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 NOTES FROM LIFE. 
 
WORKS IN VERSE AND PROSE. 
 
 BY HENRY TAYLOR, ESQ. 
 
 PHILIP VAN ARTEVELDE. 
 
 Fourth Edition. 24mo, 2s. 6d. 
 
 EDWIN THE FAIR, and ISAAC COMNENUS. 
 
 Second Edition. 24mo, 2s. 6d. 
 
 THE STATESMAN. 
 
 Fcap. 8vo, 6s. 6d. 
 
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 NOTES FROM LIFE, 
 
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 NOTES FROM BOOKS. 
 
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NOTES FROM LIFE 
 
 IN 
 
 SIX ESSAYS. 
 
 MONEY. 
 
 HUMILITY & INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 WISDOM, 
 
 CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 CHILDREN. 
 
 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 HENRY TAYLOR, 
 it 
 
 AUTHOR OF "PHILIP VAN ARTEVELDE," "NOTES FROM BOOKS," ETC. 
 
 THIRD EDITION. 
 
 LONDON : 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
 
 1849. 
 

 LOHDOS : 
 LDBURY 4SD EVAN'S, PRINTERS, WHITE* RIA RS. 
 
 Gift 
 
 W. L. Shoemaker 
 
 ? S '06 
 

 THE EARL OF ABERDEEN, K.T., 
 
 ETC. ETC. ETC. 
 
 THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED, 
 
 GREAT RESPECT AND REGARD, 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 In the year 1836 I published a book called 
 the " Statesman," a title much found fault 
 with at the time, and in truth not very 
 judiciously chosen. It contained the views 
 and maxims respecting the transaction of 
 public business, which twelve years of expe- 
 rience had suggested to me. But my expe- 
 rience had been confined within the doors of 
 an office, and the book was wanting in that 
 general interest which might possibly have 
 been felt in the results of a more extensive 
 and varied conversancy with public life. 
 
viii PREFACE. 
 
 Moreover, the sub-sarcastic vein in which 
 certain parts of it were written was not 
 very well understood, and what was meant 
 for an exposure of some of the world's ways 
 was, I believe, very generally mistaken for 
 a recommendation of them. I advert, now, 
 to this book and its indifferent fortunes, be- 
 cause whatever may have been its demerits, 
 my present work must be regarded as to 
 some extent comprehended in the same de- 
 sign, — that, namely, of embodying in the form 
 of maxims and reflections the immediate 
 results of an attentive observation of life, — 
 of official life in the former volume, — of life 
 at large in this. For more than twenty years 
 I have been in the habit of noting these 
 results as they were thrown up, when the 
 facts and occurrences that gave rise to them 
 
PREFACE. ix 
 
 were fresh in my mind/- A large portion of 
 them I would more willingly have transfused 
 into dramatic compositions. Year after year 
 I have indulged the belief that I might find 
 health, leisure, and opportunity for doing so, 
 nor do I yet relinquish the hope that I may 
 gain the time for some further efforts of 
 that nature before I lose the faculty. But 
 the years wear away, and though I do not 
 hold that youth is the poet's prime, yet I feel 
 that after youth the imagination cannot be 
 put on and taken off with the same easy 
 versatility, — that a continuous absorption in 
 
 * Some of the notes were originally made in verse ; others 
 were, from time to time, converted into verse, to serve the 
 purposes of dramatic or poetic works in progress or in con- 
 templation; and I have not hesitated to quote the verses in 
 illustration of the prose, as often as the versified form seemed 
 to give a reflection or an aphorism a better chance of finding 
 a resting-place in the memory of the reader. 
 
x PREFACE. 
 
 the dramatic theme is more indispensable to 
 its treatment, and that, consequently, such 
 pursuits come to be less readily combined 
 with other avocations. Other avocations I 
 am unable to discard, and lest, therefore, I 
 should never be in a condition to realise a 
 better hope, I have put into this prosaic form 
 such of my reflections on life as I have 
 thought worthy in one way or another to 
 be preserved. 
 
 MORTLAKE, 
 
 November, 1847. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 MONEY . 1 
 
 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE 38 
 
 CHOICE IN MARRIAGE 56 
 
 WISDOM 97 
 
 CHILDREN 118 
 
 THE LIFE POETIC 143 
 
ESSAYS 
 
 OF MONEY. 
 
 The philosophy which affects to teach us 
 a contempt of money does not run very deep ; 
 for, indeed, it ought to be still more clear to 
 the philosopher than it is to ordinary men, 
 that there are few things in the world of 
 greater importance. And so manifold are 
 the bearings of money upon the lives and 
 characters of mankind, that an insight which 
 should search out the life of a man in his 
 pecuniary relations would penetrate into 
 almost every cranny of his nature. He who 
 knows, like St. Paul, both how to spare and 
 how to abound, has a great knowledge : for 
 if we take account of all the virtues with 
 which money is mixed up, — honesty, justice, 
 
Z OF MONEY. 
 
 generosity, charity, frugality, forethought, 
 self-sacrifice, — and of their correlative vices, — 
 it is a knowledge which goes near to cover 
 the length and breadth of humanity : and a 
 right measure and manner in getting, saving, 
 spending, giving, taking, lending, borrowing, 
 and bequeathing, would almost argue a 
 perfect man. 
 
 First : — As to the getting of money. This 
 involves dangers which do not belong to the 
 mere possession of it. " Blessed is the rich 
 that is found without blemish, and hath not 
 gone after gold/' says the Son of Sirach ; and 
 again, — " He that loveth gold shall not be jus- 
 tified, and he that followeth corruption shall 
 have enough thereof."* Yet industry must 
 take an interest in its own fruits ; and God 
 has appointed that the mass of mankind 
 shall be moved by this interest, and have 
 their daily labour sweetened by it; and 
 there may be a blessing even upon the going 
 after gold, if it be not with an inordinate 
 
 * Ecclesiasticus, xxxi. 8. 
 
OF MONEY. 3 
 
 appetite — if the gold be not loved for its own 
 sake, and if the manner of it be without 
 blemish. But the danger arises out of the 
 tendency of the human mind to forget the 
 end in the means, and the difficulty of 
 going after gold for the love of the benefits 
 which it may confer, without going after it 
 also for the mere love of getting it and keep- 
 ing it, which is "following corruption." It 
 behoves him who is getting money, therefore, 
 even more than him who has it by inherit- 
 ance, to bear in mind what are the uses of 
 money, and what are the proportions and 
 proprieties to be observed in saving, giving, 
 and spending: for rectitude in the manage- 
 ment of money consists in the symmetry of 
 these three. 
 
 Sudden and enormous gains almost always 
 disturb the balance : for a man can scarcely 
 change his scale suddenly, and yet hold his 
 proportions : and hence proceeds one of the 
 many evils of highly-speculative commerce, 
 with its abrupt vicissitudes of fortune. The 
 man who engages in it can scarcely have 
 
 B 2 
 
4 OF MONEY. 
 
 any fixed and regulated manner of dealing 
 with his net income ; he knows not how 
 much he ought to save, how much he may 
 permit himself to spend, how much he can 
 afford to give: whilst, even if he could 
 know, the extreme excitements of fear and 
 hope to which he lies open, occupy his mind 
 too much for him to give many thoughts to 
 such matters. And if what is called bold 
 commercial enterprise be a thing to be 
 rejoiced in as promoting the physical well- 
 being of mankind, and thereby, perhaps, in 
 the train of consequences, their moral inte- 
 rests, it is only through that Providence by 
 which good is brought out of evil. And the 
 actors in such enterprises, when, as is mostly 
 the case, they are merely " going after gold," 
 and not considering either the physical or 
 moral results, are, in their own minds and 
 hearts, " following corruption," and are likely 
 to " have enough thereof." 
 
 A moderated and governed course in the 
 getting of money is the more difficult, because 
 this is, of all pursuits, that in which a man 
 
OF MONEY. O 
 
 meets with the greatest pressure of competi- 
 tion. So many are putting their hearts into 
 this work, that he who keeps his out of it, is 
 not unlikely to fare ill in the strife. And for 
 this reason it were well for a man, not perhaps 
 altogether to abate his desire of gain, (though 
 this should be done if it be excessive), but 
 more assiduously still to direct his desires 
 beyond, and purify the desire of gain by 
 associating with it the desire to accomplish 
 some scheme of beneficent expenditure. And 
 let no man imagine that the mere investment 
 for reproduction, though economists may 
 justly regard it as beneficial to mankind, will 
 re-act upon his own heart for good. 
 
 George Herbert is a good counsellor on 
 this head of money-getting : — 
 
 " Yet in thy thriving still misdoubt some evil ; 
 Lest gaining gain on thee, and make thee dim 
 To all things else. Wealth is the Conjuror's Devil, 
 
 Whom, when he thinks he hath, the Devil hath him. 
 Gold thou may'st safely touch ; hut if it stick 
 Unto thy hands, it woundeth to the quick." * 
 
 * The Church Porch. 
 
6 OF MONEY. 
 
 Secondly: — As to the saving of money. 
 The saving, like the getting, should be intel- 
 ligent of a purpose beyond : it should not be 
 saving for saving's sake, but for the sake of 
 some worthy object to be accomplished by 
 the money saved. And especially we are to 
 guard against that accumulative instinct or 
 passion which is ready to take possession of 
 all collectors. 
 
 Some very small portion of a man's income 
 may perhaps be justifiably saved to make 
 provision against undefined and unforeseen 
 contingencies, and also to assure himself that 
 he can save. But in the case of most men 
 there will be a sufficiency of distinct and 
 definable ends, whether certain or contingent, 
 which will not only justify, but enjoin, the 
 laying by of a proportion of their income. A 
 young man may very well lay by money to 
 enable him to be more free in the choice of a 
 wife. A middle-aged man may lay it by in 
 order that his old age may have fewer labours 
 and cares or more comforts. A father may 
 lay it by for his children. But in all these 
 
OF MONEY. 7 
 
 cases, if the end be not kept steadily in view 
 from first to last, and the means kept no 
 more than proportionate and subordinate, 
 there is the risk that the saver may become 
 a miser. The young man may grow old with- 
 out taking a wife, and save still when he no 
 longer thinks of marrying ; or he may think 
 that what he has saved may entitle him to a 
 rich wife, rather than enable him to choose. 
 The middle-aged man may reach old age 
 with no disposition to increase his comforts 
 and every disposition to increase his hoard. 
 And finally, the father, though his motive for 
 saving is the most natural and universal, and 
 in general the most warrantable of all, may 
 yet be betrayed by the very largeness of the 
 allowance which the world makes in such 
 cases, into avaricious errors. His case, as 
 being the most common and that in which 
 men are least on their guard, deserves to be 
 the more closely considered. 
 
