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THE 
 
 Essays of an Optimist. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN WILLIAM KAYE, F.R.S., 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 HISTORY OF THE WAR IN AFFGHANISTAN," "LIFE OF LORD 
 METCALFE," "HISTORY OF THE SEPOY WAR," ETC. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
 1871. 
 

 *, mi 
 
TO THE FRIENDS 
 
 WHOSE UNFAILING KINDNESS HAS SUSTAINED THROUGH LIFE 
 MY FAITH IN MY FELLOW-MEN, 
 
 fyi§ pttlt |ooh 
 
 IS GRATEFULLY AND LOVINGLY INSCRIBED. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 r I A HE papers now gathered together in this 
 -*■ volume have been composed at intervals 
 during the last ten years, and have been published 
 in the Cornhill Magazine. They have been mostly 
 written at times when I have been separated from 
 the materials of my graver work, from books and 
 documents and piles of correspondence; written 
 in country inns, or seaside lodgings, or other 
 strange places far away from home ; when I have 
 wished not to be quite idle, but when I could not, 
 if I would, have devoted myself to more substan- 
 tial labors, and, very truthfully, I may add, when 
 I would not if I could. They have been princi- 
 pally holiday-tasks, written by snatches, and sent 
 off, piece by piece, as they were written — the 
 loose thoughts of a loose thinker, desultory, 
 discursive, pretending only to express in plain 
 colloquial language some of the opinions and 
 experiences of the writer on subjects within the 
 range of our common sympathies. 
 
 (v) 
 
vi PREFACE. 
 
 I had no particular design when I wrote them. 
 I did not purpose that, running on in one groove, 
 they should illustrate any special philosophy. 
 But on reperusing them, I have thought that there 
 is a prevailing unity of sentiment in the Essays, 
 which warrants the descriptive title which I have 
 given to them ; and not the less so, because this 
 harmony is the result, not of any foregone inten- 
 tion, but of the spontaneous repetitions of the 
 writer — those involuntary harpings upon the same 
 string, which come from a settled faith in the 
 truths which thus seek utterance in his pages. 
 The doctrine is nothing more than that it is wise 
 to look for good in everything, or, more closely 
 to represent the name which I have chosen, to 
 " make the best of it." There are some natures 
 which recognize this truth unawares — which do 
 not know it, do not think of it, but habitually feel 
 it. To them it is a sentiment, not a doctrine. It ex- 
 presses itself in the divine incense of thanksgiving 
 to God, mingled with unfailing charity towards 
 Man. It rises up heavenwards in great paeans of 
 praise and love warm from the heart. For readers 
 of this kind there is no need that Essays on Op- 
 timism should be written. But there are others 
 to whom it may be profitable thus to be taught 
 
PREFACE. vii 
 
 to look ever for the bright side, alike of what 
 comes from God and what comes from Man — to 
 rejoice always in the unceasing goodness of the 
 Almighty, and to discern good, wheresoever they 
 can find it, in the lives of their neighbors. In this 
 Optimism are included Faith, Hope, and Charity 
 — all three. We cannot, therefore, go far wrong 
 in cultivating it; and there is nothing that will 
 add more to our happiness than its cultivation, 
 singing and making melody in our hearts and 
 giving thanks always for all things. It makes 
 sunshine in shady places, and keeps us in an 
 habitual state, not only of resignation, but of 
 cheerfulness. It would be absurd to say that I do 
 not know anything that reconciles us more to the 
 trials and troubles of life than an assured belief 
 that all things work together for our good; for 
 there is nothing else that, can reconcile us to them 
 at all. There are few who do not recognize this 
 truth in its general acceptation ; but do they prac- 
 tically apply it to the details of life? "It con- 
 duces much," says old Jeremy Taylor, "to our 
 content, if we pass by those things which happen 
 to our trouble, and consider that which is pleasing 
 and prosperous, that by the representation of the 
 better the worse may be blotted out." And he 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 tells us how to do this, amidst all the chances and 
 changes of life. There is a quaintness in some of 
 his recommendations which may raise a smile; 
 but there is not, on that account, less sound phi- 
 losophy in them ; and we may profitably ponder 
 what he says.* 
 
 And then with respect to our faith in our fellow- 
 men, it is surely pleasanter to believe than to 
 doubt, even though belief may bring its troubles 
 with it. We may sometimes be mistaken, some- 
 times deceived. All men are in the course of 
 their lives. But what a balance of good is there 
 on the other side ! Let us think of those whom 
 we have found truthful and honorable, tender and 
 generous, who have stood by us through good 
 report and evil report — who have succored us in 
 adversity and made us rejoice in our distresses, 
 because without such trials we should not have 
 proved the strength and genuineness of their affec- 
 tion. And even to those who wrong us, our grati- 
 tude is due. For if we had no wrongs to endure 
 we should have nothing to forgive ; and the most 
 godlike of all privileges would be denied to us. 
 
 But now that I have collected these articles, 
 
 * See the chapter on " Contentment" in the Holy Living, from 
 which the passage in the text is taken. 
 
PREFACE. ix 
 
 read them all over again (mostly after a long in- 
 terval of time), and revised them for the Press, I 
 do not — though from time to time, as fugitive 
 pieces, they have earned encouraging eulogies 
 both from friends and strangers — feel at all sure 
 that they are worthy of preservation in this volume. 
 Assailed by these misgivings, I must confess that 
 I have a personal feeling to gratify (I do not mind 
 its being called vanity) in acknowledging the pa- 
 ternity of these papers, and endeavoring to obtain 
 a few more readers for them. I have written some 
 big books in my time, and I hope, if life be spared, 
 to write some more. I was told, only the other 
 day, by a very accomplished and learned friend, 
 that I had just committed the grave mistake of 
 writing one of the heaviest books ever written. 
 On my expressing a modest regret that he had 
 not been able to read it, he told me at once that 
 he had not tried (and I never expect that he will 
 try), but that it was a prodigious weight in his 
 hands. I have got a fancy, therefore, to publish a 
 little book, which will not be a burden to the flesh, 
 and I hope not to the spirit, and so, perhaps, to 
 find a score or two of readers, who have never 
 ventured to make acquaintance with me in weighty 
 historical volumes — friends, perhaps ; perhaps 
 
x PREFACE. 
 
 strangers, who will not turn aside from this light 
 bundle of Essays on everyday topics as from a 
 heavy work on a subject of no personal interest to 
 themselves ; whilst some, I hope, who have ven- 
 tured on my bulkier efforts, will not be disinclined 
 to follow me for a little space along new paths of 
 inquiry. And if I should succeed either in making 
 a new friend, or in pleasing an old one, through 
 the help of this little volume, it will not have been 
 published in vain. 
 
 I have appended to each of the Essays the date 
 at which it was originally published; so that, if 
 any acute reader should discern that on some 
 points there are slight divergencies of opinion (I 
 do not say that there are any) scattered over the 
 entire work, he may see in the later utterance the 
 riper experience, the more mature judgment of 
 the writer. I have added a few notes, dated 1870, 
 which refer rather to change of circumstances than 
 to change of opinion, following the first publica- 
 tion of the Essays. 
 
 J. W. K. 
 
 Penge, October. 1870. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Holidays 13 
 
 Work 36 
 
 Success 77 
 
 The Wrong Side of the Stuff 107 
 
 On Growing Old 140 
 
 On Toleration 175 
 
 Rest .... . ... 219 
 
 (xi) 
 
"He that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, 
 is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who 
 loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down on 
 his little handful of thorns. such a person is fit to 
 bear Nero company in his funeral sorrow for the loss 
 of one of poppea's hairs, or help to mourn for lesbia's 
 sparrow ; and because he loves it, he deserves to starve 
 in the midst of plenty, and to want comfort whilst he 
 IS encircled with blessings." — Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 (xii) 
 
ESSAYS OF AN OPTIMIST, 
 
 HOLIDAYS. 
 
 IT is a blessed thought, all through the long 
 work-day months of the early part of the year, 
 that, if we only live long enough, we must drift 
 into August. For with August comes to many 
 toil-worn men — would that it came to all ! — one of 
 God's best gifts to man, a holiday. There is a lull 
 in the mighty clatter of the machinery of life ; the 
 great wheels are still, or they gyrate slowly and 
 noiselessly. How it happens, it is hard to say (and 
 the harder the more you think about it, for man's 
 wants and man's passions, which make work, are 
 never still); but the Autumnal Sabbath comes 
 round as surely as the shorter days and the yel- 
 lower leaves ; and from the great heart of the me- 
 tropolis we go out in search of a cheerier life and 
 a fresher atmosphere. 
 
 There is, doubtless, a special Providence decreeing 
 this, so that even the delirium of kings, out of which 
 come the wrestlings of nations, is for a time sub- 
 
 (13) 
 
14 
 
 HO LID A VS. 
 
 dued ;* and thus the Nestors of the State are suf- 
 fered, like meaner men, to grow young again in 
 the heather and the turnip-field. The High Court 
 of Parliament sets the example, removes itself from 
 the sphere of our weekly prayers, and diffuses itself 
 over vast expanses of country, in quest of new wis- 
 dom and new strength, and plentiful amusement, 
 which is both. Then Justice takes the bandage 
 from her eyes, lays down her scales, tucks up her 
 flowing robes, and girds herself for a walking tour 
 half-way over Europe with a pipe in her mouth. 
 The Exchange quickly follows suit. Commerce 
 grows a moustache, assumes the wideawake, goes 
 sketching on the Rhine, and draws pictures of 
 Ehrenbreitstein, instead of bills of exchange. And 
 so we all pour ourselves out into the great reser- 
 voir of idleness ; and we do our appointed work 
 thereby more surely than if we plodded all the 
 time at our desks. 
 
 We are coming to understand this, as a nation, 
 better than we once did ; but we have not yet so 
 hearty an appreciation of the truth, but that a few 
 reflections on the subject from an old fellow like 
 
 * A decade has passed since this was written (in i860), and the 
 whirligig of time has brought in a terrible revenge. There now 
 seems to be only a grim sarcasm in the simple words written ten 
 years ago in such good faith and on what seemed to be the secu- 
 rity of historical facts. But who will ever think, after this August 
 of 1870, of the delirium of kings respecting the Holiday season ? — 
 (1870.) 
 
BLESSINGS OF LABOR. 
 
 15 
 
 myself may have their uses just on the verge of 
 autumn. What I have to say is mainly in praise 
 of holidays. I have a becoming sense of what is 
 called the " dignity of labor," but, more than that, 
 I believe that of all the blessings and benignities 
 of life, work is verily the greatest. The bread 
 which we earn by the sweat of the brow, and 
 brain-sweat is therein included, is the sweetest that 
 is ever eaten. A dull life, and one that I would 
 not care to live, would be a life without labor. So 
 patent, indeed, is this — so often has it been demon- 
 strated — that men not born to work, make work 
 for themselves. Not being harnessed by the iron 
 hand of Necessity into the go-cart of daily labor, 
 they harness themselves into go-carts of their own, 
 and drag the burden after them as lustily as the 
 rest. We envy one another blindly and ignorantly, 
 neither knowing our neighbor's sorenesses and suf- 
 ferings, nor rightly appreciating beatitudes of our 
 own. We have all our joys and sorrows — God be 
 praised for both ! — and more equally dispensed 
 than many care to acknowledge. Toil-worn men, 
 indeed, will not readily believe that their hard, 
 grinding work is foremost in the category of their 
 blessings. They know it is very easy and very 
 pleasant to be idle for a day, or for a week, per- 
 haps for a month ; but if they were to try a life of 
 idleness they would find how hard a life it is. The 
 wise physician, who recommended Locuples, as a 
 remedy for all his aches and pains, his causeless 
 
1 6 HOLIDAYS. 
 
 anxieties, his asperities of temper, the gloom and 
 despondency of his whole life, "to live upon a shil- 
 ling a day and earn it," probed the rich man's ail- 
 ments to their very depths, and prescribed the only 
 cure for such imaginary distempers. Let Locuples 
 work and be happy. Locuples has, nowadays, 
 some notion of this, and so he works, as I have 
 said, of his own free will, turning legislator, and 
 magistrate, and poor-law guardian, and colonel of 
 volunteers, and lecturing to Mechanics' Institutes, 
 and writing books, and getting profitable place, if 
 he can, in the great omnibus of the State. And 
 what can be wiser ? For if there were no work for 
 Locuples, there would be no holidays. 
 
 And as there can be no holidays without work, 
 so ought there to be no work without holidays; 
 the one, indeed, is the natural complement of the 
 other. Labor and rest, in fitting proportions, are 
 the conditions of healthy life. This everybody 
 knows and admits. But there is a poor, weak, 
 cowardly feeling often lurking in men's minds, 
 which will not suffer them honestly to believe and 
 to declare that it is as much the duty of man to 
 rest as to labor. We are wont, in a sneaking, con- 
 temptible sort of way, to apologize for our holidays, 
 as though they were no better than small sins, de- 
 linquencies, aberrations, to be compounded for by 
 additional labor and self-denial. But, rightly con- 
 sidered, rest and amusement, or, in a word, holi- 
 days, are a substantive part of the "whole duty of 
 
DUTY OF REST. 
 
 17 
 
 man;" and to neglect that duty, or to suffer others 
 to neglect it, is no less a crime against our common 
 manhood than to suffer our energies to run to waste 
 in indifference and inaction, and to do nothing for 
 ourselves or for mankind. Have we any right to 
 over-eat ourselves, or to over-drink ourselves, or to 
 over-anything-else ourselves? Then what right 
 have we to overwork ourselves? " Moderate pas- 
 sions," says an old writer, "are the best expressions 
 of humanity." Let there be moderation, then, even 
 in the passion for work. We must not wear out 
 this mighty tabernacle of the human frame, and 
 this godlike intellect of man, by an unseemly de- 
 mand on their resources. A very old proverb is 
 that about the bow which is always bent; but it is 
 not so old that men in this generation do not some- 
 times require to be reminded of it. The Chinese 
 have another proverb to the effect that one day is 
 as good as three, if you will only do the right 
 thing at the right time. The Chinese are a wise 
 people, and I hope that, when we go to war with 
 them, we shall catch some of their wisdom. It is 
 not the time that he bestows upon his work, but 
 the system which he carries to it, and the energy 
 which he infuses into it, that enable the workman 
 to do his appointed business with success. 
 
 I carry, to the best of my poor ability, these little 
 fancies of mine into the practice of daily life. I 
 work as hard as I can. My friends are pleased 
 sometimes to say, very kindly, that they wonder I 
 
1 8 HOLIDAYS. 
 
 contrive to get through so much work. My an- 
 swer, when the remark is made in my own presence, 
 most frequently is, that I do contrive it by playing 
 as much as I can. I am getting on in years, and I 
 speak more of the past than of the present. But 
 man is never too old to play, by himself or by 
 proxy; and the vicarious disportings of advancing 
 age are not the least of the pleasures and privileges 
 of man. If we cannot stand up at Lord's to the 
 catapultian bowling of this generation, mindful as 
 we are of the times when Mr. Budd, not, perhaps, 
 without some pardonable feelings of vanity derived 
 from a consciousness of the perfect anatomy of his 
 lower limbs, kept wicket and "lobbed" at the oppo- 
 site stumps, in nankeen shorts and pink silk stock- 
 ings, — if we cannot venture to compete with the 
 athletes of different communities, who now go in 
 for astonishing broad jumps, and high jumps, and 
 hurdle-races, and puttings and pickings-up of stones, 
 at various places of gregarious resort, — we can at 
 all events look on, and let our ashes sparkle up 
 from contact with the fires of younger men ; and 
 cry, Vixi puellis, etc., and live again in the energies 
 of our boys. 
 
 And if I take a holiday myself, whenever I can, 
 without injury to others, I am no less minded to 
 give the young people, who serve under me in the 
 department of her Majesty's government to which 
 I am honored by belonging, a holiday whenever 
 they ask for it. I do not find that they take more 
 
RIFLE-PR A CTICE. 
 
 19 
 
 holidays, or that they do less work than others, 
 because I am willing to suit their convenience in 
 such matters, exhorting them, indeed, to go abroad 
 when the sun shines, and to disport themselves in 
 a clear atmosphere. I have one or two famous 
 cricketers among my young gentlemen, of whose 
 exploits I am reasonably proud; and I am more 
 than reconciled for any little inconvenience to 
 which I may be subjected in their absence, if I see 
 a good score opposite to their names in the papers 
 next day. There are new occasions for holidays 
 creeping in from that great volunteer movement 
 which is now energizing the land. And, surely, 
 one would be wanting in a becoming sense of 
 loyalty towards our Sovereign Lady the Queen, to 
 grudge a holiday to a lusty youth desirous of per- 
 fecting himself in the rifle-exercise, by which our 
 enemies, if we have any, are to be grievously dis- 
 comfited and overborne. I have heard it said that 
 it is liable to abuse, and that rifle-practice may be 
 a cover for worse practices, or a pretext for much 
 unprofitable idling. And so is church-going, for 
 the matter of that — and other excellent things, 
 easily to be named — susceptible of this kind of 
 abuse. But the primary reflection which this sug- 
 gests to my mind is, that no one ought to need an 
 excuse for taking a holiday. If society were rightly 
 constituted, holidays in the abstract would be so 
 respectable and so respected, that they could derive 
 no additional gloss or dignity from any adven- 
 
20 HOLIDA VS. 
 
 titious circumstance of rifle movement, or royal 
 birthday, or that famous national institution, the 
 great Derby race. I know no better reason for a 
 holiday than that which we were wont to urge at 
 school, namely, that it was a fine day, sometimes 
 gaining our point by means of a Latin epistle, in 
 prose or verse, to the doctor, with a good deal in 
 it about Phoebus resplendens, aura mitis, and puen 
 jocundi. I am afraid that such a plea would not 
 be considered admissible in the school which I now 
 attend. But I have often thought, when I have 
 seen from my official windows the bright morning 
 sun burnishing the Victoria Tower and "Big Ben," 
 that, if I were head-master, I should like to 
 summon my boys, and say to them, " Now, then, 
 out into the country, and enjoy yourselves;" and 
 to put a placard on the door, " Gone for a holiday 
 — back to-morrow." 
 
 It may be imputed to me, I know, by the 
 enemies of holiday-making — whereof there are, I 
 am afraid, thousands — that I am boasting only of 
 giving holidays to servants not my own, — that I 
 am lavish of other people's property. To this I 
 am not minded to reply further than that I know 
 what is best for her Majesty's service and for my 
 own; and that in my own modest establishment 
 the domestics are never denied a holiday when 
 they ask for one, and often prompted to take one 
 when they do not ask. It is a small matter for 
 me to take my chop in Westminster on that day, 
 
 
MASTER AND SERVANT. 2 I 
 
 or to carry some sandwiches to the office in my 
 pocket, that I may forego the parade of dinner, 
 and emancipate Mary, Jane, and Martha for a day 
 at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, — an institution 
 which, as an aid, not to say an incentive, to 
 holiday-making, I hold in the highest esteem. 
 Are they never to breathe the fresh air or to see 
 the green leaves, because I pay them a yearly 
 wage of from twelve to twenty pounds, and have 
 some covenants with them on the score of tea and 
 sugar? Are holidays only for heads of families 
 — masters or mistresses, as the case may be — and 
 for the dumb animals who serve them ? There are 
 those, I know, who think them sheer impertinences, 
 and esteem it dire presumption in menials to ask 
 for holidays, even to see their parents and their 
 little brothers and sisters, a few miles off. Is the 
 love of kindred to be denied to them no less than 
 the love of nature? Can any one really hope to 
 get good service out of reasonable beings by stifling 
 their natural instincts and silencing the voice of 
 their hearts? God be praised that there are some 
 who think differently about obligations of this 
 kind! There is my friend Loneyouchter, for 
 example, the kindest of human beings, and one of 
 the cleverest withal, who beat all his contempo- 
 raries, of whom I was one, in his younger days, 
 with such facility that it was only to be likened to 
 the case of " Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere;" 
 he told me, the other day, in his pleasant villa, on 
 
22 HO LID A VS. 
 
 the summit of one of the Norwood hills, that he 
 had given his servants " season-tickets" for the 
 Crystal Palace. Whereupon, I honored the man, 
 even more than I had done before. But mention- 
 ing the circumstance soon afterwards to a fair young 
 girl, she described it as a "mad freak." It appeared 
 to me to be the sanest thing that had recently 
 been brought to my notice. 
 
 The sanest in all respects, — sanity itself, and 
 the cause of sanity in others. For surely the mens 
 sana in corpore sano is promoted by harmless 
 entertainment of this kind; and health and cheer- 
 fulness are the very foundation-stones of good 
 service. If we think of nothing else but of getting 
 the largest possible amount of yearly work out of 
 a human machine, we must take care not to keep 
 it in motion from morning to night for three 
 hundred and sixty -five days in the year. It has 
 often surprised me that men, who in their dealings 
 with the brute creation have so clear an under- 
 standing of this matter, should in their transactions 
 with what horse-doctors somewhat disparagingly 
 call "the human subject" exhibit so great a defi- 
 ciency of common sense. Happening, a few weeks 
 ago, to be traveling on the top of an omnibus 
 bound for a railway -station in South Wales, I 
 became the highly-interested auditor of an ani- 
 mated conversation between the driver of that 
 public conveyance and two or three decently- 
 dressed men on the seat behind him, who might 
 
OUT TO GRASS. 
 
 23 
 
 have been small farmers or bailiffs. The subject 
 of discourse was primarily the sale and purchase 
 of a certain fast-trotting mare, very celebrated 
 upon the road. The price given and the sums 
 offered at different times for the accomplished 
 animal having been well discussed, and having 
 elicited an amount of private information "on the 
 best possible authority," such as would have done 
 no discredit to the discussion of an important 
 historical question, the properties and qualifica- 
 tions of the mare were brought under review. 
 Hereupon some diversities of opinion arose; but 
 there was wonderful agreement upon one point, 
 namely, that the mare had been overworked, and 
 that she must be turned out for a time to set her 
 right on her legs again. Whether blistering would 
 accomplish a perfect cure, or whether anything 
 short of firing would do it, appeared to be an open 
 question; but it was unanimously agreed that the 
 holiday was the main thing. And from particulars, 
 the company on the coach-top betook themselves 
 to generals, and discoursed feelingly on the cruelty 
 and folly of overworking a good horse, of keeping 
 him always in harness, instead of turning him out 
 sometimes to grass. To all of which I silently 
 assented, for I remembered that I had once been 
 "peccant in this kinde" myself, having ridden, in 
 my younger and more thoughtless days, a willing 
 horse to a remote railway-station and back again, 
 a distance in all of some two-and-twenty miles, so 
 
24 
 
 HO LID A VS. 
 
 often without taking account of the strain upon 
 the poor animal's system, that one day she sud- 
 denly, when many miles from any help, broke out 
 into a profuse sweat, drooped her head, and never 
 recovered. She fairly broke down in the midst of 
 her work; and I never think of the fact now with- 
 out shame and humiliation. 
 
 But I opine that it did me good, — that it taught 
 me to think more seriously of my obligations to 
 man and beast ; for I believe that I never offended 
 after this fashion again. I sympathized from my 
 heart with all that was said on the subject by the 
 travelers on the Welsh omnibus, in the simple 
 quadrupedal sense wherein they were fain to con- 
 sider it ; but I wondered, at the same time, how it 
 happens that, whilst the generality of mankind 
 thoroughly understand the subject in this sense, 
 there are so many able and amiable men unwilling 
 or incompetent to apply the very obvious principle 
 to the larger concerns of human life. It irks me 
 to think that there are legions of excellent persons 
 who would on no account overwork their horses, — 
 who have a lively appreciation of the necessity of 
 occasional weeks or months of rest, — who know 
 that to grudge these periods of inactivity to their 
 equine friends is, in proverbial phrase, " penny- 
 wise and pound -foolish," — but who have neither 
 the same tender consciences nor the same shrewd 
 sense to aid them in their relations with those who 
 carry them along the highways and byways of 
 
GRUDGINGS AND STINTINGS. 
 
 25 
 
 business and domestic life ; masters who refuse 
 that to their human dependents, in house or office, 
 which they grant willingly to the "beasts which 
 perish." 
 
 I had a friendly disputation on this subject the 
 other day with my neighbor, Mr. Gallicap, a great 
 Italian merchant in the city, a most worthy man, 
 and the father of a very interesting family. I fear 
 that I did not succeed in making him a convert to 
 my views, but I know that I had the sympathies 
 and best wishes of his sons and daughters, to say 
 nothing of his amiable lady ; and I was greatly 
 encouraged by the earnest, intelligent face of little 
 Carry Gallicap, who sat by and listened to the dis- 
 course with evident approbation of the sentiments 
 I expressed. Indeed, I generally find that my 
 younger auditors are heart and soul on my side. 
 The argument employed upon the other was mainly 
 that of the laudator temporis acti. There was not 
 wont to be so much talk about holidays thirty or 
 forty years ago. Young men went to their busi- 
 ness early and returned late, — indeed, on foreign 
 post-nights were often kept at their work till close 
 upon midnight. If they were ill, they went home, 
 and the heads of large houses were not wont to be 
 illiberal to them. He had got on well enough in 
 his younger days without holidays; why should he 
 take them in his older ? Why should not his sons 
 do as their father had done before them ? Why 
 should they have shorter work-days, and fewer of 
 
26 HOLIDA VS. 
 
 them, in the course of the year? And how was 
 business to go on if every one went away? 
 
 To this I observed, deferentially, that "every one" 
 was a strong word. And I ventured to allude to 
 the system in force at the public offices, which pro- 
 vides for the continual presence of some efficient 
 officer of a department, and yet enables every one 
 to take his holiday at some time or other of the 
 year, — a system which, as enabling juniors to feel 
 their way to higher duties, has its uses in another 
 sense. I alluded laughingly, too, to the famous 
 saying of a certain great statesman, who alleged 
 that he divided his business into three parts : — one 
 part he did ; another did itself; and the third was 
 not done at all. But I perceived that public offices 
 and public men were not held of much account by 
 my opponent, and that my argument gained little 
 or nothing by a reference to them. Indeed, he was 
 pleased to observe that if his firm had done busi- 
 ness after the manner of the public offices it would 
 have been bankrupt long ago, — a proposition which 
 I did not dispute, but which I could not admit to 
 be convincing against holidays. Indeed, nothing 
 could ever convince me that it is not the duty of 
 every employer, great and small, to give his work- 
 men a reasonable number of holidays in every year. 
 
 "And have they not," I may be asked, — "has 
 not every workman in this Christian land fifty-two 
 holidays in every year?" Truly, there is, for most 
 of us, one holiday in every week, — one day, set 
 
SUNDA YS. 2 J 
 
 apart by God, and given to man to keep it holy. 
 It is the holiest of all holy days, — a blessed day of 
 rest ; vouchsafed to us, apart from its spiritual uses, 
 that we may recreate our exhausted energies. But 
 " recreation," as it is popularly understood, is out of 
 the category of orthodox things. Sunday is a day 
 of routine, — the best of all possible routines, it is 
 true, — but still we have our appointed duties ; and 
 my idea of a holiday is that we should be emanci- 
 pated from all routine; that we should have no 
 appointed duties. Besides, who can really enjoy 
 Sunday, when the ghastly image of Monday peers 
 over its quiet shoulder ? 
 
 We have come now to look upon the word, in 
 its ordinary acceptation, as something distinct alto- 
 gether from its etymological meaning, and are wont 
 to associate it with ideas rather of a Bohemian or 
 vagabondizing kind of life, than of anything sta- 
 tionary and domestic. The right thing, indeed, is 
 to " go out for a holiday ;" to seek change of scene, 
 and change of air, and change of action ; to divest 
 one's self of all the environments of work-day life ; 
 to enter, as it were, into a new state of being, as 
 does the grub when he eventuates into a butterfly 
 and spreads his wings in the summer air. Grateful, 
 indeed, ought this generation to be for the benig- 
 nant aid of steam, which affords unfailing facilities 
 to holiday-makers seeking change of scene and air, 
 carrying them to remote places within an hour's 
 space, and suffering them to see hundreds of miles 
 
28 HO LI DA VS. 
 
 of country, in a single day, for a few shillings. It 
 is no small thing that in these times a toil-worn 
 artisan may transport himself from the stifling alley 
 or the reeking court in which he lives, to the fresh, 
 breezy coast of Brighton, for half a crown, and be 
 carried home again for nothing. Or if he is not 
 minded to go so far afield, there is the Crystal 
 Palace at Sydenham, or the royal palace at 
 Hampton Court, or the Rye House, famous in 
 history for its plot, to all of which he may make 
 pleasant excursions at a small charge, and travel 
 out of himself as thoroughly as though he were 
 new-born, going back into a past or onward into 
 a future age, and forgetting all the wearing toil 
 and carking anxiety of the present. There is 
 nothing pleasanter than the sight of a railway- 
 train freighted with excursionists outward-bound, 
 all radiant with the expectation of a day's 
 pleasure. And such may be seen nowadays in 
 the outskirts of every large town on summer and 
 autumn mornings; for London has no monopoly 
 of such blessings. If the South has its Brighton, 
 the North has its Scarborough; and, indeed, it is 
 easy everywhere to rush out of the smoke. I hear 
 people who can take their month's holiday when 
 they like, and travel by express-trains, and get up 
 extensive outfits for the occasion, with all sorts of 
 elaborate contrivances suggestive of nothing less 
 than an expedition into Central Africa, sneer at 
 these excursions, as things snobbish; but it seems 
 
 
BLESSINGS OF STEAM. 
 
 2 9 
 
 to me that the sneerers are the real snobs, and that 
 I have seen, in first-class carriages, extensively 
 got-up holiday-makers of both sexes, far more 
 vulgar, because more pretentious, than the poor 
 little Pippas of the silk-mills treated by their 
 admiring swains to half a crown's worth of fresh 
 air and green leaves in the pleasant country. 
 And a ripe, rich comfort ought it to be to all who 
 get their holidays regularly every year, without let 
 or hinderance, and, perhaps, without injury to them- 
 selves and others, that the blessings which they 
 enjoy are now within the reach of millions less 
 favored by fortune than themselves. And I hope, 
 too, that they who look up from the lower strata 
 of society at people sleeker than themselves, in 
 richer purple, and in finer linen, do not grudge 
 them their holidays, and say, "What have they 
 to do with such things? is not life all a holiday to 
 them?" Indeed it is not, my friend. Purple and 
 fine linen do not make holidays, any more than 
 they make happiness. Let us rejoice in the enjoy- 
 ments of each other. Let us shake hands over the 
 blessed privilege of a few days' rest. Is it rest 
 of body, or rest of mind? What matters! Bodily 
 labor and mental labor both have their privi- 
 leges, and both have their pains. Let us not envy 
 — let us honor one another. If Hand goes to 
 Rye House, and Head to Wiesbaden, for a holiday, 
 let us hope that each is equally benefited by the 
 change, and equally thankful for it. 
 
30 
 
 HO LID A VS. 
 
 If the real want, the need, of a holiday is to be 
 measured by the enjoyment of it when it comes, I 
 am sure that the upper ten thousand need it as 
 much as any mechanics in the land. Belonging 
 myself to the middle classes, I can answer for their 
 appreciation, and I know that there is nothing 
 keener. To dwellers in large towns, especially in 
 this great overgrown Babylon of ours, there is a 
 sense of enjoyment in the simple escape into the 
 country, apart from the cessation of daily labor. 
 How intensely are the first few days at the seaside 
 enjoyed by all the members of a London family! 
 I remember to have heard a dear little boy, some 
 nine years old, on the green hillside of a Welsh 
 watering-place, say to his father, as hand-in-hand 
 they clomb the ascent, "Dear papa! this is so 
 jolly, I can hardly believe it to be true." And papa 
 responded heartily, as though he thought it with 
 as much sincerity as his child. The first pink 
 flush of air and exercise was on the little boy's 
 delicate face, and his father's nose had already 
 had a sunstroke (Why will Phcebus insist on 
 assailing the noses of us Londoners before our 
 cheeks?) such as is incidental to sudden exposure. 
 It was plainly to be gathered, from the wideawake, 
 the loose jacket, and the incipient moustache, that 
 Paterfamilias was out for a month's holiday; but I 
 was concerned to see, soon afterwards, that the 
 month's holiday had like to be brought to a 
 premature close by his injudicious temerity in 
 
 
VARIOUS CONDITIONS. 
 
 31 
 
 attempting to climb a rocky ascent by an insecure 
 route, the surface of which, when midway to the 
 summit, crumbled beneath his feet, and wellnigh 
 precipitated him to the bottom. These are among 
 the common incidents of the first days' holidays; 
 we gain experience and caution as we advance. 
 
 I should have been minded, if time and space 
 had permitted, to lay down in this place some 
 rules for holiday-makers; but the circumstances 
 and conditions are so various that it would take 
 rather a small volume than the page or two at my 
 disposal to legislate for such numerous diversities. 
 To one man the best conditions of a holiday 
 are solitary traveling and perfect independence; 
 another is fain to take with him wife and children, 
 and all belongings; a third affects the companion- 
 ship of a comrade or two, masculine and muscular, 
 who can walk as many miles, smoke as many 
 cigars, and drink as much Bass as himself. Jones 
 takes a moor in Scotland; Johnson a preserve in 
 Norfolk; Brown goes with Mrs. Brown and the 
 little Browns to Scarborough; Robinson is off by 
 himself into Wales, with a sketch-book in his 
 pocket; and Jenkins departs with his young wife 
 to the Rhineland, happy as a king. Much depends 
 upon age, on health, on the bondage of our daily 
 habits. Some eschew the "strenuous idleness" of 
 holiday-making, and let the holiday take quiet 
 possession of them. There are those who consider 
 nothing so enjoyable as to spend a day in slippers, 
 
32 
 
 HOLIDA YS. 
 
 in their wonted homes, turning over their books, 
 reading old letters and papers, sauntering into the 
 garden, wondering at the flowers, nibbling at the 
 fruit, — in short, resting thoroughly from labor, and 
 never thinking what the next hour or the next day 
 
 is to produce. For my own part, I well, no 
 
 matter ; some holidays are better than others, but 
 all holidays are good. 
 
 I have had some grievous failures in my day — 
 who has not ? But I am not in the least discour- 
 aged by them. I went out for a walking tour in 
 the Home Counties, and spent ten days looking 
 out of the windows of bad hotels in fourth-rate 
 towns, gazing at the inexhaustible rain. I shall 
 never forget my visit to Llangollen, and the weather 
 by which it was celebrated. I journeyed to the 
 venerable cathedral-town of Salisbury, on a pil- 
 grimage to my old school-house, and found an in- 
 significant row of ten-pound cottages on its site. 
 It was a sore disappointment to me, but there are 
 always compensations. The march of time had 
 not taken away the playing-field, in which we 
 fought out desperate cricket-matches with the 
 Town, recruited commonly with some of the best 
 blood of the county. Nor had it taken away 
 Keynes's nursery-gardens, now of world-wide repu- 
 tation for their triumphs at rose-shows, nor the 
 eternal "rings" of old Sarum, with theii cimlk and 
 flint, their grassy banks, their yew-trees and snakes. 
 Very pleasant to revisit these old haunts, but I 
 
FAILURES AND MISCHANCES. 
 
 33 
 
 would have given much, after long years spent on 
 alien soil, again to traverse those old school-rooms 
 and eating-halls and dormitories, where I wrote 
 bad verses, and ate good beef, and slept soundly in 
 my boyhood. My experiences are replete with 
 mischances of this kind. Every holiday-maker 
 must be prepared for them. What matter ? They 
 are very disappointing whilst they last ; but we 
 have our holidays all the same. When bad weather 
 sets steadily in, we are wont to say that we might 
 as well have stayed at home ; but we are ignorant 
 and ungrateful when we say so. For, in truth, ab- 
 stinence from work, liberation from the ordinary 
 environments of daily life, familiarity with new 
 sights and sounds, and the admission of new trains 
 of thought, all confer upon us the benefits of a 
 holiday, though the immediate enjoyment may be 
 scant. We are better for it when we return. We 
 may not be conscious of the gain, but it is no less 
 certain. It finds us out years afterwards, and for 
 every day of relaxation gives us another week or 
 another month of work. Is there nothing in that, 
 my friends ? I have seen the strongest frames sud- 
 denly shattered, — the brightest intellects suddenly 
 dimmed. And why? We know that God "rested" 
 after his work; and shall human weakness dare 
 to do without it ? It is said to be a great and noble 
 thing 
 
 "To scorn delights and live laborious days." 
 
 But the line, despite its paternity, is altogether the 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 HOLIDA YS. 
 
 greatest braggart and impostor that I know. If we 
 would live laborious days, we must not scorn de- 
 lights. It is by taking a full measure of 
 
 " Delight in little things, — 
 The buoyant child surviving in the man," 
 
 that we are enabled to do our appointed work. Let 
 us all hold fast to this. Let us have our harmless 
 delights ; let us have our rest ; let us have our holi- 
 days. 
 
 Yes : here is dear old August come upon us, 
 with its ripe harvests and its riper holidays ; and 
 let us welcome it with grateful hearts. You and I, 
 dear reader, let us hope, have done seven months' 
 good work this year ; and shall we not be prepared 
 to do some more good work, by-and-by, when we 
 have played a little ? 
 
 It is time now to be packing up. Think well 
 about this matter, my friends. Don't start in a 
 hurry. Leave no neglected duties behind to stare 
 at you, with grim spectral aspects, at odd quiet 
 times, when there is a lull in the excitement of 
 travel. Many a holiday has been spoiled by disturb- 
 ing recollections of something that ought to have 
 been done or provided for before the hour of de- 
 parture. A day or two may be well spent, there- 
 fore, in quiet, thoughtful preparation at home. Take 
 your time about it, and go calmly. If you leave 
 everything to the last moment and start in a fluster, 
 your folly will be sure to find you out. 
 
CONSIDERATION FOR OTHERS. 
 
 35 
 
 I have further matter of discourse ; but I must 
 lay down the pen, hopeful, however, that I may be 
 heard again upon this or some cognate subject. 
 My last word of advice to holiday-makers is, that 
 they should never fail to remember that it is more 
 blessed to give than to receive. If they would 
 enjoy their own holidays thoroughly, and without 
 any prickings of conscience, they must carry with 
 them the pleasant reflection that, to the best of 
 their ability, they have dispensed, and are prepared 
 to dispense, the same blessed privilege to others. 
 There are few of us, great or small, who have not 
 in some measure the power of emancipating others. 
 The little mouse in the fable, it will be remembered, 
 released the great lion of the forest. The master is 
 scarcely less dependent upon the servant for his 
 holiday than the servant is upon the master. Let 
 us all bear this in mind, and all help one another. 
 A good, healthy feeling of this kind will do much 
 to bridge over the awful chasm that yawns between 
 the rich and the poor. Let us, then, encourage it 
 to the utmost. This is the best advice an old 
 fellow can give ; and with it he may well close, 
 reverentially, his plea for Holidays. 
 
 August, i860. 
 
WORK. 
 
 HAVING lately discoursed upon Holidays, and, 
 as I have been pleased to find, with good 
 acceptance from some indulgent friends, I am 
 minded, now that November has come round upon 
 us, to take Work for my theme. Less alluring 
 the present topic may be than its predecessor, but 
 some delights may be gathered from it by those 
 who seek them wisely; and there are few of us 
 whom it does not concern. For, as I said of old, 
 in other words, regard it properly, and Work is the 
 substrate, or basis, of all our daily blessings, upon 
 which lesser joys of divers kinds are built up by 
 the Great Architect and Disposer; and without 
 which there may be brief spasms and convulsions 
 of excitement, which we may call pleasure, but no 
 continuous happiness or content. 
 
 Wherefore, thank God, praise God, O my 
 friends, — ye who are born to work, and have work 
 to do. There are few of us who may not find it 
 when they will, and for those few we may weep 
 tears of compassion. Not on those who deceive 
 themselves and would deceive others into the be- 
 lief that they cannot find work to do, because mis- 
 guided by a false sense of the true dignitv of life 
 
 (36) 
 
TRUE DIGNITY OF LABOR. 37 
 
 and a false measure of their own capacity, — silly 
 worldlings who would drive the coursers of the 
 Sun, — they strive to soar aloft, when nature has 
 granted to them only to creep ; — not on such vain 
 tumors is our pity to be wasted. If they would 
 consent to creep, they might creep nobly. All 
 honest labor, be it the merest hand-work, brainless 
 and mechanical drudgery, dignifies human life. 
 Better is it to break stones or to turn a mangle 
 than to do nothing. Good roads and clean linen 
 are products of human industry which we need not 
 be ashamed of having a hand in creating. Let us 
 do the best we can If it be not permitted to us 
 to do work of one kind, let us brace ourselves up 
 for work of another. And to all of the great guild 
 or brotherhood of workmen let us hold out a hand, 
 — a hand of assistance, if need be ; anyhow, a hand 
 of fellowship. If the work be of much account in 
 the world's eye, let us be thankful ; if of little, let 
 us be content. "All service ranks the same with 
 God." — Let us rejoice that we are permitted to 
 serve, whether at the council-board of the nation, 
 at the head of a regiment of horse, or only behind 
 a counter. 
 
