«giSii^i?r' ^^f^^0 fm ^LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, || UNITED STATES OP AMERICA. J '4-^^--'^ '■■^^r.^1';^' v: ^AR 'If n w 'n^ndrm n\ mmm >iii ^mm wm #2 - m i«« ^im iS .'rri c:to2;^ m^sMi^k, >,.^'.«AnA^'.« M^^lW\: ^■^^ }r^ :■ /ilSmm^ l^nf'^Mi 1^,1 J jl i/A|/*s(^ If )a 1 ■■ Myf-^f '^fj n hr_T^1 h i i .f i^ rhhkhl 'Mmim AUTUMN HOLIDAYS. BV THE SAME AUTHOR. THE RECREATIONS OF A COUNTRY PARSON. First Series. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. THE RECREATIONS OF A COUNTRY PARSON. Second Series. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. LEISURE HOURS IN TOWN. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. THE COMMONPLACE PHILOSOPHER IN TOWN AND COUNTRY. Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. THE GRAVER THOUGHTS OF A COUNTRY PARSON. Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. COUNSEL AND COMFORT SPOKEN FROM A CITY PULPIT. Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. /« the press. A SECOND VOLUME OF THE GRAVER THOUGHTS OF A COUNTRY PARSON. Crown Svo. 3s. 6d. LONDON NTED KV 5POTTISWOODE AND CO. NEW-STREET SQUARE ^r--^^^'^^*"^^ THE AUTUMN HOLIDAYS OF A COUNTRY PARSON n.. -^A^ BY THE AUTHOR OF 'THE RECREATIONS OF A COUNTRY PARSON B Jh^ And I reply to that candid person, who never mis- represented anyone, and who never said a good word of anyone, — Yes, my acquaintance : I remember all that. But still I hold that little vexatious external circumstances have a great effect in producing a feeling of irritation the reverse of devotional : and I believe that we poor creatures, with our wander- ing thoughts and our cold hearts, are much more likely to worship in spirit, if we are kept free from 74 Of the Sudden Sweetening of such unfriendly influences : and if our worship be surrounded by all the outward decency and so- lemnity which are attainable. Give us a decorous building, I don't ask . for a grand one : give us quietude and order in all its arrangements : give us church music that soothes and cheers and brings us fresh heart : give us an assemblage of seem- ingly devout worshippers. And these things being present, I do not hesitate to say that the average worshipper will be far more likely to offer true spi- ritual worship, than in places to which I could easily point, where the discreditable building and the slovenly service are an offence and a mortifica- tion to everyone with any sense of what is fit. This, however, is by the bye. I could say much more on the subject. But I remember, thankfully, that it is a subject on which all educated persons now think alike, everywhere. It did not use to be so, once. But not merely as regards churches, but as re- gards most other things : my principle holds true, that if you look carefully and for some time into the qualifications of almost anything not positively bad, you will discern a great deal of good about it. Take a very ordinary-looking bunch of grapes : take even a bunch of grapes which appears sour at a cursory glance : look at it carefully for a good while, with the sense that it is your own ; and it will sweeten before your eyes. You pass a seedy little country Certain Grapes. 75 house, looking like a fourth-rate farm-house : you think, and possibly say, (If the man who lives in it be a friend of your own,) that it is a wretched hole. The man who lives in It has very likely persuaded himself that It is a very handsome and attractive place. '■ What kind of manse have you got 1 ' said my friend Smith to a certain worthy clergyman. * Oh, it Is a beautiful place,' was the prompt reply. It was In fact a dismal weather-stained whitewashed erection, without an architectural feature, with hardly a tree or an evergreen near it, standing on a bleak hill-side. Smith heard the reply with great plea- sure ; feeling thankful that by God's kind appoint- ment a sensible man's own grapes seem sweet to him, which appear sour to everybody else ; and to nobody sourer than to himself, before they became his own. The only wonder Smith felt was, that the good minister's reply had not been stronger. He was prepared to hear the good man say, * Oh, it is the most beautiful place In Scotland ! ' For people in general cannot express their appreciation of things, without introducing comparisons; and Indeed superlatives. If a man's window commands a fine view, he is not content to say that it does command a fine view : No, It commands '■ the finest view in Britain.' If a human being has an attack of Illness, about a hundredth part as bad as hundreds of peo- ple endure every day, that human being will proba- bly be quite indignant unless you recognize it as a 76 Of the Sudden Sweetening of fact, that nobody ever suffered so much before. Take an undistinguished volume from your shelves: read it carefully in your leisure hours for several evenings : and that undistinguished volume will be- come (in your estimation) an important one. My friend Smith, when he went to his country parish, was obliged for several months to have his books in large packing-boxes, his study not being ready to receive them. He lived in a lonely rural spot, for many wintry weeks, all alone. It was a charming scene around, indeed : warm with green ivy and yews and hollies through the brief daylight: but dreary and solitary through the long dark evenings to a man accustomed to gas-lit streets. Soon after settling there. Smith chanced to draw forth from a box a certain volume, which had remained for months in his bookcase unnoted: one among many more, all very like. And on every Sunday evening of that solitary time, Smith read in that volume. He read with pleasure and profit. Ever since then, he has thought the book a valuable and excellent one. It is distinguished among his books as the Bishop of Anywhere is among five hundred other clergymen : not that he is a whit wiser or better, but that he has been accidentally made more con- spicuous. When Smith turns over its leaves now, the moaning of January winds through the pine wood comes back ; and the brawl of a brook, winter- flooded. In brief, that cluster of grapes suddenly Certain Grapes. "jj sweetened, because its merits were fairly weighed. If a thing be good at all, look at it and examine it, and it will seem better. Now, a thing you have no chance of getting, you never seriously weigh the merits of When you re- ceive a half offer of a place in life, it is quite fair for you to say, ' Offer it fairly, and I shall think of it' You cannot take the trouble of estimating it now. It is a laborious and anxious thing to make up your mind in such a case. You must consider, and count up, and weigh, possibly a great number of circum- stances. You do not choose to undergo that fatigue, perhaps for no result. And if you be in perplexity what to do, the balance may be turned just by the fact that the thing is attainable. Hence the truth of that true proverb, that Faint heart never won fair lady. If you are fond of Miss Smith, and wish to marry her, don't speculate at home whether or not she will have you. Go and ask her. Your asking may be the very thing that will decide her to have you. And you, patron or electors of some little country parish which is vacant, don't say ' We need never offer it to such and such an eminent preacher: he would never think of it ! ' Go and try him. Per- haps he may. Perhaps you may catch him just at a time when he is feeling weary and exhausted : when he is growing old : when your offer may recall with fresh beauty the green fields and trees amid which he once was young : when he is sighing for a "]% Of the Sudden Sweetening of little rest. I could point out instances, more than one or two, in England and in Scotland, in which a bold offering of a bunch of grapes to a distinguished human being, induced him to accept the grapes : though you would have fancied, beforehand, that they would have been no temptation to him. I have known a man who (in a moral sense) refused a pine-apple, afterwards accept a turnip ; and like it. We have all heard of a good man who might have lived in a palace, holding a position of great rank and gain, and of very easy duty; who put that golden cluster of grapes aside : and by his own free choice went to a place of hard work and little fame or profit, to remain there one of the happiest as well as one of the noblest and most useful of humankind ! And the only way in which I can account for various marriages, is by supposing that the grapes sud- denly grew irresistibly sweet, just when it appeared that they could be had. You may have known a fair young girl quite willingly and happily marry a good old creature, whom you would have said a priori she was quite sure to refuse. But when the old creature made offer of his faded self (and his unfaded possessions), the whole thing offered ac- quired a sudden value and beauty. He might be an odd stick ; but then his estate had most beauti- ful timber. Intellectually and morally he might be inferior, or even deficient: but then his three per cents, formed a positive quantity, of enormous Certain Grapes. 79 amount. The whole thing offered had to be re- garded as one bunch of grapes. And if some of the grapes were sour and shrivelled, a greater number of them was plump and juicy. Nobody who reads this page really knows whether he would like to be Lord Chancellor, or to live in a house like Windsor Castle. The writer has not the faintest idea whether he would like to be Arch- bishop of Canterbury. We never even ourselves to such things as these. We don't seriously consider whether the grapes are sweet or sour, which there is not the faintest possibility of our ever reaching. When Mr. Disraeli (as he himself said in Parliament) 'would have been very thankful for some small place,' he had never lifted his eyes to the leadership of a certain great political party. Of that lofty cluster he had no estimate then : but the modest little bunch of twelve hundred a-year seemed attain- able, and so seemed sweet. But he was a great man when he said ' I am very glad now I did not get it ! ' He was destined to something bigger, and loftier. And when that greater position at last loomed in view, and became possible, became likely, — we can well believe that the great orator began to estimate it : and that it became an object of honourable ambition when it was very near, and was all but grasped. When the prize is within reach, it becomes precious. When the Atlantic cable was being laid, you can think how precious it would 8o Of the Sudden Sweetening of seem when the vessels which were laying it had got within a mile or two of land. Yes, success, just within our grasp, grows inestimably valuable. The cluster of grapes, long striven after, and now at length just got hold of, — how sweet it seems ! My friend Mr. Brown had often remarked to me, * If ever there was a hideous erection on the face of the earth, it is that St. Sophia s Church : and I don't know a man less to be envied than the incum- bent of so laborious and troublesome a parish.' Brown and I were sitting on the wall of his beauti- ful churchyard in the country, one fine summer day, when he made this remark ; adding, ' How much happier a life we have here in this pure air and among these sweet fields ' (and indeed the fragrance of the clover was very delightful that day) : ' and with our kindly, well-behaved country people ! ' I need hardly mention, that Mr. Brown shortly after- wards succeeded to the vacant charge of St. Sophia's, a huge church in a great city. He was offered it in a kind way : saw its claims and advantages in a new light : accepted it, and is very happy in it. And recently he recalled to my memory his former estimate of it, and said how mistaken it was. He even added, that although the architecture of St. Sophia's was not the purest Gothic (it is in fact not Gothic at all), still there is a simple grandeur about it, which produces a great effect upon the mind when you grow accustomed to it. ^ I used to laugh/ Certain Grapes. he said, ' at poor old Dr. Log when he declared it was the finest church in Britain : but, do you know, some of its proportions are really unrivalled. Here, for instance, look at that arch,' — and then he went on at considerable length. The truth was, that the grapes had suddenly sweetened. The position, never thought of, or thought of only as quite unattainable, was a very different thing now. I do not for a moment suppose any insincerity on the part of my friend. He quite sincerely es- teemed the grapes as sour, when they hung beyond his reach. He quite sincerely esteemed them as sweet, when he came to know them better. But, as a general rule, whenever any man or woman under- values and despises something which average human nature prizes and enjoys, we may say that if the grapes are fairly put within reach, they would sud- denly and greatly sweeten. I speak of average human nature. There are exceptional cases. There is a great and good man who did not choose to be a Bishop ; who did not choose to be an Archbishop. The test is, that he was offered these places and refused them. But there are a great many men, who could quite honestly say that they don't want to be Bishops or Archbishops. But then they have not been tried : and there are some that I should not like to try. I believe the lawn would brighten into effulgence, when it was offered. The oppor- tunity of usefulness would appear so great, that it G 82 Of the Sudden Sweetening of could not in conscience be refused. The grapes being within reach, would grow so sweet, that those good men would forget their old professions, and (in the words of Lord Castlereagh) turn their backs upon themselves. Perhaps you have known a refined young lady of thirty-nine years, who looked with disdain at her younger female friends when they got married. She wondered at their weakness in getting spoony about any man : and despised their flutter of interest in the immediate prospect of the wedding-day and all its little arrangements. The whole thing — trous- seau, cards, favours, cake — was contemptible. Per- haps you have known such a mature young lady get married herself at last : and evince a pride and an exhilaration in the prospect such as are rarely seen. It was delightful to witness the maidenly airs of the individual to whom the bunch of grapes had finally become attainable : the enthusiastic affection she testified towards the romantic hero (weighing sixteen stone) to whom she had given her young affections : the anguish of perplexity as to the material and fashion of the wedding-dress : in short, the sudden sweetening of the grapes which had previously been so remarkably sour. There is nothing here to laugh at : it is a beneficent provi- dential arrangement. In all walks of life you may have remarked the same. You may have known a hard-featured and well-principled servant, who, Certain Grapes. 8 J having no admirer, gave herself out as a man-hater, and beHeved herself to be one. But some one turn- ing up who (let us hope) admired and appreciated her real excellence, that admirable young woman grew quite tremendous : first, in her pride and ex- ultation that she had a beau ; and secondly, in her admiration and fondness for him. Yes : turn out human nature with a pitch-fork ; and it will come back again. Perhaps you have known a wealthy old gentle- man, living quietly somewhere in the City (let the word be understood in its Cockney sense), and going into no society whatever; who frequently professed to despise the vanities to which other folk attach importance. He utterly contemned such things as a fine house, a fashionable neighbourhood, titled acquaintances and the like. And he did it all, quite sincerely. But nature had her way at last. That wealthy gentleman bought a house in an aristocratic West End square. His elation at finding himself there was pleasing, yet a little irri- tating. He could not refrain from telling everyone that he lived there. Occasionally he would cut short a conversation with a City acquaintance, by stating that he ' must be home to dinner at half- past seven in Berkeley Square.' He speedily in- formed himself of the precise social standing of every inhabitant of that handsome quadrangle : and would even produce the ' Court Guide ' and tell an 84 Of the Sudde7i Sweetening of occasional visitor about the rank and connections of each name in the square. The delight with which he beheld a peer at his dinner-table may be con- ceived but not described. The grapes, in fact, had in all sincerity been esteemed as sour till he got possession of them. Then, all of a sudden, they became inconceivably sweet. So you may have beheld a plain respectable man, who had made a considerable fortune in the oil trade, buy a property in the country and settle there. ' I want nothing to do with your stuck-up gentry,' said that respectable man : ' I shall keep by my old friends Smith, Brown, and Robinson, who were apprentices with old McOily along with me, forty years ago.' But when the carriage of the neighbouring baronet drove up to the worthy man's door to call, it and its inmates were received with enthusiasm. There was, after all, a refinement of manner and feeling about gentle blood, not possessed by Smith and the others : and after a little intercourse with the family of the baronet and with other similar families, poor Smith, Brown, and Robinson got so chilly a recep- tion at the country house, and were so infuriated by the frequent mention and the high laudation of the landed families about (whom Smith and his friends did not know at all), that these old acquaintances quite dropped off; and the good old oil-merchant was left to the enjoyment of the grapes, formerly so sour and now so sweet. It is all in human Certain Gimpes. 85 nature. You may have known a cultivated man, with a small income, living in a city of very rich and not remarkably cultivated men. You may have heard him speak Avith much contempt of mere vul- gar wealth, and of certain neighbours who possessed it. And you felt how easily that cultivated man might be led to change his tune. I have witnessed a parallel case. Once upon a time, the writer was walking along a certain country road ; a walk of nine miles. He overtook a little boy, walking along manfully by himself : a little fellow of seven years old. The two wayfarers proceeded together for several miles, conversing of various subjects. It appeared in the course of conversation, that the little boy, whose parents are very poor, never had any pocket-money. I don't believe he ever had a penny to spend, in all his life. He stated that he did not care for money ; nor for the good things (in a child's sense of that phrase) which might be bought with it. And parting from the little man, I could not but tip him a shilling. Every human being who will ever read this page v/ould of course have done the same. It was his very first shilling. He tried to receive it with philosophic composure, as if he did not care a bit about it. But he tried with little success. It was easy to see how different a thing a shilling had suddenly grov\-n. The grape^ had all at once sweetened. But it is the same way everywhere. An author S6 Of the Siidden Sweetening of without popular estimation thinks he can do quite well without it : he does not care for it. ' The world knows nothing of its greatest men ; ' nor, let us add, of its best. Yet popular favour proves very pleasant, when it comes at last. So a barrister without briefs does not want them or value them; till they come. So with the schoolboy who does not care for prizes : so with the student at college whose prize essays fail, through the incompetence of the judges. So (I fear) with the very intellectual preacher who would rather have his church empty than full : and who (at present) thinks that only the stupid and blinded are likely to attend a church where all the seats are occupied. I have known clever young fellows, more than two or three, who at a very earily age had outgrown all ambition : men who had in them the makings of great things, but by free choice took to a quiet and unnoted life : men whose University standing had been un- rivalled, but who instead of aiming at like eminence afterwards, took to. gardening, to evergreens and grass and trees : to contented walks through winter fields : to preaching to fifty rustic labourers : to reading black letter books in chambers at the Temple, instead of trying for the Great Seal : quite happy, and quite sincere in thinking and saying they did not care for more eminent places. But at length, perhaps, success and eminence come : and they are very glad and pleased. Their views of Certain Grapes. these things are quite changed. They see that they can be more useful than they are. They feel that there was a good deal of indolent self- indulgence in the life they had been leading : that there is more in this life than to practise a refined Epicureanism, — at least while strength and spirits suffice for more. The day may come, when these shall be worn out : and then the old thing will again be pleasant. Let us hear the sum of the whole matter. If there be anything in this world, which is in its nature agreeable to average humanity, yet which you think sour ; the likelihood is that if you got it it would grow sweet. You cannot finally turn out nature. Though you may mow it down very tightly, it will grow again, as grass does in the like contin- gency. And if there be in you evil and unworthy tendencies which by God's grace you have resolved to extirpate, you must keep a constant eye upon them. You must knock them on the head not once for all ; but daily and hourly. There are things, perhaps, which you know you would like so much, yet which are so unattainable, that you will not allow yourself to think of them. That way lies your safety. If you allowed yourself to dwell upon them, and upon their pleasures and advantages, you would grow discontented with what you have. So, though you cannot help sometimes casting a hasty glance at the cluster of grapes, Of the Sudden Sweetening of hanging high, which you would Hke, but which you will never have, — yet don't look long at it. Don't sit down, and contemplate it for a good while from various points of view, and think how much you would like it. That will only make you unhappy. And if you have known this world long, then you kn6w this about it : that the thing you would like best is just the last you are ever likely to get. But of this I shall say no more. I said something like it once before : and got a shower of long letters controverting it. If a young fellow fails in his profession : and then say he did not want to succeed ; let us believe him. He is entitled to this. We do him, in most cases, no more than justice. The grapes have indeed grown sour : and it is a kind appointment of Provi- dence that it is so. But if success should come yet, you will find them sweeten again, surprisingly. In writing upon this subject, I have been led to think of many things : and to think of many old acquaintances. Not very cheerfully did the writer trace out the first page : still less so the last. How sadly short has many a one of whom we expected great things, fallen of those expectations ! Is there one, of the clever boys and thoughtful lads, that has done as much as we looked for .? Not one. The great thing, of course, that resigns one to this, and to anything else, is the firm belief that Certain Grapes. God orders all. ' It had pleased God to form poor Ned, A thing of idiot mind,' wrote Southey. There the matter is settled. We have not a word more to say. ' I was dumb ; I opened not my mouth : BECAUSE THOU DIDST IT ! ' We have all smiled at the fable of ^sop, of which the writer has given you the accurate version : and smiled at many manifestations we have seen in life, showing its truth ; and showing us how human nature age after age abides the self-same thing. I believe it is one of the most beneficent arrangements of God's providential government, that the grapes we cannot reach grow sour. But for that, this would be a world of turned heads and broken hearts. Who has got the purple clusters he in his childhood thought to get .'' Yet who (if a sensible mortal) cares } You were to have been a laurelled hero : you are in fact a half-pay captain, glad to be made adjutant of a militia regiment. You were to have been Lord Chancellor of Great Britain : you are in fact parish minister of Drumsleekie, with a smoky manse, and heritors who oppose the augmentation of your living. You were to have lived in a grand castle, possibly built of alternate blocks of gold and silver : you live, in fact, in a plain house in a street, and find it hard enough to pay the Christmas bills. And you were to have been buried, at last, in West- minster Abbey : while in fact you won't. But the 90 On Certain Grapes. beauty has faded off the things never to be at- tained; and the humble grapes you could reach have sweetened : and you are content. Yet there are grapes which, if submitted to your close in- spection, would seem so sweet that in comparison with them those you have would seem very in- sipid : so you may be glad you will never see those grapes too near nor too long. CHAPTER V. CONCERNING THE ESTIMATE OF HUMAN BEINGS, HE other day, talking with my friend Smith, I Incidentally said something which Implied that a certain Individual, who may be denoted as Mr. X, was a distinguished and In- fluential man. ' Nonsense ! ' was Smith's prompt reply. ' I saw Mr. X,' continued Smith, 'at a public meeting yesterday. He Is a gorilla — a yahoo. He is a dirty and ugly party. I heard him make a speecli. He has a horribly vulgar accent, and an awkward cubbish manner. In short, he Is not a gentleman ; nor the least like one I ' And having said this, my friend Smith thought he had finally disposed of X. But I replied, ' I grant all that. All you have said about X Is true. But still I say he Is a dis- tinguished and Influential man ; a very able man — almost a great man.' Smith was not convinced. He departed. I fear 92 Concerning the Estimate of I have gone down in his estimation. I have not seen him since. Perhaps he does not want to see me. I don't care. But my friend Smith's observations have made me think a good deal of a tendency which is in human nature. It is very natural, if we find a man grossly deficient in something about which we are able to judge — and perhaps in the thing about which we are able best to judge — to conclude that he must be all bad. In the judgment of many, it is quite enough to condemn a man, to show that he is a low fellow, with an extremely vulgar accent. We forget how much good may go with these evil things ; good more than enough to outweigh all these and more. There is great difficulty in bring- ing men heartily to admit the great principle which may be expressed in the familiar words — FoR Bet- ter FOR Worse. There is great difficulty in bringing men really to see that excellent qualities may coexist with grave faults; and that a man, with very glaring defects, may have so many great and good qualities, as serve to make him a good and eminent man, upon the balance of the whole account. Though you can show that A owes a hundred thousand pounds, this does not certainly show that A is a poor man. Possibly A may pos- sess five hundred thousand pounds ; and so the ba- lance may be greatly in his favour. We all need to be reminded of this. It is very Human Beings. 93 plain; but it is just very plain things that most of us practically forget. There are many folk who instantly on discovering that A owes the hundred thousand pounds, proceed to declare him a bank- rupt without further enquiry. Possibly the debt A owes is constantly and strongly pressed on your attention ; while it costs some investigation to be assured of the large capital he possesses. There is one debt in particular, which if we find owed by any man, it is hard to prevent ourselves declaring him a bankrupt, without more investigation. Great vulgarity will commonly stamp a man in the esti- mation of refined people, whatever his merits may be. That is a thing not to be got over. If a man be deficient by that hundred thousand pounds, all the gold of Ophir will (in the judgment of many) leave him poor. Once, in my youth, I beheld an eminent preacher of a certain small Christian sect. I knew he was an eloquent orator, and that he was greatly and justly esteemed by the members of his own little communion. I never heard him speak, and never beheld him save on that one occasion. But, sitting near him at a certain public meeting, I judged, from obvious indications, that he never had brushed his nails in his life. I remember well how disgusted I was ; and how hastily I rushed to the conclusion that there was no good about him at all. Those territorial and immemorial nails hid from my youthful eyes all his excellent qualities. Of 94 Concerning the Estimate of course, this was because I was very foolish and inexperienced. Men with worse defects may be great and good upon the whole. Or, to return to my analogy, no matter how great a man's debts may be, you must not conclude he is poor till you ascertain what his assets are. These may be so great as to leave him a rich man, though he owes a hundred thousand pounds. The principle which I desire to enforce is briefly this : — that men must be taken /(^r better for worse. There may be great drawbacks about a thing, and yet the thing may be good. Many people think, in a confused sort of way, that if you can mention several serious objections to taking a certain course, this shows you should not take that course. Not at all. Look to the other side of the account. Possi- bly there are twice as many and twice as weighty objections to your not taking that course. There are things about your friend Smith that you don't like. They worry you. They point to a conclusion which might be expressed in the following propo- sition : — Smith is bad. But if you desire to arrive at a just and sound estimate of Smith, your course will be to think of other things about Smith, which speak in a dif- ferent strain. There are things about Smith you cannot help liking and respecting him for. And these point to a conclusion which a man of a com- Human Beings. 95 prehensive mind and of considerable knowledge of the language might express as follows : — Smith is good. And having before you the things which may be said/r*? and con, it will be your duty first to count them, and then to weigh them. Counting alone will not suffice. For there may be six things which tell against Smith, and only three in his favour; and yet the three may be justly entitled to be held as outweighing the six. For instance, the six things counting against Smith may be these : — 1. He has a red nose. 2. He carries an extremely baggy cotton um- brella. 3. He wears a shocking bad hat. 4. When you make any statement whatever in his hearing, he immediately begins to prove, by ar- gument, that your statement cannot possibly be true. 5. He says tremcndiLOtLs when he means ti'cmen- dous; and talks of 2. prizenter when he means a precentor. 6. He is constantly saying * How very curious ! ' also 'Goodness gracious!' Whereas the three things making in Smith's fa- vour may be these : — 1. He has the kindest of hearts. 2. He has the clearest of heads. 3. He is truth and honour impersonate. 96 Concerning the Estimate of Now, if the account stand thus, the balance is unquestionably in Smith's favour. And it is so with everything else as well as with Smith. When you change to a new and better house, it is not all gain. It is gain on the whole ; but there may be some respects in which the old house was better than the new. And when you are getting on in life, it is not all going forward. In some respects it may be going back. It is an advance, on the whole, when the attorney-general becomes chan- cellor; yet there were pleasant things about the other way too, which the chancellor misses. It is, to most men, a gain on the whole to leave a beautiful rectory for a bishop's palace ; yet the change has its disadvantages too; and some pleasant things are lost. When Bishop Poore, who founded Salisbury Cathedral in the thirteenth century, left his magni- ficent church amid its sweet English scenery, to be bishop of the bleak northern diocese of Durham, he must have felt he was sacrificing a great deal. Yet to be Bishop of Durham in those days was to be a Prince of the Church, with a Prince's revenue : and so Bishop Poore was on the whole content to go. I daresay in the thirteen years he lived at Durham before he died, he often wondered whether he had not done wrong. You will find men who are good classical scholars ready to think it extinguishes a man wholly to show that he is grossly ignorant of Latin and Greek. Hti7nan Beings. 97 It is to be granted, no doubt, that as a classical training is an essential part of a liberal education, the lack of it is a symptomatic thing, like a man's dropping his h's. He must be a vulgar man who talks about his Ouse and his Hoaks. And even so, to write about rem, quomodo rem, as an eminent divine has done, raises awful suspicions. So it is with viacte estate piicr. Still, we may build too much on such things. By a careful study of English models a man may come to have a certain measure of classical taste and sensibility, though he could not construe a chance page of yEschylus or Thucydides, or even an ode of Horace. Yet you will never prevent many scholars from sometimes throwing in such a man's face his lack of Latin and Greek ; as though that utterly wiped him out. I cannot but confess, indeed, that there is no single fact which goes more fatally to the question, v/hether a man can claim to be a really educated person, than the manifest want of scholarship ; all I say is, that too much may be made of even this. You know that a false quantity in a Latin quotation in a speech in Parliament can never be quite got over. It stamps the unfortunate individual who makes it. He may have many excellent qualities; many things of much more substantial worth than the power of writing alcaics ever so fluently ; yet the suspicion of the want of the education of ,a gentleman will brand him. Yet Paley was a great man, though when he went to H 98 Concerning the Estimate of Cambridge to take his degree of Doctor of Divinity, in the Concio ad Clerum he preached on that occa- sion, he ^ronovincQd prof iigtcs, prof ugiis. A shower of epigrams followed. Many a man, incomparably inferior to Paley on the whole, felt his superiority to Paley in the one matter of scholarship. Here was a joint in the great man's armour, at which it was easy to stick in a pin. Lockhart, too, was a very fair scholar ; though you read at Abbotsford, above the great dog's grave, certain lines which he wrote : — Maidae marmorea dermis sub imagine, Maida, Ad januam Domini. Sit tibi terra levis ! You will find it difficult, if you possess a fair ac- quaintance with the literature of your own country, to suppress some little feeling of contempt for a man whose place in life should be warrant that he is an educated man, yet who is blankly ignorant of the worthy books in even his own language. Yet you may find highly respectable folk in that con- dition of ignorance: — medical men in large practice ; country attorneys, growing yearly in wealth as their clients are growing poorer ; clergymen, very diligent as parish priests, and not unversed in theology, if versed in little else. I have heard of a highly re- spectable divine, of no small standing as a preacher, who never had heard of the Spectator (I mean, of course, Steele and Addison's Spectator) y at a period Human Beings. 99 very near the close of his Hfe. And certain of his neighbours who willingly laughed at that good man's ignorance were but one degree ahead of him in literary information. They knew the Spectato7% but they had never heard of Mr. Ruskin nor of Lord Macaulay. Still, they could do the work which it was their business to do very reputably. And that is the great thing, after all. The truth is, that the tendency in a good scholar to despise a man devoid of scholarship, and the tendency in a well-read man to despise one who has read little or nothing besides the newspapers, is just a more dignified development of that impulse which is in all human beings to think A or B very ignorant, if A or B be unacquainted v/ith things which the human beings first named know well I have heard a gardener say, with no small contempt, of a certain eminent scholar — 'Ah, /^^ knows nothing: he does not know the difference between an arbutus and a juniper.' Possibly you have heard a sailor say of some indefinite person — ^ He knows nothing : he does not know the fore-top from the binnacle.' I have heard an architect say of a certain man, to whom he had shown a certain noble church — * Why, the fellow did not know the chancel from the transept.' And although the architect, being an educated man, did not add that the fellow knew nothing, that was certainly vaguely suggested by what he said. A musician tells you, as something loo Concerning the Estimate of M^hich finally disposes of a fellow-creature, that he does not know the difference between a fugue and a madrigal. I remember somewhat despising a distinguished classical professor, who read out a passage of Milton to be turned into heroic Latin verse. One line was, Fled and pursued transverse the resonant fugue : which the eminent man made an Alexandrine, by pronouncing fugue in two syllables, as FEWGEW. In fact, if you find a man decidedly below you in any one thing, if it were only in the knowledge how to pronounce fugue, you feel a strong impulse to despise him on the whole, and to judge that he stands below you altogether. Probably the most common error in the estimate of human beings, is one already named : it is, to think meanly of a man if you find him plainly not a gentleman. And I have present to my mind now, a case which we have all probably witnessed : namely, a set of empty-headed puppies, of distin- guished aspect and languid address, imperfectly able to spell the English language, and incapable of anything but the emptiest badinage in the re- spect of conversation ; yet expressing their supreme contempt for a truly good man, who may have shown himself ignorant of the usages of society. You remember how Brummell mentioned it as a fact quite sufficient to extinguish a man, that he Hitman Beings. loi was ' a person who would send his plate twice for soup.' The judgment entertained by Brummell, or by anyone like Brummell, is really not worth a moment's consideration. I think of the difficulty which good and sensible people feel, in believing the existence of sterling merit along with offensive ignorance and vulgarity. Yet a man whom no one could mistake for a gentleman, may have great ability, great eloquence in his own way, great influ- ence with the people, great weight even with cul- tivated folk. I am not going to indicate localities or mention names ; though I very easily could. No doubt, it is irritating to meet a member of the House of Commons, and to find him a vulgar vapourer. Yet, with all that, he may be a ver^^ fit man to be in Parliament ; and he may have considerable authority there, when he sticks to matters he can understand. And if refined and scholarly folk think to set such a one aside, by mentioning that he cannot read Thucydides, they will find themselves mistaken. It is, to many, a very bitter pill to swallow ; a very disagreeable thing to make up one's mind to ; yet a thing to which the logic of facts compels ever}' wise man to make up his mind : that in these days men whose features, manner, accent, entire ways of thinking and speaking, testify to their extreme vul- garity, have yet great influence with large masses of mankind. And it is quite vain for cultivated folk 102 Concerning the Estimate of to think to ignore such. Men grossly ignorant of history, of literature, of the classics : men who never brushed their nails : men who don't know when to wear a dress coat and when a frock : may gain great popularity and standing with a great part of the population of Great Britain. Their vulgarity may form a high recommendation to the people with whom they are popular. It would be I easy to point out places where anything like re- j finement or cultivation would be a positive hind- Crance to a man. Let not blocks be cut with razors. Let not coals be carried in gilded chariots. Rougher means will be more serviceable. And if people of great cultivation say — 'A set of vulgar fellows; not worth thinking of;' and refuse to see the work such men are doing, a;nd to counteract it where its effects are evil : those cultivated people will some day regret it. I occasionally see a periodical pub- lication, containing the portraits of men who are esteemed eminent by a certain class of human beings. Most of those men are extremely ugly and all of them extremely vulgar-looking. The natural impulse is to throw the coarse efifigies aside, and to judge that such persons can do but little, either for good or ill. But if you enquire, you will find they are doing a great work, and wielding a great influ- ence with a very large section of the population ; the work and influence, being, in my judgment, of the most mischievous and perilous character. Human Beings. 