LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. ©i^ap. dnji^tg]^! !fo. Shelf ,I?i..l'^,03 •^ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. i835 THE WIT AND WISDOM OF e! BULWER-LYTTON. COMPILED BY c."l. bonney. ''\ /VL-'^ -•-♦ .t) ' ,r\Wj.i.i', f 211^^^' NEW YORK: JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER. 1885. V COPYBIGHT, 1885 BY JOHN B. ALDEN TROWS PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY, NEW YORK. ORDER OF WORKS CITED. PAGE Zanoni 13 A Strange Story 23 The Disowned 29 Devereux 37 What Will He Do With It 45 My Novel 59 Ernest Mai travers ']'] Alice, or the Mysteries 85 Paul Clifford 94 Eugene Aram loi Night and Morning 113 Godolphin , 1 26 The Caxtons 135 The Coming Race 146 Leila, or the Siege of Granada ; . . 1 50 The Parisians 1 53 The Pilgrims of the Rhine 173 The Ideal World. A Poem 182 Kenelm Chillingly 185 Rienzi 190 Pelham 199 Lucretia 208 Last Days of Pompeii 216 Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings 224 The Last of the Barons 232 Calderon, the Courtier 240 Pausanias the Spartan 242 Richelieu. A Drama 250 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer was born in Mav, 1805, and died in London, January 18, 1873. He was the youngest son of General Bulwer of Haydon Hall and Wood Bal- ling, Norfolk, of an ancient family of Norman origin, whose wife, Elizabeth Barbara Lytton, was sole heiress of the Knebworth es- tate. General Bulwer died when his son Edward was a child, and he was brought up by his mother. Upon her death, in 1844, he succeeded to the Knebworth estate, and by royal licence ex- changed the surname of Bulwer for that of Bulwer-Lytton. He was instructed by private tutors, then entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, "where he graduated in 1826, having in the previous year gained the Chancellor's prize for English versification by a poem on " Sculpture." In 1827 Bulwer married Rosina, a daughter of Mr. Francis Wheeler of Limerick. The marriage proved a most unhappy one, and a separation occurred in 1836, At the hustings at Hertford in 1858, Lady Bulwer appeared, and followed her hus- band's speeches of thanks for his election, by a violent harangue against him, in consequence of which she was for a short time confined in a lunatic asylum. She was a writer of several nov- els, and a number of her publications were reflections upon her husband and his family. Bulwer's only son, Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton (now Earl of Lytton), is an author of note, and has been intrusted with several important political missions. He has written largely under the nom-de-plume of " Owen Mere- dith." In 183 1 Mr. Bulwer was returned to the House of Commons for the small borough of St. Ives, joining the ranks of the Re- formers. When this borough in 1832 was deprived of its repre- sentation by the Reform Bill, Bulwer was elected by the city of Lincoln which he represented until 1841. His prominent achieve- ments at this period were his speeches on the copyright question, and his efforts to free newspapers from the stamp duties. He published in 1835 ^ political pamphlet entitled "The Crisis," which was serviceable to the Whigs, and ran through seven edi- tions. In 1838 Bulwer was created a baronet. In June, 1841, and again in July, 1847, he was defeated by the conservative candi- lo BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. dates for the borough of Lincohi. In the general election of 1852 he reentered Parliament for the county of Herts, as a Con- servative, and supporter of the Earl of Derby. Here he made a number of effective speeches, and became a leader of the party. He supported in 1855 the repeal of the stamp duty on newspa- pers, in opposition to most of his associates. In 1857 at the general election, he was again returned as a member for Herts. In June, 1858, he became a member of the Derby Cabinet as successor to Lord Stanley in the office of Secretary of State for the Colonies, resigning this position in June, 1859. On July 14, 1866, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Lytion. The following is a chronological list of his principal works, many of which have been translated into various languages, and are now accessible in a uniform edition. Weeds and Wild Flow^ers 1826 O'Neil, or the Rebel. A Poem 1827 Falkland. His first Novel 1828 Pel ham The Disowned ^ Devereux 1829 Paul Clifford 1830 The Siamese Twins. A Satirical Poem 183 1 Eugene Aram 1832 England and the English 1833 The Last Days of Pompeii ) ^. The Pilgrims of the Rhine ) • • • i»34 The Student. Rienzi, The Last of the Tribunes 1835 The Duchess de La Valliere 1 The Lady of Lyons 1 ta o /; ,-,.,,. ■' V Dramas 18^6 Richelieu ( ■^ Money. A Comedy J Athens, its Rise and Fall 1837 P>nest Maltravers \ ^ « Alice, or The Mysteries \ ^ Leila, or The Siege of Granada 1840 Night and Morning 1841 Zanoni 1842 The Last of the Barons 1843 The Confessions of a Water Patient 1845 Lucretia, or The Children of the Night ^ o ^ A Word to the Public. j ^^^^ The New Timon. A Poetical Romance 1846 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, ii King Arthur. An Epic ) ^ ^ Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings ) ^ ^ The Caxtons 1850 A Letter to John Bull 1851 My Novel 185 1 Not so Bad as We Seem. A Comedy 1852 Political and Dramatic Works, 5 vols 1852-54 What Will He Do With It i860 A Strange Story 1861 Caxtoniana (Essays) 1865 The Odes and Epodes of Horace (Metrical Translation) . 1869 The Lost Tales of Miletus 1870 The Coming Race 1872 The Parisians ) ^ Kenelm Chillingly f ^^73 Pausanias, the Spartan (unfinished.) 1875 Bulwer seems singularly free from the mean and petty jeal- ousy which characterizes many men of letters, speaking of other authors with kindness and admiration. And notwithstanding adverse and unjust criticism, he is undeniably, if not the greatest one of the greatest novelists, not only of the age, but of the world. His works show a vast knowledge of human character, and marvellous skill in portraying it. Far from being an im- moral writer as some of his enemies have alleged, he is entitled to rank as a true moralist : presenting vice not to entice or al- lure, but to warn, to deepen the horror of guilt and the dread of its consequences, and not in a single instance attempting to cre- ate for the criminals any interest save that of horror for their crimes. I may not offer perhaps a better defence of the illustrious au- thor's sincere and lofty purpose, than to quote from his essay en- titled "A Word to the Public," the following: " It is not given to all to have genius — it is given to all to have honesty of purpose; an ordinary writer may have this in common with the greatest — that he may compose his works with sincere and distinct views of promoting truth and administering to knowledge. I claim this intention fearlessly for myself. And if, contrary to my most solemn wishes, and my most thoughtful designs, any one of my writings can be shown, by dispassionate argument, to convey lessons tending to pervert the understanding and confound the eter- nal distinction between right and wrong, I will do my best to correct the er- ror, by stamping on it my own condemnation, and omitting it from the list of those it does not shame me to acknowledge. Every reader, who has honored my books with some attention, must long since have recognized in their very imperfections as works of art the favorite and peculiar studies of their author; some, especially, of the companions of my youth, must often have traced to those inquiries, which we pursued to- 12 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, gether through the labyrinth of metaphysics, and amid the ingenious specu- lations of writers who have sought by the analysis of our ideas to arrive at the springs of our manifold varieties in conduct, that over-indulgence of moralizing deductions, and those often tedious attempts to explain the work- ings of mind, which have weakened the effect of my characters, and in- terrupted the progress of my plots. But no man can have made the study of the great investigators of human conduct his passion and his habit, and ever consciously and wilfully meditate a work at variance with morality ; — more likely is it that he will err in the opposite extreme, and undertake no work, however light, without a purpose too sharply definite. Even in the object on which he is most intent, it is true that he may err, — gravest moral- ists, the wisest divines, have so erred ; human judgment cannot be infallible: ' Tacere Tutum semper erit.' — ^if one would be safe, one has no resource but to be silent.' But an error of this kind is one only of mistaken, yet honest intention, and may surely be ex- posed, without heated invectives and calumnious personalities." Callie L. Bonney. CHiCAGO,ya;/. 1885. WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. Z A N O N I. LEADING CHARACTERS. Zanoni, a type of eternal youth. Mejnour, a type of eternal age. Viola Pisani, prima donna of Naples, and later, wife of Zanoni. Clarence Glyndon, a young Englishman of fortune. Thomas Mervale, friend to Glyndon. Jean Nicot, an infidel French painter, most unscrupulous. Prince di , a dissolute nobleman, " capable of every crime." Fillide, Italian peasant girl. Maximilien Robespierre. The Dedicatory Epistle of " Zanoni," which is addressed by Bulwer, to his sculptor friend, John Gibson, R.A., concludes as follows : — " I, Artist in words, dedicate, then, to you, Artist, whose ideas speak in marble, this well-loved work of my matured manhood. I \(Tve it not the less because it has been little understood and superficially judged by the common herd : it was not meant for them. I love it not the more because it has found enthusiastic favorers amongst the Few. My affection for my work is rooted in the solemn and pure delight which it gave me to conceive and to perform. If I had graven it on the rocks of a desert, this apparition of my own innermost mind, in its least clouded moments, would have been to me as dear: And this ought, I believe, to be the sentiment with which he whose Art is born of faith in the truth and beauty of the principles he seeks to illus- trate, should regard his work. Your serener existence, uniform and holy, my lot denies — if my heart covets. But our true nature is in our thoughts, not our deeds : And therefore, in Books — which are his Thoughts — the Author's character lies bare to the discerning eye. It is not in the life of cities — in the turmoil and the crowd ; it is in the still, the lonely, and more sacred life, which for some hours, under every sun, the 14 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. Student lives — (his stolen retreat from the Agora to the Cave), that I feel there is between us the bond of that secret sympa- thy, that magnetic chain — which unites the Everlasting Broth- erhood, of whose being Zanoni is the type." WHAT IT IS TO DIE. Up from the earth he rose — he hovered over her — a thing not of matter — an idea of joy and light ! Behind, Heaven opened, deep after deep ; and the Hosts of Beauty were seen, rank upon rank afar ; and " Welcome ! " in a myriad melodies, broke from your choral multitude, ye People of the Skies — " Welcome ! O purified by sacrifice, and immortal only through the grave — this it is to die." And radiant amid the radiant, the image stretched forth its arms, and murmured to the sleeper : " Companion of Eternity ! — this it is to die ! " — Book VII. Chap. 17. STRUGGLE FOR THE LIGHT. Said the cavalier, turning back, and gently laying his hand on hers — " And perhaps, before we meet, you may have suffered ; — known the first sharp griefs of human life ; — known how little what fame can gain, repays what the heart can lose ; but be brave and yield not — not even to what may seem the piety of sorrow. Ob- serve yon tree in your neighbor's garden. Look how it grows up, crooked and distorted. Some wind scattered the germ, from which it sprung, in the clefts of the rock ; choked up and walled round by crags and buildings, by nature and man, its life has been one struggle for the light ; — light which makes to that life, the necessity and the principle : you see how it has writhed and twisted — how, meeting the barrier in one spot, it has labored and worked, stem and branches, towards the clear skies at last. What has preserved it through each disfavor of birth and circum- stances — why are its leaves as green and fair as those of the vine behind you, which, with all its arms, can embrace the open sun- shine ? My child, because of the very instinct that impelled the struggle — because the labor for the light won to the light at length. So with a gallant heart, through every adverse accident of sorrow, and of fate, to turn to the sun, to strive for the heaven ; this it is that gives knowledge to the strong, and happiness to the weak. Ere we meet again, you will turn sad and heavy eyes to those quiet boughs, and when you hear the birds sing from them, and see the sunshine come aslant from crag and house- top to be the playfellow of their leaves, learn the lesson that Nature teaches you, and strive through darkness to the light ! " — Zanoni to Viola : Book I Chap. 4. ZANONI. IS DEATH DIVIDES NOT THE WISE. You observe those two men seated together, conversing ear- nestly. Years long have flown away since they met last — at least, bodily, and face to face. But if they are sages, thought can meet thought, and spirit spirit, though oceans divide the forms. Death itself divides not the wise. Thou meetest Plato when thine eyes moisten over the Phaedo. May Homer live with all men forever ! — Book I. Chap. 5. WISDOM CONTEMPLATING MANKIND. Wisdom contemplating mankind leads but to the two results — compassion or disdain. He who believes in other worlds can accustom himself to look on this as the naturalist on the revolu- tions of an ant-hill, or of a leaf. What is the Earth to Infinity — what its duration to the Eternal ? Oh, how much greater is the soul of one man than the vicissitudes of the whole globe ! Child of heaven, and heir of Immortality, how far from one star hereafter wilt thou look back on the ant-hill and its commotions, from Clovis to Robespierre, from Noah to the Final Fire. The spirit that can contemplate, that lives only in the intellect, can ascend to its star, even from the midst of the burial-ground called Earth, and while the sarcophagus called Life immures in its clay the Everlasting ! — Book I. Chap. 5, WRECKS OF WHAT MAKES LIFE GLORIOUS. Broken instrument — broken heart — withered laurel-wreath 1 — the setting sun through the vine-clad lattice streamed on all ! So smiles the eternal Nature on the wrecks of all that makes life glorious ! And not a sun that sets not somewhere on the silenced music — on the faded laurel! — On the death of Fisani : Book 1. Chap. ^. TENDENCY TO BELIEVE. Of all the weaknesses which little men rail against, there is none that they are more apt to ridicule than the tendency to be- lieve. And of all the signs of a corrupt heart and a feeble head, the tendency of incredulity is the surest. Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny. While we hear, every day, the small pretenders to science talk of the absurdities of Alchemy and the dream of the Philosopher's Stone, a more erudite knowledge is aware that by Alchemists the great- est discoveries in science have been made, and much which still seems abstruse, had we the key to the mystic phraseology they were compelled to adopt, might open the way to yet more noble acquisitions. — Book II. Chap. 6 i6 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. THE IDEAL AND FAITH. Oh, when shall men learn, at last, that if the Great Religion inculcates so rigidly the necessity of faith, it is not alone that faith leads to the world to be ; but that without faith there is no excellence in this — faith is something wiser, hap- pier, diviner, than we see on earth ! — the Artist calls it the Ideal — the Priest Faith. The Ideal and Faith are one and the same. Return, O wanderer ! return. Feel what beauty and holiness dwelt in the Customary and the Old. Back to thy gateway glide, thou Horror ! and calm, on the child-like heart, smile again, O azure Heaven, with. thy night and thy morning star but as one, though under its double name of Memory and Hope \—Book VII. Chap. 9. practice squaring with precept. " If it were necessary that practice square with precept," said Zanoni, with a bitter smile, "our monitors would be but few. The conduct of the individual can affect but a small cir- cle beyond himself ; the permanent good or evil that he works to others lies rather in the sentiments he can diffuse. His acts are limited and momentary; his sentiments may pervade the universe, and inspire generations till the day of doom. All our virtues, all our laws, are drawn from books and maxims, which are sentiments, not from deeds. In conduct, Julian had the virtues of a Christian, and Constantine the vices of a Pagan. The sentiments of Julian reconverted thousands to Paganism ; those of Constantine helped, under Heaven's will, to bow to Christianity the nations of the earth. In conduct, the humblest fisherman on yonder sea, who believes in the miracles of San Gennaro, may be a better man than Luther ; to the sentiments of Luther the mind of modern Europe is indebted for the noblest revolutions it has known. Our opinions, young Englishman, are the angel part of us; our acts, the earthly." — Zano7iito Glyndon: Book II. Chap. 5. the grander art. See you not that The Grander Art, whether of poet or of painter, ever seeking for the true, abhors the real ; that you must seize Nature as her master, not lackey her as her slave ? You demand mastery over the past, a conception of the future. Has not the Art that is truly noble, for its domain the Future and the Past .'' You would conjure the invisible beings to your charm : and what is painting but the fixing into substance the Invisible t Are you discontented with this world ? This world was never meant for genius ! To exist, it must create another. ZANONL 17 What magician can do more ; nay, what science can do as much ? There are two avenues from the Httle passions and the drear calamities of earth ; both lead to heaven, and away from hell — Art and Science. But Art is more god-like than science ; sci- ence discovers, art creates. You have faculties that may com- mand art; be contented with your lot. The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the universe ; the poet can call a universe from the atom ; the chemist may heal with his drugs the infirmities of the human form ; the painter, or the sculptor, fixes into everlasting youth forms divine, which no disease can ravage, and no years impair. — ZaJionito Glyndon: Book II. Chap. 7. FAITH IN WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICING. You must have a feeling — a faith in whatever is self-sacrificing and divine — whether in religion or in art, in glory or in love — or Common-sense will reason you out of the sacrifice, and a syllo- gism will debase the Divine to an article in the market. — Book II. Chap. 9. FAITH THE BEAUTY OF THE SOUL. " I feel so assured that my very being is become a part of thee, that I cannot believe that my life can be separated from thine ; and in this conviction I repose, and smile even at thy v\^ords and my own fears. Thou art fond of one maxim, which thou repeatest in a thousand forms — that the beauty of the soul is faith — that as ideal loveliness to the sculptor, faith is to the heart — that faith, rightly understood, extends over all the works of the Creator, whom we can know but through belief — that it embraces a tranquil confidence in ourselves, and a serene repose as to our future — that it is the moon-light that sways the tides of the human sea. That faith I comprehend now. I reject all doubt — all fear. I know that I have inextricably linked the whole that makes the inner life to thee : and thou canst not tear me from thee, if thou wouldst ! And this change from struggle into calm came to me with sleep — a sleep without a dream ; but when I woke, it was with a mysterious sense of happiness — an indistinct memory of something blessed — as if thou hadst cast from afar off a smile upon my slumber. At night I was so sad ; not a blossom that had not closed itself up as if never more to open to the sun ; and the night itself, in the heart as on the earth, has ripened the blossoms into flowers. The world is beautiful once more, but beautiful in repose — not a breeze stirs thy tree — not a doubt my scull " — Viola to Zanorii : Book III Chap. 5. 1 8 Wir AND WISDOM OF BULWER. THE IDEAL AND REAL. Said Zanoni, with an encouraging smile, " Do you blame yourself for the natural and necessary return to earth, in which even the most habitual visitor of the Heavens of Invention seeks his relaxation and repose ? Man's genius is a bird that cannot be always on the wing ; when the craving for the actual world is felt, it is a hunger that must be appeased. They who command best the ideal, enjoy ever most the real. See the true artist, when abroad in men's thoroughfares, ever observant, ever diving into the heart, ever alive to the least as to the great- est of the complicated truths of existence ; descending to what pedants would call the trivial and the frivolous. From every mesh in the social web, he can disentangle a grace. And for him each airy gossamer floats in the gold of the sunlight. Know you not that around the animalcule that sports in the water there shines a halo, as around the star that revolves in bright pastime through the space ? True art finds beauty everywhere. In the street, in the market-place, in the hovel, it gathers food for the hive of its thoughts. In the mire of pol- itics, Dante and Milton selected pearls for the wreath of song. Whoever told you that Raffaelle did not enjoy the life without, carrying everywhere with him the one inward idea of beauty which attracted and embedded in its own amber every straw that the feet of the dull man trampled into mud .'* As some lord of the forest wanders abroad for its prey, and scents and follows it over plain and hill, through break and jungle, but, seizing it at last, bears the quarry to its unwitnessed cave — so Genius searches through wood and waste, untiringly and eagerly, every sense awake, every nerve strained to speed and strength, for the scattered and flying images of matter, that it seizes at last with its mighty talons, and bears away with it into solitudes no footsteps can invade. Go, seek the world without ; it is for art, the inexhaustible pasture-ground and harvest to the world within ! " — Book III. Chap. 4. MAN ARROGANT IN PROPORTION TO IGNORANCE. Man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance. Man's natural tendency is to egotism. Man, in his infancy of knowl- edge, thinks that all creation was formed for him. — Book IV. Chap, 4. MIRROR OF THE SOUL. The mirror of the soul cannot reflect both earth and heaven , and the one vanishes from the surface as the other is glassed upon its deeps. — Book IV. Chap. 9. ZANONI. 19 ART OF MEDICINE. We have, my pupil, no arts by which we can put Death out of our option^ or out of the will of Heaven. These walls may crush me as I stand. All that we profess to do is but this — to find out the secrets of the human frame, to know ^ly the parts ossify and the blood stagnates, and to apply contmual prevent- ives to the effects of Time. This is not Magic ; it is the Art of Medicine rightly understood. In our order we hold most noble — first, that knowledge which elevates the intellect ; secondly, that which preserves the body. But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigor and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret which I will only hint to thee at present, by which heat or caloric, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial prin- ciple of life, can be made its perpetual renovator — these, I say, would not suffice for safety. It is ours also to disarm and elude the wrath of men, to turn the swords of our foes against each other, to glide (if not incorporeal) invisible to eyes over which we can throw a mist and darkness. And this some seers have pro- fessed to be the virtue of a stone of agate. Abaris placed it in his arrow. I will find you an herb in yon valley that will give a surer charm than the agate and the arrow. In one word, know this, that the humblest and meanest products of Nature are those from which the sublimest properties are to be drawn. — Mejnour to Glyndon : Book IV. Chap. 2. SENSE OF ETERNITY. In a moment there often dwells the sense of Eternity ; for when profoundly happy, we know that it is impossible to die. Whenever the soul feels itself it feels everlasting life ! — Book IV. Chap. II. FLUID RESEMBLING ELECTRICITY. Mejnour professed to find a link between all intellectual beings in the existence of a certain all-pervading and invisible fluid resembling electricity, yet distinct from the known opera- tions of that mysterious agency — a fluid that connected thought to thought with the rapidity and precision of the modern tele- graph, and the influence of this influence, according to Mej- nour, extended to the remotest past — that is to say, whenever and wheresoever man had thought. Thus, if the doctrine were true, all human knowledge became attainable through a medium established between the brain of the individual inquirer and all the farthest and obscurest regions in the universe of ideas. — Book IV. Chap. 5. "20 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER, DEATH MAJESTIC AND BEAUTEOUS. " Mejnour, I see here, for the first time, how majestic and beauteous a thing is Death ! Of what sublime virtues we robbed ourselves, when, in the thirst for virtue, we attained the art by whlc^ we can refuse to die ! — When in som.e happy- clime, where to breathe is to enjoy, the charnel-house swallows up the young and fair — when, in the noble pursuit of knowl- edge. Death comes to the student, and shuts out the enchanted land, which was opening to his gaze, how natural for us to desire to live ; how natural to make perpetual life the first object of research ! But here, from my tower of time, looking over the darksome past, and into the starry future, I learn how great hearts feel what sweetness and glory there is to die for the things they love ! I saw a father sacrificing himself for his son ; he was subjected to charges which a word cf his could dispel — he was mistaken for his boy. With what joy he seized the error — confessed the noble crimes of valor and fidelity which the son had indeed committed — and went to the doom, exulting that his death saved the life he had given not in vain ! I saw women, young, delicate, in the bloom of their beauty ; they had vowed themselves to the cloister. Hands smeared with the blood of saints opened the grate that had shut them from the world, and bade them go forth, forget their vows, forswear the Divine One these daemons would depose, find lovers and helpmates, and be free. And some of these young hearts had loved, and even, though in struggles, loved yet. Did they forswear the vow ? Did they abandon the faith .? Did even love allure them ? Mejnour, with one voice, they jDreferred to die ! And whence comes this courage ? because such hearts live in some 7nore abstract and holier life than their own. But to live forever upon this earthy is to live in nothing diviner than ourselves. Yes, even amid this gory butcherdom, God, the Ever-living, vindicates to man the sanctity of His servant, Death ! " — Book VII. Chap, 3. THE FATHERLESS THE CARE OF GOD. Daylight in the prison. From cell to cell they hurry with the news ; crowd upon crowd ; — the joyous captives min- gled with the very jailers, who, for fear, would fain seem joyous too — they stream through the dens and alleys of the grim house they will shortly leave. They burst into a cell, forgotten since the previous morning. They found there a young female, sitting upon her wretched bed ; her arms crossed upon her bosom, her face raised upward ; the eyes unclosed, and a smile, of more than serenity — of bliss upon her lips. ZANONT. 21 Even in the riot of their joy, they drew back in astonishment and awe. Never had they seen life so beautiful ; and, as they crept nearer, and with noiseless feet, they saw that the lips breathed not, that the repose was of marble, that the beauty and the ecstasy were of death. They gathered round in silence ; and lo ! at her feet there was a young infant, who, wakened by their tread, looked at them steadfastly, and with its rosy fingers played with its dead mother's robe. An orphan there in the dungeon vault ! " Poor one ! " said the female (herself a parent) — " and they say the father fell yesterday ; and now the mother ! Alone in the world, what can be its fate ? " The infant smiled fearlessly on the crowd as the woman spoke thus. And the old Priest, who stood among them, said, gently, " Woman, see ! the orphan smiles ! The Fatherless ARE THE CARE OF GOD ! " Book VII. Chap. 1 7. LOVE SACRIFICES ALL. " Oh, shallow and mean heart of man ! " exclaimed Zanoni, with unaccustomed passion and vehemence, " dost thou conceive so little of love as not to know that it sacrifices all — love itself — for the happiness of the thing it loves ? — Book III. Chap. 4. DESTINY LESS INEXORABLE THAN IT APPEARS. Young man. Destiny is less inexorable than it appears. The resources of the great Ruler of the Universe are not so scanty and so stern as to deny to men the divine privilege of Free Will ; all of us can carve out our own way, and God can make our very contradictions harmonize with His solemn ends. FAITH AND PRAYER. The despoilers of all that beautifies and hallows life had desecrated the altar, and denied the God ! — they had removed from the last hour of their victims the Priest, the Scripture, and the Cross ! But Faith builds in the dungeon and the lazar-house its sublimest shrines ; and up, through roofs of stone, that shut out the eye of Heaven, ascends the ladder where the angels glide to and fro — Prayer. — Book VII. Chap. 16. WORDS COMMON PROPERTY. Words themselves are the common property of all men ; yet, from words themselves, Thou, Architect of Immortalities, pilest up temples that shall outlive the Pyramids, and the very leaf of the Papyrus becomes a Shinar, stately with towers, round which the Deluge of Ages shall roar in vain ! — Book V. Chap. 7. 22 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. TWOFOLD SHAPE OF LOVE. What a twofold shape there is in love ! If we examine it coarsely — if we look but on its fleshly ties — its enjoyment of a moment — its turbulent fever and its dull reaction, — how strange it seems that this passion should be the supreme mover of the world ; that it is this which has dictated the greatest sacrifices, and influenced all societies and all times ; that to this the loftiest and loveliest genius has ever consecrated its devotion ; that, but for love, there were no civilization — no music, no poe- try, no beauty, no life beyond the brute's. But examine it in its heavenlier shape — in its utter abnega- tion of self — in its intimate connection with all that is most del- icate and subtile in the spirit — its power above all that is sordid in existence — its mastery over the idols of the baser worship — its ability to create a palace of the cottage, an oasis in the desert, a summer in the Iceland — where it breathes, and fertil- izes, and glows; and the wonder rather becomes how so few regard it in its holiest nature. What the sensual call its enjoy- ments, are the least of its joys. True love is less a passion than a symbol. — Book IV. Chap. lo. TWO WORST FOES. Behold the two worst foes — the False Ideal that knows no God, and the False Love that burns from the corruption of the senses, and takes no lustre from the soul ! — Book VII. Chap. 2. A STRANGE STORY. LEADING CHARACTERS. Dr. Allen Fenwick, the hero of the story, a young physician. Lilian Ashleigh, the heroine. Julius Faber, a physician of great distinction, and friend to Dr. Fenwick, Sir Philip Derval, an explorer in the reahn of magic. Margrave, a young man supposed to possess occult powers. Mrs. Colonel Poyntz, a social autocrat. SANCTITY OF THE SICK-ROOM. To the true physician there is an inexpressible sanctity in the sick-chamber. At its threshold the more human passions quit their hold on his heart. Love there would be profanation. Even the grief permitted to others he must put aside. He must enter that room — a calm intelligence. He is disabled for his mission if he suffer aught to obscure the keen, quiet glance of his science. Age or youth, beauty or deformity, innocence or guilt, merge their distinctions in one common attribute — human suffering appealing to human skill. Woe to the house- holds in which the trusted Healer feels not on his conscience the solemn obligations of his glorious art. — Book I. Chap, ro. DOUBLE MYSTERY OF DIVINITY AND SOUL. This idea, so miraculously abstract, of a Power that the infant has never seen, that cannot be symbolled forth and explained to him by the most erudite sage — a Power, nevertheless, that watches over him, and hears him, that sees him, that will carry him across the grave, that will enable him to live on forever; — this double mystery of a Divinity and of a Soul the infant learns with the most facile readiness, at the first glimpse of his reason- ing faculty. Before you can teach him a rule in addition, before you can venture to drill him into his horn-book, he leaps, with one intuitive spring of all his ideas, to the comprehension of the truths which are only incomprehensible to blundering sages ! And you, as you stand before me, dare not say, " Let the child pray for me no more ! '* But will the Creator accept the child's prayer for the man who refuses prayer for himself 1 — Book /. Chap. 46. 