 This is not novel doctrine; yet it needs to be 
 enforced at odd times, lest the truth of it should 
 pass out of remembrance. Even as I write, a 
 newspaper lies before me, in which there is a 
 passage headed " Romantic Suicide," which relates 
 how "a fine young man, named Arsene, lately 
 
38 WORK. 
 
 hanged himself in his master's house, near Paris." 
 His only quarrel with the world was that cruel fate 
 had condemned him to be a grocer. He left behind 
 him a memorandum, bewailing his hard lot, and 
 beseeching his parents "to erect a simple tomb- 
 stone to his memory, and to inscribe upon it these 
 words — ' Born to be a man; died a grocer.' n Xow, 
 the plain truth is that he was not born to be a 
 man ; if he had been, he would have lived a grocer. 
 The manliest thing that I know in this world is to 
 do your duty in that state of life to which it has 
 pleased God to call you ; and if you have been 
 called to grocery, why not ? There are many call- 
 ings without which the world could do better than 
 without grocers. Strive, then, to be a good grocer. 
 A good grocer is any day better than a bad poet. 
 This silly Arsene, who hanged himself, wrote, " I 
 remember to have read somewhere that a man 
 should apply his intelligence to be useful to 
 humanity, and as I see I shall never be fit for 
 anything but to weigh cheese and dried plums, I 
 have made up my mind to go to another world, 
 which I have heard of, and see whether there may 
 not be a place for me there." A place, doubtless ; 
 according to the faith of the silly grocerling, a 
 " Purgatory of Suicides," in which he will be con- 
 demned to ceaseless plum-weighings, and out of 
 which he will in no wise be suffered to escape, until 
 he has subdued his soul to a right sense of the 
 dignity of plum-weighing as an appointed duty. 
 
OUR DAILY WANTS. 39 
 
 and of the utility of the calling to the world. 
 "Useful to humanity"! Arsene! who is not 
 useful, if you are not, Monsieur L'Epicier ? On my 
 honor as a gentleman, I could no more write 
 these lines, but for the early cup of coffee where- 
 with I am refreshing myself in the quiet of the 
 morning ere the house is astir, than I could pen 
 another Iliad. And what if, my toilet accom- 
 plished, I were to descend to the breakfast-room 
 and find there no tea, and no sugar? — what of my 
 equanimity for the rest of the day? Is it any- 
 thing to me in this remote country town, in the 
 neighborhood of which I am sojourning for awhile, 
 that there are wise men and erudite scholars in the 
 vicinity? I do not ask, and I do not care. If 
 Solon were to be my next-door neighbor, or 
 Socrates my fellow-lodger, what better should I be 
 for the proximity of all their sapience? But it is 
 everything to me that there is a good grocer in the 
 High Street, — that my daily wants, though they be 
 not many, and plums are not my especial frailty, 
 are adequately supplied. " Not useful to humanity" ? 
 I should like to know who are useful to humanity, 
 if the grocer who keeps the shop in this little town, 
 the assistant who weighs out the groceries, and the 
 errand-boy who carries them to their several desti- 
 nations, are not useful. Think of the panic in 
 Castleton this morning if there were to be a gap 
 in High Street, and " Figs — No. 9," with all his 
 establishment and his stock-in-trade, were suddenly 
 
40 WORK. 
 
 to be missing; we should then know how useful he 
 has been to us all. 
 
 It is, doubtless, in the remembrance of many, 
 that among other wise things to be found in 
 Mr. John Bunyan's popular volume is a description 
 of Vain-Hope, the ferryman, who ferried Ignorance 
 across the river. In a little doctrinal note, Mr. 
 Bunyan sagaciously observes, " Vain-Hope ever 
 dwells in the bosom of fools, and is ever ready 
 to assist Ignorance!' Now, what is here said in 
 a spiritual sense is true also in worldly matters. 
 Vain-Hope is ever ready, with the oar in his 
 hand, to ferry Ignorance across the river of life. 
 And what shoals they encounter on the passage ! 
 in what depths of mud they flounder on the banks ! 
 It has always been so, more or less ; but it appears 
 to me sometimes that this is an especial vice and 
 danger of the age. We are, somehow or other, all 
 of us waxed proud, and getting above our work ; 
 and what is to become of generations beyond us, 
 if we go on at this rate, it is impossible to conjec- 
 ture. What is most wanted is a strong ebb-tide to 
 send us back again to the status of our grandsires, 
 and to give us more lowly thoughts. Young men 
 in these times think that they have "a soul beyond 
 the shop;" and old men, I am afraid, are too prone 
 to encourage the mischievous idea, and to turn 
 their sons, who might be good tradesmen, into 
 indifferent members of some " gentlemanly profes- 
 sion." But the gentlemanly professions are now 
 
 
STOOPING TO CONQUER. 41 
 
 becoming so crowded and overstocked, and the 
 difficulty of earning bare subsistence in them so 
 increasingly great, that men of family and educa- 
 tion are beginning to think whether they may not 
 advantageously pick up for their sons the grocer's 
 apron which young Figs has scornfully thrown 
 aside, or the yard measure which Bombazine junior 
 has broken across his knee.* I know some who 
 would have done wisely had they thus stooped to 
 conquer the great problem of the labor of life, — 
 who, vainly looking for " gentlemanly" employ- 
 ment for their children, and scorning meaner but 
 honorable work, which would have profitably 
 occupied their time and elevated their character, 
 as a sense of honest work and manly independence 
 ever must elevate it, have suffered them to hang 
 about billiard-rooms and stable-yards, until the 
 young " gentlemen" have developed into some- 
 thing not much better than blacklegs and sharpers. 
 Paterfamilias ! Paterfamilias ! think of this before 
 'tis too late. When you and I were little boys, 
 our mothers were v not too learned to recite to us 
 the versicles of good Doctor Watts. They were of 
 a good, homely, lasting quality, like our puerile 
 corduroys ; and as Christian Years and Proverbial 
 Philosophies were not in those days, we were 
 
 * Since this was written, ten years ago, the good sense of the 
 upper classes of English society, of the early developments of which 
 I have here spoken, has more signally asserted itself. I have spoken 
 incidentally of this in the essay on Toleration. (1870.) 
 
42 WORK. 
 
 content with both the poetry and the morality of 
 the doctor's lyrics. Neither you nor I can remem- 
 ber the best passages in Tennyson's charming 
 Idylls, delightedly as we read them last year. But 
 our memory still clings, with grateful and affec- 
 tionate tenacity, to the doctrine-freighted numbers 
 which we lisped on the maternal knee. Many 
 were the impressive truths which we learnt in those 
 days, — truths often rendered doubly imposing to 
 our dawning intelligence, by the striking facts in 
 natural history (from bears and tigers down to busy 
 bees) wherewith the poetical divine was wont to 
 illustrate his metrical precepts ; but none more 
 firmly implanted in our minds than the fact that 
 
 " Satan finds some mischief still 
 For idle hands to do." 
 
 " Give your son a Bible and a calling," said 
 another eminent divine. Write the words in letters 
 of gold ! Any calling is better than none : there 
 is nothing surer than that. You would like to see 
 your Harry fairly started for the Woolsack, your 
 little Cecil steaming up to the other bank of the 
 great river where lies the archiepiscopal palace of 
 Lambeth, and your blue-eyed Ernest floating 
 calmly into the viceregal precincts of the Govern- 
 ment House at Calcutta. Well, I have my Harry, 
 and my Cecil, and my Ernest ; and I should like 
 to see them, too, well ahead in the race for the 
 Chancellor's wig, or the Primate's sleeves, or the 
 
HIGH AND LOW. 43 
 
 portfolio of the Governor-General ; but I would 
 sooner see them cutting planks in a saw-yard, or 
 shouldering heavy luggage at a railway-station, 
 than doing nothing, when they have come to a 
 fitting age to do a good day's work for a good 
 day's wage, and to earn their bread like honest 
 gentlemen. 
 
 There is nothing like it in human life, — nothing 
 at the same time so ennobling and so exhilarating. 
 It braces a man like cold water: it invigorates him 
 like iron and quinine. What a poor creature he is 
 who has no work to do ! — what a burden to himself 
 and to others ! Many a man's happiness has been 
 blasted by the possession of an estate, and, if in- 
 dependence without work be a sore trouble, what 
 must idleness be without independence ! For a 
 thoroughly idle man, you must not look in the high 
 places of the earth. Your great lords and landed 
 proprietors have commonly work to do. The man- 
 agement of a great estate, in spite of all interme- 
 diate agency of lawyers and stewards and bailiffs, 
 is no light matter to the owner, whatever we, who 
 have neither lands, nor houses, nor fat beeves, and 
 live from hand to mouth by hard brain-work, may 
 think upon the subject. My Lord Duke disappears 
 into his sanctum, like meaner men, every morning 
 after breakfast, when you think that he might be 
 playing billiards, or shooting pheasants, or riding 
 to the hounds. He is as much encumbered with 
 his riches as we are with our poverty. Of both 
 
44 
 
 WORK. 
 
 lots hard work is the condition. Moreover, it is no 
 small thing to be a legislator, whether by birth- 
 right or by election. Our laws are made, and our 
 Public Service is presided over, by men of large 
 estate, whether for the national good I know not, 
 but assuredly for their own. And, indeed, when I 
 come to think of the immense amount of harm 
 that might be done by the thousand powerful 
 noblemen and gentlemen whom our two Houses 
 of Parliament gather up and absorb into the mass 
 of laboring men, if they were left all the year 
 round to their own devices, I can almost forgive 
 the legislative errors and the administrative mis- 
 carriages to which they are prone. What mischief 
 would Satan find for the idle hands of men with 
 so much money in their pockets ! Talk of wasted 
 sessions, of unprofitable debates, of mighty deluges 
 of words leading to nothing, and hint that Parlia- 
 ment is of no use ! Of no use ! Is there any 
 industrial school in the whole kingdom of half so 
 much use? any reformatory so potential for good? 
 Surely an institution for keeping our great lords 
 and landed gentry out of mischief is not to be 
 made light of by any benevolent mind. 
 
 Large estates, in this sense, may be great bless- 
 ings, as supplying work to the possessors; but 
 small estates are commonly our bane. It is among 
 the middle classes — the upper ranks of the middle 
 classes — that men without work are mostly to be 
 found. Say that a man is born to the possession 
 
LABORS OF THE RICH. 45 
 
 of, or that in mature age he inherits, an income of 
 two thousand pounds a year. You wish yourself 
 that man. Well, — I must confess my weakness, — 
 I have wished it scores of times myself. Cui bono? 
 Though a goodly sum to earn, it is not much to 
 spend; but it is sufficient to invite idleness. The 
 daily bread being found, there is no necessity to 
 toil for it ; so we eschew work if we are young, 
 and we renounce work if we are old ; and we live 
 upon our property, gentlemen at ease. "At ease"! 
 It seems to be an easy life to live upon a property 
 that manages itself, and to have nothing to do but 
 to spend your few modest thousands. Ah ! but I 
 have known men who have found it a very hard 
 life ; men who have envied the bricklayer as he 
 built up anew the chimney blown down by the 
 wind, or the glazier as he repaired the lights of the 
 green-house broken by the last night's hail; men 
 who have looked wistfully at the mortar and the 
 putty, and longed for a job of work on a larger and 
 a manlier scale than their principal daily occupation 
 of mending their children's toys. Well, it is better 
 to have a glue-pot simmering at your study-fire 
 than to have no implement of work within your 
 reach. But who can doubt that the bricklayer and 
 the glazier are happier than the "man of property" 
 for whom they are doing those humble strokes of 
 work? Better that he had been articled to his 
 uncle the lawyer, or that his money were invested 
 in some laborious and anxious business that would 
 
46 WORK. 
 
 occupy his time and his thoughts; better anything 
 that would give him a calling, than that he should 
 dawdle out life as "a gentleman at large," so called, 
 lucus a non luceudo, because he lives in the nar- 
 rowest possible circle of life and has not a single 
 enlarged idea to bless him. 
 
 There are some who may accept these praises 
 of work only in a qualified or conditional sense. 
 Under all circumstances of health or sickness, joy 
 or sorrow, to be compelled to work is often said 
 to be a grievous necessity, and many kind souls 
 are moved to compassion by the thought of it. 
 But there is a vis medicatrix in work as there is in 
 nothing else ; and most people owe more to it than 
 they acknowledge, or even suspect. To me, it has 
 always appeared to be the hardest necessity of all 
 to work, when good health, and elastic spirits, and 
 a general buoyancy of one's whole being, perpetu- 
 ally suggest play. Let us be up and about ! The 
 sun shines. The sky is clear. All nature is joc- 
 und. The tingling life within us prompts us to 
 active movement, and we are eager to disport our- 
 selves in the air. We would ride or walk, play at 
 cricket, shoot, fish, pull an oar on the river, — 
 anything that will give freedom to our limbs and 
 freshness to our cheeks. But — the work must be 
 done. Oh, my friends, then it is that the necessity 
 is truly grievous, then it is that the struggle be- 
 tween inclination and duty rends the very soul of 
 the workman. It is a terrible conflict, demanding 
 
IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH. 47 
 
 all the courage and resistance of a strong man to 
 lead him along the path of victory. I assume that 
 the work is work that ought to be done, and can- 
 not without injury be delayed ; else, these external 
 invitations being but few in our ungenial climate, 
 I might almost admit the wisdom of yielding to 
 them. Does not God give us fine days that we, as 
 well as the flowers and the harvest, may sun our- 
 selves in them ? Are light, and air, and heaven's 
 warmth, only for the nurslings of the field and the 
 garden ? Are they not also for us, cradled inher- 
 itors of the world's common blessings ? Truly, 
 such obstinate questionings as these, when work 
 would hold us down with an iron hand, are among 
 our sorest temptations. It is hard to be chained 
 to the desk — cabined, cribbed, confined within four 
 dreary walls — when our hearts are throbbing and 
 our limbs are twitching with desire to go far afield, 
 and to " eat the air," as they phrase it in the em- 
 phatic language of the East. Sound health and 
 buoyant spirits and the yearning after out-of-doors 
 recreation which they induce, are the real aggra- 
 vations of work, the disturbing influences which 
 make us sometimes deplore that we are workmen. 
 But sickness and sorrow — how should we bear 
 them, but for the work which we have to do? 
 Writing of sickness, I shall not be understood to 
 have in mind those mortal ailments which pros- 
 trate body and soul, and render work an impossi- 
 bility, but of the lesser infirmities of our nature. 
 
48 WORK. 
 
 There are few really sound men among us. Sick- 
 ness, in its less subduing form, is the common lot 
 of us poor worldlings. But it is tolerable or in- 
 tolerable just as we concern ourselves little or 
 much about it. If we really knew the processes 
 of derangement and decay which are going on 
 within us, — if we could see all the several parts of 
 our mortal machinery, and the disorders, organic 
 or functional, which are impeding its right action, 
 — verily the lives of many of us would be a long 
 night of suffering and terror. There are pangs, 
 and spasms, and tremors, and faintnesses, greater 
 or less, afflicting us all day long. They all indi- 
 cate some internal disorganization or disturbance ; 
 and if we have nothing to do but to dwell upon 
 them — if we are continually asking ourselves what 
 they mean — we soon shrivel into invalids, and be- 
 come what we think ourselves. A busy man takes 
 no heed of these slight promptings of infirmity. 
 He tells you, perhaps, when you ask him how he 
 is, that he really does not know, — that he has had 
 no time to consider. So much, indeed, has the 
 mind to do with our merely physical sensations, 
 that many a man will bear witness to the fact, that 
 when some good-natured friend has told him that 
 he " is not looking well," he has begun at once to 
 be conscious of some disturbance of the system of 
 which he had had no knowledge before. I have 
 heard men, too, contend against the expediency of 
 holidays, on the ground that they never feel as well 
 
TRIALS SOFTENED BY OCCUPATION. 49 
 
 during the vacation as when they are actively at 
 work. I do not deny the fact ; but I altogether 
 dispute the inference. It does not follow that be- 
 cause we are more conscious of our infirmities at 
 such times, therefore the cessation of labor is not 
 profitable both to body and mind. Besides, who 
 knows that the very sensations which oppress us 
 at such seasons are not so many indications of a 
 restorative process going on within us ? Irritabil- 
 ity is often a sign of a salutary reaction. Nature 
 handles us a little roughly when she is setting us 
 right. 
 
 And, only with a slight variation of phraseology, 
 all this might truthfully be said with respect to 
 moral ailments and disturbances. As with the 
 body, so with the mind. We take no account 
 of small troubles when we have much strenuous 
 work in hand; and even great trials are softened 
 down to us by an absorbing occupation. Whether, 
 rightly considered, this, so far as the greater trials 
 are concerned, be on the whole good for us, may 
 be open to doubt. 
 
 " He who lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend. 
 Eternity mourns that : 'tis a bad cure 
 For life's worst ills to have no time to feel them."* 
 
 This may be the higher philosophy. But, after all, 
 we suffer more in the course of our lives from 
 
 * Henry Taylor. 
 4 
 
5o 
 
 WORK. 
 
 small troubles and disturbances which do us no 
 good, than from the fiery trials which purify the 
 soul. Against such lesser or imaginary grievances 
 Work is verily a coat of mail ; and I am not sure 
 that because it gives us strength to bear more 
 grievous afflictions it therefore deprives them of 
 their salutary, chastening effects. 
 
 I know that there is such a thing as being 
 " kept up by excitement" We do not know how 
 we have torn and blistered our feet, till the toil- 
 some journey is ended and we unloose the latchets 
 of our shoes. There is a familiar story of a veteran 
 cab-horse, that lived day and night in harness, 
 because it had an awkward habit of dropping on 
 its knees as the shafts were removed. There are 
 men among us who live ever between the shafts, 
 harnessed and braced up literally within an inch 
 of their lives. Take them out of harness, and they 
 drop. This is not a state of things to be tolerated, 
 much less to be advocated. Very different are 
 the conditions of healthy labor. There is no healthy 
 labor without periods of rest. The insensibility 
 to small troubles, which is a result of salutary 
 work, is very different from the obliviousness of 
 overwrought excitement. 
 
 It was once, I believe, a popular theory that 
 men who work hard grow prematurely old and die 
 before their time. But, whatsoever the wont may 
 have been when it was the custom of our fore- 
 fathers to sustain hard work by hard drinking, I 
 
 1 
 
PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF IDLENESS. 
 
 51 
 
 believe that, in this more temperate age, idle men 
 run to seed more rapidly than their more laborious 
 contemporaries. Such, at least, is my observation 
 of life. With a keen perception of the different 
 results wrought upon the physique of men by differ- 
 ent conditions of life, I still do not find it easy to 
 describe these distinctive differences. I think, 
 however, it may be said, generally, that idle men 
 acquire, as they advance in years, a flabby appear- 
 ance, more indicative of age than the strong lines 
 and the general aspect of tension which we see in 
 those who have lived laborious days. There are 
 men "who rot themselves at ease on Lethe's 
 wharf," whilst their toiling and striving brethren 
 are full of sap and vigor. This, at least, I know, 
 that commerce with lofty themes, whilst it elevates 
 the mind, gives freshness and juvenility to the 
 countenance and buoyancy to the whole de- 
 meanor. All work does not involve such com- 
 merce; but the thoughts which arise out of the 
 humblest calling — of honest work honestly done — 
 are nobler than those which are associated only 
 with our personal wants and our personal cares. 
 And though the higher class of work be rare, it is 
 still not to be omitted from such an essay as this, 
 tjiat some of the busiest men whom I know, per- 
 sonally or by fame, — the men who have worked 
 hardest and done most, who have found life to be 
 a battle, and have fought it the most strenuously, — 
 are younger in their appearance, in their manner, 
 
52 
 
 WORK. 
 
 and in their feelings, than their contemporaries who 
 have done nothing all their lives. I never doubt, 
 when I see such men, that they have had wisdom 
 to appreciate the small beatitudes of life; that' 
 they have taken their holidays in due season, and 
 never suffered it to pass out of their remembrance 
 that there is a time to work and a time to play.* 
 Half a century ago, as I have said, the pillar of 
 statesmanship was the bottle. As the poor cast- 
 away says, alas! even in these days, "there could 
 be no bearing such a life but for the drink." Our 
 great men drank, and they played, too ; but the play 
 was hazard, and the play-room a stifling gambling- 
 house, for which no milder name could be found 
 than that which signifies the unquenchable fire of 
 the doomed. But nowadays hard work in high 
 places is ever suggestive of the wisdom of prac- 
 tically recognizing the advantage of occasional 
 interludes of pleasure. These are the harmless 
 stimulants which keep men fresh and young, gay 
 and joyous, even with the cares of a nation on their 
 shoulders. Ay, these interludes! They are the 
 
 * Some may, perhaps, here remind me of the well-known mot 
 of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who said that " Life would be 
 endurable, but for its pleasures." In the sense in which he used 
 the last word, there may have been truth in the saying. He was 
 a hard and steady workman, alternating politics and literature in 
 his daily life; but he died early, for he neither played nor rested 
 — and " The pity of it — oh ! the pity of it !" Our generation has 
 not seen many such men. — (1870.) 
 
INTERLUDES. 
 
 53 
 
 making of us all. What a word it is. Ludus inter 
 laborem. Play between work. We do not all like 
 the same games. You may choose rounders, per- 
 haps, and I may vote for prisoner's base. I saw a 
 game at the latter, the other day, on a smooth 
 grassy bit of table-land among rocks on the W r elsh 
 coast, which took five-and-thirty years off my life, 
 as with keenest interest I watched the conflict. I 
 don't care what it is. I am catholic in my sympa- 
 thies. I have not been to the Derby since Bay 
 Middleton's year; I did not quite see the glorious 
 fight which lately agitated all the great wide world 
 in which the English language is spoken, — though 
 I confess that I was within an inch of it. But I am 
 pleased when I hear that there are bets on the 
 "double event" of a noble lord winning "the blue 
 ribbon of the Turf" and gaining a decisive parlia- 
 mentary majority in the same week; and I did not 
 think much the worse of those legislators who were 
 said to have taken the train to Farnham on that 
 memorable April morning, though, doubtless, it 
 is their business to make laws, and not to break 
 them. 
 
 It may be observed, too, of men of this class, 
 who work hard and wear well, that they are com- 
 monly fond of society, and not altogether indifferent 
 to the pleasures of the table. And why not ? A 
 man is not bound to be an anchorite or an ascetic 
 because he has work to do. To be saturated and 
 sodden, as in old times, with port or any other 
 
54 
 
 WORK. 
 
 wine, is a horrible state of existence ; but are we 
 therefore to have no more cakes and ale ? Men 
 cannot work, any more than animals, on spare 
 diet. If you have a laborious occupation, whether 
 it be bodily or mental, you must live well. I read 
 sometimes in temperance tracts of careful and 
 thrifty wives, who have persuaded their husbands 
 out of beer, and have bought small cottages with 
 the savings. I have as good a wife as any man, 
 but I am convinced that the last thing in the world 
 to which she would desire to lead me is the water- 
 trough. There is nothing of which I have less 
 doubt than that every kind of labor requires 
 generous support. Some theorists have written or 
 declaimed about animal food clogging or deadening 
 the intellectual faculties. I do not ask you to 
 gormandize, whether you have much or little to 
 do. But you may be sure that intellectual labor 
 demands good physical support even more than 
 bodily work. Nature kindly tells you this. Have 
 you not, I ask you, felt more hungry, after a good 
 spell of work in your library, than after walking a 
 dozen miles in the open air? Should you then 
 feast on a salad ? I knew a man — an enthusiast in 
 art — who declared that when he was in the throes 
 of a great work he always lived on roasted apples. 
 He died before his time. I suspect that the Tin- 
 torettos of the present day fare better and live 
 longer. Beefsteaks are better than roasted apples ; 
 not that, like Fuseli, you may dream horrors, but 
 
 
IVOMANL Y SUPPOR T. 55 
 
 that you may do your appointed work with less 
 waste of human life.* 
 
 To do your work well too, and to keep your 
 mind fresh, you must diligently cultivate the affec- 
 tions. In the society of women and of children 
 there is more refreshment than in anything in the 
 world. It is bright sunshine, and clear, "pure air, 
 lovely sights and pleasant sounds; and if it cannot 
 be said of it, as of nature, it " never did betray the 
 heart that is its own," its betrayals are so few, that 
 we need not take account of them. For my own 
 part, I wonder how any one can work, who has not 
 some one to love and some one to love him — 
 
 " Some one to cast his glory on — to share 
 His rapture with." 
 
 * I remember the late Chief Baron Pollock telling me, at a 
 dinner of the Royal Society Club, that when he was leader of the 
 Northern Circuit he made a point of never going through a day in 
 court without making a substantial luncheon. At a given time his 
 steak or chop, with a pint of port, was ready for him at his lodgings 
 or hotel, and if at his luncheon-hour a cause in which he was 
 retained was coming on, he told his junior to occupy the court for 
 a certain time, and at the end of it returned to take up the brief. 
 He attributed not only his good health and his capacity for work, 
 but much also of his professional success, to this habit; and he 
 lived, active and laborious almost to the last, to the ripe age of 
 eighty-six. He must have been almost, if not quite, an octogenarian 
 when he told me this, and yet on that very day he had sat many 
 hours in court before dinner, and after dinner he delivered a lecture 
 before the Royal Society, with all the clearness and vivacity of a 
 man in the prime of his life. — (1870.) 
 
56 WORK. 
 
 Whether you have finished your great history in 
 six volumes, or only filled the gaps in the squire's 
 hedges, there is unspeakable solace and sustentation 
 in the thought that the loving heart which has 
 encouraged your labor rejoices in its completion. 
 But apart from this wonderful stimulant of sym- 
 pathy, there is nothing in the world that so takes a 
 man out of himself and diverts his thoughts from 
 the toils and cares of his daily life as the society of 
 women, even though they know nothing and care 
 nothing about his work. This has all been said a 
 thousand, times before in prose and poetry, more 
 eloquently and more forcibly than I could hope to 
 say it, if I desired to make the most of the fact. I 
 will only, therefore, observe here that it will com- 
 monly be found that men avIio, in spite of much 
 hard work, wear their years lightly, are men who 
 delight in female society and are popular with the 
 other sex. Very busy men, who can find time for 
 nothing else, beyond the immediate range of their 
 duties and responsibilities, are seldom too busy for 
 recreation of this kind. Some of the most strenuous 
 and most successful workmen of modern times have, 
 I am afraid, been perilously given to intrigue. It 
 is the most exciting of all amusements, and, there- 
 fore, the one best suited to men whose public life 
 is one of excitement. Bear well in mind, all ye 
 who peruse this in the midst of the pleasant and 
 virtuous family circle, that I merely state the fact, 
 as I believe it to be; I do not justify or palliate 
 
SLEEP. 
 
 57 
 
 the practice. Happy the man to whom the domus 
 el placens uxor are all-sufficient God be praised 
 that there are such men, and among our brightest 
 and bravest too! We will drop the subject of dan- 
 gerous and exciting intrigue. It is a hard world, 
 indeed, if it will not admit that there may be inno- 
 cent friendship and companionship between the two 
 sexes, though the female society, which lightens 
 the burden of toil and smooths down the wrinkles 
 of age, may not in all cases be that of wife and 
 daughters. 
 
 And not less necessary than pleasant recreation 
 and cheering society is good sleep. If you are to 
 work well, you must sleep well. If you are to keep 
 your health and strength and youth, — to carry your 
 powers of work with you to the last, — you must 
 sedulously pay court to your pillow. It will 
 commonly be found that the men who carry their 
 years lightly are men who possess the faculty of 
 sleeping at will. If you have much work to do, 
 you must not account time spent in sleep to be 
 time lost. It is time gained. It is an essential 
 part of the duty of the day. I had once an old 
 servant, who used to say, "Well, I have done my 
 work. I have cleaned up; and now I'll get my 
 sleeping done!' Sleeping was in her philosophy 
 a thing to be done, — not a passive state, but an 
 active part of her duty. And every workman 
 should so consider it. Let him sleep in his bed, 
 if he can, at proper hours of the night; if not, 
 
58 WORK. 
 
 let him sleep at any odd time, when nature invites 
 him to rest himself. If we do not play tricks with 
 ourselves, if we work hard without overworking 
 ourselves, sleep will rarely be coy tc us. As a 
 general rule, it may be said that busy men are 
 better sleepers than idlers, and that mental labor 
 contributes more to sound sleep than bodily fatigue. 
 I believe that only mere novices in work are kept 
 awake by the thought of it. Experienced workmen 
 acquire a habit of shaking off its environments 
 when they will. If there be one thing in life 
 for which I am profoundly thankful to the Giver of 
 all good gifts, it is for the faculty of sleep. 
 
 " I have two friends, who are with me night and day, — 
 True friends and constant, ever by my side ; 
 Than mother more devoted, or young bride — 
 Yet when one comes, the other steals away; 
 For jealous friends will no joint vigil keep ; — 
 The one's great name is Work; the other's Sleep." 
 
 It may be thought to be a condition of good 
 hearty strenuous work, that the business to be done 
 should be such as suits the especial tastes and 
 qualifications of the workman. It is a sorry thing 
 to work against the grain; the wrong way of the 
 stuff, as housewives say; invito, Minerva, accord- 
 ing to the scholars. But there is much to be 
 observed in abatement of this, whereof I shall 
 speak presently; being minded first to say that 
 this evil is one which is very- apt to cure or to 
 
CHOICE OF WORK. 59 
 
 neutralize itself. For men are prone, by very- 
 force of nature, whatsoever may be their early 
 diversions, to return to the path along which 
 their inclination would lead them, and it will com- 
 monly be found that, in the end, they are wedded 
 to the work of their choice. Sometimes, it may 
 fall out that, habit being, as saith the proverb, 
 "a second nature," the workman becomes first 
 reconciled to his work, and afterwards well affected 
 towards it, simply by the force of habit and famil- 
 iarity, and more than all by a growing competency 
 to perform it with address. For seldom it is that 
 we do not incline kindly towards that which we are 
 conscious of being able to do readily and well. 
 But the instances of the former mode of cure are, 
 I esteem, more frequent: men forsaking the pro- 
 fessions or trades to which they have been bound 
 in youth by the will of their elders to follow others 
 to which their natural tastes and appetences incline 
 them. If there be truth in the proverb that "a 
 rolling stone gathers no moss," it may be better 
 philosophy to reconcile one's self to the unloved 
 work; but "Man will break out, despite philoso- 
 phy," and nature is often too strong for us. Whether 
 it be more worldly wise in such cases of ill-assorted 
 alliance to look the matter boldly in the face, to go 
 into the Court of Divorce, and, making great sacri- 
 fice thereby of apprentice-fees, and premia, and 
 education-money, and years of early training and 
 servitude, to make a fresh start in life, or to cling 
 
60 WORK. 
 
 resolutely to the first uncongenial connection, and 
 work on ill-mated to the last, is a question which 
 may well perplex a philosopher. There is no rule 
 to be derived from experience in such a case; for 
 I have known men who have taken fresh starts, in 
 mature years, make their way triumphantly to the 
 goal of success, and I have known them too to 
 break down, weak of limb and scant of breath, 
 painfully and regretfully, on the way. It might, 
 perhaps, have appeared, on closer inspection of 
 these varying results, that in the one case the 
 workman had been moved by an irrepressible in- 
 stinct or appetence to embrace the new vocation, 
 and in the other, by the instability and weakness 
 of his nature, to forsake the old. And it is very 
 certain that no such change should be lightly 
 made; that we should examine ourselves carefully 
 before we undertake it, and feel assured that it is 
 not fickleness, or love of change, or want of perse- 
 verance that impels us, but a genuine conviction 
 that we have within us the elements of success in 
 the new way of life, — that it is, in fact, our voca- 
 tion or calling, — that it calls us irresistibly, and 
 that we must go. 
 
 Besides, I would have it to be understood, as I 
 before suggested, that even the unwilling Minerva 
 has favors of her own to dispense, — that there is 
 compensation for the pains and penalties of work- 
 ing against the grain. For there is surely no work 
 so worthy, so ennobling, as that which is done by 
 
THE UNWILLING MINERVA. 6 1 
 
 us painfully and laboriously under a strong sense 
 of an abiding duty. There is a satisfaction in the 
 feeling that we have done, to the best of our poor 
 ability, certain work altogether foreign to our tastes 
 and inclinations, — that we have striven manfully 
 against our natural repugnance, and done the work 
 assigned to us thoroughly and well, in spite of every 
 temptation to half do it, or to leave it altogether 
 undone. There is a satisfaction, I say, in such a 
 feeling, not to be derived from the contemplation 
 of more congenial labor; for there is small merit 
 in doing thoroughly and well what it pleases us to 
 do. Work done without strife, almost, indeed, 
 without labor, is but a shadow or delusion of work. 
 But to see a man sustained by a sense of duty, 
 working painfully and laboriously, with indomitable 
 perseverance, day after day, at that which to him 
 is mere drudgery and task-work, is a sight fit for 
 the gods. What merit is it that I write these 
 pages ? Does it not please me to write them ? 
 Is not my heart in the sport ? But what if I were 
 to have spent this bright autumn day adding up 
 column after column of abhorred figures, solely 
 for duty's sake ? Would it not be a meritorious 
 performance ? Should I not have reason to stroke 
 my beard approvingly, and say, " Well done, thou 
 good and faithful servant" ? Moreover, the smaller 
 your pleasure in doing your work, the greater your 
 pleasure in having done it. Like Byron's Tasso, 
 I might in one case, my pleasant long-sustaining 
 
62 WORK. 
 
 task being done, blot its final page with tears ; but 
 in the other I should send up a grateful paean, 
 shouting, "Joy, — joy forever! my task is done!" 
 like Moore's Peri, and rapturously asking myself 
 whether I am not happy. 
 
 Whether you like it or not, my friend, go at 
 it cheerfully. I know some men who are always 
 sighing over their work, and over work, too, of 
 their own election. They think they are hardly 
 used in having so much to do, and are continually 
 predicting that they will break down under it. It 
 is a bad sign in a workman when he falls into a 
 habit of predicting failures and disasters. In the 
 course of the recent investigation into the circum- 
 stances of that mysterious child-murder* which has 
 struck so deep and tragic an interest into wellnigh 
 every household in the country, one of the wit- 
 nesses, a small farmer, was asked if he knew the 
 meaning of the word " prediction." Confessing his 
 ignorance, he excused himself on the ground that 
 he had been at work since he was seven years old. 
 He had been too busy all his life to trouble him- 
 self about predictions. And I am always inclined 
 to think, I hope not uncharitably, when I hear a 
 man sighing over his work, and predicting that he 
 will break down under it, that he really has not, 
 and never has had, very much work to do. In the 
 
 * The once notorious Road Murder — now no longer a mystery. 
 -(1870.) 
 
TIME FOR WORK. 63 
 
 same way, idle men who really do nothing — who 
 have no calling, and perhaps not even a hobby — 
 are continually pleading want of time. They are 
 perfectly sincere when they tell you that they have 
 " no time" for anything involving intellectual ex- 
 ercise. They have come by force of habit to mis- 
 take strenuous idleness for work, and the day is 
 dawdled out, miserably* enough, before they have 
 begun to take account of its hours. Busy men 
 make time, whilst idle men are killing it, and re- 
 frain from urging a plea which, in their case, would 
 be a valid one, and accepted as such almost before 
 it is offered. 
 
 It is obvious that this matter of the employment 
 and distribution of time is at the very bottom of 
 the whole question of Work. There are four-and- 
 twenty hours in every day, and the great problem 
 of their distribution is one not easily to be solved. 
 So various in its conditions and requirements is 
 Work, that it is impossible, in a few sentences, to 
 lay down any rules relating to the time that should 
 be appropriated to and absorbed by it. There is 
 hand-work and there is head-work; and in many 
 trades and callings the question of time is settled 
 by Act of Parliament, by official regulation, or even 
 by social compact. Only recently one important 
 section of the working world has been agitated by 
 a question of nine or ten hours of toil to the labor- 
 ing-man's days. There are some men whose work 
 is never done, either because their calling is one 
 
64 WORK. 
 
 which forbids limitation of hours, or because their 
 minds are of so active, so restless a nature that they 
 cannot suffer themselves to lie fallow. A medical 
 practitioner, for example, can never call an hour of 
 the day or of the night his own. Literary men, 
 too, work at all hours, early and late : there is no 
 limitation to the labors of the imagination. As 
 long as there is a subject to be found, there is 
 work to be done. But the larger number of work- 
 men go forth every day after breakfast, and return 
 before dinner or before supper, spending from six 
 to ten hours at their apportioned work. From ten 
 to four is the ordinary work-time at the public 
 offices, from nine to five at private mercantile 
 establishments, and from nine to seven, or still 
 later, at shops, where the work to be done is not 
 of a kind to make any serious inroads upon body 
 or on brain. Much has been said recently about 
 the tendency of the age towards overwork. Heaven 
 knows that I would protest against the age, if I 
 believed that such were its tendency. Excessive 
 competition may generate such results. But I do 
 not think that, generally speaking, we are over- 
 worked. Perhaps what we want most is a little 
 better distribution of our time. If I had the 
 management of any number of men and women, 
 and the disposal of their time, I would rather give 
 them an extra hour's work every day, so as to 
 afford them a half-holiday in the week, and a week 
 or two's holiday in every year, than that they 
 
DISTRIBUTION 01-' WORK. 
 
 65 
 
 should go without their holidays. I am convinced 
 that I should find, on the 31st of December, that I 
 had gained some good work and that they had 
 gained some good health by the arrangement. 
 
 About the hour of the day at which head-work 
 can most profitably be done there are varying 
 opinions. The more common voice would seem to 
 incline towards the dictum that "the morning is 
 the best time for work," but I am not disposed to 
 accept this as a general proposition. I speak, of 
 course, of volunteer work, which is bound by no 
 especial laws. The ordinary affairs of life must be 
 transacted in business hours, according to the 
 official chronologies of which I have spoken above; 
 but I cannot help thinking that the work which 
 makes the most noise in the world is not done in 
 office-hours. Continual interruptions at that time 
 make sustained head-work difficult, if not impos- 
 sible. There are few men occupying an important 
 position in an "office," public or private, who do 
 not carry their work home with them, and perform 
 that part of it which demands the most thought 
 in the quietude of their own studies. Others do 
 supplementary work, write books or articles, or 
 solve mighty problems in science. Others again, 
 having no official labors, choose their own time 
 for literary labor or scientific research. To all of 
 these, it must often have been a question whether 
 it is better to work early or late. I have said that 
 the general verdict is in favor of the former, — and, 
 5 
 
66 WORK. 
 
 on the whole, I think, rightly. If a man is blest 
 with a regular occupation, demanding the mid-day 
 period, he is necessitated to take his principal meal 
 in the evening. If he works out of office-hours, he 
 must work before breakfast or after dinner. To 
 work after dinner, he must work late, by candle- 
 light, at a time when he ought to be setting bed- 
 wards. Young men may do this, but few men 
 past forty can work after dinner. If you can work 
 at all at night, one hour at that time may be worth 
 any two in the morning. The house is hushed, 
 the brain is clear, the distracting influences of the 
 day are at an end. You have not to disturb your- 
 self with thoughts of what you are about to do, or 
 what you are about to suffer. You know that there 
 is a gulf between you and the affairs of the outside 
 world, almost like the chasm of death, and that you 
 need not take thought of the morrow until the mor- 
 row has come. I have heard it said that there are 
 few really great thoughts, such as the world will 
 not willingly let die, that have not been conceived 
 under the quiet stars. It may be so. But it can 
 be only mere assumption or conjecture. We do 
 not know at what hour Bacon wrote his best- 
 remembered works, or Shakspeare, or Locke. In 
 those old pre-gaseous days, men rose early and 
 set late. Still, we have from classic ages frequent 
 references to the wasting of the midnight oil ; and 
 we know that many recent writers have toiled into 
 the small hours, after midnight, and thus pro- 
 
 
MORNING- WORK. 67 
 
 duced the most brilliant and enduring children of 
 their brains. 
 
 Why, then, do I speak in praise of morning- 
 work ? It has its inevitable drawbacks. That the 
 brain is clearer then than at other times is the 
 merest theory, propounded by those who have not 
 worked early or late. It is a time, too, of expecta- 
 tion: you feel that you are drifting into the cares 
 and anxieties of the day, and it is difficult to dis- 
 tract your mind from what is to come. Moreover, 
 the before-breakfast period must always be brought 
 to an abrupt close. With the inevitable eight o'clock 
 come the postman and the hot water; and the dis- 
 turbing business of the day has commenced. But 
 at night you only drift into deeper silence and 
 quicker inspiration. If the right mood is upon 
 you, you write on; if not, your pillow awaits you. 
 Why, then, I say, do I write in favor of early work ? 
 Partly, because after-dinner labor is often physically 
 impossible, and, when possible, sometimes detri- 
 mental ; and, partly, because few men can call their 
 evenings their own. The claims of society and of 
 the family circle are not to be resisted. The evening 
 hours are the social hours, and it is right that we 
 should devote them to intercourse with our fellows. 
 But we can always rely upon our mornings. No- 
 body disputes with us the possession of them. 
 And if we cannot do so much as at night, we are 
 sure of being able to do something. For steady 
 continuous work, commend me to these morning- 
 
68 WORK. 
 
 hours. Spasmodic utterances of genius may scin- 
 tillate best, like fireworks, in the darkness of the 
 night; but the morning is the time for laborious 
 investigation, — for all that is rightly to be called 
 work. And if there were nothing else in favor of 
 morning studies, there would be the paramount 
 consideration that early hours are assuredly con- 
 ducive to health, and, therefore, to the power of 
 sustained application. The old couplet, learnt by 
 all of us in the nursery, — 
 
 " Early to bed and early to rise 
 Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," 
 
 may not be strictly true, in a positive sense, else 
 I should be rich instead of poor at this time, and 
 wise instead of foolish; but in a comparative sense 
 it may be, and, indeed, I feel it is, — for I should, 
 doubtless, have been poorer and a greater fool if 
 I had not been an early riser and an early worker. 
 And as to health, can any one doubt the difference 
 between the night-work and the morning-work? 
 I speak alike of health of body and health of 
 mind. There is not in the morning-work that un- 
 natural excitement of the brain (too often aided 
 by stimulants) which attends night-work ; and I 
 am sure that no one who has tried the former will 
 be slow to admit the infinite refreshment of those 
 early hours, in the summer-time, before the sun is 
 high in the heavens and the heats of the day have 
 
 
SELECTION OF WORKSHOPS. 69 
 
 come upon us. Even in the winter, there is nothing 
 that is not, under due arrangement, cheerful in the 
 morning hours. In a few minutes, the gas may be 
 all ablaze, and the fire may be bright on the hearth, 
 and the water may be boiling, in an "setna," for 
 the early tea or coffee that is to start us on our 
 morning's work. But I need not add that early 
 setting bedwards must precede this. We must 
 lay our heads upon our pillows an hour or two 
 before midnight, if we expect on rising to have 
 before us — 
 
 " The morning freshness and the welcome work, 
 The aims, the objects, and the interests, 
 Which make earth heaven, and man almost a God.'' 
 
