calmly assure you, that I never feared anything in my life. I was born without the sensation, I believe; at least, it is perfectly unknown to me." Lord Lytton endows his Guy Darrell with " that superb kind of pride, which, if terror be felt, makes its action impossible, because a disgrace," and bravery a matter of course, simply because it is honour. Mr. 350 PONTIUS PILATE, THE GOVERNOR. Kingsley pictures his Hereward, " the last of the English," standing staring and dreaming over renown to come, a true pattern of the half-savage hero of those rough times, capable of all virtues save humility, and capable, too, of all vices except cowardice. PONTIUS PILATE, THE GOVERNOR. St. Matthew xxvii. ; St. John xviii., xix. PONTIUS PILATE, the governor, is in some sort a representative man as ruler who rules et qui ne gouvernt pas. The late Lord Brougham, in his inaugural address to the Social Science Congress in 1862, illustrated by several historical examples the proposition he strenuously enforced, that the gravest offence which rulers can commit, is the yield- ing of their own opinion to the pressure of the multitude. After relating how a prince, the most accomplished warrior and statesman of his time, Bedford, tarnished his great reputa- tion by yielding to public clamour, and sacrificing the Maid of Orleans to its fury, well aware that she had committed no offence, and was a prisoner of war, after rendering services beyond all price to her sovereign, the duke's ally ; the aged orator went on to say, " But a yet more memorable instance of this heinous crime, vainly sought to be disguised under the name of weakness, is the great Sacrifice, suffered, nay designed by Providence, acting as ever through second causes, the giving up our Saviour by a governor who thrice over declared his belief in the innocence, nay in the Divine mission of Jesus, but unable to resist the clamour of the mob, when referring to Caesar, and using his name as well as the high priest's — a Church and King mob ; and when we hear sceptics, or rather unbelievers, commending Pilate for his fairness in declaring the mob's victim guiltless, and his courage in standing up against the priests, their leaders, it is exactly that which works his condemnation, and of which he himself distinctly expressed AN EXECRATED NAME. 351 his shame, ascribing it to his blameable weakness, as all do who have acted this atrocious part, when the danger is over which they have escaped by their baseness." Lord Brougham adds, that Pilate in truth confessed himself guilty of murder, and dismisses him with a glance at the " universal and merited contempt " into which he fell, at the removal of him from his government, and at his alleged death by his own hand. A branded name, for all time, is that of Pontius Pilate, the governor. *' Ignominy and shame Pursue thy life, and live aye with thy name !" is the sort of wish that seems to have attached to him, and blighted his career, and blasted his credit. To be nameless in worthy deeds, says Sir Thomas Browne in his Urn Burial, exceeds an infamous history; and after citing the Canaanitish woman as living more happily without a name than Herodias with one, who, he asks, " had not rather have been the good thief, than Pilate?" When Sim.eon StyHtes, in the Laureate's poem, would avow with unsurpassable emphasis the flagrant wickedness of his nature, he couples Pilate with Judas as saintly in comparison : *' From my high nest of penance I proclaim That Pontius and Iscariot by my side Showed like fair seraphs." Commenting on Spenser's consignment of Pilate to the " loathly lakes" of Tartarus, Leigh Hunt indulges in a fancy of the astonishment of this Roman Governor of Jerusalem, could he have foreseen the destinies of his name. " He doubtless thought, that if another age spoke of him at all, it would treat him as a good-natured man who had to rule over a barbarous people, and make a compromise betwqen his better judgment and their laws and prejudices." Whereas, in point of fact, no name, except Iscariot's, has received more execration from posterity. "Ce Ponce-Pilate . . . ne se doutait guere de I'immortalite qu'il se preparait en faisant mettre en croix un juif obscur," says M. Sylvestre de Sacy, in his review of 352 PONTIUS PILATE, THE GOVERNOR. Salvador's Domination Romaine en Jtidee. It is markworthy that in the old mystery plays of the Passion, the actor who took Pilate's part made a point of speaking in a hoarse, gruff voice, calculated to set every one against him '^ as a matter of principle and a matter of course. Hence the allusion in Chaucer to the rude rough miller who swore by blood and bones, and who " m Pilates voys began to crye." As procurator, Pilate must be got by instant pressure and urgent importunity to ratify the condemnation of the Sanhedrim, which, since the occupation of the Romans, as historical critics explain, was no longer sufficient > — not that the procurator was invested, like the Imperial legate, with the disposal of life and death; but Jesus was not a Roman citizen, and it only required the authorization of the governor for the sentence pronounced against Him to be carried out. " As always hap- pens, when a poHtical people subjects a race in which the civil and the religious laws are blended [or confounded], the Romans had been brought to give the Jewish law a sort of official support;" and thus, although neutral in religion, the Romans very often sanctioned penalties inflicted for " religious " faults. As to Pontius (presumably surnamed Pilate from the pihim, or javelin of honour with which he or one of his ancestors had been decorated), indifferent to the internal quarrels of the Jews, he only saw, — an apologetic expositor contends, — in all these movements of sectaries, the results of * On the other hand, at the Ammergau M)^tery, the character of Pilate, as described by a competent spectator, is in dignity and gravity second only to that of Christ ; and the true historical tact of nature has enabled the peasant players to catch the grandeur of the Roman magistrate. Every movement is intended to produce the impression of the superiority of the Roman justice and the Roman manners to the savage, quibbling, vulgar clamours of the Jewish priests and people. "His noble figure, as he appears on the balcony of his house, above the mob— his gentle address — the formal reading of the sentence — the solemn breaking asunder of the staff, to show that the sentence has been delivered — are bold delinea- tions of the better side of the judge and of the law, under which the catastrophe of the sacred history was accomplished." — Macmillan's Maja- tinCy ii. 474. WILLING TO RELEASE. 353 intemperate imaginations and disordered brains : in general, he did not like the Jews, and the Jews detested him : they thought him hard, scornful, passionate, and, as we learn from Philo, accused him of improbable crimes. Eventually he became involved in sanguinary repression of revolts (like that of the Galileans mentioned in the Gospel), which tended to, and ended in, his recall. The experience of many conflicts had rendered him what M. Renan calls "very prudent in his relations with this intractable people." The procurator is accordingly described as seeing himself with extreme dis- pleasure led to play a cruel part in the case of Him of Nazareth, for the sake of a law he hated ; aware that religious fanaticism, when it has obtained the sanction of civil government for some act of violence, is afterwards the first to throw respon- sibiHty on the government, which it all but charges with being the author of the act. "Pilate then would fain have saved Jesus." Certain it is that he was prepossessed in His favour. He questioned Him not unkindly, and with an obvious desire of finding an excuse for sending Him away exculpated absolutely and for good. In George Herbert's poem of The Sacrifice, He whose wailing note rings at the end of every stanza "Was ever grief like Mine ?" is made to say, — " Pilate, a stranger, holdeth off ; but they, Mine own dear people, cry, Away, away ! " And the voices of these prevailed. Pontius was confused and disquieted by the accusing and accepted title of King ; yet he held out wistfully for a while against the popular tumult ; he proposed a release, but the tumult increased ; he ordered the Accused to be scourged, the usual preliminary to cruci- fixion, in the possible hope (as some surmise) that the pre- liminary might here suffice ; but all this time the frenzy of riot was gathering force; to gain time he tried, but at least nothing else was gained ; he began to fear for his office ; and so at last he gave way, yielding a compliance which " was to deliver his name to the scorn of history," and symbolically washing his hands in the presence of the multitude. 