24 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. RELIGION A BRIDGE. What a lovely bridge between old age and childhood is re- ligion ! How intuitively the world begins Vvith prayer and wor- ship on entering life, and how intuitively on quitting life the old man turns back to prayer and worship, putting himself again side by side with the infant ! — Book I. Chap. 46. EDUCATION FOR HEAVEN. But in the trial below, man should recognize education for heaven. — Book I. Chap. 46. THE SOUL HAS NEED OF REPOSE. The soul has need of pauses of repose — intervals of escape, not only from the mind. A man of the loftiest intellect will ex- perience times when mere intellect not only fatigues him, but amidst its most original conceptions, amidst its proudest tri- umphs, has a something trite and commonplace compared with one of those vague intimations of spiritual destiny which are not within the ordinary domain of reason ; and, gazing abstractedly into space, will leave suspended some problem of severest thought, or uncompleted some golden palace of imperial poetry, to indulge in hazy reveries, that do not differ from those of an innocent quiet child ! The soul has a long road to travel — from time through eternity. It demands its halting hours of contem- plation. Contemplation is serene. — Book I. Chap. 48. CEREMONIOUS FEE. Is there a physician who has not felt at times how that cere- monious fee throws him back from the garden-land of humanity into the market-place of money — seems to put him out of the pale of equal friendship, and say, " True, you have given health and life. Adieu ! there, you are paid for it." — Book I. Chap. 10. MOCKERY IN FREEDOM. Ah ! what mockery there is in that grand word, the world's fierce war-cry — Freedom ! Who has not known one period of life, and that so solemn that its shadows may rest over all life hereafter, when one human creature has over him a sovereignly more supreme and absolute than Orient servitude adores in the symbols of diadem and sceptre ? What crest so haughty that has not bowed before a hand, which could exalt or humble ! What heart so dauntless that has not trembled to call forth the voice at whose sound open the gates of rapture, of despair ! That life alone is free which rules, and suffices for itself. That life we forfeit when we love ! — Book I. Chap. 17. A STRANGE STORY. 25 THE CURRENT OF LIFE. The current of our life, indeed, like that of the rivers, is most rapid in the midmost channel, where all streams are alike com- paratively slow in the depth and along the shores in which each life, as each river, has a character peculiar to itself. And hence, those who would sail with the tide of the world, as those who sail with the tide of a river, hasten to take the middle of the stream, as those who sail agaijist the tide are found clinging to the shore. — Book I. Chap. 53. ATMOSPHERE IN LETTERS. There is an atmosphere in the letters of the one we love, which \^e alone — we who love — can feel. — Book I. Chap. 38. SOUL AND HEREAFTER. Soul and Hereafter are the heritage of all men ; the humblest journeyman in those streets, the pettiest trader behind those counters, has in those beliefs his prerogatives of royalty. You would dethrone and embrute the lords of the earth by your the- ories. For my part, having given the greater part of my life to the study and analysis of facts, I would rather be the author of the tritest homily, or the baldest poem, that inculcated that im- perishable essence of the soul to which I have neither scalpel nor probe, than the founder of the subtlest school, or the framer of the loftiest verse, that robbed my fellow-men of their faith in a spirit that eludes the dissecting-knife — in a being that escapes the grave digger. — Book I. Chap. 46. SPECULATIONS ON DEITY. What would matter all our speculations on a Deity who would cease to exist for us when we are in the grave ? Why mete out, like Archytas, the earth and the sea, and number the sands on the shore that divides them, if the end of this wisdom be a handful of dust sprinkled over a skull ! — Book I. Chap. 46. MALIGNITY OF A WRONG WORLD. Oh ! the malignity of a wrong world ! oh that strange Just of mangling reputations, which seizes on hearts the least, wantonly cruel ! Let two idle tongues utter a tale against some third per- son, who never offended the babblers, and how the tale spreads, like fire, lighted none know how, in the herbage of an American prairie ? Who shall put it out ? What right have we to pry into the secrets of other men's hearths ? True or false, the tale that is gabbled to us what con- cern of ours can it be ? I speak not of cases to which the law 26 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. has been summoned, which law has sifted, on which law has pro- nounced. But how, when the law is silent, can we assume its verdicts ? How be all judges, where there has been no witness- box, no cross-examination, no jury ? Yet, every day we put on our ermine, and make ourselves judges — judges sure to con- demn, and on what evidence ? That which no court of law will receive. Somebody has said something to somebody, which somebody repeats to everybody ! — Book I. Chap. 56. CONTRADICTION BETWEEN MAN AND AUTHOR. How Strange is that contradiction between our being as Man and our being as Author ! Take any writer enamored of a system — a thousand things may happen to him every day which might shake his faith in that system ; and while he moves about as mere man, his faith is shaken. But when he settles himself back into the phase of his being as author, the mere act of tak- ing pen in hand and smoothing the paper before him, restores his speculations to their ancient mechanical train. The system — ■ the beloved system — re- asserts its tyrannic sway, and he either ignores, or moulds into fresh proofs of his theory as author, all which, an hour before, had given his theory the lie in his living perceptions as man. — Book I. Chap. 74. HAPPIEST ART OF INTELLECT. Believe me that the happiest art of intellect, however lofty, is that which enables it to be cheerfully at home with the Real ! — Book I. Chap. 73. EVIDENCE OF MAN's SOUL. In all those capacities for the reception of impressions from external Nature which are given to Man, and not to the brqtes, I see the evidence of Man's Soul. I can understand why the inferior animal has no capacity to receive the idea of a Deity and of worship — simply because the inferior animal, even if graciously admitted to a future life, may not therein preserve the sense of its identity. I can understand even why that sym- pathy with each other which we men possess, and which consti- tutes the great virtue we emphatically call Humanity, is not pos- sessed by the lesser animals (or, at least, in a very rare and ex- ceptional degree) even where they live in communities, like beavers, or bees, or ants ; because men are destined to meet, to know, and to love each other in the life to come, and the bond between the brutes ceases here. — Book I. Chap. 73. A STRANGE S7VRV. 27 MIND NEEDS ACTION. The heart loves repose and the soul contemplation, but the mind needs action. — Book I. Chap. 60. man's will. "Man's will," answered Faber, "has over men's deeds and reason, habitual and daily power infinitely greater, and, when uncounterbalanced, infinitely more dangerous than that which superstition exaggerates in magic. Man's will moves a war that decimates a race, and leaves behind it calamities little less dire than slaughter. Man's will frames, but it also corrupts laws ; exalts, but also demoralizes opinion ; sets the world mad with fanaticism, as often as it curbs the heart's fierce instincts by the wisdom of brother-like mercy. — Book I. Chap. 71. MAN WITHOUT FAITH. Open biographical volumes wherever you please, and the man who has no faith in religion, is a man who has faith in a nightmare. — Book I. Chap. 71. MAN COGS DICE FOR HIMSELF. Man cogs the dice for himself ere he rattles the box for his dupes. Was there ever successful impostor who did not begin by a fraud on his own understanding ? — Book I. Chap. 77. WISDOM THROUGH JOY OR GRIEF. Be prepared for either ; wisdom through joy, or wisdom through grief. Enough that, looking only through the mechan- ism by which this mortal world is impelled and improved, you know that cruelty is impossible to wisdom. Even a man, or man's law, is never wise but when merciful. But mercy has general conditions ; and that which is mercy to the myriads may seem hard to the one, and that which seems hard to the one in the pang of a moment may be mercy when \dewed by the eye that looks on through eternity. — Book I. Chap. 79. INSTINCT OF IMMORTALITY. "What mourner can be consoled, if the dead die forever.?" Through every pulse of my frame throbbed that dread question. All Nature around seemed to murmur it. And suddenly, as if by a flash from Heaven, the grand truth in Faber's grand rea- soning shone on me, and lighted up all, within and without. Man alone, of all earthly creatures, asks, '^ Can the Dead die 28 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. forever ? " and the instinct that urges the question is God's an- swer to man ! No instinct is given in vain. And, born with the instinct of soul is the instinct that leads the soul from the seen to the unseen, from time to eternity, from the torrent that foams towards the Ocean of Death, to the source of its stream, far aloft from the ocean. — Book I. Chap. 89, THE DISOWNED. LEAD.ING CHARACTERS. Algernon Mordaunt, the last son of an old and honorable race. Clarence Linden, alias Clinton L'Estrange, " The Disowned." Lord Bordaile, son and heir of the powerful Earl of Ulswater, and brother to Clinton L'Estrange. King Cole, a king of the gypsies. Mr. Talbot, a vain old bachelor, whose life has been devoted to literature. Mr. Brown, an eccentric vendor. Mr. and Mrs. Copperas, the former, " a stock-jobber and wit," the latter, " a fine lady and sentimentalist." Richard Crawford, a commercial man and a villain. Wolfe, an erratic would-be political reformer. , Warner, a young artist. Isabel St. Leger, an orphan, the only child of a captain in the army. Lady Flora Ardenne, a young beauty, betrothed to L'Estrange. At the time this work was written I was deeply engaged in the study of metaphysics and ethics — and out of that study grew the character of Algernon Mordaunt. He is represented as a type of the Heroism of Christian Philosophy — an union of love and knowledge placed in the midst of sorrow, and laboring on through the pilgrimage of life, strong in the fortitude that comes from belief in Heaven. E. B. L. May, 1852. GENERALLY ESTEEMED. There are few men who do not console themselves for not being generally loved, if they can reasonably hope that they are generally esteemed. — Book I. Chap. 6. man's love. Man's love, in general, is a selfish and exacting sentiment : it demands every sacrifice, and refuses all. But the nature of Mordaunt was essentially high and disinterested, and his honor, like his love, was not that of the world : it was the ethereal and spotless honor of a lofty and generous mind, the honor which 30 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. custom can neither give nor take away ; and, however impa- tiently he bore the deferring of a union in which he deemed that he was the only sufferer, he would not have uttered a sigh or urged a prayer for that union, could it, in the minutest or re- motest degree, have injured or degraded hen These are the hearts and natures which make life beautiful ; these are the shrines which sanctify love : these are the diviner spirits for whom there was kindred and commune with every- thing holy and exalted in heaven and earth. For them, Nature unfolds her hoarded poetry, and her' hidden spells: for their steps are the lonely mountains, and the still woods have a mur- mur for their ears : for them there is a strange music in the wave, and in the whispers of the light leaves, and rapture in the voices of the birds : their souls drink, and are saturated with the mysteries of the Universal Spirit, which the philosophy of old times believed to be God himself. They look upon the sky with a gifted vision, and its dove-like quiet descends and overshad- ows their hearts : the Moon and the Night are to them wells of Castalian inspiration and golden dreams ; and it was one of them who, gazing upon the Evening Star, felt in the mmost sanctuary of his soul, its mysterious harmonies with his most worshipped hope, his most passionate desire, and dedicated it to — Love. — Book I. Chap. 19. CHARACTERISTIC OF A VAIN MAN. The great characteristic of a vain man, in contradistinction to an ambitious man, and his eternal obstacle to a high and honorable fame, is this : he requires for any expenditure of trouble too speedy a reward ; he cannot wait for years, and climb, step by step, to a lofty object : whatever he attempts, he must seize at a single grasp. Added to this, he is incapable of an exclusive attention to one end ; the universality of his crav- ings is not contented unless it devours all ; and thus he is per- petually doomed to fritter away his energies by grasping at the trifling baubles within his reach, and in gathering the worthless fruit, which a single sun can mature. — Book I. Chap. 20. EFFECT OF KINDNESS. Is there one being, stubborn as the rock to misfortune, whom kindness does not affect ? For my part, kindness seems to me to come with a double grace and tenderness from the old ; it seems in them the hoarded and long-purified benevolence of years ; as if it had survived and conquered the baseness and selfishness of the ordeal it had passed ; as if the winds, which had broken the form, had swept in vain across the heart, and THE DISOWNED. 31 the frosts which had chilled the blood and whitened the thin locks, had possessed no power over the warm tide of the affec- tions. It is the triumph of nature over art : it is the voice of the angel which is yet within us. Nor is this all : the tender- ness of age is twice blessed — blessed in its trophies over the obduracy of encrusting and withering years ; blessed, because it is tinged with the sanctity of the grave — because it tells us that the heart will blossom even upon the precincts of the tomb, and flatters us with the inviolacy and immortality of love. — Book I. Chap. 22. ART LOVED FOR ITSELF. Art is to be loved for itself — and not for the rewards it may bestow upon the Artist. — Book I. Chap. 24. THE SERAPH VIRTUE. The vilest infamy is not too deep for the Seraph Virtue to descend and illumine its abyss ! — Book I. Chap. 14. LOVE CLOSER FOR THE DESERT. As Faith clings tHe more to the cross of life, while the wastes deepen around her steps, and the adders creep forth upon her path, so love clasps that which is its hope and comfort the closer for the desert which encompasses, and the dangers which harass its way. — Book I. Chap. 27. EFFECTS OF FAME, If the certainty of future fame bore Milton rejoicing through his blindness, or cheered Galileo in his dungeon, what stronger and holier support shall not be given to him who has loved mankind as his brothers, and devoted his labors to their cause ? — who has not sought, but relinquished, his own renown ? — who has braved the present censures of men for their future benefit, and trampled upon glory in the energy of benevolence ? Will there not be for him something more powerful than fame to comfort his sufferings and to sustain his hopes ? If the wish of mere posthumous honor be a feeling rather vain than exalted, the love of our race affords us a more rational and noble desire of remembrance. Come what will, that love, if it animates our toils, and directs our studies, shall, when we are dust, make our relics of value, our efforts of avail, and consecrate the desire of fame, which were else a passion selfish and impure, by connect- ing it with the welfare of ages, and the eternal interest of the world and its Creator ! — Book I. Chap. 39. 32 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. SECLUSION, WHEN JUSTIFIABLE. They only are justifiable in seclusion who, like the Greek philosophers, make that very seclusion the means of serving and enlightening their race — who from their retreats send forth their oracles of wisdom, and render the desert which surrounds them eloquent with the voice of truth. But remember, Clarence (and let my life, useless in itself, have at least this moral), that for him who in nowise cultivates his talent for the benefit of others ; who is contented with being a good hermit at the ex- pense of being a bad citizen ; who looks from his retreat upon a life wasted in the difficiles niigce of the most frivolous part of the world, nor redeems in the closet the time he has misspent in the saloon ; remember, that for him seclusion loses its dignity, phi- losophy its comfort, benevolence its hope, and even religion its balm. Knowledge, unemployed, may preserve us from vice — but knowledge beneficently employed is virtue. Perfect happiness, in our present state, is impossible ; for Hobbes says justly, that our nature is inseparable from -desires, and that the very word desire (the craving for something not possessed) implies that our present felicity is not complete. But there is one way of attaining what we may term, if not utter, at least mortal happi- ness : it is this — a sincere and unrelaxing activity for the happi- ness of others. In that one maxim is concentrated whatever is noble in morality, sublime in religion, or unanswerable in truth. In that pursuit we have all scope for whatever is excellent in our hearts, and 7io7ie for the petty passions which our nature is heir to. Thus engaged, whatever be our errors, there will be nobility, not weakness, in our remorse ; whatever our failure, virtue, not selfishness, in our regret; and, in success, vanity it- self will become holy and triumph eternal. As astrologers were wont to receive upon metals " the benign aspect of the stars, so as to detain and fix, as it were, the felicity of that hour which would otherwise be volatile and fugitive," even so will that success leave imprinted upon our memory a blessing which can- not pass away — preserve forever upon our names, as on a sig- net, the hallowed influence of the hour in which our great end was effected, and treasure up " the relics of heaven " in the sanct- uary of a human fame. — Book 1. Chap. 48. WHOM FORTUNE BLASTS TO RENDER HOLY. There are some whom the lightning of fortune blasts, only to render holy. Amidst all that humbles and scathes — amidst all that shatters from their life its verdure, smites to the dust the pomp and summit of their pride, and in the very heart of exist- ence writeth a sudden and " strange defeature," they stand THE DISOWNED. 