 And the place of our daily work is not less im- 
 portant than the time. There are few, perhaps, 
 who can select their own workshops ; but those 
 who can I would strongly recommend to choose a 
 room, in country or the suburbs, opening into a 
 garden, or, next thing to it, commanding a view of 
 trees or grass-land, pleasant and refreshing to the 
 sight. It is no small thing to be able to lay down 
 the pen for a few minutes, and to take a rush or 
 saunter in the garden, breathing the fresh air and 
 inhaling the perfume of the flowers;* and it is 
 
 * Lord Macaulay told me that he had derived great benefit 
 from his removal from the Albany to Campden Hill, where the 
 library, in which he wrote, opened into a pleasant garden. It 
 appeared to me to be the ne plus ultra of a literary workshop, and 
 I have endeavored to imitate it on a very humble scale. 
 
;o 
 
 WORK. 
 
 good alike for the eye and the brain to look up 
 from one's books and one's papers, to gaze abroad, 
 even in London, on the beautiful foliage which 
 may be seen there, in summer and autumn, in the 
 parks or in the great squares, such as Lincoln's 
 Inn Fields. 
 
 A great deal of work may be done in little odd 
 chinks and crevices of time, — spare half hours, 
 of which many men take no account. I have not 
 much faith in the story of the gentleman who 
 wrote a great work on Jurisprudence at odd times, 
 while he was waiting for his wife to go out with 
 him. Jurisprudence is not exactly the subject to 
 be treated of by snatches in this way. But much 
 useful work, nevertheless, may come out of these 
 little odds and ends, which we are wont to throw 
 idly away. There are few who have not desultory 
 work for desultory hours. Letters may be written, 
 which otherwise would obtrude themselves upon us 
 and break in upon our sustained labor. Notes may 
 be made. Papers may be arranged. I know a man 
 who devotes these fragments of time to the cor- 
 rection of the press, and is seldom without a proof- 
 sheet in his pocket. At all sorts of odd moments 
 the pencil and the proof are produced : at railway- 
 stations, waiting for the train; at hotels, waiting 
 for dinner; on the deck of a steamer; in the wait- 
 ing-room of a Minister; in all kinds of places, and 
 in all possible circumstances, you may see him 
 with a proof in his hand. It is a wise thing, too, 
 
 
IMPLEMENTS OF WORK. yi 
 
 to carry about a note-book in one's pocket. Every 
 public writer knows that he loses many of his best 
 ideas, because they sprout up, unannounced and 
 unexpected, at strange times, and are not stereo- 
 typed on the memory. He should always have 
 the means of writing at hand. I know some men 
 who make copious notes on the backs of letters, 
 on the margins of their Bradshaws, on the fly- 
 leaves of their guide-books, — and forget them 
 almost as soon as they are made. Scattered mem- 
 oranda of this kind are sure not to turn up when 
 they are wanted. But a recognized memorandum- 
 book is an aide-de-camp never off duty: you may 
 turn to it when you will. 
 
 Indeed, small matter though it seem to be, I hold 
 that every workman should look well to the imple- 
 ments of his calling. There is a proverb which 
 saith that "a bad workman complains of his tools." 
 It may be so ; but good workmen work better with 
 good tools. To those who wo' k with their hands, 
 they are everything ; to those who work with their 
 heads, they are of more account than may be sup- 
 posed. "What are such gros. f material aids as 
 these to the subtle agencies of ' he brain ? Is the 
 flow of thought dependent up r n the flow of ink 
 from the pen ?" I am not ashamed to answer that 
 I think good pens, and good ink, and good paper 
 are " material aids" in more senses than one. When 
 the thick ink cakes in the pen, and the pen only 
 scratches the fluffy paper, and your "fine Roman 
 
72 WORK. 
 
 hand" is miserably transfigured into ungraceful 
 and unintelligible hieroglyphics, is there no inter- 
 ruption to the flow of your thoughts ? Do you 
 never lose an idea whilst you are vainly endeavor- 
 ing to embody it on paper ? Is the fecundity of 
 your imagination never checked by the disturb- 
 ance of your temper ? Is it nothing to work in 
 ease and comfort, with all appliances and means 
 to boot ? Is it nothing to have an easy-chair, and 
 a spacious table, and a good expanse of carpet 
 whereon to walk to and fro, between your throes 
 of labor? Let no man despise these things. A 
 good room in itself is no small matter. Work, 
 when you can, with the window open. Let in as 
 much fresh air as this treacherous climate will per- 
 mit. Do not sit too long at a time. Have a high 
 standing desk whereby you may vary your attitude 
 of labor; and when you are busy, receive visitors 
 standing, if you wish to get rid of them soon. 
 
 And now I am reminded that something ought 
 to be said about method in work. To be orderly 
 and methodical is a great thing ; but I cannot help 
 thinking that I might as well exhort my friends to 
 be tall, or strong, or handsome, as to be orderly 
 and methodical. Order and method are gifts, as 
 beauty and genius are. I do not underrate their 
 value, but I fear that they are not to be acquired. 
 For thirty years I have been endeavoring to import 
 something like method into my habits of business; 
 but although time after time I have taken a fresh 
 
METHOD, 
 
 73 
 
 start, and resolutely determined to reform my old 
 ways, I have ignominiously failed. I have not yet 
 given up my efforts in this direction, but I feel that 
 I might almost as well endeavor to be young again. 
 I was bewailing this failure not long ago to a 
 learned and thoughtful friend, who told me not to 
 lament my deficiency ; " for," he said, " if you had 
 this quality, you would not be the man you are : 
 you would be deficient in others, which have been 
 equally or perhaps more serviceable to you." And 
 there is, doubtless, some consolation in this. Per- 
 haps, then, I had better not strive any more to 
 become what Nature has not made me. I may 
 console myself by thinking that there may be a 
 sort of method in the unmethodical. Indeed, it is 
 often a fact, that what appears to another person 
 to be a chaotic mass of papers, is perfectly intelli- 
 gible to, and manageable by, the owner of them 
 himself. And of all things the most hopelessly 
 embarrassing to untidy men are attempts at tidi- 
 ness, — their own or others'. I doubt whether such 
 attempts at reformation are ever successful in the 
 long run ; and I know that whilst the process is 
 going on, the transition-state is infinitely worse 
 than the old order of things. You may find what 
 you want, in due time, amidst the chaos which 
 masters of method regard with such dismay ; but 
 if you put things away, in pursuit of method before 
 you have attained it, the chances are that you never 
 find them. There is no search so tedious — often so 
 
74 
 
 WORK. 
 
 hopeless — as a search after something which you 
 have put in a " safe place." 
 
 It comes, then, to this : there are different kinds 
 of workmen, — workmen who create, and workmen 
 who methodize and arrange. I do not here speak 
 of internal arrangement, — the arrangement of the 
 different parts of an intellectual work, — but of 
 external or material order and arrangement. To 
 arrange your ideas is one thing; to arrange your 
 papers is another. Some of the best and most 
 rapid workmen I know are, in respect of order 
 of this kind, hopelessly deficient. That a great 
 deal of valuable time is lost in this way must be 
 admitted. Nothing is in its right place. Papers 
 are not to be found when wanted. Work is done, 
 and then mislaid ; and more time is spent in en- 
 deavoring to find it than it would take to do it 
 over again. But, after all, I am doubtful whether 
 those who fold, and docket, and arrange, and have 
 everything in such excellent order that they can 
 find it at a moment's notice, do not spend more 
 time in producing this state of things than the 
 more careless workman loses by neglecting it. 
 The men of order are seldom men of much creative 
 genius. What they do, they do slowly ; and they 
 are commonly of more use in helping the real 
 workmen than in doing work of their own. It is 
 well for us that there are men of both kinds in the 
 world. Until the One Perfect Workman vouch- 
 safes to His creatures a diversity of qualities, a 
 
MUTUAL AIDS. 75 
 
 comprehensiveness of intelligence more nearly ap- 
 proaching His own, we must help one another, 
 looking to our neighbor, in all humility, to make 
 good our own deficiencies and to do that wherein 
 we fail* 
 
 Yes, O friends and brother-workmen, we must 
 help one another. We are all of one Guild: 
 Full-Brain cannot do without Neat-Hand, any 
 more than Neat-Hand can do without Full-Brain. 
 What poor, weak, miserable creatures we are when 
 we are left to ourselves ! We want assistance at 
 every turn of the road ; at every quarter of an hour 
 of the day. We think much of our own especial 
 work, but how few, when we consider, are the 
 things that we can do ! how many the things that 
 we cannot! Is our own work better than other 
 men's work? Is it more essential to the happiness 
 of mankind? Does it keep the world agoing 
 more than our neighbor's? Not it. That stout 
 fellow who has just brought the heavy luggage 
 from the railway-station — could I do that? Yet 
 there is somebody — perhaps a whole family of 
 somebodies — who cannot go to bed without that 
 box. , Is there any one thus dependent upon me 
 for his night's comfort or his morning's cleanli- 
 
 * I have been reading lately, but I cannot at this moment recall 
 the passage, that it was said by one distinguished personage of 
 another, " He would have been the greatest man of his age, if he 
 had only known the use of Red Tape." 
 
76 WORK. 
 
 ness? Perhaps it is my privilege sometimes to be 
 of use in my own way. If I work hard, I have a 
 right to expect that reward, and to trust that I 
 benefit some one. All true workmen are public 
 benefactors. Let us not measure ourselves against 
 others and ask who is greater, who less. The 
 "toppling crags of duty" are before us all. Let us 
 strive "with toil of heart, and knees, and hands" 
 to scale them, so that we may be brought, with 
 His good help, 
 
 "close upon the shining table-lands 
 To which our Lord himself is moon and sun." 
 
 November, i860. 
 
SUCCESS. 
 
 I HAVE a great opinion of successful men; and 
 I am not ashamed to confess it. 
 It was the fashion, some years ago, to sneer at 
 Success, — nay, indeed, sometimes to revile it, as 
 though it were an offense, or at best a pretentious 
 humbug. This came out of the sudden inflation 
 of some huge wind-bags, which as suddenly col- 
 lapsed. To do honor to successful men was held 
 to be arrant flunkeyism; for a successful man was 
 accounted little better than a flatulent impostor. 
 Clever men drew pictures of Success represented 
 by a mighty Juggernaut passing triumphantly over 
 the necks of thousands of prostrate worshipers. 
 Still cleverer men wrote brilliant stories of modern 
 life, illustrating the rise and fall of seemingly suc- 
 cessful men ; and imitative dramatists transferred 
 these sketches of society to the Stage. The great 
 imposture of Success was the pet subject of the 
 day. But a healthier social philosophy is now 
 enthroned among us. We have begun to think 
 that men who make their way to the front, be- 
 coming rich or famous by the force of their per- 
 sonal characters, must, after all, have something 
 in them, though every now and then bubbles may 
 
 (77) 
 
;8 SUCCESS. 
 
 arise, in which solid realities are reflected, only to 
 burst into thin air. Have we not all been reading 
 lately about "Self-Help"? — and what has charmed 
 us so much? Are not our assembly-rooms, and 
 lecture-halls, and mechanics' institutions, all over 
 the country, — I ask the question after a tolerably 
 wide autumnal circuit of English provincial towns, 
 — are they not thrilling night after night with 
 popular orations on " Self-made Men," or, as I see 
 it phrased at times, "Self-built Men," and all that 
 relates to them ? To prostrate one's self before what 
 Success has won, be it power, or riches, or what not, 
 may rightly be called flunkeyism ; but to honor 
 what has won success is worthy worship, not to be 
 condemned or restrained. It is veneration for that 
 type of manhood which most nearly approaches 
 the divine, by reason of its creative energy. It is 
 a good sign of the times that we appreciate it at 
 its true worth. 
 
 It is not to be expected, however, that envy 
 should die out of the world ; and so long as there 
 is envy, people will be found to talk about Luck. 
 But Success does not come by chance; Providence 
 helps those who help themselves. We may fancy 
 that two men adopt the same means towards the 
 attainment of the same end, and because one suc- 
 ceeds and the other fails, we may say that the one 
 is more fortunate than the other. But the one 
 succeeds and the other fails, because they do not 
 adopt the same means towards the same end. Of 
 
APPLICATION OF MEANS. yg 
 
 the two pilgrims who started on their journey 
 each with peas in his shoon, the one was not more 
 fortunate than the other; he was simply more 
 wise. The man who sank by the way, toil-worn 
 and foot-sore, with drops of agony on his forehead, 
 groaning with pain, may have been the better 
 walker of the two. The race is not always to the 
 swift, nor the battle to the strong. It is by the 
 right application of your swiftness or your strength 
 to the particular object in view that you make 
 your way to Success. It is not only by doing the 
 right thing, but by doing the right thing in the 
 right way and at the right time, that we achieve 
 the great triumphs of life. All this is to be dwelt 
 on presently. It is only here to be said that the 
 varying results which we discern are not attributa- 
 ble to chance, not to external circumstances of any 
 kind, but to inherent differences within ourselves. 
 Whatsoever Envy or Vanity may say upon the 
 subject, Success is a substantial and enduring 
 reality; luck is a mere vapor that is speedily 
 dissolved. "Wealth gotten by vanity," saith Solo- 
 mon, "shall diminish; but he that gathereth by 
 labor shall increase." 
 
 But what, it may be asked, is Success ? and 
 who is the successful man ? I have heard it said 
 that "all success is comparative;" but with what 
 is the comparison? Not with the successes of 
 others. In this sense all success is positive. The 
 prime minister is a greater man than his butler, but 
 
80 SUCCESS. ' 
 
 he is not, therefore, a more successful one. You 
 must measure the success of a man, not by the 
 relation which his achievements bear to what 
 others have achieved, but by their relation to what 
 he himself has endeavored. If he has kept a cer- 
 tain object steadily before him, and has attained it, 
 — no matter what the object be, — he is a successful 
 man. In another sense, too, Success is positive ; 
 for it admits of no drawbacks or abatements beyond 
 the range of the object attained. If I strive to amass 
 wealth, and I amass it, I am not the less successful 
 because my son turns out a dissolute spendthrift 
 and my daughter disgraces herself by a runaway 
 match. Am I less successful as a poet, or a painter, 
 because my wife is unfaithful to me, and I am 
 miserable in spite of my success? Success is one 
 thing ; happiness is another. The boy Warren 
 Hastings aimed at the Governor-Generalship of 
 India and the recovery of his ancestral estates; 
 was he less a successful man because, when he 
 had accomplished these objects of his ambition, 
 his life was embittered by the persecution of his 
 enemies? And the boy Charles Metcalfe — he too 
 aimed at the Governor-Generalship, and he attained 
 not solely to that eminence, but to the prouder dis- 
 tinction of ruling " the three greatest dependencies 
 of the British Crown." Was he less successful be- 
 cause, in the fullness of his fame, an excruciating 
 bodily disease ate into his life and destroyed him 
 by slow torture ? 
 
IT IS POSITIVE. 8 1 
 
 Even the disappointments and disquietudes of 
 Success itself do not detract from its completeness. 
 A man may not find the attainment of his object 
 so exhilarating as the pursuit of it; but for all 
 this he does succeed. I knew a man whose desire 
 it was to obtain a certain public situation. There 
 was a particular post in a particular department 
 which he coveted, and he said to himself that he 
 would obtain it. Night after night his way home 
 led him down Whitehall, and as he passed under 
 the shadow of the building which held the depart- 
 ment of government which he aspired to enter, he 
 would shake his fist at it, and say, " You grim old 
 pile, you exclude me now, but some day I shall 
 have a home in you, be sure." And he was right. 
 Unlikely as success appeared, he succeeded, and 
 even sooner than he had hoped. It was nothing 
 very great that he had obtained. But the success 
 consisted in this, that what he won was the iden- 
 tical thing which he aspired and endeavored to 
 win. It is nothing to the point that other men 
 had won much higher posts by their successful ex- 
 ertions. Nor is it a matter to be considered, when 
 we would determine the measure of his success, 
 whether he was happier than before. There may 
 have been distressing sets-off in other directions, 
 or the thing for which he had striven may not 
 have satisfied him; but the positive success was 
 there. All success, indeed, is self-contained. If it 
 
 6 
 
82 SUCCESS. 
 
 were not, I am afraid that the catalogue of success- 
 ful men might be printed on half a page. 
 
 We may think about this at leisure. Vanitas 
 vanitatum! It is not the subject of discourse which 
 I have chosen for myself. And I would rather, if 
 I digress at all, step aside to ask whether it may 
 not be that we all have our successes,.though they 
 be not of a kind of which the world takes any ac- 
 count. I do not think that it would be difficult to 
 show that failures have their compensations, and 
 that oftentimes unsuccessful men profit in ways 
 unknow r n to those who have achieved victories. 
 There is a tendency to compassionate and to aid 
 those who fall prostrate by the roadside, whilst 
 those who stride on, conquering circumstances, 
 are supposed to want neither pity nor help. Many 
 a man has found the trade of being a " poor fel- 
 low" extremely profitable. It is commonly some 
 unsuccessful member of a family that inherits all 
 the odds and ends of property belonging to bach- 
 elor uncles and spinster aunts. " Poor fellow!" it 
 is said, " he wants it so much; and he has been so 
 attentive." Having nothing to do, or, at all events, 
 doing nothing, he has abundant leisure to be " at- 
 tentive," whilst the strider-on is perforce neglectful 
 of those who lie out of his path. Now, this truly 
 is a kind of success, though it be born of Failure, 
 and though such successful men are not of the 
 order of those of whom I said, at starting, that I 
 have a high opinion. 
 
WITH WOMEN. 83 
 
 I must keep, however, to the subject of recog- 
 nized Success, as all men understand it, and inquire 
 how it is attained. I have heard people laugh at 
 the misquotation of that well-known Addisonian 
 platitude, — 
 
 " 'Tis not in mortals to command success, 
 But I'll do more, Sempronius — I'll deserve it." 
 
 But I have thought the varia lectio involved in the 
 blunder deserving of the highest consideration; and 
 I have been more disposed to admire than to ridi- 
 cule the reading, — 
 
 "'Tis not in mortals to deserve success, 
 But I'll do more, Sempronius — I'll command it." 
 
 More men have commanded success than have 
 deserved it. There is nothing presumptuous in 
 the idea. It is more presumptuous to talk about 
 our deserts. What do the best of us deserve, but 
 complete and disastrous failure ? 
 
 It has been said that " any man may have any 
 woman." The meaning of which I hold to be, that 
 the persevering pursuit of any object must event- 
 ually be crowned with success. Labor omnia vincit, 
 as the copy-book text has it, and as the proverbs 
 of wellnigh every country have it in other words. 
 To set your mind resolutely upon the accomplish- 
 ment of any purpose, is to go half-way to its attain- 
 ment. Now, it commonly happens, to pursue the 
 
84 SUCCESS. 
 
 illustration wherewith I commenced this passage, 
 that they who are most successful with women are 
 not the handsomest men. And the reason of this 
 is obvious. Handsome men rely overmuch on 
 their handsomeness. To use a metaphor rather 
 expressive than eloquent, they expect that all the 
 pretty women "will jump down their throats." 
 But pretty women will not jump down their 
 throats. This process of deglutition is not af- 
 fected by them. They have no notion of being 
 quietly absorbed. They must be won, — bravely, 
 laboriously, and with a becoming sense of what is 
 due to them. Are we to think that we have only to 
 sit quietly in our easy-chairs and to twirl our mous- 
 taches ? Beauty is a divine gift ; let whosoever 
 possesses it be thankful. Madame de Stael, one 
 of the most gifted of mortals, said that she would 
 surrender all that she possessed in exchange for it. 
 But Madame de Stael was a woman ; and I am 
 now writing about men. Everybody knows that 
 men care more about personal beauty in the other 
 sex than women do, and for this reason, that pleas- 
 ant sights and sweet sounds, and everything soft 
 and gentle, are a delight and a refreshment to 
 them. But the ordinary environments of women 
 are soft and gentle. They lead comparatively 
 passive lives ; and that which most fascinates them 
 in the other sex is a sense of active power. What 
 is softness and smoothness to them ? Bless them, 
 they like the grit. Even the hard lines on a man's 
 
 
GENIUS AND ABILITY. 85 
 
 face — the pallor, nay, the less interesting sallow- 
 ness, of his cheek — are interesting to them, if they 
 denote power. I repeat that personal beauty is a 
 great gift, even to a man. But it is only as an ac- 
 companiment to other gifts that it contributes to 
 success. Everybody knows what Wilkes, the 
 ugliest man in England, said to Townshend, the 
 handsomest. And it was not a mere idle boast. 
 
 And so it is with intellectual gifts of a high 
 order. The conscious possessor relies too much 
 upon them. Fortune is represented as a woman — 
 do we not call her Dame Fortune ? — and she must 
 be laboriously won. Are we to sit down by the 
 wayside, and expect that she will seat herself on 
 our lap? "Any man may have any woman," and 
 any man may have anything, if he only goes about 
 resolutely to attain it. But he must not trust too 
 much to what he is. Genius, like beauty, is a di- 
 vine gift ; let him who possesses it thank God with 
 his whole heart; but it is not by being, but by 
 doing, that we achieve success; and therefore it is 
 that the most gifted, like the handsomest men, are 
 often passed on the road by men of second-rate 
 abilities, or, more correctly, of inferior natural gifts. 
 I would have this distinction kept steadily in view, 
 for people too often use the word "ability" with ref- 
 erence to anything rather than to its true meaning. 
 I am not one of those who have much faith in the 
 general coexistence of inactivity with power. I 
 hold that what men can do they will do ; and I 
 
86 SUCCESS. 
 
 think it will be found that when they do it not, it 
 is because they feel that they cannot do it. There 
 may be great natural gifts resulting only in a 
 dreamy, indolent, unproductive state of life. But 
 this is because the possessor has no special apti- 
 tude for any particular thing, — no vocation, so to 
 speak ; no consciousness of ability to carry out any- 
 thing to a conclusion ; no resolute will to attempt 
 it. Dress up the idea as we may, cover it with 
 whatsoever gloss of fine and attractive words, talk 
 of the waywardness, the impulsiveness of genius, 
 it is, in its naked reality, no more than this, — that 
 whatsoever the natural gifts may be, their possessor 
 lacks ability to do anything, and feels the inability 
 within him. He does not see his way clearly to 
 any definite result; he does not concentrate his 
 powers on any given object; and he runs to waste, 
 nothing better at the best than a splendid failure. 
 
 To concentrate your powers on any given object 
 — to go directly to the point, looking neither to the 
 right nor to the left, and resolutely determining to 
 succeed — is to secure success. If once you begin 
 to sprawl, you are lost* I do not mean by this 
 
 * I learnt this lesson very early in life, on the box of the North 
 Devon coach, receiving the rudiments of my education as a Jehu. 
 It was night. I drove from Andover to Blackwater ; and three 
 elderly insides were ignorant of the danger to which they were 
 exposed. "Keep them well together. Keep them well together. 
 Don't let them sprawl," was all the advice I received from my 
 instructor. The lesson was worth remembering on the great turn- 
 pike-road of life. 
 
TRIB UTA RY A IDS. $y 
 
 that we are to reject collateral aids. On the other 
 hand, I would suffer all tributary streams to flow 
 freely into the great main channel of your action. 
 You may drive a dozen horses in the same chariot, 
 if you can only keep them well together. You 
 must converge to a center, not diverge from it. If 
 I were to give way to the allurements of biogra- 
 phical illustration, I should soon fill a volume, 
 instead of only a few pages ; but here are a few 
 lines from Plutarch, which I quote rather in the 
 way of caution than of example: "There was in 
 the whole city but one street in which Pericles was 
 ever seen, the street which led to the market-place, 
 and to the council-house. He declined all invita- 
 tions to banquets, and all gay assemblies and 
 company. During the whole period of his ad- 
 ministration he never dined at the table of a 
 friend." Emerson cites this with commendation 
 in one of his lectures. But I cannot help thinking 
 that it is a mistake. You should never forget the 
 Market-place or the Council-house. But you may 
 expediently dine at the table of a friend, or invite 
 a friend to dine at your table, in the interests of 
 the Market-place or the Council-house. You may 
 often, in this way, make a greater stride on to 
 success than by staying at home to post up a 
 ledger, or to wade through a volume of statistics. 
 Successful men, we may be sure, have not confined 
 themselves to direct action, or looked only to im- 
 mediate results. More failures are consummated 
 
88 SUCCESS. 
 
 by want of faith and want of patience than by 
 anything else in the world. We cannot grow rich 
 by sowing mustard-seeds on a damp flannel, 
 though they begin to sprout before our eyes. 
 Concentration is not isolation or self-absorption. 
 " Stick to your business, and your business will 
 stick to you :" an excellent doctrine, doubtless ; 
 but what if I stick to my business more closely 
 by smoking a cigar in my back parlor than by 
 serving customers in my front shop ? What if I 
 put aside some important work, claiming my 
 attention, to dress for dinner, and to convey 
 myself to the table of an influential friend, on 
 the chance of gaining more by going out than by 
 staying at home? When I was a very young 
 man, I wrote essays in illustration of what I then 
 believed to be the folly of such a course. But as 
 I grow old, every year convinces me more and 
 more that social intercourse, of the right kind, 
 is a material aid to success. Often the gain is 
 palpable to you at once, and you count your ad- 
 vantage as you take off your dress-coat. But, if 
 not, it will find you out after many days : you have 
 sown, and in due season you will reap. If you do 
 nothing more than assert your individuality — 
 make yourself a living presence among men, in- 
 stead of a myth, a nominis umbra — you may be 
 sure that you have done something. Am I more 
 or less likely to read your book, or to buy your 
 picture, or to say a good word for you, if I have a 
 
SINGLENESS OF AIM. 
 
 89 
 
 chance, to some man in authority, for sitting next 
 to you at our friend Robinson's and thinking you 
 a pleasant fellow? At all stages of your journey 
 it will be the same. It is not more incumbent 
 upon you to remember this, that you may gain 
 a high place, than that you may keep it. Our 
 statesmen are wiser in their generation than 
 Pericles. There is Lord Tiverton, the very per- 
 sonification of smiling success. Does he "decline 
 all invitations to banquets, all gay assemblies, all 
 company"? » 
 
 Now, all this does not in any way militate 
 against the theory of concentration. In a work of 
 art there may be great variety of detail with perfect 
 unity of aim. Every accessory should contribute 
 to the one general result,— should illustrate the 
 one leading idea. Every detail that is foreign to 
 the subject is so much sheer waste of strength. 
 And so it is in the conduct of life. With one 
 object set steadily before us, we may have many 
 varying activities, but they will all assist the main 
 action, and impart strength and consistency to it. 
 Singleness of aim, I repeat it-, in nowise demands 
 monotony of action. But if you allow yourself to 
 be diverted from this singleness of object, you are 
 little likely to succeed in life. " Art is long — life 
 is short." Knowing this, there is an universal 
 tendency among us to go in search of specialties. 
 General practitioners seldom get beyond a respect- 
 able mediocrity, whilst your specialists attain to 
 
9 o 
 
 SUCCESS. 
 
 eminence and wealth. If an eye or an ear be 
 affected, we seek out the man who has made that 
 particular organ the study of his life. In the pur- 
 suit of that one object, the oculist or the aurist 
 may have studied the mechanism of the whole 
 human frame, and the general physiology of man, 
 but only in their relation to the particular organ to 
 the full understanding of which he is devoting all 
 the energies of his mind. He cannot, indeed, 
 understand his subject without the aid of this 
 contributory knowledge. But all that is not con- 
 tributory is waste. In the same manner, lawyers 
 succeed by studying special branches of their pro- 
 fession ; and literary men are successful in propor- 
 tion as they stick to their specialties, or rather as 
 they are fortunate in having any. If a man can 
 write well on any one special subject — no matter 
 what that subject may be — he is sure to find profit- 
 able occupation for his pen, whilst the general 
 dealer in literary wares, though more highly gifted 
 by nature, may fail to provide himself with bread. 
 The popular appreciation of this general fact ex- 
 presses itself in the well-known proverb that u a 
 jack-of-all-trades is master of none." The world 
 has no faith in Admirable Crichtons. They may 
 be very pleasant fellows in their way, but mankind 
 in general would rather not do business with them. 
 A shrewd, intelligent man of the world, and one, 
 too, who had been eminently successful, — for from 
 a small beginning he had risen to the highest place 
 
O VER-SENSITIVENESS. 
 
 91 
 
 in the department to which he had been attached, 
 and had made the fortunes of his whole family, 
 brothers, sons, and nephews, as well as his own, — 
 once said to me, "The longer I live, the more con- 
 vinced I am that over-sensitiveness is a great mis- 
 take in a public man." He might have said, in all 
 men who desire to succeed in life. Now, I wish 
 it to be understood that what is expressed here by 
 the word " over-sensitiveness" does not signify 
 over-scrupulousness. Be as scrupulous as you 
 will. Do nothing that can give you a single pang 
 of conscience. Keep your hands clean. If you 
 cannot do this, and succeed, sink into the abysmal 
 depths of failure, unsoiled and unspotted, with 
 skin clear and white as a little child's. But do not 
 be over-sensitive on the score of pride, or vanity, 
 or dominant egotism. Every successful man, you 
 may be sure, has had much to mortify him in the 
 course of his career. He has borne many rebuffs; 
 he has sustained many failures. What if men do 
 not understand you, are not inclined to encourage 
 you, and exercise the privilege of age or superior 
 position? — bear with it all, Juvenis, your time will 
 come ; you may take your change out of the world 
 when you are a little older. Bah ! how does it 
 hurt you ? " Hard words break no bones," saith 
 the proverb. And they break no spirit that is not 
 of the feeblest. The world may laugh at your fail- 
 ures : — what then ? Try again, and perhaps they 
 will not laugh. Try once again, and perhaps it 
 
9 2 
 
 SUCCESS. 
 
 will be your turn to laugh. " He who wins may 
 laugh," saith another proverb. If you have the 
 right stuff in you, you will not be put down. 
 There is a man now among us, a man of genius, 
 who aspired to take a part in public affairs. After 
 much travail, he obtained a seat in Parliament. 
 And the House, knowing he could write, assumed 
 that he could not speak, and when he rose they 
 laughed at and hooted him. He told his assail- 
 ants that the time would come when they would 
 listen to him ; and he was right. He spoke the 
 words of prophecy and of truth. And the time did 
 come when they not only listened, but when the 
 men who had despised came to fear him, or to 
 worship him, and, when he rose, either shrank ap- 
 palled and dismayed, or looked to him for the 
 salvation of their party and applauded to the echo. 
 There are various roads to Success, but I am 
 somewhat inclined to think that the surest is 
 gravelly and gritty, with some awkward pitfalls 
 and blinding quicksets in the way. Was that 
 famous nursery rhyme of the Man of Thessaly, 
 think you, written but for the entertainment of 
 babes and sucklings ? or was it not rather meant 
 as a lesson to children of a larger growth, to the 
 adolescents of our nurseries of learning, starting on 
 the great journey of life ? Every one knows the 
 story, — how the hero of it 
 
 "jumped into a quickset hedge 
 And scratched out both his eyes." 
 
 
FIRST FAILURES. 93 
 
 Doubtless, the way with most of us, — looking not 
 before we leap; going ahead too rapidly at the 
 outset; not calculating our juvenile strength, and 
 jumping into the midst of what we think we can 
 clear at a bound. Do we not all think ourselves 
 "wondrous wise," and, thinking so, encounter 
 blinding disaster? But are we, therefore, to go 
 darkling all the rest of our lives ? It was not to 
 teach us this that the great epic of the Man of 
 Thessaly was written. He had the true heroic 
 stuff in him; and he did not sit down and bewail 
 his loss, helpless and hopeless. 
 
 " And when he saw his eyes were out, 
 He had reason to complain ; 
 But he jumped into the quickset hedge, 
 And scratched them in again."* 
 
 And such is the right way to fight the battle of 
 life, to grapple with the failures and disasters which 
 
 *I write the words as I learnt them in my childhood; but 
 there are various readings of all (so-called) nursery rhymes, and 
 I am told that more correctly the concluding portion of the legend 
 of the Man of Thessaly runs thus : — 
 
 " But when he saw his eyes were out, 
 With all his might and main, 
 He jumped into the quickset hedge, 
 And scratched them in again." 
 
 This reading is more emphatic than the other, and better illustrates 
 my text. It is by going at it again, " with all one's might and 
 main," that we repair our foregone disasters and gather strength 
 from defeat. 
 
94 SUCCESS. 
 
 beset your career. Go at it again ! You may have 
 reason to complain that your good intentions meet 
 with no better results ; that the singleness of your 
 aims, the purity of your aspirations, and the high 
 courage of your first grand plunge into life, led to 
 nothing but a torn face, smeared with blood, and a 
 night of painful bewildering blindness. But it is 
 better to strive manfully than to complain weakly; 
 brace yourself up for another plunge; gather 
 strength from defeat; into the quickset hedge 
 again gallantly; and you will recover all that you 
 have lost, scratch your eyes in again, and never lose 
 your clearness of vision for the rest of your life. 
 
 Yes, indeed, if we have the right stuff in us, 
 these failures at the outset are grand materials 
 of success. To the feeble they are, of course, 
 stumbling-blocks. The wretched weakling goes 
 no farther; he lags behind, and subsides into a 
 life of failure. And so by this winnowing process 
 the number of the athletes in the great Olympics 
 of life is restricted to a few, and there is clear 
 space in the arena. There is scarcely an old man 
 among us — an old and successful man — who will 
 not willingly admit that he was made by his 
 failures, and that what he once thought his hard 
 fate was in reality his good fortune. And thou, 
 my bright-faced, bright-witted child, who thinkest 
 that thou canst carry Parnassus by storm, learn to 
 possess thyself in patience. Not easy the lesson, 
 I know; not cheering the knowledge that success 
 
FIRST FAILURES. 95 
 
 is not attainable, per saltum, by a hop-step-and- 
 a-jump, but by arduous passages of gallant per- 
 severance, toilsome efforts long sustained, and, 
 most of all, by repeated failures. Hard, I know, 
 is that last word, grating harshly upon the ear of 
 youth. Say, then, that we mollify it a little, — that 
 we strip it of its outer crustaceousness and asper- 
 ity; and truthfully may we do so, my dear. For 
 these failures are, as I have said, but stepping- 
 stones to success; gradus ad Parnassiun, — at the 
 worst, non-attainments of the desired end before 
 thy time. If success were to crown thine efforts 
 now, where would be the great success of the here- 
 after? It is the brave resolution to "do better 
 next time" that lays the substrate of all real great- 
 ness. Many a promising reputation has been pre- 
 maturely destroyed by early success. The good 
 sap runs out from the trunk into feeble offshoots 
 or suckers. The hard discipline of the knife is 
 wanted. I repeat that it is not pleasant ; but when 
 thou feelest the sharpness of the edge, think that 
 all who have gone before thee have been lacerated 
 in like manner. At thine age I went through it all. 
 My first great effort was a tragedy upon a grand 
 Elizabethan model. It was submitted by a friend 
 to a competent critic, who pronounced it to be 
 "morally, dramatically, and irremediably bad." I 
 write the words now with a strong sense of grati- 
 tude to that critic ; but I have not forgotten the 
 keen agony with which they burnt themselves into 
 
96 SUCCESS. 
 
 my soul, when I first read the crushing verdict in 
 a dingy back bedroom in the Hummums. We 
 have all gone through it, my dear. We! "How 
 we apples swim !" I would speak of men — the 
 real Chivalry of letters — whose bucklers I am 
 not worthy to bear. Ask them about their early 
 struggles with a world incredulous of their genius, 
 and what a history they will have to tell thee! 
 Ay, and what a grand moral! Is there a true 
 knight among them who does not, on the very 
 knees of his heart, thank God for his early 
 failures? 
 
 In estimating the sources of Success, account 
 must, doubtless, be taken of constitution. Some 
 of us have constitutional defects by which others 
 are not incapacitated or impeded. Sustained 
 energy is possessed only by those who have 
 powerful digestive organs. Men of a bilious, 
 sanguine, irritable nature are capable of great 
 spasms of energy, which carry them along so far 
 at a time that they can allow for intervals of pros- 
 tration. But there is nothing like a steady flow 
 of health, — art equable robustness of manhood. 
 It is a blessing which few men possess, and for 
 which the possessor has reason devoutly to be 
 thankful. Most of us are sensible of intervals of 
 feebleness and weariness, when we are incapable of 
 any great exertion, when we feel painfully that 
 we are not doing the work which we had set our- 
 selves to do, that we are falling behind in the 
 
THE FRAIL FLESH. 
 
 97 
 
 race, and suffering day after day to slip by with- 
 out our making any impression on the sand. 
 For some time, I doubted much as to the best 
 mode of dealing with Nature in such a case, — 
 whether it were better to make the dominant will 
 assert itself, and to go on in spite of the unwilling- 
 ness of the natural man, in spite of weakness, and 
 lassitude, and continual entreaties from the frail 
 flesh ; or to let Nature have her way at once, and 
 succumb contentedly to her demands. On the one 
 hand, there is the fear of doing your work badly, — 
 perhaps of having it to do all over again, — or of 
 making on the minds of others, whom you wish to 
 influence favorably, an impression of feebleness 
 rather than of strength. There is, moreover, the 
 risk of extending the period of lassitude and in- 
 competency by doing violence to Nature ; per- 
 haps, indeed, of permanently enfeebling your 
 powers. On the other hand, there is the danger 
 of making compromises with your active powers, 
 and yielding to the temptations of indolence. We 
 may mistake idleness for inability, and follow our 
 self-indulgent inclinations, rather than be swayed 
 by an honest sense of what is wisest and most 
 befitting the occasion. It is difficult to lay down 
 any precise rules on the subject for the guidance 
 of others. If every man asks himself what is his 
 besetting infirmity, and answers the question con- 
 scientiously, he will be able to decide whether he 
 runs greater risk of injuriously forcing Nature, or 
 
 7 
 
9 8 SUCCESS. 
 
 of yielding' too readily to her suggestions. If you 
 know that you are not indolent, — if you have, for 
 the most part, pleasure in your work, and never 
 need the spur, — you may safely pause, when your 
 energies are flagging and you feel an indescribable 
 something that resists all your efforts to go forward 
 on the road. It is better not to do a thing at all 
 than to do it badly. You may lose time. What 
 then ? Men, stripping for the race of life, should 
 account no time or money thrown away that con- 
 tributes in any way to their physical health, — that 
 imparts tone to the stomach, or strength to the 
 nerves. And we should never forget that we do not 
 sustain our energies best by keeping them always 
 on the stretch. Rest and recreation are no small 
 parts of discipline. The greater the work before 
 us, the more need we have of them both. 
 
 I am nearing, not the end of my subject, but 
 the end of my space, and I see before me much 
 which I had purposed to say, but which must be 
 left unsaid, for such a theme is not easily ex- 
 hausted. But there is one matter to which, before 
 I conclude, I especially desire to invite attention. 
 I have heard it said that if we expect to get on 
 in the world we must be suspicious of our neigh- 
 bors. " Treat every man as if he were a rogue." 
 Now, if this were a condition of Success, Success 
 would not be worth having, — nay, indeed, it would 
 be wholly intolerable: commend me to a life of 
 failure. But it is not a condition of Success. To 
 
FAITH. 99 
 
 know an honest man from a rogue, and to act 
 accordingly, is doubtless a great thing ; but, if we 
 are to treat all mankind on our journey through 
 life as rogues or as honest men, why, I throw up 
 my cap for the latter. We may be cheated, it is 
 true, tricked, cozened, defrauded, and we may 
 throw away that which worthily bestowed might 
 have really contributed to our success. It is a 
 serious matter to waste our strength, — to squander, 
 in this manner, the materials of Success. Suc- 
 cessful men, it may be said, do not make blunders 
 of this kind. I am not quite sure of that; besides, 
 who knows but that the strength may not be wasted 
 after all? A good deed done in a good spirit can 
 never be. thrown away. The bread cast upon the 
 waters may return to us after many days. This at 
 least I know, that if it be true, as I have said, that 
 Providence helps those who help themselves, it is 
 no less true that Providence helps those who help 
 others. " The liberal deviseth liberal things, and 
 by his liberality shall he stand." It was not 
 meant that we should stand alone in the world. 
 Whatsoever may be our strength, whatsoever our 
 self-reliance, there are times and seasons when we 
 need a helping hand; and how can we expect it to 
 be stretched out to us, if we always keep our own 
 in our pockets ? And if we do not trust others, 
 how can we hope to be trusted ourselves ? I am 
 not writing now about high motives, but about aids 
 to Success. Still, I would have it borne in remem- 
 
100 SUCCESS. 
 
 brance that there is a vast difference between look- 
 ing for an immediate or direct return for every 
 kindness done to a neighbor, and having faith in 
 the assurance of Providence that as we mete to 
 others so shall it be meted to us. The recipient 
 of our bounty may turn his back upon us and go 
 forth into the world only to revile us ; but it does 
 not follow therefore that we have wasted our 
 generosity, or that the next shipwrecked brother 
 who comes to us should be sent empty-handed 
 away. Let us only have faith and patience, and 
 we shall find our reward. Doubtless there may be 
 exceptions, — apparent, if not real ; but my experi- 
 ence of life teaches me that men who are prone 
 to assist others commonly thrive well themselves. 
 The most successful men of my acquaintance are 
 at the same time the most liberal. Their system 
 is to treat their neighbor as an honest man until 
 their commerce with him has proved that he is a 
 rogue; and I do not think that men are less likely 
 to be honest for finding that they are trusted by 
 their neighbors. 
 