2 A 354 PILATE WASHING HIS HANDS. Twice at least in Shakspeare the exculpatory act of washing of hands is referred to ; as where one of the murderers of Clarence exclaims, ex post facto ^ — ** A bloody deed, and desperately despatch'd ! How fain, like Pilate, would I wash my hands Of this most grievous guilty murder done ! " And the unhappy, offcast, discrowned King Richard II. is made to tell the revolted nobles, — " Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands, Showing an outward pity ; yet you Pilates Have here deliver'd me to my sour cross, And water cannot wash away your sin, " Believing Jesus to be innocent, for the Roman governor ^ to give Him up to death was to take a large share of the I criminahty upon himself; and yet he thought, or^ — as the washing of hands may indicate, he tried to think, '-^ that when he got the Jews to take that criminality upon them he had relieved himself, mainly, if not wholly, of the irksome respon- sibility. He tries to regard himself, an impartial expositor has said, as one coerced by others ; and when these others are quite willing to take on themselves the entire weight of the wrong-doing, he imagines that this will go a great length in clearing him. And so he washes his hands. In which eternalized act he is seen by Spenser's Guyon in another world : " But both his handes most filthy feculent, . . . And faynd to wash themselves incessantly, Yet nothing cleaner were for such intent, * In reference to the directors of a certain bubble company hastening as soon as ever the bubble burst, to ** wash their hands of the whole affair," a plain-spoken reviewer observed, that to him this same washing of hands had always seemed so difficult an operation, that he often wondered how people came to take up the phrase, especially when we remember its associations. " Pontius Pilate, so far as we know, was the original proprietor of the patent ; and his success was hardly such as to encourage imitators." It is smartly put, that whenever we hear of a person washing his hands of anything, the only points on which we may feel assured are — first, that they are unusually dirty ; and next, that he is not likely to mend the matter by the process. LEGEND OF LUCERNE. 355 But rather fouler seemed to the eye ; So lost his labour vaine and ydle industry. "The knight, him calling, asked who he was? Who, lifting up his head, him answer'd thus : • I Pilate am, the falsest judge, alas ! And most unjust ; that, by unrighteous And wicked doome, to Jewes despiteous Delivered up the Lord of Life to dye, And did acquite a murd'rer felonous ; The whiles my handes I washt in purity. The whiles my soule was soyld with foule impurity.'" The Swiss guide in Scott's historical fiction, crosses himself devoutly as he recounts to the younger Oxford the popular legend of Mount Pilatre — whose gloomy height seems the leviathan of the huge congregation of mountains assembled about Lucerne ; that legend being, that here the wicked ex- governor found the termination of his impious life; having, after he had spent some years in the recesses of the mountain which bears his name, at length, in remorse and despair rather than in penitence, plunged into the dismal lake which occupies the summit. Whether water refused to do the executioner's duty upon ''such a wretch," or whether, his body being drowned, his vexed spirit continued to haunt the place where he com- mitted suicide, Antonio did not pretend to explain; but a form was often, he said, seen to emerge from the gloomy waters, and go through the action of one washing his hands ; and when he did so, dark clouds of mist gathered first round the bosom of the Infernal Lake (such it had been styled of old), and then wrapping the whole upper part of the mountain in darkness, presaged a tempest or hurricane, which was sure to follow in a short space.* That a weakness of the heart should produce more misery, * In Locke's Journal of his Residence in France, we come upon this entry (Nov. 30, 1675) = "About half a league from St. Vallier, we saw a house, a little out of the way, where they say Pilate lived in banishment. We met with the owner, who seemed to doubt the truth of the story ; but told us there was mosaic work very ancient in one of the floors." The closing words half remind one of the logic of Smith the weaver, in Shak- speare, as regards the bricks and the building of Jack Cade's house. 356 PILATE AND HEROD FRIENDS. more both to self and others, and be more severely chastised than a deliberate wickedness, is a fact which made Robertson of Brighton "often ponder." And, by way of example, he would turn from " weak Eli, — only a little too indulgent," with the result of a country's dishonour and ciefeat, two profligates, a deathbed of a widow and mother on which despair sits, and the death of a wretched old man, for whom it would have been a mercy if his neck had been broken before his heart, — to Pilate, of whom the characteristic is, " only irresolution — the result, the ruin of the Holiest." By Martin Luther, Pilate was pronounced a more just and honest man than "any papist prince of the empire" — many of whom Doctor Martin could name, who were in no degree comparable with Pilate ; for he kept strictly to the Roman laws. He would not that the inno- cent should be executed and slain without hearing, and he availed himself of all just means whereby to release Christ; " but when they threatened him with the Emperor's disfavour, he was dazzled, and forsook the imperial laws, thinking, It is but the loss of one man, who is both poor and contemned;* no man takes his part ; what hurt can I receive by his death ? Better it is that one man die, than that the whole nation be against me." The catching at a chance of shifting the responsi- bility of condemnation from himself to Herod, is characteristic. The mere mention of Galilee is enough to set Pontius asking if the accused Man be a Galilean, and, having ascertained that fact, to send Him to Herod, as belonging to Herod's jurisdic- tion— Herod being in Jerusalem at the time. A proper theme for rather bitter reflection is the sequel, that the same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together ; for before they were at enmity between themselves. Pilate, all too ready to deliver up an innocent prisoner ; and Herod, at one moment eager to see miracles wrought at his bidding, and the next, * Elsewhere, in his familiar Tischreden, Luther comments on Pilate's rejoinder to the Divine Prisoner's claim to a kingdom not of this world : " Doubtless Pilate took our Saviour Christ to be a simple, honest, ignorant man, one perchance come out of a wilderness, a simple fellow, a hermit, who knew or understood nothing of the world, or of government." — § xxii. ; cf. § dcclxv. BEL AT UNION WITH THE DRAGON. 