33 erect, — riven, not uprooted, a monument less of pity than of awe ! There are some who pass through the Lazar-house of Misery with a step more august than a Caesar's in his hall. The very things which seen alone, are despicable and vile, associated with them, become almost venerable and divine; and one ray, however dim and feeble, of that intense holiness which, in the Infant God, shed majesty over the manger and the straw, not denied to those who, in the depth of affliction, cherish His pa- tient image, flings over the meanest localities of earth an em- anation from the glory of Heaven ! — Book I. Chap. 49. TEARS, NOT FOR THE DEAD, BUT THEIR SURVIVORS. Tears are not for the dead, but their survivors. I would rather see thee drop inch by inch into the grave, and smile as I beheld it, than save thee for an inheritance of sin. What is there in this little and sordid life that we should strive to hold it .'' What in this dreadful dream that we should fear to wake ? — Book /. Chap. 57. VIRTUE HAS RESOURCES IN ITSELF. Virtue has resources buried in itself, which we know not, till the invading hour calls them from their retreats. Surrounded by hosts without, and when Nature itself, turned traitor, is its most deadly enemy within ; it assumes a new and a superhu- man power, which is greater than Nature itself. Whatever be its creed — whatever be its sect — from whatever segment of the globe its orisons arise. Virtue is God's empire, and from his throne of thrones He will defend it. Though cast into the dis- tant earth, and struggling on the dim arena of a human heart, all things above are spectators of its conflict, or enlisted in its cause. The angels have their charge over it — the banners of archangels are on its side, and from sphere to sphere, through the illimitable ether, and round the impenetrable darkness at the feet of God, its triumph is hymned by harps, which are strung to the glories of the Creator ! — Book I. Chap. 57. DISAPPOINTMENT IN RETROSPECT. There are few persons, however fortunate, who can look back to eight years of their life, and not feel somewhat of disap- pointment in the retrospect : few persons, whose fortunes the world envy, to whom the token of past time, suddenly obtruded on their remembrance, does not awaken hopes destroyed, and wishes deceived, which that world has never known. We tell our triumphs to the crowd, but our own hearts are the sole confidants of our sorrows. — Book 1. Chap. 59. 3 34 WIT AND WISDOM OF BU LIVER. friends' desire for our happiness. All our friends, perhaps, desire our happiness ; but, then, it must invariably be in their own way. What a pity that they do not employ the same zeal in making us happy in oms ! — Book I. Chap. 6i. OUR first era of life. Our first era of life is under, the influence of the primitive feelings : we are pleased, and we laugh ; hurt, and we weep ; we vent our little passions the moment they are excited , and so much of novelty have w-e \.o perceive., that we have little leisure to reflect. By and by, fear teaches us to restrain our feelings : when displeased, we seek to revenge the displeasure, and are punished ; we find the excess of our joy, our sorrow, our anger, alike considered criminal, and chidden into restraint. From harshness we become acquainted with deceit : the promise made is not fulfilled ; the threat not executed, the fear falsely excited, and the hope wilfully disappointed ; we are surrounded by sys- tematized delusion, and we imbibe the contagion. From being forced into concealing the thoughts which we do conceive, we begin to affect those which we do not : so early do we learn the two main tasks of life, to Suppress and to Feign, that our memory will not carry us beyond that period of artifice to a state of nature when the twin principles of veracity and be- lief were so strong as to lead the philosophers of a modern school into the error of terming them innate. — Book I. Chap. 62. ignorance, the cause of errors and vices. It is the petty, not the enlarged, mind, which prefers casuistry to conviction ; it is the confined and short sight of Ignorance which, unable to comprehend the great bearings of truth pries only into its narrow and obscure corners, occupying itself in scrutinizing the atoms of a part, while the eagle eye of Wisdom contemplates, in its widest scale the luminous majesty of the whole. Survey our faults, our errors, our vices — fearful and fertile field ; trace them to their causes — all those causes re- solve themselves into one — Ignorance ! For, as we have al- ready seen, that from this source flow the abuses of Religion, so, also, from this source flow the abuses of all other blessings — of talents, of riches, of power; for we abuse things, either be- cause we know not their real use, or because, with an equal blindness, we imagine the abuse more adapted to our happiness. But as Ignorance, then, is the sole spring of evil — so, as the an- tidote to ignorance is Knowledge, it necessarily follows that, were we consummate in knowledge, we should be perfect in THE DISOWNED. 35 good. He therefore who retards the progress of intellect, coun- tenances crime — nay, to a state, is the greatest of criminals ; while he who circulates that mental light more precious than the visual, is the holiest improver, and the surest benefactor of his race ! Nor let us believe, with the dupes of a shallow pol- icy, that there exists upon the earth one prejudice that can be called salutary, or one error beneficial to perpetuate. As the petty fish, which is fabled to possess the property of arresting the progress of the largest vessel to which it clings, even so may a single prejudice, unnoticed or despised, more than the adverse blast, or the dead calm, delay the barque of Knowledge in the vast sea of Time. — Book I. Chap. 62. STEP IN KNOWLEDGE ONE STEP FROM SIN. It is true that the sanguineness of philanthropists may have carried them too far : it is true (for the experiment has not yet been made) that God may have denied to us, in this state, the consummation of knowledge, and the consequent perfection in good ; but because we cannot be perfect, are we to resolve we will be evil ? One step in knowledge is one step from sin ; one step from sin is one step nearer to Heaven. Oh ! never let us be deluded by those, who, iox political motives, would adulterate the divinity of religions truths : never let us believe that our Father in Heaven rewards most the one talent unemployed, or that prejudice, and indolence, and folly, find the most favor in His sight ! The very heathen has bequeathed to us a nobler estimate of his nature; and the same sentence which so sub- limely declares '^ truth is the body of God," declares also "and light is his shadow." — Book I. Chap. 62. UPON the death of mordaunt. But for Him, the husband and the father, whose trials through this wrong world I have portrayed — for him let there be neither murmurs at the blindness of Fate, nor sorrow at the darkness of his doom. Better that the lofty and bright spirit should pass away before the petty business of life had bowed it, or the sor- did mist of this low earth breathed a shadow on its lustre ! Who would have asked that spirit to have struggled on for years in the intrigues — the hopes — the objects of meaner souls? Who would have desired that the heavenward and impatient heart should have grown inured to the chains and toil of this enslaved state, or hardened into the callousness of age t Nor would we claim the vulgar pittance of compassion for a lot which is ex- alted above regret ! Pity is for our weaknesses — to our weak- nesses only be it given. It is the aliment of love — it is the 36 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. wages of ambition — it is the rightful heritage of error ! But why should pity be entertained for the soul which never fell ? — for the courage which never quailed? — for the majesty never humbled ? — for the wisdom which, from the rough things of the common world, raised an empire above earth and destiny? — for the stormy life ? — it was a triumph ! — for the early death ? — it was immortality ! I have stood beside Mordaunt's tomb : his will had directed that he should sleep not in the vaults of his haughty line — and his last dwelling is surrounded by a green and pleasant spot. The trees shadow it like a temple ; and a silver, though fitful brook, wails with a constant, yet not ungrateful dirge, at the foot of the hill on which the tomb is placed. I have stood there in those ardent years when our wishes know no boundary, and our ambition no curb ; yet, even then, I would have changed my wildest vision of romance for that quiet grave, and the dreams of the distant spirit whose relics reposed beneath it. — Final Chapter, DEVEREUX. LEADING CHARACTERS. Sir William Devereux, knighted by Charles II. At the date of the story "a fine wreck, vain, but good-natured." Morton Devereux, ) Gerald Devereux, > Nephews of Sir William, Aubrey Devereux, ) Abbe Montreuil, a designing priest. Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke. COLLEY ClBBER. Steele. Swift. Addison. Fielding. Philip of Orleans. Louis XIV. Peter the Great and Catherine, the Czar and Czarina. Bishop of Frejus. Richard Cromwell. Don Diego D'Alvarez, a Spaniard of high birth. An exile. IsoRA, the heroine of the story, daughter to D'Alvarez, and wife to Morton Devereux. Madame de Maintenon. Madame de Balzac. Mr. Oswald, a lawyer. Mr. Marie Oswald, a valet. Desmarais, valet to Morton Devereux, at the same time acting as spy in the service of the Abbe. DEDICATORY EPISTLE TO JOHN AULDJO, ESQ. My DEAR AULDJO : Permit me, as a memento of the pleasant hours we passed together, and the intimacy we formed, by the winding shores and the rosy seas of the old Parthenope, to dedicate to you this romance. It was written in, perhaps, the happiest period of my literary life — when success began to brighten upon my labors, and it seemed to me a fine thing to make a name. Rep- utation, like all possessions, fairer in the hope than the reality, shone before me, in the gloss of novelty — and I had neither felt the envy it excites, the weariness it occasions, nor (worse than all) that coarse and painful notoriety, that something between 38 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. the gossip and the slander, which attends every man whose writings become known — surrendering the grateful privacies of life to " The gaudy, babbling, and remorseless day." No man, I believe, ever wrote anything really good, who did not feel that he had the ability to write something better. Writ- ing, after all, is a cold and a coarse interpreter of thought. How much of the imagination, — how much of the intellect, evapor- ates and is lost while we seek to embody it in words ! — Man made language, and God the genius. Nothing short of an eternity could enable men to imagine, think, and feel, to ex- press all they have imagined, thought and felt. Immortality, the spiritual desire, is the intellectual iiecessity. In " Devereux," I wished to portray a man flourishing in the last century, with the train of mind and sentiment peculiar to the present ; — describing a life, and not its dramatic epitome, the historical characters introduced are not closely woven with the main plot, like those in the fictions of Sir Walter Scott — but are rather, like the narrative romances of an earlier school, designed to relieve the predominant interest, and give a greater air of truth and actuality to the supposed memoir. It is a fic- tion which deals less with the picturesque than the real. Of the principal character thus introduced (the celebrated and graceful but charlatanic, Bolingbroke) I still think that my sketch, upon the whole, is substantially just. We must not judge of the poli- ticians of one age by the lights of another. Happily we now demand in a statesman a desire for other aims than his own advancement ; but, at that period, ambition was almost univers- ally selfish — the statesman was yet a courtier — a man whose very destiny it was to intrigue, to plot, to glitter, to deceive. It is in proportion as politics have ceased to be a secret science, in proportion as courts are less to be flattered, and tools to be managed, that politicians have become useful and honest men : and the statesman now directs a people, where once he out- witted an ante-chamber. Compare Bolingbroke — not with the men and by the rules of this day — but with the men and by the rules of the last. He will lose nothing in comparison with a Walpole, with a Marlborough on the one side — with an Oxford or a Swift upon the other. LOVER OF A LADV OF THE MODE. It is a charming thing to be the lover of a lady of the mode ! One so honored does with his hours as a miser with his guineas, viz. : nothing but count them. — Book II. Chap. 2. DEVEREUX. 39 THE GLASS OF LIFE. The glass of life is the best book — and one's natural wit, the only diamond that can write legibly on it. — Book I. Chap. 2. OUR FEELINGS. Our feelings, especially in youth, resemble that leaf, which, in some old traveller, is described as expanding itself to warmth, but, when chilled, not only shrinking and closing, but present- ing to the spectator, thorns which had laid concealed upon the opposite side of it h^iox^.—Book I. Chap. 2. CONSCIOUSNESS OF STRENGTH. If ever the consciousness of strength is pleasant, it is when we are thought most weak. — Book J. Chap. 2. GOOD-BREEDING. I learnt that nothing can constitute good-breeding that has not good-nature for its foundation. — Book I. Chap. 5. LOVE OF KINDRED. Ah, earth ! what hast thou more beautiful than the love of those whose ties are knit by nature, and whose union seems or- dained to begin from the very moment of their birth. — Book I. Chap. 7. FEELINGS REAL AND PRETENDED. Vain hope ! to forget one's real feelings by pretending those one never felt. — Book I. Chap. 15. FINE SAYINGS. " All the world knows. Colonel Cleland, that you are a wit, and therefore we take your fine sayings, as we take change from an honest tradesman, — rest perfectly saiisfied with the coin we get, without paying any attention to it.'' — Book II. Chap. 3. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RELIGION AND PRIESTCRAFT. Alas ! when will men perceive the difference between religion and priestcraft ? when will they perceive that reason, so far from extinguishing religion. by a more gaudy light, sheds on it all its lustre ? when will they perceive that nothing contrary to sense is pleasing to virtue, and that virtue itself is only valu- able because it is the road to happiness ? It is fabled that the first legislator of the Peruvians received from the Deity a golden rod, with which in his wanderings he was to strike the earth, 40 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. until in some destined spot the earth entirely absorbed it, and there — and there alone — was he to erect a temple to the Divin- ity. What is this fable but the cloak of an inestimable moral ? Our reason is the rod of gold ; the vast world of truth gives the soil, which it is perpetually to sound ; and only where without resistance the soil receives the rod which guided and supported us, will our altar be sacred and our worship be accepted. — Book II, Chap, 9. LOVE A DIVISION FROM THE WORLD. What is love but a division from the world, and a blending of two souls, two immortalities divested of clay and ashes, into one ? It is a severing of a thousand ties from whatever is harsh and selfish, in order to knit them into a single and sacred bond ! Who loves hath attained the anchorite's secret ; and the hermitage has become dearer than the world. O respite from the toil and the curse of our social and banded state, a little interval art thou, suspended between two eternities — the past and the future — a star that hovers between the morning and the night, sending through the vast abyss one solitary ray from heaven, but too far and faint to illumine while it hallows the earth. — Book II. Chap. 11. HUMAN NATURE A BEAUTIFUL FABRIC. After all, human nature is a beautiful fabric ; and even its imperfections are not odious to him who has studied the science of its architecture, and formed a reverent estimate of its Crea- tor. — Book II. Chap. 2. INSECTS DANGEROUS. The insects we despise as they buzz around us, become dangerous when they settle on ourselves and we feel their sting ! — Book IV. Chap. 2. FEAR INCREASES LOVE. It is a noticeable thing how much fear increases love. I mean — for the aphorism requires explanation — how much we love, in proportion to our fear of losing (or even to our fear of injury done to) the beloved object. 