103 Then a truth very much to be remembered, is, that the fact of a man's doing something conspicu- ously and extremely ill, is no proof whatsoever that he is a stupid man. To many people it appears as if it were such a proof, simply because their ideas are so ill-defined. If a clergyman ride on horse- back very badly, he had much better not do so in the presence of his humbler parishioners. The esteem in which they hold his sermons will be sensibly diminished, by the recollection of having seen him roll ignominiously out of the saddle, and into the ditch. Still, in severe logic, it must be apparent that if the sermons be good in themselves, the bad horsemanship touches them not at all. It comes merely to this : that if you take a man off his proper ground, he may make a very poor ap- pearance ; while on his proper ground, he would make a very good one. A swan is extremely graceful in the water ; the same animal is extremely awkward on land. I have thought of a swan, clumsily waddling along on legs that cannot sup- port its weight, when I have witnessed a great scholar trying to make a speech on a platform, and speaking miserably ill. The great scholar had left his own element, where he was graceful and at ease ; he had come to another, which did not by any means suit him. And while he floundered and stammered through his wretched little speech, I have beheld fluent empty-pates grinning with joy 1 04 Concerning the Estimate of at the badness of his appearance. They had got the great scholar to race with them : they in their own element, and he out of his. They had got him into a duel, giving them the choice of weapons. And having beat him (as logicians say), secundum quid, they plainly thought they had beat him sim- pliciter. You may have been amused at the arti- fices by which men, not good at anything but very fluent speaking, try to induce people infinitely superior to them in every respect save that one, to make fools of themselves by miserable attempts at that one thing they could not do. The fluent speakers thought, in fact, to tempt the swan out of the water. The swan, if wise, will decline to come (^out of the water. I have beheld a famous anatomist carving a goose. He did it very ill. And the faith of the assembled company in his knowledge of anatomy was mani- festly shaken. You may have seen a great and solemn philosopher, seeking to make himself agree- able to a knot of pretty young girls in a drawing- room. The great philosopher failed in his anxious endeavours ; while a brainless cornet succeeded to perfection. Yet though the cornet eclipsed the philosopher in this one respect, it would be unjust to say that, on the whole, the cornet was the philo- sopher's superior. I have beheld a pious and amiable man playing at croquet. He played fright- fully ill. He made himself an object of universal Htiman Beings. 105 derision. And he brought all his good qualities into , grave suspicion, in the estimation of the gay young people with whom he played. Yes, let me recur to my great principle : no clergyman should ever hazard his general usefulness, by doing anything whatso- ever signally ill in the presence of his parishioners. If he have not a good horse, and do not ride well, let him not ride at all. And if, living in Scotland, he be a curler; or living in England, join in the sports of his people ; though it be not desirable that he should display pre-eminent skill or agility, he ought to be a good player ; above the average. It is an interesting thing, to see how habitually, in this world, excellence in one respect is balanced by inferiority in another : how needful it is, if you desire to form a fair judgment, to take men for better for worse. I have oftentimes beheld the ecclesiastics of a certain renowned countr}% assem- bled in their great council to legislate on church affairs. And — sitting mute on back benches, never dreaming of opening their lips — pictures of help- lessness and sheepishness — I have beheld the best preachers of that renowned country : I am not going to mention their names. Meanwhile — sitting in prominent places, speaking frequently and lengthily, speaking in one or two cases with great pith and eloquence — I have beheld other preachers, whose power of emptying the pews of whatever church they might serve had been esta- io6 Concerning the Estimate of blished beyond question by repeated trials. Yet, by tacit consent, these dreary orators were admitted as the church's legislators ; and, in many cases, not unjustly. There is a grander church, in a larger country, in which the like balance of faculties may be perceived to exist. The greater clergymen of that church are entitled bishops. Now, by the public at large, the bishops are regarded in the broad light of the chief men of the church ; that is, the greatest and most distinguished men. Next, the thing as regards which the general public can best judge of a clergyman is his preaching. The general public, therefore, regard the best preachers as the most eminent clergymen. But the qualities which go to make a good bishop are quite different from those which go to make a great preacher. Prudence, administrative tact, kindliness, wide sympathies, are desirable in a bishop. None of these things can be brought to the simple test of the goodness of a man's sermon. Indeed, the fiery qualities which go to make a great preacher, do positively unfit a man for being a bishop. From all this comes an un- happy antagonism between the general way of thinking as to who should be bishops, and the way in which the people who select bishops think. And the general public is often scandalized by hearing that this man and the other, whom they never heard of, or whom they know to be a very dull preacher, is made a bishop ; while this or that Human Beings. 107 man who charms and edifies them by his admirable sermons is passed over. For the tendency is in- veterate with ill-cultivated folk, to think that if a man be very good at anything, he must be very good at everything. And with uneducated folk, the disposition is almost ineradicable, to conclude that if you are very ignorant on some subject they know, you know nothing ; and that if you do very ill something as to which they can judge, you can do nothing at all well. Pitt said of Lord Nelson, that the great admiral was the greatest fool he ever knew, when on shore. A less wise man than Pitt, judging Nelson a ver}^ great fool on shore, would have hurried to the conclusion that Nelson was a fool everywhere and altogether. And Nelson himself showed his wisdom, when informed of what Pitt had said. ' Quite true,' said Nelson ; ' but I should soon prove Pitt a fool if I had him on board a ship.' It may, indeed, be esteemed as certain that Pitt's strong common sense would not have failed him, even at sea ; but when he was rolling about in deadly sea-sickness, and testifying twenty times in an hour his ignorance of nautical affairs, it may be esteemed as equally certain that the sailors would have regarded him as a fool. I have heard vulgar, self-sufficient people in a country parish, relate with great delight instances of absence of mind and of lack of ordinary sense, on the part of a good old clergyman of great theolo- io8 Concerning the Estimate of gical learning, who was for many years the incum- bent of that parish. A thoughtful person would be interested in remarking instances in which an able and learned man proved himself little better than a baby. But it was not for the psychological interest that those people related their wretched little bits of ill-set gossip. It was for the purpose of con- veying, by inuendo, that there was no good about that simple old man at all ; that he was, in fact, a fool simpliciter. But if you, learned reader, had taken that old man on his own ground, you would have discovered that he was anything but a fool. * What's the use of all your learning,' his vulgar and ignorant wife was wont to say to him, ' if you don't know how to ride on horseback, and how turnips should be sown after wheat .'* ' You may remember an interesting instance, in the Life of George Stephenson, of two great men supplementing each the other's defects. George Stephenson was arguing a scientific point with a fluent talker who knew very little about the matter : but though Stephenson's knowledge of the subject was great, and his opinions sound, he was tho- roughly reduced to silence. He had no command of language or argument : he had a good case, but he did not know how to conduct it. But all this happened at a country-house, where Sir William Follett was likewise staying. FoUett saw that Stephenson was right ; and he was impatient of Human Bemgs. 109 the triumph of the fluent talker. Follett, of course, had magnificent powers of argument ; but he had no knowledge whatever of the matter under dis- cussion. But, privately getting hold of Stephenson, Follett got Stephenson to coach him up in the facts of the case. Next day, the great advocate led the conversation once more to the disputed question : and now Stephenson's knowledge and Follett's logic combined, smashed the fluent talker of yesterday to atoms. Themistocles, every one knows, could not fiddle ; but he could make a little city a big one. Yet the people who distinctly saw he could not fiddle were many, while those who discerned his competence in the other direction were few. So, it is not un- likely that many people despised him for his bad fiddling, failing to remark that it was not his voca- tion to fiddle. Goldsmith wrote The Vicar of Wakefield and The Goodnahtred Man ; yet he felt indignant at the admiration bestowed by a com- pany of his acquaintances upon the agility of a monkey ; and, starting up in anger and impatience, exclaimed — ' I could do all that myself I have heard of a very great logician and divine, who was dissatisfied that a trained gymnast should excel him in feats of strength, and who insisted on doing the gymnast's feats himself; and, strange to say, he actually did them. Wise men would not have thought the less of him though he had failed ; but I lo Concerning the Estimate of it is certain that many average people thought the more of him because he succeeded. There are single acts which may justly be held as symptomatic of a man's whole nature; for, though done in a short time, they are the manifestation of ways of thinking and feeling which have lasted through a long time. To have written two or three malignant anonymous letters may be regarded as branding a man finally. To have only once tried to stab a man in the back may justly raise some suspicion of a man's candour and honesty ever after. You know, my reader, that if A poisons only one fellow-creature, the laws of our country esteem that single deed as so symptomatic of A's whole charac- ter that they found upon it the general conclusion that A is not a safe member of society ; and so, with all but universal approval, they hang A. Still the doing of one or two very malicious and disho- nourable actions may not indicate that a man is wholly dishonourable and malicious. These may be no more than an outburst of the bad w^hich is in every man — cleared off thus, as electricity is taken out of the atmosphere by a good thunder- storm. I am not sure what I ought, in fairness, to think of a certain individual, describing himself as a clergyman of the Church of England, who has formed an unfavourable opinion of the compositions of the present writer ; and who, every now and then, Human Beings. 1 1 1 sends me an anonymous letter. It is, indeed, a curious question, how a human being can delibe- rately sit down and spend a good deal of time in writing eight rather close pages of anonymous mat- ter of an unfriendly, not to say abusive, character, and then send it off to a man who is a total stranger. What are we to think of this individual ? Are we to think favourably of him as a clergyman and as a gentleman ? He has sent me a good many letters ; and I shall give you some extracts from the last. For the sake of argument, let it be said that my name is Jones. I am a clergyman of the Estab- lished Church in a certain country. But my cor- respondent plainly thinks it a strong point to call me a Dissenter, which he does several times in each of his letters. Of course, he knows that I am not a Dissenter ; but this mode of address seems to please him. I give you the passages from his last letter verbatim, only substituting Jones for another name, of no interest to anybody : — Rev. Jones (Dissenting Preacher), I have read your Sermons from curiosity. They exhibit your invincible conceit, Hke all your other works. Your notion as to the resurrection of the old body is utterly exploded., ex- cept amongst such divines as Dr. Gumming (who is not emi- nent, as you assert), and similar riff-raff. There is now-a-days no Sabbath. The Scotch, who talk of a '• sabbath,' are fools and ignorant fanatics. I am glad to see tha.t you, Jones, were well castigated by a London paper for lending your name to a hateful crusade of certain fanatics in Edinburgh (including the odious Guthrie), against opening 1 1 2 Concerning the Estimate of the parks to the people on Sunday. I intend to visit Edin- burgh or Glasgow some Sunday^ and to walk about, as a clergyman^ between the services, with some little ostentation, in order to show my contempt of the local custom. Let any low Scotch Presbyterian lay hands on me at his peril ! Ah, Jones, you evidently dare not say your soul is your own in Scotland ! Neither Caird nor Gumming are men of first-rate ability. Gumming is a mere dunce, not even literate. How can you talk of understanding the works of Mr. Maurice ? Of course not : you are too low-minded, and narrow-souled ! But do not dare to disparage such exalted merit. Say you are a fool, and blind, and we may excuse you. You are clearly unable to appreciate excellence of any kind. Your assertion, that the doctrines of the Church, our Ghurch, are Calvinistic, is 2. false one. Calvinism is now confined to illiterate tinkers, Dissenters, Puritans, and low Scotch Pres- byterians. Your constant use of the phrase, ' My friends,' in your ser- mons, is bad and affected. We are not your '■ friends :' and you care nothing for your hearers, except to gain their applause ! I remain. Sir Jones, With no ve7y great respect. Your obedient servant, P. A. (P. S.) Poor A. K. H. B. Why not A. S. S. ! Now, my reader, how shall we estimate the man that wrote this } Can he be a gentleman } Can he be a clergyman } I have received from him a good many letters of the same kind, which I have de- stroyed, or I might have culled from them still more remarkable flowers of rhetoric. In a recent letter he drew a very unfavourable comparison between the present writer and the author of Friends in Human Beings. Council. In that unfavourable comparison I heartily concur ; but it may be satisfactory to Mr. P. A. to know that immediately after receiving his letter I was conversing with the author of Friends in Conn- cil\ and that I read his letter to my revered friend. And I do not think Mr. P. A. would have been gratified if he had heard the opinion which the author of Friends in Coimcil expressed of P. A. upon the strength of that one letter. Let us do P. A. justice. For a long time he sent his anony- mous letters unpaid, and each of them cost me twopence. For some time past he has paid his post- ages. Now this is an improvement. The next step in advance which remains for P. A., is to cease wholly from writing anonymous letters. Now to conclude : There is great difficulty in estimating human beings : that is, in placing them (in the racing sense) in your own mind. And the difficulty comes of this, that you have to take a conjunct view of a man's deservings and ill-deservings : the man's merit is the resultant of all his quahties, good and bad. In a race the comparison is brought to the single point of speed ; or, more accurately speak- ing, to the test, which horse shall, on a given day, pass the winning-post first. Everyone understands the issue; and the prize goes on just the one con- sideration. Great confusion and difficulty would I 114 Concerning the Estimate of arise if other issues were brought in: as for instance, if a man were permitted to say to the owner of the winner, * You have passed the post first, but then my horse has the longest tail; and, upon the strength of that fact, I claim the cup.' Yet, in placing human beings (mentally) for the race of life, the case is just so. You are making up your mind — * Is this man eminent or obscure '^. is he de- serving or not } — is he good or bad } ' But there is no one issue to which you can rightly bring his merits. He may exhibit extraordinary skill and ability in doing some one thing; but a host of little disturb- ing circumstances may come to perplex your judg- ment. Mr. Green was a good scholar and a clever fellow, yet I have heard Mr. Brown say — ' Green ! ah, he 's a beast ! Do you know, he told me he always studies without shoes and stockings !' And then there is a difficulty in saying what importance ought to be attached to those disturbing causes, as well as whether they exist or not. One man thinks a long tail a great beauty, another attaches no con- sequence to a long tail. One man concludes that Mr. Green is a beast because he studies without shoes or stockings ; another holds that as an in- different circumstance, not affecting his estimate of Green. I fear we can come to no more satisfactory conclusion than this — that of Green, and of each human being, there are likely to be just as many different estimates as there are people who will H^iman Beings. 1 1 5 take the trouble of forming an estimate of them at all. You will remark, I have been speaking of esti- mates, honestly formed and honestly expressed. No doubt we often hear, and often read, estimates of men, which estimates have plainly been disturbed by other forces. No wise man will attach much weight to the estimate of a successful man, which is expressed by a not very magnanimous man whom he has beaten. If A sends an article to a magazine, and has it rejected, he is not a competent judge of the merit of the articles which appear in that number in which he wished his to be. You would not ask for a fair estimate of Miss Y's singing from a young lady who tries to sing as well, and fails. You would not expect a very reliable estimate of a young barrister, getting into great practice, of poor Mr. Briefless, mortified at his own ill-success. You would not look for a very flattering estimate of Mr. Melvill or Bishop Wilberforce from a preacher who esteems himself as a great man, but who somehow gets only empty pews and bare walls to hear him preach. Sometimes, in such estimates, there are real envy and malice, as shown by intentional misrepre- sentation and mere abuse. More frequently, we willingly believe, there is no intention to estimate unfairly ; the bias against the man is strong, but it is not designed. A writer cut off from the staff of a periodical, though really an honest man, has been 1 16 Estimate of Human Beings. known to attack another writer retained on that staff. Let me say that, in such a case, a very high- minded man would decHne to express pubHcly any estimate, being aware that he could not help being somewhat biassed. Let this be a rule : — If we think highly of one who has beaten us, let us say out our estimate warmly and heartily. If we think ill of one who has beaten us, let us keep our estimate to ourselves. It is probably un- just. And even if it be a just estimate, few men of experience will think it so. CHAPTER VI. REMEMBRANCE. HALL I, because I have seen the subject which has been simmering in my mind for several past days, treated beautifully liy another hand, resolve not to touch that subject, and to let my thoughts about it go ? No, I will not. It was a little disheartening, no doubt, when I looked yesterday at a certain Magazine, to find what I had designed to say, said far better by somebody else. But then Dean Alford said it in graceful and touching verse: I aimed no higher than at homely prose. Sitting, my friend, by the evening fireside : sitting in your easy chair, at rest : and looking at the warm light on the rosy face of your little boy or girl, sitting on the rug by you : do you ever wonder what kind of remembrance these little ones will have of you, if God spares them to grow old ? 1 1 8 Reme7nbra7ice. Look into the years to come : think of that smooth face lined and roughened ; that curly hair gray ; that expression, now so bright and happy, grown careworn and sad ; and you long in your grave. Of course, your son will not have quite forgot you : he will sometimes think and speak of his father who is gone. What kind of remembrance will he have of you } Probably very dim and vague. You know for yourself, that when you look at your little boy in the light of the fire, who is now a good deal bigger than in the days when he first was able to put a soft hand in yours and to walk by your side, you have but an indistinct remembrance of what he used to be then. Knowing how much you would come to value the remembrance of those days, you have done what you could to perpetuate it. As you turn over the leaves of your diary, you find recorded with care many of that little man's wonderful sayings : though, being well aware that these are infinitely more interesting to you than to other people, you have sufficient sense to keep them to yourself. There are those of your fellow- creatures to whom you would just as soon think of speaking about these things, as you would think of speaking about them to a jackass. And you have aided your memory by yearly photographs : thank- ful that such invaluable memorials are now possible ; and lamenting bitterly that they came so late. Yet, with all this help : and though the years are very Re7nembrance. 1 1 9 few ; your remembrance of the first summer that your little boy was able to run about on the grass in the green light of leaves, and to go with you to the stable-yard and look with admiration at the horse, and with alarm at the pig, voraciously de- vouring its breakfast ; is far less vivid and distinct than you would wish it to be. Taught by experi- ence, you have striven with the effacing power of time : yet assuredly not with entire success. Yes ; your little boy of three years old has faded some- what from your memory : and you may discern in all this the way in which you will gradually fade from his. Never forgotten, if you have been the parent you ought to be, you will be remembered vaguely. And you think to yourself, in the restful evening, looking at the rosy face. Now, when he has grown old, how will he remember me } I shall have been gone, for many a day and year; all my work, all my cares and troubles, will be over : all those little things will be past and forgot, which went to make up my life, and about which nobody quite knew but myself. The table at which I write, the inkstand, all my little arrangements, will be swept aside. That little man will have come a long, long way, since he saw me last. How will he think of me } Will he sometimes recall my voice, and the stories I told, and the races I used to run } Will he sometimes say to a stranger, ' That's his picture : not very like him ; ' will he sometimes think to 1 20 Remembrance. himself, ' There is the corner where he used to sit : I wonder where his chair is now ? ' Cowper, writing at the age of fifty-eight, says of his mother : ' She died when I had completed my sixth year, yet I remember her well. I remember too a multitude of maternal tendernesses which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to me beyond expression/ For fifty-two years the over-sensitive poet had come on his earthly pilgrimage, since the little boy of six last saw his mother's face. Of course, at that age, he could understand very little of what is meant by death ; and very little of that great truth, which Gray tells us he discovered for himself, and which very few people learn till they find it by experience, that in this world a human being never can have more than one mother. Yet we can think of the poor little man, finding daily that no one cared for him now as he used to be cared for : finding that the kindest face he could remember was now seen no more. And doubtless there was a vague, overwhelming sorrow at his heart, which lay there unexpressed for half a century, till his mother's picture sent him by a relative touched the fount of feeling, and inspired the words we all know : I heard the bell toll'd on thy burial day : I saw the hearse that bore thee slow away : And turning from my nursery window, drew A long, long sigh, and wept a last adieu ! Re7nembrance. 1 2 1 But was it such ? — It was. — Where thou art gone, Adieus and farewells are a sound unknown. May I but meet thee on that peaceful shore, The parting word shall pass my lips no more ! Nobody likes the idea of being quite forgot. Yet sensible people have to make up their mind to it. And you do not care so much about being forgotten by those beyond your own family circle. But you shrink from the thought that your children may never sit down alone, and in a kindly way think for a little of you after you are dead. And all the little details and interests which now make up your habitude of life seem so real, that there is a certain difficulty in bringing it home to one that they are all to go completely out, leaving no trace behind. Of course they must. Our little ways, my friend, will pass from this earth : and you and I will be like the brave men who lived before Agamemnon. A clergyman who is doing his duty diligently, does not like to think that when he goes, he will be so soon forgotten in his old parish and his old church. Bigger folk, no doubt, have the same feeling. A certain great man has been entirely successful in carrying out his purpose ; which was, he said, to leave something so written that men should not easily let it die. But that which is nearest us, touches us most. We sympathise most readily with little men. Perhaps you preached yesterday in your own church, to a large congregation of 12 2 Remembrance. Christian people. Perhaps they were very silent and attentive. Perhaps the music was very beautiful, and its heartiness touched your heart. The service was soon over : it may have seemed long to some. Then the great tide of life that had filled the church ebbed away, and left it to its week-day loneliness. The like happens each Sunday. And many years hence, after you are dead, some old people will say, Mr. Smith was minister of this parish for so many years. That is all. And looking back for even five or ten years, a common Sunday's service is as un- distinguished in remembrance as a green leaf on a great beech-tree now in June, or as a single flake in a thick fall of snow. Probably you have seen a picture by Mr. Noel Paton, called The Silver Cord Loosed. It is one of the most beautiful and touching of the pictures of that great painter. I saw it the day before yester- day : not for the first or second time. People came into the place where it was exhibited, talking and laughing : but as they stood before that canvas, a hush fell on all. On a couch, there is a female figure, lying dead. Death is unmistakeably there, but only in its beauty. And beyond, through a great window, there is a glorious sunset sky. * Thy sun shall no more go down ; neither shall thy moon withdraw herself : for the Lord shall be thine ever- lasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.' Seated by the bed, there is a mourner, Remembrance. 123 with hidden face, in his first overwhelming grief. Looking at that picture in former days, I had thought how 'at evening time there shall be light:' but looking at it now, with the subject of this essay in my mind, I thought how that man, so crushed meanwhile, if the first grief do not kill him (and the greatest grief rarely kills the man of sound physical frame), would get over it : and after some years would find it hard to revive the feelings and thoughts of this day. People in actual modern life are not attired in the picturesque fashion of the mourner in Mr. Noel Paton's picture : but it is be- cause many can from their own experience tell what a human being in like circumstances would be feel- ing, that this detail of the picture is so touching. And the saddest thing about it is not the present grief: it is the fact that the grief will so certainly fade and go. And no human power can prevent it. * The low beginnings of content ' will force them- selves into conscious existence, even in the heart that is most unwilling to recognize them. You will chide yourself that you are able so soon to get over that which you once fancied would darken all your after days. And all your efforts will not bring back the first sorrow : nor recall the thoughts and the atmosphere of that time. When you were a little boy, and a little brother pinched your arm so that a red mark was left, you hastened downstairs to make your complaint to the proper authority. On your 1 24 Remembrance. way down, fast as you went, you perceived that the red mark was fading out, and becoming invisible. And did you not secretly give the place another pinch to keep up the colour till the injury should be exhibited ? Well, there are mourners who do just the like. I think I can see some traces of that in hi Memoriam. In sorrow that the wound is healing, you are ready to tear it open afresh. And by observing anniversaries : by going to places sur- rounded by sad associations : some human beings strive to keep up their feeling to the sensitive point of former days. But it will not do. The surface, often spurred, gets indurated : sensation leaves it. And after a while, you might as well think to excite sensation in a piece of India rubber by pricking it with a pin, as think to waken any real feeling in the heart which has indeed met a terrible wound, but whose wound is cicatrized. All this is very sad to think of. Indeed I confess to thinking it the very sorest point about the average human being. Great grief may leave us : but it should not leave us the men we were. There are people in whose faces I always look with wonder ; thinking of what they have come through, and of how little trace it has left. I have gone into a certain room, where everything recalled vividly to me one who was dead. Furniture, books, pictures, piano : how plainly they brought back the face of o.ne, far away ! But the regular inmates of the house had no such feeling : Remembrance. 1 2 5 had it not, at least, in any painful degree. No doubt, they had felt it for awhile, and outgrown it : whereas, to me it came fresh. And after a time it went from me too. You know how we linger on the words and looks of the dead after they are gone. It is our sorrow- ful protest against the power of Time, which we know is taking these things from us. We try to bring back the features and the tones : and we are angry with ourselves that we cannot do so more clearly. ' Such a day,' w^e think, ' we saw them last : so they looked : and such words they said.' We do tJiat about people for whom we did not especially care while they lived : a certain conse- cration is breathed about them now. But how much more as to those who did not need this to endear them ! You ought to know the lines of a true and beautiful poet, about his little brother who died : — And when at last he was borne afar From the world's wear}- strife, How oft in thought did we again Live o'er his little life ! His every look, his ever>^ word, — His very voice's tone, — Came back to us like things whose worth Is only prized when gone I I wish I could tell Mr. Hedderwick how many scores of times I have repeated to myself that most touching poem in which these verses stand. But I know (for human nature is always the same) that, 126 Remembrance. when the poet grew to middle age and more, those tones and looks that came so vividly back in the first days of bereavement, would grow indistinct and faint. And now, when he sits by the fire at evening, or when he goes out for a solitary walk, and tries to recall his little brother's face, he will grieve to feel that it seems misty and far away. I cannot see the features right, When on the gloom I strive to paint The face I knew ; the hues are faint, And mix with hollow masks of night. And you will remember how Mr. Hawthorne, with his sharp discernment of the subtle phenomena of the mind, speaking in the name of one who re- called the form and aspect of a beautiful woman not seen for years, says something like this : When I shut my eyes, I see her yet, but a little wanner than when I saw her in fact. Yes ; and as time goes on, a great deal wanner. I have remarked that even when the outlines remain in our remembrance, the colours fade away. Thus true is it, that as for the long absent, and the long dead, their remembrance fails. Their faces, and the tones of their voice, grow dim. And some- times we have all thought what a great thing it would be to be able at will to bring all these back with the vividness of reality. What a great thing it would be if we could keep them on with us, clearly Remembrance. 127 and vividly as we had them at the first ! When your young sister died, oh how distinctly you could hear, for many days, some chance sentence as spoken by her gentle voice ! When your little child was taken, how plainly you could feel, for awhile, the fat little cheek laid against your own, as it was for the last time ! But there is no precious possession we have which wears out so fast as the remembrance of those who are gone. There never was but one case where that was not so. Let us remember it as we are told of it in the never-failing Record : there are not many kindlier words, even there : * But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.' So you see in that case the dear remembrance would never wear out but with life. The Blessed Spirit would bring back the words, the tones, the looks, of the Blessed Redeemer, as long as those lived who had heard and seen Him. He was to do other things, still more important ; but you will pro- bably feel what a wonderfully kindly and encou- raging view it gives us of that Divine Person, to think of Him as doing all that. And while we have often to grieve that our best feelings and impulses die away so fast, think how the Apostles, everywhere, through all their after years, would have recalled to them when needful, all tilings that the Saviour had 128 Remembrance. said to them ; and how He said those things ; and how He looked as He said them. They had not to wait for seasons when the old time came over them ; when through a rift in the cloud, as it were, they discerned for a minute the face they used to know ; and heard the voice again, like distant bells borne in upon the breeze. No : the look was always on St. Peter, that brought him back from his miserable wander : and St. John could recall the words of that parting discourse so accurately, after fifty years. The poet Motherwell begins a little poem with this verse: — When I beneath the cold red earth am sleeping, Life's fever o'er, — Will there for me be any bright eye weeping That I'm no more ? Will there be any heart sad memory keeping Of heretofore ? Now that is a pretty verse ; but to my taste it seems tainted with sentimentalism. No man really in earnest could have written these lines. And I feel not the slightest respect for the desire to have * bright eyes weeping ' for you ; or to have some vague indefinite 'heart' remembering you. Mr. Augustus Moddle, or any empty-headed lackadai- sical lad, writing morbid verses in imitation of Byron, could do that kind of thing. The man whose desire of remembrance takes the shape of a wish to have some pretty girl crying for him (which is the thing Remembrance. 