357 disappointed, joining mth his men of war in setting Jesus at nought, and mocking Him, and arraying Him in a gorgeous robe ; a friendship struck up between these twain, and for such an occasion, may well point a moral, with a sting in it. These spurious reconciliations are often a blot on human nature. Of such was that between Cyril of Alexandria and the prefect Orestes. " A rumour was spread among the Christians,^' writes Gibbon, " that the daughter of Theon was the only obstacle to the reconciliation of the prefect and the archbishop ; and that obstacle was soon removed." That is to say, Hypatia was murdered. So with Frederick Barbarossa and the Pope, in the matter of Arnold of Brescia : " In the balance of ambition, the innocence or life of an individual is of small account ; and their common enemy was sacrificed to a moment of political concord." The historian may well and advisedly write "a moment j" for it is but for a moment, a peace so hollow in fabric, and based on a foundation so treacherous as this. No friendship will abide the test, says Cowper, if merely ** such as may awhile subsist Between the sot and sensualist, For vicious ends connected." The application is sufficiently obvious. It was a bad look-out for their inferiors when, in the fable, " L'aigle et le chat-huant leurs querelles cesserent, Et firent tant qu'ils s'embrasserent." A bad look-out for the commonalty, as in Butler's Hudibrastic phrase, ** When Bel's at union with the Dragon, And Baal-Peor friends with Dagon." And significantly suggestive are Dryden's lines on those " by common guilt made friends ; "Whose heads, though ne'er so differing in their creed, I' the point of treason yet were well agreed," Dean Milman's reading of the character of Pilate is of a man not naturally disposed to unnecessary bloodshed, but 358 PONTIUS PILATE THE GOVERNOR, stern, decided, and reckless of human life, when the peace of his province seemed to be in jeopardy — on all other occasions by no means regardless of ingratiating himself in the popular favour. The Christian Historian of the Jews takes Pilate to have been perhaps awed by the tranquil dignity of Jesus, or at least to have seen no reason for apprehending danger to the Roman sovereignty from a person of such peaceful demeanour; and credit is given him for detecting the malice, though he might not clearly comprehend the motive, of the accusation brought forward by the priests and populace : he shrank, how- ever, from the imputation of not being " Caesar's friend," and could not think the life of one man, be he never so innocent, of much importance in comparison with the peace of the country, and his own favour at Rome.* Bishop Horsley explains the procedure of Pilate by selfish pohcy alone — petty, pusillanimous : the procurator, he takes it, afraid of further unpopularity in his province, and dreading the jealous temper of the Emperor Tiberius (ever ready to listen to complaints against his provincial governors, and ever cruel and implacable in his resentments), — thought the present opportunity was not to be missed of doing the Jews a pleasure, by throwing away the life of a seemingly inconsiderable, friendless man, who, when once he was gone, would never be inquired after. To these motives of "selfish cunning and guilty fear," Bishop Horsley traces Pilate's extorted consent, " against the remon- strances of his conscience and the warnings of Heaven," to our Saviour's death. Now, by Mr. de Quincey it is strenuously asserted, that justice has never been done to the procurator. That man he declares to have little comprehended the style and manner of the New Testament who does not perceive the ''demoniac earnestness" of Pilate to effect the liberation of Christ, or who fails to read the anxiety of the several evangelists to put on record his profound sympathy with the prisoner. So again * '■'■ Rather than Pilate will be counted Caesar's enemy, he will pronounce Christ innocent one hour, and condemn Him the next." — South, Ser- mons, iii. HIS QUERY, 'WHAT IS TRUTH?' 359 Archbishop Whately remarks, that any one of Bacon's acute- ness, or of a quarter of it, might easily have perceived, had he at all attended to the context of the narrative, that never was any one less in a "jesting" mood than Pilate, on the occasion of putting his query concerning truth. He was anxious to release Jesus ; and Whately takes him to have been sufficiently . aware of the superhuman power of Him he had to do with, to be filled with dread of the consequences of doing any wrong to such a Person, while he may have cherished a hope of furthering some ambitious views of his own, by taking part with One whom he (in common with so many others) expected to be just about to assume temporal dominion, and to enforce His claim by resistless power. What is Truth ? What is the Truth ? that of which He who is the W^ay, the Truth, and the Life was speaking, when Pon- tius interposed the query. " When Pilate's hall that a^vful question heard, The heavenly Captive answer'd not a word." He who, in the words of Thomas de Quincey, reveals a body of awful truth to a candid and willing auditory, is content with the grand simphcities of truth in the quality of his proofs. And truth, we are reminded, where it happens to be of a high order, is generally its own witness to all who approach it in a spirit of childlike docility. " But far different is the position of that teacher who addresses an audience composed in various proportions of sceptical inquirers, obstinate opponents, and malignant scoffers." Less than an apostle, it is added, is unequal to the suppression of all human reactions incident to wounded sensibilities, — scorn being too naturally met by retorted scorn. And then again, the light of absolute truth is " too dazzling to be sustained by the diseased optics of those habituated to darkness." Pilato interroganti deveritate, Christus nofi respondU, which is Englished by Bishop Taylor, " When the wicked governor asked of Christ concerning truth, Christ gave him no answer" — he being not fit to hear it. It is in a 36o PILATE'S QUERY, 'WHAT IS TRUTH?' sermon preached before the University of Dublin that the same fervent prelate recognizes his position in "an auditory of inquisitive persons, whose business is to study for truth," that they may find it for themselves, and teach it to others : "I am in a school of prophets and prophets' sons, who will ask Pilate's question, 'What is truth?' " They look for it in their books, the great preacher tells them, — much as his Great Master told the Jews they searched the Scriptures ; they tugged hard for it in their disputations, and they derived it from the cisterns of the fathers, and they inquired after the old ways, and sometimes were taken with new appearances, and they rejoiced in false lights, or were delighted with " little umbrages and peep of day." They had examined all ways but one, all but God's way : let them, having missed in all the other, try this. *' Let us go to God for truth ; for truth comes from God only. ... If you ask ' What is truth ?' you must not do as Pilate did — ask the question, and then go away from Him that only can give you an answer ; for as God is the author of truth, so is He the teacher of it." And if any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God or no. There is something of the Strawberry-hill sneer in Horace Walpole's jaunty avowal to my Lady Ossory : " I have often been of opinion that it was not designed we should be able to distinguish certainly what is truth. Pilate asked the Person most likely to resolve him, and received no answer." In another epistle to the same fair correspondent, professing his ignorance of the verity as touching the king's recovery (in 1789), he adds : "I am still less quaHfied to answer, when you ask me where is Truth ? I reply, how should I know it, even if I could tell where it is ? When Pilate asked what it was, I do not find that he was informed. Dr. Beattie may know better, perhaps." This, of course, is a fling at Beattie's Essay on Truth. Poets Young, of the Night Thoughts, and Cowper, of The Task, each has his fling at Pontius Pilate the governor. " The coward flies," says Young ; GALLIO AND PILATE. 