 This matter of mutual aid is a point much to be 
 considered. Self-reliance is a great thing, but it 
 may sometimes carry us out of our depths. Suc- 
 cessful men are commonly as ready to be helped 
 by, as to help, others. They know how to turn 
 inferior agency to good account. After all, that 
 which any man can do by himself is very little. 
 You must turn the energies of other men to ac- 
 
SELFISHNESS. IO i 
 
 count in furtherance of your own. The right thing 
 is to identify their interests with yours, and not 
 only to make them believe that by helping you 
 they are helping themselves, but really to insure 
 that it is so. My belief is that selfish men do not 
 succeed in life. Selfishness is essentially suicidal. 
 You know instances to the contrary, you say. Are 
 you sure of it ? Appearances are sometimes de- 
 ceitful. There are men who bear the appearance 
 of selfishness, — who are harsh in manner, stern of 
 purpose, seemingly inaccessible and unyielding, — 
 but there are soft spots under the grit. They do 
 things differently from men of a more genial tem- 
 perament. But what right have we to expect that 
 every one should wear our colors ? Stern men are 
 not necessarily selfish men. There are men who, 
 conscious of the excessive softness of their natures, 
 have felt the necessity of induing a sort of outer 
 crust or armor of asperity, as a covering or pro- 
 tection for themselves, and who thus, in their 
 efforts to counteract a tenderness approaching to 
 weakness, do manifest injustice to the goodness of 
 their hearts. I have known men, too, noted for an 
 almost impenetrable reserve, who were in reality 
 thus reserved .only because no one invited their 
 confidences. The injudicious bearing of those with 
 whom they lived had brought them to this pass. 
 The respect and deference of inferiors, whether of 
 the family or only of the household, if in excess, 
 will often produce this result. Reticence begets 
 
102 SUCCESS. 
 
 reticence. But men of this kind often long for an 
 opportunity of letting loose their pent-up confi- 
 dences, and, if you only touch the right spring, 
 will raise at once the lid of their reserve, and show 
 you all the inner mechanism of their hearts. Ay, 
 and how grateful they will feel to you for giving 
 them the chance ! What a sense of relief is upon 
 them when they have thus unburdened themselves ! 
 We little know what a deep wrong we sometimes 
 do to others by suffering this outer crust of reserve 
 to gather about them. 
 
 Whether you govern best by a reserved, digni- 
 fied demeanor, or by an open, cheery manner, 
 may be a question. Each has its advantage, and 
 each is very effective in its occasional deviations 
 into the system of the other. The genialities of 
 stern men, and the asperities of genial ones, are 
 each very impressive in their way. Indeed, the 
 question of manner, in connection with my present 
 topic of discourse, is one of such high importance 
 that I cannot summarily dismiss it. I do not say 
 that it is a thing to be studied. To lay down any 
 rules on the subject is a vain thing. People who 
 shape their outward behavior with elaborate design 
 generally overreach themselves. Nothing but a 
 really natural manner is genuinely successful in 
 the long run. Now the natural manner of some 
 people is good, of others hopelessly bad, though 
 there may be little difference in the good stuff be- 
 neath. It is hard that we should be prejudiced by 
 
 
OPENNESS AND RESERVE. IQ 3 
 
 what is merely superficial; but we are. I have 
 heard it said that this is not prejudice, — for the 
 manner is the outward and visible sign of the man. 
 But there are very excellent people in the world 
 with manners the reverse of pleasant, — people shy 
 and reserved, or brusque and boorish, with whom 
 personal intercourse is by no means a delight. 
 Others, again, there are, with whom half an hour's 
 talk is like an invigorating bath of sunshine. In 
 this last there is an element of success. There is 
 another successful manner, too, — one which im- 
 presses every one with a sense of your power. If 
 you have both, — that is, a manner at once gracious 
 and powerful, — you have everything that you can 
 wish as an outward aid to success. A thoroughly 
 good manner will often do much to neutralize the 
 ill effects of an unprepossessing appearance. But 
 an ill-favored countenance may be a stumbling- 
 block at the outset that is never surmounted. It 
 repels at the first start. There are people described 
 as "unpresentable," who have giants to contend 
 against at their first start in life. When they have 
 once made their way in the world, the insignificance 
 or grotesqueness of their appearance is a matter of 
 no moment. Nay, indeed, we may not unfairly 
 assign some additional credit to the man who has 
 forced his way to the front, in spite of all physical 
 defects and personal drawbacks. But it is an awful 
 thing for a young beginner to have to contend 
 against the impediments of a bad face, an insignifi- 
 
104 
 
 SUCCESS. 
 
 cant or an ungainly figure, and a bad manner in 
 the presence of others. 
 
 However material to the subject under discus- 
 sion, these last remarks appear here in the nature 
 of a digression ; and I do not know that I can 
 close this essay in any better manner than by re- 
 turning to what I was saying about mutual help. 
 Great as is self-help, I am disposed to think that 
 mutual help is greater. If we contribute to the 
 success of our neighbors, that is a success in itself. 
 There are few of us who may not do something in 
 this way, assured that we shall not do it in vain. 
 And there are few of us who do not want, or who 
 have not at some time of our lives wanted, a help- 
 ing hand, and been saved by its timely extension. 
 Liberality is not for nothing. — " The liberal man 
 shall be made fat, and he that watereth shall be 
 watered himself." 
 
 And there is this to be said for the success 
 which may attend our efforts to make others suc- 
 cessful, — that nothing can ever take it from us. 
 What we do for ourselves is perishable ; what we 
 do for others is abiding. There are many draw- 
 backs from our own successes ; none from the suc- 
 cess attending our contributions to the successes 
 of our neighbors. Ay, indeed, there are seasons 
 in the life of almost every successful man, when he 
 almost wishes that he had not succeeded. My 
 friend Vetus, you can remember, I doubt not, 
 when you were just budding into fame, how all 
 
THE BEST SUCCESS OF ALL. 105 
 
 men spoke well of your doings. And you are 
 doing still better now ; but all men do not speak 
 well of what you do. They are as tired as the 
 people were of old of hearing the praises of Aris- 
 tides, and they would ostracise you with as much 
 pleasure. But have comfort; that is a part of 
 success, sent to teach you the true value of it. 
 No one is successful until he has been well abused. 
 And it is no small thing at the close of life to 
 know how little you have done. It is good that a 
 time should come to all " quando etiam sapientibus 
 cupido gloriae novissima exuitur," — when wise men 
 lay aside even " the last infirmity of noble minds," 
 the love of fame, and think that the best that they 
 have done for themselves is but a failure. But 
 what you have done for others is an enduring 
 possession. The bank-note which you gave to 
 Asterisk when at the last gasp of his failing for- 
 tune, and which set him on his legs again and 
 gave him a fresh start and a successful course; 
 the appointment which you got for Dash, when a 
 hopeless stripling, and which placed his foot on the 
 ladder, which he ascended to a high place in the 
 public administration of his country ; the encour- 
 aging review of Blank's book, which revived his 
 drooping spirits just as he was on the brink of 
 despair, and made him a successful author (what 
 matter that he has since driven his critical beak 
 into your heart ?) ; the title which your successful 
 advocacy in high places gained for Quis-quis, — 
 
106 SUCCESS. 
 
 nothing can ever take these good gifts away from 
 you ; so let us think more of them than of what 
 we do for ourselves, for they constitute the only 
 genuine Success. 
 
 December, i860. 
 
THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 WHEN I was very young, I wrote a novel. 
 A friendly publisher placed it, with a kind 
 word or two, in the hands of his literary adviser, 
 who pronounced upon it a verdict singularly ad- 
 verse, not to say altogether crushing. How I de- 
 spised the surly critic for it ! How assured I was, 
 in my inmost heart, that he was ineffably ignorant 
 and demonstrably wrong, envious, malignant, a 
 hater of his race ! But I see him now, at odd times, 
 on public and on private occasions, a bland and be- 
 nevolent elderly gentleman; and I shake hands 
 with him, knowing that he denounced the first 
 efforts of my Muse, but feeling that instead of my 
 bitter enemy he was my very good friend, and that, 
 in truth, my novel was far more guilty of heinous 
 literary crimes than in his over-lenient verdict 
 
 I do not now remember the words of his judg- 
 ment, — that judgment which dispersed all my 
 cherished visions of an honored manhood, and 
 sent me back to hobbledehoyism and dependence 
 beneath my father's roof. It is an old story now, 
 and if I could recover a transcript of this first criti- 
 cism, every word of which, at the time, burnt itself 
 into me like hot iron, I would frame it for the en- 
 
 (107) 
 
108 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 couragement of my children. But there was one 
 particular passage of the Reader's judgment which, 
 after the lapse of a quarter of a century, I have not 
 forgotten. He dwelt upon the singular inconsist- 
 encies of the hero of my story, maintaining that 
 the man who did this or that good thing could not 
 have done this or that bad one. I took the hint, 
 called my tale The Inconsistent Man, put upon the 
 title-page an appropriate morality from Words- 
 worth, and published the novel at my own risk. 
 And I have often since thought that if it had had 
 no more serious defect than the inconsistency of 
 its hero, there was no reason why it should not 
 have succeeded. But as it had scarcely anything 
 that a novel ought to have, and almost everything 
 that a novel ought not, it is mere matter of course 
 that it failed. How coolly one writes about these 
 failures now, — fearful and terrible as they were at 
 the time, — almost, indeed, rejoicing in them ! And 
 why not ? Are not these early failures wounds 
 inflicted upon us in honorable battle ? May we 
 not be proud of our scars ? There is heroism 
 needed for that conflict ; and shall the hoary vet- 
 eran not recite the audacities of his youth ? May 
 there not be deeds done out of uniform worthy of 
 Victoria Crosses ? Truly, I have known such. 
 We may not bear about with us an empty sleeve 
 or other outward insignia of our gallantry;* but 
 
 * I saw a pleasant sight, the other day, since this sheet was 
 written. Hard by the great palace of Westminster there stood at 
 
CONTRA DICTIONS. 
 
 109 
 
 we may have had wounds less readily healed, 
 agonies less easily borne, and may have gone 
 through it all with equal constancy and courage. 
 
 But I have recalled this juvenile experience, 
 only to observe that, after a quarter of a century's 
 adult acquaintance with life, I am even less minded 
 than I was at nineteen to regard men as consistent 
 unities. Consistency is so rare a quality — or, 
 rather, such a rare combination of harmonious 
 qualities — that if statues are not erected in the 
 market-place to consistent men, surely they ought 
 to be, as to the rarities and marvels of the earth. 
 We think that we know our neighbors, — our 
 acquaintances, — our friends; but the chances are 
 that we know them only in one particular aspect, 
 and that, perhaps, the aspect which is least essen- 
 
 a corner, in his neat uniform of green, leaning against a post, and 
 ready to be 1 hired, one of that useful body of men called commis- 
 sionaires, who do our errands so much more quickly and more 
 cheaply than the old race of ticket-porters, — an old soldier with 
 three medals on his breast. As I neared him, on my way to my 
 daily work, I saw another old soldier approach him, — an older 
 soldier, and of a higher rank, with bronzed cheek, and white 
 moustache, and erect carriage, and a noble presence ; one whom 
 there was no mistaking, though dressed in the common garb of an 
 English gentleman. When he saw the medals on the commis- 
 sionaire's breast, his face brightened up, and he stopped before the 
 man in green, and, with a pleasant word or two, took up the 
 medals, one after another, in his one hand, and then I saw that he 
 had an empty sleeve. And when I looked at the commissionaire, 
 I saw that he also had an empty sleeve. And I wished that I had 
 been an artist, to paint that touching scene. 
 
HO THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 tially true to the inner nature of the man. We are 
 wont to say that So-and-So is not a likely man to 
 do such-and-such a thing. Broadly, it may be 
 said that we cannot bring ourselves to believe that 
 men whose leanings are evidently towards virtue, 
 who talk and write virtuously, can do things the 
 reverse of virtuous; and when we find that they 
 do such things we are wont to cry out that they 
 are hypocrites. The fact is, that they are not 
 hypocrites. They may love what is good without 
 doing it. Was David a hypocrite ? Was Paul a 
 hypocrite? "The evil I would not, that I do." 
 How common a case it is ! I knew a man who 
 stood in the felon's dock, who wore the felon's 
 dress, who did the felon's servitude. I knew him 
 when all men respected him. It was not only that 
 he talked good things ; he did them ; he took 
 pleasure in doing them. He had a hearty relish 
 for good; I am sure that he had none for evil. 
 But he fell ; to the astonishment of the world, he 
 fell; and when he lay there, utterly crushed, by 
 reason of the tremendous height from which he 
 had fallen, people with one accord said that he 
 was a hypocrite. I remember well the dark faces 
 that were turned upon me — faces not all masculine, 
 the owners of which were righly honored by the 
 world — when I ventured to say that I could not 
 believe, having known him in his brighter days, 
 that that poor, crushed sinner had artistically 
 assumed a robe of sanctity for the concealment of 
 
HYPOCRISY. IH 
 
 his systematic iniquities. I cannot bring myself 
 to believe it even now, after the lapse of years, 
 when his image has faded somewhat from my 
 sight, and his voice has grown dim in my ears. 
 What I do believe is that there is a vast deal 
 more of inconsistency than hypocrisy in the world. 
 Hypocrisy is a laborious trade. The emoluments 
 must be great if they are proportionate to the 
 pains of following it. But every man is not a 
 hypocrite who does not act up to his professions. 
 Video meliora, proboque ; deteriora sequor. 
 
 The Christian confession previously cited is but 
 an unconscious rendering of the heathen. It is 
 worse than folly to assert that a man is not to 
 commend what is good because he is not able to 
 practice it. Am I not to admire and to extol 
 learning because I am unlearned myself? For my 
 own part, I hold that the less harm we do to 
 others, the better ; and that " if from the weak- 
 ness of our natures we cannot always stand 
 upright," it is far better not to sin, as some do, 
 glorying in their sins, confounding good and evil, 
 and leading weak people astray by pernicious 
 example. It has been said, and brilliant is the 
 saying, that " hypocrisy is the homage which vice 
 pays to virtue;" but, like other sharp epigrams 
 of the same kind, this must be taken with some 
 qualification. The homage which vice pays to 
 virtue by cloaking itself, is not always hypocrisy. 
 Genuine hypocrisy is, primarily, homage to self 
 
112 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 The hypocrite conceals his vices because he thinks 
 that the revelation of them will be injurious to 
 him. His homage consists only in the practical 
 acknowledgment that vice is less seemly in men's 
 eyes than virtue. But we more frequently pay 
 our homage to virtue, because we really love 
 virtue and would not willingly infect others with 
 the disease which we have not the constitutional 
 power to throw off ourselves. 
 
 Another error very frequently committed is 
 this. We learn that a man has done some wrong 
 thing, and straightway we judge him to be alto- 
 gether wrong. We are loth to give him credit for 
 the possession of any good qualities. It is very 
 true, in one sense, that " morality admits of no 
 sets-off." If a man runs off to America with his 
 neighbor's wife, it is no excuse for his conduct 
 that lie paid his tradesmen before he went. But 
 it would be very unjust to assume that because he 
 has eloped with a paramour he has cheated his 
 creditors and violated every moral and social en- 
 gagement at the same time. A man may break 
 one of the commandments without shivering both 
 tables of the decalogue at a blow. The fact is, 
 that many men who do very wrong things have 
 a great deal of good in them. Indeed, the very 
 wrong that they do is often only a riotous de- 
 velopment of some good quality, — something that, 
 although fair and smooth and glossy and beautiful 
 to behold upon one side, is all rough and tangled 
 
 I 
 
VIRTUE-BORN VICES . H 3 
 
 and confused and unseemly upon the other. The 
 gusts of circumstance have caught it, and turned 
 it the wrong side uppermost. But it has a right 
 side all the same. 
 
 If it cannot be said that the father of evil had 
 no originality of conception, and that all he could 
 do was to turn our good qualities to his own profit, 
 I am disposed to think that this notion borders 
 very closely upon the truth. Vices pure and 
 simple — vices wholly vicious in their origin and 
 in their progress — there are, when we come to 
 think of it, very few. Let it be accounted what 
 paradox, what absurdity it may, when any foul 
 crime has been committed, to declare that there 
 was a root of Virtue somewhere beneath that great 
 spreading tree of Vice, it is not, when we dig deep 
 beneath the surface, so preposterous as it seems. 
 Perhaps there is no deadlier sin than revenge; but 
 has not the first of English moralists most happily 
 called it "wild justice"? Is there not at the bot- 
 tom of it a virtuous hatred of the wrong done, — a 
 holy yearning after that divine attribute of justice? 
 We would fain leave the matter in the hands of 
 God; but divine judgments are for the most part' 
 slow, and, lacking faith and patience, we would 
 forestall the sentence of the one perfect Judge, and 
 so our Justice breaks*its bonds, runs wild, and in 
 its wildness becomes Revenge. Very unseemly 
 it may be to behold, very grievous to contem- 
 
II 4 THE WR ONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 plate ; but it is, after all, only the wrong side of 
 the stuff. 
 
 Ah ! if we could only draw the line that sepa- 
 rates good from evil, — if we could only obey, in 
 our hearts and in our lives, the mandate, " Thus 
 far shalt thou go, and no farther," — what a blessed 
 thing it would be ! But we go on, little by little, 
 up to the very verge of right, and silently we 
 transgress the boundary, not intending to suffer 
 ourselves on that other side, and not knowing that 
 we are there. If, when we are about to pass the 
 pickets into the enemy's country, some sentry- 
 angel would only warn us of our danger, we might 
 be saved in time; but we pass on in the darkness 
 right up to the advanced guard of the enemy, and 
 are not conscious of our error till we find our- 
 selves in the arch-fiend's camp and all his batteries 
 playing upon us. 
 
 You have heard it said a thousand times, "God 
 preserve me from my friends, and I will look after 
 my enemies myself." Apply this to your own 
 humanity, and pray to be preserved from your 
 good qualities in the knowledge that you can look 
 after your bad ones yourself. You are liberal; 
 beware of your liberality. You are loving; be- 
 ware, above all things, of that " rich loving-kind- 
 ness, redundantly kind," which leads us into so 
 many snares and pitfalls. You have a strong sense 
 of justice; pray to be able to set a restraint upon 
 it, lest you should become hard, intolerant, exact- 
 
VIRTUE RUN RIOT. 
 
 115 
 
 ing. You are firm, resolute, constant ; seek better 
 support than your own, or you may degenerate 
 into obstinacy, obduracy, dogged resistance of 
 conviction, and impenetrable pride. I need not 
 run through the catalogue. Every one knows the 
 old couplet, — 
 
 " Vice is a monster of sucli hideous mien, 
 As to be hated needs but to be seen." 
 
 It is by that which is not hideous — by that which 
 is not seen — that we are beguiled ; by the fair 
 Delilah upon whose lap we lay our trusting heads, 
 unconscious of the depths of treachery which lurk 
 beneath that smooth face and that pleasant smile. 
 It is thus that our temptations assail us, thus that 
 we are lured on to the death. We hear much in 
 the pulpit and read in excellent books about our 
 " besetting sins ;" but it is of our besetting, ensnar- 
 ing virtues, or goodnesses, that we have to beware, 
 both for ourselves and for others. Do we think 
 enough of this ? Does it enter into our heads or 
 our hearts as a matter whereof we should take 
 sovereign account in the education of our little 
 ones ? Who has not heard that pretty story of the 
 child who, when asked how it was that every one 
 loved her, made answer that she did not know, 
 unless it was because she loved every one ? Who 
 would not have been the father of that little girl ? 
 Who would not have been prouder of such a jewel 
 than of the Koh-i-noor? Would you or I have 
 
Il6 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 saddened over that sweet speech, or dared to soil 
 the pure reflection which it cast by any prophecies 
 of coming evil ? And yet, truly, in that dear child's 
 loving nature — and because so loving, therefore so 
 lovable — there is much to deplore, much to dread. 
 Thinking seriously of it, we know that of all tem- 
 peraments it is the most dangerous, — the one most 
 likely to bring its possessor to much sorrow and 
 much sin. And, truly, it is right, if we can do it, 
 to check this propensity to love overmuch. But 
 how can we do it ? Lecture as we may, the head 
 will not understand, and the heart will repudiate, 
 our doctrine. Such a tender plant as this requires 
 very careful handling. Can we snatch the baby- 
 doll from the young arms, and thrust its fair waxen 
 face between the bars of the fire, or send, in her 
 tearful presence, the sportive kitten to the inevita- 
 ble pond ? And if we could, what then ? That 
 treatment does not answer in childhood any more 
 than in later life. We try it sometimes with our 
 grown-up boys and girls, and only make a mess of 
 it. No, if we would moderate such a tendency as 
 this, we must above all things avoid violence. At 
 best there is not much to be done ; but we may be 
 watchful and considerate, and, above all, we may 
 take care to provide healthy objects of affection, 
 and never to force the inclinations of a loving 
 nature, from any worldly motives, — any mistaken 
 estimate of what we are wont to call " eventual 
 good." Out of such efforts as this come the sad 
 
 
LOVING NATURES. ny 
 
 domestic histories which make the records, now so 
 tersely tragic, of the Divorce Court; a few lines, — 
 just a few lines, — the stories of half a dozen lives 
 in half a newspaper-column. 
 
 What is more beautiful than the right side of 
 this stuff, what is more hideous than the wrong? 
 It is all of the same woof, look at it as you may ; 
 but, oh, the difference ! There is the " new com- 
 mandment" given to you, broidered on the one side 
 in fair characters, and one of the seven deadly sins 
 glaring out upon you in ghastly letters from the 
 other. Poor lost child, sinful and the cause of sin 
 in others, cast away, unrepentant, smiling at night 
 beneath the gas, what a very wrong side it is ! But 
 it was fair and seemly to behold, before you turned 
 that side uppermost. A trusting, loving nature; 
 guileless, unsuspicious ; feeling no wrong, and 
 dreaming of none in others ; a strong tendency to 
 hero-worship, veneration largely developed; ca- 
 pable of any self-sacrifice so it but please the one- 
 beloved object. How grand in Iphigenia, how 
 noble in Antigone ! But in poor Perdita the sacri- 
 fice is not for a father or a brother ; and it is only 
 a living death. 
 
 Let no one say that this is " dangerous doc- 
 trine." In truth, there is no doctrine in it. It is 
 merely plain matter of fact. The doctrine, as I 
 have already said, is that we shoud pray to be 
 protected, not against our besetting sins, but 
 against our besetting virtues. And, indeed, do we 
 
Il8 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 not so pray ? There is no temptation in sin ; it is 
 anything but tempting. We are tempted by what 
 is beautiful and alluring. There is a narrow line, 
 very finely drawn, almost imperceptible, which if 
 you do not cross, you are safe. But the Tempter 
 is continually enticing you to cross that line ; and 
 you find yourself in his grip before you know that 
 he is at your elbow. It is natural that when we 
 write of love we should draw our illustrations from 
 woman, but there are men, too, "peccante in this 
 kinde," — men of gentle, kindly natures, loving 
 hearts, caressing manners, — with something in their 
 faces, when they talk to women, "like a still em- 
 brace;"* men who could not willfully do an unkind 
 thing, and who forgive an injury as soon as it is in- 
 flicted upon them. But what a deal of mischief these 
 amiable sinners do in this world of ours ! They do 
 not mean it. They would stand aghast at the 
 thought of the iniquities into which they are likely 
 to drift, if they were to see them foreshadowed in 
 the magic mirror of the Future. But they see 
 nothing, and on they go, giving free vent to the 
 impulses of their loving natures, untill all at once 
 
 * XOTE. 
 
 " There was something in his accents, there was something in his 
 
 face, 
 When he spoke that one word to her, which was like a still embrace; 
 And she felt herself drawn to him, — drawn to him, she knew not 
 
 how, 
 With a love she could not .stifle, and she kissed him on the brow." 
 
AMIABLE DINNERS. 1 19 
 
 they wake to the knowledge that God's gift of love 
 has blackened into a curse. The world may know 
 it, or the world may not know it. Most likely it 
 is profoundly ignorant ; it may be very inquisitive 
 and very censorious : but how often it is grievously 
 at fault! How often even Mrs. Grundy sees only 
 the amiable husband, and the kind father, and the 
 benevolent gentleman, where, if the curtain were 
 raised, if the hidden life were revealed, if the wrong 
 side of the stuff, with its frayed ends, were made 
 clear to the vision, there would be such a cry of 
 respectable indignation, such a shudder of virtuous 
 horror, as would strike even the seared conscience 
 of the sinner with dismay ! Men who slide into 
 wrong-doing, conscious that they mean no wrong, 
 soon reconcile themselves to it, and might, without 
 hypocrisy, express surprise when their offenses 
 come to be described by their proper names. All 
 this can be readily understood. And the better we 
 understand it, the more impressed we are with the 
 marvelous truth of the aphorism that " hell is 
 paved with good intentions." Nothing has been 
 written more frequently than that men are worse 
 than they seem, — that, if we could only read men's 
 thoughts . . . 
 
 And, if we could, though many a "good man" 
 might be shown to be worse than he appears, many 
 a "bad man" might be revealed to us as some- 
 thing better. On the whole, perhaps, our thoughts 
 are better than our lives. Fatal errors — even 
 
120 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 deadly sins — are committed, which have a source 
 of goodness, if we only trace those polluted waters 
 back to their pure fount There is many a tangled 
 wilderness — many a dark forest, "whose very trees 
 take root in love;" many a cruel act that branches 
 from the stem of a kind heart.* And then as to 
 the omissions, — the good things which we would 
 fain do, but do not, — which we act in thought, but 
 only in thought, yet still with a grave sincerity of 
 purpose, — how manifold they are ! Under the 
 single apologetic heading of "want of time," we 
 might most of us tick off omissions of this kind, 
 which, had the will ripened into action, would have 
 set up a dozen men with a capital of good deeds 
 sufficient to qualify them for the calendar of saints. 
 Almost every active-minded man sketches out for 
 himself, in the course of his life, intellectual ex- 
 
 * Very many years ago, in the prime of my verdure, happening 
 upon a grave truth by accident, I wrote that "the most unselfish 
 people often do the most selfish things;" and some critics, whose 
 years and experience doubtless exceeded my own twice told, com- 
 mended the paradox with a warmth that surprised me. But now 
 that I have lived a quarter of a century longer in the world, I see 
 the full force of the words far more clearly than when I wrote 
 them. The cruelties of the kindly are often most grievous. Even 
 in their self-sacrifices at times there is an egotism which gives 
 them pleasure, and practically a total disregard of the sufferings of 
 others. But they are honestly bent on self-negation, and resolute 
 to bear their martyrdom bravely to the last gasp. Do not let us 
 say, then, that they are selfish, and condemn them ; rather let us 
 teach them how they may better contribute to others' happiness 
 and to their own. 
 
GOOD INTENTIONS. 12 1 
 
 ploits which it would take at least five centuries 
 to perform. And we believe that there are a vast 
 number of men whose unaccomplished works of 
 charity and love could not be crowded into any 
 smaller space of time. For want of time, we are 
 continually failing in all the offices of friendship; 
 neglecting those who have strong claims upon us ; 
 leaving visits unpaid, letters unwritten, hospitalities 
 unrendered, all sorts of neighborly duties unper- 
 formed. How many kind letters does the mind 
 write for us, when pen and ink are lacking, in the 
 crowded streets, in the railway-carriage, or abroad 
 in the fields! How many messages of love does 
 the spirit waft to distant friends! How many far- 
 off houses do we visit, carrying with us some token 
 of affection ! How many welcome guests do we 
 gather around our own boards — in everything but 
 the solid substantiality of fact! The dramatist 
 who said that he had written all his play but the 
 acts, gave expression to that which may be taken 
 literally with reference to the great drama of life. 
 There is friendship, kindliness, charity, hospitality, 
 boundless sympathy, — complete in everything "but 
 the acts." Are we, then, all humbugs? Not a bit 
 of it. We are oftener humbugs in doing than in 
 not doing. But we cannot expect the world to take 
 the will for the deed. We must be content that 
 judgment should be passed upon us for that only 
 which is seen and done. When some stroke of 
 good or of evil fortune befalls my friend, I must 
 
122 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 not, being silent, expect him to give me credit for 
 the pleasure or the pain which I have not expressed, 
 though it may have filled my eyes with tears and 
 made me thrill with emotions of joy or sorrow. 
 The letter or the visit of congratulation or condo- 
 lence has been paid or written only in the spirit, 
 and, though One who reads all hearts can see 
 the untraced words on the sheet, and hear the 
 sound of the unraised knocker on the door, our 
 best of human friends can hardly be expected to 
 think that our silence at such a time is not cold, 
 unkindly, and ungrateful. In these respects, and 
 in others, perhaps, of greater moment, we are 
 most of us better than we seem. But life is short, 
 and the battle thereof is very sharp and absorbing, 
 and we have not always the wax spread upon the 
 wall or the style ready to the hand. And so our 
 brightest thoughts do not find their way into our 
 books, or our best feelings into action. They fall 
 by the wayside, and the birds of the air devour 
 them. What I write now I had in my head last 
 night, as I lay abed in the dark, but with far 
 greater force of words and fertility of illustration. 
 Why, then, it may be asked, did I not spring from 
 my bed, grope my way to a match-box, light a 
 candle, and rush to the library? Why! because I 
 was weary, because I might have broken my shins, 
 because I might have caught cold, and lost the 
 bright thoughts, after all, before I had got the pen 
 in my hand to give them permanent expression. 
 
GIVING NATURES. 
 
 123 
 
 They are lost forever. It cannot be helped. I do 
 not expect any credit for them. But I say that 
 many of us are cleverer fellows than we are in our 
 books, and, what is more to the point of this essay, 
 better fellows than we are in our actions. 
 
 I have said that there is often cruelty to those 
 whom we love best in the sacrifices which we make 
 for their sakes. But it is not in affairs of love only 
 that this prodigal expenditure of self is often very 
 hurtful to others. As there are loving natures, so 
 also there are giving natures. Sometimes we find 
 them both combined. Indeed, a loving nature is 
 commonly a giving nature ; but to give is not 
 always to love. I have known some very liberal, 
 open-handed people, who would give away, indeed, 
 the very shirt on their backs, and yet the depths 
 of whose affections are very easily fathomed. And 
 truly this is a dangerous quality, — almost as 
 dangerous as the tendency to love overmuch. But 
 there is something beautiful in it too ; and we are 
 loth to check it, though we know that it should 
 be checked. Yes, indeed, when that fine little boy 
 on his way to the pastrycook's, with his right hand 
 in the pocket of his knickerbockers, firmly clinch- 
 ing the small coin wherewith he is about to pur- 
 chase buns for a nursery feast, is arrested at the 
 very threshold of the palace of dainty delights by 
 the sight of a shivering beggar-woman with three 
 small pinched children, lean-faced and wistful-eyed, 
 on the pavement, and presently returns bunless and 
 
24 
 
 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 moneyless to the paternal roof, can you or I find it 
 in us to utter word of reproach or even warning ? 
 We may try — almost we may begin, when we hear 
 the artless story, to say, "Clement," with a grave 
 face, "I think, perhaps . . . ." — but before the 
 first few words are out, the grave look gives way 
 to a flushing smile, and all you can bring out is, 
 " Clem, my darling, you're a dear, kind boy : here's 
 a shilling ; go and buy the buns for me, and re- 
 member that the money is mine." And Clem goes, 
 with his hand more tightly clinched in his knicker- 
 bockers than ever, and, listening to no allurements 
 on the way, he brings back the buns in safety, for 
 he feels that neither the money nor the buns are 
 his — until he gets fairly home, and then he becomes 
 undisputed proprietor, and he has his feast, with 
 interest, in the nursery. 
 
 Now, I do not say that all this is right : morally, 
 indeed, it is very wrong. " Cast your bread upon 
 the waters, and it will return to you after many 
 days." True; and what lessons of faith, hope, and 
 charity — all three — does this teach us ? But we 
 must not look for our bread or our buns to come 
 back to us in the next half-hour. Where is the 
 faith, where is the hope, where is the charity, to 
 be exercised under such a dispensation ? It would 
 be far better, therefore, if dear Clem had had his 
 lecture and lost his buns. I speak very seriously. 
 I know how hard it is to look disapprovingly 
 upon a kind act. I know, too, that, strictly speak- 
 
THE SNARES OF LIBERALITY. 12$ 
 
 ing, we ought to assume that Clem would have 
 been happier without his buns than with them. 
 Little boys used to be so when I was one, — in the 
 story-books at least. But, bless the little knicker- 
 bockers, in these degenerate days our boys eat 
 the second bag of buns with all the heartier relish 
 for having given away the first to a beggar. If 
 they are not rewarded with a second, they go 
 without, and perhaps are naughty enough some- 
 times to think regretfully, almost self-reproach- 
 fully, of the sacrifice they have made. But even 
 boy nature is weak, and why should we expect 
 these little ones to be stronger than grown men ? 
 
 But here I am, according to my wont, drifting, 
 drifting farther and farther away from the morality 
 which I ought to teach. That dear little Clem 
 ought really to be cautioned against the snares of 
 liberality. He ought to be told that liberality is 
 not always generosity. He should be cautioned 
 lest, although it is now quite enough to tell him 
 that the money in his pocket is not his, he should 
 some day be liberal with that which is not his own. 
 The man has not always so keen a sense of the 
 sacredness of other people's belongings as the boy. 
 At all events, we should watch well the good and 
 kindly tendencies of our children. It is a common 
 saying with respect to the boys, that their bad 
 qualities will be " knocked out of them at school." 
 If they be proud, their pride will be laughed out 
 of them ; if they be quarrelsome, their contentious- 
 
126 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 ness will be thrashed out of them ; if they be mean, 
 their meanness will be scorned out of them. But 
 all their attractive qualities are sure to be en- 
 couraged and developed, and if in time they are 
 not exaggerated, first into weakness, and then 
 into vices, happy indeed is the youth, or wiser and 
 stronger than his comrades. It is, therefore, I say 
 again, the parental duty to warn a child against its 
 kindlier and more attractive qualities, and, if pos- 
 sible, to moderate and control them. If we do not, 
 we may be sure that some day or other we shall 
 see the wrong side of the stuff. 
 
 In no respect, perhaps, is it of more sovereign 
 importance to the moral well-being of a man, and 
 to the general welfare of society, that the line 
 which separates good from evil should be jealously 
 observed, than in the manifestations of generosity 
 run riot. Doubtless it is a good thing to give, 
 and to give freely. The Lord " loveth a cheerful 
 giver." But if we do not take heed, our delight in 
 giving may lead us not only to give what we have, 
 but what we have not, and to be generous at other 
 persons' expense. That miserable George Barn- 
 well, who when I was young was preached at the 
 rising generation on Easter Mondays, Boxing- 
 nights, and other solemn occasions, from the great 
 dramatic pulpits of the metropolis, went through 
 prodigality of giving straight on to murder. This, 
 doubtless, is an exceptional manifestation. We do 
 not often, literally and corporeally, slay our bene- 
 
SHIPWRECK OF THE GENEROUS. \ 2 J 
 
 factors in order that we may bestow rich gifts upon 
 some frail friend, but figuratively, metaphorically, 
 we are afraid, we often sin in this fashion, and are 
 generous before we are just and honest. Many 
 grievous shipwrecks have come out of this ; and 
 the fairest promises have led straight up to the 
 felon's dock. Do you think that the poor, blasted 
 wretch whom you see quailing and cowering there 
 had any natural tendency towards dishonesty? Had 
 that miserable George of whom I have spoken any 
 taste for blood, — any craving after the excitement 
 of highway-robbery ? He did it, not that he loved 
 his uncle less, but that he loved another more, 
 and he would rather have given her trinkets 
 sprinkled with -blood than not have given her any 
 trinkets at all. 
 
 This is altogether, as I have said, an extreme 
 case. George took what he knew he could never 
 restore. He could not restore life ; and he could 
 not restore money to the dead. But a large 
 number of those who are brought to ruin by their 
 heedless liberality have no thought of being dis- 
 honest or even unjust. If, directly or indirectly, 
 they take what is not their own, they believe in 
 their hearts that they can make restitution before 
 any one will miss it. Strictly, it is unjust — perhaps 
 dishonest — to give or to lend sixpence, unless you 
 have the means, without that sixpence, of satisfying 
 every rightful claim upon you. Say that the poor 
 old lady who nursed you in your tender childhood 
 
128 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 is down in the rheumatics, or that little Barbara, 
 your handmaiden, who kept long and patient vigils 
 beside the bed of your sick wife or your dying 
 boy, has been crying her poor eyes out, because 
 she has bad news from home of rent that cannot be 
 paid, and little brothers and sisters who cannot be 
 fed, or that unhappy Bibulus Boanerges, the man 
 of letters, who has done you, as you know, many a 
 bad turn in his day, now come to drunken grief, 
 seeks a good one at your hands, — what right have 
 you, as an honest man, to give to one or the other, 
 if you cannot pay your tradesmen's bills on demand 
 to the last farthing ? None. I know it ; I feel it. 
 To give, when you owe, is to give what is not your 
 own. This is a great moral truth to be impressed 
 upon little Knickerbockers ; and if you catch him 
 giving a penny to a beggar when he owes sixpence 
 at the lolly-pop shop, — for in these days even little 
 Knickerbockers is prone to contract debts — doubt- 
 less it is the parental duty to admonish him severely 
 on the spot. 
 
 But — stern moralist as I am, after this I cushion 
 myself on a but — but, if the wrong side of that 
 fine, rich stuff of generosity be injustice and dis- 
 honesty, justice and honesty also have their wrong 
 sides. Just and honest men, whom I wot of, often 
 suffer their virtues to exuberate, so as to overgrow 
 some of the milder graces, which I, for one, cannot 
 help esteeming. It may be our duty to narrow 
 our obligations to the utmost, or, rather, to the 
 
 
SELF. 
 
 129 
 
 innermost ; to recognize only the primary duties ; 
 to see no neighborhood beyond our own fireside 
 or the walls of our own counting-house; to provide 
 plentifully for our own offspring ; to owe no man 
 anything; and neither to borrow nor to lend. 
 This may be right ; at all events, it is safe. I 
 confess that I have not so read the precepts of 
 Christianity, — but, then, my understanding maybe 
 a false interpreter of the truth. " What claim has 
 he upon me, that I should do this thing for him? 
 By doing it, I may injure those who have claims 
 upon me." What claim ? Well, I confess that 
 when we come to talk about claims there is very 
 little to be said. What claims have you and I 
 upon the bounty either of Man or God ? It would 
 end at last, I fear, if they came to be tried, in our 
 throwing ourselves upon the mercy of the Court. 
 It is, doubtless, a very grievous thing when men, 
 under the inspiration of a vague feeling of universal 
 brotherhood, forget that they are husbands and 
 fathers. Books, we know, have been written to 
 prove that our kindred have no claim upon us as 
 kindred, but simply as members of the great family 
 of mankind. Such doctrine is to be repudiated 
 utterly. Home first, and the world afterwards. 
 But there are those whose maxim it is, " Home 
 first, and after that the Deluge." And the home 
 of such men often contains a family of which the 
 solitary member is Self. The honesty of such men 
 is not to be questioned. If they were to die to- 
 9 
 
130 THE WRONG SIDE OE THE STUFF. 
 
 morrow, all their worldly affairs would be found in 
 the nicest order; no man would be defrauded of 
 his rights. But, Honestus, you must beware of 
 your besetting virtue. It is possible that some- 
 what more maybe required of you than this strict- 
 ness of dealing. The unprofitable servant who 
 wrapped up his talent in a napkin was, doubtless, 
 a very honest man, — safe to the extremest point 
 of safety. But he did not satisfy his master. 
 Honesty is a grand thing ; — " An honest man's 
 the noblest work of God," — ay, truly. But may it 
 not be that there are regions in which honesty is 
 measured by a standard differing somewhat from 
 our own, — regions in which account is taken of 
 other debts than those for food and clothing, doc- 
 tors' stuff and servants' wages ? Have you paid 
 those debts, O Honestus ? Being human/it cannot 
 be expected of you that you have paid them in 
 full ; but have you paid even a reasonable install- 
 ment of your obligations ? or have you remembered 
 the first half only of that most beautiful and most 
 solemn precept, "Owe no man anything, but to love 
 o?i e anotlier" ? 
 
 Yes, justice and honesty may run riot, — the 
 strong even as the weak; but should we not be 
 tolerant also of their excesses ? You do not like 
 that cold, stern, reserved, case-hardened man. 
 Geniality is more pleasant; generosity is more 
 alluring. But who knows, after all, that there may 
 not be some soft spots beneath that coat of mail ? 
 