1 29 aimed at in the mention of the'bright eye weeping') is on precisely the same level, in regard to taste and sense, with the silly conceited blockhead who struts about in some place of fashionable resort, and fancies alli^he young women are looking at him. Why should people with whom you have nothing to do weep for you after you are dead, any more than look at you or think of you while you are living ? But it is a very different feeling, and an infinitely more respectable one, that dwells with the man who has outgrown silly sentimentalism ; yet who looks at those whom he holds dearest ; at those whose stay he is, and who make up his great interest in life ; at those whom he will remember, and never forget, no matter where he may go in God's uni- verse : and who thinks, Now, when the impassable river runs between, — when I am an old remem- brance, unseen for many years, — and when they are surrounded by the interests of their after life, and daily see many faces but never mine; how will they think of me ? Do not forget me, my little children whom I loved so much, w^hen I shall go from you. I do not Avish you (a wise good man might say) to vex yourselves, little things ; I do not wish you to be gloomy or sad : but sometimes think of your father and mother Avhen they are far away. You may be sure that, Avherever they are, they will not be forgetting you. K CHAPTER VII. ON THE FOREST HILL: WITH SOME THOUGHTS TOUCHING DREAM- LIFE. HY is it that that purple hill will not get out of my mind to-night ? I am sure it is not that I cared for it so much when I could see it as often as I pleased. I suppose, my reader, that you know the painful vividness with which distant scenes and times will sometimes come back, unbidden and unwished. No one can tell why. And now, at 1 1.25 P.M., when I have gone up to my room far away from home, and ought to go to bed, that hill will not go away. There is no use in try- ing. And nothing can be more certain than that if I went to bed now, I should toss about in a fever till 4 or 5 A.M. Well, as a smart gallop takes the nonsense out of an aged horse, which has shown an unwonted friskiness, there is something which will quiet this present writer's pulse : and it shall be tried. Come out, you writing case. Come forth, On the Forest-Hill. i^i the foolscap, the Ink-bottle, the little quill that has written many pages. And now you may come back again before the mind's eye, purple hill not seen for years. I shut my eyes, which if opened would behold many things not needful to be noted ; and then the scene arises. In actual fact, the writer is surrounded by the usual furniture of a bedroom in a great rail- way hotel in a certain ancient city : and occasional thundering sounds, and awful piercing screeches, speak of arriving and departing trains somewhat too near. I have walked round the city, upon the wall. And reaching a certain spot, I sat down in the summer twilight, and looked for a long time at the old cathedral, which is not grey with age. On the contrary, it is red ; as though there lingered about its crumbling stones the sunsets of seven hundred summers. The day was, as we learn from Bishop Blomfield's Life, wherein to be the chief minister of that noble church was esteemed as a very poor preferment. And this estimation is justified by the statement that the annual revenue of the bishop was not so very many hundred pounds. But who shall calculate the money value of the privilege of living in this quaint old city, whose streets carry you back for centuries ; and of worship- ping, as often as you please, under that sublime roof: of breathing the moral atmosphere of the ancient place ; and of looking from its walls upon 132 On the Forest- H ill : • those blue hills and over those rich plains ? Surely one might here live a peaceful life of worship, thought, and study : amid Gothic walls and carved oak and church music. And if any ordinary man should declare that he could not be content with all this, just let me get him by the ears. Wouldn't I shake him ! But all this is a deviation. And if there is any- thing on which the writer prides himself, it is the severity of his logic. You will not find in his pages those desultory and wandering passages which attract the unthinking to the works of Archbishop Whately and Mr. John Stuart Mill. And from this brief excursion he returns, to the severe order of thought which is natural to him. I shut my eyes, as has been already remarked. The railway hotel, the thundering trains, and the yelling engines vanish ; and the old scene arises. It is a bright autumn afternoon. The air is very still. The sun is very warm, and makes the swept corn- fields golden. The trees are crimson and brown ; and crisp leaves rustle beneath your foot. It is a long valley, with hills on either side ; and a river flowing down it. A path winds by the river side, through the fields ; and there, in front, is the purple hill. An Englishman would think it pretty high. It is more than twelve hundred feet in height. The upper part of it is covered with heather. It rises like a great pyramid, closing in the valley. There Thotights touching Drea^n-Life. i jj are two or three little farm-houses half way up it. Above these, it is solitary and still. I wonder, this evening, being so far away, yet with painful distinctness seeing all that, whether I am there in fact as well as feeling t Would some country lad, returning late from market, discern a shadowy figure walking slowly along the path ; and bawl out and run away, recognizing me t If you believe various recent books, you will understand that when you think very intently of a place or person, it is not improbable that some misty eidolon of yourself is present to the person or at the place. I cannot say that I think this fact well authenticated. I walk on, not in the summer night, but in the autumn afternoon. I want to climb the hill, as I have done so often in departed days. So I lay aside the pen, and bend down my head on my hands. I have been there, if ever I was in my life. It is not every day one can sit in a very hard easy chair; and take such a walk, nearly two hundred miles off. Through the long grass, with a dry rustle under one's feet, by the river side : up through a little wood of firs, till the highway is gained : over a one- arched bridge, that spans a little rocky gorge, where a stream, smaller than the river, tumbles over a shelf of rock, making a noisy waterfall, now white as 134 ^^ ^^^ Forest- Hill : country snow that has lain but a night : up a steep and rough road, with birches on either hand, and a brook flowing down on one side, that brawls in rainy weather, but only murmurs on the still autumn day : up and up till the hedges give place to walls of rude stones, built without mortar ; and till rough slopes of heather spread away on either side : up and up till the path ceases, and you sit down on a great boulder of granite in the lonely bosom of the hill : through all that I have been. A long way below this, but a longer way above the wooded valley, which you now see in its whole extent, you may discern the smoke rising from a farm-house, screened a little by a clump of rather scraggy pines. There is a sick man there : an aged man whom I go to see frequently. I went to the farm-house door, a black and white dog barking furiously: there a pleasant comely young face welcomed me : I went in and found my old friend sitting by his warm fireside, which was, indeed, a great deal too warm for anyone who had been striving up that stiff ascent. I saw his face, and heard his voice : though he has been dead for years. I saw the sheep feeding on the hill around : I heard a cart passing noisily along a road far below: I saw the long gleam of the river, down in the valley: and the horizon of encircling hills : saw and heard all these things as really as though they had been present. Memory is certainly a most wonderful thing. It is Tho7ights touching Dream- Life. 135 very capricious. Sometimes it recalls things very faintly and dimly : sometimes with a vividness that makes one start. Can it be so long ago ! And it selects, in a very arbitrary fashion, what it will choose to remember. The faces and voices we would most desire to recall, it allows to fade away : and scenes and people we did not particularly care for, it now and then sets before us with this strange vividness of force and colour. I did not cherish any special regard for the old farmer: and the walk up the hill was not a very great favourite. Yet to-night something took me by the collar, and walked me up that path, and set me down beside the old man's chair. I have come back. It has exorcised the hill, to write all this about it. I had an eerie feeling, like that which De Quincey tells he had for many nights about the Malay to whom he gave the great piece of opium. But now the hill is appeased. All these odd, inexplicable states of thought and feeling are transitory. And it is much better that they should be so. Hard work crowds them out : it is only in comparative leisure they come at all. But we are not to suppose that only weak and fanciful persons know by experience these mental phenomena. What may be called Dream-life, that is, spending some part of one's time in an imagi- nary world ; is a thing in which some of the hardest- 136 On the Forest-Hill: headed of human beings have had their share. And this little walk which the writer has had to-night, in a place far away, and as upon a day that is left far behind, helps him to understand some of those singular things which are recorded of the extent to which many men have spent their time in castles in the air ; and of the persistency with which they have dwelt there, to the forgetfulness of more tangible interests. If ever there was a man who was not a morbid day-dreamer, it was Sir James Mackintosh, Sir James Mackintosh was known to mankind in general as an acute metaphysician : a forcible po- litical writer : a brilliant talker. The greatest place he ever held, to the common eye, was that of Re- corder of Bombay. And he held that place just the shortest time he possibly could to earn his pension. How many men knew, looking at the homely Scotchman, what his true place in life was t Had he not told us himself, we should hardly have believed it. He was Emperor of Constantinople ! And a laborious and anxious position he found it. He (mentally) promoted many of his friends to important offices of state : and his friends, by their indiscretion and incompetence, caused him an im- mense deal of trouble. Then the empire was always getting involved in the most vexatious com- plications, which seriously affected the Emperor's sleep and general health. He always felt like a man playing a ^^ry intricate game at chess. No Thoughts touching Dream- Life. 137 ' wonder he was sometimes very absent and dis- tracted. You would say he might have escaped all this by resigning his crown : but he could not arrange satisfactorily to do that. A thoughtless person smiles at these things : but to Mackintosh they were among the most serious things of his life. A man of bread-and-butter understanding would explain it by saying that Mackintosh was cracjced ; but then we all know that he was not cracked. Yet, in his disengaged hours, regularly as they came, was the thread of his history taken up where it had been dropped last time : and he was the Emperor, laden with an Emperor's cares. It was not as with the actor EUiston, received with great applause on the stage at Drury Lane, and fancying himself a king just long enough to bestow a blessing upon the audience, till he was pulled up by a burst of laughter. Nor was it like Alexander the Great, according to Dryden, who ' assumed the god ' for only a very limited period. Neither was the astute philosopher's notion of an Emperor the childish one. He was not Emperor, to sit on a throne, and receive homage, and make a grand appearance on grand occasions : but to go through intricate calcu- lations and hard work, and to undergo great anxiety. In short. Sir James Mackintosh, being a great man, indulged in dream-life on a great scale. But commonplace human beings do it in a way that suits themselves, and their moderate aspirations. 138 On the Forest-Hill : The poor consumptive girl, who on a dark Decem- ber evening is propped up with pillows, and gets you to sit beside her while she tells you how much stronger and better she feels ; how by spring she will be quite well again ; and how delightful the long walks will be in the summer evenings, while you know she will never see the black-thorn in blossom, nor the green leaves on the tree : she is doing just what the great metaphysician used to do. And the little schoolboy, far away from home, a thoughtful, bullied little fellow, does it too, when he pictures out the next holiday-time, and his get- ting away from all this to be with those who care for him. Possibly more people than you would think make up for the dulness of their actual life in some such way. They take pleasure in fancying what they would like, in their vacant hours. And unless you wish your mind to become very small and dry, you will have such hours. No matter how hard-worked you may be, they are attainable. You remember what Charles Lamb once wrote to a friend : * If you have but five consolatory minutes, between the desk and the bed, make much of them, and live a century in them.' Human beings, living even the most prosaic lives, have sometimes their enchanted palace, and live in it a great deal. Have you not sometimes, my reader, pictured out the life you would like : not in the least expecting it, or even really wishing it, any more than Mackintosh really Thoughts touching Dreain-Life. 139 looked to be made Emperor of Constantinople ? And when you have set your heart on something happening, which is very likely not to happen, it is quite right to please yourself by picturing out the best: all the more that this is all the enjoyment of it you are likely to have. If we have all suffered a great deal of pain, through the anticipation of evils which never came ; we have all probably enjoyed a great deal of pleasure, through the anticipation of pleasant things which were never to be. We have lived a good deal in castles which were never to be built, but in the air. When we tried for something we did not get, you remember well how we used, in vacant hours, to plan out all the mode of life, even to its minute details : enjoying it only the more keenly through the intrusion of the fear that only in this airy fashion should we ever lead that life which we should have enjoyed so much. Of course, it is not expedient to waste in dreaming over noble plans, the precious hours which might have gone far to turn our dreams into serviceable realities. It is foolish for the lad at college to spend, in thinking how proud his parents would be, and how pleased all his friends, if he were to carry off all the ho- nours that were to be had, the time which if devo- ted to hard work might have gained at least some of those soon-forgotten laurels. It may be said here, by way of parenthesis, that one of the very last visions in which ambitious youth need indulge, 140 On the Forest-Hill : is the vision of being recognized as great and dis- tinguished in the place of your birth or your early days. A prophet has no honour in his own country. I have a friend, greatly revered, who expresses an opposite opinion. He maintains, in a charming volume, that if you rise to decent eminence in life, the people who knew you as a boy will be proud of you, and will help to push you on farther. '■ I see, with my mind's eye,' says my friend, ' a statue of Dunsford erected in ToUerporcorum.' Dunsford was a native of ToUerporcorum : and having re- corded the conversation of his Friends in Council, would probably be thus distinguished. There are portions of this earth where the fact is just the con- trary. ToUerporcorum is just the last place where certain Dunsfords I know are likely to have a sta- tue. Dunsford's early acquaintances cannot bear the moderate success which has attended Dunsford in life : they regard Friends in Council as a very poor work ; and a college acquaintance, who never forgave Dunsford the medals he won there, now and then abuses Dunsford in the ToUerporcorum newspaper. I lately visited a certain ToUerporco- rum : an ancient town in a fair tract of country. That ToUerporcorum had its Dunsford. Dunsford started from small beginnings ; but gradually rose about as high as a human being well can in a cer- tain portion of Scandinavia. But the fashionable and intellectual thing, in ToUerporcorum, was to Thottghts toticJiing Dream- L ife. 141 ignore Dunsford and his career altogether. Nobody cared about him or it. Dunsford sometimes went back to Tollerporcorum ; and the Tollerporcorum people diligently shut their eyes to his existence. Every envious little wretch who had stuck in the mud, thus avenged himself on Dunsford for having got on so far. In the latter years of his honoured life, Dunsford hardly ever visited Tollerporcorum : and when the great man died, it was never proposed at Tollerporcorum to erect so much as a drinking- fountain to his memor}^ Here ends the parenthesis. Take up the broken thread of thought. It is right and pleasant to gain at least the pleasure of anticipation out of happy things that are not to be. And when you see a sanguine person in a state of great enjoyment through such anticipation, you will not, unless you have in you the spirit of my old friend Mr. Snarling, try to throw a damp upon all this innocent happi- ness by pointing out, with great force of logic, how ver>' little chance there is of the anticipation being realized. That is only the stronger reason for en- joying in this way that which you are not likely to enjoy in any other. There is hardly a more touch- ing sight, than the sight of a human being, old or young, happy in the anticipation of any pleasant thing which he w^ill never reach. With what a rosy face and what bright eyes your little boy of five years old confides to you all he is to do when he is 142 On the Forest-Hill : a man ! Great are the grandeur and fame in which he is to live : many are to be his horses and nume- rous his dogs ; but a great feature in his plan al- ways is, how happy he is to make his father and mother. Ah, little man, before those days come, your father and mother will be far away. And a reason why a wise man, desirous to eco- nomize the enjoyment there is in this life, and to make it go as far as possible, will often quietly luxuriate in the prospect of what he secretly knows is not likely to happen, is this certain fact : that in this world the thing you would like best, is the thing you are least likely to get. That is a fact which, as we get on through life, we come to know extremely well. Yes : if you set your heart on a thing, whoever gets it, yoii won't. You may get something else : perhaps something better : but not that. If you have such an enthusiasm for Gothic architecture, that you sometimes think no one could enjoy it so much : if you feel that it would sensibly flavour all your life, to live in a Gothic house, or to worship in a Gothic church : then, though every- thing else about them be all you could wish, rely on it, your church and house will be Palladian. And you will often meet men whose belongings are Gothic : who tell you they are very beautiful, very uncomfortable ; that the church is destroying their lungs, and the house giving them perpetual cold in their heads : and Avho greatly envy you. Of course, Thoughts touching Dream-Life. 143 all this is gratifying, to a certain degree. It serves to make you content. I have known a man who lived in a house which was extremely comfortable, and extremely ugly. No one could ever say to what school of architec- ture, in particular, his residence was to be referred. And the country round was very ugly and bare. But, like the farmer in Virgil, in that exquisite pas- sage in one of the GeorgicSy regitm ceqiiabat opes animo : he could picture out, at will, a charming English manor-house, of hospitable-looking red brick with stone dressings; oriel-windowed, steep- gabled, with great wreathed chimneys,, with envi- roning terraces, with magnificent horse-chestnuts ever blazing in the glory of June. You thought he was walking a bleak moorland road, dreary and dismal ; but in truth the warm breeze was shaking the blossoms overhead, and making a chequered dancing shade on soft green turf below. And there yearly comes a certain season, when very many human beings practise on themselves a delusion something like his. I mean Christmas-time. Who ever spent the ideal Christmas } I should like very greatly to behold that person. I have never done so yet : never spent a Christmas in all my life in the ideal way. You ought to be living in a noble Gothic house, somewhere in the Midland Counties of England. There ought to be a large and gay party, spending the holidays there. There ought 144 ^^ ^^^ Forest-Hill : to be an exquisite old church near. There ought to be bracing frost, and cheerful snow. All hearts should seem touched and warmed by the sacred associations of the season. There should be an oaken hall, and a vast wood-fire : holly and mistle- toe ; and of course roast beef and plum pudding and strong ale for every poor person near. You should be living, in short, at Bracebrldge Hall, exactly as it was when Washington Irving described it : and with all the same people. It need not be said that in fact, the Christmas time and its sur- roundings are quite different from all this. You sit down by yourself, and try to get up the feeling of the time by reading Washington Irving and Mr. Dickens' Christinas Carol. T\\q Ilhistrated Lo7tdon News is a great help to ordinary imaginations at that season. On the actual Christmas-day, rainy, muddy, tooth-aching, ill-tempered, you turn over the pictures In that excellent journal ; and you find the Ideal Christmas there. My friend Smith once told how he spent his first Christriias-day in his little country parsonage. Luckily, there was snow. He provided that his servants, three in number, should have the means of a little enjoyment. He worked hard all the forenoon writing a sermon, whose subject was not the Nativity. And for an hour before dinner he walked, alone, up and down a little gravelled walk with evergreens on each side, looking at the leaden sky, and the solitary fields ; Thottghts touching Dream- Life. 145 and trying to feel as if he were at Bracebridge Hall. He tried with small success. Then, having dined in solitude on turkey and plum-pudding, he read the pleasant Christmas chapter in Pickwick : and tried to get up an enthusiasm about the enjoyment which, for the sake of argument, might be conceived as existing in many houses that night. Finally, he concluded that he was unsuccessfully trying to hum- bug himself; and ended by reading Butler s Analogy in a good deal of bitterness of heart. Very early in our intelligent life, our personality begins to cut us off from those nearest to us. Un- less a parent have a much deeper insight and sym- pathy than most parents have, he loses knowledge, very early, of the real inward life of his children. At first, it is like wading in shallow water; but it is not long till it shelves down into depths beyond your diving. The little thoughtful face you see every day; the little heart within you know just as much as you know the outer side of the moon. No doubt, if this be so, it is in a great measure your own fault. There are many parents to whom their children, young or old, would no more confide the things they really care for and think about, than they would confide these to the first cabman at the next stand. But beyond this, the little things soon begin to have a world of their own, not known to any but themselves. You may have known young children who wearied for the hour when they might L 146 On the Forest-Hill : get to bed, and begin to think again : take up the history where they left it off last night. Of course, the history and the world were very different from the fact. Kings and queens, heroes and giants, elves and fairies, palaces and castles, these being oftentimes enchanted, were common there. Also clear views of the kind of life they would live when they grew up : a life in which coaches and six, suits of armour, and the like, were not unknown. It is a mercy for some people, that circumstances keep them down. Their lot circumscribes their opportunity of making fools of themselves. My friend Smith, already named, is a clergyman. His church is a plain one. Such is his craze for Gothic architecture, that I tremble to think what would have become of him if he had chanced to attain a magnificent church dating from the eleventh century : a church with stately ranks of shafts, echoing aisles, storied window, crusaders' statues, rich oak carving and monumental brasses, standing amid grand old trees. I fear he would have spent great part of his time in admiring and enjoying the structure : in sitting on a gravestone outside and looking at it : in walking up and down inside it : and the like. It would have been a great feature in his life. It is much safer and better that he has been spared that temptation. The grand building, of course, has fallen to somebody who does not care for it at all. In a former age, there was a barrister TJio2igh ts to uchiiig Dream- L ife. 147 ^vho would have keenly enjoyed being made a judge. Probably no man ever made a judge would have delighted so much in the little accessories of that eminent position : the curious garb, and the varied dignity whereAvith the administrators of the lavv- are surrounded. How tremendously set up he would have been if he could once have sentenced a man to be hanged ! The writer was present when the name of that person was suggested to an individual who could have made him Avhat he v^ished to be. That individual was asked whether he might not do. That individual did not open his lips ; but he shook his head slowly from side to side, several times. For thus goes on this Avorld. Probably most human beings, now and then, have short glimpses of cheerfulness and light-heartedness, which make them think how much more and better might be made of this life. You have seen a charming scene, bathed in a glorious sunshine ; and you have thought, Now, it might always be like this. Sometimes there comes a hopefulness of spi- rit in Avhich all difficulties and perplexities vanish : in which everything seems delightful, and all crea- tures good. This is the potential of happiness in man. Of course, it is seldom reached, and never for long. ]\Iost people are more familiar Avith the converse case, in which everything looks dark and amiss : the season of perplexity, despondency, de- pression. Probably this comes many times more 148 On the Forest-Hill : frequently than the other. Let me say, my reader, that we know the reason why. The truth is, it is not needful to our enjoyment of many things, that we should fancy any connexion between ourselves and them. You read a pleasant story, and like it, without fancying yourself its hero or heroine. Never in your life, perhaps, have you spent a week in a house like Bracebridge Hall : and you are never likely to do that. Yet you enjoy the sunshiny volume ; and you thank its author for many hours of quiet, thoughtful enjoyment, for which you felt the better. And indeed, much of what is pleasing and beautiful you enjoy most, when you never think of it in relation to yourself Take the most pleasing development of human comeliness : which is doubtless in the case of young women. Let it be admitted, that there are few things more pleasing and interesting to the rightly- constituted mind, than the sight of sweet girlish faces and graceful girlish forms, and the tones of the plea- sant voices that generally go with them. But there is no doubt earthly, that in grave middle age, you have much more real pleasure in these things, than in feverish youth. Let us suppose, my reader, that you are a man in years. Those who were young girls in your day, are middle-aged women now : they are past. But you look with the kindest interest on the fair young faces of another genera- tion. A young lad is eager to commend himself to Thoughts touching Dream- Life. 149 the notice and admiration of these agreeable human beings. He is filled with bitter enmity at other lads, more successful than himself in gaining their favour. His whole state of mind, in the circum- stances, leads him into a host of absurdities : the contemplative mind sees him in the light of an ass. Now, you are beyond and above all these things. You look with pure pleasure and kindness at the fairest beings of God's creation. And you look at the fair sight and enjoy it, as you look at Ben Lomond or at the setting sun, without the faintest wish to make it your own. It is the entire absence of personal interest, that makes your interest so pleasant, and so unmingled with any disagreeable feeling. I remember to have read, in a religious biography, a statement made by a very clever and good man, about a certain beautiful girl, called away in early youth. ' I found myself,' he said, ' looking at her with an interest for which I could not account' Was that unsophisticated simplicity real 1 Not able to account for the interest with which you look at a pleasant sight ! I think it might be accounted for. Though indeed when we go to first principles, we get beyond the reach of logical explanation. In strictness, you may not be able to say why the tear comes to your eye, when you look at a number of little children and think what is before them. In strictness, you may not be able to say why it was that so many people found T 50 On the Forest-Hill. themselves shedding tears, on a day in Westminster Abbey, when they saw the Crown placed on the head of a certain young girl, who in after years was destined to gain the love of most hearts in Britain as the best of Queens. Yet a great many thought- ful persons have recorded that they were affected alike, in beholding that sight. So there must have been something in the sight, to awaken the emotion. These are the things of which the writer thought, in the circumstances already set out. Probably it has made you sleepy to read all this. It had the contrary effect to write it : for when the writer at length wearily sought his couch, he could not sleep at all. CHAPTER VIII. CONCERNING RESIGNATION OU know how a little child of three or four years old kicks and howls if it do not get its own way. You know how quietly a grown-up man takes it, when ordinary things fall out otherwise than he wished. A letter, a newspaper^ a magazine, does not arrive by the post on the morn- ing on which it had been particularly wished for, and counted on with certainty. The day proves rainy, when a fine day was specially desirable. The grown-up man is disappointed ; but he soon gets reconciled to the existing state of facts. He did not much expect that things would turn out as he wished them. Yes : there is nothing like the habit of being disappointed, to make a man resigned when disappointment comes, and to enable him to take it quietly. And a habit of practical resignation grows upon most men, as they advance through life. You have often seen a poor beggar, most probably an old man, with some lingering remains of respect- 152 Concerning Resignation. ability in his faded appearance, half ask an alms of a passer-by : and you have seen him, at a word of repulse, or even on finding no notice taken of his request, meekly turn away : too beaten and sick at heart for energy : drilled into a dreary resignation by the long custom of finding everything go against him in this world. You may have known a poor cripple, who sits all day by the side of the pavement of a cer- tain street, with a little bundle of tracts in his hand, watching those who pass by, in the hope that they may give him something. I wonder, indeed, how the police suffer him to be there : for though ostensibly selling the tracts, he is really begging. Hundreds of times in the long day, he must see people approach- ing ; and hope that they may spare him a halfpenny; and find ninety-nine out of each hundred pass with- out noticing him. It must be a hard school of Re- signation. Disappointments without number have subdued that poor creature into bearing one disap- pointment more with scarce an appreciable stir of heart. But on the other hand, kings, great nobles, and the like, have been known, even to the close of life, to violently curse and swear if things went against them; going the length of stamping and blas- pheming even at rain and wind, and branches of trees and plashes of mud, which were of course guilt- less of any design of giving offence to these eminent individuals. There was a great monarch, who when any little cross-accident befell him, was wont to fling Co7icerning Resignation. 153 himself upon the floor ; and there to kick and scream and tear his hair. And around him, meanwhile, stood his awe-stricken attendants : all doubtless ready to assure him that there was something noble and graceful in his kicking and screaming : and that no human being had ever before with such dignity and magnanimity torn his hair. My friend Mr. Smith tells me that in his early youth he had a (very slight) acquaintance with a great Prince, of elevated rank and of vast estates. That great Prince came very early to his greatness ; and no one had ever ventured, since he could remember, to tell him he had ever said or done wrong. Accordingly, the Prince had never learned to control himself; nor grown acustomed to bear quietly what he did not like. And when any one, in conversation, related to him something which he disapproved, he used to start from his chair, and rush up and down the apartment, furiously flapping his hands together, till he had thus blown ofl" the steam produced by the irritation of his ner\^ous system. That Prince was a good man : and so aware was he of his infirmity, that when in these fits of passion, he never suffered himself to say a single word : being aware that he might say what he would aftenvards regret. And though he could not wholly restrain himself, the entire wrath he felt passed off in flapping. And after flapping for a few minutes, he sat down again, a reasonable man once more. All honour to him ! For my friend 154 Concerning Resignation. Smith tells me that that Prince was surrounded by toadies, who were ready to praise everything he might do ; even to his flapping. And in particular, there was one humble retainer, who whenever his master flapped, was wont to hold up his hands in an ecstacy of admiration : exclaiming, ' It is the flapping of a god, and not of a man !' Now all this lack of Resignation on the part of princes and kings comes of the fact, that they are so far like children, that they have not become accustomed to be resisted ; and to be obliged to forego what they would like. Resignation comes by the habit of being disappointed ; and of finding things go against you. It is, in the case of ordi- nary human beings, just what they expect. Of course, you remember the adage : ' Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disap- pointed.' I have a good deal to say about that adage. Reasonableness of expectation is a great and good thing : despondency is a thing to be dis- couraged and put down as far as may be. But meanwhile let me say, that the corollary drawn from that dismal beatitude seems to me unfounded in fact. I should say just the contrary. I should say, ' Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he will very likely be disappointed.' You know, my reader, whether things do not generally happen the opposite way from that which you expected. Did you ever try to keep off an evil you dreaded, by Conceriiing Resignation. 00 interposing this buffer ? Did you ever think you might perhaps prevent a trouble from coming, by constantly anticipating it : keeping meanwhile an under-thought that things rarely happened as you anticipate them : and thus that \-our anticipation of the thing m.ight possibly keep it away ? Of course you have : for you are a human being. And in all common cases, a watch might as well think to keep a skilful watchmaker in ignorance of the way in which its movements are produced, as a human being think to prevent another human being from knowing exactly how he will think and feel in given circumstances. We have watched the working of our own watches far too closely and long, my friends, to have the least difficulty in understand- ing the great principles upon which the watches of other men go. I cannot look inside your breast, my reader, and see the machinery that is working there: I mean the machinery- of thought and feeling. But I know exactly how it works, nevertheless : for I have long Avatched a machinery precisely like it. There are a great many people in this world who feel that things are all wrong : that they have missed stays in life : that they are beaten : and yet who don't much mind. They are indurated by long use. They do not try to disguise from themselves the facts. There are some men who diligently try to disguise the facts : and who in some measure suc- ceed in doing so. I have known a self-sufficient 156 Concerning Resignation. and disagreeable clergyman who had a church in a large city. Five-sixths of the seats in the church were quite empty : yet the clergyman often talked of what a good congregation he had, with a con- fidence which would have deceived any one who had not seen it I have known a church where it was agony to any one with an ear to listen to the noise produced when the people were singing : yet the clergyman often talked of what splendid music he had. I have known an entirely briefless barrister, whose friends gave out that the sole reason why he had no briefs was that he did not want any. I have known students who did not get the prizes for which they competed : but who declared that the reason of their failure was, that though they com- peted for the prizes, they did not wish to get them. I have known a fast young woman, after many engagements made and broken, marry as the last resort a brainless and penniless blackguard : yet all her family talk in big terms of what a delightful connexion she was making. Now, where all that self-deception is genuine, let us be glad to see it : and let us not, like Mr. Snarling, take a spiteful pleasure in undeceiving those who are so happy to be deceived. In most cases, indeed, such trickery deceives nobody. But where it truly deceives those who practise it, even if it deceives nobody else, you see there is no true Resignation. A man who has made a mess of life, has no need to be resigned, if Coficernmg Resignation. i^j he fancies he has succeeded splendidly. But I look with great interest, and often with deep respect, at the man or woman who feels that life has been a failure : a failure, that is, as regards this world : and yet who is quite resigned. Yes : whether it be the unsoured old maid, sweet-tempered, sympathetic in others' joys, God's kind angel in the house of sorrow: or the unappreciated genius, quiet, subdued, pleased to meet even one who understands him amid a community which does not: or the kind-hearted clever man to whom eminent success has come too late, when those were gone whom it would have made happy : I reverence and love, more than I can express, the beautiful natures I have known thus subdued and resigned ! Yes : human beings get indurated. When you come to know well the history of a great many people, you will find that it is wonderful what they have passed through. Most people have suffered a very great deal, since they came into this world. Yet, in their appearance, there is no particular trace of it all. You would not guess, from looking at them, how hard and how various their lot has been, I once knew a woman, rather more than middle- aged. I knew her well, and sav\^ her almost ever\- day for several years, before I learned that the homely Scotchwoman had seen distant lands, and had passed through ver>' strange ups and downs. 