 The prudent parent is less likely to be cor- 
 rupted into a covetous parent, if he be saving 
 for several children, than if it be for one 
 
8 OF MONEY. 
 
 only child, or for an eldest son : for avarice 
 projects itself more readily in the singular 
 number than in the plural ; and saving for a 
 provision is always to be distinguished from 
 saving for aggrandisement, which is no other 
 than a form of avarice. Saving for an only 
 child or eldest son may be. defended when the 
 father has means beyond the devisable patri- 
 mony, and when that devisable patrimony is 
 insufficient for the station to be inherited along 
 with it. But if the patrimony be insufficient, 
 and the father have no extrinsic means, he 
 must not make it more insufficient in Ms 
 lifetime, in order that it may be less insuffi- 
 cient in his son's : he is not to be niggardly 
 in order that his son may be liberal. He may 
 indeed retrench in matters connected with 
 the keeping up of appearances — that is, he 
 may ostensibly retire from his station for a 
 time, or for life ; but he must not, whilst 
 keeping up the appearances of his station, 
 fall short in matters of bounty and liberality. 
 In saving for younger children, the parent 
 has to consider what is a competency ; and if 
 
OF MONEY. 9 
 
 he be wise, and can count upon an average 
 share of health and abilities in his younger 
 sons, he will not relieve them from the neces- 
 sity of earning the main part of their liveli- 
 hood ; for unless a man's property be large 
 enough to find him an occupation in the 
 management of it and in the discharge of the 
 duties incident to it, (which generally speak- 
 ing can only be the case of the eldest son,) it 
 will be essential to his happiness that he 
 should have to w r ork for his bread. And it 
 is on this fact that the custom of succession 
 according to primogeniture is to be defended ; 
 for if any one is sacrificed by this custom, it 
 is rather the eldest than the younger sons ; 
 the eldest being too often pampered into self- 
 love, — the most wretched inheritance of all, 
 — the younger being trained in self-sacrifice, 
 fortified in self-reliance, and through industry 
 and progress leading a wiser, a better, a more 
 generous, and a happier life. 
 
 How much to save for a daughter is another 
 question ; and since a woman's life for the 
 most part turns upon her marriage, it is her 
 
 B 3 
 
10 OF MONEY. 
 
 matrimonial prospects which are principally to 
 be regarded. Let not her wealth be too tempt- 
 ing : an heiress has a large assortment of suit- 
 ors, and yet an ill choice : and do not, if you 
 can help it, let her poverty be an obstruction ; 
 for prudent men make good husbands, and in 
 many cases a man cannot marry with pru- 
 dence where there is not the fair facility of a 
 moderate fortune. I have heard, indeed, of 
 a father who stinted his daughters' dowries 
 on purpose that poor men might not be able 
 to marry them ; whence he inferred that rich 
 men would. He might be mistaken in his 
 inference ; for though rich men can afford to 
 marry poor maids, yet men are not found to 
 wish less for money because they want it less, 
 and in the making of marriages it is gene- 
 rally seen that "wealth will after kind." 
 Even if he were not mistaken, however, the 
 calculation was but a sordid one at the best ; 
 and considering how many requisites must be 
 combined to make a good husband and a 
 happy marriage, the father is likely to impose 
 a cruel limitation of choice who needlessly 
 
OF MONEY. 11 
 
 adds wealth to the number of essentials. 
 Even the marriage which is poor through an 
 improvident choice, is less likely to end ill 
 than that which is rich through a constrained 
 choice. 
 
 There is yet another domestic object which 
 may be a fair ground for saving out of a 
 patrimony. One of the incidents of the law 
 and custom of primogeniture to which our 
 natural feelings are the least easily recon- 
 ciled, is the effect of it upon the wife and 
 mother when she passes into widowhood. 
 She is deposed from her station and deprived 
 of her affluence at the moment of her greatest 
 domestic calamity, and her own child is the 
 person to whom they are transferred. It 
 may be that the cares, duties and responsi- 
 bilities of a large property and a high pro- 
 prietary station, are not suitable to a widow 
 in the decline of life : but this is not left for 
 her to determine, and very frequently the still 
 less acceptable cares of a straitened income 
 and a total change in her mode of life are 
 fixed upon her. The force of custom has 
 
12 OF MONEY. 
 
 brought the feelings of mankind into more 
 accordance than one would have thought 
 possible with so unnatural an arrangement ; 
 but the husband needs not to be charged with 
 parsimony who should save money with a 
 view to mitigate the future contrast between 
 his wife's position and his widow's. 
 
 Of all undue savings, those of churchmen 
 should be regarded with the least toleration. 
 For though all wealth is, morally speaking, 
 held in trust, the trust is of a more sacred 
 nature in the case of wealth derived from the 
 revenues of the Church. Out of that hire of 
 which the labourer is worthy, he may leave 
 to his family a competent provision ; but he 
 does not leave to them a good name, if he 
 leaves to them wealth which he did not in- 
 herit. On this point the Church at large has 
 latterly perhaps stood clear. It were to be 
 wished that for the future it should see the 
 best example set by the highest of its digni- 
 taries. 
 
 Thirdly : — As to the spending of money. 
 
 The art of living easily as to money, is to 
 
OF MONEY. 13 
 
 pitch your scale of living one degree below 
 your means. Comfort and enjoyment are 
 more dependent upon easiness in the detail of 
 expenditure, than upon one degree's difference 
 in the scale. 
 
 Guard against false associations of pleasure 
 with expenditure, — the notion that because 
 pleasure can be purchased with money, there- 
 fore money cannot be spent without enjoy- 
 ment. What a thing costs a man is no true 
 measure of what it is worth to him ; and yet 
 how often is his appreciation governed by no 
 other standard, as if there were a pleasure in 
 expenditure per se. 
 
 Let yourself feel a want before you provide 
 against it. You are more assured that it is 
 a real want ; and it is worth while to feel it 
 a little, in order to feel the relief from it. 
 
 When you are undecided as to which of 
 two courses you would like best, choose the 
 cheapest. This rule will not only save 
 money, but save also a good deal of trifling- 
 indecision. 
 
 Too much leisure leads to expense ; because 
 
14 OF MONEY. 
 
 when a man is in want of objects, it occurs 
 to him that they are to be had for money ; 
 and he invents expenditures in order to pass 
 the time. 
 
 A thoroughly conscientious mode of regu- 
 lating expenditure implies much care and 
 trouble in resisting imposition, detecting 
 fraud, preventing waste, and doing what in 
 you lies to guard the honesty of your stewards, 
 servants, and tradesmen, by not leading them 
 into temptation but delivering them from 
 evil. A man who should be justly sensible 
 of the duties involved in expenditure and 
 determined to discharge them, would find the 
 burthen of them heavy; and instead of having 
 a pleasure in expense, he would probably 
 desire as much as might be to avoid the 
 trouble of it. We sometimes hear rich men 
 charged with parsimony because they look 
 minutely to differences of cost ; but if they 
 are spending their money in a right spirit, 
 the question they have to consider is, not 
 whether the sum is of importance to them- 
 selves, but whether it is right or wrong that 
 
OF MONEY. 15 
 
 it should be given and taken. If then the 
 acquisition of great wealth involve many 
 cares and troubles, not few are those which 
 should attend the due dispensing and 
 managing thereof, as well as the execution 
 of the various trusts belonging to the station 
 into which great wealth will lift a man : — 
 
 " For now know I in veray sothfastnesse 
 That in gret lordship, if I me wel avise, 
 Ther is gret servitude in sondry wise." * 
 
 Young men, instead of undertaking the 
 disagreeable office of checking accounts, are 
 often inclined to lay out a good deal of 
 money in the purchase of bows and smiles, 
 which they mistake for respect. It is only 
 the right and just payment that commands 
 real respect : and the obsequious extortioner 
 well understanding the weakness on which he 
 practises, will often repay himself for his own 
 servility, not only in money, but in secret 
 contempt for his dupe. 
 
 Prodigality is indeed the vice of a weak 
 
 * Chaucer. Clerke's Tale, Pars 5 a . 
 
16 OF MONEY. 
 
 nature, as avarice is of a strong one; it 
 comes of a weak craving for those blandish- 
 ments of the world which are easily to be had 
 for money, and which, when obtained, are 
 as much worse than worthless as a harlot's 
 love is worse than none. 
 
 " Thrice happy he whose nobler thoughts despise 
 To make an object of so easy gains ; 
 Thrice happy he who scorns so poor a prize 
 Should be the crown of his heroic pains : 
 Thrice happy he who ne'er was born to try 
 Her frowns or smiles ; or being born, did lie 
 In his sad nurse's arms an hour or two, and die."* 
 
 Fourthly: — As to giving and taking. All 
 giving is not generous; and the gift of a spend- 
 thrift is seldom given in generosity; for prodi- 
 gality is, equally with avarice, a selfish vice : 
 nor can there be a more spurious view of 
 generosity than that which has been often 
 taken by sentimental comedians and novelists, 
 when they have represented it in combination 
 with recklessness and waste. He who gives 
 only what he would as readily throw away, 
 
 * Quarles. 
 
OF MONEY. 17 
 
 gives without generosity ; for the essence of 
 generosity is in self-sacrifice. Waste, on the 
 contrary, comes always by self-indulgence ; 
 and the weakness and softness in which it 
 begins will not prevent the hard-heartedness 
 to which all selfishness tends at last. The 
 mother of Gertruda 
 
 " In many a vigil of her last sick bed, 
 Bid her beware of spendthrifts as of men 
 That seeming in their youth not worse than light, 
 Would end not so, but with the season change ; 
 For Time, she said, which makes the serious soft, 
 Turns lightness into hardness." 
 
 When you give, therefore, take to yourself 
 no credit for generosity, unless you deny 
 yourself something in order that you may 
 give. 
 
 I have known a man who was never rich, 
 and was indeed in a fair way to be ruined, 
 make a present of several hundred pounds, 
 under what he probably conceived to be an 
 impulse of generous friendship : but if that 
 man had been called upon to get up an hour 
 earlier in the morning to serve his friend, I 
 
18 OF MONEY. 
 
 do not believe that he would have done it. 
 The fact was that he had no real value for 
 money, no real care for consequences which 
 were not to be immediate: in parting with 
 some hundreds of pounds he flattered his self- 
 love with a show of self-sacrifice ; in parting 
 with an hour's folding of the hands to sleep, 
 the self-sacrifice would have been real, and 
 the show of it not very magnificent. 
 
 Again, do not take too much credit even 
 for your self-denial, unless it be cheerfully 
 and genially undergone. Do not dispense 
 your bounties only because you know it 
 to be your duty, and are afraid to leave it 
 undone : for this is one of those duties 
 which should be done more in the spirit of 
 love than in that of fear. I have known 
 persons who have lived frugally, and spent 
 a large income almost entirely in acts of 
 charity and bounty, and yet with all this 
 they had not the open hand. When the 
 act did not define itself as a charitable duty, 
 the spirit of the God-beloved giver was 
 wanting, and they failed in all those little 
 
OF MONEY. 19 
 
 genial liberalities towards friends, relatives 
 and dependents, which tend to cultivate the 
 sympathies and kindnesses of our nature 
 quite as much as charity to the poor or 
 munificence in the contribution to public 
 objects. 
 
 The kindness from which a gift proceeds 
 will appear in the choice as well as in the 
 cost of it. I have known a couple who 
 married on 400Z. a year, receive three car- 
 riages as -wedding gifts, they being unable 
 of course to keep one. The donors had been 
 thinking rather of what would do credit 
 to themselves, than of what would be 
 serviceable and acceptable : or they had not 
 been thinking at all ; and if so they had not 
 been really kind ; for real kindness is 
 thoughtful. 
 