RASH JUDGMENTS. 131 
 
 Who knows, indeed, that the armor has not been 
 indued by very reason of those soft spots ? Men, 
 ere now, warned in time of their besetting infirm- 
 ities, have steeled themselves against them, have 
 curbed their errant propensities, rudely and pain- 
 fully, and in their outward aspects belied their 
 inward natures, bringing themselves to it only by 
 habitual resistance, and that, too, of the most de- 
 termined, uncompromising kind. It is the tender- 
 est-hearted wayfarer, peradventure, who buttons 
 his coat most securely over his waistcoat-pocket 
 and passes on most rapidly, when the voice of dis- 
 tress reaches him from the shadow of the house, 
 and he feels, rather than sees, a ragged figure pur- 
 suing him along the pavement in quest of alms. 
 He hurries on, not to escape the mendicant so 
 much as to escape from his own propensity to give, 
 and by giving to relieve his feelings, at the expense 
 of his principles, and to solace himself to the injury 
 of others. And it may be the most jovial of boon- 
 companions who refuses the proffered glass, who 
 seems to have no good-fellowship in him. Who 
 knows that he may not be only too good a fellow, 
 that it may not be the constant study of his life to 
 hold in due restraint and governance the com- 
 panionable qualities which, without such a strong 
 hand upon them, might drag him down to de- 
 struction ? 
 
 Besides, even as regards more practical mani- 
 festations, we may often be very greatly mistaken. 
 
132 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 We may know the act of generosity that was not 
 done, but we may not know the act of greater 
 generosity that was done, — the greater sacrifice 
 that forbade the lesser. I had a lesson of this 
 kind taught me at school, the impression of which 
 thirty years of active life have in nowise weakened. 
 Our senior usher — it was a large private school — 
 was a liberal, open-handed fellow; he dressed well, 
 subscribed handsomely to the cricket-club, and 
 had the reputation — it was a glory, not a reproach, 
 among us — of being " in debt in the town." But 
 the second usher was an intolerable screw. He 
 carried the fact upon his back ; it spoke out from 
 all his actions. His conduct was as shabby as his 
 coat. Of course our notion was that he was by 
 nature a skinflint, and that he had hoards of gold 
 " at the bottom of his box." He was a man other- 
 wise of a kindly nature and a harmless way of life, 
 so we despised rather than hated the wretch. But 
 it came out afterwards that he had an aged mother 
 and two sisters, relying solely for their maintenance 
 on his scanty earnings ; and the saddest thing of all 
 was — I know nothing sadder in history — that con- 
 templating, at the end of one half-year, a pleasant 
 surprise for these poor people, he walked home, a 
 hundred miles under a June sun, and appeared un- 
 expectedly among them one sultry evening, only 
 to find that all three were helplessly drunk. Next 
 half we had a new usher, and for a little space there 
 was a belief among us that the poor fellow had 
 
RASH JUDGMENTS. 1 33 
 
 saved money enough to start a school of his own ; 
 but little by little the truth, as I have told it, oozed 
 out, with this pathetic addition, that he had gone 
 hopelessly mad. We were very much grieved then 
 at the rash judgments that we had passed, and we 
 penitentially recanted by getting up a subscription, 
 the largest ever known in the school, which kept 
 the poor crazy wretch — he was quite harmless — 
 under comfortable restraint, until he died. When 
 the doctor's eldest son married, and we subscribed 
 for a silver tea-equipage to present to the young 
 couple, — and when, that prodigal senior usher, at a 
 later period, retiring upon his debts, and starting, 
 upon that modest capital, a school and a wife of 
 his own, we endowed him with a preposterous 
 plated epergne fit for the dinner-table of a duke, — 
 we had availed ourselves of the opportunity to 
 seek special aid from the parental purse. But in 
 this instance it was a point of honor and of con- 
 science with us all to make solemn sacrifice of self 
 and to deny our appetites for the benefit of the man 
 we had wronged ; and I am sure, let alone the 
 satisfaction of such an atonement, that the lesson 
 we had all learned was worth the money ten times 
 told. Many of us, I doubt not, were sadder and 
 wiser boys from that time. We had seen only the 
 wrong side of the stuff of that poor second usher's 
 beautiful generosity, and we had not thought for a 
 moment that it had a right side, smooth to the 
 touch, lovely to the eye, gay with many-colored 
 
34 
 
 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 flowers and bright with tissue of gold, such as might 
 almost form the tapestry of heaven itself. The 
 angels saw, if we did not ; and if we could only 
 see things a little more w T ith their eyes, how much 
 less injustice would they have to write down 
 against us ! 
 
 In the case which I have cited above, the error 
 committed, the wrong done, was of the most abso- 
 lute, unqualified kind ; we judged the poor man 
 to be ungenerous and selfish, when his generosity 
 really was of the most self-sacrificing order. We 
 altogether blundered over the fact. But some- 
 times, although right in our facts, we are griev- 
 ously astray in our judgments, looking only at the 
 wrong side of the stuff, and refusing to believe 
 that there is a right. We say that a man is ob- 
 stinate ; that he is stern and inflexible. But we 
 know not, perhaps, what a noble constancy, what 
 a high sense of justice, may lie beneath those more 
 unattractive qualities. Even truth, smooth and 
 beautiful as it is, turns up sometimes a side harsh 
 to the touch and uncomely to the sight. You 
 and I may not sympathize with the Brutuses of 
 the world : we may not have enough of the noble 
 Roman in us to send our sons to the headsman, or 
 to strike down our dearest friends " at the base of 
 Pompey's statue ;" but it would be wrong to close 
 our eyes to the fact that there is nobility in such 
 exploits. In these cases we may fairly assume that 
 there is self-negation of the highest order. But in 
 
A PLEA FOR SHYLOCK. 135 
 
 others, where there is nothing to justify the ques- 
 tion, " Had you rather that Caesar were living 
 and die all slaves?" there may still be something to 
 admire even in the ugliest manifestations of these 
 sterner qualities. I have often thought whether 
 Shakspeare intended utterly to close the hearts of 
 his audience against that poor baffled Shylock. 
 As for myself, I must acknowledge that I never 
 go away altogether satisfied with the result. I 
 have quoted already the Baconian aphorism that 
 revenge is a kind of wild justice. I believe an in- 
 genious essay has been written to prove that the 
 dramatist was aided by his great contemporary in 
 the composition of his plays ; and we might, at all 
 events, pleasantly conjecture that these memorable 
 words had been given by the philosopher to the 
 poet as a subject for a drama. That Shylock had 
 a strong sense of justice is not to be doubted. He 
 took a strictly logical view of the matter, and was 
 only beaten at last by a wretched quibble. I have 
 known men who have stood out for their ounce of 
 flesh just as tenaciously as this persecuted Israelite, 
 and with much less excuse. I have known as 
 stern a resolution to exact what is " nominated in 
 the bond" beneath a waistcoat of Christian broad- 
 cloth as beneath the Jewish gabardine. Not be- 
 cause such men desire to injure their neighbors, 
 but because they have an immovable conviction of 
 what is due to themselves. What they contend 
 for chiefly is a full acknowledgment of their rights; 
 
1 36 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 and, the acknowledgment once unreservedly made, 
 they will sometimes yield the thing itself, and be 
 generous, when justice is satisfied. I have thought 
 sometimes whether Shylock would have taken the 
 pound of flesh at last, if the judge had placed the 
 knife in his hand. He might have been satisfied 
 with his victory, and have heaped coals of fire on 
 the Christian's head by showing that the dog he 
 had spat upon could forgive. At all events, if I 
 were a Hebrew, I would "adapt" the Merchant of 
 Venice after that fashion. And even as a Christian 
 I cannot help thinking that the smug Venetians, 
 being clearly guilty of intolerance and persecution, 
 escaped a little too easily. It may be observed 
 that Shakspeare, even in the delineation of his 
 worst characters, generally contrives to give us a 
 glimpse of the right side of the stuff. Even that 
 truculent Lady Macbeth is redeemed from utter 
 iniquity by the " one touch of nature" which glim- 
 mers out in the exclamation, — 
 
 " Had he not resembled 
 My father as he slept, I had done it." 
 
 When I first addressed myself to write upon 
 this subject, after a colloquy with one to whose 
 suggestions I owe more than his modesty will 
 acknowledge, I was minded to treat it in another 
 fashion. I purposed to show the evil that there is 
 in good, or that emanates from good, rather than 
 "the soul of goodness in things evil." But it has 
 
GERMS OF GOOD. 137 
 
 pleased me better, looking at the wrong side of the 
 stuff, to show that it has a right, — to turn it with 
 its bright smooth surface uppermost, — than to say 
 anything disparaging of it because there are frayed 
 ends and unevennesses beneath. Whether this be 
 the truer philosophy or not, I do not pretend to 
 determine; but I am very certain that it is the 
 pleasanter and the more encouraging. And may 
 we not thus, looking at the matter in this more 
 cheerful aspect, find that from the very mode and 
 manner of our investigation there are special truths 
 to be learnt, — that there are some good practical 
 lessons in it which we should do well not to ignore ? 
 Morally, it is right that we should judge people 
 according to their opportunities. Legally, of course, 
 we can take account only of results. Now, the 
 results of being dragged up are, doubtless, very 
 lamentable. They are apparent in frequent appeals 
 to the legal tribunals of the country. Under such 
 adverse circumstances, good is very difficult to 
 maintain as good. It is speedily perverted into 
 evil. There stands the prisoner in the dock, — a 
 ruffian and a thief, — with previous convictions 
 written down against him. His has been the 
 education of the gutter. We say it is a " hopeless 
 case." But who knows that still some germ of 
 good may not lurk in the secret places of his 
 nature, to be called forth again, in all its freshness 
 and vitality, under wise treatment and fostering 
 care? 
 
1 38 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 
 
 If we look well into it, we may find that we 
 have not to contend with some dominant sin, but 
 with the misdirection of some originally good 
 quality, — that the wrong side of the stuff has 
 turned up very early in life and obstinately re- 
 mained uppermost. If we are satisfied of this, we 
 may find the work of reformation comparatively 
 easy. I have often thought that we take too much 
 trouble to find out the dark spots, and, having found 
 them, to cut them out with the knife. If we could 
 only chance upon the bright ones, our treatment 
 would be more simple and more pleasant. There 
 may be, we say, beneath them — who knows ? — a 
 pure fount of good, from which may flow rivers of 
 living waters. Let us make a channel for the 
 stream, so that it shall pour itself in the right direc- 
 tion, and go rippling over golden sands and clean 
 smooth pebbles, not slushing through mud and 
 garbage. That young Arab cowering under a dry 
 arch, — there has been nothing but the wrong side 
 of the stuff for him all his life. Can we expect him 
 to be any better than he is ? But peradventure 
 there is some humanity in him, if we could only 
 find it out. And that seemingly still more hope- 
 less subject, — that hoary sinner, blear-eyed and of 
 Vesuvian aspect, reeling out of the gin-shop, with 
 inarticulate blasphemies in his scorched throat, — 
 he too may have some good in him ; and, if we 
 could only find it out, he would not be wholly lost. 
 Men even in that state have been saved, ere now, 
 by an appeal, perchance Heaven-directed, to some 
 
THE RIGHT SIDE. 
 
 139 
 
 feeling of honor and decency still alive, though 
 long dormant, in their bosoms. " You may not 
 believe it, but I was gentleman once — I was, in- 
 deed!" — or words of kindred meaning — said New- 
 man Noggs ; and there was pride in the thought 
 which lifted a corner of the tapestry and revealed 
 for a time the right side of the stuff. There is 
 something to work upon when you have found the 
 soft spot. A sweet sound, a pleasant sight, will do 
 more than the chain or the lash to subdue the 
 maniac to quietude ; and a succession of sweet 
 sounds and pleasant sights may bring him back to 
 reason, which we may be sure the whip and the 
 strait-waistcoat never will. And this is mainly 
 because these sweet sights, these pleasant sounds, 
 supply, as it were, the long-broken link between 
 the present and the past, and bring back lost 
 remembrances of peace and happiness in the 
 antecedent state. And by the same power of 
 association, men whose moral sense is overcast 
 may be brought back to commune with themselves 
 as they once were, — may see glimmerings of by- 
 gone beatitudes, and be purified and humanized 
 by the glimpses they have caught of a holier state 
 of existence once theirs. If we can only succeed 
 in turning up a corner, a very little corner, of the 
 right side of the stuff, there is good hope that we 
 may soon see it lifted by the mild breath of favor- 
 able circumstance, rolling over, fold after fold, 
 until we can no longer see anything of the wrong. 
 July, 1 86 1. 
 
ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 I AM growing old. 
 I do not mean that I am bed-ridden or 
 chair-ridden ; that I am blind, or lame, or deaf. 
 I read without spectacles, and I walk my four 
 miles under the hour without fatigue. But, for all 
 that, there are many things which say that age is 
 creeping upon me. I have left off pulling the gray 
 hairs out of my whiskers. I am glad when any 
 one helps me on with my great-coat. I go to sleep 
 at the Play. I have had a sharp touch of gout; 
 and I saw myself described, the other day, in print, 
 not unkindly, as a " literary veteran." So I sup- 
 pose that I am a veteran; and I have been just 
 thinking how I like it. 
 
 According to all received opinions, I ought not 
 to like it at all. I ought to feel very sad and 
 serious over my lost youth. It is certain that it 
 will never come back again. Once gone, it is gone 
 forever. I know that ; 
 
 " Nothing can bring back the hour 
 Of glory to the grass, of splendor to the flower." 
 
 The verdant, grassy, flowery state has lapsed into 
 the great limbo of the Past. It has become a 
 
 (140) 
 
ACCEPTING THE POSITION. 
 
 141 
 
 reminiscence. Am I therefore to bewail it? or is 
 it wiser to accept the situation ? Accept it ! ay, 
 and more than that, — accept and be grateful for it, 
 throwing up my magnificats in full faith that, if the 
 glory and the splendor have departed, new glories 
 and new splendors have taken their place. 
 
 It is a very pleasant thought that Life is made 
 up of compensations. All Nature teaches this one 
 grand lesson. There is seed-time, and there is 
 summer. There is harvest, and there is winter. 
 When autumn comes upon us, — when the roses 
 have long since gone, and the leaves on the trees 
 are sere and yellow, — are we to regret that it is no 
 longer summer and that the greenery has departed? 
 Have not the rich tints of the autumnal foliage 
 peculiar beauties of their own ? As time takes 
 away, so it gives ; as it empties, so it replenishes. 
 There is a process of restoration and compensation 
 ever at work in the physical world ; and is it not so 
 also in the moral ? You have lost a parent, but 
 you have gained a child. Do you not see revived in 
 your daughter the calm, clear brow and the sweet, 
 mild eyes of your mother, as you last saw her, when 
 you were a little child? You must not expect to 
 enjoy at the same time the beatitudes of the Past 
 and of the Present. But I am afraid that there 
 are some whose nature it is rather to deplore what 
 they have lost, than to rejoice in what they have 
 gained. They say that " the beautiful has vanished, 
 and returns not;" instead of believing in the great 
 
1 42 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 truth that it is continually recreating and renew- 
 ing itself. 
 
 And, after all, what is it that w r e lose by grow- 
 ing old? Is it much more than the fruit loses 
 when it ripens. We lose our greenness — our raw- 
 ness — our crudeness ; and surely maturity is better 
 than these. But maturity, it is said, is the fore- 
 runner of decay. Well, O Wiseman! what then? 
 It was one wiser than thou, albeit a heathen teacher, 
 who said, in venerable Sanskrit — 
 
 "Weep not ! Life the hired nurse is, holding us a little space; 
 Death, the mother, who does take us back into our proper place." 
 
 This from the Book of Good Counsels, O Wiseman! 
 — known to Orientalists as the Hitopadcsa, — written 
 centuries before we had even the glimmer of a 
 literature of our own. But let us look at the 
 matter less seriously, thinking, first of all, what 
 maturity replaces. We all know how fond are 
 the poets and romancers of discoursing upon the 
 joyousness, the insouciance, of youth; but we hear 
 little of its embarrassments, its anxieties, its morti- 
 fications. If there be one faith more blindly ac- 
 cepted than all others by the world, it is that 
 freedom from care and trouble is the blissful im- 
 munity of childhood and early youth ; that these 
 burdens increase in volume and press more heavily 
 upon us as we advance in years, and are griev- 
 ous only in the maturity and the decay of our 
 lives. If children were to write essays and truth- 
 
TERRORS OF CHILDHOOD. 143 
 
 fully to record their experiences, I have very 
 little doubt as to what they would say upon this 
 subject. And I believe, too, that the testimony of 
 very many grown-up men, looking back through 
 a vista of thirty or forty years, would be very 
 conclusive against the carelessness and lighthead- 
 edness of childhood. In the ordinary commerce 
 of adult life, there is probably nothing half so 
 distressing as the night-fears of the young, — the 
 horrible dread of solitude and darkness, which 
 crushes the childish heart. There are some sen- 
 sitive and excitable children whose lives are em- 
 bittered by these vague apprehensions of night 
 dangers, of which ghosts and thieves are the most 
 tremendous, for all the latter part of each day is 
 overclouded by the dreadful shadow of approach- 
 ing bedtime. A great deal might be said — and, 
 indeed, a great deal has been said, in divers places, 
 very much to the point — about want of care in 
 nurses, and want of judgment in parents; but I 
 am not writing to expose omissions or to suggest 
 remedies, but simply to state facts ; and the nursery 
 horrors of which I speak are very grave facts, — 
 grave even in the retrospect. Yet we talk about 
 the cloudless happiness of childhood as though 
 children never knew a care. 
 
 And has schoolboy life no cares, no anxieties, 
 no terrors ? There is the big bully, or the trucu- 
 lent usher, or the fellow you ought to fight and yet 
 can't quite bring yourself to do it; the debt to the 
 
144 0N GROWING OLD. 
 
 itinerant pastrycook, of which he reminds you with 
 an indelicacy of which in after-life your tailor is 
 quite incapable ; the prize worked for, toiled for, 
 with vast brain-sweat, and mighty sacrifice of self, 
 grand heroic surrender even of the pleasures and 
 privileges of fine weather and the cricket-season, 
 and yet not gained after all. And even that 
 cricket-season, has it not its own peculiar crop of 
 bitterness ? A bad innings sends many a fellow 
 unhappy to bed. On grand occasions, such as that 
 half-yearly "match with the town," a disaster of 
 this kind is pure wretchedness for a fortnight; ay, 
 and for longer, if the holidays do not charitably 
 intervene. I doubt whether the fates have anything 
 half so bitter as this in store for our latter days. 
 To be booked, by the general voice of the school, 
 as good at least for thirty runs, and to go out, 
 branded, disgraced, with that terrible round O to 
 your name ! The dreadful feeling of descent and 
 humiliation ; the knowledge that you have dis- 
 appointed your friends, and given a triumph to 
 your enemies; the self-reproach, the self-contempt, 
 with which you are burdened, as though you had 
 really been only an impostor : they are truly such 
 tremendous inflictions that the wonder is that you 
 make your crestfallen way to the tent, and do not 
 utterly perish before the next boy has taken your 
 place. Talk of the elasticity of youth! How soon 
 does the schoolboy recover from that round O ? 
 How soon does he regain his serenity of mind after 
 
SORROWS OF BOYHOOD. 
 
 145 
 
 missing that catch at cover-point which would have 
 extinguished the Town's best man and turned the 
 tide of victory in favor of the School ? Talk of 
 the generosity of youth ! In the agony of his own 
 humiliation, what boy so generous as to desire his 
 successor at the wicket to attach a large score to his 
 name? Does not his heart warm to the fellow who 
 surrenders like himself to the first ball? Well, as 
 we grow older, we doubtless have our failures, our 
 distresses, our envies, and. our jealousies ; and I am 
 not now saying that in adult life we may be bowled 
 out first ball with perfect composure. Spoken 
 literally, it might not be to the point; meta- 
 phorically, it might not be true. All I mean to 
 say is that there are few keener mortifications — 
 few so difficult to bear — as those which beset us 
 in early life, and that this kind of juvenile bank- 
 ruptcy preys upon the spirits and really wears 
 the heart with an attrition as great as that which 
 far greater failures subject us to in after-life. It is 
 very well to say, "What does it matter? — a boy 
 may be a very good boy, and yet may fail to 
 defend his wicket, and may add nothing to the 
 score." But is his reputation no matter? Is it 
 nothing that the hero-worship which once attended 
 him has gone down with his stumps ? In school- 
 boy life there are no set-offs and compensations as 
 there are in after-years, and there is no philosophy 
 to make the most of them if there were. A hun^ 
 dred — perhaps, five hundred — young hearts have 
 10 
 
146 ON GROWING OLD.. 
 
 suddenly cooled towards their idol, and come, in a 
 moment, to regard it as an empty and pretentious 
 sham. 
 
 We talk of the simplicity, the singleness, the 
 transparent truth of boyhood ; but there are no 
 such arrant impostors as boys. They go through 
 all sorts of penances — martyrdoms, almost — just 
 for the sake of appearances. I remember now, with 
 a feeling of wonder, the things which we used to do 
 in mere boastfulness, — things that we would have 
 fain left undone, but that we thought it "fine" to 
 do them. What braggart absurdities we committed 
 in those days, with inward fear and trembling! 
 What would induce us, in later life, to go through 
 such self-incurred punishments ? Even those 
 school-feasts of which we talked so much before- 
 hand were terrible inflictions when the time came. 
 We went to bed at eight or nine o'clock, and the 
 feast could not come off until the doctor and his 
 family were in bed. So we kept ourselves awake, 
 struggling against the inroads of sleep, till near 
 midnight (taking it, perhaps, in turns to watch for 
 an hour), weary, hungry, and athirst, wishing 
 heartily that the veal-pies and lobsters, the port- 
 wine, or the ingredients of punch, were anywhere 
 but behind our beds. When the time came for 
 eating, we had generally passed the esurient stage, 
 and the promised enjoyment was flat and feeble. 
 We lived in perpetual fear of being " caught out," 
 and sometimes we were. Anyhow, we were ex- 
 
JUVENILE AUDACITIES. i 4 y 
 
 ceedingly sick next morning (and, perhaps, for 
 some days afterwards), and would have been very 
 sorry for what we had done, if it had not been for 
 the pleasure of talking about " such fun." There 
 was an ingenious process of substituting removable 
 screws for the nails which kept the wooden panels 
 of which the walls of our room were constructed, — 
 a process which enabled us to go into the town at 
 night, when we were supposed to be asleep, — a 
 performance which was considered the very height 
 of puerile daring. I remember that the audacity of 
 myself and an adventurous comrade culminated in 
 a visit to the theater, half-price, when we sat in 
 the dress-circle, and witnessed the last act of Jane 
 Shore and an after-piece. I was exceedingly glad 
 to find myself in bed again, but I was proud of the 
 feat next morning. It was an immense sacrifice of 
 the Present to the Future. And when I think over 
 it now, I am inclined to think that it is out of such 
 sacrifices as this that our maturer heroism arises. 
 I wonder whether any one who volunteers for a 
 forlorn-hope ever likes it. In the schoolboy freaks 
 of which I have spoken, we had no sustaining sense 
 of duty ; what we did was precisely the reverse of 
 our duty; but we were equally eager for the ap- 
 plause of our comrades. If we would rather remain 
 in bed at fourteen, perhaps we would rather remain 
 in camp at two-and-twenty; but we do not. For 
 the love of glory takes us out of our security and 
 impels us to do what is dangerous and distasteful 
 
1 48 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 to us. I do not, therefore, say that even these 
 puerile audacities have not their uses; there are 
 the germs of better things in them. But when we 
 set these things down among the pleasures of 
 youth, and talk of its sincerity and truthfulness, 
 I cannot help thinking that we succumb to a vague 
 tradition. One of the great advantages of age is 
 that we are not wont to disturb ourselves by doing 
 things that we do not like, simply for the look of 
 the thing. When a friend takes me into his stables 
 and, pointing out a spindle-legged, vicious-eyed 
 mare, who sets her ears back at the sight of me, 
 and tells me I shall ride her to-morrow, do I mind 
 saying, " No, thank you !" ? But when I was a 
 stripling I would have mounted a flying dragon, 
 had one been offered to me, and professed a liking 
 for that sort of cattle. There are, doubtless, some 
 men who never outlive their vanity. There was 
 
 my old schoolfellow, C S , a year or two 
 
 my senior, who never could shake off the boast- 
 fulness of his youth. Endeavoring not long ago, 
 in the presence of myself and others, to witch us 
 with his noble horsemanship, he sprang upon the 
 back of his charger with such a show of juvenile 
 agility that, like vaulting ambition, he overleaped 
 himself, and fell on the other side, flat on his face. 
 If one of my boys had done that, I should have . 
 been sorry for him ; but, in my schoolfellow, I 
 could not help thinking that he was old enough 
 to know better. Such follies and failures, how- 
 
HOBBLEDEHO YISM. 
 
 149 
 
 ever, are only the exceptions which prove the 
 rule. 
 
 But of all the different seasons of life, I believe 
 that which is most laden with its own peculiar 
 distresses is the season of incipient manhood. 
 The sensitiveness of hobbledehoyism is very afflict- 
 ing. I have heard it said that all this has passed 
 away, — that times are changed, that youth is 
 changed with them, and that the rising genera- 
 tion are distinguished by an amount of cool 
 assurance to which, a quarter of a century ago, 
 striplinghood was utterly a stranger. I do not 
 undertake to settle this point. Possibly it may be 
 so. Possibly the cool assurance of which we hear 
 so much is but the outward cloak of that real want 
 of self-reliance, of that nervous uncertainty, which 
 is the normal state of those who have not yet 
 secured their position. The very bluster of youth 
 has something of timidity in it. I know, at least, 
 it had in my time, a quarter of a century ago. 
 What agonies I endured in that state of adoles- 
 cence ! What fearful turmoils of the mind there 
 were, what fears, what fightings, on that terrible 
 bridge which unites the opposite banks of boyhood 
 and manhood, — when, to speak without a metaphor, 
 you do not like to be thought a boy, whilst others 
 are scarcely minded to treat you as a man ! There 
 are some who may laugh at this. I vow that there 
 is nothing to me laughable in the recollection. 
 The sufferings of hobbledehoyism have been set 
 
150 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 forth with pathetic humor, in the persons of 
 David Copperfield and Pip of the Great Expecta- 
 tions, with a fidelity which vividly recalls my own 
 miserable experiences on the bridge. In those 
 days, with an insane ambition, one went in for 
 everything. If one could have limited one's 
 aspirations, it would have been comparatively a 
 light matter to be dragged up into manhood. 
 But, with the unlimited assumptions of youth, 
 what roughnesses have to be encountered ! You 
 wish to be accounted handsome, well dressed, well 
 mannered, well informed, active, brave, clever, a 
 fellow who fears nothing, who can do anything, 
 and who knows everything in the world. In after- 
 life, you know that pretentiousness of this kind 
 has its own death-warrant written on its forehead. 
 But very young men never acknowledge ignorance 
 or incapacity. Their struggles to maintain a 
 character for manhood are painful in the extreme. 
 They do not know that the manliest thing of all is 
 to keep quiet. It is their misfortune to be restless 
 and uneasy. The fact is, that, the world being all 
 new and strange to them, they cannot help think- 
 ing that they are new and strange in the eyes of 
 the world, and that therefore the world is con- 
 tinually looking at them, instead of treating them 
 with the most sovereign indifference and cold- 
 blooded unconcern. That pimple on your chin, 
 Juvenis, has made you unhappy for a week. You 
 have looked at it every morning on first getting 
 
 
JUVENILE ANXIETIES. I5I 
 
 up. I will not say what you have done to diminish 
 its size and its rubicundity, only increasing the evil 
 by every new effort to remove it ; and yet no one 
 has observed that pimple on your chin, — no one 
 certainly has given a thought to it. And that un- 
 toward splash on your white neckcloth, dinner- 
 bound, which makes you vow never to travel, 
 en costume, in Hansom again, — who sees the spot, 
 and who would concern himself about it if he did? 
 Not men who have got dinners to eat, or girls to 
 flirt with, or anecdotes to ventilate with effect 
 Take it as a rule, O Juvenis, that we are all of us 
 thinking about ourselves a great deal too much to 
 think about you. You talk : you wish to display 
 your knowledge, and you make a slip. You find 
 it out yourself, and you are unhappy. You have 
 an uneasy conception of the blunder almost as 
 soon as you have made it; you are out in your 
 geography, or your history, or you have given a 
 wrong date; you consult a score of volumes when 
 you get home, find that you really have blundered, 
 and are miserable for a week under the impression 
 that you have irremediably damaged your reputa- 
 tion and henceforth will be accounted an ass. You 
 have found yourself out, my friend ; but, take my 
 word for it, no one else has found you out ; no one 
 has discovered your blunder or given you and your 
 talk a second thought. But we are not easily 
 taught that, however much we may think about 
 ourselves, other people think very little about us, 
 
152 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 and that in most cases we make no more impression 
 on society than a snowflake on a tablet of stone. 
 
 This continual struggle about what others will 
 think of you, this incessant inquietude concerning 
 trifles, is, I repeat, one of the main unhappinesses 
 peculiar to youth. We gain our experience, even 
 in the_ smallest matters, after much perturbation of 
 spirit, — much sore and grievous travail. I re- 
 member that when I first began to pay visits by 
 myself, just after leaving school, I was terribly 
 disquited by the agonizing uncertainty as to what 
 I ought to say to the servant who opened the door. 
 The great question, concerning which there were 
 such inward conflicts throughout the journey, was 
 whether I ought to say, " Is Mr. Robinson at 
 home ?" or, " Is your master at home ?" The only 
 thing I cared to know was which was the most 
 manly, man-about-town form of question to be 
 addressed to the footman or the parlor-maid on 
 opening the door. Of course, I only thought 
 about myself, for the vanity of youth is egregiously 
 selfish. I know, at all events, now, which is the 
 form of question most pleasing to the door-opener; 
 and I am quite content with that knowledge. It 
 may be inquired, why should youth suffer itself to 
 be made wretched by such doubts as these (and I 
 have only cited one of many familiar illustrations 
 that might be adduced), when it is so easy, in any 
 circumstance of life, to ask some one older and 
 more experienced than yourself, what is the right 
 
 ;ht 
 
VANITY OF YOUTH. 
 
 153 
 
 thing to do ? A man who reasons in this wise can 
 never have been young. "Easy"! Why, it is in 
 youth the hardest thing in the world. Does youth 
 ever confess ignorance, — ever ask advice ? It would 
 rather die first ! You or I may smile to see our 
 boys assume the veteran air, and do things for the 
 first time with an assumption of experience, as 
 thoug*h they had been doing the same thing all 
 their lives. But if we look to our own early days 
 the feeling will be rather one of pity than amuse- 
 ment, for we shall remember how we ourselves 
 suffered in this transition-state, when we wore the 
 toga virilis with a jaunty air, as though we were 
 used to it, and it was continually tripping us up. 
 
 There is absolute misery in pretentiousness of 
 all kinds, and youth is infinitely more pretentious 
 than age. There are some men, I have said, who 
 never outlive their vanity ; but, as a general rule, 
 it may be maintained that the longer we live the 
 less we care what others think of us, and the less 
 we strive after effect. I do not mean to say that in 
 these strivings of youth there may not be some- 
 thing good and noble, — " strivings, because our 
 nature is to strive." They are the outward expres- 
 sion of what the same poet * calls " our inborn, 
 uninstructed impulses" — the tentative, experi- 
 mental action of powers immature and undecided. 
 A young man feels that he has something in him, 
 
 * Robert Browning, in Paracelsus. 
 
154 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 and, not knowing in what form Providence designs 
 that it shall come forth, he is continually making 
 outlets for it, first in one direction, then in another, 
 as though the whole circle of human knowledge 
 were not too vast for his intellectual exploration. 
 We are often, therefore, astounded by the ambition 
 of youth ; but we ought not to be offended by it. 
 It is sure to bring its own punishment. To sow 
 in vanity is to reap in mortification. We learn, in 
 time, how little we can ever know, and how ridicu- 
 lous we make ourselves by pretending to know 
 everything. When a man has learnt to say, " I 
 am as ignorant as a child on this or that subject," 
 or, "as powerless as a baby to do this or that 
 thing," he has mastered one of the great difficulties 
 of life; he has entered upon a new stage of his 
 career. If, however, he says it boastingly, scorn- 
 fully, he is a greater fool than if he pretended to 
 know, and to be able to do, everything. To affect 
 to consider the knowledge or the power which one 
 has not attained, not worth possessing, is simply 
 to write one's self an ass. There is no need, on the 
 other hand, of any great parade of humility. You 
 are a man. Be thankful for it. It is no humiliation 
 that you are not a god. If your neighbor knows 
 what you do not know, and can do what you can- 
 not do, the chances are that you know and can do 
 some things which are out of the circle of his 
 potentiality. You do not know one star from the 
 other, but you can put the Sakoontala into Greek 
 
 ' 
 
CONTENTMENT. 
 
 155 
 
 verse. You do not know the principle of the 
 diving-bell, but you could fortify a city in accord- 
 ance with the system of Cormantagne. You can- 
 not ride across country to hounds, but you can 
 take a round or two with the gloves with Jem 
 Mace and not have a worse appetite for your 
 dinner. Be content, then ; turn what you know 
 and what you can do to the best possible account ; 
 and be neither elated because you know so much, 
 nor depressed because you know so little. 
 
 If contentment of this kind contributes, as I 
 believe it very greatly does, to our happiness, Age 
 has a vast advantage over Youth. The great lesson 
 of life, the one of all others best worth learning, is 
 that which teaches us thoroughly to appreciate the 
 fact of the little that we know. This is a lesson 
 which no young person has ever yet learnt. There 
 is no royal road to it. We come upon it after a 
 long journey and after sore travail, foot-sore, sun- 
 burnt, wind-stained, and bramble-torn. There is 
 infinite satisfaction in it when we acquire it at last. 
 I came upon the great fact the other day, so 
 quaintly and pleasantly put that it made me happy 
 for some time, almost beyond precedent: — "Man 
 is necessarily so much of a fool, that it would be a 
 species of folly not to be a fool!' It is Philosopher 
 Pascal who writes this. As soon as ever you have 
 made up your mind that you are a fool, and that 
 it is altogether out of nature not to be a fool, a 
 measureless calm descends upon you. The con- 
 
156 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 viction, however, that at the best you are a very 
 poor creature, need not prevent you from diligently 
 striving to make yourself less poor. There are 
 degrees of folly, — different kinds of fools; and 
 though the greatest of all is he who thinketh him- 
 self wise, not far behind him is he who does not 
 strive to make himself as wise as he can. All 
 knowledge is of high worth, let a man but know it 
 well. A " smattering" of this or that is not to be 
 despised. " A little learning" — say, for example, of 
 surgery — may be the very reverse of " dangerous." 
 The principle of the tourniquet, applied in the 
 improvised shape of a pocket-handkerchief, has ere 
 now saved a man from bleeding to death. But I 
 believe we are of most use to our fellows by apply- 
 ing our little intellect to the mastery of some one 
 subject. The word mastery must be understood 
 only in a limited sense ; for true it is, as Pascal 
 justly philosophizes, that no man can know all that 
 is to be known about any one subject, let him give 
 his whole life to the study. 
 
 But still he may, as I have said, know quite 
 enough of his one subject to make him very useful 
 to his fellows, whilst it is the veriest accident if any 
 one of his numerous smatterings is turned to prof- 
 itable account. If a man devotes his life to the 
 study of pin-making, and makes better pins than 
 all the rest of the world, he by no means lives an 
 unprofitable life. A pin is a very small thing. It 
 is, indeed, a symbol of worthlessness. A " pin's 
 
NARROW SYMPA THIES. i$y 
 
 fee" is held to be next to nothing. But civilized 
 Humanity cannot do without pins; and the in- 
 ventor of a new pin — say, for example, a pin that 
 will fasten without pricking or scratching — would 
 be fairly entitled to take rank among the benefac- 
 tors of mankind. A button, too, is another little 
 thing. " Not worth a button" is an expression of 
 contempt. But to invent a really serviceable but- 
 ton would be a great effort of humanity, — a button 
 that will not play at " fast-and-loose," but will hold 
 fast, with an abiding sense of the purpose for which 
 it was invented. What agonies have we all endured 
 for want of such a button ! I would gladly send 
 my modest contribution towards a public testi- 
 monial in honor of the inventor of a really service- 
 able button. Any one who does something better 
 than every one else is to be accounted one of the 
 men of the age ; whilst your would-be Admirable 
 Crichtons, who squander their strength on many 
 vain things, are condemned to rot on Lethe's 
 wharf, as utterly unprofitable servants. 
 
 But we must take care that this concentration 
 of ourselves does not betray us into an error to 
 which, I am afraid, our natural egotism is prone. 
 I have glanced at this above, but it demands more 
 than a passing allusion. We must take care that 
 we do not come in time so to narrow our sympa- 
 thies, by continually dwelling upon our pins and 
 our buttons, as to believe that the world has 
 nothing else worth living for, — that mankind is 
 
158 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 divided into only two races of men, the makers 
 and the consumers of pins and buttons, and that 
 all beyond the great material fact of pindom and 
 buttondom is mere surplusage and refuse. Your 
 calling may be something higher than that of 
 making pins and buttons, or you may think that it 
 is, — still, your egotism is equally absurd. Was the 
 world made only that you should take cities, or 
 discover comets, or put odds and ends of mortality 
 together as the framework of extinct mammalia? 
 You may not quite think that ; but you may err 
 after a like fashion, though not in the same degree. 
 It is the commonest thing for men to attach undue 
 importance to their own pursuits, and in like pro- 
 portion to undervalue, somewhat scornfully per- 
 haps, the pursuits of others. It is a foolish, 
 small-minded thing to do, and the meaner the 
 occupation is, I am inclined to think, the greater 
 the store that is set by it. No honest occupa- 
 tion is in itself mean; but some pursuits are 
 doubtless less ennobling than others ; and money- 
 making, for the mere sake of making money, is 
 not, perhaps, the very highest. Now, you will find 
 that the conversation of men whose main object in 
 life it is to make money runs continually upon this 
 one subject, or is interlarded with references to it. 
 I confess that when I ask about this or that man 
 I do not, as a matter of course, wish to be told 
 " what he is worth," — worth in this case represent- 
 ing the money value of the man and nothing else. 
 
 ' 
 
RESPECT FOR MONEY. 
 
 1 59 
 
 When I was a younger man than I am now, these 
 utterly irrelevant allusions to the length of a man's 
 purse put me sorely out of temper. But this was 
 a mistake upon my part, almost as great as that 
 which so much annoyed me. What right had I 
 to be annoyed? I can hear men talk nowadays 
 about money-making without any feeling of con- 
 tempt. When I ask about Mr. Brown, or Sir John 
 Jones, wishing to know what sort of neighbor he, 
 is, whether he is hospitable and liberal, whether he 
 gives to the poor, whether he is well read, well 
 informed, a scholar, and a gentleman, I confess that 
 I do not much care to be told that he has £12,000 
 a year landed property, or that he made half a 
 million by railway-contracts. But why should I 
 go fuming and fretting and blustering to myself all 
 the way home, and vowing that I will never dine 
 with Nummosus again, because he will apply the 
 money standard to everything and talk as though 
 there were nothing but £ s. d. in the world ? It is 
 foolish, I say, in him to talk in this strain, but it is 
 more foolish in me to be vexed about it. Num- 
 mosus is an excellent fellow, — " warm," too ; he 
 knows what he is talking about. And who am I, 
 that I should go gasconading after this fashion, and 
 endeavoring to persuade myself that the money 
 element has nothing to do with it? If there be 
 one thing which we are all sure to learn by growing 
 old, it is that the money element has everything to 
 do with it. I was shocked, when I was a young 
 
l6o ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 man, because the first question asked, in my pres- 
 ence, on the arrival of news of a great fire, was 
 whether the buildings and contents were insured. 
 No thought of human life, of homes made desolate, 
 of wives made widows, or children fatherless, dis- 
 turbed the hearts of the inquirers. I do not expect 
 now, in such a case, to hear any other question. 
 I have just read, in Beamish's Life of Isambard 
 Brunei, that when news was brought to him that 
 his Battersea Sawmills were burnt down, his only 
 question was, " Is any one hurt ?" Nummosus will 
 tell you, perhaps, that the works were well insured. 
 I will not so read the anecdote of the great 
 engineer ; but I am afraid that it must be regarded 
 as an exceptional manifestation of humanity, and 
 that material property, for the most part, enters 
 into the calculation long before human life. 
 
 But I have been led by all this out of the line 
 which I had purposed to follow. I desired to show 
 that one of the great advantages of mature life is, 
 that we cease from those strivings after the mastery 
 of many things which end in disappointment and 
 mortification ; that we learn to measure our own 
 powers aright, to know how little we can do, how 
 small the space we occupy in the world. I do not 
 know that there is anything in the delusions of 
 youth which contributes so much to happiness as 
 this power of self-measurement, and the calm self- 
 reliance which attends it. 
 
SELF-RELIANCE OF AGE. 161 
 
 " Youth is soon gone — but why lament its going ? 
 What we were once we cannot always be. 
 Change is the law of life; the seasons three, 
 Each after each, of man's great year, of sowing, 
 Of reaping, and of gathering into store, 
 Follow each other quick. Men say we lose, 
 As we ascend life's green hillside, much more 
 Than we can ever gain, and oft deplore 
 ' Their youth and their brave hopes all dead and gone.' 
 Yet would I, were the offer made, refuse, 
 As one content to reap what he has sown, 
 To give for youth, with all its hopes and fears, 
 Its restless yearnings after things unknown, 
 The self-reliance of maturer years." 
 