158 Concerning Resignation. before she settled into the quiet orderly life in\vhich I knew her. Yet when spoken to kindly, by one who expressed surprise that all these trials had left so little trace, the inward feeling, commonly sup- pressed, burst bitterly out : and she exclaimed, ' It's a wonder that I'm living at all ! ' And it is a wonder that a great many people are living, and looking so cheerful and so well as they do : when you think what fiery passion, what crushing sorrow, what terrible losses, what bitter disappointments, what hard and protracted work, they have gone through. Doubtless, great good comiCS of it. All wisdom, all experience, comes of suffering. I should not care much for the counsel of the man whose life had been one long sunshiny holiday. There is greater depth in the philosophy of Mr. Dickens, than a considerable portion of his readers discern. You are ready to smile at the singular way in which Captain Cuttle commended his friend Jack Bunsby as a man of extraordinary wisdom ; whose advice on any point was of inestimable value. * Here's a man,' said Captain Cuttle, ' who has been more beaten about the head than any other living man ! ' I hail the words as the recognition of a great principle. To Mr. Bunsby, it befell in a literal sense: but we have all been (in a moral- sense) a good deal beaten about both the head and the heart before we grew good for much. Out of the travail of his nature : out of the sorrowful history Concerning Resignation. 159 of his past life : the poet or the morahst draws the deep thought and feeHng which find so straight a w^ay to the hearts of other men. Do you think Mr. Tennyson would ever have been the great poet he is, if he had not passed through that season of great grief which has left its noble record in In Memoriam 1 And a youthful preacher, of vivid imagination and keen feeling, little fettered by anything in the nature of good taste, may by strong statements and a fiery manner draw a mob of un- thinking hearers : but thoughtful men and women w^ill not find anything in all that, that awakens the response of their inner nature in its truest depths : they must have religious instruction into which real experience has been transfused : and the worth of the instruction will be in direct proportion to the amount of real experience which is embodied in it. And after all, it is better to be wise and good, than to be gay and happy ; if we must choose between the two things : and it is worth while to be severely beaten about the head, if tJiat is the condition on which alone we can gain true wisdom. True wis- dom is cheap at almost any price. But it does not follow at all that you will be happy (in the vulgar sense) in direct proportion as you are wise. I suppose most middle-aged people, when they re- ceive the ordinary kind wish at New Year's time of a Happy New Year, feel that happy is not quite the word : and feel that, too, though well aware that i6o Concerning Resignation. they have abundant reason for gratitude to a kind Providence. It is not here that we shall ever be happy : that is, completely and perfectly happy. Something will always be coming to worry and distress. And a hundred sad possibilities hang over us: some of them only too certainly and quickly drawing near. Yet people are content, in a kind of way. They have learnt the great lesson of Resignation. There are many worthy people who would be quite fevered and flurried by good fortune, if it were to come to any very great degree. It would injure theii; heart. As for bad fortune, they can stand it nicely. They have been accustomed to it so long. I have known a very hard-wrought man, who had passed, rather early in life, through very heavy and protracted trials. I have heard him say that if any malicious enemy wished to kill him, the course would be to make sure that tidings of some signal piece of prosperity should arrive by post on each of six or seven successive days. It would quite unhinge and unsettle him, he said. His heart would go : his nervous system would break down. People to whom pieces of good luck come rare and small, have a great curiosity to know how a man feels when he is suddenly told that he has drawn one of the greatest prizes in the lottery of life. The kind of feeling, of course, will depend entirely on Concernmg Resignation. 1 6 1 the kind of man. Yet very great prizes, in the way of dignity and duty, do for the most part fall to men who in some measure deserve them : or who at least are not conspicuously undeserving of them and unfit for them. So that it is almost impossible that the great news should elicit merely some unworthy explosion of gratified self-conceit. The feeling would in almost every case be deeper, and worthier. One would like to be sitting at breakfast with a truly good man, when the letter from the Prime Minister comes in, ofi*ering him the Archbishopric of Canterbury. One would like to see how he would take it. Quietly, I have no doubt. Long preparation has fitted the man who reaches that position for taking it quietly. A recent Chancellor publicly stated how he felt when offered the Great Seal. His first feeling, that good man said, was of gratification that he had fairly reached the highest reward of the profession to which he had given his life : but the feeling which speedily supplanted that, was an overwhelming sense of his responsibility and a grave doubt as to his qualifi- cations. I have always believed, and sometimes said, that good-fortune ; not so great or so sudden as to injure one's nerves or heart : but kindly and equable ; has a most wholesome effect upon human -character. I believe that the happier a man is, the better and kinder he will be. The greater part of unamiability, ill-temper, impatience, bitterness, and M T 6 2 Concerning Resignation. uncharitableness, comes out of unhappiness. It is because a man is so miserable, that he is such a sour, suspicious, fractious, petted creature. I was amused, this morning, to read in the newspaper an account of a very small incident which befell the new Primate of England on his journey back to London after being enthroned at Canterbury. The reporter of that small incident takes occasion to record that the Archbishop had quite charmed his travelling companions in the railway carriage by the geniality and kindliness of his manner. I have no doubt he did. I am sure he is a truly good Christian man. But think what a splendid train- ing for producing geniality and kindliness he has been going through for a great number of years. Think of the moral influences which have been bearing on him for the last few weeks. We should all be kindly and genial if we had the same chance of being so. But if Dr. Longley had a living of a hundred pounds a year : a fretful ailing wife : a number of half-fed and half-educated little chil- dren : a dirty miserable house : a bleak country round : and a set of wrongheaded and insolent pa- rishioners to keep straight : I venture to say he would have looked, and been, a very different man, in that railway carriage running up to London. In- stead of the genial smiles that delighted his fellow- travellers (according to the newspaper story), his face would have been sour and his speech would Concerning Resignation. i6 have been snappish : he would have leant back in the corner of a second-class carriage, sadly calcu- lating the cost of his journey; and how part of it might be saved by going without any dinner. Oh, if I found a four-leaved shamrock, I would under- take to make a mighty deal of certain people I know ! I would put an end to their weary sche- mings to make the ends meet. I would cut off all those wretched cares which jar miserably on the shaken nerves. I know the burst of thankfulness and joy that would come, if some dismal load, never to be cast off, were taken away. And I would take it off. I would clear up the horrible muddle. I would make them happy : and in doing that, I know that I should make them good ! But I have sought the four-leaved shamrock for a long time, and never have found it : and so I am growing subdued to the conviction that I never will. Let us go back to the matter of Resignation ; and think a little longer about that. Resignation, in any human being, means that things are not as you would wish ; and yet that you are content. Who has all he wishes t There are many houses in this world in which Resignation is the best thing that can be felt, any more. The bitter blow has fallen : the break has been made : the empty chair is left (perhaps a very little chair) : and never more, while Time goes on, can things be as they were fondly wished and hoped. Resignation 164 Concerning Resignation. would need to be cultivated by human beings : for, all round us, there is a multitude of things very different from what we would wish. Not in your house, not in your family, not in your street, not in your parish, not in your country, and least of all in yourself; can you have things as you would wish. And you have your choice of two alternatives. You must either fret yourself into a nervous fever; or you must cultivate the habit of Resignation. And very often. Resignation does not mean that you are at all reconciled to a thing ; but just that you feel you can do nothing to mend it. Some friend, to whom you are really attached, and whom you often see, vexes and worries you by some silly and dis- agreeable habit : some habit which it is impossible you should ever like, or ever even overlook : yet you try to make up your mind to it : because it cannot be helped ; and you would rather submit to it than lose your friend. You hate the East wind : it withers and pinches you, in body and soul : yet you cannot live in a certain beautiful city without feeling the East wind many days in the year. And that city's advantages and attractions are so many and great, that no sane man, with sound lungs, would aban- don the city merely to escape the East wind. Yet though resigned to the East wind, you are anything but reconciled to it. Resignation is not always a good thing. Some- times it is a very bad thing. You should never be Concerning Resignation. 165 resigned to things continuing wrong, when you may rise and set them right. I daresay, in the Romish Church, there were good men before Luther, who were keenly aHve to the errors and evils that had crept into it : but who, in despair of making things better, tried sadly to fix their thoughts upon other subjects : who took to illuminating missals, or con- structing systems of logic, or cultivating vegetables in the garden of the monastery, or improving the music in the chapel : quietly resigned to evils they judged irremediable. Great reformers have not been resigned men. Luther was not resigned : Howard was not resigned : Fowell Buxton was not resigned : George Stephenson was not resigned. And there is hardly a nobler sight, than that of a man who determines that he will NOT make up his mind to the continuance of some great evil : who determines that he will give his life to battling with that evil to the last : who determines that either that evil shall extinguish him, or he shall extinguish it ! I reverence the strong, sanguine mind, that resolves to work a revolution to better things ; and that is not afraid to hope it can work a revolution ! And perhaps, my reader, we should both reverence it all the more that we find in ourselves very little like it. It is a curious thing, and a sad thing, to remark in how many people there is too much resignation. It kills out energy. It is a weak, fretful, unhappy thing. People are reconciled, in a sad sort of way, 1 66 Concerning Resignatio7i. to the fashion In which things go on. You have seen a poor, slatternly mother, in a wayside cottage, who has observed her little children playing in the road before it, in the way of passing carriages ; angrily ordering the little things to come away from their dangerous and dirty play: yet when the chil- dren disobey her, and remain where they were, just saying no more ; making no farther effort You have known a master tell his man-servant to do something about stable or garden : yet when the servant does not do it, taking no notice : seeing that he has been disobeyed, yet wearily resigned : feeling that there is no use in always fighting. And I do not speak of the not unfrequent cases in which the master, after giving his orders, comes to discover that it is best they should not be carried out, and is very glad to see them disregarded : I mean when he is dis- satisfied that what he has directed is not done, and wishes that it were done, and feels worried by the whole affair: yet is so devoid of energy as to rest in a fretful resignation. Sometimes there is a sort of sense as if one had discharged his conscience by making a weak effort in the direction of doing a thing : an effort which had not the slightest chance of being successful. When I was a little boy, many years since, I used to think this : and I was led to thinking it by remarking a singular characteristic in the conduct of a school companion. In those days, if you were chasing some other boy who had Concerning Resignation. 167 injured or offended you, with the design of retaHa- tion; if you found you could not catch him, by reason of his superior speed ; you would have re- course to the following expedient. If your com- panion was within a little space of you, though a space you felt you could not make less : you would suddenly stick out one of your feet, which would hook round his : and he stumbling over it, would fall. I trust I am not suggesting a mischievous and dangerous trick to any boy of the present genera- tion. Indeed, I have the firmest belief that existing boys know all we used to know, and possibly more. All this is by way of rendering intelligible what I have to say of my old companion. He was not a good runner. " And when another boy gave him a sudden flick with a knotted handkerchief, or the like ; he had little chance of catching that other boy. Yet, I have often seen him, when chasing another, before finally abandoning the pursuit, stick out his foot in the regular way, though the boy he was chasing was yards beyond his reach. Often did the present writer meditate on that phenomenon, in the days of his boyhood. It appeared curious that it should afford some comfort to the evaded pursuer, to make an offer at upsetting the escaping youth, — an offer which could not possibly be successful. But very often, in after life, have I beheld in the conduct of groAvn-up men and women, the moral likeness of that futile sticking out of the foot. I have beheld 1 68 Concerning Resignation. human beings who Hved in houses always untidy and disorderly : or whose affairs were in a horrible confusion and entanglement : who now and then seemed roused to a feeling that this would not do : who querulously bemoaned their miserable lot ; and made some faint and futile attempt to set things right : attempts which never had a chance to succeed, and which ended in nothing. Yet it seemed some- how to pacify the querulous heart. I have known a clergyman in a parish with a bad population, seem suddenly to waken up to a conviction that he must do something to mend matters : and set agoing some weak little machinery, which could produce no appreciable result, and which came to a stop in a few weeks. Yet that faint offer appeared to dis- charge the claims of conscience : and after it the clergyman remained long time in a comatose state of unhealthy Resignation. But it is a miserable and a wrong kind of Resignation which dwells in that man, who sinks down, beaten and hopeless, in the presence of a recognised evil. Such a man may be, in a sense, resigned : but he cannot possibly be content. If you should ever, when you have reached middle age, turn over the diary or the letters you wrote in the hopeful though foolish days when you were eighteen or twenty, you will be aware how quietly and gradually the lesson of Resignation has been taught you. You would have got into a terrible Concerning Resignation. 169 state of excitement if any one had told you then that you would have to forego your most cherished hopes and wishes of that time : and it would have tried you even more severely to be assured that, in not many years, you would not care a single straw for the things and the persons who were then up- permost in your mind and heart. What an entirely new set of friends and interests is that which now surrounds you : and how completely the old ones are gone ! Gone, like the sunsets you remember in the summers of your childhood : gone, like the prim- roses that grew in the woods where you wandered as a boy. Said my friend Smith to me, a few days ago : ^ You remember Emily Jones, and all about that ? I met her yesterday, ^vfter ten years. She is a fat, middle-aged, ordinary-looking woman. What a terrific fool I was ! ' Smith spoke to me in the confidence of friendship : yet I think he was a little mortified at the heartiness with which I agreed with him on the subject of his former folly. He had got over it completely : and in seeing that he was (at a certain period) a fool, he had come to discern that of which his friends had always been aware. Of course, early interests do not always die out. You remember Dr. Chalmers : and the ridiculous exhibition about the wretched little likeness of an early sweetheart, not seen for forty years, and long since in her grave. You remember the singular way in which he signified his remembrance of her, in his 1 70 Concerning Resignatio7i. famous and honoured age. I don't mean the crying : nor the walking up and down the garden walk calling her by fine names. I mean the taking out his card : not his carte ; you could understand that : but his visiting-card bearing his name ; and sticking it behind the portrait with two wafers. Probably it pleased him to do so : and assuredly it did harm to no one else. And we have all heard of the like things. Early affections are sometimes, doubtless, cherished in the memory of the old. But still, more material interests come in : and the old affection is crowded out of its old place in the heart. And so, those comparatively fanciful disappointments sit lightly. The romance is gone. The mid-day sun beats down : and there lies the dusty way. When the resolute and judicious mother of Christopher North stopped his marriage with a person she deemed unsuitable, we are told that the future pro- fessor nearly went mad ; and that he never quite got over it. But really, judging from his writings and his biography, he bore up under it, after a little, wonderfully well. But looking back to the days which the old yellow letters bring back, you will think to yourself. Where are the hopes and anticipations of that time } You expected to be a great man, no doubt. Well, you know you are not. You are a small man : and never will be anything else : yet you are quite resigned. If there be an argument which stirs me to indigna- Concernmg Resignation. 1 7 1 tion at its futility ; and to wonder that any mortal fever regarded it as of the slightest force : it is that which is set out in the famous soliloquy in Cato, as to the Immortality of the Soul, Will any sane man say, that if in this world you wish for a thing very much, and anticipate it very clearly and confidently, you are therefore sure to get it ? If that were so, many a little schoolboy would end by driving his carriage and four, who ends by driving no carriage at all. I have heard of a man whose private papers were found after his death all written over with his signature as he expected it would be when he be- came Lord Chancellor. Let us say his peerage was to be as Lord Smith. There it was. Smith, C, Smith, C, written in every conceivable fashion : so that the signature, when needed, might be easy and imposing. That man had very vividly anticipated the woolsack, the gold robe, and all the rest. It need hardly be said he attained none of these. The famous argument, you know of course, is that man has a great longing to be immortal ; and that there- fore he is sure to be immortal. Rubbish ! It is not true that any longing after immortality exists in the heart of a hundredth portion of the race. And if it were true, it would prove immortality no more, than the manifold signatures of Smith, C, proved that Smith was indeed to be Chancellor. No : we cling to the doctrine of a Future Life : we could not live without it : but we beHeve it, not because 172 Concerning Resignation. of undefined longings within ourselves, not because of reviving plants and flowers, not because of the chrysalis and the butterfly : but because ' our Sa- viour Jesus Christ hath abolished death, and brought light and immortality to light through the gospel.* There is something very curious, and very touching, in thinking how clear and distinct, and how often recurring, were our early anticipations of things that were never to be. In this world, the fact is for the most part the opposite of what It should be to give force to Plato's (or Cato's) argument : the thing you vividly anticipate is the thing that Is least likely to come. The thing you don't much care for : the thing you don't expect : is the likeliest. And even if the event prove what you anticipated ; the cir- cumstances, and the feeling of It, will be quite dif- ferent from what you anticipated. A certain little girl three years old was told that in a little while she was to go with her parents to a certain city, a hundred miles ofl": a city which may be called Al- tenburg as well as anything else. It was a great delight to her to anticipate that journey, and to anticipate it very circumstantially. It was a delight to her to sit down at evening on her father's knee : and to tell him all about how it would be in going to Altenburg. It was always the same thing. Al- ways, first, how sandwiches would be made : how they would all get into the carriage (which would come round to the door), and drive away to a certain Concerning Resignatioft. 173 railway station f how they would get their tickets ; and the train would come up ; and they would all get into a carriage together, and lean back in cor- ners, and eat the sandwiches, and look out of the windows : and so on. But when the journey was actually made, every single circumstance in the little girl's anticipations proved wrong. Of course, they were not intentionally made wrong. Her parents would have carried out to the letter, if they could, what the little thing had so clearly pictured and so often repeated. But it proved to be needful to go by an entirely different way and in an entirely different fashion. All those little details, dwelt on so much, and w^th so much interest, were things never to be. It is even so with the anticipations of larger and older children. How distinctly, how fully, my friend, we have pictured out to our minds a mode of life, a home and the country round it, and the multitude of little things which make up the habitude of being : which we long since resigned ourselves to knowing could never prove realities ! No doubt, it is all right and well. Even St. Paul, with all his gift of prophecy, was not allowed to foresee what was to happen to himself. You know how he wrote that he would do a certain thing, 'as soon as I shall see how it will go with me ! ' But our times are in the Best Hand. And the one thing about our lot, my reader, that we may 1 74 Concerning Resignation. think of with perfect contentment, is that they are so. I know nothing more admirable in spirit, and few things more charmingly expressed, than that little poem by Miss Waring which sets out that comfortable thought You know it, of course. You should have it in your memory ; and let it be one of the first things your children learn by heart. It may well come (if you live in Scotland) next after O God of Bethel : it breathes the self-same tone. And let me close these thoughts with one of its verses : Thefe are briars besetting every path, Which call for patient care : There is a cross in every lot, And an earnest need for prayer : But a lowly heart that leans on Thee, Is happy anywhere ! CHAPTER IX, A REMINISCENCE OF THE OLD TIME : BEING SOME THOUGHTS ON GOING AWAY. OU know, I am sure, how as we advance in life, hours come in which we feel an impulse to sit down for a little, and try to revive an old feeling, before it dies away. And many of our old feelings are dying away ; and will ultimately die out altogether. It is partly through use ; and partly because our system, physical and psychical, is growing less sensitive as we go on. We do not feel things now as we used to do. We are getting stronger : the robuster nerves of middle age do not receive the vivid impressions of earlier years ; and there are faintly-flavoured things which they cease to appreciate at all. We have come out from the green fields, and from the shady wood- lands : and we are plodding along the beaten high- way of life. It is the noon now; not perhaps without some tendency to decline towards evening : 176 A Reminiscence of and we look back to the dawn and to the mornings when the air was cool and fresh, and when the sky was clear. And we have grown hardened to the rougher work of the present time. We have all got lines, pretty deeply drawn, upon our faces : and a good many grey hairs. And if one could see a middle-aged soul, no doubt you would see about it something analogous to being wrinkled and grey. No doubt you would likewise discern something analogous to the thickening and toughening of the skin in the case of the middle-aged hand. Neither hand nor heart feels so keenly. There is no help for it ; but still one cannot help regretting it, the way in which things lose their first fresh relish by use. We ought to be getting more enjoyment out of things than we do. A host of very small matters, which we pass without ever noticing, would afford us real and sensible pleasure if we had not grown so accustomed to them. Prince Lee Boo, as we used to read, was moved to ecstatic wonder and delight by the upright walls and the flat ceiling of an ordinary room. They were new to him. There was a young Indian chief, many years ago, who came from the Far West to London, and was for a season a lion in fashionable society. He was a manly, clever young fellow : but in his English months he never got over his unsophisticated enjoyment of the furniture of English houses. And thoughtless folk despised The Old Time. 177 him, when they ought rather to have envied him, as they witnessed his dehght in the contemplation of a dinner-table where he had been accustomed to see a stretched bull's hide : and of plates, knives and forks, carpets, mirrors, window-curtains, and wash- hand stands. All these great luxuries, and a thousand more, he appreciated at their true value : while civilized men and women, through familiarity, had arrived at contempt of them. Which was right, the civilized folk or the savage man } Is it the human being who sees least in the things around him that ought to be proud : or is not the man rather to be envied who discerns in simple matters qualities and excellences which others do not discern t If you had so worn out your eyes by constant use, that you could no longer see, that would be nothing to plume yourself on ; you would have no right to think you had attained a position of superiority to the remainder of the human race, in whom the optic nerve still retained its sensitive- ness. Yet there are people who are quite proud that their mind has had its nerves of sensation partially paralyzed ; and who would like you to think that those nerves are entirely paralyzed. * I don't remark these things,' they will say with an air of disdain, when you point out to them some of the little material advantages which we enjoy in this country now-a-days. They convey that they think you must be a weak-minded person N 178 A Reminiscence of because you do remark these things : because you still feel it a curious thing to leave London in the morning, and after ten hours and a half of unfatiguing travelling to reach Edinburgh in the evening : or because you still are conscious of a simple-minded wonder when you send a message five hundred miles and get your answer back in a quarter of an hour. If there be a mortal whom I despise, it is the man who is anxious to impress you with the fact that he does not care in the least for anything. The human being who is proud because he has reached the nil admirari stage, is just a human being who is proud because a creeping par- alysis has numbed his soul. Yet without giving in to it, and without being proud of it, you are aware that the keen relish goes from that which you grow accustomed to. I have indeed heard it said concerning certain individuals whose supercilious and lofty air testified that some sudden rise in life had turned their head, that they lived in a state of constant surprise at finding themselves so respectable. But this statement was not true in its full extent. For after being for several years in a position for which nature never intended him, even Dr. Bumptious (before his elevation his name was Toady) must have grown to a certain measure accustomed to it. Even other people got accus- tomed to it. And though his incompetence for his place remained just as glaring as ever, they ceased The Old Time. 179 to remark it ; and came to accept it as something in the nature of things. You know, we do not per- plex ourselves by inquiring every morning why there are such creatures as wasps, toads, and rattle- snakes. But if these beings were of a sudden intro- duced into this world for the first time, it would be different. It is to be lamented, that the very fresh and sen- sible enjoyment which we derive from very little things when they are new to us, passes so completely away when they grow familiar. I remark that my fellow-creatures, who inhabit houses in this street, are very far from being duly thankful for the great privilege we possess, in having a post-office at the end of it. You write your letters in the forenoon after you have completed your more serious work ; and upon each envelope you stick the representation of a face which is very familiar to us all, and very dear. If you are a wise man, you post your letters for yourself : and accordingly the first thing you do daily, when you go forth to your out-door business or duty, is to proceed to that little opening which receives the expression of so much care, so much kindness, so much worry, so much joy and sorrow, and to drop the documents in. Not many of the human beings who post letters and who receive them have any habitual sense of the supreme luxury they enjoy in that, familiar institution of the post- office. Into that little opening goes your letter : a 1 8o A Reminiscence of penny secures its admission, and obtains for it very distinguished consideration : and in a little while the most ingenious mechanism that has been de- vised by the most ingenious minds is hard at work conveying your letter, at tremendous speed, by land or sea : till next morning, unerring as the eagle upon its eyrie, it swoops down upon the precise dwelling at which you aimed it. When I say it swoops down upon a dwelling in the country, I mean to express poetically the fact that it comes jogging along in a cart drawn by a little white pony, which stops for the purposes of conversation when- ever it meets anybody in the wooded lane I have in my mind. But in saying that the inhabitants of this street are not duly thankful for the post-office at the corner, I did not mean merely that they fail to understand what a blessing to Britain the system of postal communication is. Everybody, on ordi- nary days, fails to understand that. I was thinking of something else. I was thinking of the luxury of having a receiving-house so near. When I lived in the country, the post-office was five miles distant : and if you missed the chance of sending away your letters in the morning by the cart drawn by the white pony, you must wait till next day ; or you must send a special messenger to the old-fashioned town of red freestone dwellings, standing by a clas- sic river's side. Let not that town be mentioned save in complimentary terms. Let me learn by the The Old Time. i8i misfortune of another. An eminent native of the district which surrounds it, known in the world of letters, once upon a time pubHshed some remarks upon that town, disguising its pretty name in ano- ther of somewhat ludicrous sound. And when that eminent man shortly afterwards strove to persuade the inhabitants to send him to represent them in Parliament, the old offence was raked up, and it did him harm. This, however, is a digression. Let us return. When I came from the country, to live in this city, I felt it a great privilege, and something to be enjoyed freshly every time, to take my letters to the post-office two hundred yards off. It was delightful. Not once in the day, but (if need were) half a dozen times, could you write your letter, and in three minutes have it in the post-office. There was something very fresh and enjoyable in the reflection, as you stood by the receiving-house window, Now here in these minutes I am in the same position in which half an hour's smart driving, or an hour and a quarter's steady walking, would have placed one in departed days ! Wonderful ! But now, after several years of the enjoyment of this privilege, the fresh wonder has worn away. The edge of enjoyment is dulled. And though I try hard, in going to the post-office, to feel what a blessing it is, I cannot feel it as I would wish. Yes, the enjoy- ment of the post-office is gone in great measure : even as the unutterable greenness discerned by the i82 A Reminiscence of stranger goes from the summer trees among which you have come to feel yourself at home : even as the sound of Niagara becomes inaudible to the waiters at the Niagara Hotel : even as the Bishop who was plucked at college gradually ceases to be astonished at finding himself a Bishop : even as Miss Smith, in a few weeks after she is married, no longer feels it strange to be called Mrs. Jones : even as the readers of what is with bitter irony called a religious newspaper lose their first bewilderment at finding a human animal writing an article filled with intentional misrepresentation, lying, and slandering, and ending the article by taking God to witness that in abusing the man he hates for his success and eminence, he is actuated by a simple regard to the Divine glory. And thus it is, remembering how the old time and the old way fade out, that the writer has re- solved to give a little space of comparative rest to reviving (as far as may be) something which used to have a strongly felt character of its own, in years which are gone, and which are melting into blue distance fast. Let me seek to bring up again the atmosphere of Going Away, as it used to be, and to be felt. No doubt, there is a certain fanci- fulness about moral atmospheres : not all men feel them alike ; and there are robust natures which probably do not feel them at all. When a man comes to describe a house, a landscape, a mode of The Old Time. 183 life, not as these are in literal fact, but as these impress himself: then we get into a realm of un- certainty and fancy. When a man ceases to say of a dwelling, that it is built of red brick, that it has so many windows in front, that it is so many stories high, that it has evergreens of such kinds round it, and the like : and when the man goes on to describe the house by quite other characteristics — saying that it is a sleepy-looking house, a dull house, a hospitable-looking house, an eerie strange- looking house, a house that makes you feel queer — then you feel that though the man may convey to another man, who is in sympathy with himself, a very true impression of the fact as it presents itself to him, still there are many people to whom such descriptions are really quite unintelligible; and that those who are most capable of understand- ing them are least likely to agree as to their truth. It is so with what I have called moral atmospheres : the pervading characteristic of a time, a scene, a way of life, a human being. Nor can it be admitted that there is anything of morbid sensitiveness in being keenly aware of these. Most people know the vague sort of sense that you have of being in a remote pastoral country, or of being in a busy town. You feel a difference in the morning when- ever you awake ; and before you have fully gathered up your consciousness : it pervades your very dreams. You remember periods of your life about 184 A Reminisce7ice of which there was a kind of flavour; strongly-felt, but indescribable to others : not to be expressed in any spoken words : Mendelssohn or Beethoven might have come near expressing it in music : and it comes back upon you in reading some pas- sage In Memoriam which has nothing to do with it, or in looking at the first yellow crocus in the cold March sunshine, or in walking along a lane with blossoming hawthorn on either hand, or in smelling "the blossoms of an apple-tree. And when you look back, you feel the atmosphere surround you again, with its fragrance a good deal gone, and with its colours faded. It is a misty, ghost- like image of a past life and its surroundings, that steals vaguely before your mental sight : and pos- sibly it cannot be more accurately or expressively described, than by saying that the old time comes over you. Doubtless external scenery has a great deal to do in the production of that general sense of a character pervading one's whole mode of life, which I mean by a moral atmosphere. It is especially so if you lead a lonely life : or if you have not many companions, and these not very energetic or striking. How well many men in orders remember the peculiar flavour of the time when they first began their parochial duty ! Years afterwards, you go and walk up and down in the church where you preached your first sermons ; and you try to The Old Time. awaken the feeling of that departed time. It comes back, in a ghostly unsubstantial way : sometimes it refuses to be wakened up at all. And the feeling, whatever it may be, is (to many men) very mainly flavoured by the outward scene in which that time was spent. I can easily believe that there are persons on whose mood and character no appreci- able impression is produced by external scenery : probably the reader knows one or two. They have usually high cheek-bones, smoke-dried complexions, and disagreeable voices : they think Mr. Tennyson a fool, and tell you that they cannot understand him, in a tone that conveys that in their judgment nobody can. I have known men who declared honestly that they did not think Westminster Abbey in the least a more solemn place than a red brick meeting-house with a flat ceiling, and with its inner walls chastely whitewashed, or pa- pered with a paper representing yellow marble. My acquaintance with such individuals was slight : and by mutual consent it speedily ceased. Give us the man who frankly tells you how different a man he is in this place from what he is in that : how outward nature casts its light or its shadow upon all his thinking and feeling. What would you be, my friend, if you lived for months by a misty Shetland sea ; or amid a wide Irish bogland ; or in a wooden chalet at Meyringen ; or on a flat French plain, with white ribbons of highway 1 86 A Reminiscence of stretching across it, bordered with weary poplars ; or under the shadow of castle-crowned crags upon the Rhine ; or amid the bustle of a great commercial town ; or in the classic air of an ancient university city, with a feast of Gothic everywhere for the eyes, and with courts of velvety turf that has been velvety turf for ages ? But here I get into the region of the fanciful ; and though holding very strongly a certain theory about these things, I am not going to set it out here. Yet I cannot but believe, that when you read men's written thoughts, you may readily, if you be of a sensitive nature, feel the surroundings amid which they were written. Turn over the volume which was written in the country, by a man keenly alive to outward things and their influences ; and you will be aware of a breeziness about the pages : a fresher air seems to breathe from them, the atmosphere of that simple life and its little cares. Turn over the Best of all books : read espe- cially the accounts of patriarchal times in Genesis : and (inspiration apart) you will feel the presence of something indefinitely more than the bare facts recorded. You will feel the fresh breeze come to you over the ocean of intervening centuries : you will know that a whole life and its interests surround you again. And there seems to me no more marked difference between fictitious stories written by men of genius and written by commonplace people, than this : that the commonplace people make you aware The Old Time. 187 of just the incidents they record ; while the man of genius makes you aware of a vast deal more — of the entire atmosphere of the surrounding circum- stances and concerns and life. You will understand what is meant when I remind you of the wonderful way in which the battle of Waterloo is made to surround and pervade a certain portion of the train of events recorded in that thoroughly true history, Mr. Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Now all this is pleasant. I mean to the writer; not necessarily to the reader. The writer has to produce a multitude of pages, which to produce is of the nature of grave work ; and in them he must hold right on, and discuss his subject under no small sense of responsibility. But such pages as this are his play; and he may without rebuke turn hither and thither, and pluck the wild flowers on either side of the path. Oh, how hard work it is to write a sermon ; and (when one is in the vein) how easy it is to write an essay ! And in saying that all this is pleasant, the thing present to the author's mind was the very devious course which his train of thought has followed since the first sentence of this dissertation was written. I have a great respect for certain men, who write in a logical and scholarly way. I admire and esteem such. When I read their productions at all, I do so after breakfast, when one's wits are fully awake. But in the evening, by the fireside, when the day's work and worry are A Reminiscence of over, and there remains the precious little breathing- space, I would rather not read them. Neither do I desire here to write like them. Going Away is my subject. Going Away and its atmosphere, as it used to be, and as it is to many people now. Going Away from home. Not Going Away for ever ; not Going Away for a long time ; not Going Away under painful circumstances. Ordinary and commonplace Going Away. And let me tell you, intrepid travellers, who think nothing of flying away to London, to Paris, to Chamouni, to Constantinople; that Going Away for a week or two, and to a distance not exceeding a hundred miles, is a very serious thing to a quiet, stay-at-home person. A multitude of contingencies suggest themselves in its prospect : there is the vague fear of the great, terrible outside world. It is as when a little boat, that has been lying safe in some sheltered cove, puts out to sea, to face the full might of winds and waves ; when a lonely human being, who for months has plodded his little round of work and care, looking at the same scenes, and conversing with the same people, musters courage to go away for a little while. There is a consider- able inertia to overcome ; some effort of resolution is needed. When you have lived an unvaried life for many weeks in a quiet country place, your wish is to sit still. Yet there are great advantages which belong to people who have seen little or nothing. The Old Time. 189 They have so keen a sense of Interest, and so lively an impression of the facts, in beholding something new. By-and-by they come to take it easily. You look out of the window of the railway carriage, and in reply to something said by a fellow traveller, you say, 'Ah, that's Berne, or that's Lausanne,' and you return to your Times, or your Saturday Review. You look forth on the left hand, as the train rounds a curve, and say, ' Strasburg spire ; very fine. Four hundred and fifty feet high. It does not look nearly so much from this point' Now once it was very different It was a vivid sensation to see for the first time some town in England, or some lake or hill in Scotland. My friend Smith told me that once, for more than six years, beginning when he was eight and twenty, he never had stirred ten miles from his home and his parish, save when he went in the autumn for a few weeks to the seaside ; and then he went always to the same place, a journey of four hours or so. It would have done him much good, had he been able sometimes through those years, which were very anxious and very trying ones, to have the benefit of a little change of scene. But he could not afford it; and in those days of depressed fortune, he had, literally, not a friend in this world, beyond the little circle of his own home. He had, indeed, some acquaintances; but they were able to understand him, or sympathise with him, about as much as a donkey could. But I go A Reminiscence of better days came ; as (let us trust) they will come, through hard work and self-denial to most men, by God's blessing; and Smith could venture on the great enterprise of a journey to London. Ah ! an express train was a great thing to him; and a journey of three hundred miles an endless pilgrim- age. And he told me himself (he is in his grave now, and no one who knew him will know him by what has been said of him) that it was an extra- ordinary feeling to look out of the carriage-window, and to think, Now Cambridge is only a few miles off, over these flats ! And farther on, when the trains glided by the capital of the Fens, and the noble mass of Peterborough Cathedral loomed through the misty morning, it was a stranger object to him than St. Sophia or even the Mosque of Omar would be to you ; and he thought how curious a thing it would be to live on that wide plain, in that quiet little city, under the shadow of that magnifi- cent pile. Probably, my friend, you have been long enough in many striking places to feel their first interest and impression go : to feel their moral atmosphere become inappreciable. You feel all that keenly at first; but gradually the place becomes just like anywhere else. After a while, the inner atmosphere overpowers the outer : the world within the breast gives its tone and colour to the scene around you. I believe firmly, that if you want to know a place vividly and really (I mean a town The Old Time. 191 of moderate extent), you ought to stay in it just a day and no more. By remaining longer, you may come to know all the churches and shops, and the like; but you will lose the pervading atmosphere and character of the whole. First impressions are always the most vivid ; and I firmly believe they are in the vast majority of cases the most truthful. An observant and sensitive man, spending just a day in a town with twenty thousand inhabitants, knows what kind of place that town is, far better than an ordinarily observant person who has lived in it for twenty years. The truth is, that a little of a thing is usually far more impressive than the whole of it, or than a great deal of it. Don't you remember how, when you were a child, lying in bed in the morning, you used to watch the day-light through the shutters } And you remember how bright it looked, through the narrow line where the shutters hardly met : it was like a glowing fire. At length, the shutters were thrown back, and they let in all the day ; and it was nothing so bright. Even if the morning was sunshiny, there was a sad falling off: and perhaps the morning was dull and rainy. Even so is the glimpse of Peterborough from the passing express train, infinitely finer than the view of Peterborough to the man who lives in it all the year round. Even so has the quiet life of a cathedral city, a charm to the visitor for a day, who has come from a land 192 A Reminiscence of where cathedrals are not, which fades away to such as spend all their days in the venerable place ; and come to have associations not merely of glorious architecture and sublime music, but likewise of many petty ambitions, jealousies, diplomacies, and disappointments; and in short of Mr. Slope and Mrs. Proudie. Yes, a little of a thing is sometimes infinitely better than the whole : and it is the little which especially has power to convey that general estimate of a pervading characteristic which we understand by perceiving the moral atmosphere. And besides this, you may have a surfeit of even the things you like best. You heartily enjoy a little country Gothic church : you linger on every detail of it : it is a pure delight. But a great cathe- dral is almost too much : it wearies you : it over- whelms you. You may get, through one summer day, as much enjoyment out of Sonning Church, as out of York Minster. That perfection of an EngHsh parish church, with its perfect vicarage, by the beautiful Thames, is like a friend with whom you can cordially shake hands: the great minster is like a monarch to be approached on bended knee. Most people remember a case in which a thousandth part would have been far better than the whole : I mean the Great Exhibition in that fine shed which the nation declined to buy. You would have enjoyed the sight of a little of what was gathered there : but the whole was a fearful task to get through. I never The Old Time. 193 beheld more wearied, dazed, stuplfied, disgusted, and miserable countenances, than among rich and poor under that roof. I wonder whether any mortal ever really enjoyed that glare and noise and hubbub; or felt his soul expanded under the influence of that huge educational institution. Too many maga- zines or books, too, coming together, convert into a toil what ought to be a pleasure. You look at the mass ; and you cannot help thinking what a deal you have to get through. And that thought is in all cases fatal to enjoyment. Whenever it enters the heart of a little boy, contemplating his third plate of plum-pudding, the delight implied in plum- pudding has vanished. Whenever the hearer listens to the preacher describing what he is to do in the first and second place, and so on to the fifth or sixth, the enjoyment with which most sermons are heard is sensibly diminished. And even if you be very fond of books, there is a sense of desolation in being turned loose in a library of three hundred thousand volumes. That huge array is an incubus on your spirit. There is far more sensible pleasure when you go into a friend's snug little study, and diligently survey his thousand or twelve hundred books. And you know that if a man has a drawing- room a hundred feet long, he takes pains to convert that large room into a little one by enclosing a warm space round the fire with great screens for O 194 ^ Reminiscence of his evening retreat. Yes, a little is generally much better than a great deal. A thing which precedes Going Away, is packing up. And this the wise man will do for himself : the more so, if he cannot afford to have any one to do it for him. There is a great pleasure in doing things for yourself. And here is one of the com- pensations of poverty. You open for yourself the parcel of new books you have bought ; and with your own hand you cut the leaves. A great peer, of course, could not do this, I suppose. The volumes would be prepared for his reading, and laid before him with nothing to do but to read them. Now, it ought to be understood, that the reading of a book is by no means the only use you can put it to, or the only good you can get out of it. There is the enjoyment of stripping off the massive wrap- pings in which the volumes travelled from the bookseller's shop, through devious ways, to the coun- try home. There is the enjoyment of cutting the leaves : which, if you have a large ivory paper knife, is a very sensible one. There is the enjoyment of laying the volumes, after their leaves are cut, upon your study table ; and sitting down in an arm-chair by the fireside, and calmly and thoughtfully look- ing at them. There is the enjoyment of considering earnestly the place where they shall be put on your shelves, and then of placing them there, and of arranging the volumes which have been turned out I The Old Time. 195 to make room for them. All these pleasures you have, quite apart from the act of reading the books : and all these pleasures are denied to the rich and mighty man, who is too great to be allowed to do things for himself He has only the end : we have both the end and the means which lead up to it. And the greater part of human enjoyment is the enjoy- ment of means, not of ends. There is as much solid satisfaction in going out and looking at your horse in his warm stable, as in riding or driving him. An eminent sportsman begins a book in which he gives an account of his exploits in hunt- ing in a foreign countr}', by fondly telling how happy he was in petting up his old guns till they looked like new, and in preparing and packing ammunition in the prospect of setting off on his expedition. You can see that these tranquil and busy days of anticipation and preparation at home Avere at least as enjoyable as the more exciting days of actual sport which followed. Now, how- ever much a duke might like to do all this, I suppose his nobility would oblige him to forego the satisfaction. If you have a wife and children (and for the purposes of this essay I suppose you to have both,) the multitude of trunks and packing-cases in which their possessions are bestowed in the prospect of going away, are sought out and packed apart from any exertion or superintendence on your part. Your 196 A Reminiscence of share consists in writing addresses for them ; and in counting up the twenty-three things that are assembled in the lobby before they are loaded on cart, cab, or carriage. I have remarked it as a curious thing, that when a man with his wife and two or three children and three or four servants go to the seaside in autumn, the articles of luggage invariably amount to twenty-three. And it has ever been to me a strange and perplexing thought, how so many trunks and boxes are needed : and how, through various changes by land and sea, they get safely to their destination. There are few positions which awaken more gratitude and satisfaction in the average human being, than (having arrived at the sea-side place) to see the twenty-three things safe upon the little pier, after the roaring steamer which brought them has departed, and the little crowd has dispersed : when, amid the stillness, suddenly be- come audible, you tell the keeper of the pier to send your baggage to the dwelling which is to be your temporary home. A position even more gratifying is as follows : when, returning to town, your holiday over, you succeed, by the aid of two liberally- tipped porters, in recovering all your effects from the luggage-van of the railway train, amid an awful crowd and confusion on the platform, and accumu- lating them into a heap, for whose conveyance you would assuredly be called to pay extra but for the judicious largesse already alluded to : then in seeing The Old Time. 197 them piled in and upon three cabs, in which you slowly wend your way to your door ; and finally, in the lobby whence they originally started, count- ing up your twenty-three things once more. Yes, there is much pleasure attendant on the possession and conveyance of luggage : a pleasure mingled with pain, indeed, like most of our pleasures : a pleasure dashed with anxiety and clouded with confusion, yet ultimately passing into a sense of delightful rest and relief, as you count up the twenty-three things and find them all right, which you had hardly dared to hope they would ever be. So much having been said concerning the general luggage of the family, let us return to. the thought of your own personal packing. You pack your own portmanteau, arranging things in that order which long usage has led you to esteem as the best. And if you be a clergyman, you always introduce into that receptacle your sermon-case with two or three sermons. You do this, if you be a wise man, though there should not appear the faintest chance of your having to preach anywhere : having learned by experience how often and how unexpectedly such chances occur. And then, when your portmanteau is finally strapped up and ready to go, you look at it with a moralising glance, and think how little a thing it looks to hold such a great deal. It is like a general principle, including a host of individual cases. It is like a bold assertion, which you accept iqB a Reminiscence of without thinking of all it implies. And in a short time that compendium of things immediately need- ful will be one among a score like it in the luggage- van. Thus, the philosopher may reflect, is every man's own concern the most interesting to himself, because every man knows best what is involved in his own concern. There are many associations about the battered old leathern object : and it is sad to remark that it is wearing out. It is to many people a sensible trial to throw aside anything they have had for a long time. And this thing especially, which has faithfully kept so many things you intrusted to it, and which has gone with you to so many places, seems to cast a silent appealing look at you when you think it is getting so shabby that you must throw it aside. Some day you and I, my friend, will be like an old portmanteau ; and we shall be pushed out of the way to make room for something fresh. Probably it is worldly wisdom to treat trunks and men like that single-minded person Mr. Uppish, who steadfastly cuts his old friends as he gradually gets into a superior social stratum. Doubtless he has his reward. It is invariably on Monday morning that certain human beings Go Away, in the grave and formal manner which has been spoken of. I mean with an entire family, and with the twenty-three trunks, The Old Time. 199 many of them very large ones. Not unfrequently, a perambulator is present ; also a nursery crib. And going at that especial period of the week, there is a certain thing inevitably associated with Going Away. That thing is the periodical called the Saturday Review. It comes every Monday morning; and you cut the leaves after breakfast and glance over it : but you put off the reading of it till the evening. But on those travelling days, this paper is associated with the forenoon. Breakfast is a hasty meal that day. The heavy baggage, if you dwell in the country, has gone away early in a cart : the railway station is of course five miles off. And then, just a quarter of an hour after the period you had named to your man-servant, round comes the phaeton which can hold so much. It comes at the very moment you really desired to have it : for knowing that your servant will always be exactly a quarter of an hour too late, you always order it just a quarter of an hour before the time you really want it. Phaeton of chocolate hue, picked out with red and white : horse of the sixteen hands and an inch, jet black of colour, well-bred in blood, and gentle of nature; where are you both to-night.^ Through the purple moorlands, through the rich cornfields, along the shady lanes, up the High-street of the little town, we have gone together : but the day came at length when you had to go one way and I another : and we have each gone through a 200 A Reminiscence of good deal of hard work doubtless since then. Pleasant it is driving home from the town in the winter afternoon, and reaching your door when it has grown pretty dark: pleasant is the flood of mellow light that issues forth when your door is opened : pleasant is it to witness the unloading of the vast amount and variety of things which, in various receptacles, that far from ponderous equip- age could convey. Pleasant to witness the pile that accumulates on the topmost step before your door : pleasant to behold the bundle of books and magazines from the reading-club : pleasanter to see the less frequent parcel of those which you can call your own : pleasant to see the manifold brown- paper parcels enter the house, which seems to be such a devouring monster, craving ceaseless fresh supply. All this while the night is falling fast ; and the great trees look down ghost-like upon the little bustle underneath them. Then phaeton and horse depart : and in a little you go round to the stable-yard, and find your faithful steed, now dry and warm, in his snug stall, eagerly eating; yet bearing in a kindly way a few pats on the neck and a few pulls of the ears. And your faithful man-servant is quite sure to have some wonderful intelligence to convey to you, picked up in town that afternoon. In the country, you have not merely the enjoyment of rich summer scenery ; of warm sunsets and green leaves shining golden : there is a peculiar pleasure known to the The Old Time. 201 thorough country man, in the most wintry aspects of nature. The bleak trees and sky outside, the moan of the rising wind presaging a wild night, and the brawl of the swollen brook that runs hard by, all make one value the warmth and light and com- fort within doors about forty times as much as you could value these simple blessings in a great city, where they seem quite natural, and matters of course. Of course, a great man would not care for these things ; and would despise the small human being that does care for them. Let the great man take his own way ; and let the small human being be allowed to follow his in peace. This, however, is a deviation to an evening on which you come home : whereas our proper subject is a morning on which you go away from home. The phaeton has come to the door : many little things go in : finally the passengers take their seats, and the thick rugs are tucked in over their knees : then you take the reins (for you drive yourself), and you wind away outward till you enter the highway. The roads are smooth and firm : and for all the heavy load behind him, the black horse trots briskly away. Have I not beheld a human being, his wife, two children, a man-servant, and a woman- servant, steadily skimming along at a respectable nine miles an hour, with but one living creature for all the means of locomotion } And the living crea- ture was shining and plump, and unmistakably 202 A Reminiscence of happy. The five miles are overcome, and you enter the court-yard of your little railway station. There, in a heap, cunningly placed on the platform where the luggage-van may be expected to rest when the train stops, is your luggage. The cart has been faithful : there are the twenty-three things. You have driven the last mile or two under a certain fear lest you might be too late ; and that fear will quicken an unsophisticated country pulse. But you have ten minutes to spare. There are no people but your own party to divide the attention of the solitary porter. At length, a mile off, along the river bank, you discern the sinuous train : in a little, the tremendously energetic locomotive passes by you, and the train is at rest. You happily find a compartment which is empty; and there you swiftly bestow your living charge : and having done this you hasten to witness the safe embarkation of the twenty-three trunks and packages. All this must be done rapidly: and of course you take much more trouble than a more experienced tra- veller would. And when at length you hurriedly climb into your place, you sink down in your seat, and feel a delicious sense of quiet. The morning has been one of worry, after all. But now you are all right, for the next four hours. And that is a long look forward. You keenly appreciate this blink of entire rest. Your unaccustomed nerves have been stretched by that fear of being late : The Old Time. 203 then there was the hurry of getting the children into their carriage, and seeing after the twenty- three things : and now comes a reaction. For a few miles it is enough just to sit still, and look at the faces beside you and opposite you : and espe- cially to watch the wonder imprinted on the two round little faces looking out of the window. First, looking out on either side, there is a deep gorge : great trees : rocks on one side, and on the other side a river. By-and-by the golden gleam of ripe corn-fields in the sunshine on either hand lightens up all faces. And now, forth from its bag comes the Saturday Review ; and you read it luxuriously, with frequent pauses and lookings out between. Do the keen, sharp, brilliant men who write those trenchant paragraphs ever think of the calm enjoyment they are providing for simple minds ? Although you do not care in the least about the subject discussed, there is a keen pleasure in remarking the skill and pith and felicity with which the writer discusses it. You feel a certain satisfac- tion in thinking that every Monday since that periodical started on its career, you have read it. It is a sort of intellectual thing to do. You reflect with pleasure on the statement made on oath by a witness in a famous trial. He described a certain person as ' a sensible and intelligent man who took in the Times' What proof, then, of scholarly likings, and of power to appreciate what not everybody can 204 A Reminiscence of appreciate, should be esteemed as furnished by the fact that a man pays for and reads the Saturday Review ? Now here, my reader, we have reached the very article of Going Away. Many are the thoughts through which we approached it : here it is at last. Behold the human being, about the first day of August, seated in a corner of a railway carriage, whose cushions are luxurious, and whose general effect is of blue cloth within, and varnished teak without. Opposite the human being sits his wife. Pervading the carriage you may behold two chil- dren. And carefully tending them, and seeking vainly to keep them quiet, you may (in very many cases, for such excellent persons are happily not uncommon) discern a certain nurse, who is as a member of that little family circle : more than a trusted and valued servant ; even a faithful friend. That is how human beings Go Away. That is the kind of picture which rises in the writer's mind, and in the mind of very many people in a like station in this life, when looking back over not many years. There is a certain cumbrous enjoyment in all Going Away, bearing with you all these impedi- Tfiejita : even when you are going merely for a Christmas week or the like. But the great Going Away is at the beginning of your autumn holidays. And thinking of this, I feel the prospect change from country to town : I think how the human being, wearied out by many months of hard work amid The Old Time. 205 city bustle and pressure, leaves these behind ; how the little children shut up their school-books, and their tired instructors are off for their turn of much- needed recreation : how the churches are emptied, and the streets deserted : how the congregation, assembled in one place on the last Sunday of July, is before the next one scattered far and wide, like the fragments of a bursting bombshell. But it is not now, in this mid-term of work, that one can recall the feelings of commencing holiday-time. Meanwhile, you are out of sympathy with it : and every good thing is beautiful in its time. Was it worth while, thus to revive things so long past } It has been pleasant for the writer ; and a hundred things not recorded here have been awakened in the retrospect. And when these pages meet the right people's eye, they may serve to re- call simple modes of being and doing which are melting fast away. For the experience of ordinary mortals is remarkably uniform ; and most of the people you know are in many respects extremely like yourself Now let us cease, and sit down and think. There is indeed a temptation to go on. One would rather not stop in the middle of a page ; I mean a manuscript page : and it is almost too much for human nature to know that we may add a few sentences more, and they will not be cut off. And there are positions too much for human nature. A 2o6 A Reminiscence of sense of power and authority, as a general rule, is more than the average man can bear. Not long since I beheld, in the superhuman dignity of a po- liceman, something which deeply impressed this on my mind. The kitchen chimney of this dwelling caught fire. It is contrary to municipal law to let your kitchen chimney catch fire ; and very properly so : so there was a fine to be paid. On a certain day, I was told there was a policeman in the kitchen, who desired an interview. I proceeded thither, and found him there. No language can convey an idea of the stern and unyielding severity of that eminent man's demeanour. He seemed to think I would probably plead with him to let Justice turn from her rigid course ; and he sought, by his whole bear- ing, to convey that any such pleading would be futile ; and that, whatever might be said, the half- crown must be paid, to be applied to public pur- poses. When I entered his presence, he sternly asked me what was my name. Of course, he knew my name just as well as I did myself: but there was something in the requirement fitted to make me feel my humble position before him. And having received the information, he made a note of it in a little book : and conveying that serious consequences would follow, he departed. A similar manifestation may be found in the case of magistrates in small authority. I have heard of such an individual, who dispensed justice from a seedy little bench with an The Old Time. 207 awful state. He sat upon that bench, all alone : and no matter of the smallest importance ever came before him. Yet when expressing his opinion, he never failed to state that THE COURT thought so and so. A vague impression of dignity thus w^as made to surround the workings of the individual mind. It once befell, that certain youthful students, in a certain ancient university, had a strife with the police : and being captured by the strong arm of the law, were conveyed before such a magistrate. Sitting upon the judgment seat, he sternly upbraid- ed the youths for their discreditable behaviour; adding, that it gave him special sorrow to witness such lawless violence in the case of individuals who were receiving a university eddication. He did not know, that unhappy magistrate, that there stood at his bar one whose audacious heart quailed not in his presence. ' Stop,' exclaimed that unutterably irreverent youth, interrupting the stern magistrate : * let me entreat you to pronounce the word properly : it is not EDDICATION, it is EDUCATION.' And the magistrate's dignity suddenly collapsed, like a blown-up bladder when you insert a penknife. This incident is recorded to have happened at Timbuctoo, in the last century. I have no doubt the story is not true. Hardly any stories are true. Yet I have often heard it related. And like the legend of The Ass a7id the Archbishop, which is utterly without foundation, you feel that it ought to be true. CHAPTER X. CONCERNING OLD ENEMIES. T may be assumed as certain, that most readers of this page have on some occa- sion climbed a high hill. It may be esteemed as probable, that when half-way up, they felt out of breath and tired. It is extremely likely that, having come to some inviting spot, they sat down and rested for a little, before passing on to the summit. Now, my reader, if you have done all that, I feel assured that you must have remarked as a fact that though when you sit down you cease to make progress, you do not go back. Yo do not lose the ground already gained. But if you ever think at all, even though it should be as little as possible, you must have discerned the vexatious truth that in respect of another and more important kind of progress, unless you keep going on, you begin to go back. You struggle, in a moral sense, up the steep slope : and you sit down at the top, thinking to yourself. Now that is overcome. But Concerning Old Enemies. 209 after resting for a while you look round : and lo ! insensibly you have been sliding down ; and you are back again at the foot of the eminence you climbed with so much pain and toil. There are certain enemies with which every worthy human being has to fight, as regards which you will feel, as you go on, that this principle holds especially true: the principle that if you do not keep going forward, you will begin to lose ground and go backward. It is not enough to knock these enemies on the head for once. In your inexperi- enced days you will do this : and then, seeing that they look quite dead, you will fancy they will never trouble you any more. But you will find out, to your painful cost, that those enemies of yours and mine must be knocked on the head repeatedly. One knocking, though the severest, will not suffice. They keep always reviving : and struggling to their feet again : a little w^eak at first through the battering you gave them ; but in a very short time as vigor- ous and mischievous as ever. The Frenchman, imperfectly acquainted with the force of English words, and eager that extremest vengeance should be wreaked on certain human foes, cried aloud, ' Kill them very oftex ! ' And that, my friend, as regards the worst enemies we have got, is pre- cisely what you and I must do. If we are possessed of common sense to even a limited amount, we must know quite well who are P 2IO Concerning Old Enemies, our worst enemies. Not Miss Limejuice, who tells lies to make you appear a conceited, silly, and ignorant person. Nor Mr. Snarling, who diligently strives to prevent your reaching something you would like, because (as he says) the disappointment will do you good. Not the human curs that gnarl at your heels when you attain some conspicuous success or distinction ; which probably you worked hard for, and waited long for. Not these. ' A man's foes,' by special eminence and distinction, are even nearer him than 'they of his own house:' a man's worst enemies are they of his own heart and soul. The enemies that do you most harm ; and probably that cause you most suffering ; are ten- dencies and feelings in yourself If all within the citadel were right : if the troop of thoughts and affections there were orderly and well-disposed and well-guided : we should be very independent of the enemies outside. Outside temptation can never make a man do wrong, till something inside takes it by the hand, and fraternizes with it, and sides with it. The bad impulse within must walk up arm in arm with the bad impulse from without, and introduce it to the will, before the bad impulse from without, however powerful it may be, can make man or woman go astray from right. All this, however, may be taken for granted. What I wish to impress on the reader is this : that in fighting with these worst enemies, it is not enough for once C oncer nmg Old Enemies, 1 1 1 to cut them down, smash them, bray them in a mortar. If you were fighting with a Chinese inva- der ; and if you were to send a rifle bullet through his head, or in any other way to extinguish his life ; you would feel that he was done with. You would have no more trouble from tJiat quarter. But once shoot or slash the ugly beast which is called Envy, or Self-Conceit, or Unworthy Ambi- tion, or Hasty Speaking, or general Foolishness : and you need not plume yourself that you will not be troubled any more with him. Let us call the beast by the general name of Besetting Sin : and let us recognise the fact that though you never willingly give it a moment's quarter, though you smash in its head (in a moral sense) with a big stone, though you kick it (in a moral sense) till it seems to be lying quite lifeless ; in a little while it will be up again, as strong as ever. And the only way to keep it down, is to knock it on the skull afresh every time it begins to lift up its ugly face. Or, to go back to my first figure : you have climbed, by a hard effort, up to a certain moral elevation. You have reached a position, climbing up the great ascent that leads towards God, at which you feel resigned to God's will ; and kindly disposed to all your fellow-creatures, even to such as have done you a bad turn already, and will not fail to do the like again. You also feel as if your heart were not set, as it once used to be, upon worldly aims and 2 1 2 Concerni7tg Old Enemies. ends : but as if you were really day by day working towards something quite different and a great deal higher. You feel humble : patient : charitable. You sit down there, on that moral elevation, satisfied with yourself; and thinking to yourself: Now, I am a humble, contented, kindly, Christian human being ; and I am so for life. And let it be said thankfully. If you keep always on the alert, always watching against any retrogression, always with a stone ready to knock any old enemy on the head, always looking and seeking for a strength beyond your own, — you may remain all that for life. But if you grow lazy and careless, in a very little while you will have glided a long way down the hill again. You will be back at your old evil ways. You will be eager to get on, and as set on this world as if this world were all : you will find yourself hitting hard the man who has hit you : envying and de- tracting from the man who has surpassed you : and all the other bad things. Or if you do not retrograde so far as that : if you pull yourself up before the old bad im.pulse within you comes to actual bad deeds : still you will know that the old bad impulse within you is stirring ; and that, by God's help, you must give it another stab. Now this is disheartening. When, by making a great effort, very painful and very long, you have put such a bad impulse down, it is very natural to think that it will never vex you any more. The Concerning' Old Enemies. dragon has been trampled under the horse's feet : its head has been cut off: surely you are done with it. You have ruled your spirit into being right and good : into being magnanimous, kindly, humble. And then you fancied you might go a-head to some- thing more advanced : you had got over the Pons Asinoruni in the earnest moral work of life. You have extirpated the wolves from your England : and now you miay go on to destroy the m.oles. The wolves are all lying dead, each stabbed to the heart. You honestly believe that you have got beyond them ; and that whatever new enemies may assail you, the old ones, at least, are done with finally. But the wolves get up again. The old enemies revive. I have sometimes wondered whether those men who have done much to help you and me in the putting down of our worst enemies, have truly and finally slain those enemies as far as concerns them- selves. Is the man, in reading whose pages I feel I am subjected to a healthful influence, that puts down the unworthy parts of my nature, and that makes me feel more kindly, magnanimous, hopeful, and earnest than when left to myself: is that man, I wonder, always as good himself as for the time he makes me 1 Or can it be true that the man who seems not merely to have knocked on the head the lower impulses of his own nature ; but to have done good to you and ,me, my friend, by helping to kill those impulses within us : has still to be fighting 2 T 4 Concerning Old Enemies. away with beasts, like St. Paul at Ephesus : still to be lamenting, on many days, that the ugly faces of suspicion, jealousy, disposition to retaliate when assailed, and the like, keep wakening up and flying at him again ? I fear it is so. I doubt whether the human being lives in whom evil, however long and patiently trodden down, does not sometimes erect its crest, and hiss, and need to be trodden down again. Vain thoughts and fancies, long ex- tinguished, will waken up : unworthy tendencies will give a push, now and then. And especially, I believe it is a great delusion to fancy that a man who writes in a healthy and kindly strain is what he counsels. If he be an honest and earnest man, I believe that he is striving after that which he counsels ; and that he is aiming at the spirit and temper which he sets out. I think I can generally make out what are a moral or religious writer's besetting sins, by remarking what are the virtues he chiefly magnifies. He is struggling after those virtues : struggling to break away from the corre- sponding errors and failings. If you find a man who in all he writes is scrupulously fair and temperate, it is probable that he is a very excitable and pre- judiced person : but that he knows it and honestly strives against it. An author who always expresses himself with remarkable calmness, is probably by nature a ferocious and savage man. But you may see in the way in which he restricts himself in the Concerning Old Enemies. 