 When gifts proceed from public bodies, 
 communities, or high functionaries, in the 
 way of testimonials, and are to do honour 
 to the party receiving them, they should if 
 possible assume a shape in which they will 
 be seen without being shown. 
 
20 OF MONEY. 
 
 There is often as much generosity in 
 accepting gifts as there can be in bestowing 
 them, — the generosity of a nature which 
 stands too strong in its humility to fear 
 humiliation, which knows its own indepen- 
 dence, and is glad to be grateful. 
 
 Upon a very different sense of generosity 
 are some of the practices of the present 
 time founded. It is not an uncommon thing 
 amongst some persons, with peculiar notions 
 of doing things delicately, for contributions 
 to be conveyed to some decayed gentle- 
 woman under various pretences which are 
 meant to disguise, more or less transparently, 
 the fact that she receives money in charity. 
 Some wretched products of her pencil, which 
 would not command one penny in the market, 
 are privately sold for five shillings a piece, 
 and the proceeds are paid to her as if she 
 had earned them ; or a few deplorable 
 verses are stitched together and disposed 
 of in the same manner. It is surely impos- 
 sible to take a more unworthy view of 
 what should be the character and spirit 
 
OF MONEY. 21 
 
 of a gentlewoman, than that which this 
 sort of proceeding implies. If a gentle- 
 woman be in want, she should say so with 
 openness, dignity, and truth, and accept in 
 the manner that becomes a gentlewoman, 
 in all lowliness but without the slightest 
 humiliation or shame, whatever money she 
 has occasion for and others are walling to 
 bestow. The relations between her and 
 them will in that case admit of respect 
 on the one side and gratitude on the 
 other. But where false and juggling pre- 
 tences are resorted to, no worthy or honest 
 feeling can have place. Delicacy is a strong 
 thing; and whether in giving or taking, 
 let us always maintain the maxim, that 
 what is most sound and true is most 
 delicate. 
 
 There are some other w r ays of the world 
 in this matter of charity, which proceed, I 
 think, upon false principles and feelings, 
 — charity dinners, charity balls, charity 
 bazaars, and so forth ; devices (not even once 
 blessed) for getting rid of distress without 
 
22 OF MONEY. 
 
 calling out any compassionate feeling in 
 those who give or any grateful feeling in 
 those who receive. God sends misery and 
 misfortune into the world for a purpose ; 
 they are to be a discipline for His creatures 
 who endure, and also for His creatures who 
 behold them. In those they are to give occa- 
 sion for patience, resignation, the spiritual 
 hopes and aspirations which spring from pain 
 when there comes no earthly relief, or the 
 love and gratitude which earthly ministra- 
 tions of relief are powerful to promote. In 
 these they are to give occasion for pity, self- 
 sacrifice, and devout and dutiful thought, 
 subduing — for the moment at least — the 
 light, vain, and pleasure-loving motions of 
 our nature. If distress be sent into the 
 world for these ends, it is not well that it 
 should be shuffled out of the world without 
 any of these ends being accomplished ; and 
 still less that it should be made the occasion 
 of furthering ends in some measure opposite 
 to these ; that it should be danced away at 
 a ball, or feasted away at a dinner, or 
 
OF MONEY. 23 
 
 dissipated at a bazaar. Better were it in 
 my mind, that misery should run its course 
 with nothing but the mercy of God to stay 
 it, than that we should thus corrupt our 
 charities. 
 
 Let me not be misunderstood. Feasting 
 and dancing, in themselves and by them- 
 selves, I by no means disparage : there is a 
 time and a place for them; but things 
 which are excellent at one time and occa- 
 sion, are a mere desecration at another. It 
 is much more easy to desecrate our duties 
 than to consecrate our amusements; and 
 better therefore not to mix them up with 
 each other. 
 
 Another modern mode is to raise a sub- 
 scription by shillings or pennies, — fixing the 
 contribution at so low a sum that nobody 
 can care whether they give it or not, and 
 collecting it in the casual intercourse of 
 society. This is a less vitiated mode than the 
 others, being of a more negative character : 
 but if the others are corrupted charity, this 
 is no better than careless charity. 
 
24 OF MONEY. 
 
 Lastly, there is a rule in giving which is 
 often overlooked by those whose generosity 
 is not sufficiently thoughtful and severe. 
 Generosity comes to be perverted from its 
 uses when it ministers to selfishness in others; 
 and it should be our care to give all needful 
 support to our neighbour. in his self-denial, 
 rather than to bait a trap for his self-indul- 
 gence ; in short, to give him pleasure only 
 when it will do him good, not when sacrifices 
 on our part are the correlatives of abuses 
 on his ; for he who pampers the selfishness 
 of another, does that other a moral injury 
 which cannot be compensated by any amount 
 of gratification imparted to him. 
 
 " Give thou to no man, if thou wish him well, 
 What he may not in honour's interest take ; 
 Else shalt thou but befriend his faults, allied 
 Against his better with his baser self." 
 
 Amongst the questionable acts which are 
 done from generous motives, is the not un- 
 common one of a son and heir in tail paying 
 the debts of a prodigal father deceased, out of 
 property which the father had no right to 
 
OF MONEY. 25 
 
 appropriate. There may be instances in 
 which such nn act would be worthy of all 
 praise ; but perhaps the cases are not few 
 in which the effect is purely pernicious, 
 enabling a spendthrift to squander another's 
 inheritance in addition to his own; for the 
 frequency of the practice leads money-lenders 
 and others to calculate on the chances. 
 
 The motive of the son is the pious and 
 commendable one of shielding a parent's 
 memory from disgrace. But how far is this 
 end accomplished ? The selfishness which is 
 the ground of disgrace, is the same whether 
 it be the heir or the creditor that suffers by 
 it. The heir may suffer in silence, and the 
 sting of personal damage may make the 
 creditor cry out; but in every just judgment 
 the shame and dishonour attaching to the 
 memory of the dead man should be measured 
 by what he did when he was alive, and not 
 by the silence or outcry ensuing; and it is 
 hardly a high view of moral assoilment, which 
 can regard with much complacency the mere 
 stifling of reproaches and hushing up of a 
 
26 OF MONEY. 
 
 * 
 
 parent's memory. In many cases, therefore, 
 the weak and careless, or interested and 
 usurious creditor, should be left to bear his 
 loss when his debtor dies insolvent. Still 
 our philosophy is not to put Nature out of 
 office ; and if the prodigality of the parent 
 have been merely one of the infirmities of 
 " a frail good man/' and if the conduct of 
 the creditor have not been grossly culpable, 
 natural feeling should take its course, and 
 the blessing will be upon Shem and Japhet 
 rather than upon Ham. 
 
 Fifthly : — As to lending and borrowing. 
 
 Never lend money to a Mend, unless you 
 are satisfied that he does wisely and well in 
 borrowing it. Borrowing is one of the most 
 ordinary ways in which weak men sacrifice 
 the future to the present, and thence is it 
 that the gratitude for a loan is so proverbially 
 evanescent : for the future, becoming present 
 in its turn, will not be well-pleased with 
 those who have assisted in doing it an injury. 
 By conspiring with your friend to defraud 
 his future self, you naturally incur his future 
 
OF MONEY. 27 
 
 displeasure. Take to heart, therefore, the 
 admonition of the ancient courtier : — 
 
 " Neither a borrower nor a lender be ; 
 For loan oft loseth both itself and friend, 
 And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. 5 '* 
 
 To withstand solicitations for loans is often 
 a great trial of firmness ; the more especially 
 as the pleas and pretexts alleged are gene- 
 rally made plausible at the expense of truth ; 
 for nothing breaks down a man's truthfulness 
 more surely than pecuniary embarrassment — 
 
 " An unthrift was a liar from all time ; 
 Never was debtor that was not deceiver.''" 
 
 The refusal which is at once the most safe 
 from vacillation, and perhaps as little apt to 
 give offence as any, is the point blank refusal, 
 without reasons assigned. Acquiescence is 
 more easily given in the decisions of a strong 
 will, than in reasons, which weak men, under 
 the bias of self-love, will always imagine 
 themselves competent to controvert. 
 
 * Shakespeare. 
 c 2 
 
28 OF MONEY. 
 
 Some men will lend money to a friend in 
 order, as it were, to purchase a right of 
 remonstrance : but the right so purchased is 
 worth nothing. You may buy the man's ears, 
 but not his heart or his understanding. 
 
 I have never known a debtor or a prodigal 
 who was not, in his own estimation, an injured 
 man ; and I have generally found that those 
 who had not suffered by them were disposed to 
 side with them ; for it is the weak who make 
 the outcry, and it is by the outcry that the 
 world is wont to judge. They who lend money 
 to spendthrifts should be prepared, therefore, 
 to suffer in their reputation as w T ell as in 
 their purse. Let us learn from the Son of 
 Sirach : — " Many, when a thing was lent 
 them, reckoned it to be found, and put them 
 to trouble that helped them. Till he hath 
 received he will kiss a man's hand; and 
 for his neighbour's money he will speak 
 submissly ; but when he should repay, he will 
 prolong the time, and return words of grief, 
 and complain of the time. If he prevail he 
 shall hardly receive the half, and he will 
 
OF MONEY. 29 
 
 count as if he had found it ; if not, he hath 
 deprived him of his money, and he hath 
 gotten him an enemy without cause : he 
 payeth him with cursing and railings, and for 
 honour he will pay him disgrace." 
 
 It is a common reproach with which man- 
 kind assails mankind, that those who fall 
 into poverty are forsaken by their friends : — 
 
 " Ay, quoth Jacques, 
 Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens ; 
 'Tis just the fashion : wherefore do you look 
 Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there ?"* 
 
 But before the friends of the poor be con- 
 demned, it would be well to inquire whether 
 their poverty have been honestly come by; and 
 I believe it would very rarely be found that a 
 person in a fair condition of life is allowed to 
 sink unassisted into extreme indigence with- 
 out some serious fault and offence : and the 
 person having so sunk, it will be found to be 
 still more rarely the case that the pressure 
 of poverty is not too strong for his character. 
 
 * " As You Like it," Act ii. Scene 1. 
 
30 OF MONEY. 
 
 It is when the character has given way, that 
 poverty is deserted: for pity and affection 
 divorced from respect, lose the main element 
 of their strength and permanency. 
 