 I cannot say how thoroughly my own heart echoes 
 all this. When you know what you can do and 
 what you cannot do, — what you are and what 
 you are not, — the voyage of life is comparatively 
 smooth sailing. You cease to be disturbed by vain 
 anxieties and restless discontents. You may have 
 failed, or you may have succeeded; but, anyhow, be 
 it success or be it failure, it is a fait accompli; you 
 accept your position, and you are, at all events, 
 tranquil. It is with life in the aggregate as with 
 the separate incidents of life. You may get rid 
 of a disturbing impression — of a painful anxiety 
 with respect to something of a vague and uncer- 
 tain issue — by passing over all the intermediate 
 lesser stages of evil and looking the worst possible 
 contingency in the face. The inspired writer, in 
 that grand old epic known as the Book of Job, 
 wishing to describe a vision of the night supremely 
 
1 62 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 terrible and awe-inspiring, makes the patriarch to 
 say that he " could not discern the shape thereof.'"' 
 The spectral horror culminated in the indistinct- 
 ness of the thing. So is it in the ordinary affairs 
 of life. It is the formless and conjectural that 
 disturb us. Failure itself is far better than the 
 fear of failure. We can reconcile ourselves to it 
 when it comes. But the common lot of life is 
 neither to succeed nor to fail, but to hit the line of 
 mediocrity, half-way between success and failure. 
 Whatever it may be, the only real wisdom and the 
 only real happiness consist in reconciling yourself 
 to it, with boundless faith that it is all right. As 
 long as, having the third or fourth place, you be- 
 lieve that you ought to have the first or second, 
 you are a wretch, and there is no peace for you. 
 But men who have lived forty or fifty years in the 
 world have generally had this sort of nonsense 
 knocked out of them. They have, for the most 
 part, learnt to believe, what young men are very 
 prone to deny, that the world is, on the whole, 
 tolerably just to its inmates, and that most men 
 get pretty well what they deserve. Neglected 
 merit is, in reality, a much rarer thing than at 
 the outset of life we believe. At five-and-twenty, 
 a man often thinks that all the world is in a con- 
 spiracy against him. At five-and-forty, he acknowl- 
 edges that the only conspirators have been his 
 indolence and his incapacity, — or, perhaps, his 
 presumption and self-conceit. He ceases then to 
 
SENSITIVENESS. ^3 
 
 give way to vain repinings, and humbly, thank- 
 fully acknowledges that his slender merits have 
 met with ample reward. 
 
 I heard it said, not long ago, by a man whose 
 opinion I very much respect, that in the maturity 
 of our years we are much more impressionable, 
 much more easily stabbed and lacerated by ex- 
 ternal circumstances, and that our wounds much 
 less readily heal, than in the elastic season of youth. 
 I cannot say how heartily I dissent from this as a 
 general proposition. It is not to be denied that if a 
 man of fifty is fairly knocked down on the road of 
 life, he does not pick himself up so readily as a man 
 of five-and-twenty. But these knock-down blows 
 are very rarely delivered. Life is made up of small 
 joys and small sorrows; and the longer we live 
 the better we learn not to disturb ourselves about 
 trifles. A man who has fought the battle of life — 
 who has encountered some stern realities in the 
 course of his career — is not very likely to suffer 
 himself to be made wretched by imaginary evils. 
 Above all, as I have before said, he is not, as in- 
 experience is, continually fretted by the thought of 
 what others are thinking of him. He is assured of 
 his position. He knows what it is, and whence it 
 is derived, and he does not disturb himself about 
 circumstances which do not really affect it. And 
 so with regard to the real evils of life ; with an 
 increase of years comes an increase of faith : we 
 have somehow or other, even when our troubles 
 
164 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 are at the worst, an assured conviction that we 
 shall surmount them. The past gives us confi- 
 dence in the future. We have lived down other 
 troubles, and shall we not live down these ? So I 
 think that whilst in advanced years we are much 
 less prone than in youth to disturb ourselves about 
 imaginary evils, we have far more strength to con- 
 tend with real ones, and far more faith to live 
 them down. It will be suggested, perhaps, that 
 over and above all this, there is the fact that we 
 grow case-hardened, — that the continual attrition 
 of trouble renders us less sensitive, less alive to its 
 influence. But I would fain take a higher view 
 of the matter than this, and believe that the large 
 and sustaining patience of maturer years proceeds 
 from an increased knowledge of ourselves and an 
 increased faith in the goodness of God. 
 
 And it is this knowledge, this faith, which leads 
 us to cease from all vague repinings and regrets. 
 It is hard to say how much misery men make for 
 themselves by lamenting either that circumstances 
 had not worked differently for their good, or that 
 they themselves had not done differently. But, 
 in all probability, the circumstances which we de- 
 plore are just those which have most contributed 
 to our advancement, and the way in which we have 
 gone about our work is the only one in which we 
 could have done it at all. To take the illustration 
 that comes most readily, — a mean and familiar one, 
 perhaps, but sufficiently suggestive, — am I, when 
 
REPININGS. j6$ 
 
 I have finished this essay, to regret that I did not 
 write it in a different way, — that I did not apply 
 myself more steadily and perseveringly to it, — 
 never once turning aside or suffering myself to be 
 distracted from my work, instead of getting up 
 every five minutes, going to the window, strolling 
 into another room, drawing faces on the blotting- 
 paper, reading the newspaper, and deviating into 
 other irregularities? Of what use is it to say that 
 I should have written the essay sooner, and that it 
 would have been much better when written, if I 
 had done none of these things ? I have the pro- 
 foundest possible conviction that I could not have 
 done it in any other way. 
 
 " I am broken and trained 
 To my old habits. They are part of me." 
 
 So, too, in the larger concerns of life, we may be 
 sure that our way of doing our work is a part of 
 ourselves, that we could not have done otherwise, 
 any more than we could have been otherwise — 
 taller, stronger, or cleverer than we are. 
 
 And then as to repinings, — vain, idle complaints 
 that circumstances have not been favorable to us, 
 — that if this or that thing had not happened, how 
 different it would have been ! Ay, different ! But 
 let it not be assumed that to be different is to be 
 better. One of the lessons which we learn by 
 growing old is that all things work together, not 
 for evil, but for good. Let us think calmly and 
 
1 66 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 quietly over the reverses which we have sustained 
 at different periods of our lives; of the disappoint- 
 ments which we have encountered ; of accidents 
 which, at the time of their occurrence, we con- 
 sidered to be gigantic calamities. How small they 
 appear even in themselves, looking at them as we 
 approach the summit of the hill of life ! But think 
 of them in connection with later events and with 
 our present position, and the chances are that we 
 shall come to recognize them as "blessings in dis- 
 guise." I heard only last night of a man who 
 owed everything to a heavy blow in early life. 
 He wished, when he married, to insure his life, 
 but the Offices rejected him. This made him care- 
 ful and thrifty; and the end was that he died at the 
 age of eighty-five, worth a quarter of a million. It 
 will be often thus. By some grand reverse of for- 
 tune, in our boyhood, perhaps, we were left to 
 struggle broad-breasted against the stream of life, 
 instead of quietly floating down with the current ; 
 we were cast upon our own resources, compelled 
 to put forth our own strength, with nothing to aid 
 us but our God-given manhood, and lo ! the result. 
 Are we not wiser, greater, perhaps richer, for the 
 reverse which in early youth we so often lamented? 
 I speak only in the plain, sober, demonstrable lan- 
 guage of truth, when I say that I owe everything, 
 humanly speaking, that makes life dear to me, to 
 a reverse of fortune in my boyhood. Hard work 
 has been my heritage. I shudder to think what 
 
HERITAGES. 
 
 167 
 
 I might have been if existence had gone more 
 smoothly with me, — if action had not encountered 
 passion in the great battle of life, — in a word, if I 
 had had more leisure to be wicked. It is a com- 
 mon case. Our very misfortunes save us. It may 
 seem very hard at the time. Some one has got 
 our heritage, as far as money makes heritages, and 
 we bewail our miserable lot; but there is one heri- 
 tage to which no man can play the part of Jacob, 
 and be even once a supplanter, — the heritage of our 
 own strong arm or our own strong brain. To be 
 "lord of ourselves" is not to have "a heritage of 
 woe." The real heritage of woe is not to be lord 
 of ourselves, but to be lorded over by wealth, by 
 luxury, or by pride. If a man is really lord of him- 
 self, there is very little woe in his portion. Almost 
 all the real evils of life come to us from a want 
 of self-domination. As a general rule, it may be 
 said that the more a man has to do, the more he is 
 master of himself. The best heritage, therefore, 
 that a man can have is Work. He who laments 
 that hard fate has compelled him to work is little 
 better than a fool. 
 
 I began this trick of essay- writing very early in 
 life ; and, whilst I have been correcting this paper 
 for the press, accident has brought before me a 
 passage in an essay which I wrote before I was 
 twenty years old. The paper, which was one of 
 many, was published in an Indian periodical at the 
 time. I refer to it now because it discourses — 
 
1 68 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 visum teneatis ! — on one of the advantages of grow- 
 ing old, — indirectly, or rather inversely, for the 
 subject is memory ; and i humbly think that now 
 I should not wish to alter it. " One of the most 
 manifest advantages of Memory over Hope" — this 
 I wrote in 1834 — "is, that as we grow older, the 
 former increases, while the latter diminishes. Every 
 day gives us less to desire, more to remember. 
 Memory moves with the past; Hope with the 
 future. I put little faith in anything that grows 
 smaller every hour of the day. . . . Memory 
 is like a magnifying-glass : the farther we remove 
 it from the object we are inspecting, the larger 
 that object will appear. Every day, whilst it gives 
 us fresh food for remembrance, renders our re- 
 collections more beautiful and bright. . . . Thus 
 we go on daily increasing in happiness, until old 
 age steals upon us with gradual advances, and 
 we have gained the summit of the mountain of 
 life . . ." There is more in the same strain ; but 
 I have quoted enough. Such utterances as these 
 are among the audacities of youth, of which I have 
 before spoken. But they are not the less true. I 
 was told by a local critic, — one of the kindest and 
 best of men, — from whose criticism I have taken 
 the words quoted, that I was wrong. " Chateau- 
 briand observes," he said, "'that the pleasures of 
 youth reproduced by memory are ruins viewed by 
 torchlight.' We think Chateaubriand is right, and 
 we are in a better position to form a judgment on 
 
PLEASURES OF MEMORY. 169 
 
 that point than Mr. Kaye can be for twenty years 
 to come." And now I have the advantage, in re- 
 spect of years, over my friendly critic, who has long 
 since passed away to his rest ; and I still abide by 
 the belief that the blessings of memory are greater 
 than the blessings of hope. " We know in part, 
 and we prophesy in part." It was wellnigh all 
 prophecy when I wrote, and now it is wellnigh all 
 knowledge. And I cling to the old faith, and for 
 the old reason: that memory increases whilst hope 
 diminishes — on this side of the grave. What have 
 we old fellows to look for but the eternal rest? 
 It is much, — very much, — everything. But I wrote 
 as a worldling, and I write now as a worldling, 
 and I am not fit to discuss graver questions. Men 
 think in their younger days that it would be a fine 
 thing to be a husband ; a fine thing to be a father ; 
 a fine thing to be a grandfather ; a fine thing to 
 write a book, to be praised in the newspapers, to 
 be quoted in Parliament, to become a member of 
 the House, perhaps a member of the Government; 
 and when all this is done, what is earthly hope to 
 them ? But the delights of memory are inex- 
 haustible. Our first friendship, our first love (per- 
 haps our last), our first success, — we can live them 
 all over again when we please, and the older we 
 are, the more vivid is the remembrance. " jfuvat, 
 oh! meminisse beati temporis /" These reminis- 
 cences may be " ruins seen by torchlight." But 
 ruins, seen by torchlight or by moonlight, are 
 
170 
 
 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 beautifully picturesque. I have seen Melrose 
 and Furness by these lights ; and day took away 
 half their beauties. 
 
 Again, it is to be observed that as we grow old 
 we arrive at a just conception of the great truth 
 that the pains and pleasures of life are pretty 
 equally distributed over the world. We come 
 to learn that if in some one respect Providence 
 has been more chary of her favors to us than to 
 our friends, in others we have had our full share, or 
 more than our full share, — good measure, perhaps, 
 pressed down and running over. If money has 
 been scanty, we have enjoyed a large measure of 
 health. If we have been disappointed in our pur- 
 suit of fame, we have been compensated by a rich 
 portion of love. We are sure to find our compen- 
 sation somewhere. And looking at the lives of 
 our neighbors, shall we not perceive that, if they 
 have escaped some peculiar sufferings which we 
 have been compelled to bear, they have some 
 sorrows of their own from which we ourselves are 
 exempt ? My brother has a better house than I 
 have ; he has more servants to minister to him ; 
 he has more money in the funds ; — but my children 
 are healthier than his : thanks be to God, the doc- 
 tor seldom darkens my doors. Why, then, should 
 I complain ? We all suffer, — high and low, man 
 and brute. I take up, as I write, a little red book 
 about Garibaldi at Capirra, — not in any hope of 
 finding a thought or an illustration to aid me, but 
 
COMPENSA TIONS. 
 
 I/I 
 
 in the indulgence of a desultory habit of which I 
 have spoken above, — and I come upon a passage 
 about the great liberator and his cows. The " cows," 
 we are told by Colonel Vecchi, were sick, nigh unto 
 death, from eating a poisonous herb called the 
 ferola, and Garibaldi administered to them lumps 
 of sugar and sage precepts at the same time. 
 " Poor things !" he said, " you also have your suf- 
 ferings : dreadful bodily pains instead of heartaches ! 
 Have not I also my ferola, in the bad treatment of 
 my comrades in arms, and in the sufferings of the 
 people in Rome and Venetia ?" * No doubt. We 
 all have our own particular ferola. We all have 
 some subtle poison or other working into our blood- 
 But I am not sure that, if I had been Garibaldi's 
 Boswell, I should have told this story. Real wis- 
 dom consists not in seeking occasions to convince 
 ourselves, or to convince others, that we have suf- 
 fered like our neighbors of the human or of the 
 brute family, but in consoling ourselves with the 
 reflection that we have enjoyments like unto theirs. 
 If Garibaldi had one day seen his cows ruminating 
 in the sun, and had apostrophized them, saying, 
 " Happy creatures ! you have your delights ! And 
 have not I too basked in the sun? Has it not 
 been mine to chew the cud of sweet fancies? Have 
 
 * I observe, whilst I am correcting this sheet for the press, that 
 a recent essayist, writing on " Cynicism," has placed Garibaldi 
 among the " non-cynics." Perhaps the writer may think differ- 
 ently should he ever read the passage in the text. — (1870.) 
 
172 
 
 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 I not ruminated — humbly, but thankfully — over 
 the applause of a free people, the love of noble 
 natures, the liberty God has suffered me, weak 
 instrument as I am, to achieve for a great and a 
 grateful nation?" Would it not be pleasanter, I 
 say, to look at this side of the stuff, than at the 
 frayed ends suggesting that poisonous ferola ? Let 
 us all think of the beatitudes that are continually 
 hovering above us. Let us so believe in them — 
 
 " That neither evil tongues, 
 Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 
 Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 
 The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
 Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
 Our settled faith, that all which we behold 
 Is full of blessings." 
 
 The poet, as all men know, writes of the great 
 solace of external nature. I too have pondered 
 these same things, and on the same spot. But it 
 is not permitted to working men, save in blessed 
 autumnal holidays, to throw up praises and thanks- 
 givings skywards from the dear banks of the 
 " sylvan Wye." Still, may not we carry the same 
 philosophy into our offices and counting-houses, or 
 something even still better ? For I hold that even 
 in this Wordsworthian passage there is something 
 of paradox and contradiction, arising from the 
 incompleteness of the poet's faith in the doctrine 
 which he professes. Why, in a world so full of 
 blessings, is the intercourse of daily life to 
 
 be 
 
INTEREST OF DAILY LIFE. 
 
 173 
 
 accounted dreary? In the commonest things and 
 in the most commonplace people, there is some- 
 thing to interest, if we do not willfully close our 
 eyes against it It is our own fault if we do not 
 see it. It is our own egotism that blinds us. If 
 we could be successfully couched for that moral 
 cataract, we should see plainly that it is not a 
 dreary desert, but a cheerful garden, that stretches 
 out before us, even in the most beaten paths of 
 unexciting town life. Those " thoroughly unin- 
 teresting," " slow fellows" whom we meet every 
 day, and whom Adolescens so despises, have all 
 their own little romances ; their hearts throb as 
 quickly as our own ; there is tenderness of feeling, 
 chivalry of sentiment, beneath the outer crust; 
 and perhaps the most where you least look to 
 find it. 
 
 And through this fuller recognition of the deep 
 human interest that underlies the great expanse of 
 Commonplace, increase of years brings us increase 
 of happiness. We enlarge our sympathies as we 
 grow old. The scales of egotism fall from our 
 eyes, and we see an inner life of beauty and be- 
 nignity beneath what is outwardly unattractive and 
 unpromising. I know nothing in the blundering, 
 puppy-blind, self-importance of youth, for which 
 I would give this deeper insight into life, — this 
 enlarged love of humanity. Of course, there is 
 another love greater still, of which this human 
 love is but a part; and it must not be thought 
 
I 74 ON GROWING OLD. 
 
 that I ignore it if I do not speak of it here. If it 
 does not grow broader, and strike deeper, as we 
 advance in life, we grow old to very little purpose. 
 But it is not for me, as I have said, to write of 
 these things : and my space is exhausted. I have 
 but thrown up a few chance thoughts, looking at 
 the subject in its worldly aspects ; and even in that 
 light there is far more to say of it than I have at- 
 tempted to say in this humble essay. What I have 
 said, I have at least said gratefully and reverently; 
 and I hope that it may bring comfort and content- 
 ment to the minds of others, who, like myself, 
 have just awakened to the thought that they are 
 Growing Old. 
 
 April t 1862, 
 
 
ON TOLERATION. 
 
 SOME years ago, under the same good au- 
 spices, I wrote an essay On Growing Old. 
 Since that time I have grozvn old; and I have 
 been thinking what I have gained by it. Per- 
 haps the sum-total is much ; perhaps little. I 
 am not now going to inquire. I would merely 
 discourse upon one of my gains. I trust that I 
 may use the first person plural and say that it 
 is great gain that as We grow older We grow 
 more tolerant. We are less frequently disap- 
 pointed, — we are less querulous and censorious, 
 — because we have dropped some of the egotism 
 of our youth, and have ceased to look for the 
 same manifestations from others as we know to 
 be habitual in ourselves. And it is not only that 
 with advancing age we come to understand more 
 clearly that the same inward qualities or feelings 
 speak out from different persons after different 
 outward fashions, just as different men go by dif- 
 ferent roads to the same bourn, or do the same 
 business in different ways, but that we learn how 
 to take account of the influence of circumstances 
 in moulding character and shaping conduct, and 
 are more gentle and moderate in our judgments. 
 
 (175) 
 
176 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 I can remember that, when I was young, I sat in 
 a sort of " bloody assize" not only upon the doings 
 but on the characters of my neighbors ; and I pur- 
 sued with a remorseless egotism all who happened 
 to differ from me in action, in opinion, or in senti- 
 ment. I may be worse in many other respects, 
 but in this I trust that I am better; and I would 
 fain hope that many old or elderly people have 
 profited in like manner by the attrition of years. 
 
 I am afraid, nevertheless, that there is still a 
 large amount of intolerance in the world, even 
 among those who have lived long enough to be 
 kinder and wiser. For eighteen centuries, ever 
 since the Great Exemplar of the Christian world 
 stooped down and wrote with his hand on the 
 dust, mankind has been open to the same rebuke ; 
 and we have been inclined to cast the first stone, 
 if we only dare to do it with a knowledge of our 
 own innocence. I purpose, therefore, to write some- 
 thing on the subject of Toleration, though with a 
 full knowledge that I shall leave unsaid much that 
 ought to be said about it. It is not, however, 
 my design to discourse upon political or religious 
 intolerance ; although, having lived much in the 
 great principality of Wales, Heaven knows that of 
 both I have seen more than enough. Frightful 
 things in the way of dispossessions and evictions — 
 cruel pressure of orthodox landlords on dissenting 
 tenants not disposed to vote for church-rates — have 
 often been done, bringing honest men and families 
 
 les 
 
SOURCE OF INTOLERANCE. 
 
 177 
 
 to the dust of ruin.* Of course, this intolerance 
 of the rich begets counter-irritations of intolerance 
 among the poor. You may hear it said, " They 
 
 have passed a church-rate, and Mrs. " (naming 
 
 the rector's wife) " has got a new bonnet." Of course 
 the notion that the parsoness's new head-gear was 
 bought out of the parochial money was simply 
 preposterous. But the belief was widely accepted 
 among the Poor. It was simply the intolerance 
 of extreme ignorance, which cannot understand 
 that anything can be done by others without a 
 view to personal gain. 
 
 It is this ignorance, indeed, — partly want of 
 knowledge, and partly want of imagination, — by 
 no means confined to the Poor, which is the source 
 of nearly all the intolerance with which the world 
 is afflicted. We know the full extent of the temp- 
 tations and inducements by which we are beset, 
 and we judge others with reference to the circum- 
 stances which surround ourselves. But it is no 
 merit in a blind man that he is free from " lust of 
 
 * I ought to state that I wrote this passage some months ago, — 
 long before Mr. Richard brought the intolerance of Welsh landlords 
 to the notice of the House of Commons. I see it stated in a con- 
 servative journal that Welsh evictions are pure myths. I feel 
 tolerably certain that if the writer had ever lived in Wales he would 
 not have written anything so notoriously at variance with the truth, 
 I wish that I could believe the story to be a fiction. My own experi- 
 ence teaches me that the landlord-screw has been put on very tightly, 
 not merely with reference to votes at elections, but in respect also 
 to votes at vestry-meetings. 
 
 12 
 
178 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 the eye," or in a dumb man that he is not given to 
 " evil speaking." Men and women, in all condi- 
 tions of life, have their special temptations and 
 their special exemptions from temptation; and 
 there is a moral law, at least, by which we may 
 sometimes move for an arrest of judgment, when 
 we learn that some poor sinner has been tempted 
 beyond what he could bear. Rich and Poor, old 
 and young, men and women, are subject, equally 
 or unequally, to various internal and external in- 
 fluences, all more or less adverse to purity of life 
 and integrity of conduct; and it would be far 
 better for us all, in the long run, if we would pray 
 for power to resist our own inducements to evil, 
 instead of thanking God that we do not yield 
 to the beguilements that allure our neighbors. 
 Every one knows this ; it is the merest common- 
 place. But nothing so generally admitted in 
 words is in practice so uniformly denied. It may 
 be strange, but it is most true, that near the end, 
 as we are, of the nineteenth century of the Christian 
 era, no teaching is more wanted than this ; ay, it 
 would seem that even the teachers need to be 
 taught : else why have I read, whilst I have been 
 writing this paper at odd times, of an English 
 clergyman bringing his dairy woman to the judg- 
 ment-seat for taking a pennyworth of milk from 
 the can without the permission of her reverend 
 master, and of a bench of justices who sent her to 
 prison for a week upon such a charge? 
 
RICH AND POOR. iyg 
 
 Above all things, I think that we should be 
 more tolerant towards the Poor. We should en- 
 deavor to understand thoroughly what are the 
 temptations which beset them, before we condemn 
 them for doing what is not done by people who 
 live easy lives, and, comparatively at least, "fare 
 sumptuously every day." The morning dram and 
 the evening visit to the alehouse are, doubtless, 
 abominable things; but if Dives had to turn out in 
 all weathers at five o'clock in the morning, perhaps 
 earlier, would he abstain from fortifying himself by 
 a matutinal stimulant of some kind or other? And 
 if he had to go home in the evening to a close 
 and untidy room, a slatternly wife and fractious 
 children, would he not fain take refuge in some 
 comfortable place of social resort, whether a club- 
 house or a tap-room ? Indeed, without these provo- 
 cations, does he not often comport himself in this 
 manner? The morning stimulant may be of a 
 more aristocratic character than a noggin of gin, — 
 it may, perhaps, be sanctimoniously disguised as a 
 " tonic," — but in effect it is the same thing. And 
 the smoking-room of a West-End club is only a 
 better kind of tap-room. I dare say that poor 
 Opifex would as soon have a tumbler of soda-and- 
 brandy, or a spoonful of bitter tonic in a glass of 
 sherry, as the cheaper fluid to which he is com- 
 pelled in the morning, and that he would not 
 object to solace himself at sundown with choice 
 regalia in the smoking-room of the Regimentum. 
 
180 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 For my own part, I wonder less at the amount of 
 self-indulgence of this kind, than at the extent of 
 the forbearance that is exercised. I observed a 
 man, one evening, who had been at work since six 
 in the morning, at the building of some suburban 
 villas over against my cottage, shoulder his basket 
 of tools and prepare to march homewards. Just 
 as he started, a workman from another job, also 
 homeward-bound, met him, and said, "How far for 
 you, Bill ?" " Five mile," was the answer, — and it 
 was said cheerily enough, — as he strode on towards 
 another county. I could not help thinking that I 
 hoped he would have a pint of beer at some half- 
 way house. For my own part, I am afraid that if 
 I had to work some twelve hours at house-building 
 with a supplement of a five-mile walk, morning 
 and evening, on a hot summer's day, I should 
 require a good number of refreshers of this kind 
 between my uprising and my downsitting. No 
 one can forget the heat of last summer,* or how 
 rich people lived in a continual state of iced claret- 
 cup. There was a horrible report in the autumn 
 that nearly all the workmen, of whom my friend 
 with the five-mile walk was one, engaged on the 
 buildings opposite to me, had gone away largely 
 in debt to the proprietor of a contiguous tavern. 
 Very strong opinions were of course expressed on 
 the "rascality" of the proceeding; and I grieved 
 
 * The summer of 1868. 
 
BAD LANGUAGE. ;i8i 
 
 over it, because the tavern-keeper was a poor man ; 
 but I felt that, if I had been a rich one, I would 
 fain have wiped out the score, in consideration of 
 those fiery days and the hours of hard toil at sub- 
 stantial house-building, at a time when it was a 
 laborious process even to lie upon a sofa and build 
 castles in the air. 
 
 But there are worse things than beer-drinking 
 — worse things than not paying for it — with which 
 the Poor are often charged in no tolerant spirit by 
 their more fortunate brethren. There is foul lan- 
 guage, blasphemous, obscene, sickening the very 
 soul of the more refined passer-by, — terrible often 
 in its unmeant significance. The extreme inap- 
 propriateness of the expletives in common use 
 among the " lower orders" proves that those who 
 use the offensive words attach no particular idea 
 to them, — perhaps do not even know that they are 
 offensive words that could shock the most sensitive 
 hearer. And, after all, so far as perfect incongruity 
 is concerned, the " awfully jolly" or "awfully nice" 
 of the young gentlemen and gentlewomen of the 
 period cannot possibly be outmatched in inappro- 
 priateness, even by the application of the epithet 
 which Protestants apply to Queen Mary to such 
 things as a good tap of beer or a good screw of 
 tobacco. Those who use this and other expletives 
 so freely as to send a shudder through us as they 
 pass on the highroad, have been habituated to the 
 words since they were children — words that issued 
 
1 82 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 freely from the paternal lips, — and they are no 
 more than "very" is to us graybeards or "awfully" 
 to our children. It must be in the memory of 
 many that less than half a century ago the boys 
 at the most aristocratic public schools swore even 
 more terribly than "our troops in Flanders," and 
 that the most obscene language flowed freely from 
 the rosy lips of little fellows of twelve or thirteen. 
 There is nothing so readily transfusible as con- 
 tagion of this kind. If we could learn French and 
 Italian, German and Romaic, as easily, we should 
 all be great linguists in our boyhood. And perhaps 
 it might be well, therefore, with our shudders to 
 combine a thrill of thankfulness that neither the 
 examples of our youth nor the tendencies of the 
 age have been or are such as to make the dreadful 
 words that so revolt us as familiar to our lips as to 
 our ears. 
 
 Again, we hear a great deal about outrages on 
 women among the Poor. I remember writing, a 
 dozen years ago or more, an article on this subject 
 in a quarterly review. But I am afraid that I did 
 not make the required allowances for the aggrava- 
 tions which bristle up so continuously in the poor 
 man's domestic life. It may be assumed that men 
 in good houses, with establishments of servants, do 
 not beat their wives — with fists, or sticks, or pokers, 
 or the legs of broken chairs. In a more refined 
 state of society the cruelties to which women are 
 subjected in the married state are not commonly 
 
OUTRAGES ON WOMEN. ^3 
 
 physical cruelties. But perhaps they are quite as 
 unendurable. And it is not improbable that those 
 who now go home every day, when they like it, to 
 a spacious well-furnished residence, with a servant 
 to open the door to them and to bring them a 
 glass of iced sherry, to be quietly sipped whilst 
 they are reading the evening papers in their library, 
 and who thus cool and console themselves, if need 
 be, "before entering the family circle, and who are 
 sure to see at dinner a well-ordered table and a 
 well-dressed wife and to be regaled with viands 
 more or less choice, might not be in a much better 
 frame of mind or hand than the ill-educated work- 
 ing-man, if they were to go home weary, worn, 
 foot-sore, irritated, to a wretched house, with all 
 the aggravations, perhaps, of an untidy wife, a bare 
 table, and a bevy of noisy children. If under these 
 evil influences 
 
 " Ruder words will soon rush in, 
 To spread the breach that words begin," 
 
 and words after a little space develop into blows, 
 we cannot be so greatly surprised. We may be 
 sorry, but we ought not to be shocked. At all 
 events, we ought not to pass in our hearts severe 
 censures on the "brutal offenders." There is other 
 brutality than that of the fist and the bludgeon, — 
 quite as cruel, perhaps, and less excusable. But it 
 does not bring the culprit before a police magis- 
 trate, and, perhaps, is beyond the reach of the 
 
1 84 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 Divorce Court. The difference is only in the out- 
 ward and visible sign ; and the blow which pro- 
 duces a black eye, which disappears in a fortnight, 
 may be infinitely less painful than the stab which 
 inflicts a heart-wound never to be healed till God 
 wipes away all tears from our eyes. 
 
 It is commonly said that all these evils — vio- 
 lence of word and violence of act — are the results 
 of hard drinking. And there is no single word into 
 which so much bitterness of reprobation is infused 
 as that which closes the last sentence. " That de- 
 testable habit of much-drinking !" And yet I know 
 nothing towards which we ought to be more tolerant. 
 No one, indeed, rich or poor, is more to be pitied 
 than he who feels a craving for such help as this, 
 and yet, from some constitutional peculiarity, can- 
 not find the solace which he seeks without lower- 
 ing himself as a reasonable being in the estimation 
 of his fellows. It is a fact, in the knowledge of us 
 all, that a certain quantity of " strong drink," which 
 will freshen and strengthen one man and render 
 him more fit to perform his appointed work, will 
 wholly unhinge and incapacitate another. There 
 may be seen sometimes a man of noble nature and 
 glorious intellectual faculties, whom much trouble 
 has driven thus to solace himself, and who has 
 utterly degraded himself to the level of the beasts 
 that perish, — and that, too, by not drinking more 
 than would have given other men strength to bear 
 their crosses and to do their work with higher 
 
DRINKING. 185 
 
 courage and clearer brains. One of the finest 
 scholars whom I have known in a lifetime of more 
 than half a century, — a man altogether of a refined 
 mind and a most kindly heart, — utterly crushed by 
 the long illness and subsequent death of a dearly- 
 loved wife, lived for years in a chronic state of in- 
 toxication ; and yet my impression is that he did 
 not drink in the course of the day as much as many, 
 perhaps most, men could have drunk without the 
 least perceptible change. But he could not "carry 
 his liquor discreetly;" and so he passed for a sot. 
 Poor J. B.! — I never compassionated any one so 
 much. Of course he was condemned, and perhaps 
 deservedly, — for in respect of drink, whether you 
 take a thimbleful or a bucketful, it is all the same : 
 the right measure is just that which you know will 
 do you good. If you feel that you are " putting 
 an enemy into your mouth to steal away your 
 brains," you know that even the one glass, which 
 gives to another only strength and cheerfulness 
 and increased intelligence, and is as a tonic medi- 
 cine to him, body and mind, is to you the vilest of 
 poisons. But, even looking at it from the worst 
 point of view, there should be infinite toleration in 
 such cases for those who are driven by much 
 anguish, whether of mind or of body, to stimulants 
 or narcotics; and truly it behoves us to think 
 sometimes 
 
 " That what to us seems vice may be but woe." 
 
1 86 ON TOLERATIOX. 
 
 There are few who have not read that touching 
 passage in one of Coleridge's letters, in which he 
 narrates briefly, but with a graphic force almost 
 terrible in its earnestness, the evil influences which 
 drove him to have recourse to opium. But I may- 
 still call it to remembrance. " My conscience," he 
 wrote to a friend, "indeed bears me witness that, 
 from the time I quitted Cambridge, no human 
 being was more indifferent to the pleasures of the 
 table than myself, or less needed any stimulation 
 to my spirits ; and that by a most unhappy 
 quackery, after having been almost bedrid for six 
 months with swollen knees and other distressing 
 symptoms of disordered digestive functions, and 
 through that most pernicious form of ignorance, 
 medical half-knowledge, I was seduced into the 
 use of narcotics, not secretly, but (such was my 
 ignorance) openly and exultingly, as one who had 
 discovered, and was never weary of recommending, 
 a grand panacea, and saw not the truth till my 
 body had contracted a habit and a necessity; and 
 that, even to the latest, my responsibility is for 
 cowardice and defect of fortitude, not for the least 
 craving after gratification or pleasurable sensation 
 of any sort, but for yielding to pain, terror, and 
 haunting bewilderment. But this I say to man 
 only, who knows only what has been yielded, not 
 what has been resisted. Before God I have but 
 one voice, 'Mercy! mercy! woe is me.'" And in 
 these words we see what is very often the whole 
 
STEALING. 187 
 
 inner history of the degrading practices which we 
 are so prone to condemn with all the vituperative 
 rhetoric at our command. There are very few, I 
 believe, who drink immoderately for the sake of 
 drinking. I mean by this that they derive no 
 sensual pleasure from such potations, — that there 
 is no activity of delight in this self-abandonment, — 
 but that the object sought is an escape from posi- 
 tive pain. An active misery of some sort, physical 
 or mental, is to be stupefied, — deadened; and if 
 the same result could be produced by periodical 
 doses of assafetida, valerian, or any other nauseous 
 medicine, with less injury to mind and body, many, 
 perhaps most, would resort to it instead of to alco- 
 holic drinks. It is commonly some inscrutable 
 physical derangement which lays the foundation 
 of an evil habit of this kind, and we should not, 
 therefore, condemn too remorselessly that which 
 we are simply unable to understand because we 
 have not in like manner been tempted. To what 
 extent the physical, for which we cannot be respon- 
 sible, underlies, in this and other human frailties, 
 the moral, for which we are responsible, can never 
 be known ; nor shall we know, upon this side of 
 eternity, how far it may be taken into account in 
 the final reckoning. 
 
 And then of that other matter whereof I have 
 spoken with reference to the temptations of the 
 Poor, — what is commonly called stealing, — the in- 
 fraction of the eighth commandment. The steal- 
 
1 88 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 ing of a loaf of bread from a baker's counter or a 
 turnip from a farmer's field, or the knocking down 
 of a stray rabbit in the squire's warren, though each 
 offense be the result of the cravings of hunger, is vile 
 and unpardonable to the last degree, and society 
 would, of course, be disorganized altogether, if the 
 necessities of nature were thus to be recognized. 
 But is there no other kind of thieving, — no other 
 kind of poaching ? What answer would the law 
 esteem it to be if a poor man charged with stealing 
 a sheep, one of a flock of two hundred, the property 
 of a neighboring squire, were to answer, " Please 
 your worship, he stole my only daughter''? The 
 criminal law can take no cognizance of the latter 
 offense, but the stolen sheep may send a man to 
 penal servitude for a number of years, and not 
 very long ago would have sent him to the gallows. 
 I make no complaint against the law : I am only 
 pleading for toleration. And I would suggest that 
 there may be some among us who could not hear 
 unmoved those solemn words, "Thou art the man!' 
 But, much as we are wont to err in this respect, 
 it must in all truth be added that we do not keep 
 all our intolerance for those beneath us. We 
 often go grievously wrong in our judgment of the 
 offenses of those whom high station surrounds with 
 its own peculiar chain of temptations. A friend 
 once said to me, "I believe that I should have been 
 one of the worst men that ever lived, if I had been 
 an idle one." I have felt the same myself at 
 
TEMPTATIONS OF THE RICH. ^9 
 
 times, and many may echo the misgiving. From 
 how many follies, how many wickednesses, are we 
 preserved merely by want of money and want of 
 time ! If we have not ruined ourselves by horse- 
 racing or degraded ourselves by immoralities of a 
 kind not so publicly canvassed, we may be thankful 
 that we have not had the opportunities which are 
 present to those who have time to be killed and 
 money to be spent ; but we have clearly no right 
 to rejoice vaingloriously in our immunity from such 
 evils. A man who is occupied from morning to 
 night with honest labor cannot do very much 
 harm in the course of the day. But let him be 
 exempted from the necessity of work, and place 
 thousands to his account at Coutts's, and see whether 
 he will be a more self-denying honest gentleman 
 than any of our young dukes and marquises who 
 have gone headlong to ruin. Perhaps these young 
 dukes and marquises are not less to be compas- 
 sionated than the toil-worn day-laborers whose 
 besetting temptations and infirmities lie in such 
 opposite directions and are of such a different kind. 
 I do not know anything worse for a young man 
 than to come into a great estate on first attaining 
 that great heritage of woe, the lordship of himself. 
 He thinks the wealth, of which he suddenly be- 
 comes the possessor, so boundless ; and there are 
 so many tempters lying in wait with honeyed 
 words to lure to his destruction the voyager in 
 that frail bark where sit " Youth at the prow and 
 
190 
 
 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 Pleasure at the helm," and all the gay company 
 lounge, lauging and singing, whilst the boat is 
 sinking in smooth water. 
 
 " Oh, different temptations lurk for all ! 
 The rich have idleness and luxury, 
 The poor are tempted onward to their fall 
 By the oppression of their poverty. 
 Hard is the struggle, deep the agony, 
 When from the demon watch that lies in wait, 
 The soul with shuddering terror strives to flee, 
 And idleness, or want, or love, or hate, 
 Lure us to various crimes for one condemning fate." 
 
 And, therefore, I say, recognizing this truth, it 
 becomes us to be tender and forbearing in our 
 judgments, when the sirens are too powerful for 
 the young lords of the Castle of Indolence, as they 
 put out to sea in their gilded barks. And all the 
 more should we rejoice and admire when, as some- 
 times happens, all temptations are wrestled down, 
 and the will to do good is equal to the power. 
 Truly says the accomplished writer of the above 
 lines, after dwelling on " the victory in a battle 
 mutely fought," achieved by others,* — 
 
 " Yet doubly beautiful it is to see 
 One set in the temptation of High Class, 
 
 * There are many of my readers whom I need not remind that 
 these lines are taken from Caroline Norton's Child of the Islands, 
 which, from first to last, is a beautiful poetical plea for toleration, — 
 very tender, compassionate, and charitable in all its utterances. The 
 value of such a book must long outlive the occasion which called it 
 forth. I have but one, which I more treasure, in my library. 
 
 
TRUE NOBILITY. 
 
 I 9 I 
 
 Keep the inherent deep nobility 
 
 Of a great nature, strong to over-pass 
 
 The check of circumstance, and choking mass 
 
 Of vicious faults, which youthful leisure woo, — 
 
 Mirror each thought in honor's stainless glass, 
 
 And by all kindly deeds that power can do, 
 
 Prove that the brave good heart hath come of lineage true." 
 
 A quarter of a century has passed since this 
 was written, and England has rejoiced, during that 
 time, in noble exemplars of that true nobility, to 
 the splendor of which native worth has contributed 
 more than rank and wealth and all the outer crust 
 of the blue blood. And second to none among 
 these is one whom the gifted writer has seen grow 
 up among the nearest and dearest of her kindred, — 
 that sister's son, whom to know is to admire and 
 love. We are all now grieving, as I write, over 
 some sad decadences of noble houses, and many 
 shallow-brained, sensational writers are drawing 
 inferences from them not favorable to our aristoc- 
 racy; but these instances are, after all, only the 
 exceptions, — indeed, the rare exceptions, — and I 
 could cite against every single example of lost 
 opportunities many of such opportunities turned 
 to the best account. And I am glad to see that 
 the highest among us are appreciating the true 
 dignity of honest labor. When we are told that 
 the head of a great ducal house (and he is not 
 alone in this) is apprenticing his younger sons to 
 commerce, and wishing them to become in time 
 
1 92 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 merchant princes, we may well have greater faith 
 than ever in the nobility of the land. 
 
 Then again, perhaps, we are not always very 
 tolerant to the Young. Much has been written 
 lately, and with great severity, against the rising 
 generation, as though the young men of the 
 present day were infinitely worse than their fathers. 
 And in some respects, perhaps they are. But 
 ought not we graybeards to consider that, after all, 
 it maybe our own fault? It may not be an axiom 
 of universal truth that " good fathers make good 
 sons." Indeed, I have known many cases in which 
 industry, self-denial, and other kindred virtues have 
 shown a tendency to "skip a generation," like the 
 gout. But there is enough in the saying for us to 
 ponder over very gravely when we are disappointed 
 and grieved by the conduct of our children. I do 
 not think that, in the recent discussions upon this 
 subject, sufficient stress was laid upon the fact that 
 the age is emphatically one of excessive competi- 
 tion, and that men devote more time than they did 
 of old to affairs of business, and less to the per- 
 formance of their domestic duties. It is a hard, 
 grinding, money-making age. Men toil early and 
 late for their wives and children, and think that 
 they have done well. The man who said that he 
 had never seen his children by daylight except on 
 Sundays, expressed, with only a very little exag- 
 geration, what is a common state of things. And 
 I say that such fathers do well in their generation 
 
 
PARENTS AND CHILDREN. 
 