361 " Thinks, but thinks slightly; asks, but fears to know; Asks, * What is truth ?' with Pilate ; and retires." Cowper's text is, that as the only amaranthine flower on earth is virtue, so the only lasting treasure is truth. " But what is truth ? 'Twas Pilate's question put To Truth itself, that deign'd him no reply. And wherefore ? will not God impart His light To them that ask it ? Freely — 'tis His joy. His glory, and His nature to impart. But to the proud, uncandid, insincere, Or negligent inquirer, not a spark." It has been remarked, that while Gallio is put forward as the type of people -svho, on the whole, are sceptical about the advantage of entering upon the discussion of religious contro- versy, it is somewhat significant that this should form part of the burden of the indictment against Pilate, who " is thought to have displayed an improper incredulity* as to the possibility of arriving at abstract ' truth.' " Gallio and Pilate, observes an essay-writer on the typical character of the former, were both of them, as far as one can judge, sceptics in the metaphysical sense of the word, though Gallio seems to have been exempt from the criminal weakness which has rendered the latter an object of infamy to all time. '''- What is truth?' jesting Pilate Ask'd, and passed from the question at once with a smile at Its utter futility." " What is truth ? " says the reverend and revered guide, philo- sopher, and friend of Tremaine, was once asked with fearful curiosity, on an awful occasion. " We^ at least, will not be so cruelly and criminally indifferent to it afterwards, as he who asked it proved to be ; and we will not, with him, wash our hands, and by that act think we may leave the world to its horrors." * It often happens in a judicial investigation that a great many questions have to be asked in order to obtain a direct answer to a very simple inquiry. And a caustic commentator on this fact suggests, that it was probably Pilate's judicial experience which led him to ask so sarcastically, What is truth ? 362 WAS PILATE 'JESTING'? " But even Pilate," urges Tremaine, " was anxious . . ." " He cared not to inquire," interrupts Evelyn : " truth came not of its own accord ; and finding it troublesome to pursue it, he plunged into sin and blood, from mere indolency and weakness of character." Very many, on the good rector's showing, are of the same complexion. — On the other hand, one of Mr. Disraeli's contemplative spokesmen, apparently speaking for his author, protests against Lord Bacon's " greatly misrepresenting" Pontius Pilate, in the celebrated passage which describes him as the "jesting" governor, who would not wait for an answer. " Let us be just to Pontius Pilate, who has sins enough surely to answer for. There is no authority for the jesting humour given by Lord Bacon." Pilate, it is contended, was evidently of a merciful and clement disposition, and was probably an Epicurean. His question is accordingly taken to have referred to the declaration immediately preceding it, that He who was before him came to bear witness to the truth. " Pilate asked. What truth ?" When two of the Reforming doctors debated in Luther's company the question why Pilate asked, What is truth — Was ist Wahrheit? — the view taken by Luther was, that Pilate meant. Why wilt thou dispute concerning truth in these wicked times ? Truth is here of no value. Thou must think of some other plan ; adopt some lawyer's quiddity, and then, perchance, thou mayest be released.* Dr. Hanna takes the procurator's question to have been put, not sneeringly or scoffingly, but rather sadly and bitterly, so far as Pilate himself is concerned, having come to regard all truth as a phantom ; and with a kindly, tolerant, half-pitying, half-envious feeling towards Jesus. Quite different is Currer Bell's impression of the manner of the man, in a poem called Pilate's Wife's Z>rea?n : *' I do not weep for Pilate — who could prove Regret for him whose cold and crushing sway * On the same occasion Luther maintained that Pilate scourged Christ out of sheer compassion, that he might still thereby the insatiable wrath and raging of the Jews. PILATE /A MODERN VERSE. 363 No prayer can soften, no appeal can move ; Who tramples hearts as others trample clay, Yet with a faltering, an uncertain tread. That might stir up reprisal in the dead. " Forced to sit by his side and see his deeds ; Forced to behold that visage, hour by hour. In whose gaunt lines the abhorrent gazer reads A triple lust of gold, and blood, and power ; A soul whom motives fierce, yet abject, urge — Rome's servile slave, and Judah's tyrant scourge." Much more refined and subtle, as well as vigorous, are the lines in which another poetess, — happily living, and writing still, and, as some critics think, able to enforce a claim to the highest rank of the sisterhood, — thus represents Pilate in his meditative speculations about the great Deliverer whom he has handed over to the Jews : " But why waste thought To beat out the philosophy or creed He would have taught from the disfiguring husks Rough rumour gives as grain ? The man is dead : Guilty or innocent, wise or possessed, He sleeps the silent sleep which ends all hope, And we may bawl our questions at his door. He makes no answer. Dead philosophers Are just as useful to the living world As are dead lions, or dead rats — they help To make good soil. As for the coins they leave Of thought, for us to heir, Avhy ninety-nine Out of each hundred stamp their own image On all their dies, and so the coins mean nought, Save to disciples who will let them pass As money 'twixt themselves, still bickering The while about their values." * If the popular reading of his character as a truth-seeker be correct, Pilate was no more a seeker after truth than the giant in Spenser was a favourer of right, in the colloquy with Sir Artegall, about right versus wrong : * From Poems by Augusta Webster (1867). 364 PILATE JESTING, OR IN DEADLY EARNEST? " But he the right from thence did thrust away ; For it was not the right which he did seeke," * Jesting Pilate, says Mr, Carlyle, had not the smallest chance to ascertain what was Truth : he could not have known it, had a god shown it to him. " Thick serene opacity, thicker than amaurosis, veiled those smiling eyes of his to Truth ; the inner refma of them was gone paralytic, dead. He looked at Truth ; and discerned her not, there where she stood." Mr. de Quincey, on the other hand, declares the falsest word that ever yet was uttered upon any part of the New Testament, to be that sneer of Lord Bacon's at '■^jesting Pilate." Pilate, he insists, was in deadly earnest from first to last, and retired from his frantic effort on behalf of Christ, only when his own safety began to be seriously compromised. Do the thoughtless accusers of Pilate, asks this eloquent apologist, fancy that he was a Chris- tian ? If not, why, or on what principle, was he to ruin him- self at Rome, in order to favour one he could not save at Jerusalem ? DEVOUT SOLDIER, Acts x. 2-7. THE Roman centurions of the New Testament are mostly, if not all of them, markworthy and estimable men. But that centurion of the band called the Italian band — probably a praetorian cohort of Italian soldiers, attendant on the Roman procurator-}- — Cornelius, who dwelt in Csesarea, stands forth as a representative man, the devout soldier. " A devout man," thus is he characterized, " and one that served God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway." The prayers and the alms of this * Faerie Queene, bk. v., canto ii. + For although Tacitus mentions the Legio prima Italica^ it was not formed until the days of Nero. Arrian uses the same words as occur in Acts X.I, viz. (nrdpTjs'lTaXiKrjs. A CHRISTIAN SOLDIER. 