 The ordinary course of things, then, is as 
 follows : — A becoming embarrassed, through 
 some (perhaps venial) imprudence, is kindly 
 assisted by his friends, B, C, and D ; who, 
 however, do not altogether approve his con- 
 duct, but think it would be ungenerous in 
 them, under the protection of the favours they 
 are conferring, to assail him with reproaches. 
 So far all goes smoothly between A on the 
 one hand, and B, C, D, on the other. But 
 A, having, by the loans he has received, staved 
 off any immediate consequences of his im- 
 prudence, is under a rather stronger tempta- 
 tion than before to forego the severe self- 
 denial which would set him right again. He 
 has now broken the ice in the matter of 
 asking favours: he has incurred whatever 
 humiliation belongs to it ; and having begged 
 once, it costs him comparatively little to beg 
 again. This process of begging and borrow- 
 
OF MONEY. 31 
 
 ing goes on therefore, becoming continually 
 more frequent and less efficacious ; and as the 
 borrower grows less and less scrupulous, he 
 nourishes his pride (the ordinary refuge of 
 those w r ho lose their independence) and 
 resents every repulse as an insult. B, C, 
 and D then discover that they are not to be 
 thanked for what they have lent, but rather 
 reproached for not lending more and more ; 
 whereupon they withdraw their friendship; 
 and those who ignorantly look on, or perhaps 
 hear the story of A, whilst B, C, and D are 
 silent out of consideration for him, make 
 remarks on inconstancy in friendship and 
 the manner in which men are forsaken in 
 their adversity and distress. 
 
 The desertion by friends, however well 
 merited, leads the embarrassed man to con- 
 sider himself as a castaway, and throw him- 
 self into still more reckless and shameless 
 courses ; and on the part of men in this condi- 
 tion there is sometimes seen a perfect infa- 
 tuation of extravagance, which seems to 
 proceed from the delusions of a disordered 
 
32 OF MONEY. 
 
 mind and a sort of fascination in ruin. Such 
 men come to have a repugnance to spare 
 expense, because it brings the feeling of their 
 difficulties home to them ; and a relief in pro- 
 fuseness, because it seems for the moment to 
 renounce the very notion of embarrassment. 
 The end may be short of the gallows (for in 
 our days the gallows has fallen out of favour), 
 but it will scarcely be short of a punishment 
 worse than death : for men will not tolerate 
 in its necessary consequences that to which 
 they are very indulgent in its inchoation ; and 
 the " unfortunate debtor " who was cockered 
 with compassion whilst he was in that stage 
 of his existence, is regarded with just indig- 
 nation and abhorrence when he has passed 
 into that of the desperate outcast : though it 
 may be as much in the course of nature that 
 the one stage should follow the other, as that 
 a tadpole, if he lives, should grow to be a toad. 
 Creditors have always been an obnoxious 
 people, and in divers times and countries the 
 laws which have awarded imprisonment for 
 insolvent debt have shared in their unpopu- 
 
OF MONEY. 33 
 
 larity. But when we trace debt in its conse- 
 quences and look to all the social evils which 
 have their root in it, and when we consider 
 that in moral as well as in physical thera- 
 peutics, the principle of withstanding com- 
 mencements is all-important, we may well, 
 I think, bring ourselves to believe that insol- 
 vent debt should be regarded as presumably 
 criminal, and unless proved to be otherwise, 
 should fall within the visitations of penal 
 law. 
 
 There remains only to be considered, 
 Sixthly : — The subject of bequeathing : and 
 some topics which might have fallen under 
 this head have been anticipated in treating 
 of motives for saving. 
 
 To make a will in one way or another is of 
 course the duty of every person whose heir- 
 at-law is not the proper inheritor of all he 
 possesses : and unless where there is some 
 just cause for setting them aside, expectations 
 generated by the customs of the world are 
 sufficient to establish a moral right to inherit 
 and to impose a corresponding obligation to 
 c3 
 
34 OF MONEY. 
 
 bequeath. For custom may be presumed, in 
 the absence of any reasons to the contrary, 
 to have grown out of some natural fitness ; 
 and at all events it will have brought about 
 an amount of adaptation which is often 
 sufficient, as regards individual cases, to make 
 a fitness where there was none. Unless in 
 exceptional instances, therefore, in which 
 special circumstances are of an over-ruling 
 force, the disappointment of expectations 
 growing out of custom is not to be inflicted 
 without some very strong and solid reasons 
 for believing that the custom needs to be 
 reformed. If there be such reasons, by all 
 means let the custom be disregarded, all ex- 
 pectations to the contrary notwithstanding — 
 
 " What custom wills, in all things should we do 't, 
 The dust on antique time would lie unswept, 
 And mountainous error be too highly heaped 
 For truth to overpeer." * 
 
 But the presumption should be always held 
 to be in favour of custom, and he who de- 
 
 * "■ Coriolanus," Act ii. Scene 3. 
 
OF MONEY. 35 
 
 parts from it without the plea of special 
 circumstances, should be able to find in 
 himself a competency to correct the errors of 
 mankind. 
 
 If it be not well for the natural or cus- 
 tomary heirs that they should be disap- 
 pointed, neither is it good for those to whom 
 an inheritance is diverted, that wealth should 
 come upon them by surprise. Sudden and 
 unexpected accessions of wealth seldom pro- 
 mote the happiness of those to whom they 
 accrue; and they are for the most part 
 morally injurious ; especially when they ac- 
 crue by undue deprivation of another. 
 
 But some part of the property of most 
 people, and a large part, or even the whole of 
 the property of some people, may not be the 
 subject of just or natural expectations on 
 the part of customary heirs ; and in respect of 
 such property there is a great liberty of judg- 
 ment on the part of the testator, though it is 
 to be a grave and responsible, not a capricious 
 liberty. The testator has to consider to 
 whom the property will bring a real increase 
 
36 OF MONEY. 
 
 of enjoyment without increase of temptation ; 
 and in whose hands it is likely most to pro- 
 mote the happiness of others. In general 
 the rule of judgment should be to avoid lift- 
 ing people out of one station into another; 
 and to aim at making such moderate addi- 
 tions to moderate fortunes. in careful hands 
 as may not disturb the proportion of property 
 to station, — or still better, may rectify any 
 disproportion, and enable those wiio are 
 living with a difficult frugality to live with 
 a free frugality. 
 
 This rule is not, I fear, very generally 
 regarded ; for mere rectitude, and the obser- 
 vance of measures and proportions, does not 
 much lay hold of the minds of men. On the 
 contrary, there is a general disposition to add 
 to anything which affects the imagination by 
 its magnitude; and there is also in some 
 people a sort of gloating over great wealth, 
 which infects them with a propensity to feed 
 a bloated fortune. Jacques took note of this 
 when he saw the deer that was weeping in 
 " the needless stream " : — 
 
ON MONEY. 37 
 
 " Thou mak'st a testament 
 As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more 
 To that which had too much." * 
 
 Thus it is that in the most solemn acts which 
 men have to perform in the management of 
 their money — in those too from which selfish 
 ends seem most removed — they will often 
 appear to be as little sensible of moral 
 motives and righteous responsibilities as in 
 any other transactions ; and even a testator 
 jamjam moriturus will dictate his will with 
 a sort of posthumous cupidity, and seem to 
 desire that his worldliness should live after 
 him. 
 
 * " As You Like it," Act ii. Scene 1. 
 
OF HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 I propose to treat of these jointly, because 
 I regard them as inseparably connected in 
 life. We shall find, I think, on looking below 
 the surface, that Humility is the true mother 
 and nurse of Independence ; and that Pride, 
 which is so often supposed to stand to 
 her in that relation, is, in reality, the step- 
 mother, by whom is wrought — novercalibus 
 odiis — the very destruction and ruin of Inde- 
 pendence. 
 
 For pride has a perpetual reference to the 
 estimation in which we are holden by others ; 
 fear of opinion is of the essence of it ; and 
 with this fear upon us it is impossible that 
 we should be independent. The proud man is 
 of all men the most vulnerable ; and as there 
 is nothing that rankles and festers more than 
 
HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 39 
 
 wounded pride, he has much cause for fear. 
 Pride, therefore — whether active or passive 
 — whether it goes forth to claim the defer- 
 ence of mankind, or secludes itself from the 
 danger of their disrespect — has always much 
 at stake, and leads a life of caution and soli- 
 citude. Humility, on the contrary, has no 
 personal objects, and leads its life in "the 
 service which is perfect freedom." 
 
 An uneasy, jealous, or rebellious feeling in 
 regard to ranks and degrees, argues this want 
 of independence through defect of humility. 
 It is the feeling of a man who makes too 
 much account of such things. A begrudging 
 of rank and station, and refusal of such 
 deference as the customs of the world have 
 conceded to them, will generally be found to 
 proceed from the man who secretly over- 
 values them, and who, if himself in posses- 
 sion of them, would stretch his pretensions 
 too far. For plebeian pride and aristocratic 
 pride issue from one and the same source in 
 human nature. An illiberal self-love is at 
 the bottom of both. 
 
40 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 When low-born men of genius, like Burns 
 the poet, maintain the superiority of intrinsic 
 worth to adventitious distinction, we can 
 readily go along with them so far : but when 
 they reject the claims of social rank and 
 condition in a spirit of defiance and resent- 
 ment, as if suffering a personal injury, we 
 may very well question whether they have 
 not missed of the independence at which 
 they aimed : for had their independence been 
 genuine, they would have felt that all they 
 possessed which was valuable was inalien- 
 able ; and having nothing to lose by the social 
 superiority of the better born, they would 
 have made them welcome to it as being 
 perhaps a not inequitable compensation for 
 the comparatively small share bestowed on 
 them of intellectual gifts and abilities. 
 
 If equality be what these men of in- 
 dependence would contend for, it can only 
 be had (if at all) by the balance of what is 
 adventitious : for natural equality there is 
 none. If personal merit be what they regard, 
 this, at least, will not found any claim for 
 
HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 41 
 
 intellectual endowments to be preferred to 
 accidents of station. There is no more of 
 personal merit in a great intellect than in a 
 great estate. It is the use which is made of 
 the one and of the other, which should found 
 the claim to respect ; and the man who has it 
 at heart to make the best use he can of either, 
 will not be much occupied with them as a 
 means of commanding respect. Thus it is 
 that respect is commonly least due, as well 
 as least willingly accorded, where it is arro- 
 gated most, and that independence is hardly 
 possessed where it is much insisted on. 
 " The proud man," says St. Jerome, " (who 
 " is the poor man) braggeth outwardly, but 
 " beggeth inwardly." The humble man, who 
 thinks little of his independence, is the man 
 who is strong in it ; and he who is not solici- 
 tous of respect will commonly meet with as 
 much as he has occasion for. " Who calls ? " 
 says the old shepherd in "As You Like it;" 
 " Your betters," is the insolent answer : and 
 what is the shepherd's rejoinder? "Else 
 " are they very wretched." By what retort, 
 
42 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 reprisal, or repartee, could it have been made 
 half so manifest that the insult had lighted 
 upon armour of proof? Such is the invincible 
 independence of humility, 
 
 The declaration of our Saviour that the 
 meek shall inherit the earth, may be under- 
 stood, I think, as verified in the very nature 
 and attributes of meekness. The dross of 
 the earth the meek do not inherit; the 
 damnosa hcereditas of the earth's pomps and 
 vanities descends to others : but all the true 
 enjoyments, the wisdom, love, peace, and 
 independence, which earth can bestow, are 
 assured to the meek as inherent in their 
 meekness. " ; Tis in ourselves that we are 
 " thus or thus." It depends on our own 
 hearts to cast off the bondage of pride with 
 all its chains and sores, and by meekness to 
 possess the earth. For this possession comes 
 not by observation and saying "Lo ! here, or 
 Lo ! there : " * But as the Kingdom of God 
 is within us, so also is the inheritance of 
 the Earth : 
 
 * Luke xvii, 21. 
 
HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 43 
 
 " How much that Genius boasts as her's 
 
 And fancies her's alone, 
 On you, Meek Spirits, Faith confers ! 
 
 The proud have further gone, 
 Perhaps, through life's deep maze, but you 
 Alone possess the labyrinth's clue. 
 
 "To you the costliest spoils of thought, 
 
 Wisdom, unclaimed, yields up ; 
 To you the far-sought pearl is brought, 
 
 And melted in your cup ; 
 To you her nard and myrrh she brings, 
 Like orient gifts to infant kings. 
 
 " The single eye alone can see 
 
 All truths around us thrown, 
 In their eternal unity ; 
 
 The humble ear alone 
 Has room to hold, and time to prize, 
 The sweetness of life's harmonies." * 
 
 If distinctions of rank, order, and degree 
 were of no other use in the world, they might 
 be desired for the exercise which they give 
 to a generous humility, on the part of those 
 who have them and of those who have them 
 not. The inequality of relation should culti- 
 vate this virtue on both sides ; those who have 
 
 * Aubrey De Vere ; Waldenses, and other Poems, p. 165. 
 
44 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 the superiority being disposed to prize it at 
 no more than its worth ; those who have it 
 not, being glad to recognise superiority in 
 others, even in this its least substantial 
 form — 
 
 " Cloth of gold, be not too nice, 
 Though thou be match' d with cloth of frieze ; 
 Cloth of frieze, be not too bold, 
 Though thou be match'd with cloth of gold." * 
 
 Here are two humilities enjoined ; that which 
 in a superior forgets superiority — that which 
 in an inferior remembers inferiority : and 
 neither could have place without difference 
 of rank and degree. 
 
 When the social distinctions indicate power 
 and a governing authority, the relations be- 
 tween the parties are still more pregnant with 
 occasions for the exercise of humility. From 
 humility there will result, not only on the one 
 side a generous care and consideration in the 
 use of power, but likewise on the other, what 
 may be called a generous submission. For 
 though the world may be more aware of 
 
 * Old Saw. 
 
HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 45 
 
 generosity shown in the exercise of power, 
 there is a generosity also in the spirit of obe- 
 dience, when it is cordial, willing, and free ; 
 and this is the case only when the nature is 
 humble. 
 
 It is indeed chiefly in our intercourse with 
 equals and superiors that our humility is put 
 to the proof. When the " Servus Serwrum " 
 at Rome washes, according to annual usage, 
 the feet of some poor pilgrims, the ceremony, 
 if it be held to typify humility, should at the 
 same time be understood to be typical of the 
 easiest of all humilities. If the same person- 
 age were to hold the stirrup of an emperor, 
 the proceeding would be typical of another 
 degree of humility, — and one to which the 
 Potentates of the Earth could not bear witness 
 in his predecessors. Many people are gentle 
 and forbearing with those placed under them, 
 but proud and quarrelsome in their dealings 
 with those above them. Where humility is 
 wanting, there may be much submission 
 without generosity, or, on the other hand, 
 much resistance without an independent 
 
46 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 spirit. The disposition to submit to autho- 
 rity unduly, and where the interests of 
 others or our own are unjustly injured, 
 will never arise out of humility; it will 
 always arise out of those worldly anxieties 
 from which the humble heart is exempt. 
 The disposition to resist authority from per- 
 sonal feelings, where no duty dictates the 
 resistance, will never proceed from a genu- 
 ine spirit of independence; for the heart 
 is not independent which is engaged in a 
 struggle for personal objects. And whether 
 submitting or resisting, humility and inde- 
 pendence will still be found to go together ; 
 but they will for the most part be found to be 
 favoured by submission ; for the pride of the 
 human heart, which is commonly called up by 
 resistance even when not undue, is in like 
 manner abated by submission, even when 
 carried too far ; and wherever pride is abated, 
 the heart is raised and purified and made 
 free. Elevation, therefore, is chiefly to be 
 found in submission—" Govern them and lift 
 them up." 
 
HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 47 
 
 Humility, like most other virtues, has its 
 credit a good deal shaken by the number of 
 counterfeits that are abroad. Amongst the 
 false humilities by which the world is most 
 nattered and beguiled, is that of the pro- 
 fessor in this kind who shrinks from all 
 censure and reprobation of what is evil, 
 under cover of the text, "Judge not lest 
 ye be judged ;" as if it were the intent of 
 that text, not to warn us against rash, pre- 
 sumptuous and uncharitable judgments, but 
 absolutely to forbid our taking account of the 
 distinction between right and wrong. " It is 
 not for us to judge our brother," says the 
 humilitarian of this way of thinking ; " we 
 know not how he may have been tempted ; 
 perhaps he was born with stronger passions 
 than other people ; it may have been that he 
 was ill brought up ; peradventure he was 
 thrown amongst evil associates ; we ourselves, 
 had we been placed in the same circum- 
 stances, might have been in like manner 
 led astray." Such are the false charities of 
 a false and popular humility. If we are 
 
48 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 to excuse all the moral evil that we can 
 account for, and abstain from judging all 
 of which we can suppose that there is 
 some adequate explanation, where are we 
 to stop in our absolutions? Whatever 
 villany exists in the world is compounded 
 of what is inborn and what comes by cir- 
 cumstance : there is nothing so base or 
 detestable but it is the consequence of some 
 adequate cause ; and if we are to make 
 allowances for all but causeless wickedness, 
 there is an end of condemnation. 
 
 The man of true humility, on the contrary, 
 will not spare the vices and errors of bis 
 fellow-creatures, any more than he would his 
 own ; he will exercise manfully and without 
 fear or favour, those judicial functions which 
 God has committed in some greater or less 
 degree to every member of the human com- 
 munity ; but he will come to the task, on 
 serious occasions, not lightly or unawed, but 
 praying to have "a right judgment in all 
 things f and whilst exercising that judgment 
 in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he will 
 
HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 49 
 
 feel that to judge his brother is a duty and 
 not a privilege ; and he will judge him in 
 sorrow, humbled by the contemplation of 
 that fallen nature of which he is himself 
 part and parcel. 
 
 There is a current and a natural opinion, 
 that a man has no right to censure in others 
 a fault with which he is himself chargeable. 
 But even this limitation is founded, I think, 
 upon the same erroneous notion, of moral 
 censure being an honourable privilege instead 
 of a responsible function, a franchise instead 
 of a due. No faults are better known and 
 understood by us than those whereof we 
 have ourselves been guilty; none, surely, 
 should be so personally obnoxious to us as 
 those by which we have ourselves been de- 
 filed and degraded : and may we not, there- 
 fore, be expected to be quick in perceiving 
 them, and to regard them with a peculiar 
 bitterness, rather than to overlook them in 
 others ? I would answer, assuredly yes : but 
 always with this proviso — that to bitterness 
 of censure should be added confession and 
 
50 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 humiliation and the bitterness of personal 
 shame and contrition. Without this the 
 censure is not warrantable, because it is not 
 founded upon a genuine moral sense; it is 
 not, indeed, sincere : for though the offence 
 may be worthy of all disgust and abhor- 
 rence, that abhorrence and disgust cannot 
 be really felt by those who have committed 
 the like offence themselves without shame 
 or repentance. 
 
 Besides the false humility under cover of 
 which we desert the duty of censuring our 
 fellow-creatures, there are others by which 
 we evade or pervert that of censuring our- 
 selves. The most common of the spurious 
 humilities of this kind, is that by which a 
 general language of self-disparagement is sub- 
 stituted for a distinct discernment and specific 
 acknowledgment of our real faults. The 
 humble individual of this class will declare 
 himself to be very incontestably a miserable 
 sinner; but at the same time there is no 
 particular fault or error that can be imputed 
 to him from which he will not find himself 
 
HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 51 
 
 to be happily exempt. Each item is seve- 
 rally denied ; and the acknowledgment of 
 general sinfulness turns out to have been an 
 unmeaning abstraction — a sum total of 
 cyphers. It is not thus that the Devil makes 
 up his accounts. 
 
 Another way is to confess faults from 
 which we are tolerably free, being perhaps 
 chargeable with no larger a share of them 
 than is common to humanity, whilst we pass 
 over the sins which are more peculiarly and 
 abundantly our own. Real humility will 
 not teach us any undue severity, but truth- 
 fulness in self-judgment. "My Son, glorify 
 thy soul in meekness, and give it honour 
 according to the dignity thereof.""' 5 ' For undue 
 self-abasement and self-distrust will impair 
 the strength and independence of the mind, 
 which, if accustomed to have a just satisfac- 
 tion with itself where it may, will the better 
 bear to probe itself, and will lay itself open 
 with the more fortitude to intimations of its 
 
 * Ecclesiasticus, x. 28. 
 D 2 
 
52 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 weakness on points in which it stands truly 
 in need of correction. No humility is 
 thoroughly sound which is not thoroughly 
 truthful. The man who brings misdirected 
 or inflated accusations against himself, does 
 so in a false humility, and will probably be 
 found to indemnify himself on one side or 
 another. Either he takes a pride in his 
 supposed humility ; or escaping in his self- 
 condemnations from the darker into the 
 lighter shades of his life and nature, he plays 
 at hide and seek with his conscience. 
 
 And true humility, being a wise virtue, will 
 deal more in self-examination and secret 
 contrition than in confession. For confession 
 is often a mere luxury of the conscience, — 
 used as the epicures of ancient Rome would 
 use an emetic and a warm bath before they 
 sat down to a feast. It is often also a very 
 snare to the maker of it, and a delusion 
 practised on the party to whom it is made. 
 For, first, the faults may be such as words 
 will not adequately explain : secondly, the 
 plea of" guilty " shakes judgment in her seat : 
 
HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 53 
 
 thirdly, the indulgence shown to confession 
 might be better bestowed on the shame 
 which conceals ; for this tends to correction, 
 whereas confession will many times stand 
 instead of penitence to the wrong-doer ; and 
 sometimes even a sorrowful penitence stands 
 in the place of amendment, and is washed 
 away in its own tears. 
 
 There is a frivolous practice of confession, 
 much used in certain classes of society, by 
 which young ladies or others, in the earlier 
 moments of a friendship, take out a license 
 to talk of themselves. In the confessionals 
 of the ball-room, much superfluity of naughti- 
 ness is mutually disclosed, by persons who 
 might have been better employed in dancing 
 than in confessing. This needs not to be 
 very severely noticed; yet it points to an 
 infirmity against which it may be well to be 
 on our guard ; and wiien the occasion is suffi- 
 ciently serious, we should take care that our 
 confessions are free from any egoistical taint. 
 