'Tis an instance of the re- action of the feelings — the love produces the fear, and the fear reproduces the love. This is one reason, among many, why women love so much more tenderly and anxiously than we do ; and it is also one reason among many, why frequent absences are, in all stages of love, the most keen exciters of the passion. — Book III. Chap. 2. DEVEKEUX. 41 DISTINCTION BETWEEN POLITICS AND POLICY. Ah, there is a nice distinction between politics and policy, and Madame de Balzac knew it. The distinction is this : Poli- tics is the art of being wise for others ! Policy is the art of being wise for one's self. — Book IV. Chap, 4. AFFLICTION THE EBON-GATE. A re-entrance into life through the ebon-gate, affliction. — Book IV. Chap. I. A MEETING OF WITS. A meeting of wits — Conversation gone out to supper in her dress of velvet and jewels. — Book IV. Chap. 5. MAN HIS OWN SHARPER AND BUBBLE. Man is at once his own sharper and his own bubble. We make vast promises to ourselves, and a passion, an example, sweeps even the remembrance of those promises from our minds. One is too apt to believe men hypocrites, if their con- duct squares not with their sentiments, but perhaps no vice is more rare, for no task is more difficult, than systematic hypocrisy : and the same susceptibility which exposes men to be easily im- pressed by the allurements of vice, renders them at heart most struck by the loveliness of virtue. Thus, their language and their hearts worship the divinity of the latter, while their conduct strays the most erringly towards the false shrines over which the former presides. Yes ! I have never been blind to the sur- passing excellence of good. The still sweet whispers of virtue have been heard, even when the storm has been loudest, and the bark of reason been driven the most impetuously over the waves : and at this moment, I am impressed with a foreboding, that sooner or later, the whispers will not only be heard, but their suggestion be obeyed ; and that far from courts and in- trigues, from dissipation and ambition, I shall learn, in retire- ment, the true principles of wisdom, and the real objects of life. — Thus did Bolingbroke converse. — Book IV. Chap. 11. PETER THE GREAT. Pattern and teacher of kings, if each country had produced one such ruler as you, either all mankind would now be con- tented with despotism, or all mankind would be />'. 10. EACH GENERATION ITS OWN CANONS. Each generation has its own critical canons in poetry as well as in political creeds, financial systems, or whatever other changeable matters of taste are called " Settled Questions " and "Fixed Opinions."— ^d?^>^ VII. Chap. 20. INFLICTIONS PROVIDENT MERCY. Heaven often veils its most provident mercy in what to man seems its sternest inflictions. — Book VII. Chap. 20. PERCEPTION OF THE BEAUTIFUL. Be it a work of art, a scene in nature, or, rarest of all, a hu- man face divine, a beauty never before beheld strikes us with hidden pleasure, like a burst of light ; and it is a pleasure that elevates. The imagination feels itself richer by a new idea of excellence ; for not only is real beauty wholly original, having no prototype, but its immediate influence is spiritual. It may seem strange — I appeal to every observant artist if the assertion 54 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. be not true — but the first sight of the most perfect order of fe- male beauty, rather than courting, rebukes and strikes back every grosser instinct that would alloy admiration. There must be some meanness and blemish in the beauty which the sensualist no sooner beholds than he covets. In the higher incarnation of the abstract idea which runs through all our notions of moral good and celestial purity — even if the moment the eye sees the heart loves the image — the love has in it something of the rever- ence with which it was said the charms of Virtue would produce could her form be made visible ; nor could mere human love obtrude itself till the sweet awe of the first effect had been fa- miliarized away. And I apprehend that it is this exalting or etherealizing attribute of iDeauty to which all poets, all writers who would poetize the realities of life, have unconsciously ren- dered homage, in the rank to which they elevate what, stripped of such attribute, would be but a gaudy idol of painted clay. If from the loftiest epic to the tritest novel a heroine is often lit- tle more than a name to which we are called upon to bow, as to a symbol representing beauty ; and if we ourselves (be we ever so indifferent in our common life to fair faces) feel that in art, at least, imagination needs an image of the Beautiful — if, in a Word, both poet and reader here would not be left excuseless, it is because in our inmost hearts there is a sentiment which links the ideal of beauty with the Supersensual. Wouldst thou, for instance, form some vague conception of the shape worn by a pure soul released ? wouldst thou give to it the likeness of an ugly hag ? or wouldst thou not ransack all thy remembrances, all thy conceptions of forms most beauteous, to clothe the holy image .'' Do so : now bring it thus robed with the richest graces before thy mind's eyCc Well, seest thou now the excuse for poets in the rank they give to Beauty? Seest thou now how high from the realm of the senses soars the mysterious Arche- type ? Without the idea of beauty, couldst thou conceive a form in which to clothe a soul that has entered heaven t — Book VII. Chap. 23. THE author's temperament. What is the author's temperament ? Too long a task to be de- fined. But without it a man may write a clever book, a useful book, a book that may live a year, ten years, fifty years. He will not stand out to distant ages a representative of the age that rather lived in him than he in it. The author's tempera- ment is that which makes him an integral, earnest, original unity, distinct from all before and all that may succeed him. And as a Father of the Church has said that the consciousness of indi- WHA T WILL FIE DO WITH IT. 55 vidual being is the sign of immortality, not granted to the infe- rior creatures — so it is in this individual temperament one and indivisible ; and in the intense conviction of it, more than in all the works it may throw off, that the author becomes immortal. Nay, his works may perish like those of Orpheus or Pythagoras ; but he himself, in his name, in the foot-print of his being, re- mains, like Orpheus or Pythagoras, undestroyed, indestructible. —Book VIII. Chap. I. SCIENCE AS A DISTRACTION. So long as you take science only as a distraction, science will not lead you to discovery. — Book VIII. Chap. i. THE COLORS OF LOVC. The learned compute that seven hundred and seven millions of millions of vibrations have penetrated the eye before the eye can distinguish the tints of a violet. What philosophy can calcu- late the vibrations of the heart before it can distinguish the col- ors of love ? — Book VIII. Chap. 2. REASONING FROM THE HEART. A woman too often reasons from her heart — hence two-thirds of her mistakes and her troubles. A man of genius, too, often reasons from his heart — hence, also, two-thirds of his troubles and mistakes. Wherefore, between woman and genius there is a sympathetic affinity ; each has some intuitive comprehension of the secrets of the other, and the more feminine the woman, the more exquisite the genius, the more subtle the intelligence between the two. But note well that this tacit understanding becomes obscured if human love pass across its relations. Shakespeare interprets aright the most intricate riddles in woman. A woman was the first to interpret aright the art that is latent in Shakespeare. But did Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare un- derstand each other i* — Book VIII. Chap. 4. DIANA LUNA — HECATE. There is a place at which three roads meet, sacred to that mysterious goddess called Diana on earth, Luna (or the Moon) in heaven, and Hecate in the infernal regions. At this place pause the Virgins permitted to take their choice of these three roads. Few give their preference to that which is vowed to the goddess in her name of Diana; that road, cold and barren, is clothed by no roses and myrtles. Roses and myrtles veil the entrance to both the others, and in both the others Hymen has much the same gay-looking temples. But which of those two 56 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. leads to the celestial Lima, or which of them conducts to the in- fernal Hecate, not one nymph in fifty divines. If thy heart should misgive thee, O nymph ! — if, though cloud veil the path to the Moon, and sunshine gild that to pale Hecate — thine in- stinct recoils from the sunshine, while thou darest not advent- ure the cloud — thou hast still a choice left, — thou hast still the safe road of Diana. Hecate, O nymph ! is the goddess of ghosts. If thou takest her path, look not back, for the ghosts are behind thee. — Book IX. Chap. 2. NUMBER OF FRIENDS. Whatever the number of a man's friends, there will be times in his life when he has one too few ; but if he has only one en- emy, he is lucky indeed if he has not one too many. — Book IX. Chap. 3. GRIEF AT DIFFERENT STAGES OF LIFE. Lo, how contrasted the effect of a similar cause of grief at different stages of life ! Chase the first day-dreams of our youth, and we cry, " Action — Strife ! " In that cry, unconsciously to ourselves, Hope speaks, and proffers worlds of emotion not yet exhausted. Disperse the last golden illustration in which the image of happiness cheats our experienced manhood, and Hope is silent ; she has no more words to offer — unless, indeed, she drop her earthly attributes, change her less solemn name, and float far out of sight as " Faith ! " — Book IX. Chap. 3. No wind so cutting as that which sets in the quarter from which the sun rises. — Book X. Chap. 5. PHYSICAL POWER BRUTE-LIKE OR GOD-LIKE. O young Reader, whosoever thou art, on whom Nature has bestowed her magnificent gift of physical power with the joys it commands, with the daring that springs from it — on closing this chapter, pause a moment and think — " What wilt thou do with it ? " Shall it be brute-like or God-like ? With what advantage for life — its delights or its perils — toils borne with ease, and glories cheap bought — dost thou start at life's onset ? Give thy sinews a Mind that conceives the Heroic, and what noble things thou mayest do ! But value thy sinews for rude Strength alone and that strength may be turned to thy shame and thy torture. The Wealth of thy life will but tempt to its waste. Abuse, at first felt not, will poison the uses of Sense. Wild bulls gore and trample their foes. Thou hast Soul ! Wilt thou trample and gore it ? — Book X. Chap. 7. WffA T WILL HE DO WITH IT. 57 COURSE OF TRUE LOVE. ''The course of true love never does run smooth ! " May it not be because where there are no obstacles, there are no tests to the truth of Love ? Where the course is smooth, the stream is crowded with pleasure-boats. Where the wave swells, and the shoals threaten, and the sky lowers, the pleasure-boats have gone back into harbor. Ships fitted for rough weather are those built and stored for long voyage. — Book XI. Chap. i. RECONCILIATION OF THE HEART WITH LOSS. Now, as he sits and thinks, and gazes abstractedly into that far, pale, winter sky — now, the old man is still scheming how to reconcile a human loving heart to the eternal loss of that affection which has so many perishable counterfeits, but which, when true in all its elements — complete in all its varied wealth of feeling — is never to be forgotten, and never to be replaced. — Book XI. Chap. I. YOUNG man's HOPE. Nothing so obstinate as a young man's hope ; nothing so eloquent as a lover's tongue. — Book XI. Chap. 3. INDIVIDUAL CONCESSIONS. Individual concessions are like political ; when you once be- gin, there is no saying where you will stop. — Book XI. Chap. 6. TREES WHICH SHELTER. Trees that, like the poplar, lift upward all their boughs, give no shade and no shelter, whatever their height. Trees the most lovingly shelter and shade us, when, like the willow, the higher soar their summits, the lowlier droop their boughs.— Book XI. Chap. 10. fortune's workings. Let Fortune strike down a victim, and even the heathen cries "This is the hand of God!" But where Fortune brings no vicissitude ; where her wheel runs smooth, dropping wealth or honors as it rolls — where AfHiction centres its work within the secret, unrevealing heart — there, ev^en the wisest man may not readily perceive by what means Heaven is admonishing, forcing or wooing him nearer to itself. I take the case of a .man in whom Heaven acknowledges a favored son. I assume his out- ward life crowned with successes, his mind stored with opulent gifts, his nature endowed with lofty virtues ; what an heir to ^8 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. train through the brief school of earth for due place in the ages that roll on forever ! But this man has a parasite weed in each bed of a soul rich in flowers ; weed and flowers intertwined, stem with stem — their fibres uniting even deep down to the root. Can you not conceive with what untiring vigilant care Heaven will seek to disentangle the flower from the weed ? — how (drop- ping inadequate metaphor) Heaven will select for its warning chastisements that very error which the man has so blent with his virtues that he holds it a virtue itself ? — how, gradually, slowly, pertinaciously, it will gather this beautiful nature all to itself — insist on a sacrifice it would ask from no other ? — Book XII. Chap, 2. HUMAN LIVES SEPARATE CIRCLES. " All human lives are as separate circles ; they may touch at one point in friendly approach, but even where they touch, each rounds itself from off the other. — Book XII, Chap. 2. RELENTING OF FINE NATURES. More bounteous run rivers when the ice that locked their flow melts into their waters. And when fine natures relent, their kindness is swelled by the thaw. — Book XII. Chap. 5. DEATH-BED REPENTANCE. " You believe," asked the Man of the World, " in the efficacy of a death-bed repentance, when a sinner has sinned till the power of sinning be gone ? " " I believe," replied the Preacher, " that in health there is nothing so unsafe as trust in a death-bed repentance ; I believe that on the death-bed it cannot be unsafe to repent ! " — Book XII. Chap. 12. MAN AND THE HELPMATE. And the lake is as smooth as glass ; and the swans, hearken- ing the music, rest still, with white breasts against the grass margin ; and the doe, where she stands, her fore-feet in the water, lifts her head wistfully, with nostrils distended, and wondering soft eyes that are missing the master. Now full on the beech-groves shines the westering sun ; out from the gloomy beech-grove into the golden sunlight — they come, they come — Man and the Helpmate, two lives rebetrothed — two souls re- united. Be it evermore ! Amen. — Final Chapter. ■ "MY NOVEL;" OR, VARIETIES IN ENGLISH LIFE. LEADING CHARACTERS. Parson Dale, " quite a beau in a clerical way," a patient man and pattern husband. Mrs. Dale, wife of the parson, and with all her " tempers " an excellent woman. Squire Hazeldean, "with a hearty affection for country life." Half brother to Audley Egerton. Mrs. Hazeldean, the squire's wife and the lady of the parish. Frank Hazeldean, son of the squire. Miss Jemima Hazeldean, the squire's first cousin, finally married to Dr. Riccabocca. Capt. Barnabas Higginbotham, a distant relation of the Hazeldeans, at whose house he visited ten months of the year. AuDLEY Egerton, a widower, and member of Parliament. Harley, Lord L'Estrange, the only son of the Earl of Lansmere, a no- bleman of considerable wealth, and allied to the most powerful families of England. The dearest friend of Audley Egerton. Dr. Riccabocca, an Italian exile, alias the Duke di Serrano. Violante, daughter to Dr. Riccabocca. A child when the story opens. She marries Harley L'Estrange. Leonard Fairfield, supposed to be the son of widow Fairfield. In reality the son of Egerton. Mrs. Fairfield, a plam, middle-aged working-woman. A widow. Henry Norreys, a man of letters- Randal Leslie, a scheming hypocrite. Protege of Audley Egerton, and related to his second wife, who was a Miss Leslie. Dr. Morgan, a homoeopathic physician. John Avernel, and his wife. Grandfather and mother to Leonard Fair- field, on his mother's side. Richard Avernel, a self-made man, son of John Avernel. Nora Avernel, daughter of John Avernel, First wife of Egerton, and mother of Leonard, Capt. Algernon Digby, an improvident and invalid soldier. Helen Digby, Captain Digby's daughter, finally married to Leonard Fair- field, alias Egerton. Beatrice, Marchessa di Negra, an Italian beauty. A widow, and sister of Count di Peschiera. GiULio Franzini, Count di Peschiera. A kinsman of Dr. Riccabocca, and seeking to possess himself of the Doctor's fortune. The Count is well known as an Italian adventurer. Baron Levy, a money-lender. John Burley, devoted to literature and whiskey. Jackeymo, servant to Dr. Riccabocca. 