215 matter of adjectives, and in which he excludes the superlative degree, that he is making a determined effort to put down his besetting sin. And probably he fancies, quite honestly, that he has finally knocked that enemy on the head. The truth no doubt is, that it is because the enemy is still alive, and occasionally barking and biting, that it is kept so well in check. There is just enough of the old beast surviving, to compel attention to it : the at- tention which consists in keeping a foot always on its head, and in occasionally giving it a vehement whack. The most eminent good qualities in human beings are generally formed by diligent putting down of the corresponding evil qualities. It was a stutterer who became the greatest ancient orator. It was a man who still bore on his satyr face the indications of his old satyr nature, who became the best of heathens. And as with Socrates and De- mosthenes, it has been with many more. If a man writes always very judiciously, rely upon it he has a strong tendency to foolishness : but he is keeping it tight in check. If a man writes always very kindly and charitably, depend upon it he is fighting to the death a tendency to bitterness and uncharit- ableness. A faithful and earnest preacher, resolved to say no more than he has known and felt ; and remembering the wise words of Dean Alford, ' What thou hast not by suffering bought, presume thou not to teach ;' 2 1 6 Concerning Old Enemies. would necessarily show to a sharp observer a great deal of himself and his inner being : even though rigidly avoiding the slightest suspicion of egotism in his preaching. And it need hardly be said that egotism is not to be tolerated in the pulpit. After you have in an essay or a sermon described and condemned some evil tendency that is in human nature, you are ready to think that you have finally overcome it. And after you have described and commended some good disposition, j^ou are ready to think that you have attained it ; and that you will not lose it again. And for the time, if you be an honest man, you have smashed the foe ; you Jiave gained the vantage ground. But, woe's me, the good disposition dies away ; and the foe gradually revives, and struggles to his legs again. Let us not fancy that because we have been (as we fancied) once right, we shall never go wrong. We must be always watch- ful. The enemy that seemed most thoroughly beaten, may (apart from God's grace) beat us yet. The publican, when he went up to the temple to pray, expressed himself in a fashion handed down to all ages with the imprimatur upon it. Yet, for all his speaking so fairly, the day might come when, having grown a reformed character and gained ge- neral approbation, he would stand in a conspicuous place and thank God that he was not as other men. Let us trust tJiat day never came. Yet, if the pub- lican had said to himself, as he went down to his Conce7niing Old Enemies. 2 1 7 house, Xovv-, I have attained an excellent pitch of morality : I am all right : I am a model for future generations : that day would be very likely to come. It is a humiliating and discouraging sight to be- hold a man plainly succumbing to an enemy which you fancied he had long got over. You may have seen an individual of more than middle age making a fool of himself by carrying on absurd flirtations with vounc^ o-irls, who were babies in lon^-- clothes when he first was spoony. You Avould have said, looking at such a man's outward aspect, and know- ing something of his history, that years had brought this compensation for what they had taken away, that he would not make a conspicuous ass of him- self any more. But the old enemy is too much for him : and oh how long that man's ears would appear, if the inner ass could be represented out^\ardly! You may have seen such a one, after passing through a discipline which you would have expected to sober him, evincing a frantic exhilaration in the prospect of his third marrias^e. And vou mav ha\-e witnessed a person evincing a high degree of a folly he had unsparingly scourged in others. I have beheld, in old folk, manifestations of absurdity all very well in the very young, which suggested to me the vision of a stiff, spavined, lame, broken-down old hack, fit only for the knacker, trying to jauntily scamper about in a field with a set of spirited, fresh young colts. And looking at the spectacle, I have reflected 2 1 8 Concerning Old Enemies. on the true statement of the Venerable Bede, that there are no fools like old fools. But here it may be said, that we are not to sup- pose that a thing is wrong, unless it can bear to be looked back on in cold blood. Many a word is spoken, and many a deed done, and fitly too, in the warmth of the moment, which will not bear the day- light of a time when the excitement is over. Mr. Caudle was indignant when his wife reminded him of his sayings before marriage. They sounded fool- ish now in Caudle's ears. This did not suffice to show that those sayings were not very fit at the time : nor does it prove that the tendency to say many things under strong feeling is an enemy to be put down. You have said, with a trembling voice, and with the tear in your eye, things which are no discredit to you : though you might not be dis- posed to say the like just after coming out of your bath in the morning. You needed to be warmed up to a cerfain pitch : and then the spark was struck off. And only a very malicious or a very stupid person would remind you of these things when you are not in a correspondent vein. And now that we have had this general talk about these old enemies, let us go on to look at some of them individually. It may do us good to poke up a few of the beasts, and to make them arise and walk about in their full ugliness : and then to smite them Conce7^ning Old Enemies. 2 1 9 on the head as with a hammer. Let this be a new slaying of the slain, who never can be slain too often. Perhaps you may not agree with me when I say that one of these beasts is Ambition. I mean un- scrupulous self-seeking. You resolved, long ago, to give no harbour to that : and so to exclude the manifold evils that came of it. You determined that you would resolutely refuse to scheme, or push, or puff, or hide your honest opinions, or dodge in any way, for the purpose of getting on. You know how eager some people are to let their light shine before men, to the end that men may think what clever fellows those people are. You know how anxious some men are to set themselves right in newspapers and the Hke : and to stand fair (as they call it) with the public. You know how some men, when they do any good work, have recourse to means highly analogous to the course adopted by a class of persons long ago, who sounded a trumpet before them in the streets to call attention to their charitable deeds. I know individuals who constantly sound their own trumpet, and that a very brazen one : sound it in conversation, in newspaper para- graphs, in advertisements, in speeches at public meetings. But you, an honest and modest person, were early disgusted by that kind of thing : and you determined that you would do your duty quietly and faithfully, spending all your strength upon your work, and not sparing a large percentage of it for 2 20 Concerning Old Enemies. the trumpet. You resolved that you would never admit the thought of setting yourself more favour- ably before your fellow-creatures. You learned to look your humble position in the face : and to dis- card the idea of getting any mortar to think you greater or better than you are. Yes : you hope that the petty self-seeking, which keeps some men ever on the strut and stretch, has been outgrown by you. Yet if you would be safe from one of the most con- temptible foes of all moral manhood, you must keep your club in your hand ; and every now and then quiet the creature by giving it a heavy blow on the head. St. Paul tells us that he had '■ learned to be content' It cost him effort. It cost him time. It was not natural. He came down, we may be sure, with many a heavy stroke, on the innate disposition to repine when things did not go in the way he wanted them. And that is what we must do. As you look back now, it is likely enough that you recall a time when self-seeking seemed thoroughly dead in you. You were not very old, perhaps : yet you fancied that (by God's help) you had outgrown ambition. You did your work as well as you could ; and in the evening you sat in your easy chair by the fireside : looking not without interest at the feverish race of worldly competition, yet free from the least thought of running in it. As for thinking of your own eminence, or imagining that any one would take the trouble of talking about you, //^^/ never entered Concerninor Old Enemies. 221 your mind. And as you beheld the eager pushing of other men, and their frantic endeavours to keep themselves before the human race, you wondered what worldly inducement would lead you to do the like. But did you always keep in that happy con- dition ? Did you not, now and then, feel some little waking up of the old thing : and become aware that you were being drawn into the current ? If so, let us hope that you resolutely came out of it : and that you found quiet in the peaceful backvv-ater, apart from that horrible feverish stream. There is another old enemy, a two-headed mon- ster, that is not done with when it has been killed once. It is a near relative of the last : it is the ugly creature Self-Conceit and Envy. I call it a two- headed monster, rather than two monsters ; it is a double manifestation of one evil principle : Self- Conceit is the principle as it looks at yourself; Envy is the same thing as it looks at other men. I fear it must be admitted that there is in human nature a disposition to talk bitterly of people who are more eminent and successful than yourself: and though you expel it with a pitchfork, that old enemy will come back again. This disposition exists in many walks of hfe. A Lord Chancellor has left on record his opinion, that nowhere is there so much envy and jealousy as among the members of the Enghsh bar. A great actor has declared that nowhere is there so 222 Concer7iing Old Enemies, much as among actors and actresses. Several authors have maintained that no human beings are so bitter at seeing one of themselves get on a little, as literary folk. And a popular preacher has been heard to say that envy and detraction go their greatest length among preachers. Let us hope that the last statement is erroneous. But I fear that these testimonies, coming from quarters so various, lead to the conclusion that envy and detraction (which imply self-conceit) are too natural and com- mon everywhere. You may have heard a number of men talking about one man in their own vocation who had got a good deal ahead of them : and who never had done them any harm except thus getting ahead of them : and you may have been amazed at the awful animosity evinced towards the successful man. But success, in others, is a thing which some mortals cannot forgive. You may have known people savagely abuse a man because he set up a carriage, or because he moved to a finer house, or because he bought an estate in the country. You remember the outburst which followed when Ma- caulay dated a letter from Windsor Castle. Of course, the true cause of the outburst was, that Macaulay should have been at Windsor Castle at all. Let us be thankful, my friend, that such an eminent distinction is not likely to happen either to you or me : we have each acquaintances who would never forgive us if it did. What a raking up of all Concerning Old Enemies. the sore points in your history would follow, if the Queen were to ask you to dinner ! And if you should ever succeed to a fortune, what unspeakable bitterness would be awakened in the hearts of Mr. Snarling and Miss Limejuice ! If their malignant glances could lame your horses as you drive by them with that fine new pair, the horses would limp home with great difficulty. And if their eyes could set your grand house on fire, immediately on the new furniture going in, a heavy loss would fall either upon you or the Insurance Company. But this will not do. As you read these lines, my friend, you picture yourself as the person who attains the eminence and succeeds to the fortune : and you picture Miss Limejuice and Mr. Snarling as two of your neighbours. But Avhat I desire is, that you should change the case: imagine your friend Smith preferred before you : and consider whether there would not be something of the Snarling ten- dency in yourself. Of course, you would not suffer it to manifest itself: but it is there, and needs to be put down. And it needs to be put down more than once. You will now and then be vexed and mortified to find that, after fancying you had quite made up your mind to certain facts, you are far from really having done so. Well, you must just try again. You must look for help where it is always to be found. And in the long run you will succeed. It will be painful, after you fancied 2 24 Concerning Old Enemies. you had weeded out self-conceit and envy from your nature, to find yourself some day talking in a bitter and ill-set way about some man or some woman whose real offence is merely having been more prosperous than yourself You thought you had got beyond that. But it is all for your good to be reminded that the old root of bitterness is there yet : that you are never done with it : that you must be always cutting it down. A gardener might as justly suppose that because he has mown down the grass of a lawn very closely to-day, the grass will never grow up and need mowing again, as we fancy that because we have unsparingly put down an evil tendency within us, we shall have no more trouble with it. Did nature give you, my friend, or education develope in you, a power of saying or writing severe things, which might stick into people as the little darts stick into the bull at a Spanish bull-fight } I believe that there are few persons who might not, if their heart would let them, acquire the faculty of producing disagreeable things, expressed with more or less of neatness and felicity. And in the case of the rare man here and there, who says his ill-set saying with epigrammatic point, like the touch of a rapier, the ill-setness may be excused, because the thing is so gracefully said. We would not wish that tigers should be exterminated : but it is to be desired that they should be very few. Let there be Concernmg Old Enemies. 225 spared a specimen, here and there, of the graceful, agile, ferocious savage. But you, my reader, were no great hand at epigrams, though you were ready enough with your ill-set remark : and after some experience, you concluded that there is something better in this world than to say things, however cleverly, that are intended to give pain. And so you determined to cut that off, and to go upon the kindly tack : to say a good and cheering word whenever you had the opportunity : to be ready with a charitable interpretation of what people do : and never to utter or to write a word that could vex a fellow-creature, who (you may be sure) has quite enough to vex him without your adding anything. Perhaps you did all this : rather overdoing the thing : ill-set people are apt to overdo the thing when they go in for kindliness and geniality. But some day, having met some little offence, the elec- tricity that had been storing up during that season of repression, burst out in a flash of what may, by a strong figure, be called forked lightning : the old enemyhadgot the mastery again. And indeedahasty temper, founding as it does mainly on irritability of the nervous system, is never quite got over. It may be much aggravated by yielding to it : and much abated by constant restraint : but unless the beast be perpetually seen to, it is sure to be bursting out now and then. Socrates, you remember, said that his temper was naturally hasty and bad : but that Q 2 26 Concerning Old Enemies. philosophy had cured him. I believe it needs something much more efficacious than any human philosophy to work such a cure. No doubt, you may diligently train yourself to see what is to be said in excuse of the offences given you by your fellow-creatures; and to look at the case as it appears from their point of view. This will help. But though ill-temper, left to its natural growth, will grow always worse, there is a point at which it has been found to mend. When the nervous system grows less sensitive through age, hastiness of temper sometimes goes. The old enemy is weak- ened : the beast has been (so to speak) hamstrung. You will be told that the thing which mainly im- pressed persons who saw the great Duke of Wellington in the last months of his life, was what a mild gentle old man he was. Of course, every one knows that he was not always so. The days were, when his temper was hot and hasty enough. And thus thinking of physical influence, let us remember that what is vulgarly called nervousness is an enemy which many men know to their cost is not to be got over. The firmest assurance that you have done a thing many times, and so should be able to do it once more, may not suffice to enable you to look forward to doing it without a vague tremor and apprehension. There are human beings, all whose work is done without any very great nervous strain : there are others in whose vocation Concerning Old Enemies. 227 there come many times that put their whole nature upon the stretch. And these times test a man. You know a horse may be quite lame, while yet it does not appear in walking. Trot the creature smartly : and the lameness becomes manifest. In like manner a man may be nervous, particular, crotchety, superstitious : while yet this may not appear till you trot him sharply : put him at some work that must be done with the full stretch of his powers. And then you will see that he has got little odd ways of his own. I do not know what is the sensation of going into battle, and finding one- self under fire : but short of that, I think the greatest strain to which a human being is usually subjected, is that of the preacher. A little while ago, I was talking with a distinguished clergyman : and being desirous of comparing his experience with that of his juniors, I asked him, 1. Whether, in walking to church on Sunday to preach, he did not always walk on the same side of the street 1 Whether he w^ould not feel uncomfort- able, and as if something were going wrong, if he made any change } 2. Whether when waiting in the vestry, the minute or two before the beadle should come to precede him into church, he did not always stand on the same spot t Whether it would not put him out of gear, to vary from that } My eminent friend answered all these questions ), there is one verse which he has not given as Lovelace wrote it : When I lie tangled in her hair And fetter'd to her eye. The birds, that wanton in the air, Know no such liberty. Lovelace wrote ' the gods that waiiton in the air : ' and birds was substituted by Bishop Percy. It is a simple and obvious substitution : and the change is so greatly and so unquestionably for the better, 350 Concer7iing Cutting and Carving. that it may well be accepted : as indeed it has uni- versally been. The mention of a happy substitution naturally suggests the most unhappy substitutions on record. You may remember how the great scholar, Bentley, puffed up by his success in making emendations on Horace and Terence, unluckily took it upon himself to edit Milton. And here indeed, we have, with a vengeance, Raphael improved by the painter of wagons. Milton wrote, as everybody knows : No light, but rather darkness visible : but Bentley, eager to improve the line, turns it to No light, but rather a transpicuous gloo7n. There is another passage in which the contrast between the master and the wagon-painter is hardly less marked. Where Milton wrote, Our torments also may in length of time Become our elements : Bentley, as an improvement, substituted the follow- ing remarkable passage, Then, as 'twas well observed^ our torments may, Become our elements. It is to be admitted that the stupidity of Bentley's reading, is even surpassed by its impudence. Of course, the principle taken for granted at the be- ginning of such a work is, that Bentley's taste and judgment were better than Milton's. For, you Concerning Cutting and Carving. 351 observe, there was no pretext here of restoring a more accurate reading, lost through time : there was no pretext of giving more exactly what Milton wrote. There was no question as to Milton's pre- cise words : but Bentley thought to make them better. And there is something insufferable in the picture of the self-satisfied old Don, sitting down in his easy chair with Paradise Lost', and, pencil in hand, proceeding to improve it. Doubtless he was a very great classical scholar : but unless his wits had mainly forsaken him when he set himself to edit Milton, it is very plain that he never could have been more than an acute verbal critic. Think- ing of Bentley's Milton, one imagines the Apollo Belvedere put in a hair-dresser's window, with a magnificent wig : and dressed in a suit of clothes of the very latest fashion. I think likewise of an incident in the life of Mr. N. P. Willis, the Ameri- can author. When he was at college in his youth, the head of his college kept a white horse, which he was accustomed to drive in a vehicle of some kind or other. Mr. N. P. Willis and his companions surrep- titiously obtained temporary possession of the horse; and painted it crimson, with a blue mane and tail. 1 confess that I like Mr. N. P. Willis better for that deed, than for anything else I ever heard of his doing : and I may mention, for the satisfaction of my younger readers, that the colours used in paint- ing the horse were of such a nature, that they 352 Concerning Cutting and Carving. adhered to the animal for a lengthened period, notwithstanding all endeavours to remove them. Now Dr. Bentley, in editing Milton, did as it were paint the white horse crimson and blue ; and then exhibit it to the world, saying, ' That is Smith's fine horse!' Nor should it be accepted as any apology for like conduct on the part of any editor, that the editor in good faith has such a liking for these colours, that he thinks a horse looks best when it looks blue and crimson. And though the change made by an editor be not of such a com- prehensive nature as the painting of an entire horse anew, but rather consists of a multitude of little touches here and there ; — as points changed, capitals left out, and whiches for thats ; still the result is very irritating. You know that a very small infusion of a foreign substance can vitiate a thing. Two drops of prussic acid in a cup of water : two smears of red paint across the Raphael : affect the whole. I know hardly any offence, short of great crime, which seems to me deserving of so severe punishment, as this of clipping the coin of the realm of literature. There is something, too, which irritates one, in the self-sufficient attitude which is naturally as- sumed by a man who is cutting and carving the composition of another. It is an evil which attends all reviewing, and which a modest and conscientious reviewer must feel keenly, that in reviewing ano- Concemmg Cutting and Carving. 353 ther man's book, you seem to assume a certain superiority to him. For in every case in which you find fault with him, you are aware that the question comes just to this : whether your opinion or his is worth most. To which may be added the further question : whether you or he have devoted most time and thought to forming a just opinion on this particular point. But when a man sits down not merely to point out an author's faults, but to correct them ; the assumption of superiority is more marked still. And everybody knows that the writings of great geniuses have been un- sparingly cut and carved by very inferior men. You know how Byron sent The Siege of Corinth to Mr. Gifford, giving him full power to alter it to any extent he pleased. And you know how Mr. Gifford did alter it; by cutting out all the good passages and leaving all the bad. The present writer has seen a man in the very act of cutting and carving. Once upon a time, I entered a steamer which was wont to ply upon the waters of a certain noble river, that winds between Highland hills. And entering that bark, I beheld a certain friend, seated on the quarter-deck, with a little volume in his hand. I never saw a man look more entirely satisfied with himself than did my friend ; as he turned over the leaves of the little volume in a hasty, skipping fashion; and jauntily scribbled here and there with a pencil. I beheld A A 354 Concerning Cutting and Carving. him in silence for a time, and then asked what on earth he was doing. ' Oh/ said he, ' I am a member of the committee appointed by the Great Council to prepare a new book of hymns to be sung throughout the churches of this country. And this little volume is a proof copy of the hymns suggested : and a copy of it is sent to each member of the committee to receive his emendations. And, as you see, I am beguiling my time in sailing down the river by improving these hymns.' In this easy manner did my friend scribble whatever alterations might casually suggest themselves, upon the best compositions of the best hymn writers. Slowly and laboriously had the authors written these hymns, carefully weighing each word : and weigh- ing each word perhaps for a very long time. But in the pauses of conversation, with no serious thought whatsoever, but willing to testify how much better he knew what a hymn should be than the best authors of that kind of literature, did my friend set down his random thoughts. ' Give me that volume,' said I, with no small indignation. He gave it to me, and I proceeded to examine his improvements. And I can honestly say that not merely was every alteration for the worse ; but that many of the alterations testified my friend's utter ignorance of the very first principles of metrical composition ; and that all of them testified the extreme narrowness of his acquaintance with that Concerning Ctitting and Carving. 355 species of literature. Some of the verses, as altered by him, were astounding specimens of rhythm. The only thing I ever saw which equalled them was a stanza by a local poet, very zealous for the observance of the Lord's day. Here is the stanza : — Ye that keep horses, read psalm 50 : To win money on the Sabbath day, see that ye never be so thrifty ! In Scotland, we have a psalter and a hymnal imposed by ecclesiastical authority ; so that in all parish churches there is entire uniformity in the words of praise. But it worries one to enter a church in England, and to find, as one finds so often, that the incumbent has published a hymnal, the sale of which he ensures by using it in his church : and all the hymns in which are cut and carved to suit his peculiar doctrinal and assthetical views. The execrable taste and the remarkable ignorance evinced in some of these compilations, have on myself, I confess, the very reverse of a devotional effect. And the inexpressible badness of certain of the hymns' I have seen in such volumes, leads me to the belief that they must be the original compositions of the editor himself There is an excellent little volume of Psalms and Hymns, collected by Mr. Henry Herbert Wyatt, of Trinity Chapel, Brighton : but even in it, one is 35^ Concer7ting Cutting and Carving. annoyed by occasional needless changes. In Bishop Heber's beautiful hymn, which begins, * From Greenland's icy mountains,' Mr. Wyatt has smeared the third verse. The Bishop wrote, as everybody knows. Shall we, whose souls are lighted With wisdom from on high, — Shall we to men benighted The lamp of life deny ? But Mr. Wyatt substitutes can for the shall with which the first and third lines begin : a change which no man of sense can call an improvement. A hymn to which I always turn, as one that tests an editor, is Bishop Ken's incomparable one, com- monly called the Evening Hymn. I find, with pleasure, that Mr. Wyatt has not tried to improve it : save that he has adopted an alteration which has been all but universally accepted. Bishop Ken wrote, All praise to Thee, my God, this night : while most of us, from childhood, have been taught to substitute Glory for All Praise. And this is certainly an improvement. Glory, gloria, is cer- tainly the right word with which to begin an ascription of praise to the Almighty. If not in itself the fittest word, the most ancient and revered associations of the Christian Church give it a prescriptive right to preference. A hymn which Concerjting Cutting and Carving. 357 no man seems able to keep his sacrilegious hands off, is Charles Wesley's hymn, Jesu, lover of my soul. I observ'e Mr. Wyatt makes three alterations in the first three lines of it : each alteration for the worse. But I begin to be aware that no human being can be trusted to sit down with a hymn book and a pencil ; with leave to cut and carve. There is a fascination about the work of tampering : and a man comes to change for what is bad, rather than not change at all. There are analogous cases. When I dwelt in the country, I w^as once cutting a little path through a dense thicket of evergreens : and a friend from the city, who was staying with us, went out wath me to superintend the proceed- ings. Weakly, I put into my friend's hands a large and sharp weapon, called in Scotland a saitcJiing- knife: and told him he might smooth off certain twigs which projected unduly on the path. My friend speedily felt the fascination of cutting and carving. And after having done considerable damage, he restored me the weapon, saying he felt its possession was a temptation too strong for him to resist. When walking about with the keen sharp steel in his hand, it was really impossible to help snipping off any projecting branch which obtruded itself upon the attention. And the writer's serv^ant . (dead, poor fellow : one of the worthiest though most unbending of men) declared, 358 Concerning Ctttting and Carving. with much solemnity and considerable Indignation, that in forming a walk he would never again suffer the scutchlng-knife to be in any other hands than his own. Now, it is a like temptation that assails the editor of hymns : and even if the editor is a competent man (and In most cases he is not), I don't think it safe to trust him with the scutchlng- knife. The only editor of hymns whom the writer esteems as a perfect editor, is Sir Roundell Palmer. For Sir Roundell starts with the deter- mination to give us each hymn exactly as its author left It. It is delightful to read ' All praise to Thee, my God, this night :' and to come upon Jesu, lover of my soul, Let me to Thy bosom fly : after * Jesu, Saviour of my soul : ' and * Jesus, re- fuge of my soul.' I remark. In Sir Roundell's book, occasional signs of having taken a hymn from an early edition of the author's works : v/hich in later editions was retouched by the author him- self. Thus James Montgomery's * Friend after friend departs,' is given as first published : not as the author left it. In the four verses, Montgomery made five alterations : which are not shown In Sir Roundell's work. But, as one who feels much in- terest In hymnal literature, and who has given some attention to it, I cannot refrain from saying that in the matter of faithfulness, Sir Roundell Palmer's book Is beyond question or comparison the best. Co7icerni7ig Ctttting and Carving. 359 ' There is nothing second, third, or tenth to it. It is first : and the rest are nowhere. Having mentioned the best hymnal that I know, one naturally thinks of the worst. There is a little volume purporting to be Hymns collected by the Committee of tJie General Assembly on Psalmody : published at Edinburgh in i860. It is to be re- membered that the Church of Scotland has never approved this little volume : the committee have published it on their own responsibility. Mr. Wyatt, in making his collection, tells us he ex- amined thirty thousand hymns, and took the best of them. Sir Roundell Palmer also gives us in his volume the best hymns in the language. But neither Mr. Wyatt nor Sir Roundell (both most competent judges) has seen fit to admit much of the matter contained in this little compilation. So we may conclude, either that Mr. Wyatt did not find some of these compositions among his thirty thousand : or that, having examined them, he did not think them worthy of admission to his collec- tion of about two hundred and fifty hymns. Sir Roundell Palmer's hymns number four hundred and twelve : and he has not erred on the side of exclusion : yet he has excluded a good many of the Scotch eighty-five. Out of the first fifteen of the Scotch book, fourteen are unknown to him. And I do not think cutting and carving ever went to a length so reprehensible, as in this volume. As to 360 Concerning Cutting and Carving. the fitness of the hymns for use in church, opinions may possibly differ : but I am obliged to say that I never saw any collection of such pieces so filled with passages in execrable taste, and utterly unfit for Christian worship. It may amuse my readers, to show them George Herbert improved. Everybody knows the famous poem, The Elixir. It consists of six verses. The Scotch reading consists of four. In the first verse, three verbal alterations, intended as improvements, are made on Herbert. * Teach me, my God and king,' becomes * Teach us, our God and king.' The second verse in the Scotch reading, is unknown to Herbert. It is the doing of some member of the committee. The gold has been punched out, and a piece of pinchbeck has been put in. Herbert's third verse is omitted. Then comes the well-known verse : All may of Thee partake : Nothing can be so mean, Which, with this tincture, FOR THY SAKE, Will not grow bright and clean. This is improved as follows : All may of Thee partake ; Nothing so sinall can be. But draws ^ when ACTED for Thy sake^ Greatness and worth from Thee. You will doubtless think that Herbert pure is better than Herbert improved by the sign-painter. Concerning Ctitting and Carving. 