365 proselyte of the gate went up as a memorial before God ; and on the principle that to him that hath shall more be given, this devout man was directed to a means of grace that should give him the hope of glory. Not to be overlooked is the unnamed man-at-arms after his own heart, whom Cornelius sent with two of his household servants to Joppa, to call for Simon Peter ; '' a devout soldier of them that waited on him continu- ally." Such were his surroundings. With the progress and result of that mission to Joppa we are not at present concerned. Cornelius the centurion, and that devout soldier unnamed, who was evidently dear to him and deservedly in his confidence, — these we take as types of the religious spirit of military life, as New Testament ensamples of piety in men whose profession is war. One of the interlocutors in Mr. P. J. Bailey's colloquial satire, The Age, conceits that " Of all conceits misgrafted on God's word, A Christian soldier is the most absurd. # * « # A Christian soldier's duty is to slay, Wound, harass, slaughter, hack in every way, These men, whose souls he prays for night and day — With what consistency let prelates say. He's told to love his enemies — don't scoff; He does so, and with rifles picks them off." It is very well, says Dr. Russell, that soldiers have some to pray for them at home : " There are pious and devout men, who in the hurry of campaigning, before and after battle, forget not their Maker. But who can think of Him in the shock of arms, when the air is laden with death, and the ground covered with shrieking wretches passing away to their account, or en- gaged in kilHng?" Yet in Plutarch we read of Flaminius "standing still," in midmost battle with the Macedonians, " with his hands lifted up towards heaven, and praying." Shall Corporal Trim be cited for evidence ? "I thought," said the curate, " that you gentlemen of the army, Mr. Trim, never said your prayers at all." " A soldier, an please your reverence. 366 MILITARY LEVITY. prays as often (of his own accord) as a parson ; and when he is fighting for his king, and for his own Hfe, and for his honour too, he has the most reason to pray to God of any one in the whole world. . . . But when a soldier, an please your reverence, has been standing for twelve hours together in the trenches, up to his knees in cold water — or engaged for months together in long and dangerous marches \ . . . resting this night out upon his arms, — beat up in his shirt the next, — benumbed in his joints, — perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on ; he must say his prayers how and when he can." Adam Smith pursues a philosophical inquiry, why it is that we are apt to annex the character of gaiety, levity, and sprightly freedom, as well as some degree of dissipation, to the military profession; whereas the most suitable mood or tone of tem- per to this situation would seem to be a surpassingly serious and thoughtful turn of mind, as best becoming those whose lives are continually exposed to uncommon danger, and who should, therefore, be more constantly occupied than other men with the thought of death, and of what comes after death. It is this very circumstance, however, which the Theorist of Moral Sentiments takes to explain why levity is so prevalent a characteristic of the soldier ; for so great is the effort required to conquer the fear of death, when we survey it with steadiness and attention, that those who are constantly exposed to it find it easier to turn away their thoughts from it altogether, to wrap themselves up in careless security and indifference, and to plunge themselves, for this purpose, into every sort of amuse- ment and dissipation. In his Project for the Adva?ice?ne?it of Religion, Swift incidentally affirms, as what " is observed abroad, that no race of mortals have so little sense of religion as Eng- lish soldiers ; to confirm which, I have been often told by great officers of the army, that, in the whole compass of their acquaint- ance, they could not recollect three of their profession who seemed to regard or believe one syllable of the Gospel." Fur- ther on again we read : *' If gentlemen of that profession were at least obliged to some external decorum in their conduct ; or even if a profligate Ufe and character were not a means oi DEVOUT SOLDIERS. 367 advancement, and the appearance of piety a most infallible hindrance, it is impossible the corruptions there should be so universal and exorbitant." The time is even yet to come when a devout soldier shall not be a marked man, and quoted as. an exception to prove the contrary rule. Pope Gregory the Great was anxious to assure the Emperor of the possibility of such a thing as a devout soldier : " It is supposed, perhaps, that such conversions are not sincere ; but I, your unworthy servant, know many converted soldiers, who in our own days have worked miracles and done many signs and wonders;" — them- selves, perhaps, to some observers, the greatest sign and won- der, or miracle, of all. In Gibbon, narrating the African war in A.D. 398, " it is observed, to the praise of the Roman general, that his days and nights were employed in prayer, fasting, and the occupation of singing psalms." The " devout leader" is, of course, anything but a man after Mr. Gibbon's own heart. That great historian would have sympathized rather with the common soldier whose prayer is on record, just before the battle of Blenheim : " Oh God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul !" Sir William Wyndham once quoted this in company, as the shortest prayer he had ever heard of, and a general laugh ensued ; whereupon the Bishop of Roches- ter (Atterbury), then first joining in the conversation, and addressing himself to Wyndham, said, with what Earl Stanhope calls his usual grace and gentleness of manner, " Your prayer, Sir William, is indeed very short ; but I remember another as short, but a much better, offered up likewise by a poor soldier in the same circumstances : ' O God, if in the day of battle I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me !' " The whole company, it is said, sat silent and abashed.* The favourite appeal of Gustavus Adolphus to his soldiers was, •' Pray constantly : praying hard, is fighting hard." " You may win salvation under my command, but hardly riches," was his encouragement to his officers. He is cited by Mr. Herman * It was at a dinner party at the Duke of Ormond's, at Richmond, in 1715- 368 MILITARY PIETY, Merivale as exceptionally distinguished by that deep religious conviction which, when openly avowed and consistently acted on, invariably awes minds conscious of their own falling short- Comparing him with Cromwell, who could not have been more convinced of his own divine vocation, or more fearless in his expression of rehance on it, the same historical critic maintains that there is in the zeal of Cromwell, even when taken at its best, something of the earth, earthy, which contrasts unfavour- ably with the earnest, manly, single-minded piety of Gustavus j the consequence being, that, while Cromwell's enemies have made him out a hypocrite, and have left great part of the world persuaded that he was one, no detractor has ever endeavoured to fasten the like imputation on the Swede. With him, how- ever, as with Cromwell, the constant sense of religion led