6o WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. PEASANT FOND OF HOME. How well it speaks for peasant and landlord, when you see that the peasant is fond of his home, and has some spare time and heart to bestow upon mere embellishment. Such a peas- ant is sure to be a bad customer to the ale-house, and a safe neighbor to the Squire's preserves. All honor and praise to him, except a small tax upon both, which is due to the land- lord ! — Book I. Chap. 3. ANECDOTE OF THE EMPEROR ADRIAN, "Once in a time," pursued Riccabocca, "the Emperor Adrian, going to the public baths, saw an old soldier, who had served under him, rubbing his back against the marble wall. The Emperor, who was a wise, and therefore a curious, inquisi- tive man, sent for the soldier, and asked him why he resorted to that sort of friction. ' Because,' answered the veteran, ' I am too poor to have slaves to rub me down.' The Emperor was touched, and gave him slaves and money. The next day, when Adrian went to the baths, all the old men in the city were to be seen rubbing themselves against the marble as hard as they could. The Emperor sent for them, and asked them the same question which he had put to the soldier; the cunning old rogues, of course, made the same answer. ' Friends,' said Adrian, ' since there are so many of you, you will just rub one another ! ' Mr. Dale, if you don't want to have all the donkeys in the country with holes in their shoulders, you had better not buy the Tinker's ! ''—Book I. Chap. 6. TREATISE ON " DEAR." While the Parson and his wife are entertaining their guest, I propose to regale the reader with a small treatise apropos of that " Charles dear," murmured by Mrs. Dale — a treatise ex- pressly written for the benefit of The Domestic Circle. It is an old jest that there is not a word in the language that conveys so little endearment as the word "dear." But though the saying itself, like most truths, be trite and hackneyed, no little novelty remains to the search of the inquirer into the va- rieties of inimical import comprehended in that malign mono- syllable. For instance, I submit to the experienced that the degree of hostility it betrays is in much proportion to its collo- cation in the sentence. When, gliding indirectly through the rest of the period, it takes its stand at the close, as in that " Charles dear " of Mrs. Dale, it has spilt so much of its natural bitterness by the way that it assumes even a smile, " amara ''MY novel:' 6i lento temperet risu." Sometimes the smile is plaintive, some- times arch. Ex. gr. {Plaintive.) — " I know very well that whatever I do is wrong, Charles dear." " Nay, I am very glad you amused yourself so much without me, Charles dear." " Not quite so loud ! If you had but my poor head, Charles dear," etc. {Arc/i.) — " If you could spill the ink anywhere but on the best table-cloth, Charles dear ! " " But though you must always have your own way, you are not quite faultless, own, Charles dear," etc. When the enemy stops in the middle of the sentence, its venom is naturally less exhausted. Ex. gr. " Really, I must say, Charles dear, that you are the most fidgety person," etc. " And if the house bills were so high last week, Charles dear, I should just like to know whose fault it was — that's all." " But you know, Charles dear, that you care no more for me and the children than — " etc. But if the fatal word spring up, in its primitive freshness, at the head of the sentence, bow your head to the storm. It then assumes the majesty of " my " before it ; it is generally more than objurgation — it prefaces a sermon. My candor obliges me to confess that this is the mode in which the hateful mono- .syllable is more usually employed by the marital part of the one flesh ; and has something about it of the odious assumption of the 1^ eixuchidin pater-familias — the head of the family — boding, not perhaps " peace and love, and quiet life," but certainly "awful rule and right supremacy." Ex. gr. " My dear Jane — I wish you would just put by that everlast- ing crochet, and listen to me for a few moments," etc. " My dear Jane — I wish you would understand me for once — don't think I am angry — no ; but I am hurt. You must con- sider," etc. " My dear Jane — I don't know if it is your intention to ruin me, but I only wish you would do as all other women do who care three straws for their husband's property," etc. " My dear Jane — I wish you to understand that I am the last person in the world to be jealous : but I'll be d d if that puppy, Captam Prettyman," etc. Now, few so carefully cultivate the connubial garden, as to feel much surprise at the occasional sting of a homely nettle or two ; but who ever expected, before entering that garden, to find himself pricked and lacerated by an insidious exotical 62 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. " dear," which he had been taught to believe only lived in a hothouse, along with myrtles and other tender and sensitive shrubs, which poets approjDriate to Venus ? — Bdok I, Chap. 7. EVERY MAN HIS BURDEN. Brethren, every man has his burden. If God designed our lives to end at the grave, may we not believe that he would have freed an existence so brief from the cares and sorrows to which, since the beginning of the world, mankind has been sub- jected 1 Suppose that I am a kind father, and have a child whom I dearly love, but I know by a Divine revelation that he will die at the age of eight years, surely I should not vex his infancy by needless preparations for the duties of life. If I am a rich man, I should not send him from the caresses of his mother to the stern discipline of school. If I am a poor man, I should not take him with me to hedge and dig, to scorch in the sun, to freeze in the winter's cold ; why inflict hardships on his childhood for the purpose of fitting him for manhood, when I know that he is doomed not to grow into man ? But if, on the other hand, I believe my child is reserved for a more durable existence, then should I not, out of the very love I bear to him, prepare his childhood for the struggle of life, according to that station in which he is born, giving many a toil, many a pain, to the infant, in order to rear and strengthen him for his duties as man ? So it is with our Father that is in heaven. Viewing this life as our infancy, and the next as our spiritual maturity, where, " in the ages to come, he may show the exceeding riches of his grace," it is in his tenderness, as in his wisdom, to permit the toil and the pain which, in tasking the powers and develop- ing the virtues of the soul, prepare it for " the earnest of our inheritance." Hence it is that every man has his burden. Brethren, if you believe that God is good, yea, but as tender as a human father, you will know that your troubles in life are a proof that you are reared for an eternity. But each man thinks his own burden the hardest to bear ; the poor man groans under his poverty, the rich man under the cares that multiply with wealth. Grant all conditions the same — no reverse, no rise, and no fall — nothing to hope for, nothing to fear — what a moral death you would at once inflict upon all the energies of the soul, and what a link between the Heart of man and the Providence of God would be snapped asunder ! If we could annihilate evil, we should annihilate hope ; and hope, my brethren, is the avenue to faith. If there be " a time to weep and a time to laugh," it is that he who mourns may turn to eternity for comfort, and he who rejoices may bless God ''MY novel:' 63 for the happy hour. Ah ! my brethren, were it possible to an- nihilate the inequalities of human life, it would be the banish- ment of our worthiest virtues, the torpor of our spiritual nature, the palsy of our mental faculties. The moral world, like the world without us, derives its health and its beauty from diversity and contrast. "Every man shall bear his own burden." True; but now turn to an earlier verse in the same chapter, — " Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." Yes ; while heaven ordains to each his peculiar suffering, it connects the family of man into one household, by that feeling which, more perhaps than any other, distinguishes us from the brute crea- tion — I mean the feeling to which we give the name of sym- pathy — the feeling for each other ! The flock heedeth not the sheep that creeps into the shade to die ; but man has sorrow and joy not in himself alone, but in the joy and sorrow of those around him. He who feels only for himself abjures his very nature as man ; for do we not say of one who has no tenderness for mankind that he is inhuman ? and do we not call him who sorrows with the sorrowful, humane 1 — Book II. Chap 12. AN APOLOGY. Of all the wares and commodities in exchange and barter, wherein so mainly consists the civilization of our modern world, there is not one which is so carefully weighed — so ac- curately measured — so plumbed and gauged — so doled and scraped — so poured out in 7ninima and balanced with scruples — as that necessity of social commerce called " an apology ! " If the chemists were half so careful in vending their poisons, there would be a notable diminution in the yearly average of victims to arsenic and oxalic acid. But, alas, in the matter of apology, it is not from the excess of the dose, but the timid, niggardly, miserly manner in which it is dispensed, that poor Humanity is hurried off to the Styx ! — Book III. Chap. 14. CHILDREN, — PLEASURE OF BEING USEFUL. There is not a greater pleasure you can give children, espe- cially female children, than to make them feel they are already of value in the world, and serviceable as well as protected. — Book IV. Chap. 7. APPEALS TO OPERATIVES. Noble and generous spirits are ye, who, with small care for fame, and little reward from pelf, have opened to the intellects of the poor the portals of wisdom ! I honor and revere ye ; 64 ^IT AND WISDOM OF BUL WER. only do not think ye have done all that is needful. Consider, I pray ye, whether so good a choice from the Tinker's bag would have been made by a boy whom religion had not scared from the pestilent, and genius had not led to the self-improving. And Lenny did not wholly escape from the mephitic portions of the motley elements from which his awakening mind drew its nur- ture. Think not it was all pure oxygen that the panting lip drew in. No ; there were still those inflammatory tracts. Po- litical I do not like to call them, for politics means the art of government, and the tracts I speak of assailed all government which mankind has hitherto recognized. Sad rubbish, perhaps, were such tracts to you, O sound thinker, in your easy-chair ! Or to you practised statesman, at your post on the Treasury Bench — to you, calm dignitary of a learned Church — or to you, my lord judge, who may often have sent from your bar to the dire Orcus of Norfolk's Isle the ghosts of men whom that rub- bish, falling simultaneously on the bumps of acquisitiveness and combativeness, hath untimely slain ! Sad rubbish to you ! But seems it such rubbish to the poor man, to whom it promises a para.dise on the easy terms of upsetting a world ? For ye see, those " Appeals to Operatives " represent that same world up- setting as the simplest thing imaginable — a sort of two-and-two- make-four proposition. The poor have only got to set their strong hands to the axle, and heave-a-hoy ! and hurrah for the topsy-turvy ! Then, just to put a little wholesome rage into the heave-a-hoy ! it is so facile to accompany the eloquence of " Ap- peals " with a kind of stir-the-bile-up statistics — "Abuses of the Aristocracy " — " Jobs of the Priesthood " — " Expenses of the Army kept up for Peers' younger sons " — "Wars contracted for the villancfus purpose of raising the rents of the land-owners" — all arithmetically dished up, and seasoned with tales of every gentleman who has committed a misdeed, every clergyman who has -dishonored his cloth; as if such instances were fair speci- mens of average gentlemen and ministers of religion ! All this passionately advanced (and observe, never answered, for that literature admits no controversialists, and the writer has it all his own way) may be rubbish; but it is out of such rubbish that op- eratives b^ild barricades for attack, and legislators prisons for deAence-,Boo^ IF. Chap. 7. INDULGENCE OF POETIC TASTE AND REVERIE. To many minds, at the commencement of our grave and ear- nest pi/grimage, I am Vandal enough to think that the indul- gence of poetic taste and reverie does great and lasting harm ; that it serves to enervate the character, give false ideas of life, I ''MYNOVELr 65 impart the semblance of drudgery to the noble toils and duties of the active man. All poetry would not do this — not, for in- stance, the Classical, in its diviner masters — not the poetry of Homer, of Virgil, of Sophocles — not, perhaps, even that of the indolent Horace. But the poetry which youth usually loves and appreciates the best — the poetry of mere sentiment — does so in minds already over-predisposed to the sentiment, and which re- quire bracing to grow into healthful manhood. On the other hand, even this latter kind of poetry, which is peculiarly modern, does suit many minds of another mould — minds which our modern life, with its hard positive forms, tends to produce. And as in certain climates plants and herbs, par- ticularly adapted as antidotes to those diseases most prevalent in the atmosphere, are profusely sown, as it were, by the benig- nant providence of nature — so it may be that the softer and more romantic species of poetry, which comes forth in harsh, money-making, unromantic times, is intended as curatives and counter-poisons. The world is so much with us, now-a-days, that we need have something that prates to us, albeit even in too fine an euphuism, of the moon and stars. — Book IV. Chap. 9. SOMETHING NOBLER THAN FORTUNE. Certes, to Leonard Fairfield, at that period of his intellectual life, the softness of out Helicon descended as healing dews. In his turbulent and unsettled ambition, in his vague grapple with the giant forms of political truths, in his bias toward the application of science to immediate practical purposes, this lovely vision of the Muse came in the white robe of the Peace- maker ; and with upraised hand, pointing to serene skies, she opened to him fair glimpses of the Beautiful, which is given to Peasant as to Prince — showed to him that on the surface of the earth there is something nobler than fortune — that he who can view the world as a poet is always at soul a king ; while to prac- tical purpose itself, that larger and more profound invention, which poetry stimulates, supplied the grand design and the sub- tle view — leading him beyond the mere ingenuity of the me- chanic, and habituating him to regard the inert force of the matter at his command with the ambition of the Discoverer. But above all, the discontent that was within him finding a vent, not in deliberate war upon this actual world, but through the purifying channels of song — in the vent itself it evaporated, it was lost. By accustoming ourselves to survey all things with the spirit that retains and reproduces them only in their lovelier or grander aspects, a vast philosophy of toleration for what we before gazed on with scorn or hate insensibly grows upon us. 5 (£ WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. Leonard looked into his heart after the Enchantress had breathed upon it ; and through the mists of the fleeting and tender mel- ancholy which betrayed where she had been, he beheld a new sun of' delight and joy dawning over the landscape of human life. Thus, though she was dead and gone from his actual knowl- edge, this mysterious kinswoman — " a voice, and nothing more " — had spoken to him, soothed, elevated, cheered, attuned each discord into harmony ; and, if now permitted from some serener sphere to behold the life that her soul thus strangely influenced, verily with yet holier joy, the saving and lovely spirit might have glided onward in the Eternal Progress. We call the large majority of human lives obscure. Presumpt- uous that we are ! How know we what lives a single thought retained from the dust of nameless graves may have lighted to renown ? — Book IV. Chap. 9. HAPPINESS. "Come hither, my child," said Mr. Dale, turning round to Violante, who still stood among the flowers, out of hearing, but with watchful eyes. " Come hither," he said, opening his arms. Violante bounded forward, and nestled to the good man's heart. " Tell me, Violante, when you are alone in the fields or the garden, and have left your father looking pleased and serene, so that you have no care for him at your heart, — tell me, Vio- lante, though you are alone, with the flowers below, and the birds singing overhead, do you feel that life itself is happiness or sorrow ? " " Happiness ! " answered Violante, half shutting her eyes, and in a measured voice. " Can you explain what kind of happiness it is t " *' Oh, no, impossible ! and it is never the same. Sometimes it is so still — so still, and sometimes so joyous, that I long for wings to fly up to God, and thank him ! " — Book IV. Chap. 16. DESIRE TO KNOW. Certainly it is a glorious fever that desire to know ! And there are few sights in the moral world more sublime than that which many a garret might afford, if Asmodeus would bare the roofs to our survey — viz., a brave, patient, earnest human be- ing toiling his own arduous way, athwart the iron walls of pen- ury, into the magnificent Infinite, which is luminous with starry souls. — Book IV. Chap. 18. ''MY NOVELr . e^^ INTELLECTUAL CULTURE NOT NECESSARY TO VIRTUE. Let me here, my child, invite you to observe, that