 193 
 
 as "bread-finders;" but might they not do better 
 if they lived less in the counting-house and a little 
 more in the nursery and the schoolroom ? One 
 cannot but respect the man who " scorns delights 
 and lives laborious days" for the sake of those who 
 " are to come after him ;" but there is better wealth 
 than money to be stored up for his children. We 
 may speak tenderly of the error, but it is none the 
 less an error, for our tenderness. Of small benefit 
 is it to make money for our children, if we do not 
 teach them how to spend it wisely. I have, whilst 
 writing this, opened a book, in my desultory way, 
 — a volume of Mazzini's Essays, — in which I find it 
 written, " Compelled by your position to constant 
 toil, you are less able to bestow upon your children 
 a fitting education. Nevertheless, even you can 
 in part fulfill your arduous mission, both by word 
 and example. You can do it by example. ' Your 
 children will resemble you, and become corrupt or 
 virtuous in proportion as you are yourself corrupt 
 or virtuous. How shall they become honest, chari- 
 table, and humane if you are without charity for 
 your brothers ? How shall they restrain their 
 grosser appetite if they see you given up to intem- 
 perance ? How shall they preserve their native 
 innocence if you shrink not from offending their 
 modesty by indecent act or obscene word ? You 
 are the living model by which their pliant nature 
 is fashioned. It depends on you whether your 
 children be men or brutes.' (Lamennais : Words 
 13 
 
194 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 of a Believer)) And you may educate your chil- 
 dren by your words. . . . Let them learn from 
 your lips, and the calm approval of their mother, 
 how lovely is the path of virtue ; how noble it is to 
 become apostles of the truth ; how holy to sacrifice 
 themselves, if need be, for their fellows." 
 
 It is well that we elders should ponder these 
 words of a great teacher — or, rather, of two great 
 teachers — when we press heavily upon the short- 
 comings of the young. Let us ask ourselves, 
 Have we done all that we could do 
 
 To teach high thoughts and amiable words, 
 And courtliness and the desire of fame, 
 And love of truth and all that makes a man ?' 
 
 
 before we complain, as it is much the fashion now 
 to complain, that the present generation of young 
 men are more selfish and corrupt than the past. 
 Self-questionings of this kind are of the very es- 
 sence of toleration. But there are other questions 
 than those which so often result in self-reproach — 
 other excuses for the young than the errors of the 
 old. Chiefly there are what are called " the tend- 
 encies of the age." If our sons, in the adolescent 
 state, are not as domestic as we ourselves were at 
 that dangerous period of life, is it not true that we 
 had fewer temptations, — that there were fewer 
 snares to entrap us, — that it was not then, as it is 
 now, the business in life of large numbers of people 
 to provide, on a great scale but at a small charge, 
 
YOUNG MEN OF THE PERIOD. 
 
 195 
 
 intoxicating and demoralizing amusements, after 
 dark, for the residents in large towns ? It would 
 be simply asinine for a man of fifty to say to his 
 son, " I did not go to music-halls when I was of 
 your age." The son would answer silently, if not 
 vociferously, — for the sons of the period are not 
 very forbearing and respectful in their addresses to 
 parents, — "But you would, if there had been any." 
 It may be so. I cannot say that I am at all clear 
 on the subject. I should be sorry to put in a very 
 distinct negative. I think that we had our " larks" 
 in those days ; but they were few and far between, 
 and we went home very regularly to the paternal 
 dinner. The respected gentleman, who would in 
 these days be called my " governor" (there was a 
 generation between us), though he had a thriving 
 business in the City, by which he made more than 
 a quarter of a million out of half a crown, was at 
 home to dinner on Wandsworth Common every 
 day at half-past five; and I well remember the 
 agony of mind that I suffered if by any unhappy 
 chance I seemed to be at such a distance from 
 home as to be likely not to be full dressed, in 
 complete suit of black, white neckcloth, black silk 
 stockings and pumps, to appear in the drawing- 
 room in response to the "second bell." I am 
 afraid that the. young men of the period are very 
 irregular in this respect, — that their place at the 
 dinner-table is often vacant without any explana- 
 tion, or that they dribble into it with the second 
 
ig6 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 
 course. We never ventured to appear late in those 
 days, and were fain, in case of default, to make 
 interest with the butler to get something cold in 
 the odd room, which was called " the study." But 
 then the " governor" of those days was more 
 regular than he is in these. Clubs were only in 
 their infancy. Those family compacts, which are 
 anything but infrequent nowadays, for a paternal 
 dinner at the club, that wife and daughters may 
 have more time to dress for opera or ball, were 
 unknown when I was a boy, for dinners were early. 
 Men drop in at their clubs on their way home- 
 wards, and appear about eight o'clock. Of course 
 this kind of irregularity affects the younger mem- 
 bers of the family. The absence of the parental 
 red tape begets looseness of conduct; and the 
 ubiquitous attractions of the music-halls in such 
 circumstances are not to be resisted. I wonder 
 what is the amount of capital sunk in these insti- 
 tutions, and what the statistics of the female popu- 
 lation engaged to appear nightly in the scantiest 
 possible attire ? It is true that we had the " Cider 
 Cellars" and the "Coal Hole" in my young days, 
 but the coarseness there was all masculine, and our 
 attendances were rare. I do not remember that 
 they had much effect upon the lives of our genera- 
 tion. Perhaps they rather disgusted us. 
 
 That continual pest of much smoking had not 
 grown up in those days. It was feebly struggling 
 into English existence, and was not recognized as 
 
WOMANLY WEAKNESSES. 
 
 197 
 
 a legitimate custom. Such was the repugnance of 
 most elderly people to the habit, when I was a 
 stripling, that when I occasionally indulged, on the 
 top of a coach or during a pull up the river, in a 
 cigar (to smoke a pipe was in those days an unfail- 
 ing mark of the canaille), I never dared to present 
 myself in the family circle without an entire change 
 of clothes, and at least an hour of ablution and de- 
 odorization by means of lavender-water or eau-de- 
 Cologne. And yet such was the keenness of the 
 olfactory nerves of the period that I was generally 
 detected after all. Smoking has now become a 
 habit among us; and it would be intolerant on our 
 part to condemn our sons because they bring their 
 pipes out of their pockets after breakfast, and, after 
 an unknown number of applications to the weed 
 during the daytime, finish up with a smoke before 
 going to bed. Of course they do not hesitate to 
 appear before their parents reeking with tobacco, 
 or to light their pipes (to put the case mildly) in 
 the hall. But the age — not the boys — dear fel- 
 lows ! — is to be blamed for this. We should have 
 done the same when we were youngsters, if the 
 customs of the period had been in our favor. 
 
 Again, I think that we men are not very tolerant 
 of what we call the weaknesses of women, — but in 
 which, after all, lies much of their strength. The 
 commonest complaint of all is, that they are "fond 
 of dress." For my own part, I would not give 
 much for a woman who is not fond of dress. Nor 
 
I 9 8 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 would I care much to know a man indisposed 
 to encourage this feminine fondness.* The true 
 knightly instinct is to feel towards the chosen one 
 an unfailing desire 
 
 " To compass her with sweet observances, 
 To dress her beautifully, and keep her true." 
 
 I can hardly conceive any greater delight for an 
 honest, loving gentleman than to do these good 
 works and to mark their results. And it is to be 
 said that in many, if not in most, instances, the 
 desire to dress well is only a desire to please. As 
 between husband and wife, carelessness in dress is 
 one of the first indications of declining affection. 
 And even if, as sometimes happens, the love of 
 dress is, for the most part, a desire to outshine 
 other women, it is a natural, indeed a harmless, 
 emulation. If women have no nobler ambitions, 
 it is mainly the fault of the men. If they cannot 
 speak each other down in debate, they may dress 
 each other down in society. It may be said that 
 victor}- depends in such a case upon the husband's 
 purse or the dressmaker's art, not upon the genius 
 of the competitor. But this is true only in a 
 limited sense. No amount of money to buy 
 clothes, and no skill in the artiste who makes 
 them, can compensate for a want of taste in the 
 wearer. Taste in dress commonly indicates a 
 
 * See note at the end of this E? 
 
MANYSIDEDNESS OF LOVE. igg 
 
 general sense of the becoming in all domestic con- 
 cerns. The Frenchman who wrote a treatise on 
 The Duty of a Pretty Woman to Look Pretty, did 
 not address himself to the discussion of a mere 
 frivolity. There was an under-current of philos- 
 ophy beneath it. And surely there is something 
 like ingratitude to the Giver of all good gifts not 
 to treasure and to cherish, even to rejoice in, the 
 divinest of them all. 
 
 I think, too, that we are somewhat prone to 
 misunderstand and to misjudge women, because 
 their ways are so different from the manifestations 
 of our masculine natures. It is common, for 
 example, to attribute want of affection to others, 
 merely because it is not in their nature to be 
 affectionate after our own external pattern. We 
 break our hearts over the thought, " I should not 
 have done this or that," and, with the marvelously 
 false logic of self-torture, we say, " If there were 
 any true love, this thing could not be." But love 
 is not one, but many. Its angel-wings are of varied 
 plumage. I had a very dear friend who married, 
 as men the wisest among us often do, a woman 
 younger than and much unlike himself, — in all 
 ways charming, but in all ways provoking too, 
 as only very pretty women can be, — saucily, co- 
 quettishly, petulantly provoking, often rainy and 
 stormy, but with marvelous gleams of tender sun- 
 shine, — beautiful and bewitching and irresistible 
 always ; treading down reason, judgment, all things 
 
200 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 with her small foot, and snapping all the bound- 
 aries that lie between right and wrong with her 
 queenly hand. Some men would have resented 
 this : my friend saddened under it Like Shak- 
 speare's Moor, he was " not easily jealous," but, in 
 time, he came to be " perplexed in the extreme." 
 So he spoke to her one day, very gravely and 
 sorrowfully, saying that he was afraid that she did 
 not love him, — that she would have been happier 
 with some one else. And what did she do ? She 
 turned upon him a face radiant with happiness, 
 and said, " You dear old goose, not love you ! — 
 ' happier with some one else' ! Why, if I had 
 married any one else but my silly old darling, I 
 should have worried him into his grave in a month. 
 But you must take me as I am, you know, and let 
 me love you in my own way." And from that 
 time a great contentment came upon him. With 
 his tenderness, which was unfailing, there went 
 forth towards her an infinite toleration ; and in time 
 it came to pass that he would not have changed 
 the love which she gave him " in her own way" for 
 any love shaped in accordance with the standard of 
 his egotism. What she gave him was all herself, 
 as he found, not as once he wished to fashion, her; 
 and it was far better than anything he could have 
 made. Sickness fell upon him, and she was the 
 gentlest of nurses. Poverty — I mean what was 
 poverty to them — descended upon him, and she 
 was the most self-denying of helpmates. She 
 
CLAIMS OF THE BREAD-FINDER. 2 0I 
 
 who had been wont to have every wish gratified, 
 and to pout, perhaps to murmur, if it were not, 
 now subdued herself to all the wishes of another. 
 She who had once exacted, now yielded every- 
 thing ; and she lovingly confessed, " I am happier 
 now, dear, than when I was your spoilt child." 
 And I believe that this is anything but an un- 
 common story. We blame others, and we worry 
 ourselves, mainly because, lacking the necessary 
 amount of imagination, we cannot go out of our- 
 selves, — we cannot eat our way out of the hard 
 shell of our egotism and look abroad upon the 
 manysidedness of human nature. 
 
 I do not mean to imply that all the injustice, 
 as between men and women, is committed by the 
 former and endured by the latter. I am afraid 
 that women are sometimes a little intolerant and 
 unjust, simply from a want of right understanding 
 of masculine irritations and provocations, and the 
 general environments, indeed, of the bread-finder. 
 The commonest thing of all is to think that men 
 are " cross," — ill-tempered, saturnine, — when they 
 are only serious and silent, perhaps weary and 
 careworn. They may have had many crosses out- 
 of-doors, but they have no crossness at home, and 
 at the very bottom, perhaps, of their solemnity is 
 an infinitude of tenderness and love. I do not 
 know how I can put my meaning better than in 
 the words of a valued friend, to whom years had, 
 indeed, brought the toleration for which I am con- 
 
202 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 tending. One of his young daughters had said to 
 him, — as young girls are somewhat prone to say, — 
 "I wish I were a man!" — and he had not answered 
 her at once, save with a word or two of dissent, but 
 had waited till she was a little older ; and, one day, 
 the opportunity having arisen, he spoke to her 
 after this fashion: 
 
 " You remember, darling, when you told me 
 that you wished you were a man, and I replied 
 that you would soon revoke the wish, if you were 
 tried? I did not then answer your 'Why?' but 
 I will tell you now that you are better able to 
 understand me. You say that when I come home 
 from my daily official work in London, I some- 
 times 'look so cross.' I take a candle, perhaps, 
 and go straight to my dressing-room, and when we 
 are seated all together at the dinner-table I am 
 silent and thoughtful ; and then you think that I 
 am cross, and you are all silent because I am. 
 But I am only wearied and worried. I have had, 
 perhaps, not only much to do, but much to endure. 
 You have all of you spent your day very differ- 
 ently, and, therefore, feel very differently at the 
 close of it. If I am careworn, my cares are not 
 selfish cares. You have, all of you, not only a 
 place in them severally, but together you absorb 
 them all. If, at times, my losses are heavy and 
 prospects appear to be bad, is the anxiety which 
 will not suffer me to wear a cheerful countenance 
 anxiety for myself alone? There is so little 
 
 
MISUNDERSTANDINGS. 
 
 203 
 
 selfishness in it, that sometimes, cowardly as it 
 might have been, I have longed to strike my 
 colors and to desist from this great battle of life. 
 A very little suffices for a man of my years, who 
 has outgrown the passions and ambitions of life 
 and longs for nothing more than rest. And if I 
 am grave sometimes when you would wish to see 
 me cheerful, it is only because I love you much 
 and am thinking of your happiness. The igno- 
 rance which is bliss is denied to us men. I dare 
 say you all of you often think that I am un- 
 generous, perhaps * stingy.' You think that I have 
 more money than I have got, — that it is more 
 easily earned and less speedily spent. You know 
 nothing of such things as bad times and high 
 prices, and necessary increase of expenditure, as 
 you all grow older, without any corresponding 
 increase of income; and you think that I am 
 growing meaner every day, when I am only grow- 
 ing older, and thinking more than I did of what 
 would become of you if I were taken away. You 
 think, all of you, that I do not ' live up to my 
 income.' But if I did live up to my income, which 
 all comes from my professional exertions, what 
 would there be for you when I die ? Do you think 
 that, as a matter of mere selfishness, I should 
 pinch and hoard? Does not Self say, 'Let us live 
 right royally? The annual hundreds that go to 
 the Insurance Offices had better be spent on 
 carriages and horses, and women's dress, and 
 
204 0N TOLERATION. 
 
 autumnal visits to the German Baths. Your 
 daughters, when you are dead, may go out as 
 governesses, or canvass for admission to some 
 Benevolent Society. Let us eat and drink, for 
 to-morrow we die!' — No language can be more 
 intelligible than this language of the ogre Self. 
 Do you wish me to be persuaded by it ? 
 
 " This charge of the ways and means, dear, is 
 no small matter, I assure you. It is enough to 
 make any one grave. When we are traveling, for 
 example, in the holidays, it is all holiday to you. 
 It goes so easily, that you might almost think, if 
 you thought at all about it, that some good fairy 
 were administering to all our wants, and ordering 
 and arranging everything for us. But you women 
 never think anything about it so long as all goes 
 well. The railway and steamboat tickets are 
 taken and paid for; the hotel accommodation is 
 provided and hotel bills are ' settled,' and you 
 have nothing in the world to do but to enjoy 
 yourself. All this is quite right, and quite as I 
 would wish it to be. But if I look grave some- 
 times when you are all merry, or if I do not fall 
 in very kindly with all your plans and projects, 
 you should not think me a disagreeable traveling 
 companion. I remember that when we were at 
 Wiesbaden last year you thought it very unkind 
 that I would not go for a week to Homburg. But 
 I had to consider whether in that case I should 
 have had money enough to carry us all home 
 
 
MASCULINE RESPONSIBILITIES. 
 
 205 
 
 again, and whether, had I been justified in spend- 
 ing more money on amusement, I could have 
 obtained in sufficient time the necessary remit- 
 tances from London. It is well for you all that 
 these financial cares will haunt the paternal 
 traveler in foreign countries, or some day you 
 might all find yourselves stranded very incon- 
 veniently on a strange coast. Women, who have 
 never been thrown upon their own resources, who 
 have never had to fight the battle of life for 
 themselves, can hardly conceive how largely this 
 money element enters into all the thoughts of 
 the masculine manager when he is away from 
 home. One cannot travel upon credit, you know, 
 dear. Even in much smaller matters, men are 
 continually brought face to face very painfully 
 with the commonplace fact that there is a great 
 difference between having money in one's bank 
 and having it in one's pocket. I have known 
 times, my darling, when some of you have thought 
 me nothing better than an old curmudgeon, 
 grudging even a small coin, when I had no 
 thought of grudging you anything. Among the 
 minor miseries of life, there is none greater than 
 that of change. I see you don't quite know what 
 I mean. It is money change, 'small change,' coin, 
 currency, sovereigns, half-sovereigns, half-crowns, 
 shillings, sixpences. In any dilemma of this kind, 
 I have invariably found that no womanly member 
 of the family can ever help me. Going out with 
 
206 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 the ' governor,' every one leaves her purse behind. 
 And you have, I know, often thought me very 
 stingy because I have not given a shilling here or 
 a sixpence there, simply because I had no shillings 
 or sixpences in my purse. These are very trifling 
 matters, but human life is made up of trifles, and 
 it is in respect of trivialities of this kind that we 
 are most prone to misjudge each other. And 
 wishing, as you do, to be a man, I think it right 
 to remind you that in the smaller as in the greater 
 affairs of life we men have to think for you women, 
 to provide our sixpences as well as our thousands 
 of pounds, and that you ought to be tolerant to us 
 if we have not always got them ready. 
 
 "And when your brother Walter was coming 
 home from Australia, how pleased you all were! — 
 how 'jolly' you all thought it! There was not, in 
 the estimation of any of you, the least shadow to 
 mar the prospect. Some of you then thought it 
 unkind, almost unnatural in me that I did not 
 look upon his return with the same unqualified 
 satisfaction. But was it less delight to me than to 
 any of you to see the dear boy again ? I could 
 not help, however, seeing something else. I saw 
 loss of money, loss of prospects, much injury to 
 him, to you, to me, to the whole family. It threw 
 him back years in the march of life, — the pursuit 
 of independence; and my old brains saw all this 
 very clearly, whilst you only saw the dear fellow 
 himself. I do not know how it would have been 
 
 
WORK IN SORROW. 
 
 207 
 
 if I had called upon each of you to forego a moiety 
 of your allowances, or to do without your annual 
 'outing,' that you might all contribute towards the 
 expenses of Walter's visit to England. But, as it 
 was, each had your full share of the pleasure, and 
 to the lot of the governor fell all the cost. 
 
 "And there are other ways in which you mis- 
 judge us. You remember, too bitterly," — here his 
 voice faltered, — " that wretched day when poor 
 Lilian died. You came in to me at night, and 
 found me writing, — doing my accustomed work 
 amidst books and papers, — just — just, it must have 
 seemed to you, as if nothing had happened. It 
 was natural that you should think so, my darling. 
 For you could not know what it cost me, nor why 
 I did it. There are things in the world of great 
 importance, perhaps to thousands and tens of 
 thousands, which depend for their due and regular 
 performance upon some humble instrument like 
 myself. It was necessary that the work I was 
 then doing should be done and delivered at a 
 certain place before noon next morning. There 
 was no one who could do it for me. However 
 repugnant to my nature, it was necessary that I 
 should do it, even though I should be thought 
 hard and unfeeling for doing it at such a time. 
 And this is another of the penalties of manhood. 
 
 " But of this I do not complain. The great and 
 good God, even of his infinite mercy, sends these 
 burdens and distractions to us men in the midst of 
 
208 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 our sorrow. The necessity of exertion is, doubt- 
 less, salutary to us. Even out of the very causes 
 of our grief there proceeds much to be done. ' Men 
 must work and women must weep;' and it is good 
 for us to work, though we weep at our work hot 
 tears from the heart. We must order and arrange 
 everything even for the mournful accessories of 
 death; and there are many among us, and not 
 only those who are bread-finders by the sweat of 
 their brow, who, in periods of great sorrow, are 
 constrained to toil the more, because the earnings 
 of toil must be greater to meet the larger demands 
 of the season of tribulation. You think that we 
 suffer less, because we must be up and doing. It 
 will never fall to your lot, my dear, to know what 
 that conflict is. But you, who have not to work, 
 when great tribulation is upon you, must think 
 kindly of us who have, and not fancy that we do 
 not sorrow bitterly, because we sorrow differently 
 from you. Only the Father 'who seeth in secret' 
 can tell how often in anguish of spirit we are com- 
 pelled to cease from our work, — how often, though 
 the pen be in the hand, there is a mist of tears be- 
 fore the paper so that nothing can be traced. We 
 men try to ' keep up' before you, darling; but you 
 must not think us heartless because we do, — be- 
 cause we try even to lead your thoughts sometimes 
 away from the one great subject of your sorrows. 
 It is the most painful part of our duties, but, per- 
 haps, also the most essential. And even the gross 
 
DROWNING SORROW. 
 
 209 
 
 necessity of eating and drinking at such times 
 seems to be heartless in its fulfillment. But those 
 who have work to do must be strong to do it. And, 
 believe me, there are few among us who in times 
 of great sorrow would not rather lay ourselves down 
 and turn our faces to the wall and i indulge the 
 luxury of grief and refuse to be comforted. Men 
 do not complain that they cannot do this, but 
 those who can do it must not wrong us by think- 
 ing that we do not suffer. We only ask for a little 
 
 Toleration " 
 
 Thus spoke the father to his daughter. And it 
 seems to me that there is much in what he said that 
 women may take to their hearts, especially when 
 they are prone to think that men are stern and un- 
 feeling — "heartless," perhaps, is the favorite word 
 — simply because the outward expressions are so 
 different. I knew a great statesman who, when 
 sorely smitten by tidings of the death of his absent 
 wife, cried in despair to those who would fain have 
 stood aloof in silent sympathy and respect for his 
 heavy sorrow, " Work ; bring me work ; you can- 
 not bring me too much!" And, immersed in the 
 affairs of a great empire, he strove to find in high 
 intellectual efforts that opiate for the heart which 
 men of lower natures might have sought — elsewhere. 
 Every reader knows the meaning of that last word; 
 and there are few who cannot instance, as I have 
 instanced above, some examples of men whom 
 grief of this same kind has driven to the " drowning 
 14 
 
2io ON TOLERATION. 
 
 in the cup," until reason has been drowned with 
 the sorrow, and only the brute has remained. 
 " Give strong drink unto him who is ready to 
 perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. 
 Let him drink and forget his poverty, and remem- 
 ber his misery no more." No man need be ashamed 
 to confess that in seasons of trouble he has derived 
 strength and endurance from wine, — or from what, 
 among poorer people, is the representative of wine. 
 I have heard a resort to such stimulants, or seda- 
 tives, or whatever they may be, stigmatized, in 
 general language, as degrading ; and so it is, as- 
 suredly, in excess. But it is not the only one of 
 God's good gifts to man that is sometimes fear- 
 fully abused. 
 
 But this has expanded into a digression; and I 
 purposed to say something more about the femi- 
 nine idea of the relation between man and woman, 
 in respect of financial concerns. I do not know 
 very precisely what are the provisions of the Mar- 
 ried Women's Property Bill, but I have talked the 
 matter over with women, at odd times, and I have 
 gathered a notion of the view which is taken by 
 some amiable casuists. It seems to be the idea 
 that they are to have uncontrolled authority over 
 their own money, and to leave their husbands to 
 pay their debts. They say in effect to the bread- 
 finder, "What is yours is mine — what's mine is my 
 own." Indeed, the general feminine idea of what 
 is called "an allowance" includes the assumption 
 
 v 
 
WOMANLY ONESIDEDNESS. 2 II 
 
 that the person granting it is to pay just the same 
 for everything for which the said allowance is dis- 
 bursed, as if no independent arrangement existed. 
 I heard a charming story of husband and wife the 
 other day, so illustrative of this that I am minded 
 to repeat it. The wife had said laughingly to the 
 husband — they were young people and sufficiently 
 "well-to-do" — that he spent much more pocket- 
 money than she did, and that he was altogether an 
 extravagant fellow: so in the evening, when he 
 came home, he brought a purseful of sovereigns, 
 and, taking what remained to each from their last 
 supplies, equalized the two little piles to a shilling, 
 and said, "Now we'll start fair, darling, and see who 
 is bankrupt first." At the end of a week, they 
 agreed playfully to compare notes; and it was found 
 that the wife had a few shillings more than the hus- 
 band, upon which she was very jubilant and tri- 
 umphant, and told him that she had always known 
 him to be an extravagant fellow. " But, my child," 
 he said, deprecatingly, " remember that when we 
 have gone out together I have paid the expenses of 
 both out of my money. There were the railway 
 
 fares to , and the flys and cabs, and the little 
 
 dinner we had at Richmond, and the stalls at the 
 Haymarket, and the Crystal Palace on Saturday — 
 all have been paid for out of my money ; and there 
 is that pretty new bonnet on your head, in which 
 you look so charming." Upon which she lifted 
 up her hands and made a mouth at him (it was a 
 
212 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 very pretty one), and cried out, " Oh, I am ashamed 
 of you ! You, indeed, to talk of chivalry, and to 
 think for a moment of taking a poor little woman 
 out with you, and expecting her to pay her share 
 of the expenses ! What will the men of the period 
 come to next?" Of course there was no appeal 
 against this. He could only put his arms round 
 her and kiss her, and confess that he was an " ex- 
 travagant fellow." 
 
 There is one more point of view from which I 
 would regard this great question of Toleration be- 
 fore I lay aside the pen. I have said that I would 
 eschew politics and religion, and I shall not de- 
 part from my promise, though I may approach 
 nearly the forbidden ground, if I say that among 
 us there is a great want of National Toleration. 
 As a nation, perhaps, Ave English are the most in- 
 tolerant people in the world. We go about every- 
 where in a spirit of egotism, which clings to us 
 like the poisoned robe of the centaur and strikes 
 the venom to our very marrow. We visit foreign 
 countries, and, so far from doing at Rome what 
 is done at Rome, we think that every Roman 
 should do exactly like ourselves. Now, I do not 
 mean to say that we should accommodate our- 
 selves too readily to foreign habits and usages. Of 
 course there must be a limit to such adaptations. 
 For example, an Englishman in New Zealand is 
 not bound "to dine on cold man." But that is no 
 
NATIONAL INTOLERANCE. 213 
 
 reason why we should be very severe even on the 
 New Zealander, who, having an instinct for flesh- 
 eating, was originally driven, by want of mutton 
 and beef, to dish up his fellow-men as savory 
 food. We are wont to call all who differ from us 
 in their way of life, savages and barbarians, forget- 
 ting that the time was when we painted our bodies, 
 and did other very preposterous things, which, 
 although conventionally out of date, are not in- 
 trinsically any greater absurdities than some of 
 those which we encourage and foster in the present 
 day. And why do we not take account of the 
 conditions of men's birth and training, of the 
 terrible drawbacks and hinderances, almost the 
 impossibilities, which beset some men before we 
 describe them as vile and degraded? Can we 
 expect an Asiatic prince, reared in the zenana, to 
 resemble one brought up amidst all the ennobling 
 influences of Christian life ? Can we expect his 
 
 Highness the of to be in all things like 
 
 unto "Albert the Good"? If he be no worse than 
 others of his kind, we should tolerate him. If he 
 be better, we should respect him. But do we? 
 No. He is unlike ourselves ; and, therefore, we 
 denounce him. 
 
 And we do this, on a large scale, concerning 
 affairs of government and modes of administration, 
 not less than, on a small scale, in respect of social 
 habits and fashions, and personal vagaries, and the 
 vanities of life. I chanced not long ago, in the 
 
214 0N TOLERATION. 
 
 house of a friend who holds an official appoint- 
 ment, to take up some blue-books relating to India, 
 which I found less dreary reading than I expected, 
 and from them I learnt that our " goody" govern- 
 ment had been lecturing, if not threatening, some 
 of the neighboring states, for the monstrous offense 
 of bolstering up their revenues by means of govern- 
 ment monopolies.* A great fervor of Free-trade 
 seemed to be upon our government functionaries, 
 who were eager, as shown in the correspondence 
 I was reading, to teach true principles of commer- 
 cial policy to native potentates on the outskirts of 
 civilization, as in Burmah and Ladakh, and to 
 sweep away all such abominations as protective 
 duties. With the characteristic intolerance of new 
 proselytes, we were condemning with fiery zeal all 
 who happened to be a few lessons behind ourselves. 
 Indeed, it seemed, to my limited comprehension of 
 the matter, that our want of toleration went even 
 further than this, inasmuch as that we were cen- 
 suring heathen governments for doing that which 
 we Christians had not only recently done, but 
 which we actually then were and are now doing in 
 a more lamentable and injurious manner. And I 
 thought, perhaps, that an Indian Puncli might not 
 unfitly represent the Viceroy sitting on a well- 
 padded chair, inscribed " Opium Revenue" and 
 
 * There are, doubtless, some readers whom I need not tell that 
 this "friend" was a poetical license. — (1870.) 
 
NATIONAL INTOLERANCE. 2 I$ 
 
 "Salt Revenue," and teaching, birch in hand, a 
 class of native princes to decline the noun-sub- 
 stantive Monopoly. One might have a wallet 
 inscribed "Oil," another "Timber," a third "Shawl- 
 wool," and the like, but none equal in bulk to the 
 cushions of the chair on which the pedagogue sits 
 to insist upon the duty of free-trade in all these 
 articles of commerce. And on the walls of the 
 schoolroom might hang a historical picture of 
 good Mr. John Company building up our Anglo- 
 Indian empire on a broad basis of Monopoly.* 
 Somehow or other we always do forget our own 
 weaknesses and infirmities of past days, and are 
 intolerant in the extreme towards the very errors 
 which we have scarcely yet abandoned. I have 
 often heard it said — and, indeed, having once held 
 a military commission, I have some experience of 
 the fact — that no military officer is so intolerant of 
 the offenses of the privates under him, as the man 
 who has himself risen from the ranks. And so 
 
 * I observe, whilst writing this, that a Member of the House of 
 Commons has given notice of his intention to bring before Parlia- 
 ment next session the subject of the large amount of revenue derived 
 from the sale of opium by the Indian government. But this is only 
 another instance of want of Toleration. Governments, like indi- 
 viduals, " must live ;" and we must not scan too nicely the manner 
 in which revenue is raised. It is not very long since, in our own 
 country, light and air were heavily taxed, under the name of 
 "windows." Taxation in any shape is an evil, but it is an inevi- 
 table one, and we ought not to be over-severe on others who put 
 it into shapes different from our own. 
 
2i6 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 it is both in personal and in national affairs. States 
 and individuals are alike intolerant of a condition 
 of things out of which they have only recently 
 emerged. 
 
 And this brings me back to the point from 
 which I started, and, therefore, warns me that it 
 is time to conclude. This propensity to condemn 
 others is commonly strongest in those who have a 
 sense of their own infirmities. It is the inherent 
 disposition to 
 
 " Compound for sins we are inclined to 
 By damning those we have no mind to." 
 
 But "if, instead of blaming men" — and here I 
 quote another, the ever-tolerant editor of Coleridge's 
 Letters, — " for what they are, and are made to be, 
 we occupied and interested ourselves with earnest 
 inquiries into the causes of the evils we deplore, 
 with a view to their removal, it cannot be doubted 
 that this real labor of love, if carried on with and 
 through the spirit of love, would in its very en- 
 deavor include much of the good sought to be 
 obtained. To me, it seems that the greatest 
 amount of benefit will result from the labors or 
 the exertions of those who unite the good to 
 others with that which is — has been made — pleas- 
 urable to themselves ; from those who seek to 
 make what is genial and joyous to themselves 
 more genial and more joyous to others. This 
 is a labor in which not merely some favorite 
 
'A LABOR OF LOVE." 
 
 217 
 
 crotchet, some abstract opinion, or even sincere 
 and honest convictions, are engaged: it is one in 
 which the best, the purest, the .highest sympathies 
 of our nature are enlisted in the service and in the 
 promotion of those enjoyments and of those prac- 
 tical occupations from which our own well-being 
 has resulted, or with which it has been associated." 
 There can be no better teaching than this. To a 
 certain extent we know what is, but we do not 
 know why it is. We see the effect, but are blind 
 to the cause. Only the sufferer himself can com- 
 pute the daily, the hourly temptations and provo- 
 cations which lead some men — and women — 
 astray, whilst others are not assailed. I remem- 
 ber, some years ago, to have read in a novel, 
 doubtless now forgotten, that a certain stiff, wiz- 
 ened old maid, who could scarcely have been even 
 good-looking in her youth, exclaimed, when some 
 reference to the subject was made in conversation, 
 "Oh! virtue is very easy," — upon which a poor 
 little woman (it was on board a Rhine boat) whose 
 whole life had been one of temptation, hearing the 
 remark, walked away, with her sweet, though care- 
 worn face, her charming petite rounded figure and 
 elastic step, and, heaving a deep sigh, said to her- 
 self, u Oh, but virtue is not easy!" And so it is; 
 and so it ever will be ! 
 
 " What's done we partly may compute, 
 But know not what's resisted." 
 
 August — September, 1869. 
 
2i8 ON TOLERATION. 
 
 Note. — I have said in this essay (p. 197) that " I would not give 
 much for a woman who is not fond of dress," and more to the same 
 effect laudatory of this supposed " woman's weakness." It is sug- 
 gested that this passage might be regarded as a plea for extravagance 
 in dress, which, doubtless, is among the besetting evils of the time. 
 But to be fond of dress and to be extravagant in dress are two very 
 different things. Women who are extravagant in dress are often 
 very careless and wasteful ; they show that they are not really fond 
 of dress by the manner in which they treat it, casting aside or 
 destroying their dresses, one after another, as the whim seizes 
 them; whilst others, uniformly careful and neat, spend only half the 
 money, and make twice as good an appearance. This is the come- 
 liness of which I have spoken in the text, which is only another 
 name for carefulness, and which bespeaks, as I have said, in 
 women, orderly habits and a desire to please. But it is shocking 
 to think of the amount of money wasted by others owfine dresses, 
 without the attainment, after all, of the great object of being ivell 
 dressed. The best-dressed woman is the one who dresses most 
 according to her station, and who evinces her fondness for dress 
 by taking the best care of it. — (1870.) 
 
REST. 
 
 I HAD a long illness at the end of last year, — 
 not dangerous, not very painful, but compelling 
 me, as an indispensable aid to recovery, to keep 
 steadfastly to my bed. Such a mischance had not 
 befallen me for twenty-five years. I am habitually 
 an early riser, spending little time abed, and it 
 seemed strange to me at first, with a strangeness 
 not unmingled with self-reproach, to hear the cry 
 of the milkman from between the sheets ; but this 
 soon wore away, and there came over me a calm 
 satisfaction with my lot, — something more than 
 mere patience. And now I look back to the time 
 with a feeling almost of regret, as though I should 
 not much deplore the necessity of spending it all 
 over again. It is true that all the conditions were 
 in my favor. I had physicians as wise as they 
 were kind, the best and brightest of nurses, and 
 the sympathy of a few loving friends. And I had 
 what I had not known for many years, something 
 nearly approaching to — Rest. 
 
 I had a fanciful notion at the time — and I have 
 not ceased yet from the indulgence of the thought 
 — that the " good Fairy" which watches over me, 
 
 (219) 
 
220 REST. 
 
 seeing that I would not of my own motion cease 
 from labor, had purposely prostrated me, that I 
 might rest mind and body from the ceaseless work 
 of years, and rescue what little good might still 
 be left in me for use in a later day. Not long ago, 
 some papers were written, in a popular periodical, 
 on " Enforced Pauses in Life." I could not, at the 
 time, make a pause in life to read them ; but I was 
 much struck by the title, and I often feel an ex- 
 treme amount of thankfulness for the occurrence 
 and recurrence of these enforced pauses. They 
 may last for only five minutes, or they may last 
 for an hour, a day, a week, a month. It is impos- 
 sible to calculate the good that they do. In the 
 midst of a hard bout of writing-work, just as I am, 
 perhaps, getting into a state of congestion, I miss 
 a certain paper, or I cannot find a certain book. 
 I am compelled to rise from my chair, to change 
 my-position, to go into another room, to spend a 
 quarter of an hour, perhaps, in an active search, 
 which may, after all, be unsuccessful. But the 
 labor has not been labor lost ; I am all the better 
 for it; there has been some rest of the brain. Then 
 again, there is a stoppage on my line of railway : 
 I am detained for an hour on my way to business 
 I spend the time between looking out of windo 
 and reading the advertisements in my newspaper 
 I take in a succession of entirely new ideas, not one 
 of which may be of much value : but I have rested 
 for awhile; perhaps, I have slept a little in the 
 
 i • 
 is. 
 
THE SICK-BED. 221 
 
 course of my detention. I have been ordered to 
 halt and to stand at ease ; I have been compelled 
 to pause, whether I would or not; and, however 
 much I have chafed at the commencement, I have 
 always acknowledged, at last, that the hour has 
 been well spent. For rest is a thing to be done, as 
 well as work ; and if we are disinclined to do it, we 
 should be thankful that the " Providence which 
 shapes our ends" sometimes compels us thereto, in 
 spite of ourselves. But for these occasional com- 
 pulsions, I might, long ere this, have been in a 
 churchyard or a mad-house. At least, I am con- 
 vinced — and the conviction brings a strong feeling 
 of gratitude in its train — that, if I had always had 
 my own way, I should not now be writing this 
 essay, enjoying the soft summer air, and the sweet 
 odor of the roses in my garden. What we are 
 wont to call mischances are commonly blessings 
 in disguise. And so I thought that, as these 
 small pauses had not been enough for me, it had 
 been beneficently ordained that I should be laid 
 in my bed for six weeks and ordered to take my 
 rest. 
 
 So I took it, not merely uncomplainingly, but 
 in the main gratefully. And I have been thinking 
 that perhaps nothing but a decided attack of illness, 
 placing me under the strict discipline of the faculty, 
 would have had the same beneficial effect. We 
 are wont to coquet with slight ailments. Admo- 
 nitions of the gentler kind are too often unheeded. 
 
222 REST. 
 
 Nature benignantly indicates the time to pause; 
 but man, stiff-necked and presumptuous, too often 
 disregards these warnings, and, instead of ceasing 
 to work, works badly against the grain. Then, 
 again, as to voluntary cessation from labor, there 
 are conditions to be observed with respect to the 
 perfect realization of the idea of a holiday, which 
 some men, by reason partly of their natural dispo- 
 sitions, partly of their adventitious surroundings, 
 can rarely fulfill. The nominal holiday often 
 brings with it anything but genuine rest. Too 
 frequently a man's business pursues him into the 
 country, haunts him at the seaside, crosses the 
 Channel with him, sits upon his back wheresoever 
 he goes. " This is his own fault," it may be said. 
 Nay, rather it is his misfortune. It is the result 
 commonly of a conscientious feeling that what a 
 man can do he ought to do with all the power that 
 is in him, — and that he has no right, for the sake 
 of personal ease and enjoyment, to lose sight of his 
 appointed work, unless he be perfectly assured in 
 his own mind that it can be done equally well by 
 others in his absence. I have heard much of the 
 " happy faculty" of getting thoroughly rid of the 
 burden of work, "shaking it off" is the favorite 
 expression ; I do not doubt that it is a very happy 
 faculty to the possessor, but the happiness may be 
 confined to himself. I do not wish to be misunder- 
 stood, and, therefore, I must discriminate a little in 
 this place. There are times and seasons when it 
 
 
"SHAKING-OFF BUSINESS." 223 
 
 would be a mere waste of self not to get rid of all 
 cares of business, all thoughts of one's work. If 
 one can do nothing, it is needless self-torture to 
 kick against the pricks of the inevitable. There 
 can be no self-reproach where there is no power to 
 do otherwise. 
 