2>^ r But the next verse is smeared even worse. Who does not remember the saintly man's words : A servant with this clause, Makes drudgery divine : Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws, Makes that, and the action, fine. But, as Sam Weller remarked of Mr. Pickwick in a certain contingency, * his most formihar friend voodnt know him,' as thus disguised : If done beneath Thy laws, Even humblest labours shine : Hallowed is toil, if this the cause, The meanest work, divine. Herbert's temper, we know, was angelic : but I wonder what he would have looked like, had he seen himself thus docked, and painted crimson and blue. No doubt, The Elixir, as the master left it, is not fitted for congregational singing. But that is a reason for leaving it alone : it is no reason for thus unpardonably tampering with the coin of the realm. There are various pieces in this unfortunate work, whose appearance in it I can explain only on this theory. Probably, some day when the com- mittee met, a member of committee produced a manuscript, and said that here was a hymn of his own composition ; and begged that it might be put in the book. The other members read it, and saw it was rubbish : but their kindly feeling prevented their saying so : and in it went. One of the last 362 Concerning Cutting and Carving. things many people learn, is not to take offence when a friend declines to admire their literary doings. I have not the faintest idea who are the members of the committee which issued this com- pilation. Likely enough, there are in it some acquaintances of my own. But that fact shall not prevent my saying what I honestly believe : that it is the very worst hymn-book I ever saw. I can- not believe that the persons who produced it, could ever have paid any attention to hymnal literature : they have so thoroughly missed the tone of all good hymns. Indeed, many of the hymns seem to be formed on the model of what may be called the Scotch Preaching Prayer : the most offensive form of devotion known ; and one entirely abandoned by all the more cultivated of the Scotch clergy. I heard, indeed, lately, an individual pray at a meet- ing about the Lord's day. In his prayer, he alluded to the Lancashire distress : and informed the Al- mighty that the patience with which the Lancashire people bore it was very much the result of their being trained in Sunday schools. But, leaving this volume, which is really not worth farther notice, let me mention, that in the first twelve lines of * Jesu, lover of my soul,' there are ten improvements made on Wesley. *■ While the tempest still is high,' has nigh substituted for high. * Till the storm of life is past,' is made ' Till the storms of life are past,' Oh receive my soul at last,' has And substituted Concerning Ctttting and Carving. 363 for OJi : for no conceivable reason. And the fa- miliar line, ' Hangs my helpless soul on Thee/ has been turned, by the wagon-painter, into * Clings my helpless soul to Thee.' I ask any intelligent reader, Is not this too bad } I am a clergyman of the Church of Scotland, for whose use these hymns have been so debased and tampered with. They never shall be sung in my church, you may rely on it. And the fact, that this cutting and carving has been done so near home, serves only to make me the more strongly to protest against it. If it were not far too large a subject to take up now, I should say something in reprobation of the fashion in which many people venture to cut and cai*ve upon words far more sacred than those of any poet : I mean, upon the words of Holy Scripture. Many people improve a scriptural text or phrase when they quote it : the improvement generally consisting in giving it a slight twist in the direction of their own peculiar theological views. I have heard of a man who quoted as from Scripture the following words : ' It is appointed unto all men once to die ; and after death HelU It was pointed out to him that no such statement exists in Scrip- ture : the words which follow the mention of death being, ' and after this the judgment.' But the mis- quoter of Scripture declined to accept the correc- tion, declaring that he thought his own reading was 364 Concerning Cutting and Carving. better. I have heard of a revival preacher who gave out as his text the words * Ye shall all likewise perish/ Every one will know what a wicked dis- tortion he made of our Saviour's warning in thus clipping it. And I have heard texts of Scripture pieced together in a way that made them convey a meaning just as far from that of the inspired writers, as that conveyed by the well known mo- saic, *■ And Judas departed, and went and hanged himself:' ' Go thou and do likewise.' Probably the reader is tired of the subject. I thank him for his patience in following me so far. CHAPTER XVIL FROM SATURDAY TO MONDAY, HERE are great people who have seen so much, that they are not surprised by any- thing. There are silly people who have not seen very much, but who think it a fine thing to pretend that they are not surprised by anything. As for the present writer, he has seen so little that he feels it very strange to find himself here= And he has not the least desire to pretend that he does not feel it so. This morning the writer awoke in a bare little chamber, curtainless and carpetless, in that great hotel at Lucerne in Switzerland which is called the Schweizer Hof. And having had breakfast in a very large and showy dining-room, along with two travelling companions, he is now standing at a win- dow of that apartment, and looking out. Just in front, there spreads the green lake of Lucerne. Away to the left, is the Rigi : and to the right, be- yond the lake, the lofty Pilatus, in a tarn on whose 366 From Saturday to Monday. summit tradition says the banished governor of Judea drowned himself, stricken by conscience for his unjust condemnation of Christ. The town stands at this end of the lake ; divided into two parts by the river Reuss, which here flows out of the lake in a swift green stream, running with almost the speed of a torrent. There is a glare of light and heat everywhere in the town : most of all on the broad level piece of ground which at this point spreads between the lake and several hotels. On a rising ground, a few hundred yards off, rising steeply from the lake, stands the Roman Catholic cathedral, a somewhat shabby building, with two lofty slender spires at its west end. There are cloisters round it: and from several openings in the wall on the side towards the lake, you have delightful peeps of the green water below and of snow-capped hills beyond. If you enter that cathedral at almost any time, you will find its plain interior filled by a large congre- gation; and you will hear part of the service boisterously roared out by priests of unprepos- sessing aspect. Why do the Rom.an priests so furiously bellow t This is a Saturday morning in August : a beauti- ful bright morning. There is no part of the week that is so well remembered by many people, as the period from Saturday to Monday: including both the former and the latter days. That season of time has a From Saturday to Monday. 367 character of its own : and many pleasant visits and expeditions have been comprised within it. Every one can sympathize with the poet Prior, and can understand the picture he calls up, when he de- scribes himself as 'in a little Dutch chaise on a Saturday night ; on his left hand his Horace, and a friend on his right,' going out to the country to stay till Monday with the friend so situated. I fear, indeed, that Prior would not go to church on the Sunday ; which I can only regret. But I am going to spend this time in a way as different as may be from that in which I am accustomed to spend it, or in which I ever spent it before. When the writer arises on common Saturdays, the thing he has in prospect is several quiet hours spent in going over the sermons he has to preach on the following day. I suppose that most clergy- men who do their work as well as they can, do on Saturday morning after breakfast walk into their study, and sit down in that still retreat to work. And if, on other days, you are thinking all the while you are at work there, of ten sick people you have to see, and of a host of other matters that must be attended to out of doors, you will much enjoy the affluent sense of abundant time for thinking, which you will have if you make it a rule that on Satur- days you shall do no pastoral nor other parochial work. Then you ought to take a long walk in the afternoon; and give the evening to entire 368 From Saturday to Monday. rest, refreshing your mind by some light cheerful reading. This advice, however, need not be prolonged ; as it is addressed to a limited order of men, and to men who are not likely to take it. And to-day, instead of sitting down to work, there is something quite different to be done. For it is time to cease looking out of the window at the Schweizer Hof, and to walk the short distance to the spot where a little steamer is preparing to start. The baggage of the three travellers is con- tained in three black leather bags, of modest size. The steamer departs, and leaves the town behind : but to-day, instead of sailing the length of the lake to where it ends amid the wilds of Uri, we turn to the right hand into a retired bay, which gradually shallows, till the depth of water becomes very small. Pilatus is on the right; and the place where in former days there used to be the Slide of A Ipnach. The sides of Pilatus are covered with great forests, the timber of which would be of great use if it could be readily got hold of And the Slide was made for the purpose of bringing down great trees from spots from which any ordinary conveyance would be impossible. So a trough of wood was formed, eight miles in length, beginning high up the mountain, and ending at the lake. It was six feet wide, and four feet deep : a stream of water was made to flow through it, to lessen friction. It wound From Saturday to Monday. 369 about to suit the ground, and was carried, bridge- like, over three deep ravines. The trees intended to be sent down by it, were stripped of bark and branches ; and then launched away. The biggest trees did the eight miles in six minutes; tearing down with a noise like thunder, an avalanche of wood. Sometimes a tree leapt out of the Slide, in mid career, and was instantly smashed to atoms. The steamer stops at a rude little wharf, near which a great lumbering diligence is waiting : very clumsy, but comfortable. Six horses draw it, whose harness, made mainly of rope, is covered with bells, that keep up a ceaseless tinkle as we go. In Britain, we wish a carriage to run as quietly as possible : in Switzerland, they like a good deal of noise. We go slowly on, into the Canton of Unterwalden, by the little town of Sarnen, along a valley richly wooded. For a while, the road is level : then we begin to climb. And now, as is usual with British travellers, we get out and walk on, leaving the diligence to follow. We are entering the Brunig Pass. In former days, it could be traversed only on foot or on mules : now a carriage road has been made, a marvel of skilful engineering. We walk up a long steep ascent : on the left hand, far below, are little green lakes, and scattered chalets; on the right, rude hills. Every here and there, a little stream from the hills crosses the road. It is now a mere trickling thread of water : but acres on either side B B 370 From Sahirday to Monday. of it, covered with huge stones, testify what a raging torrent it must be in winter. So we go on, till we reach a spot where we are to witness a piece of ingenuity combined with bad taste. Turn out of the highway by a little path to the right, and you come in two hundred yards to a sawmill, driven by an impetuous little stream. Where does the stream come from } It seems to issue out of the rocky wall, which a quarter of a mile above the sawmill here crosses the little upland valley. You follow the stream towards its source. You reach the rocky wall. And there, sure enough, violently rushing out through a low-browed dark tunnel, which it quite fills, you see the origin of the stream. What is on the other side of the rocky wall } Why, there is a considerable lake, which was once a great deal bigger. The Lake of Lungern was once a beautiful sheet of water, with fine wood coming down to its margin. But the people of the valley thought that by partially draining the lake, they might get some hundreds of acres of valuable land : and all consideration of the picturesque had to give way. The tunnel we have seen lowered the water in the lake by a hundred and twenty feet, and diminished its size to half. With great labour, the work of nineteen thousand days given by the peasants, the tunnel was made, beginning at its lower end, through the rocky ridge, to within six feet of the water at the end of the lake. These six From Saturday to Monday. 01 feet, of friable rock, were blown up with gunpowder, fired by three daring men who instantly fled ; and in a few minutes a black stream of mud and water appeared at the lower end of the tunnel. The traveller, returning by the sawmill to the road, goes on till he reaches the village : whence you may see a bare ugly tract of five hundred acres, dotted with wooden chalets, gained by spoiling the lake. Passing through the village, you climb on and on : the diligence makes no sign of overtaking you. You reach the summit at last, 3,600 feet above the sea : whence you have a grand view of the vale of Hash. These tremendous snowy peaks beyond are the peaks of the Wetterhorn, one of the grandest of the Alps. All this way, the road has been very lonely, but always richly wooded. Now you begin to go down. The road winds along the side of the mountain, cut out of the rock. In some places it is a mere notch, with great masses of rock hanging over far beyond its outer edge. And so, broken by a pause for some bread and wine at a little wayside inn, the day goes on towards evening. All this while, one is trying to feel that it is Saturday ; the familiar day one knows at home. For somehow it seems quite different. And in this strange country, where you are a foreigner, you feel yourself quite a different person from what you used to be at home. No doubt, by having two travelling companions from Britain, you keep a 372 From Saturday to Monday. little of the British atmosphere about you. If you were walking down now into Hasli all alone, you would be much more keenly aware of the genius of the place. All your life, and your interests, at home, would grow quite shadowy and unreal. But this is one thing that makes a holiday season in a foreign country deliver you so thoroughly from your home burden of care and labour. How very lightly the charge of one's parish rests upon one, when the parish is a thousand miles away ! The thing which at home is always pressing on you so heavily, grows light, at that distance, as one of those coloured air-balls of India-rubber. And now, as the light is fading somewhat, the great diligence, running swiftly down the hill, and zigzagging round perilous corners, with little exer- tion of the six plump horses, but with a tremendous jingling of their bells, overtakes us : and for a mile or two you may enjoy a pleasant rest after the long walk. We stop at a place where a roofed wooden bridge crosses the river, turning sharp off to the left. Here we leave the big diligence ; and climb to the top of a lesser one which is waiting, a vast height. And now, in the growing darkness, we proceed slowly up the valley, following the course of the river Aar. On the right hand, huge precipices close in the valley, from which every now and then a streak of white foam, hundreds of feet in height, shows you a waterfall. It is perfectly silent, though these seem so near : they are much From Sahirday to Afonday. 373 farther off than you are aware. On and on, up the river: till you can see lights ahead : and you jolt along a very roughly-paved street, where in the darkness you see picturesque wooden houses on either hand. This is Meyringen : one of the most thorough and beautiful Swiss villages to be found in Switzerland. What an odd Saturday evening this seems ! Our old w^ays of thinking and feeling are quite dislocated. We stop at the door of a large hotel, built of wood. Everything in it seems of wood, except the stone staircase. It is eight o'clock in the evening, — quite dark : they have not our long beautiful twilights there. And now we have din- ner. Then we inspect a room filled with carved work in wood which is for sale : and select some little things which will pleasantly remind us of this place and time when both are far away. Finally, before ten o'clock, we climb the long stair, each to his little bare chamber; with many thoughts of those at hom.e ; and trying unsuccessfully to feel that this is Saturday night. But the glory and beauty of Meyringen appeared the next morning: one of the sunniest, calmest, and brightest Sundays that ever shone since the crea- tion. You go forth from the hotel, and walk down the street, with the most picturesque wooden houses on either hand: with their projecting gal- leries and great overhanging eaves. Above, there is the brightest blue sky; and all round, snowy peaks, dazzling white, rising into the deep blue. 374 From Saturday to Monday. Walk on till you are clear of the village, and fields of coarse grass spread round you : for you will not find there the soft green turf of Britain, but a rough harsh grass, alive with crickets and grasshoppers. We have some compensation for our uncertain cli- mate and abundant rain. Yet, amid that scenery, so sublime, still, and bright, you do not miss any- thing that could be desired. And now, on the silent Sunday morning, I have no doubt that of several men whom I saw, who though arrayed in mountain dress each Avore a white neckcloth, each one was thinking of his own church many hun- dreds of miles off, and hoping and asking that all might go well there that day. All round Meyringen there stand those snowy Alps. Let the small critic understand that we all know that an Alp does not strictly mean a moun- tain, but a pasture high in the mountains. But in Britain Alps mean mountains, and nothing else. And all round are those white peaks, save in the narrow opening where the Aar comes down from above, and where it rolls away below. From great precipices on the left hand as you look up the valley, streams descend in foamy falls : and one among these has sometimes brought down, in its flood, such masses of mud and gravel, as served to overspread half the valley. Turn up this little street, at whose end you can see the church, which is a Protestant one. Eighteen feet from the pave- From Saturday to Mo7tday. 375 ment, there is a line drawn on the inside walls, showing the height to which the church was once filled with mud by an overflow of that torrent. Service is going on. We quietly enter, and steal to a seat by the door. A clergyman, in very ugly robes, is standing in the pulpit, which looks dia- gonally across the plain interior. He is reading his sermon, in a rather sleepy way. His robe is of blue, and a great white collar, turned over, is round his neck. Here is the best place to see a whole congregation, men and women, in their national dress. The men sit on one side of the church : and the women on the other. Swiss women are for the most part far from pretty. They wear here a black bodice, with white sleeves starched till they seem as stiff as boards : a yellow petti- coat, and a little black hat. The church was well filled : and the people seemed to listen very atten- tively to their pastor's words. But, for one thing, I do not understand them, for they are expressed in German : and for another thing I am going to worship elsewhere : so I slip quietly away. Just at the gate through which you pass into the churchyard, there is a shabby little building which I took for a school. No, it is the Little CJmrch'. and here, during the summer and autumn, you may join in the service of the Church of England. A succession of clergymen come, for a few weeks each. A little before the hour of 37^ From Saturday to Monday. worship, we enter the building. It is just Hke a very shabby Scotch parish school. Forms without backs occupy the floor : at one corner there is an odd little enclosure which serves as a reading-desk and a pulpit : and a little way off there is placed a very small table, which is to-day covered with white, and bears the elements of the Communion. As the congregation assembles, five-and-twenty persons, the clergyman puts on his surplice ; and entering the little desk begins the service. I cannot but admire the determination this young minister shows, even in that shabby place, to make the worship of God as decorous as may be. Although there was no organ, there was quite a musical service : even the Psalms being chanted remarkably well. Five or six young Englishwomen acted as a choir. The lessons were read by an old gentleman standing by the little communion table. But a second surplice was not forthcoming : and he was devoid of any robe. The sermon was a very decent one : not eloquent nor striking, but plain and earnest. I should have liked it better, if the clergyman had prayed, before beginning it, in the words of one of the usual collects. But he simply prefaced his discourse by the words ' In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost :' and by that exceedingly silly shibboleth, conveyed to me his adherence to a decaying party, which assuredly does not consist of the wisest or From Sattirday to Monday. ^jy ablest of the Anglican Clergy. There are, of course, two or three grand exceptions ; but there is something fatuous in the parade of going as near Rome as may be, which some empty-headed youths exhibit Let me add, that in the evening I went to service again. And now the sermon was so terribly bad, so weak and silly, that I found it hard to understand how any man who had brains to write the former discourse, could possibly have produced it. Yet the text was one of the noblest in Holy Scripture. After the forenoon service, we walk along a great wall, built to defend the valley from floods, towards the heights on the left hand, looking up the valley: and in the hot afternoon toil slowly up and up, till Meyringen is left far below. What is that distant sound } Well, it is that of rifle-shooting : for the men of Hash think Sunday afternoon the best time for practice. Let me confess that the perpetual reports broke in very sadly on the silence of the Holy Day. Yet there never was a nobler temple than that on which you looked, sitting down on a rock and gazing at the valley far below and the snowy Alps beyond. You could not but think of the words, chanted in that morning service, ' The strength of the hills is His also !' And sitting here, can one forget that at this hour the text is being read out in the church far away : can one help shutting out the "Alps for a little, and asking that 378 From Saturday to Monday. the Blessed Spirit may carry the words that are to be spoken to many hearts, for warning, counsel, and comfort ? It is quite true, that when at a dis- tance of hundreds of miles, your home interests grow misty and unsubstantial : but it is likewise true that at such an hour as this, they press them- selves on one with a wonderful clearness and force. My friend Smith told me that in two hours' lonely walking under Mont Blanc, on a bright clear au- tumn day, he felt more worried by some little per- plexity which soon cleared itself up, than at any other time in his life. And sitting down on the edge of a glacier, whence a stream broke away in thunder, with the Monarch of Mountains looking down, all he could think of was that wretched little vexation. The Sunday dinner-hour at the Sattvage at Mey- ringen is four : so let us slowly descend from this height. A large party dines : chiefly English. The main characteristic of dinner was the fish called lotte, which is caught in the river near. There was a certain quietness becoming the day ; and it was pleasant to remark that the greater number of our countrymen seemed to make Sunday a day of rest. And indeed it is inexpressibly pleasant, after the fatigue and hurry which attend travelling rapidly on through grand scenery, to have an occasional day on which to repose. And going to church, with a little congregation of one's countrymen and From Satu7^day to Mo7iday. 0/ countrywomen, to join in the familiar sen-ice in a strange land, one felt something of that glow which came into St. Paul's heart, when after his voyage he was cheered by the sight of Christian friends ; and which made him ' thank God and take courage.' Then to the evening ser\'ice, when the congrega- tion was less, and the sermon so extremely bad. The setting sun was casting a rosy colour upon the sno\\y peaks, as we returned to the onl}- home one had there. And indeed Sunday is the Avorst day at an inn. There is a strongly-felt inconsistency between the associations of the day, especially if you live in Scotland, and the Avhole look of the place. And sitting in a verandah behind the Sauvagc, with the fragrance of the trees in the twilight coming up from the garden below, and looking across to the Falls of the Relchenbach on the other side of the valley, it was worrying to think of the weak sermon we had just heard, where one had hoped for that which might cheer and comfort and direct. On another da}*, In a church In a grander scene than even this, I sat beside a certain great preacher while a poor sermon was being preached with much attempt at oratorical effect ; and thought how dif- ferent it would have been had that man occupied the pulpit. Perhaps he thought so too ; though he did not say so. But indeed, arrayed in garments of gre}', and with a wideawake hat lying beside 380 From Sahtrday to Monday. him, that eminent clergyman was Hke a locomotive engine when the steam is not up. He could not have preached then ; at least, not without two hours of previous thought. Before the best railway engine can dash away with its burden, you must fill its boiler with water, and kindle its fire. And when you may see that clergyman ascend his pulpit in decorous canonicals on a Sunday, charged with his subject, with every nerve tense, and with the most earnest purpose on his rather frightened face, to deliver his message to many hundreds of immortal beings ; if you had previously seen the easy figure in the light-grey suit sitting in a pew at Chamouni, you would discern a like difference to that between the engine standing cold and powerless in the shed, and the engine coming slowly up to the platform, with the compressed strength of a thousand horses fretting for escape or employment, to take away the express train. To-morrow morning we have to be up at half- past four : so let us go to bed. First, let us have a look at the quiet street, indistinct in the twilight ; and at the outline of encircling hills. There are places in Switzerland where you do not sleep so well as might be desired. A host of wretched little enemies scarify your skin, and drive sleep from your eyes. The Sauvage at Meyringen is not one of these places. It is a thoroughly clean and respectable house. Yet for the guidance of From Saturday to Monday. tourists who may know even less than the writer (which is barely conceivable), let it be said that there is an effectual means of keeping such hostile troops away. Procure a quantity of camphor. Wear some of it in a bag about you ; a very little bag : and even though you sit next a disgusting, infra- grant, unwashed person in a diligence, nothing will assail you. And at night, rub a little of that mate- rial into powder between your palms, and sprinkle it over your bed, having turned back the bed-clothes. Do that, and you are safe. If you rub yourself over with camphor besides, you are secure as though wrapped in triple brass. You have made yourself an offensive object to the aesthetic sensibilities of fleas; and they will reject you with contempt. They will do this, even though, uncamphored, you might be (in the South Sea Island sense) a remark- ably good man. You remember how an Englishman once spoke to a chief of a tribe, out there. He spoke of a certain zealous missionary. 'Ah, he Avas a very good man, a very good man,' said the Englishman, truly and heartily. ' Yes,' said the chief, not so warmly : ' Him was a good man, but him was very tough ! ' The chief spoke with the air of one who says, critically, ' The venison at Smith's was not so good as usual last night.' And the Englishman forbore to enquire as to the data on which the chief pronounced his judgment. No doubt he had experimental knowledge on that subject. 382 Prom Saturday to Monday. It is a great deal easier to get up in the dark at half-past four in the morning in Switzerland, than it is anywhere in Britain. There is something so bracing and exhilarating in the mountain air, that you are easily equal to exertion which would knock you up elsewhere. Men who at home could not walk five or six miles without fatigue, walk their thirty miles over a Pass without difficulty : come in to dinner with a good appetite ; and after dinner, without the least of that feeling of stiffness which commonly follows any unusual exertion, are out of doors again, sauntering in the twilight, or visiting some sight that is within easy reach. Yesterday was a resting day with us: so to-day, we had break- fast a little after five ; and then, the three black leather bags being disposed on a black horse, that scrambled like a cat over ground that would have ruined an English steed's knees in the first quarter of a mile, we set off at six o'clock to cross the Pass of the Great Scheideck to Grindelwald. First, along the road up the valley for a mile or so : then turn to the right and begin to climb the mountain which on that side walls the valley in. The ascent is very steep : and the path consists of smooth and slippery pieces of rock. You soon come to understand the wisdom of your guide, who requires you to walk at a very slow pace. That is your only chance, if you are to climb such ways for several successive hours. The inexperienced From Saturday to Monday. ^i^^i traveller pushes on at a rapid pace, and speedily is quite exhausted. After a little climbing, you may turn to the right, where you will see the torrent of the Reichenbach go down nearly two thousand feet in a succession of rapids and falls, hurrying to the Aar in the valley below. On, higher and higher, till you see the huge snowy mass of the Wetterhorn far before you on the left ; and you enter a little plain of bright green grass, dotted with many pictu- resque wooden chalets. On, higher and higher, till you stop to rest and have something to eat at the baths of Rosenlaui, a pretty inn near a rock where the Reichenbach comes roaring out of a cleft. In a large room here, you will be tempted to buy specimens of wood-carving, very beautifully done. Having rested, you determine to make a little deviation from your way. Twenty minutes' stiff pulling up the steep hill-side, over a very rough path to the left : and you cross a bridge that spans a fissure in the rock two hundred feet deep, where a little stream foams along. Now you stand beside the glacier of Rosenlaui : not large, but beautifully pure. A cave has been cut out for many yards into the beautiful blue ice ; and into it you go. It is a singular place in which to find yourself, that cave, or rather tunnel, in the solid ice. The air is cold, the floor is somewhat wet : a soft light comes through the ice from without. But there is no time to linger unduly: and we return down the rough slope to the 384 From Saturday to Monday. spot, near the inn, where the guide and packhorse are waiting. Now upwards again, by a very muddy path through a long wood of pines. But gradually the pines cease, and the ground grows bare; till you enter on a tract where the snow lies some inches deep. Parched as are your hands and your tongue, there is a great temptation to refresh both with handfuls of that snow, which in a little while will leave you more parched than ever. But after no long climbing on the snow, you reach the summit of the Pass, 6,500 feet above the sea. Here you will find a little inn, the Steinbock ; where a simple but abundant repast awaits the travellers. Thirty or forty, almost all English, sit down to copious supplies of stewed chamois, washed down with prodigious draughts of thin claret. Here you rest an hour. And going out, you look at the Wetterhorn, which rises in a perpendicular wall of limestone rock, many thousand feet in height, beginning to rise apparently a hundred yards off. But your eye deceives you in this clear air and amid these tre- mendous magnitudes. The base of the precipice is more than a mile away. And when you begin to descend towards Grindelwald, the awful wall of rock seems to hang over you ; though nowhere you approach within a mile of it. It is not safe to go nearer: for every now and then you hear a tre- mendous roar; and looking towards the Wetterhorn, you see a mass of what looks like powdery snow From Saturday to Mojtday. 385 sliding swiftly down the rock. You are astonished that so small a thing should make such a noise. But that is an avalanche ; and if you were nearer, you would know that what seemed powdery snow was indeed hundreds of tons of ice, in huge blocks and masses. And if a village of chalets had stood in the way, that slide of powdery snow would have swept it to destruction. It is a fact, well known to students of physical philosophy, that it is incomparably easier to go down a steep hill than to ascend one. This is a result of the great and beneficial law of Gravitation; according to which all material bodies tend towards the centre of the earth. And the consequence of this lav/ is, that when we set off to descend from this height, we do it very easily and rapidly. A horse, indeed, looks a poor and awkward figure scrambling down these paths : but if you have in your hands that long light tough stafT of ash shod with iron which is called an Alpen-Stock, you w^ill bound over the masses of rock at a great pace; doing things which in a less exhilarating air you would shrink from. All the way down, on the left, apparently close by, there is that awful wall of the Wetterhorn; and you may see other peaks, of which the most noticeable or at least the most memorable is the Schreckhorn. By-and-by, by the path, you may discern a man' standing beside a great square wooden box, like a small tub, fixed on a stake of C C 386 From Saturday to Monday. wood four or five feet high. And when the travellers approach, the man will fit to that box a wooden pipe, eight feet long : and sticking his tongue into the lesser end of the pipe, will vehemently blow into it. That rude apparatus is the Alpine Horn, of which you have heard folk talk and sing. There is nothing specially attractive to the ear, in the few notes brayed forth : but what grand echoes, doubled and redoubled, are awakened up in the breast of that huge wall, and die away in the upper air and mountain ! Produce from your purse a liberal tip ; and ask the mountaineer to let you try his horn. You blow with all your might, like my friend Mac Puff sounding his own trumpet : but there is dead silence, as when to such as know him well Mac Puff does so sound : a feeble hissing of air from the great tub is all that rewards your labour. And one always respects a person who can do what one can- not do. Down along the slope ; till, turning a little way to the left, you approach the Upper Glacier of Grindelwald, filling up the great gulf between the Wetterhorn and the Schreckhorn. Into this glacier you enter, by an artificial tunnel: but the ice is dirty, and streams of water pour from it on your head. Thus you speedily retreat. Great belts of fir trees fringe the glacier ; which, like other glaciers, comes far below the snow-line. For as the ice which forms the glacier gradually melts away at the lower extremity next the valley, the ice from From Saturday to Monday. 387 above presses on and fills its place. The glacier is in fact a slowly-advancing stream of ice. And all the glaciers are gradually retreating into the moun- tains, as increasing cultivation and population make the lower extremity melt away someAvhat faster than the waste can be supplied. Starting from far in the icy bosom of the Alps, in the region of perpetual snow, the Grindelwald glaciers come down to within a few yards of as green and rich grass as (if you were a cow) you would desire to eat. Now we Vv'alk for an hour through meadows In the valley ; pausing at a chalet to have some Alpine strawberries, small, and flavourless : and so at five o'clock on iMonday afternoon enter Grindelwald. The inns are filled with travellers ; but we are lucky in finding space at the Adler, whose windows look full on the Lower Glacier, at the distance of a mile. From a great black-looking cave at the end of the glacier, a river breaks away; of the dirty whity-brown water that comes from glaciers. It is a curious thing to see a river starting, full grown from the first. Look to the left of the lower end of the glacier; the ground meets the ice. Look to the right, and there a pretty big river, that looks as If It had burst out from the earth, is flowing away as if it had run a score of miles. Let the traveller refresh himself by much-needed ablution : they give you pretty large basins here. 388 From Saturday to Monday. And then descending, sit down to dinner at the table-d'hote. A large party : almost all Germans. So are the waiters. Thus, if you express to a neighbour your conviction that something presented to you as chamois, is in truth a portion of a very tough and aged goat, no offence is given. Shall it be recorded how, after dinner, we sat in the twilight on a terrace hard by, looking at the glacier and the Alps : how, as it darkened down, we entered the dining-room again, and there beheld, seated at tea, a certain great Anglican prelate } Shall it be recorded how, if one had never seen nor heard of him before, you might have learned some- thing of his eloquence, geniality, and tact, tran- scending those of ordinary men, even from that hour and a half before he retired to rest 'i Shall it be recorded how, having begun to tell a story to his own party, he gradually and easily, as he discerned others listening with interest, addressed himself to them, till he ended his story in the audience of all in that large chamber 1 And shall it be recorded how two pretty young English girls sat and gazed with rapt and silent admiration on the great man's face } Two or three young fellows who had sought, during that day, to commend themselves to these fair beings, felt themselves (you could see) hope- lessly eclipsed and cut out ; and regarded the un- conscious Bishop with looks of fury. Happily, he did not know : so it did him no harm. From Saturday to Monday. 