 Of all false humilities the most false is to 
 be found in that meeting of extremes wherein 
 
54 HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 
 
 humility is corrupted into pride. John 
 Wesley, when he was desirous to fortify his 
 followers against ridicule, taught them to 
 court it. " God forbid," said he, " that we 
 should not be the laughing-stock of man- 
 kind!" But it is through pride, and not 
 in humility, that any man will desire to be a 
 laughing-stock. And though it may seem at 
 first sight that he has attained to an inde- 
 pendence of mankind when he can brave 
 their laughter, yet this is a fallacious appear- 
 ance : it will be found that in so far as his 
 humility was corrupted, his independence 
 was undermined ; and whilst courting the 
 ridicule of the world, he is in reality courting 
 the admiration and applause of his party or 
 sect, or fearing their rebuke. This is the 
 dependence into which he has fallen, and 
 there is probably no slavery of the heart 
 which is comparable to that of sectarian 
 pride. Moreover Mr. Wesley's followers doubt- 
 less deemed that the laughers were in danger 
 of hell-fire. Where then was their charity 
 when they desired to be laughed at by all 
 
HUMILITY AND INDEPENDENCE. 55 
 
 mankind ? Or if (without desiring it) they 
 deem mankind, themselves only excepted, 
 to be in so reprobate a state, that the 
 religious must needs be a laughing-stock, — 
 was this their humility ? I wish to speak of 
 Mr. Wesley with respect, not to say reverence: 
 but in this instance I think that his appeal 
 was made to a temper of mind in his fol- 
 lowers which was not purely Christian. It 
 is not the meek who will throw out this sort 
 of challenge and defiance: and it is pride 
 and not humility which we shall find to lie 
 at the bottom of any such ostentatious self- 
 abasement — 
 
 "For Pride, 
 
 Which is the Devil's toasting-fork, doth toast 
 Him brownest that his whiteness vaunteth most." 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 " What do you think of marriage ? " says 
 the Duchess of Malfy in Webster's play, and 
 Antonio answers — 
 
 " I take it as those that deny purgatory ; 
 It locally contains or heaven or hell ; 
 There is no third place in it." 
 
 When I was young and inexperienced in 
 wives, I did not take the same view of mar- 
 riage which Antonio took. I used to say 
 that there were two kinds of marriages, w T ith 
 either of which a man might be content ; the 
 one " the incorporate existence marriage," the 
 other "the pleasant additament marriage." 
 For I thought that if a man could not com- 
 mand a marriage by w^hich all interests would 
 be deepened, all objects exalted, rewards 
 and forfeitures doubled and far more than 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 57 
 
 doubled, and all the comparatives of life 
 turned into superlatives, then there remained 
 nevertheless a very agreeable kind of re- 
 source, — a marriage, that is, in which one 
 might live one's own substantive life with the 
 additional embellishment of some graceful, 
 simple, gay, easy-hearted creature, who would 
 lie light upon the surface of one's being, be at 
 hand whenever solitude and serious pursuits 
 had become irksome, and never be in the way 
 w T hen she was not wanted. Visions these are ; 
 merely dreams of our Epicurean youth. There 
 is no such wife, and marriage is what Antonio 
 took it to be. 
 
 And marriage being thus the highest stake 
 on this side the grave, it seems strange that 
 men should be so hasty in the choice of a wife 
 as they sometimes are ; for if we look about us 
 at those marriages in which men and women 
 have chosen for themselves, we shall find 
 that even where there has been no absolute 
 passion to expedite the business, the choice 
 has not alwa} r s been preceded by much deli- 
 beration. Perhaps it is owing to that very 
 d3 
 
58 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 fact of the decision being so critical, that it is 
 often a little hurried ; for when great interests 
 are depending, we deliberate with an anxiety 
 to avoid error which presently becomes too 
 painful to be endured, and perhaps, also, too 
 disturbing to be successful ; and it is at some 
 crises of their fortunes that men in all times 
 have been disposed to commit them to Provi- 
 dence, under various forms of reliance, some 
 religious, others superstitious. We are most 
 sensible of the fallibility of human judg- 
 ment in those matters in which it is most 
 essential to judge well, and to the irreligious 
 man, fate, destiny, chance, sortilege, the stars 
 — anything seems more trustworthy ; whilst 
 he who is not irreligious knows that what is 
 done in faith will be justified in the fruits, be 
 they sweet or bitter. The maid who "was 
 married one morning as she went into the 
 garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit," might 
 have nothing to fear in marriage if she was one 
 to whom all things work together for good. 
 
 Men who know not in what to put trust will 
 often fall into the fatal error of supposing that 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 59 
 
 some of the graver consequences of marriage 
 are to be escaped by concubinage, — a sup- 
 position from which, if there be no better 
 monitor at hand, even the wisdom of this 
 world might withhold them. Unless they 
 be utterly heartless and worthless, they will 
 find that the looser tie is not the lighter. 
 Mistresses, if they have any hold on the 
 affections, are generally more exacting than 
 wives ; and with reason, for there will natu- 
 rally be the most assertion of claims where 
 there is the least ground for confidence. The 
 claims strengthen with time, whilst the 
 qualities for which mistresses are commonly 
 chosen, and on which they depend for their 
 charm, are proverbially perishable. Beauty 
 and the vivacities of youth fall away as soon 
 from the concubine as if she were a wife ; 
 domestic cares and jealousies will accrue as 
 readily in the one case as in the other ; and 
 unless generosity be out of the question, and 
 a man have so " corrupted his compassions " 
 as to have deliberately determined to keep a 
 woman's affections until thev should involve 
 
60 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 the cares naturally belonging to the affections 
 and then to cast them off, there is no one of 
 the burthens, vexations, dues and responsibili- 
 ties incident to marriage, which will not be 
 felt with ten-fold force in concubinage. Such 
 are the miscalculations of selfishness. A man 
 thinks that he has hung a trinket round his 
 neck, and behold ! it is a millstone. 
 
 Whilst one man will be hurried into a 
 marriage from the very painfulness of per- 
 plexity, another will live and die a bachelor 
 out of mere indecision. The latter case is the 
 more rare, and requires a peculiar serenity of 
 temper and strength of irresolution. But it 
 can occur. And the cases occur very fre- 
 quently in which a man misses, through 
 indecision, the opportunity of making the 
 marriage he would have liked best, and then, 
 resolving to be indecisive no more, takes a 
 wrong decision. So that having regard to 
 the various sources from which error pro- 
 ceeds in such matters, it may perhaps be 
 reasonably doubted whether a passion, with 
 all its impetuosities and illusions, affords, 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 61 
 
 comparatively speaking, an ill guidance ; and 
 whether those who have surrendered to it 
 might not have been as much misled had 
 they proposed to themselves the task of 
 making a calm and judicious choice. 
 
 And indeed the seasonable time for the 
 exercise of prudence is not so much in 
 choosing a wife or a husband, as in choosing 
 with whom you will so associate as to risk 
 the engendering of a passion. Even in this 
 choice the prudence should not be cold- 
 blooded; for a cold-blooded choice of associates 
 is likely to lead to a cold-blooded marriage. 
 With the leanings and leaps of the heart in 
 the new acquaintanceships of the young, there 
 should be just so much prudence presiding 
 as will turn them away from what there is 
 reasonable ground for believing to be false, 
 selfish, weak or vicious. There should be 
 thus much and no more. If the taste and 
 fancy are resisted upon grounds less sub- 
 stantial than these, they are resisted by what 
 is less worthy to prevail than they ; for the 
 taste and fancy are by no means of small 
 
62 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 account — they are indeed of all but para- 
 mount importance — in human life and inter- 
 course. The taste lies deep in our nature, 
 and strikes the key-note with which outward 
 circumstance is to harmonise. 
 
 But if the taste be in truth a matter of 
 such import and ascendancy in our life, it 
 follows that we are deeply responsible for 
 the formation of it. It is, like everything 
 else in us, partly of Nature's fashioning, 
 partly of our own ; and though it is to rest 
 upon the foundation of our natural disposi- 
 tions, it is to be built, not like a baby-house 
 at our pleasure, but according to the laws and 
 model of the great Architect, like a temple. 
 If there can be little that is genial or cordial 
 in our life, married or unmarried, unless the 
 taste be indulged, for that very reason it 
 behoves us so to raise and purify the taste 
 as to be enabled to give way to it in safety 
 and innocence — not certainly with a total 
 abandonment or an absolute affiance — 
 nothing short of perfection in taste could 
 justify that — but with a trust proportioned 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 63 
 
 to the degree of purity and elevation which 
 has been attained. According to this mea- 
 sure our habitual propensities will be towards 
 what is good ; whilst the habit of guarding 
 and correcting the taste will prevail to some 
 extent even over its more impassioned move- 
 ments ; and if we are carried away by our 
 fancy, we shall yet know whither we are 
 going, and give some guidance as well as 
 take some. 
 
 Wealth and worldly considerations have a 
 good deal to do with the choice made in most 
 marriages; and though the taste which is 
 under these influences will not be supposed 
 to be very high, yet if it cannot be elevated, 
 better that a man should take the lower 
 course to which it points, than aim at what 
 is above him. If his mind be habitually 
 involved in worldly interests and pursuits, 
 he has no right to suppose that by stepping 
 aside from them on a single occasion, even 
 though it be the most important of all occa- 
 sions, he can place himself in a different order 
 of beings, or bring himself into harmony with 
 
64 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 what is high and free. What he has to do 
 is to emancipate his mind if he can ; bnt if 
 not, to marry according to the conditions of 
 his slavery. For if he marries from a mere 
 impulse of his higher mind, whilst he is still 
 in habitual subjection to the lower, the 
 impulse will pass away,. whilst the habit 
 stands fast, and the man will find that he 
 has introduced a discord into his life, or 
 rather that he has composed it in the wrong 
 key. The man who marries for money has 
 one advantage over those who marry for 
 other considerations ; he can know what he 
 gets ; if he can feed upon husks and draff, 
 it is competent to him to see that his trough 
 is filled. 
 
 But if marrying for money is to be jus- 
 tified only in the case of those unhappy 
 persons who are fit for nothing better, it does 
 not follow that marrying without money is 
 to be justified in others, — marrying, that is, 
 without the possession or the fair prospect 
 of a competency suited to their condition 
 in life. What is to constitute such a 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 65 
 
 competency depends in a great measure on 
 the prudence, independence, and strength 
 in self-denial of the parties. Those who 
 resolve to marry on very small means, 
 against the wishes of their relatives and 
 friends, should always consider that they 
 are setting up a claim to an extraordinary 
 share of these excellent virtues ; and they 
 should not expect their claim to be readily 
 acknowledged unless it be founded, not 
 merely on good intentions, but on actual 
 savings, on ascertained facts of frugality and 
 habits of self-sacrifice. Without such habits, 
 they may intend and profess what they 
 please as to independence and self-reliance : 
 the result will be that they have indulged 
 their unworldly inclinations at the expense 
 of others. 
 
 Whether money have much to do with 
 a marriage or little, proper marriage-settle- 
 ments are of great importance. And whether 
 or not they be insisted on by the woman's 
 friends, no man should consider that his 
 individual probity or good intentions are 
 
66 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 to stand instead of what is just and right 
 upon general principles, or that it can be 
 otherwise than a disgrace to him to marry 
 without divesting himself of all power which 
 it is not right and just that he should possess. 
 Many are the cases in which the settled 
 money comes to be the only stay of the family, 
 and this in itself is a strong reason for main- 
 taining the principle of just marriage-settle- 
 ments; but there are objects other than 
 pecuniary and prudential which are effected 
 by it. The negociations and transactions 
 connected with marriage-settlements are 
 eminently useful as searching character and 
 testing affection, before an irrevocable step 
 be taken. 
 