to a familiarity of utterance respecting it which, in the ears of our reserved generation, seems almost startling. Gustavus ^'preached" so much — though without the shadow of affec- tation— that a Michelet, it is suggested, might perhaps say of him, as of our Henry V. at Agincourt, " le plus dur pour les prisonniers, c'etait d'entendre les sermons de ce roi des pretres, d'endurer ses moralites, ses humilites." That is not the accepted English notion of our fifth Harry. But the madcap prince, who had been boon companion with Poins and Falstaff, had been also the observant contemporary of Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, and though a good hater of heresy, could not but be impressed by the piety of that martyred Lollard — a man of the highest military reputation, who, after serving with great distinction in the French wars, devoted his whole soul to his religion ; and of whom Dean Milman says, " His conduct was throughout that of a noble religious man. Before his execution he fell on his knees, and implored forgiveness on his enemies. . . . His last words, drowned by the crackling flames, were praise of God." Lollardism notwithstanding, worthy was this man of a place among the "Worthies" of Fuller ; such a place as Fuller gives to Lord Vere (Horace) when he describes that meeker but not less valorous of two distinguished brothers as " so pious that he first made his DEVOTED AND DEVOUT. 369 peace with God before he went out to war with men." Like that brave Captain Bate, who was killed in a daring enterprise in the Chinese war of 1858, and of whom a very gallant officer had previously said, " My pluck is quite a different thing from Bate's. I go ahead because I never think of danger \ Bate is always ready for a desperate service because he is always pre- pared for death" — he being indeed characterized by the his- torian of that war as " an eminently religious man." It has been said of Collingwood, that none of the captains at the Nile led his ship with more intrepidity to the hottest of the fire, as assuredly none did so under a more devout sense of religion and of imphcit trust in God. He is noted as having been the first, after the battle was over, to hoist the signal for the ship's company to assemble at prayers ; and, however much disposed to ridicule such observances in their own country, or in a different situation, the French prisoners, we are told, were struck with something of respect and admiration at seeing the men kneel down on decks still running with blood and encum- bered with the dead, to return thanks to the Supreme Disposer of events for a signal victory. Enghsh critics said of the Abbe MuUois' book on Le St. Fere et Rome, that he threw a light upon the character of French soldiers which to us islanders was absolutely new ; ■ our idea of a French grenadier having always been that he was brave, obedient, and indomitably patriotic ; but that, if he had a weak point, it was in regard to religion — that his life was scarcely more regular than that of our own brave guardsmen, whose yearly campaigns in London are the dread of steady house- holders— that he was rather given to laugh at mysteries, and loved dearly to play off a practical joke upon a priest. " But the Abbe Mullois has taught us that, with respect at least to the army of occupation, we might almost as innocently have scoffed at a prophet, or spoken lightly of a saint j" and that so far are they from being profane mockers, that at every step of the history of the Holy Father's sorrows and successes, the effect is always heightened by the picture of an officer who goes into ecstasies, or 'a regiment of Zouaves who burst into 2 B 370 CHRISTIAN HEROES. tears — the common soldiers declaring that the Pope's benedic- tion \vill a thousand times overpay them for all their toil, all their wounds, all their blood spilt beneath the walls of Rome. " ' Qu'ils sont bons,' disait Fautre jour un cardinal a un person- nage Frangais de la plus eminente piete, 'qu'ils sont bons, vos Fran^ais ! s'ils restent ils finiront par convertir tons nos Romains!'" In like manner the author of Flemish Interiors has been flouted for maintaining the decided piety of not only the French volunteers who fought for the Pope under Lamori- ciere, but also of the French army which fought against the Austrians ; even the Zouaves exhibiting a spectacle of religious faith and practice which " must have been highly edifying to the Itahans, among whom their campaigns were made." Not but that candid British reviewers own the connection between military and religious ardour to be too natural to warrant a denial of its existence on a large scale in the French Imperial army. Was not the founder of the Order of Jesuits a soldier ? and was not the first colonel of Zouaves, General Lamoriciere. known to be "devout"? As to the author's stress laid upon the similarity which may be traced between the duties and the trials of the soldier and the priest, it is allowed to be impossible to pronounce that this similarity does not exist \ and if there are many soldiers who do not act up to the high standard thus placed before them, it may be, and is, conceded that there are also not a few priests whose shortcomings are equally con- spicuous. Books appear from time to time, such as Dr. C. Rogers's Christian Heroes in the Army and Navy, which offer exemplars of such heroism ; but they are apt to be one-sided, and seldom make any pretensions to be complete. The volume just named omits mention of " the psalm-singing admiral," Lord Gambler, whom Admiral Harvey reproached to his face, in the Rochefort affair (see the Earl of Dundonald's memoirs), for mustering the ships' companies for catechizing, instead of taking soundings of the anchorage ; it being indeed a now accepted fact, that Lord Gambler neglected to have the enemy's defences and the approach to them properly examined, while he spared no LEE, STONEWALL JACKSON, HAVELOCK. 371 pains in the religious instruction of his crews. Due place is found for that " faithful soldier of the cross," Lord Exmouth • and for Admiral Kempenfelt, who not only sang hymns, but composed them ; and for Sir Edward Parry, whom cynical reviewers point to as having made " a pretty good thing of his religion, both temporally and spiritually ;" and from the same volume they single out, as a companion instance, Major-General Bum. Colonel Blackader, of the Cameronian regiment, is more highly esteemed ah extra, — deeply imbued as he was with the spirit of the preacher from whom that regiment was named — the spirit in which he wrote in his diary, that, " if God were with him, he durst attack the French lines alone." There needed no biography of the American General Lee, to assure students of his career that he was one of the best men and truest Christians, as well as one of the noblest soldiers and ablest gene- rals, of whom history bears witness. Nor could faction itself deny to many others on the same side, as well as to him and Stonewall Jackson, an established character for pure and deep religion, as well as high honour and virtue. General Jackson's earnest ascription of his victories to " our God," is allowed to have been no matter of form or pious phraseology, somewhat demonstrative as well as earnest though his devotion may have appeared ; and the perfect resignation with which he accepted death in the prime of life, and at the zenith of his fame and usefulness, has been cited as a conclusive proof of the thorough genuineness of a faith which, says one English critic, while as simple as that of a child, had in it nothing unworthy of the hero. Havelock, it has been said, became a popular hero in Eng- land, not only because he was eminent as a soldier and excel- lent as a man, but because he was religious ; and