389 My friend Mac Spoon recently dilated, in my hearing, on the advantages of Pocket Diaries ; which (as wise men know) are not records of pass- ing and past events, but memoranda of engage- ments. You note down in these, said he, all you have to do ; while yet if your book should be lost, and so fall into the hands of a stranger, he could not for his life understand the meaning of your inscriptions. Thus (he went on) you see how under the head of Thursday, April 32nd, 1864, I have marked Jericho, Train at 10*30. Now if tJiat were to fall into a stranger's possession, he could make nothing of it : he would not know what it meant at all. But as for me, the moment I look at it, I know that it means that on Thursday, April 32nd, 1864, I am to go to Jericho by the I0"30 train. Such were the individual's words. And now, for the sake of those readers who could not under- stand that mysterious inscription, I think it expe- dient distinctly to declare, that the reason why this History is called From Saturday to Monday is, that it gives an account of historical events, beginning with Saturday and ending on Monday. And thus, having reached Monday evening (for soon after the Bishop's story, everybody went to bed), my task is done. It can never transpire, what happened on the Tuesday. Perhaps something hap- pened of great public interest. But if I were to record it here, then it would appear as if what 390 From Saturday to Monday. occurred on Tuesday occurred between Saturday and Monday ; which is absurd. The remembrance of foreign travel is pleasanter than the travel itself For in remembrance there are none of the hosts that are dispelled by copious camphor: no wear of the muscles, nor of the lungs and heart : no eyes hot and blinded with the sun- shine on the snow ; no parched throat and leathery tongue; no old goat's flesh disguised as chamois venison. The little drawbacks are forgot ; but the absence of care and labour, the blue sky and the bright sun, glacier and cataract, and the snowy Alps remain. CHAPTER XVIII. CONCERNING THINGS WHICH CANNOT GO ON F course, In the full meaning of the words, Ben Nevis is one of the Things that can- not Go On. And among these, too, we may reckon the Pyramids. Likewise the unchanging ocean : and all the everlasting hills, which cannot be removed, but stand fast for ever. But it is not such things that I mean by the phrase : it is not such things that the phrase sug- gests to ordinary people. It is not things which are passing, indeed ; but passing so very slowly, and with so little sign as yet of their coming end, that to human sense they are standing still. I mean things which even we can discern have not the element of continuance in them : things which press it upon our attention as one of their most marked characteristics, that they have not the ele- ment of continuance In them. And you know there are such things. Things too good to last 392 Coitcerning Things very long. Things too bad to be borne very long. Things which as you look at, you say to yourself, Ah, it is just a question of time ! We shall not have you long ! This, as it appears to me, my reader, is the essen- tial quality which makes us class anything among the Things which cannot Go On : it is that the thing should not merely be passing away, or even pass- ing away fast ; but that it shall bear on its very face, as the first thing that strikes us in looking at it, that it is so. There are passing things that have a sort of perennial look: things that will soon be gone, but that somehow do not press it upon us that they are going. If you had met Christopher North, in his days of affluent physical health, swinging along with his fishing-rod towards the Tweed, you might, if you had reflected, have thought that in truth all that could not go on. The day would come when that noble and loveable man would be very different : when he would creep along slowly, instead of tearing along with that springy pace : when he would no longer be able to thrash pugna- cious gipsies, nor to outleap flying tailors : when he would not sit down at morning in his dusty study, and rush through the writing of an article as he rushed through other things, impetuously, determinedly, and with marvellous speed, and hardly an intermission for rest : when mind and body, in brief, would be unstrung. But tliat was zvhich cannot Go On. 393 not what you thought of, in the sight of that pro- digal strength and activity. At any rate, it was not the thought that came readiest. But when you see the deep colour on the cheek of a consumptive girl, and the too bright eye : when you see a man awfully overworking himself: when you see a human being wrought up to a frantic enthusiasm in some cause, good or bad : when you find a lady declaring that a recently-acquired servant, or a new-found friend, is absolute perfection : w^hen you see a church, crowded to discomfort, passages and all, by people who come to listen to its popular preacher: when you go to hear the popular preacher for yourself, and are interested and car- ried away by a sermon, evincing such elaborate preparation as no man, with the duty of a parish resting upon him, could possibly find time for in any single week, — and delivered with overwhelm- ing vehemence of voice and gesture : w^hen you hear of a parish in which a new-come clergyman has set a-going an amount of parochial machinery which it would need at least three and probably six clergy- men to keep working : w^hen you see a family, living a cat-and-dog life : when you see a poor fellow, crushed down by toil and anxiety, setting towards insanity : when you find a country gentle- man, with fifteen hundred a year, spending five thousand : when you see a man submitting to an in- sufferable petty tyranny, and commanding himself 394 Concerning Things by a great effort, repeated several times a day, so far as not just yet to let fly at the tyrant's head : when you hear of King Bomba gagging and mur- dering his subjects, amid the reprobation of civilised mankind : when you see the stoker of an American steamer sitting upon his safety-valve, and observe that the indicator shows a pressure of a hundred and fifty pounds on the square inch of his boiler : — then, my friend, looking at such things as these, and beholding the end impending and the explosion imminent, you would say that these are Things which cannot Go On. And then, besides the fact that in the case of very many of the Things which cannot Go On, you can discern the cause at work that must soon bring them to an end ; there is a further matter to be considered. Human beings are great believers in what may be called the doctrine of Average. That is a deep conviction, latent in the ordinary mind, and the result of all its experience, that anything very extreme cannot last. If you are sitting on a winter evening in a chamber of a country house which, looks to the north-east ; and if a tremendous batter of wind and sleet suddenly dashes against the windows with a noise loud enough to attract the attention of everybody ; I am almost sure that the first thing that will be said, by somebody or other, in the first momentary lull in which it is possible to hear, will be, ' Well, that cannot last long.' We which cannot Go On. 395 have in our minds, as regards all things moral and physical, some idea of what is the average state of matters : and whenever we find any very striking deviation from that, we feel assured that the de- viation will be but temporary. When you are travelling by railway, even through a new and striking country, the first few miles enable you to judge what you may expect. The country may be very different indeed from that which you are accustomed to see, day by day : but still, a little observation of it enables you to strike an average, so to speak, of that country. And if you come suddenly to anything especially remarkable : to some enormously lofty viaduct, whence you look down upon the tops of tall trees and upon a foam- ing stream : or to some tunnel through a huge hill : or to some bridge of singular structure : or to some tract wonderfully wooded or wonderfully bare: you involuntarily judge that all this is some- thing exceptional ; that it cannot last long ; that you will soon be through it, and back to the ordi- nary jog-trot way. And now, my friend, let me recall to mind certain facts connected with the great order of Things which cannot Go On : and let us compare our experience with regard to these. Have you a residence in the country, small or great? Have you ever had such a residence.'* If you have one, or ever have had one, I have no doubt 39^ Concerning Things at all but there is or was a little gravelled walk, which you were accustomed often to walk up and down. You walked there, thinking of things pain- ful and things pleasant. And if nature and training made you the human being for a country life, you found that that little gravelled path could do you a great deal of good. When you went forth, some- what worried by certain of the little cares which worry at the time but are so speedily forgotten, and walked up and down ; you found that at each turn you took, the path, with its evergreens at either hand, and with here and there a little bay of green grass running into the thick masses of green boughs and leaves, gently pressed itself upon your attention ; a patient friend, content to wait your time. And in a little space, no matter whether in winter or in summer, the path with its belongings filled your mind with pleasant little thoughts and cares ; and smoothed your forehead and quieted your nervous system. I am a great believer in grass and evergreens and gravelled walks. Was it not pleasant, when a bitter wind was blowing outside your little realm, to walk in the shelter of the yews and hollies, where the air felt so snug and calm : and now and then to look out beyond your gate, and catch the bitter East on your face, and then turn back again to the warm, sheltered walk ! Beautiful in frost, beautiful in snow, beautiful in rain, beautiful in sunshine, are which cannot Go On. 397 clumps of evergreens : is green grass : and cheerful and healthful to our whole moral nature is the gravelled walk that winds between ! But all this is by the way. It is not of gravelled walks in general that I am to speak : but of one special phenomenon concerning such walks ; and bearing upon my proper subject. If you are walk- ing up and down a path, let us say a hundred and fifty yards long, talking to a friend, or holding con- versation with yourself; and if at each turn you take, you have to bend your head to pass under an overhanging bough : here is what will happen. To bend your head for once, will be no effort. You will do it instinctively, and never think about the matter. To stoop even six times, will not be much. But if you walk up and down for an hour, that constant evading of the overhanging bough will become intolerably irksome. For a little, it is nothing: but you cannot bear it if it is a thing that is to go on. Here is a fact in human nature. You can stand a very disagreeable and painful thing for once : or for a little while. But a very small annoyance, going on unceasingly, grows in- sufferable. No annoyance can possibly be slighter, than that a drop of cold water should fall upon your bare head. But you are aware that those ingenious persons, who have investigated the con- stitution of man with the design to discover the sensitive places where man can feel torture, have 39^ Concerning Things discovered what can be got out of that falHng drop of water. Continue it for an hour ; continue it for a day : and it turns to a refined agony. It is a thing which cannot go on long, without driving the sufferer mad. No one can say what the effect might be, of compelHng a human being to spend a week, walking, through all his waking hours, in a path where he had to bend his head to escape a branch every minute or so. You, my reader, did not ascertain by experiment what would be the effect. However pretty the branch might be, beneath which you had to stoop, or round which you had to dodge, at every turn ; that branch must go. And you cut away the blossoming apple- branch : you trained in another direction the spray of honeysuckle : you sawed off the green bough, beautiful with the soft beechen leaves. They had become things which you could not suffer to go on. Have you ever been misled into living in your house, during any portion of the time in which it was being painted .? If so, you remember how you had to walk up and down stairs on planks, very steep and slippery : how, at early morning, a sound pervaded the dwelling, caused by the rubbing your doors with stones, to the end of putting a smoother surface upon the doors : how your children had to abide in certain apartments under ground, to be beyond the reach of paint, and brushes, and walls still wet. The discomfort was extreme. You which ca7i7iot Go On. 399 could not have made up your mind to go on through life, under the like conditions : but you bore it patiently, because it was not to go on. It was as when you shut your eyes, and squeeze through a thicket of brambles, encouraged by the hope of reaching the farther side. So when you are obliged to ask a man to dinner, with whom you have not an idea or sympathy in common. Sup- pressing the tendency to yawn, you force yourself to talk about things in which you have not the faintest interest : and you know better than to say a word upon the subjects for which you really care. You could not stand this : were it not that from time to time you furtively glance at the clock, and think that the time of deliverance is drawing near. And on the occasion of a washing-day, or a change of cook, you put up without a murmur with a din- ner to which you could not daily subdue your heart. We can go on for a little space, carried by the impetus previously got, and by the hope of what lies before us. It is like the dead points in the working of a steam-engine. You probably know that many river steamboats have but a single engine : and that there are two points, each reached every few seconds, at which a single engine has no power at all. The paddle-wheels continue to turn, in virtue of the strong impetus already given them. Now, it is plain to every mind, that if the engine remained for any considerable period at the point 400 Concerning Things where it is absolutely powerless, the machinery driven by the engine would stop. But in practice, the difficulty is very small : because it is but for a second or two that the engine remains in this state of paralysis. It does quite well for a Httle : but is a state that could not go on. Any very extreme feeling, in a commonplace mind, is a thing not likely to go on long. Very extravagant likes and dislikes : very violent grief, such as people fancy must kill them : will, in most cases, endure not long. In short, anything that flies in the face of the laws which regulate the human mind : anything which is greatly opposed to Nature's love for the Average : cannot, in gene- ral, go on. I do not forget, that there are striking exceptions. There are people, who never quite get over some great grief or disappointment : there are people who form a fixed resolution, and hold by it all through life. I have seen more than one or two men and women, w^hose whole soul and energy were so devoted to some good work, that a stranger, witnessing their doings for a few days, and hearing their talk, would have said, ' TJiat cannot last. It must soon burn itself out, zeal like that ! ' But if you had made enquiry, you would have learned that all tJiat had gone on un- flagging, for ten, twenty, thirty years. There must have been sound and deep principle there at the first, to stand the wear of such a time : and which cannot Go On. 401: you may well believe that the whole nature is now confirmed irretrievably in the old habit ; you may well hope that the good Christian and philanthro- pist who has gone on for thirty years, will go on as long as he lives ; — will go on for ever. But, as a general rule, I have no great faith in the stabi- lity of human character : and I have great faith in the law of Average. People will not go on very long, doing what is inconvenient for them to do. And I will back Time against most feelings and most resolutions in human hearts. It will beat them in the end. You are a clergyman, let us suppose. Your congregation are fond of your ser- mons. They have got into your way : and if so, they probably like to hear you preach, better than anybody else; unless it be the two or three very great men. A family, specially attached to you, moves from • a house near the church, to another two or three miles away. They tell you, that nothing shall prevent their coming to their accus- tomed places every Sunday still : they would come, though the distance were twice as great. They are perfectly sincere. But your larger experience of such cases makes you well aware that time, and distance, and mud, and rain, and hot sunshine, will beat them. Coming to church over that in- convenient distance, is a thing that cannot go on. It is a thing that ought not to go on : and you make up your mind to the fact. You cannot D D 402 Concerning Things -vanquish the laws of Nature. You may make water run up hill, by laborious pumping. But you can- not go on pumping for ever: and whenever the water is left to its own nature, it will certainly run down hill. All such declarations as ' I shall never forget you : ' * I shall never cease to deplore your loss : ' ' I can never hold up my head again : ' may be ethically true: but time will prove them logically false. The human being may be quite sincere in uttering them : but he will change his jnind. I do not mean to say that it is very pleasant to have to think thus : or that much good can come of dwelling too long upon the idea. It is a very chilling and sorrowful thing, to be reminded of all this in the hard, heartless way in which some old people like to drive the sad truth into the young. It is very fit and right that the girl of twenty, broken-hearted now because the young individual she is fond of is gone off to Australia, should believe that when he returns in five years he will find her unchanged : and should resent the remotest suggestion that by that time she will probably think and feel quite differently. It is fit and right that she should do all this, even though a prescient eye could discern that in two years exactly she will be married to somebody else : and married, too, not to some old hunx of great wealth whom her parents have badgered her which cannot Go On. 403 into marrying against her will ; but (much worse for the man in Australia, who has meanwhile taken to drinking) married with all her heart to some fine 'young fellow, very suitable in age and all other respects. Yet, certain though the general principle may be, a wise and kind man or woman will not take much pleasure in imparting the sad lesson, taught by experience, to younger hearts. No good can come of doing so. Bide your time, my friend : and the laws of nature will prevail. Water will not long run up hill. But while the stream is quite happy and quite resolute in flow- ing up an incline of one in twenty, there is no good in standing by it, and in roaring out that in a little while it will get tired of that. Experience tells us several things, which are not quite to the credit of our race : and it is wrong to chill a hope- ful and warm heart with these. We should be delighted to find that young heart falsifying them by its own history : let it do so if it can. And it is chilling and irritating to be often re- minded of the refrigerating power of Time upon all warm feelings and resolutions. I have known a young clergyman, appointed early in life to his first parish ; and entering upon his duty with tremendous zeal. I think a good man, however old, would re- joice at such a sight : would delightedly try to direct and counsel all that hearty energy, and to turn all that labour to the best account. And even 404 Concerning Things if he thought within himself that possibly all this might not quite last, I don't think he would go and tell the young minister so. And the aged man would thankfully remember, that he has known instances in which all that has lasted ; and would hope that in this instance it might last again. But I have known a cynical, heartless, time-hardened old man (the uncle, in fact, of my friend Mr. Snarling), listen with a grin of mingled contempt and malig- nity to the narration of the young parson's doings ; and explain the whole phenomena by a general principle, inexpressibly galling and discouraging to the young parson. ^ Oh,' says the cynical, heartless old individual, ' new brooms sweep clean ! ' That was all. The whole thing was explained and settled. I should like to apply a new knout to the old indi- vidual, and see if it would cut smartly. And then we are to remember, that though it be only a question of time with the existence of any- thing, that does not prove that the thing is of no value. A great part of all that we are enjoying, con- sists of Things which cannot Go On. And though the wear that there is in a thing be a great consider- ation in reckoning its worth ; and more especially, in the case of all Christian qualities, be the great test whether or not they are genuine ; yet things that are going, and going very fast, have their worth. And it is very fit that we should enjoy them while they last ; without unduly overclouding which cannot Go On. 405 our enjoyment of them by the recollection of their evanescence. ^Why,' said an eminent divine, — ' why should we pet and pamper these bodies of ours, which are soon to be reduced to a state of mucilaginous fusion ?' There was a plausibility about the question : and for about half a minute it tended to make you think, that it might be proper to leave off taking your daily bath, and brushing your nails and teeth : likewise that instead of patronising your tailor any further, it might be well to assume a horse-rug : and also that it might be unworthy to care for your dinner, and that for the future you should live on raw turnips. But of course, anything that revolts common sense, can never be a part of Christian doctrine or duty. And the natural reply to the rhetorical question I have quoted would of course be, that after these mortal frames are so fused, we shall wholly cease to care for them : but that meanwhile we shall suitably tend, feed, and clothe them, because it is comfort- able to do so ; because it is God's manifest inten- tion that we should do so : because great moral and spiritual advantage comes of our doing so : and because you have no more right to disparage and neglect your wonderful mortal frame, than any other talent or gift confided to you by God. Why should we neglect, or pretend to neglect, these bodies of ours, with which we are commanded to glorify God : which are bought with Christ's blood : which, even 4o6 Concerning Things through the last lowliness of mortal dissolution, even when turned to dust again, are ' still united to Christ :' and which are to rise again in glory and beauty, and be the redeemed soul's companion through eternity? And it is a mere sophism to put the shortness of a thing's continuance, as a reason Vv^hy it should not be cared for while it lasts. Of course, if it last but a short time, all the shorter will be the time through which we shall care for it. But let us make the best of things while they last : both as regards our care for them and our enjoy- ment of them. That a thing will soon be done with : that the cloud will soon blow by : is a good reason for bear- ing patiently what is painful. But it is very need- less to thrust in this consideration, to the end of spoiling the enjoyment of what is pleasant. I have seen people, when a little child, in a flutter of delighted anticipation, was going away to some little merrymaking, anxious to put down its un- seemly happiness by severely impressing the fact, that in a very few hours all the pleasure would be over, and lessons would begin again. And I have seen, with considerable wrath, a cloud descend upon the little face at the unwelcome suggestion. What earthly good is to come of this piece of stupid, well-meant malignity } It originates, doubtless, in that great fundamental belief in many narrow minds, that the more uncomfortable you are, the likelier which cannot Go On. 407 you are to be right : and that God is angr}- when he sees people happy. Unquestionably, most of the little enjoyments of life are very transient. All pleasant social gatherings : all visits to cheerful country houses : all holidays : are things which cannot go on. Xo doubt, that is true : but that is no reason why we should sulkily refuse to enjoy them while they last. There is no good end secured, by persisting in seeing * towers decayed as soon as built.' It is right, always latently, and sometimes expressly, to rem.ember that they must decay: but meanwhile, let us be thankful for their shelter and their beauty. Sit down, happily, on a July day, beneath the green shade of your beeches : do not needlessly strain what little imagination you have, to picture those branches leafless, and the winter wind and clouds racking overhead. Enjoy your parcel of new books when it comes, coming not often : cut the leaves peacefully, and welcome in each volume a new companion : then carefully decide the fit place on your shelves Avhere to dis- pose the pleasant accession to your store : and do not worry yourself by the reflection that when you die, the little library you collected may perhaps be scattered ; and the old, friendly-looking volumes fall into no one knows whose hands : perhaps be set forth on out-door bookstalls ; or be exhibited on the top of a wall, with a sack put over them when it begins to rain, as in a place which I have 4o8 Concerning Things seen. ^ What is the use of washing my hands ?' said a httle boy in my hearing : '■ they will very soon be dirty again ! ' Refuse, my reader, to accept the principle implied in the little boy's words : however specious it may seem. Whitewash your manse, if you be a Scotch minister, some time in April : paint your house in town, however speedily it may again grow black. Write your sermons diligently : write them on the very best paper you can get, and in a very distinct and careful hand : and pack them with attention in a due receptacle. It is, no doubt, only a question of time how long they will be needed, before the day of your departure shall make them no more than waste paper. Yet, though things which cannot go on, you may hope to get no small use out of them, to others and to yourself, before the time when the hand that tra- velled over the pages shall be cold with the last chill ; and the voice that spoke these words shall be hushed for ever. We know, obscurely, what we shall come to : and by God's grace we are content, and we hope to be prepared : but there is no need to overcast all life with the ceaseless anticipation of death. You may have read how John Hampden's grave was opened, at the earnest desire of an ex- tremely fat nobleman who was his injudicious ad- mirer. The poor wreck of humanity was there : and, as the sexton said, * We propped him up with a shovel at his back, and I cut off a lock of his which cannot Go On. 409 hair.' I hold with Abraham, who ' buried his dead from his sight ; ' I hold with Shakspeare, who desired that no one should disturb him in his lowly bed, till He shall awaken him whose right it is to do so. Yet I read no lesson of the vanity of Hampden's life, in that last sad picture of help- lessness and humiliation. He had come to that : yet all this does not show that his life was not a noble one while it lasted, though now^ it was done. He had his day : and he used it : whether well or ill let wiser men judge. And if it be right to say that he withstood tyranny, and helped to lay the foundation of his country's liberties, the whim of Lord Nugent and the propping up with the shovel can take nothing away from that. You understand me, my friend. You know the kind of people who revenge themselves upon human beings who meanwhile seem happy, by suggesting the idea that it cannot last. You see Mr, A., de- lighted with his beautiful new church : you know how Miss B. thinks the man to whom she is to be married next week, the handsomest, wisest, and best of mankind : you behold the elation of Mr. C. about that new pair of horses he has got : and if you be a malicious blockhead, you may greatly console yourself in the spectacle of the happiness of those individuals, by reflecting, and perhaps by saying, that it is all one of those things that cannot 4IO Concerning Things go on. Mr. A. will in a few months find no end of worry about that fine building : Miss B.'s husband, at present transfigured to her view, will settle into the very ordinary being he is : and Mr. C.'s horses will prove occasionally lame, and one of them a permanent roarer. Yet I think a wise man may say, I am aware I cannot go on very long ; yet I shall do my best in my little time. I look at the right hand which holds my pen. The pen will last but for a short space ; yet that is no reason why I should slight it now. The hand may go on longer. Yet, warm as it is now, and faithfully obeying my will as it has done through all those years, the day is coming when it must cease from its long labours. And, for myself, I am well content that it should be so. Let us not strive against the silent cur- rent, that bears us all away and away. Let us not quarrel with the reminders we meet on many country gravestones, addressed to us who are living from the fathers who have gone before. Yet you will think of Charles Lamb. He said (but nobody can say when Elia meant what he said), ' I conceive disgust at those impertinent and unbecoming fami- liarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that " Such aa he now is I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters ! ' which cannot Go On. 4 1 1 You may look on somewhat farther, in a sweet country burying-place. Dear old churchyard, once so familiar : with the old oaks and the gliding river, and the purple hills looking over : where the true heart of Jeanie Deans has mouldered into dust : I wonder what you are looking like to-day ! Many a time have I sat, in the quiet summer day, on a flat stone : and looked at the green graves : and thought that they were Things that could not Go On ! There were the graves of my predecessors : the day would come when old people in the parish would talk, not unkindly, of the days, long ago, when some one was minister whose name is neither here nor there. But it was a much stranger thing to think, in that silent and solitary place, of the great stir and bustle there shall be in it some day ! Here it has been for centuries: the green mossy stones and the little grassy undulations. But we know, from the best of all authority, that * the hour is coming ' which shall make a total change. This quiet, this decay, this forgetfulness, are not to Go on ! We look round, my reader, on all our possessions, and all our friends : and we discern that there are the elements of change in all. ' I am content to stand still,' says Elia, 'at the age to which I am arrived : I, and my friends : to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer : I do not want to be weaned by age ; or drop, like mellow fruit, into the grave.' 412 Concerning Things There are indeed moods of mind, in which all thoughtful men have possibly yielded to a like feeling : but I never heard but of one other man whose deliberate wish was just to go on in this round of life for ever. Yet, though content to be in the wise and kind hands in which we are, we feel it strange to find how all things are going. Your little children, my friend, are growing older : growing out of their pleasant and happy child- hood : the old people round you are wrinkling up, and breaking down. And in your constitution, in your way of life, there are things which cannot go on. There is some little physical malady, always rather increasing: and you cannot always be en- larging the doses of the medicine that is to correct it, or the opiates which make you sleep. I confess, with sorrow, that when I see an extraordinarily tidy garden, or a man dressed with special trim- ness, I cannot help looking forward to a day when all that is to cease : when the man will be some- what slovenly ; when the garden w411 be somewhat weedy. I think especially of the garden : and the garden which comes most home to me is the manse garden. It was a marvel of exquisite neatness and order: but a new minister comes, who does not care for gardening : and all that goes. And though rejoicing greatly to see a parish diligently worked, yet sometimes I behold the parochial machinery driven with such a pressure of steam, that I cannot which cannot Go On. but think it never will last. I have known men who never could calmly think : who lived in a hurry and a fever. There are places where it costs a constant effort, not always a successful effort, to avoid coming to such a life : but let us strive against it. Let us not have constant push, and ex- citement, and high pressure. I hate to feel a whirl around me, as of a huge cotton mill. Let us * study to be quiet!' And I have observed that clergymen who set that feverish machinery a-going, generally find it expedient to get away from it as speedily as may be, so as to avoid the discredit of its breaking down in their hands : being well aware that it is a thing which cannot go on. We cannot always go at a tearing gallop, with every nerve tense. Probably we are doing so, a great deal too much. If so, let us definitely moderate our pace, before the pace kills us. ^ It's a long lane that has no turning/ says the proverb, testifying to the depth of human belief in the Average : testifying to our latent conviction that anything very marked is not likely to go on. A great many people, very anxious and unhappy and disappointed, cherish some confused hope that surely all this has lasted so long, things must be going to mend. The night has been so long, that morning must be near : even though there be not the least appearance of the dawn as yet. If you have been a briefless barrister, or an unemployed 414 Things which cannot Go On. physician, or an unbeneficed clergyman, for a pretty long time ; even though there be no apparent reason now, more than years since, why success should come, you are ready to think that surely it must be coming now, at last. It seems to be overdue, by the theory of Average. Yet it is by no means certain that there is a good time coming, because the bad time has lasted long. Still, it is sometimes so. I have known a man, very laborious, very unfortunate, with whom everything failed : and after some years of this, I have seen a sudden turn of fortune come. And with exactly the same merit and the same industry as before, I have beheld him succeed in all he attempted, and gain no small eminence and reputation. ' It behoved him to dree his weird,' as was said by Meg Merrilies: and then the good time came. If you are happy, my reader, I wish your happiness may last. And if you are mean- while somewhat down and depressed, let us hope that all this may prove one of the Things which cannot Go On ! CONCL US ION. T is the way of Providence, in most cases, gradually to wean us from the things which we must learn to resign. And it las been so with this holiday-time, now all but ended. It is not now what it was when we came here. The leaves wore their summer green when we came : now they have faded into autumn russet and gold. The paths are strewn deep with those that have fallen ; and even in the quiet sunshiny afternoon, some bare trees look wintry against the sky. Like the leaves, the holiday-time has faded. It is outgrown. The appetite for work has revived : and all of us now look forward with as fresh interest to going back to the city to work, as we once did to coming away from the city to rest and play. We have been weaned, by slow degrees. Nature is hedging us in. The days are shortening fast : the breeze strikes chill in the afternoons, as they darken. The sea sometimes feels bitter, even though you enter it head foremost. Nor have 41 6 • Conclusion. there lacked days of ceaseless rain, and of keen north wind. Two lighthouses, one casting fitful flashes across the water, and one burning with a steady light, become great features of the scene by seven o'clock in the evening. A little later, there is a line of lights that stretches for miles at the base of the dark hills along the opposite shore : indoor occupations have supplanted evening walks. Yet a day or two, and those lights will no more be seen. The inhabitants of the dwellings they make visible will have returned to the great city; and very many of the pretty cottages and houses will remain untenanted through the long winter-time. As these last days are passing, one feels the vague remorse which is felt when most things draw to an end. One feels as if we might have made more of this time of quiet amid these beautiful hills. Surely we ought to have enjoyed the place and the time more! Thus we are disposed to blame ourselves ; but to blame ourselves unjustly. You would be aware of the like tendency, parting from almost anything; no matter how much you had made of it. You will know the vague remorse when dear friends die, thinking you ought to have been kinder to them : you will know it, though you did for them all that could be done by mortal. And when you come to die, my friend, looking back on the best-spent life, you will think how differently you would spend it were it to be spent again : you Conchtsion. 417 will feel as if your talent had been very poorly occupied. And doubtless with good reason, here. Last night, there was a magnificent sunset. You saw the great red ball above the mountains, visibly going down. It was curious, to watch the space between the sun and the dark ridge beneath it lessening moment by moment, till the sun slowly sunk from sight. Of course, he had been approach- ing his setting just as fast all day, as in those last minutes above the horizon; but there was some- thing infinitely more striking about the very end. At broad noonday, it is not so easy to fully take in the great truth which Dr. Johnson had engraved on the dial of his watch, that he might be often re- reminded of it, — the solemn Nu0 yap sp^srcn. It is in the last minutes that we are made to think that we ought to have valued the sun more when we had him ; and valued more the day he measured out. Day by day this volume has grown up through this holiday-time. In its earlier portion, the author diligently revised the chapters you have read. And by-and-by, the leisurely postman brought the daily pages of pleasing type, in which things look so different from what they look in the cramped magazine printing. Great is the enjoyment which antique ornaments and large initial letters afford to a simple mind. E E 41 8 Conclusion. And now it is the forenoon of our last day here : we go early to-morrow morning. Play-time is past ; and work-time is to begin. I hear voices outside, and the pattering of little feet : there are the sea and the hills ; and all the place is pervaded by the sound of the waves. On no day through our time here, did the place look as it does now : it wears the peculiar aspect which comes over places from which you are parting. How fast the holidays have slipped away ! And what a beautiful scene this is 1 What a pretty little Gothic church it is, in which for these Sundays that are gone the writer has taken part of the duty : how green the ivy on the cliffs, and the paths through the woods; what perpetual life in that ceaseless fluctuation of which you seldom lose sight for long ! But we must all set our faces to the months of work once more, thankful to feel fit for them : not without some anxiety in the prospect of them ; looking for the guidance and help of that kindest Hand which has led through the like before. LONDON PRINTED BY SP OT T I SVV O ODE AND CO. 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