He who knew most of our human hearts and our immortal destinies, did not insist on this intellectual culture as essential to the virtues that form our well-being here, and conduce to our salvation hereafter. Had it been essential, the Allwise One would not have selected humble fishermen for the teachers of His doc- trine, instead of culling His disciples from Roman portico or Athenian academe. And this, which distinguishes so remarka- bly the Gospel from the ethics of heathen philosophy, wherein knowledge is declared to be necessary to virtue, is a proof how slight was the heathen sage's insight into the nature of mankind, when compared with the Saviour's ; for hard, indeed, would it be to men, whether high or low, rich or poor, if science and learn- ing, or contemplative philosophy, were the sole avenues to peace and redemption ; since, in this state of ordeal requiring active duties, very few in any age, whether they be high or low, rich or poor, ever are or can be devoted to pursuits merely men- tal. Christ does not represent heaven as a college for the learned; therefore the rules of the Celestial Legislator are rendered clear to the simplest understanding as to the deepest. — Book IV, Chap. 20. " I WISH " AND " I WILL." "Oh," continued Violante, again raising her head loftily, " what it is to be a man ! A woman sighs * I wish,' but a man should say 'I ^\\\r'—Book IV. Chap. 22. DESCRIPTION OF l'eSTRANGE. He was not L'Estrange with them, he was Harley ; and by that familiar baptismal I will usually designate him. He was not one of those men whom author or reader wish to view at a distance, and remember as " my Lord," it was so rarely that he remembered it himself. For the rest, it had been said of him by a shrewd wit, — " He is so natural, that every one calls him affected." Harley L'Estrange was not so critically handsome as Audley Egerton ; to a commonplace observer he was only rather good-looking than otherwise. But women said that he had "a beautiful countenance" — and they were not wrong. He wore his hair, which was of a fair chestnut, long, and in loose curls ; and instead of the Englishman's whiskers, indulged in the foreigner's mustache. His complexion was delicate, though not effeminate ; it was rather the delicacy of a student than of a woman. But in his clear gray eye there was wonder- ful vigor of life. A skilful physiologist, looking only into that 68 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. eye, would have recognized rare stamina of constitution, — a na- ture so rich, that, while easily disturbed, it would require all the effects of time, or all the fell combinations of passion and grief, to exhaust it. Even now, though so thoughtful, and even so sad, the rays of that eye were as concentrated and steadfast as the light of the diamond." — Book V. Chap, 6. WOMAN CHANGEABLE. " Hush ! Audley, hush ! or I shall think the world has indeed corrupted you. Excuse for the friend who deceives, who be- trays ! No, such is the true outlaw of Humanity ; and the Fu- ries surround him even while he sleeps in the temple." The man of the world lifted his eyes slowly on the animated face of one still natural enough for the passions. He then once more returned to his book, and said, after a pause, " It is time you should marry, Harley." " No," answered L'Estrange, with a smile at this sudden turn in the conversation — " not time yet ; for my chief objection to that change in life is, that the women nowadays are too old for me, or I am too young for them. A few, indeed, are so infantine that one is ashamed to be their toy ; but most are so knowing that one is afraid to be their dupe. The first, if they conde- scend to love you, love you as the biggest doll they have yet dandled, and for a doll's good qualities — your pretty blue eyes and your exquisite millinery. The last, if they prudently accept you, do so on algebraical principles ; you are but the X or the Y that represents a certain aggregate of goods matrimonial — pedigree, title, rent-roll, diamonds, pin-money, opera-box. They cast you up with the help of mamma, and you wake some morn- ing to find that/Z/'/j" wife minus affection equals — the Devil ! " " Nonsense," said Audley, with his quiet grave laugh. " I grant that it is often the misfortune of a man in your station to be married rather for what he has than for what he is ; but you are tolerably penetrating, and not likely to be deceived in the character of the woman you court." "Of the woman I cotirt ? — No ! But of the woman I marry, very likely indeed. Woman is a changeable thing, as our Vir- gil informed us at school ; but her change par excellence is from the fairy you woo to the brownie you wed. It is not that she has been a hypocrite, it is that she is a transmigration. ^ You marry a girl for her accomplishments. She paints charmingly, or plays like St. Cecilia. Clap a ring on her finger, and she never draws again — except perhaps your caricature on the back of a letter, and never opens a piano after the honey-moon. You marry her for her sweet temper ; and next year, her nerves are \ ''MY novel:' 69 so shattered that you can't contradict her but you are whirled into a storm of hysterics. You marry her because she declares she hates balls and likes quiet ; and ten to one but what she be- comes a patroness ^t Almack's, or a lady-in-waiting." — Book V, Chap. 6. THE POET — CREATIVE FACULTY — FAME. Gazing on his last effort, Leonard felt that there, at length, spoke forth the Poet. It was a work which, though as yet but half completed, came from a strong hand ; not that shadow trembling on unsteady waters, which is but the pale reflex and imitation of some bright mind, sphered out of reach and afar, but an original substance — a life— a thing of the Creative Fac- ulty, — breathing back already the breath it had received. This work had paused during Leonard's residence with Mr. Avenel, or had only now and then, in stealth, and at night, received a rare touch. Now, as with a fresh eye, he reperused it, and with that strange, innocent admiration, not of self — for a man's work is not, alas ! himself, — it is the beautified and idealized essence (extracted, he knows not how^, from his own human elements of clay), admiration known but to poets — their purest delight, often their sole reward. And then, with a warmer and more earthly beat of his full heart, he rushed in fancy to the Great City, where all rivers of Fame meet, but not to be merged and lost, — sallying forth again, individualized and separate, to flow through that one vast Thought of God which we call The V^om.T>.—Book VI. Chap. 5. MAN LIKE A BOOK. " Man is like a book, Mr. Prickett ; the commonalty only look to his binding. I am better bound, it is very true." — Book VI. Chap. 19. ^ PATIENCE, COURAGE OF THE CONQUEROR. Patience is the courage of the conqueror; it is the virtue, /^r excelleiice., of Man against Destiny — of the One against the World, and of the Soul against Matter. Therefore this is the courage of the Gospel ; and its importance, in a social view — its import- ance to races and institutions — cannot be too earnestly inculca- ted.— ^^^ VII. Chap. I. STRANGE HUMAN HEART. Oh Strange human heart ! no epic ever written achieves the Sublime and the Beautiful which are graven, unread by human eye, in thy secret leaves. — Book VII. Chap. 15. 70 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWEK. THOUGHT PRESIDING OVER ALL. He read what poets must read if they desire to be great — Sa- pere principium et fons — strict reasonings on the human mind: the relations between motive and conduct, thought and action, the grave and solemn truths of the past world ; antiquities, his- tory, philosophy. He was taken out of himself. He was car- ried along the ocean of the universe. In that ocean, O seeker, study the law of the tides ; and seeing Chance nowhere — Thought presiding over all, — Fate, that dead phantom, shall vanish from creation, and Providence alone be visible in heaven and on earth ! — Book VI2. Chap. 2. LITERATURE AS A CALLING. "Lord L'Estrange tells me that you wish to enter literature as a calling, and no doubt to study it as an art. I may help you in this, and you meanwhile can help me. I want an amanuensis — I offer you that place. The salary will be porportioned to the services you will render me. I have a room in my house at your disposal. When I first came up to London, I made the same choice that I hear you have done. I have no cause, even in a worldly point of view, to repent my choice. It gave me an income larger than my wants. I trace my success to these maxims, which are applicable to all professions — ist. Never to trust to genius for what can be obtained by labor; 2dly, Never to profess to teach what we have not studied to understand ; 3rdly, Never to engage our word to what we do not our best to execute. With these rules, literature — provided a man does not mistake his vocation for it, and will, under good advice, go through preliminary discipline of natural powers, which all vo- cations require — is as good a calling as any other. Without them, a shoe-black's is infinitely better." — Book VII. Chap. 19. HEART MATCHING THE HEAD. It has, doubtless, been already remarked by the judicious reader, that of the numerous characters introduced into this work, the larger portion belong to that species which we call the Intel- lectual — that through them are analyzed and developed human intellect, in various forms and directions. So that this History, rightly considered, is a kind of humble familiar Epic, or, if you prefer it, a long Serio-Comedy, upon the Varieties of English Life in this our Century, set in movement by the intelligences most prevalent. And where more ordinary and less refined types of the species round and complete the survey of our pass- ing generation, they will often suggest, by contrast, the deficien- cies which mere intellectual culture leaves in the human being. '* MY novel:' yi Certainly, I have no spite against intellect and enlightenment. Heaven forbid I should be such a Goth ! I am only the advo- cate for common sense and fair play. I don't think an able man necessarily an angel ; but I think if his heart match his head, and both proceed in the Great March under the divine Oriflamme, he goes as near to the angel as humanity will per- mit : if not, if he has but a penn'orth of heart to a pound of brains, I say, ^'' Bon Jour, mon angel I see not the starry upward wings, but the grovelling c^oven-hoof." — Book VIII. Chap, I. LIFE A RIDDLE. " Life is a dark riddle," said he, smiting his breast. And he walked slowly on, gained the recess where he had stood several nights before with Helen, and, dizzy with want of food, and worn out for want of sleep, he sank down into the dark corner ; while the river that rolled under the arch of stone muttered dirge-like in his ear — as under the social key-stone wails and rolls on forever the mystery of Human Discontent. Take comfort, O Thinker by the stream ! 'Tis the river that founded and gave pomp to the city ; and without the discontent, where were progress — what were Man ? Take comfort, O Thinker ! wherever the stream over which thou bendest, or be- side which thou sinkest, weary and desolate, frets the arch that supports thee ; — never dream that, by destroying the bridge, thou canst silence the moan of the wave ! — Book VII. Chap. 15. GAIT AND MIEN INDICATIONS OF SPIRIT AND DISPOSITION. One may judge of the spirits and disposition of a man by his ordinary gait and mien in walking. He who habitually pursues abstract thought, looks down on the ground. He who is accus- tomed to sudden impulses, or is trying to seize upon some nec- essary recollection, looks up with a kind of jerk. He who is a steady, cautious, merely practical man, walks on deliberately, his eyes straight before him ; and even in his most musing moods, observes things around sufficiently to avoid a porter's knot or a butcher's tray. But the man with strong ganglions — of pushing, lively temperament, who, though practical, is yet speculative — the man who is emulous and active, and ever trying to rise in life — sanguine, alert, bold — walks with a spring — looks rather above the heads of his fellow-passengers — but with a quick, easy turn of his own, which is lightly set on his shoulders ; his mouth is a little open — his eye is bright, rather restless, but penetrative — his port has something of defiance — his form is erect, but without stiffness. — Book IX. Chap. 5. ^2 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. UNION OF TWO HEARTS. Who shall say — who conjecture how near two hearts can be- come, when no guilt lies between them, and time brings the ties all its own ? Rarest of all things on earth is the union in which both, by their contrasts, make harmonious their blending; each supplying the defects of the helpmate, and completing, by fus- ion, one strong human soul ! Happiness enough, where even Peace does but seldom preside, when each can bring to the al- tar if not the flame, still the incense. Where man's thoughts are all noble and generous, woman's feelings all gentle and pure, love may follow, if it does not precede ; — and if not,— if the roses be missed from the garland, one may sigh for the rose, but one is safe from the thorn. — Book IX. Chap. 8. APPROACH OF THE PARVENU TO THE EXQUISITE. It is noticeable that it is yowx parve?tu who always comes near- est in fashion (so far as externals are concerned) to your genu- ine exquisite. It is yonr parvenu who is most particular as to the cut of his coat, and the precision of his equipage, and the minutiae of his menage. Those between the parvenu and the ex- quisite, who know their own consequence, and have something solid to rest upon, are slow in following all the caprices of fash- ion, and obtuse in observation as to those niceties which neither give them another ancestor, nor add another thousand to the ac- count at their banker's ; — as to the last, rather, indeed, the con- trary ! — Book IX. Chap. 13. DEVELOPMENT OF IDEAS. The education of a superior human being is but the develop- ment of ideas in one for the benefit of others. To this end, at- tention should be directed — ist. To the value of the ideas col- lected ; 2ndly, To their discipline ; 3rdly, To their expression. For the first, acquirement is necessary ; for the second, disci- pline ; for the third, art. The first comprehends knowledge, purely intellectual, whether derived from observation, memory, reflection, books or men, Aristotle or Fleet Street. The second demands traifting, not only intellectual, but moral ; the purifying and exaltation of motives ; the formation of habits ; in which method is but a part of a divine and harmonious symmetry — an union of intellect and conscience. Ideas of value, stored by the first process ; marshalled into force, and placed under guidance, by the second ; it is the result of the third, to place them before the world in the most attractive or commanding form. This may be done by actions no less than words ; but the adaptation of means to end, the passage of ideas from the brain of one man ''MY NOVEL." . 73 into the lives and souls of all, no less in action than in books, requires study. Action has its art as well as literature. Here Norreys had but to deal with the calling of the scholar, the forma- tion of the writer, and so to guide the perceptions toward those varieties in the sublime and beatiful, the just combination of which is at once creation. Man himself is but a combination of elements. He who combines in nature, creates in art. — Book IX. Chap. 1 6. FINE NATURES LIKE FINE POEMS. Fine natures are like fine poems, — a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on. — Book X. Chap. 3. PITY AND ADMIRATION BOTH FELT. Ah ! wherever pity and admiration are both felt, something nobler than mere sorrow must have gone before ; the heroic must exist. — Book X. Chap. 3. GENIUS AND ITS INFLUENCE. VioLANTE (with enthusiasm). — How I envy you that past which you treat so lightly ! To have been something, even in childhood, to the formation of a noble nature ; to have borne on those slight shoulders half the load of a man's grand labor. And now to see Genius moving calm in its clear career ; and to say inly, " Of that genius I am a part ! " Helen (sadly and humbly).— A part ! Oh, no ! I don't un- derstand you. Violante. — Take the child Beatrice from Dante's life, and should we have a Dante } What is a poet's genius but the voice of its emotions.? All things in life and in Nature influence genius ; but what influences it the most are its own sorrows and affections. — Book XI. Chap. 7. DEATH OF EGERTON. Egerton reared his head, as if to answer ; and all present were struck and appalled by the sudden change that had come over his countenance. There was a film upon the eye — a shadow on the aspect ; the words failed his lips — he sunk on the seat beside him. The left hand rested droopingly upon the piles of public papers and official documents, and the fingers played with them, as the bed-ridden sufferer plays with the coverlid he will soon exchange for the winding-sheet. But his right hand seemed to feel, as through the dark, for the recovered son ; and having touched what it sought, feebly drew Leonard near and nearer. 