 Rank and station have an influence which, 
 though not very high or worthy, is to be 
 regarded, I think, as somewhat less bare and 
 poor than motives which are merely mer- 
 cenary. There is something in differences 
 of rank and degree which affects the imagi- 
 nation, as everything does which is unfa- 
 miliar ; and an imaginative person is perhaps 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 67 
 
 more apt to fall in love with what is either 
 above him or below him in station, than with 
 what is on a dead level with him. This, 
 however natural, should be looked upon as a 
 misdirection of the fancy; for any extreme 
 inequality of station will commonly lead to 
 sore trials in marriage. 
 
 Beauty, in itself and of itself, has, I believe, 
 less power in determining matrimonial choice 
 than at first sight it might seem natural that 
 it should have. The charm of mere physical 
 and corporeal beauty is perhaps too open 
 and immediate to involve consequences ; its 
 first effect is too strong in proportion to its 
 further effects: for the imagination of man 
 wishes to feel that it has something to come 
 to ; and there is a charm more insidiously 
 winning in that which turns to beauty as you 
 advance, than in that which declares itself 
 as beauty from the first. 
 
 Lord Bacon has said that "there is no 
 excellent beauty without some strangeness in 
 the proportion ; " from which I infer that the 
 beauty which had individuality was alone 
 
68 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 excellent in his eyes ; and I believe this to be 
 so far prevalent amongst mankind, that whilst 
 the name of beauty is given to perfection of 
 symmetry, the power of beauty is felt in a 
 slight deviation from it — just sufficient to 
 individualise without impairing. It is this 
 peculiarity, this "some strangeness," which 
 lays hold of the imagination. 
 
 But even when such a hold has been taken, 
 the first feelings are those of admiration 
 rather than love, and there must be some- 
 thing in the beauty indicating something 
 besides the beauty, in order that the admira- 
 tion may pass into love. If other forces are 
 behind, admiration is an excellent herald and 
 harbinger of love ; if not, admiration will not 
 of itself constitute love ; indeed, wiiere the 
 passion of love has attained to its full force, 
 admiration will sometimes be almost lost and 
 absorbed : " She loved too deeply to admire," 
 said one lady writing of another some thirty 
 years ago. 
 
 It is commonly said that beauty, howsoever 
 enchanting before marriage, becomes a matter 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 69 
 
 of indifference after. But if the beauty be 
 of that quality which not only attracts 
 admiration, but helps to deepen it into love, 
 I am not one of those who think that what 
 charmed the lover is forthwith to be lost 
 upon the husband. It is doubtless a ques- 
 tion of kind. There may be much beauty, 
 eminent in its way, which is but "the per- 
 fume and suppliance of a minute ; " but there 
 exists also a species and quality of beauty, 
 the effect whereof (as I conceive) it would 
 not be possible for daily familiarity to 
 deaden, and the power whereof may be 
 expected to last as long as the beauty itself 
 lasts, and perhaps much longer. Pictures 
 and statues wrought by the more spiritual 
 masters of art, do not satiate the sense ; and 
 if in that beauty which is of art's creation, 
 when the art is of the highest order, there is 
 this cleaving and abiding power, we are not 
 to doubt that Nature, which creates the art, is 
 competent to create without the intervention 
 of the art, a beauty expressed in flesh and 
 blood, that may be constantly lived with 
 
70 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 and daily dwelt upon, yet be found to be not 
 less inexhaustible in its charm. Other objects 
 will intervene, no doubt, where beauty is pre- 
 sent to our daily life ; a man cannot be con- 
 
 i 
 
 sciously and continually occupied with such 
 impressions ; insusceptible moods will inter- 
 vene also, and the perceptions will from time 
 to time be overclouded ; this will be the case 
 in regard to works of art, and even in regard 
 to those natural and universal sources from 
 which the sense of beauty in man is nou- 
 rished as with its daily food ; nor can it be 
 otherwise in regard to human beauty: but 
 when this beauty is pure and spiritual, I see 
 no reason to suppose that it will be a less per- 
 manent source than those others ; and I will 
 not consent to believe that daily familiarity 
 with it will make it of no effect, any more 
 than that the flowers will cease to please 
 because they hang over our doors, or the 
 stars because they shine nightly. 
 
 The exception to be taken to beauty as a 
 marriage portion, (if it be beauty of the 
 highest order,) is not therefore that it can 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 71 
 
 become otherwise than precious whilst it 
 lasts, but rather that, as it is precious so is 
 it perishable, and that, let it be valued as it 
 may, it must be accounted at the best but a 
 melancholy possession : — 
 
 " For human beauty is a sight 
 To sadden rather than delight ; 
 Being the prelude of a lay 
 Whose burthen is decay." 
 
 And if it be our fortune to encounter in flesh 
 and blood a beauty which seems to revive 
 for us the realities from which Rafaello and 
 Perugino painted, we are to consider whether 
 to possess such beauty in marriage and see 
 it subjected to the changes and chances of 
 this mortal life, would not bring upon us the 
 same sort of feeling with which we should 
 contemplate a Madonna or a St. Cecilia hang- 
 ing exposed to the weather and losing some 
 tenth part of its form and colouring with 
 each successive winter. 
 
 I have said that, considering the many 
 misguidances to which a deliberative judg- 
 ment is exposed in the matter of marriage, 
 
72 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 there may often be less risk of error in a 
 choice which is impassioned. But I ought 
 perhaps to have explained that by a passion 
 I do not mean — what young ladies sometimes 
 mistake for it — a mere imaginative sentiment, 
 dream, or illusion. Such imaginative senti- 
 ments, dreams, or illusions, not only do not 
 constitute a passion, but they commonly 
 render the person who indulges them incapa- 
 ble of conceiving one; they bring out a 
 strong fancy perhaps, but a weak and wasted 
 heart. This is well understood by worldly 
 mothers, who will rather promote than dis- 
 courage a rapid succession of such sentiments, 
 resting upon the maxim that there is safety 
 in numbers. In destitution there is security 
 from arrest, in nakedness there is security 
 from a rending of garments, and in this 
 beggary of the heart there is security from 
 a passion. 
 
 But if the heart have been trained in the 
 way that it should go, the passion to which 
 it will lie open will be something very different 
 from a warm illusion or a sentimental dream, 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 73 
 
 though very possibly including these, and 
 having begun in them. For true love is not, 
 I think, that isolated and indivisible unity 
 which it might be supposed to be from the 
 way in which it is sometimes spoken of. It 
 is mixed and manifold according to the abun- 
 dance of the being, and in a large nature 
 becomes in its progress a highly composite 
 passion; commonly, no doubt, having its 
 source in admiration and imaginative senti- 
 ment, but as it rolls on, involving divers tribu- 
 taries, swollen by accessory passions, feelings, 
 and affections, — pity, gratitude, generosity, 
 loyalty, fidelity, anxiety, fear, and devotion, 
 — and deepened by the embankments of duty 
 and justice — foreign to the subject as these 
 last may seem to some. In short, the whole 
 nature and conscience being worked upon 
 by this passion, re-act upon it and become 
 interfused and blended with it ; not by an 
 absorption of all elements into one, but 
 by a development of each into each: and 
 when, therefore, I affirm that passion, err 
 though it may, will be often less misleading 
 
74 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 than the dispassionate judgment, I do but 
 aver that the entire nature — reason, con- 
 science, and affections, interpenetrating and 
 triune, — that this totality of the nature, 
 raised, vivified, and enlarged by love — is less 
 likely to take an erroneous direction than a 
 part of the nature standing aloof and dictat- 
 ing to the other parts. 
 
 I say not, however, that the risk is small 
 in either case or under any guidance. Far 
 from it. And the preference to be given to 
 passion as a guide, will depend upon the 
 natural capabilities, and the maturity and 
 cultivation of the moral, spiritual, and intel- 
 lectual mind. If there be much of this for 
 the passion to call out, it will be an exalted 
 and enlightened passion, and may see its way. 
 If there be little, it will be a blind passion. 
 Whence it follows that passion is not to be 
 taken for a guide in extreme youth ; in the 
 rawness of the moral and spiritual elements, 
 and the greenness of the judgment. And as 
 it is in these days that a first passion will 
 most frequently take place, it will generally 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 75 
 
 be found, I believe, that a second may be 
 better trusted. 
 
 If, however, I maintain that passion in one 
 season or another of our soul's progress, is to 
 have a voice of much force and potency in the 
 direction of the judgment, and will enlighten 
 it on some points more than it may bedarken 
 it on others, this is not because I imagine 
 that it can realise its illusions or establish its 
 empire in marriage. Passion is of course 
 designed by Nature to be transitory, — a 
 paroxysm, — not a state. And then the ques- 
 tion arises which has been so often agitated, 
 whether the affection which succeeds marriage 
 is in all cases much influenced — and if influ- 
 enced, how influenced — by the nature of the 
 feeling which preceded ? Whether a passion 
 which has transmigrated into an affection 
 carries with it into the affection any elements 
 which could not exist in an affection other- 
 wise originating ? When it begins with pas- 
 sion, there must needs be a period of collapse 
 and regurgitation, or at least of subsidence. 
 Whether, therefore, is the affection the 
 
76 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 weaker for never having known the high 
 tide, or the stronger for not having felt the 
 refluence? This temporary flooding of the 
 affections, does it devastate as regards 
 durable results, or does it enrich? 
 
 I think that the predominance, amounting 
 almost to universality, of the law of Nature 
 which places us once in our lives at least 
 under the dominion of this passion, would 
 afford of itself a strong presumption that 
 some beneficial result is to be brought about 
 by it. And if it be admitted (as without any 
 offence to Calvin I hope it well may), that 
 the better part of most human beings is the 
 larger part, it will follow that this temporary 
 expansion and outburst of the whole of the 
 being, will bring a greater accession of good 
 activities than of bad ; and as the first cry of 
 the infant is necessary to bring the lungs into 
 play, so the first love of the adult may, 
 through a transitory disturbance, be designed 
 to impart a healthy action to the moral and 
 spiritual nature. The better the tree, the 
 better of course will be the fruits; neither 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE 7 
 
 the rains of spring nor the glow of summer 
 will make grapes grow upon brambles ; but 
 whatever the fruits may be, the yield will be 
 larger after every seasonable operation of 
 Nature has been undergone. With the few 
 in whom envy, jealousy, suspicion, pride, and 
 self-love are predominant, there may be an 
 aggravation of these evil dispositions or of 
 some of them ; but to them (and God be 
 praised they are the many) with whom humi- 
 lity, generosity, the love of God, and the love 
 of God's creatures, though partly latent per- 
 haps, is powerfully inherent, the passion of 
 love will bring with it an enlargement and a 
 deepening and strengthening of these better 
 elements, such as no other visitation of merely 
 natural influences, however favourably re- 
 ceived and dutifully cherished, could avail to 
 produce. And when the passion has passed 
 away, the enlargement of the nature will 
 remain ; and as the better and more abound- 
 ing human being will make the better and 
 more abounding husband or wife, so will the 
 marriage which has been preceded by a passion, 
 
78 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 be a better marriage — other things alike — 
 than that which has not — more exalted, more 
 genial, more affluent in affections. 
 