his religion took a very marked form, and was, in an unusual degree, at once sincere and demonstrative. Every one, a critic of an utterly distinct school has declared, must honour the courage with which Havelock stuck to what he thought was right, and the heartiness with which he laboured to bring home a sense of religion to those with whom he came in contact : wherever 372 DEVOUT GENERAL, MAJOR, he went he had what his American biographer calls a Bethel tent, in which he preached to, and prayed with, his soldiers ; and his efforts were unwearying to put down the usual military vices, especially that of drinking — which labours were not without a visible result, for we are told that the men in his regiment who came under his influence were not only zealous attendants at his ministrations, but were capital soldiers, and very temperate. That Mr. Headley should be lost in wonder at a soldier being religious, occasioned the remark by a thoughtful writer that, constantly as soldiers are thrown in the way of coarse temptations, and unlikely as the moral standard of officers is to be a very strict one, yet, if an officer once separates himself from the way of life which is the attraction to most men entering the army, and can hold his own course, he is not in a very unfavourable position. " There is nothing in the duties he has to perform, nothing in the way of his daily life, which makes it hard for him to be a religious man. He has a constant sense of responsibihty to stimulate him, and his occupations are at once grave and methodical." This writer contends that there are many callings perfectly lawful which often present more serious obstacles to the growth of a spiritual Christianity. Major Rank en, a name of note in Canada and the Crimea, is another example of the devout soldier, simple, grave, sin- cere. His journal affords ample evidence of the support which the practice of religious duties gave him amid the diffi- culties and dangers of his calling. Such entries, for instance, as this: "Sept. 5 [1855, after arduous nights in the trenches]. — Thank God, I still keep quite well, though disease and death are rife around me. Exposed constantly to danger, I can rely only upon God, and place niy life in His hands. Last Sunday I received the Sacrament with seven or eight of my brother officers — the ceremony, within sound, and even range, of the enemy's guns, was to me deeply impressive. Nothing makes a man feel the extreme uncertainty of life, and his entire dependence on the will of God, so much as war. I was on duty in the trenches on Sunday night, and I think the ceremony SERGEANT, CORPORAL. 373 I had gone through strengthened and supported me a good deal." The question which this young Crimean officer asked himself, in his rude hut, penning question and answer on a chest, "with ink just thawed before the fire," was. What good could he do in this world before he should leave it, to be num- bered with the things that have been ? And his desire was, to be filled (as he expresses it) with a fine enthusiasm, an onward- pressing feeling that should bear him up and carry him through difficulties, dangers, and opposition — an enthusiasm for what- ever is right, noble, lovely, and of good report. His desire was to be filled to overflowing with an intense sympathy for all that is suffering, oppressed, bowed down, isolated, stricken, and comfortless ; and in all things to feel that he had within him a spirit fresh as it were from the hand of the Great Creator. Corporals and sergeants have their representative men on the muster roll of Christian heroes. Dr. Rogers has com- memorated accordingly the careers of Corporal Robert Flock- hart, who for upwards of forty years preached daily in the streets of Edinburgh, and of Corporal James Murray, of Bel- fast by birth, who from Romanist turned Protestant, and from dissolute devout. A prominent figure in the correspondence of Hannah More is that Sergeant Hill who had been one of her (and her sisters') first scholars at Cheddar, and whom she thanks God for 'preserving in faith and virtue, in a station so full of temptation. Some half-dozen years later, she asks Mr. Wilberforce if he remembers this same " John Hill, our first scholar, whose piety and good manners you used to notice ? He afterwards became a teacher, but war tore him from us. Judge of our pleasure to see him at Weymouth, in full regimen- tals, acting as paymaster and sergeant-major ! There was a sort of review. Everybody praised the training of eight hun- dred men, so well disciplined. The officers said they were fit for any service. One of them said to us, ' All this is due to the great abilities and industry of Sergeant Hill. ... At first he was so reHgious that we thought him a Methodist ; but we find him so good a soldier, and so correct in his morals 374 COLONEL GARDINER. that we do not trouble ourselves about his religion.' " Fenimore Cooper had such a figure in his mind's eye when he painted his Sergeant Hollister, " distinguished in the corps as a man of most exemplary piety and holiness of life/' who, when Harvey Birch shudders at the darkness and desolation of the prison cell he is led into, and calls it a fearful place wherein to prepare for the last change, replies, " Why, for the matter of that, it can reckon but little in the great account, where a man parades his thoughts for the last review, so that he finds them fit to pass the muster of another world. I have a small book here," adds the veteran, " which I make it a point to read a little in when- ever we are about to engage, and I find it a great strength en er in time of need." With which words he hands a pocket Bible to the condemned spy. Doddridge's book has made Colonel Gardiner an accepted type, or stereotype, of the devout soldier. And naturally there was some popular resentment expressed at Dr. Carlyle's cha- racterization of him, all too slightingly, as "an honest well- meaning man and a pious Christian," but •' very ostentatious ; though, to tell the truth, he boasted oftener of his conversion than of the dangerous battles he had been in." Sir Walter Scott, in the novel that gave all the Waverley novels a name, introduces Colonel Gardiner in more than one chapter, and always in terms of unquahfied respect and of sincere homage to exceptional worth. His estimate of the man is so far in marked contrast with that expressed by the latitudinarian divine of Musselburgh, Jupiter Carlyle. The great novelist has nothing but grave words of admiration for this devout com- mander ; while the tone adopted towards him by the reverend Alexander is nearer akin to that in which the yager flings out at the royal Swede, in WalleiisteiiC s Camp : " What a fuss and a bother, forsooth, was made By that man-tormentor, Gustavus the Swede, Whose camp was a church, where prayers were said At morning reveille and evening tattoo ; And whenever it chanced that we frisky grew, A sermon himself from the saddle he'd read. Sergeajit. Ay, that was a man with the fear of God." REV. F. IV. ROBERTSON. 375 The late F. W. Robertson, of Brighton, was a born enthusiast for a military life — " rocked and cradled," as he phrased it, " to the roar of artillery ;" impressed to tears by a review, as sug- gesting the conception of a real batde; and unable to see a regiment manoeuvre, or artillery in motion, without a choking sensation. His father's opposition to his passionate desire to follow that father's profession, he encountered with strenuous counter-pleas ; and when the temptations to which he would be exposed in the army were strongly set before him, Frederick refused to admit that these were real barriers against his en- trance into it : on the contrary, " with his usual desire for some positive outward evil to contend with, he imagined that it was his peculiar vocation to bear witness to God, to set the example of a pure and Christian life in his corps, to be the Cornelius of his regiment."'