 What I mean is best shown by a familiar illus- 
 tration. Whatever may be the business to be 
 done, whatever the difficulties to be surmounted, 
 whatever the cares and anxieties attending them, 
 when business hours are over on Saturday even- 
 ing, when the last post has come in and gone out, 
 a man feels that he can do nothing more till Mon- 
 day morning. It is out of his own hands. God's 
 law and man's law alike decree his quiescence. 
 To endeavor to cast out, during that blessed in- 
 terval, all corroding thoughts, is surely the duty 
 of all of us, as it is a privilege to be suffered to 
 accomplish it. And I am disposed to think that 
 there are few to whom this privilege is not merci- 
 fully vouchsafed. I have heard men, upon whom 
 the burden of the world has sat by no means 
 lightly, declare that they always sleep better on 
 Saturday night and wake later on Sunday morning 
 than at any other time of the week, and that 
 although Monday morning amply revenges itself, 
 the sabbatical repose of the dies non strengthens 
 them for the struggles of the coming week and 
 keeps them from breaking down. I shall speak 
 of this more fully in another place. I desire 
 
224 REST. 
 
 here only to illustrate the difference between en- 
 forced and willful quiescence. Thus to " shake off 
 business," when no business can be done, is a 
 privilege if it come naturally to us, and wisdom if 
 it be attained by discipline of the mind. I can see 
 no use in opening letters of business on Saturday 
 night, that cannot be answered and acted upon 
 until Monday morning. To do so may give one 
 a troubled Sunday, without helping the matter in 
 hand. But when the banks and the marts and the 
 exchanges are open, when men are buying and 
 selling, borrowing and lending, when the public 
 offices are in full departmental activity, when states- 
 men are meeting and legislators are babbling, and 
 judges are sitting on the judgment-seat, it may be 
 neither a privilege to be able to shake off business, 
 nor wisdom to encourage the faculty. To lose a 
 single post, to be half an hour late at a certain 
 place, may make all the difference between suc- 
 cess and failure. That which brings ease of mind 
 is the knowledge that we have done our best, — 
 that it is not in our power to do anything more 
 than we have done, or differently from what we 
 have done. But there is the bitterness of self- 
 reproach in the thought that if we had not yielded 
 to some infirmity or some temptation, some self- 
 indulgence of the moment, causing us to lose a 
 train or to miss a post, — or, on a larger scale of 
 pleasure-seeking, to be at a distance from the seat 
 of business, when we might be close at hand, — 
 
DISTURBING INFLUENCES. 2 2$ 
 
 everything might have turned out differently, to 
 our contentment instead of to our despair. 
 
 We cannot, unfortunately, get over the fact that 
 all the tendencies of the age are the very reverse 
 of favorable to Rest. I should be a mere Goth, an 
 outer barbarian of the worst kind, if I did not thank- 
 fully acknowledge the benefits which the present 
 generation derives from the almost magical rapidity 
 with which both thought and matter are conveyed 
 from one spot to another. Communication by post 
 has been wonderfully improved, and the electric 
 telegraph is a great institution. But posts and 
 telegraphs are among the disturbing accessories 
 of life ; and a man connected with business of any 
 kind, official, professional, or commercial, can 
 hardly expect to enjoy anything like genuine 
 rest, so long as he is within reach of the post or 
 the telegraph. The telegraph now, under post- 
 office development, is invading the remotest dis- 
 tricts. Happening some weeks ago to visit an 
 obscure village or townlet in South Wales, I was 
 surprised to see the posts and wires following the 
 rural road, miles away from the station, and thus 
 bringing London within a few minutes' distance of 
 my retreat. In a little time, I suppose that there 
 will be no place in which the telegraph cannot find 
 you out. I have thought sometimes, in my search 
 after rest, whether I would not, on leaving London 
 for an autumnal holiday, leave directions behind 
 me to forward no letters or telegrams, or, as a cer- 
 
 *5 
 
226 REST. 
 
 tain preventive to the dispatch of all unwelcome 
 missives, to leave no address behind me. I envy, 
 if I do not applaud, those who can do such things, 
 — who can thus cut themselves off from the outside 
 world altogether, and feel no misgivings of danger. 
 Of the faculty of abstraction I have spoken above. 
 I am now writing of the permissive or preventive 
 circumstances. And it unfortunately happens that 
 the very men to whom perfect repose is most essen- 
 tial are those whom hostile circumstances rarely 
 suffer to enjoy it. They may go to distant places 
 in the holidays, but they cannot deny the ap- 
 proaches of the post and the telegraph; and if 
 they did, their apprehensions and anxieties and 
 self-reproaches would give them as little genuine 
 rest as their letters and their messages and the 
 office-boxes which are sent down to them. It is 
 best, therefore, I am disposed to think, as most 
 contributing to rest in such circumstances, cheer- 
 fully to face your business, to do such work, or to 
 issue such orders for its doing, as will keep the 
 wheels going without accidents ; to get over it 
 every day as expeditiously as possible ; and then 
 to give yourself up to recreation and amusement. 
 Change of air and change of scene may do much 
 for a man, and it is no small thing to be able to 
 work by an open window, with the fresh air of the 
 departing summer breathing upon him, and fair 
 fields and smiling flowers to meet his eyes, when 
 he lifts them from his papers. Besides, there is 
 
FREEDOM FROM INTERRUPTION. 
 
 227 
 
 a blessed immunity from the distracting, at times 
 almost maddening, interruptions to which, at the 
 headquarters of your business, you are always 
 subject, — legitimate interruptions from clerks and 
 clients, and illegitimate incursions and intrusions 
 from the idle world, barbarians regardless of the 
 value of time, coming on their own private business 
 or on no business at all, impervious to hints of all 
 kinds, from covert appeals to ill-disguised re- 
 proaches. There is gain in the direction of rest 
 from the absence of these disturbing influences, 
 which is sufficient answer to those who thanklessly 
 exclaim, "I might as well have remained at office." 
 Better, again I say, under these happier conditions, 
 to do one's work, than to be accessible to con- 
 tinually recurring apprehensions of disaster and the 
 stingings of a lively conscience. 
 
 It is the absence, I am inclined to think, of these 
 sharp twinges of self-reproach, which, to a man 
 encumbered with the affairs of the world, makes a 
 period of sickness the nearest approach to a period 
 of rest to which he is ever likely to attain, until he 
 has rid himself of all fleshly encumbrances. There 
 is something very comforting in utter helplessness. 
 It is God's will that you should for awhile be in- 
 active — and there's an end of it. Satisfied that all 
 that comes from the Almighty disposer of events 
 is for the best, you resign yourself to his bidding, 
 as a child ; and with this childlike confidence come 
 childlike tastes and inclinations, and something like 
 
228 REST. 
 
 a childlike state of intelligence, — the mind, like the 
 body, eschewing strong diet and delighting in the 
 mildest nutriment. I am one of those who, in 
 seasons of health and strength, live upon meat and 
 wine. I eschew delicate cates and meek beverages. 
 I have a horror of slops. I thrive best upon heroic 
 aliment. But there are pauses in men's lives when 
 the heroic is at a discount. Mind and body are 
 alike in this. At such times I have found solace in 
 the perusal of books of the milder sort, which in 
 full health I should have regarded as the most in- 
 sipid of all possible reading, — books of the hum- 
 drum order, such as meek domestic stories about 
 goody people, who neither do nor suffer anything 
 that is not done or suffered by people of one's own 
 acquaintance every day of the year. I would not 
 class among these books such a work as Miss 
 Martineau's Decrbrook, which is good reading at 
 all times. I read it once, for the second or third 
 time, during a severe attack of the gout, under a 
 continual sense of gratitude to the writer. It is, 
 indeed, a great book, with as much meaning in it 
 as Bulwer's Rienzi, to which in my mind I have 
 frequently compared it. Dr. Hope is a sort of 
 Rienzi of middle-class life in England. Widely 
 different as are the costumes, the scenic effects, all 
 the external accessories, there is in both the same 
 moral groundwork, — the same truth wrought out 
 by different means. The variableness of popular 
 favor is finely illustrated by each writer. But I 
 
MILD READING. 
 
 229 
 
 could read one when I could not read the other. 
 Indeed, I tried, on my sick-bed, last year, to read 
 the Last of the Barons, and I found that the food 
 was too strong for me. But I read with pleasure, 
 at the time, some mild stories of everyday life at 
 home, of which I do not now remember a word, — 
 stories that take a man placidly just a very little 
 way out of the environs of self, and awaken a 
 calm, genial, sympathetic interest, which is gently 
 stimulating to the system, without disturbing one's 
 rest. Even children's books are sometimes pleasant 
 reading at such times, — especially schoolboy stories, 
 — such, for instance, as Charles Dickens's Old 
 Cheeseman; for, in truth, a sick man is little more 
 than a child. At such periods, indeed, there is 
 much pleasure in going back some forty years to 
 one's schoolboy days, and wondering what has be- 
 come of one's old schoolfellows, — what they have 
 done in the world, what they are like. Some, of 
 course, have turned up at odd times and in odd 
 places, with friendly recognitions ; and what delight 
 has there been in the renovata jnventus! — what 
 wonderful Rest in the interchange of old re- 
 miniscences, — the revivification of boyish jokes 
 between the Dean, the Queen's Counsel, and the 
 Chief of an Official Department, fondly remem- 
 bered by each other, with pleasant memories of 
 fair young faces and light agile figures, and 
 buoyant spirits that nothing could check! Such 
 reunions are worth many a hard and toilsome 
 
230 
 
 REST. 
 
 passage in life, and the more so that they com- 
 monly come upon us unawares. But I was minded 
 to speak of these blessed reunions in the spirit, 
 not in the flesh, — wishing to say that, when neces- 
 sitated to cease from labor, and to find some 
 pleasant occupation for the mind, I have often 
 derived, from reminiscences of old times, especially 
 of those embraced by the academic period, infinite 
 solace and repose. At such times, in the life- 
 pauses of illness, or in intervals of broken rest 
 (which, as we grow older, become unfortunately 
 more frequent), I have lived over again and again 
 those blessed periods of 
 
 " Youth, 
 When life was luxury, and friendship truth," 
 
 and have never become weary of the retrospect. 
 Strange it is that these memories of our early days 
 grow more vivid as we advance in life. Perhaps 
 it is that, as the fiercer excitements of the heyday 
 of manhood subside under the influence of age 
 and infirmity, we live less in the present, and give 
 ourselves more leisure to review the past. Our 
 first affections, out of the family circle, are com- 
 monly given to some school-friend ; and though, 
 in after-years, our paths may be far apart, and we 
 may lose sight altogether of the first objects of 
 our love, an enduring impression is made upon the 
 heart, which Time cannot efface. Perhaps, on the 
 whole, pleasant as are the meetings of which I 
 
SICKNESS A RENOVATOR. 
 
 231 
 
 have spoken, it is best for such school -friends 
 (speaking of them as something distinct from mere 
 sch.oo\-fellows) not to meet as adults, — not to have 
 anything to mar the mind-picture of the bright- 
 faced, supple-limbed boy, all aglow with healthful 
 exercise and innocent excitement, shouldering his 
 bat and walking down to the scorer to learn how 
 many runs he has made. He may have gone the 
 right way, or he may have gone the wrong way. 
 He may have developed into a bishop, or he may 
 have sunk into a sot. In either case, he is not our 
 little Bright-face ; and it is a pity that the remi- 
 niscence should be spoiled by any disfigurements 
 of mature reality. 
 
 It may appear to some, and not unreasonably, 
 that this notion of mine, that for a man, in the 
 full swing of business, to realize anything like 
 an approximation to rest, he must be prostrated 
 on a bed of sickness, is not unlike the idea of 
 Elia's Chinaman, that it was necessary to burn 
 down a house to obtain the luxury of roast-pig. 
 Perhaps it is. But there is nothing of which I 
 am more assured, in my own mind, than that, 
 in the midst of an active, perhaps an over-active, 
 career (I speak of cerebral, not muscular, activi- 
 ties), to be laid aside by no will of your own, but 
 by the ruling of One who better knows what is 
 good for you, may be in your case, as it has 
 been in thousands of other cases, the salvation 
 both of your body and of your mind. If I were 
 
232 
 
 REST. 
 
 the ruling principle of a life-assurance society, I 
 should put the question to the would-be assurer, 
 " When did you have your last illness ?" with a 
 view to ascertain the danger rather of unbroken 
 health (or the simulacrum of it) than the sup- 
 posed warnings of occasional attacks of sickness. 
 I should be always suspicious of men who are 
 " never ill." I have seen such men snap suddenly, 
 for want of that relief from incessant tension which, 
 to some natures, can only come unbidden. The 
 unbending of the bow is forced upon us when we 
 are really sick ; and it is bountifully provided in 
 such genuine disorderments that with the debility 
 of the body engendered at such times should come 
 also a corresponding debility of mind, or rather 
 a certain obtuseness thereof, an absence of that 
 sensitiveness to external influences which is in- 
 separable from perfect, or even slightly impaired, 
 health ; and from this absence of the vivida vis of 
 other times comes the nearest approach to Rest 
 which active men are capable of enjoying. And 
 next to this, in their salutary effects on overworked 
 man, are the conditions of the Sabbath. 
 
 I have spoken incidentally of the Christian's 
 day of rest, and promised to return to the subject. 
 I think with a shudder, sometimes, of what life 
 would be without Sunday, — if day after day the 
 great wheel of the world went round with its 
 ceaseless clatter, never a rest in motion, never a 
 pause in sound. These are mere secular essays ; 
 
SUNDA YS. 
 
 233 
 
 they do not aspire even to the dignity of lay- 
 sermons. What am I that I should dare to write 
 otherwise than as a worlding? I speak of the 
 Sabbath only in its original meaning, as a word 
 that signifies Rest. And in this sense it is by 
 most men, and ought to be by all, esteemed as 
 the very greatest of all the blessings which the 
 Almighty benevolence has bestowed upon man. 
 The worst Sabbath-breaker of all is the ingrate 
 who is not thankful when the Sabbath comes 
 round. He may go to church three times a day, 
 and be austere in all outward observances, but he 
 breaks the Sabbath in his heart if he rejoices when 
 it is over. There are many kinds of worship, and 
 I am humbly disposed to think that the giving of 
 thanks is not the least acceptable of them. If it 
 be true that laborare est orare, we are praying 
 during six days of the week, and may devote the 
 seventh to praise. He who thoroughly enjoys his 
 day of rest lives from morning to night in a state 
 of thankfulness to the Almighty; the incense of 
 praise is continually rising from his heart. I 
 do not envy the man who does not hail the 
 advent of Sunday, and rejoice in the Rest which 
 it vouchsafes. 
 
 I am not forgetful that among those who have 
 professed this want of appreciation of the great 
 weekly restorative, for which I am so devoutly 
 thankful, once lived and loved one, of whom to 
 write at all is to write tenderly and affectionately, 
 
234 
 
 REST. 
 
 — that gentle hero, that Titanic weakling, Charles 
 Lamb. It was not well of him to write, in one of 
 the most delightful of his Essays, " I had my Sun- 
 days to myself; but Sundays, admirable as the 
 institution of them is for purposes of worship, are 
 for that very reason the worst adapted for days of 
 unbending and recreation. In particular there is 
 a gloom for me attendant upon city Sundays, a 
 weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of 
 London, the music and the ballad-singers, the buzz 
 and stirring music of the streets. Those eternal 
 bells depress me. The closed shops repel me. 
 Prints, pictures, all the glittering and endless suc- 
 cession of knacks and gewgaws, and ostenta- 
 tiously-displayed wares of tradesmen, which make 
 a weekday saunter through the less busy parts of 
 the metropolis so delightful, are shut out. No 
 bookstalls deliciously to idle over. No busy faces 
 to recreate the idle man, who contemplates them 
 ever passing by, — the very face of business a charm 
 by contrast to his temporary relaxation from it. 
 Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances, or 
 half-happy at best, — of emancipated 'prentices and 
 little tradesfolk, with here and there a servant-maid 
 who has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the 
 week, with the habit has lost almost the capacity 
 of enjoying a free hour, and livelily expressing 
 the hollowness of a day's pleasuring. The very 
 strollers in the fields on that day look anything 
 but comfortable." Half serious, half sportive, and 
 
L OND ON SUN DA YS. 235 
 
 wholly wrong ! It appears to me, too, that there 
 is something of an anachronism in it. Written in 
 the character of the " Superannuated Man," it re- 
 lates to a past period of existence, when the writer 
 had "a desk in Mincing Lane," — otherwise in 
 Leadenhall Street, — and yet it seems to be imbued 
 with the spirit of superannuation, and to express 
 rather the sentiments of the " idle man" than of 
 the busy one. Perhaps he would not have written 
 in this strain whilst he was harnessed to the go-cart 
 of the Accounts' Office of the East India Company, 
 and had only his Sundays for holidays. It is surely 
 abundant compensation for the closed bookstalls 
 and the silent hurdygurdies, that you can rise in 
 the morning with the delightful sense that there 
 is nothing that you are compelled to do. If it be 
 any luxury to you to lie late abed, you may do it. 
 You need not look at your watch every ten minutes, 
 lest you should miss the train (in Mr. Lamb's day 
 it was the coach). You need not grudge yourself 
 an extra quarter of an hour over your breakfast. 
 You need not be disquieted by the thought that 
 you have got your slippers on instead of your 
 boots (in Mr. Lamb's time the disquieting thought 
 was connected with the buttoning of the gaiters). 
 In a word, you need not be in a hurry. Is this no 
 small thing in itself? Is it not rest, — rest from 
 that unceasing battle with Time that we are waging 
 all through the weekdays ? For my own part, it 
 is the quietude of Sunday that I so much enjoy, — 
 
236 REST. 
 
 the cessation of the postman's rap, of the trades- 
 man's call, of the street-cries, of the references to 
 BradsJiaw. I can sit still when I like, I can sleep 
 when I like, and I have time to be thankful. 
 
 It is true that I commonly spend my Sundays 
 a little way in the country, or, rather, a little out 
 of town, for in these days of perpetual aedification 
 the country is not easily reached. If you pitch 
 your tent where there is a pleasant prospect of 
 green fields and orchards, and you can see the 
 cows grazing from your windows at all times and 
 the apple-blossoms whitening the ground beneath 
 them in the spring and early summer, the specula- 
 tive builder soon plants opposite to you a steam- 
 engine and a sawing-machine, exorcises houses, 
 with demoniacal rapidity, from the bowels of the 
 earth, and blocks out all of nature but the skies. 
 There is some good, be it said, even in this ; for it 
 is a blessing, bountifully tending to rest, to be suf- 
 fered to know the worst. When all is done that 
 can be done to your despite, there is nothing more 
 for you to fear or fidget about ; and it is better, 
 perhaps, to know that you can never see those 
 fields and apple-blossoms again from your win- 
 dows, than to live haunted by continual apprehen- 
 sions of losing them. We soon get reconciled, as 
 I have before said, to the inevitable. I purpose to 
 say something presently about the rest that comes 
 from knowing the worst. I" am now, when not 
 hindered by my digressional infirmity, writing of 
 
DELIGHT IN SUNDA Y. 
 
 237 
 
 the blessed Rest of Sundays. And I was proceed- 
 ing to say that though now, in spite of the builder, 
 I can sit on Sundays under my vine and saunter 
 among flowers, it has not been always so ; and that 
 I have spent years of Sundays in town, under 
 nearly every residential condition known to our 
 middle-class humanity, — in comfortable family 
 dwelling-houses, in lodging-house " drawing-room 
 floors," in chambers of Inns of Court, ay, and in 
 the city proper, hard by that so-called "Mincing 
 Lane" whereof Mr. Lamb discourses ; and yet I 
 protest that I have never failed to rise from my bed 
 lighter and happier on Sundays than on any one 
 of the six weekdays. Not that I make wry faces 
 at my work. We are upon the very best of terms 
 with each other. Indeed, I might in this case 
 adapt to my own uses the fine old chivalrous senti- 
 ment, and say, — 
 
 I should not love thee, Work, so well, 
 Loved I not Sunday more. 
 
 My selfish delight in Sunday is, that I am not 
 compelled to do any work on that day, if I do not 
 wish it, and that I ought not if I would ; but there 
 is a joy beyond this in seeing others going out for 
 their Sunday holidays, in their best clothes, looking 
 clean and bright and fresh, and, whatever Mr. Lamb 
 may say to the contrary, with a keen sense of the 
 coming enjoyment written on their faces. I like to 
 speculate on what they are going to do, as I see 
 
238 REST. 
 
 them starting when the morning air is fresh and 
 the sun not very high above the house-tops, 
 wondering whether they are going to see their 
 old parents in the country (mayhap in the Work- 
 house) or a daughter in service, or only to get a 
 little fresh air away from the smoke of London. 
 And there were other pleasant and suggestive 
 sights as seen from my chamber-windows, not the 
 least of which was this : — I was wont to see on 
 Sunday mornings, in the bright summer-time, a 
 little stream of people flowing, under an archway, 
 from Lincoln's Inn Fields towards Covent Garden, 
 and returning by the same channel. They went 
 empty-handed and they returned full ; each one, 
 man or woman, carrying — I might almost write 
 hugging — a pot of flowers; a geranium, a fuchsia, 
 a verbena, or some other freely-blossoming plant. 
 It mystified me for some time ; but I learned after- 
 wards that there was an early sale of flowers on 
 Sunday mornings in Covent Garden, and that pur- 
 chases were to be made more cheaply at that hour 
 than at any other. And it pleased me to think 
 that a part of the wages paid on Saturday evening 
 had been put aside for these Sunday-morning pur- 
 chases ; and though this buying and selling might, 
 in the eyes of rigid Sabbatarians, be held, in some 
 sort, as a violation of the Fourth Commandment, 
 I could not help thinking that the Recording 
 Angel might well drop a tear upon the page that 
 registered the offense. For the love of flowers, 
 
GARDENING. 239 
 
 especially in sorely-tried Londoners, is a virtue in 
 itself; and it greatly engenders Rest. 
 
 I would recommend every man, in the autumn 
 of his life, to take to gardening, if he has not 
 already experienced its pleasures. Of all occupa- 
 tions in the world it is the one which best combines 
 repose and activity. It is rest-in-work or work-in- 
 rest. It is not idleness; it is not stagnation; and 
 yet it is perfect quietude. Like all things mortal, 
 it has its failures and its disappointments, and there 
 are some things hard to understand. But it is 
 never without its rewards. And, perhaps, if there 
 were nothing but successful cultivation, the aggre- 
 gate enjoyment would be less. It is better for the 
 occasional shadows that come over the scene. The 
 discipline, too, is most salutary. It tries one's 
 patience and it tries one's faith. The perpetual 
 warfare, that seems ever to be going on between 
 the animal and the vegetable world, is something 
 strange and perplexing. It is hard to understand 
 why the beautiful tender blossoms and the delicate 
 fresh leaflets of my rose-trees should be covered 
 with green flies and destroyed as soon as they are 
 born. It is a mystery which I cannot solve; but I 
 know that there is a meaning in it, and that it is all 
 decreed for good, only that I am too ignorant to 
 fathom it. And even in the worst of seasons there 
 is far more to reward and encourage than to dis- 
 hearten and to disappoint. There is no day of the 
 year without something to afford tranquil pleasure 
 
240 
 
 REST. 
 
 to the cultivator of flowers, something on which the 
 mind may rest (using the word in its double sense) 
 with profit and delight. If there is no new surprise, 
 no fresh discovery for you, there is always some- 
 thing to be done. " The garden is a constant source 
 of amusement to us both," wrote Dr. Arnold in 
 one of his delightful letters, — he was writing of 
 himself and wife; "there are always some little 
 alterations to be made, some few spots where an 
 additional shrub or two would be ornamental, 
 something coming into blossom ; so that I can 
 always delight to go round and see how things are 
 going on." In the spring and summer there is 
 some pleasure-giving change visible every morning, 
 something to fulfill and something to excite expec- 
 tation. And even in the winter, flower-culture has 
 its delights. If you have a green-house or con- 
 servatory, no matter how small, you have an in- 
 doors garden, in which you may watch the same 
 changes and enjoy the same delights. And if you 
 have not, you may still do something to preserve 
 your nurslings during the rigors of the hybernal 
 season. Indeed, there are few states of life in which 
 floriculture is not an available enjoyment. To rich 
 and to poor it is a blessing equally accessible. "As 
 gardening," it was observed by Sir William Temple, 
 who has had a new lease of life in one of the best 
 of Macaulay's Essays, " has been the inclination 
 of kings and the choice of philosophers, so it has 
 been the common favorite of public and private 
 
WINDOW-GARDENING. 24 1 
 
 men, a pleasure of the greatest and the care of 
 the meanest; and indeed an employment and a 
 possession for which no man is too high or too 
 low." I am disposed, indeed, to think that to men 
 of low estate it yields greater joys than to those 
 who hail from high places. I have got a little 
 garden about the size of a rich man's dining-table. 
 I am as fond of it, and, when the roses are in 
 bloom, as proud of it, too, as the Duke can be of 
 his world-renowned Chatsworth. I do not suppose 
 that if I could bring as many acres as I please 
 under floral cultivation, and have as many gardeners 
 as I choose to hire, with another Paxton at the 
 head of them, I should derive from them all a 
 tenth part of the enjoyment that is now vouchsafed 
 to me by my little strip of suburban soil. Indeed, 
 in that ducal case, I should not be suffered to 
 garden ; I must be gardened for : they would be 
 the gardener's roses, not mine; I should have 
 merely the privilege of looking at them. And 
 it is essential to any real enjoyment of a garden 
 that you should be an autocrat in it, that you 
 should do much of the work yourself, and have 
 a particular knowledge of almost each individual 
 flower. 
 
 But there are lowlier gardeners even than I ; 
 there are gardens to which my diminutive domain 
 is a Chatsworth, — gardens limited to the capacity 
 of a window-sill. I honor those window-gardeners, 
 especially those who dwell in towns, in narrow 
 
 16 
 
242 REST. 
 
 
 streets or murky alleys, and whose homes are made 
 beautiful by the smiles of the flowers in their 
 windows, — gardeners such as I have spoken of 
 above, as seen from my windows in Lincoln's Inn, 
 carrying their gardens in their hands, beautiful off- 
 shoots of the great garden which ever flourishes 
 between Long Acre and the Strand. And even of 
 this window- gardening there are many degrees, — 
 descending even down to one delicate plant, reared 
 perhaps from a slip beneficently given by a neigh- 
 bor, in a fragment of a broken water-jug. There 
 seems to be something of the old Paradisiacal 
 beatitude in these modest cultivations. I saw 
 yesterday, as I journeyed homeward-bound, after 
 my day's work, to the station, whence I take 
 train to my suburb, a woman at a second-floor 
 window in Westminster (it is a house ancient and 
 decrepit, doubtless doomed to speedy deletion) 
 amidst a perfect Eden of many-colored and many- 
 shaped flowers and creepers, picking off the dead 
 leaves here and there. Neither youth nor beauty 
 physically belonged to her; but the picture was 
 not without a suggestiveness of youth and beauty; 
 for the love of flowers keeps the heart young, and 
 the greater the difficulty of indulging that love the 
 greater the moral beauty of success in the culti- 
 vation of a purifying taste. I could readily asso- 
 ciate with it the idea of a background, behind that 
 
 festooned window, in which, notwithstanding all 
 
 the ordinary troubles and disturbances of metro- 
 
 
STATESMANSHIP IN THE GARDEN. 
 
 243 
 
 politan work, there is, at appointed times, a fine air 
 of repose, — a soothing benignity of Rest* 
 
 But I am minded, having thus spoken of these 
 lower strata of floriculture, to return for a little 
 space to the higher. If I were to give way to the 
 inclination to discourse upon this subject, and to 
 illustrate it by examples drawn from ancient and 
 modern history, showing how the greatest men of 
 all ages have sought and found Rest in the con- 
 templation of fields and flowers, — the inexhausti- 
 ble works of that benignant Nature, which "never 
 doth betray the heart that is her own," — I should 
 require more sheets than I can find pages for my 
 commentary. But I have been recently reading 
 Lord Russell's Life of Charles Fox, and do not 
 know any more beautiful illustration of the love of 
 Rest than is to be found in the story of the great 
 statesman's retirement and the correspondence 
 which accompanies it: — "At a period," writes 
 Lord Russell, "when the prospects of office nearly 
 vanished from his sight, when calumny loved to 
 paint him as a man of disordered ambition and 
 criminal designs, he was busy in the study of 
 Homer, or lounging carelessly through his garden 
 
 * Since this was written, I have found a charming illustration of 
 window-gardening in that unfinished work of Charles Dickens, 
 which it so saddens one to read, — the window-garden cultivated 
 by the retired naval lieutenant in Staple Inn, who " thought he'd 
 feel his way to the command of a limited estate by beginning in 
 boxes." 
 
244 REST. 
 
 and expressing to his beloved nephew the full 
 sense of his happiness and content. The trees and 
 the flowers, the birds and the fresh breezes, gave 
 him an intense enjoyment, which those who knew 
 his former life of politics and pleasure could hardly 
 have imagined. To the capacious benevolence 
 which longed to strike the chain from the African 
 slave, he joined a daily practice of all the charities 
 of life and a perception of the beautiful in nature, 
 in literature and in art, which was a source of con- 
 stant enjoyment. With a simplicity of manners 
 rare in great statesmen, he united views the most 
 profound, and a feeling heart which calumny could 
 not embitter, nor years make cold, nor the world 
 harden." The enjoyment of rest, which he derived 
 from the sights and sounds of nature, from the 
 beauty of the flowers and the songs of the birds, 
 was intense; and with this went hand-in-hand 
 the cultivation of literature, especially in its less 
 laborious forms. He was writing history, but he 
 turned aside to revel in poetry; and from his 
 poetical studies he was diverted, at times, by his 
 inquiries as to the season of nightingale-singing in 
 different parts of the country. But, in the midst 
 of all this, he had his misgivings. He could not 
 help those qualms of conscience which rose up at 
 odd times, and suggested that he ought to be at 
 work again. 
 
 Take the following from one of his letters in 
 1795, as illustrative of the great struggle within 
 
CHARLES FOX IN RETIREMENT. 245 
 
 between the sense of duty and the longing for 
 Rest: — "As to myself, I grow every day to think 
 less of public affairs ; possibly your coming home 
 and taking a part in them might make me again 
 more alive about them, but I doubt even that 
 The bills of this year appear to me to be a finish- 
 ing stroke to everything like a spirit of liberty; 
 and though the country did show some spirit whilst 
 they were depending, yet I fear it is only a tempo- 
 rary feeling which they have quite forgotten. I 
 wish I could be persuaded that it is right to quit 
 public business, for I should like it to a degree 
 that I cannot express; but I cannot yet think that 
 it is not a duty to persevere. One may be of 
 opinion that persevering is of no use ; but ought a 
 man who has engaged himself to the public to 
 trust so entirely to a speculation of this sort as to 
 go out of the common road, and to desert (for so 
 it would be called) the public service ? .... I 
 think it can scarcely be right. But as for wishes, 
 no one ever wished anything more. I am per- 
 fectly happy in the country. I have quite re- 
 sources enough to employ my mind, and the 
 great resource of all, literature. I am fonder 
 of literature every day." — [April 12, 1795.] And 
 again, some years later: — "My feeling is this, — 
 that notwithstanding nightingales, flowers, litera- 
 ture, history, etc., all which, however, I conceive 
 to be good and substantial reasons for staying 
 here, I would nevertheless go to town if I saw 
 
246 
 
 REST. 
 
 any chance of my going being serviceable to the 
 public, or (which, in my view of the case, is the 
 same thing) to the party ; which I love both as a 
 part} 7- , and on account of many of the principal 
 individuals who compose it. I feel myself quite 
 sure that this is not now the case ; and that if I 
 were to go the best I could hope for would be that 
 I should do no mischief." — \Ap?il 19, 1801.] The 
 love of repose, of flowers and singing-birds, had 
 grown upon him in the interval, but still ever 
 and anon came goadings of self-reproach, and 
 the much-coveted rest seemed to be continually 
 slipping away from him. Thus, three years after- 
 wards, he wrote, " I am going up to town to- 
 morrow, to stay I know not how many weeks. I 
 dislike it to a degree you can hardly conceive, but 
 I feel it is right, and resolve to do it handsomely. 
 . . . . Nightingales not come yet, and it will be 
 well, if I do not quite miss hearing them this 
 spring ; but I will do it so handsomely that I hope 
 you will hear from your other correspondents that 
 I have quite turned my mind to politics again, 
 and am as eager as in former days. Pray remem- 
 ber to inquire at what time nightingales usually 
 appear and sing where you are." — [April g, 1804.] 
 There is something very pleasant in this last 
 touch of nature. The nightingales again ! What 
 a change from those soft songsters to the obstrep- 
 erousness of the House of Commons! There are 
 many, doubtless, whom we are wont, in these days, 
 
DELIGHTS OF LITERA TURE. 247 
 
 to think self-seeking and ambitious, because they 
 continue to take part in the strife of public affairs, 
 even when health and strength are failing and the 
 voice is growing weak. We seldom take account 
 of the sacrifices which they make. How many 
 would give up place and power if they did not feel 
 within them a strong sense of duty, compelling 
 them to listen to the calls of their country ! No 
 one, who has tried both, doubts for a moment that 
 Literature is more delightful than Politics. What 
 Rest our two great party-leaders must have found 
 in their Homeric studies and translations ! What 
 repose must have been the lot of that other states- 
 man who wrote the Life of Fox above quoted, and 
 that other life, in which he passed from politics to 
 poetry, and manifested as keen an appreciation of 
 the one as of the other! And who can fathom the 
 depths of that intense amusement and recreation 
 which another party-leader, sui generis, must have 
 experienced, when he hoaxed and hocussed the 
 world by publishing a fashionable novel, intended 
 to satirize the perverted literary taste and to gauge 
 the literary flunkyism of the age ? I think it must 
 have added half a dozen good working-years to 
 his life. He has achieved many successes, but 
 none equal to this last. I do not say that I 
 applaud it. He had before laid bare the rotten- 
 ness of party politics, and it was still less pleasant 
 to see the literary criticism of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury thus shown to be a pretentious sham. But it 
 
248 REST. 
 
 will have its uses. My roses are not less sweet 
 because the soil from which they grow is manured 
 with the vilest offal. If this stupendous hoax, 
 which must have shaken the sides of Beaconsfield 
 right merrily, should, as we apprehend it will, 
 teach criticism a little more caution and conscien- 
 tiousness, it will not have been played out in vain. 
 I have spoken incidentally, above, of the Rest 
 which comes from knowing or suffering the worst, 
 — the quiet that follows an explosion. It is like 
 the stillness now succeeding the thunderstorm, 
 amidst which some of these lines have been written 
 in the early morning. Almost every one, in some 
 shape or other, has experienced, after a long period 
 of painful doubt and suspense and anxiety, — of 
 those fears which cling to you in the day, which 
 haunt your sleep, and oppress you with deadly 
 sickness at the " shuddering dawn," — the infinite 
 relief of the dreaded it having actually come upon 
 you. There is an end, then, of all your strugglings 
 to escape your doom, — all your writhings and 
 wrestlings, — all the miserable turmoil and excite- 
 ment of battle with an impending fate. I have 
 heard that men whose business affairs have been 
 in an embarrassed state for months and years, have 
 felt, when the " smash" came at last, a quietude of 
 spirit, a repose of mind, such as they had not felt 
 for a long and weary time. The worst had come ; 
 and bankruptcy itself was not so bad as the fear of 
 bankruptcy. I have seen, indeed, with my own 
 
KNOWING THE WORST. 
 
 249 
 
 eyes, men who had shrunk and shriveled into an 
 extreme state of tenuity, who had grown pale and 
 wrinkled and careworn, hollow-eyed and dragged- 
 mouthed, under the pressure of their difficulties, 
 make their appearance, after a little space in the 
 Fleet Prison or some kindred institution, quite 
 sleek and rosy and bright-faced, jaunty and debon- 
 naire in their manner, ten years younger everyway, 
 as though the worst had come upon them and 
 there was nothing now to be feared. Of course, 
 this indicates a certain obtuseness of conscience 
 and want of sympathy with others, in favor of 
 which I have nothing to say. I am only speaking 
 of the Rest that ensues from the it having come 
 upon us. I can easily imagine, too, that an offender 
 against the laws of God and man, endeavoring to 
 escape from the pursuing hand of justice, might 
 feel infinite relief when the hand has been laid 
 on him and he can no longer evade its grasp. I 
 think that wretched Falkland, — rare product of the 
 genius of William Godwin, — that typical man, vain 
 fugitive from a remorseless and untiring Nemesis, 
 must have rejoiced when the terrible pursuit was at 
 an end. Even death itself has less terror than the 
 perpetual uplooking at the Damoclean sword im- 
 pending above one's head. It is related in cotem- 
 porary annals of the Great Indian rebellion, that 
 on more than one occasion there was a sense of 
 infinite relief after the storm had burst, and that 
 when the mutinous sepoys were everywhere surg- 
 
250 
 
 REST. 
 
 ing around our Christian people, there was less 
 misery in the knowledge of the actual present, than 
 in the vague apprehension of the impending evil. 
 
 It was in some mood of this kind that a dear 
 friend, who, with the best intentions in the world, 
 was always in trouble, — one of those men who 
 believe every one and everything, who are never 
 to be convinced by any failures or misfortunes, 
 who can never profit by experience or grow wise 
 by suffering, but go on to the end with unfailing 
 trust in humanity, — once wrote, on what he thought 
 the eve of a crisis, which never came after all, — for 
 though some friends misled, it cannot be said 
 betrayed him, others were stanch to the last ; and 
 his faith in his fellow-men was not found to be 
 ill bestowed, — 
 
 " Rest ! — Yes ; a prison, it may be. 'Tis well ! 
 I have fought the battle long, and I have lost — 
 Trusted my friends, and counted not the cost 
 Of this blind faith in others. So I fell. 
 And now that I have long been tempest-tost, 
 I find my haven gladly in a cell. 
 Water and bread, and just a little light, 
 And air it may be, and full leave to pray, 
 And I shall not much care for man's despite, 
 Waiting, in God's good time, a better day — 
 Better to lay one's arms down and to wait, 
 Than to fight on, sore-spent, all gashed and gory ; 
 For the time cometh, be it soon or late, 
 When perfect Rest is link'd with perfect Glory." 
 
 I have a few words more to say in conclusion. 
 There is something very soothing and solacing, 
 
SUPERANNUA TION. 
 
 251 
 
 amidst the cares and distractions, the ceaseless 
 goings-to-and-fro of active life, in the thought of 
 some day being able to lay down one's burdens 
 and to cease from the strenuous business to which 
 one has been harnessed for long years, — to make 
 over the traces and the collar and the reins, which 
 one has worn so long, and the bit one has champed 
 for nearly half a century, to a younger and stronger 
 horse, and to go out quietly to grass. And yet 
 there are some men who shrink from the thought, 
 — who have a vague presentiment that if the harness 
 cease to brace them up any longer they will fall 
 down by the wayside and die. I think it is a 
 miserable mistake. Every man should listen to 
 the warnings which benignant Nature is continually 
 uttering to him. Whether in the autumn of life 
 we are cautioned now and then to pause,* or 
 
 * Whilst I am correcting the proofs of this essay, I read in 
 one of the daily papers this gratifying intelligence : — "The Prime 
 Minister is not ill, still less has he suffered what can be called ' a 
 relapse,' however • slight.' He has simply been conscious that 
 those were right who advised a little rest after recent hard labors, 
 if he wished actually to avoid any return of indisposition which 
 has before been induced by overwork. And so successful has been 
 the resort to repose, that he will probably be in his place again to- 
 day, or at the latest to-morrow, in the full enjoyment of that excel- 
 lent health which all have noticed recently." Here, indeed, is an 
 example to lesser men. "A stitch in time saves nine," in your 
 constitution as well as in your coat. It is true wisdom to take 
 heed of these slight warnings. The hardest worker in high place 
 that I ever knew, having rejected some timely admonitions of this 
 kind, was mercifully laid aside by a broken head in the hunting- 
 
252 REST. 
 
 whether in the winter of life we are told that the 
 time has come for us to cease altogether from 
 work, we should never reject those promptings. 
 The time must come when younger men will do 
 our work better, and, if we remain still at the grind- 
 stone, we shall be little more than cumberers of the 
 earth. Nay, we may be something worse, — miser- 
 able spectacles of decay, not even stately ruins. 
 Shall we cling thus to a mere mockery and make- 
 belief of work, — sorry " drivelers and shows," — 
 with dim eyes, and palsied hands, and vagrant 
 memories ? Let us take our pensions thankfully 
 in good time ; let us be content to be superan- 
 nuated ; let us go cheerfully into retirement before 
 people say that we ought to be kicked into it. At 
 the close of life we ought to be left to our repose, 
 — to have time to take account of eternity. To 
 work after we have ceased to be good workmen is 
 only to take away so much from the good work 
 already done. We may then reverse the words of 
 the aphorism above cited, and say, "Orare est 
 laborareT We are never too old to pray. Let us 
 be thankful that we have time and repose to do it, 
 and hopefully wait until the summons comes : — 
 " Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter 
 into thy rest." 
 
 field, and compelled to cease from the labor of years. And now 
 he has gone back to the councils of the nation, all the better for 
 that disaster in the field. 
 
THE BATTLE WITH TIME. 253 
 
 It is only through the gates of death that we 
 can grope our way to the fullness of repose. Let 
 us then pause and make our houses ready, while 
 there is time still left. It is not good to be stricken 
 down in the midst of the great battle, as was he of 
 whom erst I wrote : — 
 
 His life was one grand battle with old Time. 
 
 From morn till noon, from noon to weary night, 
 
 Ever he fought as only strong men fight; 
 And so he passed out of his golden prime 
 
 Into grim hoary manhood ; and he knew 
 
 No rest from that great conflict, till he grew 
 Feeble and old, ere years could make him so. 
 
 Then on a bed of pain he laid his head, 
 As one sore-spent with labor and with woe; 
 
 " Rest comes at last; I thank thee, God," he said. 
 Death came ; upon his brow laid chilly hands, 
 
 And whispered, "Vanquished!" But he gasped out, "No, 
 I am the Victor now ; for unto lands 
 
 Where Time's dark shadow cannot fall, I go." 
 
 Ay, but whither ? It is ill thus to die with the 
 harness on one's back and the battle-axe in one's 
 hand. Better to lay them down ere the dark 
 shadow falls, and, resting as best we may upon 
 earth, pass away into the Perfect Rest. 
 
 August, 1870. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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