74 WJT AND WISDOM OF BU LIVER. Alas ! that blissful private life — that close centre round the core of being in the individual man — so long missed and pined for — slipped from him, as it were, the moment it reappeared ; hurried away, as the circle on the ocean, which is scarce seen ere it vanishes amidst infinity. Suddenly both hands were still ; the head fell back. Joy had burst asunder the last ligaments, so fretted away in unrevealing sorrow. Afar, their sound borne into that room, the joy-bells were pealing triumph ; mobs roaring out huzzas ; the weak cry of John Avenel might be blent in those shouts, as the drunken zealots reeled by his cottage-door, and startled the screaming ravens that wheeled round the hollow oak. The boom which is sent from the waves on the surface of life, while the deeps are so noiseless in their march, was wafted on the wintry air into the chamber of the statesman it honored, and over the grass sighing low upon Nora's grave. But there was one in the chamber, as in the grave, for whom the boom on the wave had no sound, and the march of the deep had no tide. Amidst promises of home, and union, and peace, and fame, Death strode into the household ring, and seating itself, calm and still, looked life-like ; warm hearts throbbing round it ; lofty hopes fluttering upward ; Love kneeling at its feet ; Religion, with lifted linger, standing by its side. — Book XII. Chap. 34. EVERMORE. There are certain moments in life in which we say to our- selves, " All is over ; no matter what else changes, that which I have made my all is gone evermore — evermore." And our own thought rings back in our ears, " Evermore — evermore ! " — Book XI. C/iap. 7. AN IMPRUDENT MARRIAGE. Nothing but real love (how rare it is ! has one human heart in a million ever known it ?) — nothing but real love can repay us for the loss of freedom — the cares and fears of poverty — the cold pity of the world that we both despise and respect. And all these, and much more, follow the step you would inconsiderately take — an imprudent marriage." — Book XI. Chap. 14. ANGELS OF LOVE, AND* KNOWLEDGE. You can regulate the warm tide of wild passion — you can light into virtue the dark errors of ignorance ; but where the force of the brain does but clog the free action of the heart — where you have to deal, not with ignorance misled, but intelli- gence corrupted — small hope of reform ; for reform here will need reorganization. I have somewhere read (perhaps in He- brew tradition) that of the two orders of fallen spirits — the An- ''MY NOVELr 75 gels of Love, and the Angels of Knowledge — the first missed the stars they had lost, and wandered back tlirough the darkness, one by one into heaven ; but the last, lighted on by their own lurid splendors, said, " Wherever we go, there is heaven ! " And deeper and lower descending, lost their shape and their nature, till, deformed and obscene, the bottomless pit closed around them." — Final Chapter, THE HEIGHT OF BLISS. A Greek poet implies, that the height of bliss is the sudden relief of pain ; there is a nobler bliss still — the rapture of the conscience at the sudden release from a guilty thought. — Book XII. Chap. 31. TRUTH A VITAL NECESSITY. For SO vital a necessity to all living men is truth, that the vilest traitor feels amazed and wronged — feels the pillars of the world shaken, when treason recoils on himself. — Book XII. Chap. T,i. DUTY OF THE INTELLECT BLESSED THE WOMAN WHO CONSOLES. Leonard thinks over the years that his still labor has cost him, and knows that he has exhausted the richest mines of his intel- lect, and that long years will elapse before he can recruit that capital of ideas which is necessary to sink new shafts, and bring to light fresh ore ; and the deep despondency of intellect, frus- trated in its highest aims, has seized him, and all he has before done is involved in failure by the defeat of the crowning effort. Failure, and irrecoverable, seems his whole ambition as writer ; his whole existence in the fair Ideal seems to have been a prof- itless dream, and the face of the Ideal itself is obscured. And even Norreys frankly, though kindly, intimates that the life of a metropolis is essential to the healthful intuition of a writer in the intellectual wants of his age ; since every great writer supplies a want in his own generation, for some feeling to be announced, some truth to be revealed ; and as this maxim is generally sound, as most great writers have lived in cities, Leonard dares not dwell on the exceptions; it is only success that justifies the at- tempt to be an exception to the common rule ; and with the blunt manhood of his nature, which is not a poet's, Norreys sums up with, " What then ? One experiment has failed ; fit your life to your genius, and try again." Try again ! Easy counsel enough to the man of ready resource and quick combative mind ; but to Leonard, how hard and how harsh ! " Fit his life to his genius ! " — renounce contemplation and Nature for the jostle of Oxford Street ? — would that life not scare away the genius forever ? 76 V/IT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. Perplexed and despondent, though still struggling for fortitude he returns to his home, and there at his hearth awaits the Soother, and there is the voice that repeats the passages most beloved, and prophesies so confidently of future fame ; and gradually all around smiles from the smile of Helen. And the profound conviction that Heaven places human happiness be- yond the reach of the world's contempt or praise, circulates through his system and restores its serene calm. And he feels that the duty of the intellect is to accomplish and perfect itself — to harmonize its sounds into music that may be heard in Heaven, though it wake not an echo on the earth. If this be done, as with some men, best amidst the din and the discord, be it so ; if, as with him, best in silence, be it so too. And the next day he reclines with Helen by the sea-shore, gazing calmly as before on the measureless sunlit ocean ; and Helen, looking into his face, sees that it is sunlit as the deep. His hand steals within her own, in the gratitude that endears beyond the power of passion, and he murmurs gently, " Blessed be the woman who consoles." — Final Chapter. BLESSED THE WOMAN WHO EXALTS. The old Countess, who had remained silent and listening on her elbow-chair, rose and kissed the Earl's hand reverently. Perhaps in that kiss there was the repentant consciousness how far the active goodness she had often secretly undervalued had exceeded, in its fruits, her own cold unproductive powers of will and mind. Then passing on to Harle}^, her brow grew elate, and the pride returned to her eye. " At last," she said, laying on his shoulder that light firm hand, from which he no longer shrunk — " at last, O m}- noble son, you have fulfilled all the promise of your youth ! " " If so," answered Harley, " it is because I have found what I then sought in vain." He drew his arm around Violante, and added, with a half tender half solemn smile — " Blessed is the woman who exalts ! " So, symbolled forth in these twin and fair flowers which Eve saved for Earth out of Paradise, each with the virtue to heal or to strengthen, stored under the leaves that give sweets to the air ; — here, soothing the heart when the world brings the trouble — here, recruiting the soul which our sloth or our senses ener- vate, leave we woman, at least, in the place Heaven assigns to her amidst the multiform "Varieties of Life." Farewell to thee, gentle Reader ; and go forth to the world, O My Novel ! — Final Chapter. ERNEST MALTRAVERS. LEADING CHARACTERS. Ernest Maltravers, the hero and heir to affluent fortunes. Mr. Frederick Cleveland, a younger son of the Earl of Byrnsham, and guardian of Ernest Maltravers. Alice Uarvil, the heroine, the early and last love of Ernest Maltravers. Luke Uarvil, a hardened criminal, father to Alice. John WaLTERS, Darvil's companion in crime. Lumley Ferrers, a man who had seen a great deal of the world. His rule in life to make all persons and things subservient to himself. He succeeds to the title of his uncle Lord Vargrave. Madame de Ventadour, descended from one of the most illustrious houses of France. Monsieur de Ventadour, Madame's husband. Monsieur de Montaigne, forty-eight, tall and handsome, a true philosopher, employed with distinction in civil affairs. 3IADAME DE MoNTAiGNE, a celebrated personage in Italy, her earlier life spent on the stage and her promise of vocal excellence brilliant. But after a brief, though splendid career, she marries De Montaigne, and re- tires to private life. She is also gifted as an improvisatrice. SiGNOR Castruccio Cesarine, a poet and brother of Madame De Mon- taigne. Mrs, Leslie, friend to Alice. A woman of the finest intellect and the softest heart. Mr. Templeton, an opulent man, a banker, and once in Parliament. He becomes Lord Vargrave. Evelyn Templeton, the banker's daughter. Lady Florence Lascelles, the daughter of the Earl of Saxingham, and supposed to be the richest heiress in England. Also intellectual and handsome. Lord Saxingham, in political life. Lumley Ferrers' great relation. Colonel Danvers, sat next to Maltravers in Parliament; his friend polit- ically more than socially. THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS. Nine times out of ten it is over the Bridge of Sighs that we pass the narrow gulf from Youth to Manhood. That interval is usually occupied by an ill-placed or disappointed affection. We recover and we find ourselves a new being. The intellect has become hardened by the fire through which it has passed. The mind profits by the wrecks of every passion, and we may measure our road to wisdom by the sorrows we have undergone. — Book I. Chap. 14. 78 WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. BEGIN LIFE WITH BOOKS. We should begin life with books ; they multiply the sources of employment ; so does capital ; but capital is of no use, unless we live on the interest, — books are waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought. — Book I. Chap. 15. CRISES IN LIFE. And Ernest Maltravers one night softly stole to his room and opened the New Testament, and read its heavenly morali- ties with purged eyes ; and when he had done, he fell upon his knees, and prayed the Almighty to pardon the ungrateful heart that, worse than the Atheist's, had confessed His Existence, but denied His goodness. His sleep was sweet and his dreams were cheerful. Did he rise to find that the penitence which had shaken his reason would henceforth suffice to save his life from all error ? Alas ! remorse overstrained has too often re-actions as dangerous ; and homely Luther says well, that " the mind, like the drunken peasant on horseback, when propped on one side, nods and falls on the other." — All that can be said is, that there are certain crises in life which leave us long weaker; from which the system recovers with frequent revulsion and weary relapse, — but from which, looking back, after years have passed on, we date the foundation of strength or the cure of disease. It is not to mean souls that creation is darkened by a fear of the anger of Heaven. — Book I. Chap. 16. THE BEAUTY-MAN. The air, the manner, the tone, the conversation, the some- thing that interests, and the something to be proud of — these are the attributes of the man made to be loved. And the Beauty-man is, nine cases out of ten, little more than the oracle of his aunts, and the " sitch a love " of the housemaid ! — Book II. Chap. 2. EXPERIENCE AN OPEN GIVER. I fear that as yet Ernest Maltravers had gained little from Experience, except a few current coins of worldly wisdom (and not very valuable those !), while he had lost much of that no- bler wealth with which youthful enthusiasm sets out on the journey of life. Experience is an open giver, but a stealthy thief. There is, however, this to be said in her favor, that we retain her gifts ; and if ever we demand restitution in earnest, 'tis ten to one but what we recover her thefts. — Book II. Chap. 3. ERNES T MA L TRA VERS. 79 TO LIVE HAPPILY. People, to live happily with each other, mustyf/ in as it were — the proud be mated with the meek, the irritable with the gentle, and so forth. — Book II. Chap. 4. NIGHT AND LOVE. When stars are in the quiet skies, Then most I pine for thee ; Bend on me, then, thy tender eyes, As stars look on the sea ! For thoughts, like waves that glide by night, Are stillest where they shine ; Mine earthly love lies hushed in light, Beneath the heaven of thine. There is an hour when angels keep Familiar watch on men ; When coarser souls are wrapt in sleep, — Sweet spirit, meet me then. There is an hour when holy dreams, Through slumber, fairest glide ; And in that mystic hour, it seems Thou shouldst be by my side. The thoughts of thee too sacred are For daylight's common beam ; — I can but know thee as my star. My angel, and my dream ! Book III. Chap. I. INTELLECTUAL AMBITION. "It is an excitement," said Valerie, "to climb a mountain, though it fatigue ; and though the clouds may even deny us a prospect from its summit — it is an excitement that gives a very universal pleasure, and that seems almost as if it were the result of common human instinct, which makes us desire to rise — to get above the ordinary thoroughfares and level of life. Some such pleasure you must have in intellectual ambition, in which the mind is the upward traveller." "It is not the ambition that pleases," replied Maltravers, "it is the following a path congenial to our tastes, and made dear to us in a short time by habit. The moments in which we look be- yond our work, and fancy ourselves seated beneath the Ever- lasting Laurel, are few. It is the work itself, whether of action or literature, that interests and excites us. And at length the dryness of toil takes the familiar sweetness of custom. But in intellectual labor there is another charm — we become more inti- mate with our own nature. The heart and the soul grow friends, as 8o WIT AND WISDOM OF BULWER. it were, and the affections and aspirations unite. Thus, we are never without society — we are never alone ; all that we have read, learned, and discovered, is company to us. — Book V. Chap. 9. FORCING INFANTS UNDER KNOWLEDGE-FRAMES. He was far too clever a man not to despise all the systems of forcing infants under knowledge-frames, which are the present fashion. He knew that philosophers never made a greater mis- take than in insisting so much upon beginning abstract educa- tion from the cradle. It is quite enough to attend to an infant's temper, and correct that cursed predilection for telling fibs which falsifies all Dr. Reid's absurd theory about innate propensities to truth, and makes the prevailing epidemic of the nursery. Above all, what advantage ever compensates for hurting a child's health or breaking his spirit ? Never let him learn, more than you can help it, the crushing bitterness of fear. A bold child who looks you in the face, speaks the truth, and shames the devil ; that is the stuff of which to make good and brave — ay, and wise men ! — Book III. Chap. 4. FIDELITY OF BOOKS. We may talk of the fidelity of books, but no man ever wrote even his own biography, without being compelled to omit at least nine-tenths of the most important materials. What are three — what are six volumes ? We live six volumes in a day ! Thought, emotion, joy, sorrow, hope, fear, how prolix they would be, if they might each tell their hourly tale ! But man's life it- self is a brief epitome of that which is infinite and everlasting ; and his most accurate confessions are a miserable abridgment of a hurried and confused compendium ! — Book IV. Chap. 2. PERIODICALS AN EXCELLENT MODE OF COMMUNICATION. Periodicals form an excellent mode of communication between the public and an author already established, who has lost the charm of novelty, but gained the weight of acknowledged repu- tation ; and who, either upon politics or criticism, seeks for fre- quent and continuous occasions to enforce his peculiar theses and doctrines. But, upon the young writer, this mode of communi- cation, if too long continued, operates most injuriously both as to his future prospects and his own present taste and style. With respect to the first, it familiarizes the public to his mannerism (and all writers worth reading have mannerism) in a form to which the said public are not inclined to attach much weight. He forestalls in a few months what ought to be the effect of years ; ERNEST MAL TRA VERS. 8 1 namely, the wearying a world soon nauseated with the toujours perdrix. With respect to the last, it induces a man to write for momentary effects ; to study a false smartness of style and rea- soning ; to bound his ambition of durability to the last day of the month ; to expect immediate returns for labor ; to recoil at the "hope deferred " of serious works on which judgment is slowly formed. The man of talent who begins young at periodicals, and goes on long, has generally something crude and stunted about both his compositions and his celebrity. He grows the oracle of small coteries ; and we can rarely get out of the im- pression that he is cockneyfied and conventional. Periodicals sadly mortgaged the claims that Hazlitt, and many others of his contemporaries, had upon a vast reversionary estate of Fame. But I here speak too politically ; to some, \h