* All the impulses of his character to self-sacri- fice, chivalry, daring, romantic adventure, the conquest of oppression, the living of life intensely, he is said to have looked forward to satisfying as a soldier ; and we are told how closely the trained obedience of an army to one head, harmonized with his own strong conception of the beauty of order and the dignity of duty. After his wishes had been disappointed, and the clerical profession decided upon, instead of the military, — a decision most reluctantly come to on his part, — we find him writing from Oxford to his father, at the close of his University * "To two great objects — the profession of arms M^hich he had chosen, and the service of Christ in that profession — he now devoted himself wholly. They filled his life, and for both of them he read carefully. . . Pai-allel with his military reading, in rather a strange contrast, ran his reli- gious reading. Sometimes both glided into one another, as when, in the hope of advancing Christ's kingdom, he devoted a portion of his time to the history of Indian missions and the study of the reason of their small success. ... In his commonplace book may be seen the fluctuations of his mind between the Church and the army as professions, or, at least, his desire to bring Christianity into a soldier's life. " — Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson^ i. 12 sq. Again and again he expresses his conviction that in a military life the highest self-sacrifice he was capable of could alone have been accomplished. Those who have heard him speak of battle, says his biographer, will re- member how his lips quivered, and his eyes flashed, and his voice trembled with restrained emotion. 376 MILITARY INSTINCTS OF career, that somehow or other he still seemed to feel the queen's broad arrow stamped upon him, and that the men whom he had longed to benefit in a red coat, he might now be useful to, with a better-founded hope of usefulness, " in the more sombre garb of an accredited ambassador of Christ." In short, his strong desire was now for a military chaplaincy. But neither was this to be. It is noteworthy, that at his ordina- tion, on being presented with his papers by the Bishop of Win- chester,* that prelate (Dr. Sumner) gave him as his motto the text, " Endure hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ," — noteworthy, because it is one of the keynotes of his character, as Mr. Stopford Brooke draws it, that all his life long he was a soldier at heart. The ring of his words and the choice of his expressions were influenced and coloured by the ideal he had formed of a soldier's life, by the passionate longing of his youth to enter it, and by the bitterness of the regret f with which he surrendered it. But it is claimed for him that he transferred the same spirit of sacrifice with which he would have died for men in battle, to a more hidden and a diviner warfare. Throughout his Lectures on the Influence of Poetry on the Working Classes, what his biographer calls his " rapturous * His first curacy was in that cathedral city (1840). _ t "He often thought that he had mistaken his profession, and said to his friends that he would rather lead a forlorn hope than mount the pulpit stairs." — Life, p. 96. In his letters from abroad we often come upon some such passage as this in one from Innsbruck, referring to Hofer and his sword (in the museum) : **I drew his sword, and almost felt that it was done with a soldier's feeling." — Ibid., p. 116. Years later, again. ** As I walked home in my dragoon cloak, I thought that I ought to be at this moment lying in it at rest at Moodkee, where the Third fought so gallantly, and where spots of brighter green than usual are the only record to mark where the flesh of heroes^is melting into its kindred dust again" (p. 291). So, too, after a visit to the churchyard at Hove, by moonlight, and musing on the graves : " Young R , too, is gone, but I do not envy any of them except the soldier, perhaps. I wish I had been with my own gallant, wondrous regiment in that campaign [Chillian wallah]" (p. 269). — Again, in a letter to Mr, Drew, referring to Mr, Kingsley's ser- mon for the latter (in 1851), and what came of it : "I am afraid my illus- trations are somewhat too military ; but I was rocked and cradled to the roar of artillery, and I began life with a preparation for, and appointment to, the 3rd Dragoons. Dis aliter visiwi^ — Ibid.^ vol. ii., p. 15. ROBERTSON OF BRIGHTON. 377 delight in a militaty career" breaks out, — witness his eloquence in describing the "glorious death of the heroes of Trukkee," the gathering of the bravest in battle round the torn colours which symbolized courage and honour, and the chivalry of war in contrast with a selfish and ignoble peace ; witness, in par- ticular, the closing sentence, spoken in anticipation (Feb. 1852) of a French invasion. Often, " with most unclerical emphasis," it seems, did he express his wish to die, sword in hand^ against a French invader. The epitaph on Colonel Prude,* in Canterbury Cathedral, takes no very high flight poetically speaking ; but it is known to have attracted and impressed Mr. Windham, who remem- bered the lines, within a word or two, after an interval of long years. With part of them we may close this chapter. " Here in peace Rests one whose life was war, whose rich increase Of fame and lionour from his valour grew, Unbegg'd, unbought ; for what he won he drew By just desert : having in service been A soldier, till near sixty, from sixteen Years of his active life ; continually Fearless of death, yet still prepared to die In his religious thoughts ; for midst all harms He bore as much of piety as arms." THE VOICE OF HEROD AND THE VOICE OF THE MOB. Acts xii. 22. THERE was a certain set day, upon which Herod, arrayed in royal apparel, sat upon his throne, and made an oration before the people. And the people gave a shout, saying. It is the voice of a god, and not of a man. That is to say, the vox popidi, the voice of the people, on this occasion, was, that the voice of Herod was the voice * Killed at the siege of Maestricht, July 12, 1632. 378 NEW TESTAMENT ^flNAl. Ot a god, vox del. 'O 6e br^xos eW^Q'NEr ecoC <&QNH\ Ka\ ovK dvOpoiTrov. And if the Z'ox populi be Z'^^ dei, the divinity of Herod's oration is thus settled at once. That the vox popidi is not infalHble, however, and therefore not vox del absokitely, is suggested by more than one other passage of history in this same book of Acts of the Apostles. "When the people of Lystra, for instance, saw what Paul had done to the man impotent in his feet, a cripple from his mother's womb, who never had walked, — they hfted up their voices — eTTT/poy rr]v $qnh'N aurcoi', — saying in the speech of Lycaonia, '' The gods are come down to us, in the Hkeness of men," This vox popidi affords another example of the same edifying process of deifying made easy. Unhappily, before the scene closes, certain Jews from Antioch and Iconium have ''persuaded the people," and St. Paul is stoned, and drawn out of the city, as supposed to be dead. The barbarous people, again, of Melita, are equally facile with civilized mobs in changing their mind. No doubt, they said, when they saw the viper hang on the apostle's hand. No doubt this man is a murderer, whom, though he hath escaped the sea, yet Vengeance [j? A/kt/] suffereth not to live. But when they saw him shake off the viper into the fire, and saw no harm come to him, they changed their mind, and said that he was a god. Who can forget, in connection with the vox popidi subject, that the people once were instant with loud voices \^