 If the passion have ended, not in a marriage 
 but in a disappointment, the nature, if it have 
 strength to bear the pressure, will be more 
 ennobled and purified by that than by success. 
 Of the uses of adversity which are sweet, 
 none are sweeter than those which grow out 
 of disappointed love ; nor is there any greater 
 mistake in contemplating the issues of life, 
 than to suppose that baffled endeavours and 
 disappointed hopes bear no fruits, because 
 they do not bear those particular fruits which 
 were sought and sighed for : — 
 
 "The tree 
 Sucks kindlier nurture from a soil enriched 
 By its own fallen leaves ; and man is made, 
 In heart and spirit, from deciduous hopes 
 And things that seem to perish." 
 
 Indeed the power and spiritual efficacy 
 of love can hardly be realised to its full 
 extent without either disappointment, or 
 at least reverses, vicissitudes, and doubts; 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 79 
 
 and of the fact which Shakspeare observes, 
 that 
 
 " The course of true love never did run smooth," 
 
 perhaps this explanation may be given, — that 
 roughnesses are needful in order to make the 
 love true ; and marriages that follow upon 
 trouble, trial, and vicissitude, will be more 
 likely to be conservative of the love by which 
 they have been achieved, than those which 
 are merely the crown or coronal of a triumphal 
 career in courtship : 
 
 " The flowers in sunshine gathered soonest fade." 
 
 Amongst the obstructions which the course 
 of love has commonly to encounter, one which 
 is specified by Shakspeare is the opposition of 
 parents ; and it is often one of the most per- 
 plexing problems in human life to determine 
 to what length parental opposition should 
 proceed in such cases. A moderate opposi- 
 tion can seldom do harm, unless there be 
 positive perversity in the parties opposed, so 
 that opposition shall be in itself a provocative 
 to folly. Such perversity apart, a moderate 
 
80 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 opposition will suffice to set aside a weak 
 love, whilst it will tend to consolidate a strong 
 one ; and it will thus act favourably in either 
 case, so far as regards that most essential 
 element in all such matters, — the weakness 
 or strength of the affection. In respect of an 
 opposition beyond this, it seems hardly pos- 
 sible to generalise, the qualities of the persons 
 and the specialties of the cases being so all- 
 important. In extreme youth, obedience 
 should be the rule of the child. But so soon 
 as the child shall have attained to a fair 
 maturity of judgment, there is a moral respon- 
 sibility for the just exercise of that judgment 
 which must not be overlaid by an exagge- 
 rated notion of filial duty. Of the members 
 of a family it is for the benefit of all that 
 each should act upon each with some degree, 
 though with very different degrees, of con- 
 trolling influence. The sons and daughters, 
 when children no longer, are to demean them- 
 selves towards the parents with humility, 
 deference, and a desire to conform, but not 
 with an absolute subjection of the judgment 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 81 
 
 and the will. There is such a thing as a 
 spoilt parent. On the question of choice in 
 marriage, as on other questions in which 
 both child and parent are personally con- 
 cerned, if the child presumptuously conceive 
 that his judgment is mature when it is not 
 mature, or that it is worthy to be weighed 
 with his parents' when it is not worthy, he is 
 culpable of course ; being chargeable, not with 
 mere error of judgment, but with the sin of 
 presumption. On the other hand, if in all 
 humility of heart and desire to be dutiful, he 
 shall nevertheless clearly perceive, or think 
 he perceives, that his judgment is the juster 
 and is guided by higher, purer, and more 
 righteous views of life, it behoves him, after 
 much patience and the neglect of no endea- 
 vour to bring about a coincidence of judg- 
 ment, to resist his parents' judgment and 
 give effect to that which he conceives to be 
 better ; and this for his parents' sake as well 
 as for his own. We all need resistance to 
 our errors on every side. " Woe unto us when 
 all men shall speak well of us !" and woe unto 
 E 3 
 
82 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 us also, when all men shall give way to us ! 
 It may be a sacred duty on the part of a 
 child to give a helpful resistance to a parent, 
 when the parent is the more erring of the 
 two ; and the want of such resistance, espe- 
 cially on the part of daughters, (for they are 
 more prone than sons to misconceive their 
 duties of this kind, or to fail in firmness), has 
 often betrayed a parent into fatal errors, 
 followed by life-long remorse. Women, in 
 a state of exaltation from excited feelings, 
 imagining because duty often requires self- 
 sacrifice, that when they are sacrificing them- 
 selves they must needs be doing their duty, 
 will often be capable of taking a resolution, 
 when they are not capable of undergoing the 
 consequences with fortitude. For it is one 
 sort of strength that is required for an act of 
 heroism ; another, and a much rarer sort, 
 which is available for a life of endurance. 
 Probably most people could quote instances 
 within their own knowledge, in which the 
 daughter has obeyed, and then losing her 
 health, and with it perhaps her temper and 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 83 
 
 her resignation, has died of what is called a 
 broken heart ; thus, as it were, heaping coals 
 of fire upon the parents' head. 
 
 But if an unreasonable opposition to a 
 daughter's choice be not to prevail, I think 
 that, on the other hand, the parents, if their 
 views of marriage be pure from worldliness, 
 are justified in using a good deal of manage- 
 ment — not more than they very often do use, 
 but more than they are wont to avow or than 
 society is wont to countenance, — with a view 
 to putting their daughters in the way of such 
 marriages as they can approve. It is the 
 way of the world to give such management 
 an ill name, — probably because it is most used 
 by those who abuse it to worldly purposes ; 
 and I have heard a mother pique herself on 
 never having taken a single step to get 
 her daughters married, — which appeared to 
 me to have been a dereliction of one of the 
 most essential duties of a parent. If the 
 mother be wholly passive, either the daugh- 
 ters must take steps and use management 
 for themselves (which is not desirable), or the 
 
84 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 happiness and the most important interests 
 of their lives, moral and spiritual, must be 
 the sport of chance and take a course purely 
 fortuitous : and in many situations, where 
 unsought opportunities of choice do not 
 abound, the result may be not improbably 
 such a love and marriage as the mother and 
 every one else contemplates with astonish- 
 ment. Some such astonishment I recollect 
 to have expressed on an occasion of the kind 
 to an illustrious poet and philosopher, whose 
 reply I have always borne in mind when 
 other such cases have come under my obser- 
 vation : — " We have no reason to be surprised, 
 unless we knew what may have been the 
 young lady's opportunities. If Miranda had 
 not fallen in with Ferdinand, she would have 
 been in love with Caliban." 
 
 But management, if it is to be recom- 
 mended, must be good management, and not 
 the management by which young ladies are 
 hurried from ball-room to ball-room, so that a 
 hundred prelibations may give one chance to 
 be swallowed. A very few ball-rooms will 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 85 
 
 afford the means of introduction and selec- 
 tion of acquaintances; and the intercourse 
 which, by imparting a real knowledge of the 
 dispositions, will give the best facilities of 
 choice, will be that which is withdrawn, by 
 one remove and another, from gay metro- 
 politan assemblies — first, to intercourse in 
 country places ; secondly, to domestic society. 
 Our present manners admit, perhaps, too 
 much freedom of intercourse in public, too 
 little in private. The light familiarity of 
 festive meetings is carried far enough, further 
 than tends to attach; but the graver intimacy 
 is wanting. Milton complained that in his 
 time choice in marriage was difficult, because 
 there was not "that freedom of access, 
 granted or presumed, as may suffice to a 
 perfect discerning till too late."* In our age 
 the freedom of access is sufficient ; but the 
 access is, for the most part, at times and 
 places where nothing can be discerned but 
 the features of a restless and whirling life. 
 And if Milton could say, "Who knows not 
 
 * Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, ch. 3. 
 
86 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 that the bashful muteness of a virgin may 
 ofttimes hide all the unliveliness and natural 
 sloth which is really unfit for conversation," 
 we, on the other hand, who cannot reasonably 
 complain of the bashful muteness of the 
 virgins, may be in our own way perplexed 
 in the attempt to discover what is the life 
 that lies beneath those dancing and glancing 
 outsides of which we see so much. But 
 the difficulty of managing well in this 
 respect depends less on our manners in 
 regard to the intercourse between girls and 
 men, than on the general mode of living, 
 which, in some sections of society (not 
 in all), tends to separate domestic from 
 social life, and to subjugate the former to 
 the latter. 
 
 It may be observed, I think, that women 
 of high intellectual endowments and much 
 dignity of deportment, have the greatest 
 difficulty in marrying, and stand most in 
 need of a mother's help. And this, not be- 
 cause they are themselves fastidious (for they 
 are often as little so as any), but because 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 87 
 
 men are not humble enough to wish to have 
 their superiors for their wives. 
 
 Great wealth in a woman tends to keep at 
 a distance both the proud and the humble, 
 leaving the unhappy live-bait to be snapped 
 at by the hardy and the greedy. If the 
 wealthy father of an only daughter could be 
 gifted with a knowledge of what parental 
 care and kindness really is, it is my assured 
 belief that he would disinherit her. If he 
 leaves her his w r ealth, the best thing for her 
 to do is to marry the most respectable per- 
 son she can find of the class of men who 
 marry for money. An heiress remaining 
 unmarried is a prey to all manner of extor- 
 tion and imposition, and with the best inten- 
 tions becomes, through ill-administered expen- 
 diture and misdirected bounty, a corruption 
 to her neighbourhood and a curse to the poor ; 
 or if experience shall put her on her guard, 
 she will lead a life of resistance and suspicion, 
 to the injury of her own mind and nature. 
 
 In the case, therefore, of either high en- 
 dowments or great wealth in a daughter, the 
 
88 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 care of a parent is peculiarly needed to 
 multiply her opportunities of making a good 
 choice in marriage ; and in no case can such 
 care be properly pretermitted. 
 
 When the mother takes no pains, the mar- 
 riage of the daughter, even if not in itself 
 ineligible, is likely to be unduly deferred. 
 For the age at which marriages are to be 
 contracted is a very material consideration. 
 Aristotle was of opinion that the bridegroom 
 should be thirty-seven years of age and the 
 bride eighteen ; alleging physical reasons 
 which I venture to think exceedingly incon- 
 clusive. Eighteen for the bride is the least to 
 be objected to, and would yet be rather early 
 in this climate. A girl of that age may be 
 not absolutely unprepared for marriage ; but 
 she has hardly had time for that longing and 
 yearning affection which is to be her best 
 security after. Sir Thomas More, in account- 
 ing for Jane Shore's infidelity to her hus- 
 band, observes, that "foreasmuche as they 
 wer coupled ere she wer wel ripe, she not 
 very fervently loved for whom she never 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 89 
 
 longed." But whether or not the girl be to 
 be considered ripe at eighteen, I know no 
 good reason, moral or physical, why the man 
 should withhold himself till seven-and-thirty, 
 and many excellent reasons against it. Some 
 few years of seniority on the part of the man, 
 I do conceive to be desirable ; and on this, as 
 well as on other grounds, the woman should 
 marry young ; for if the woman were to be 
 past her first youth and the man to be some 
 years older, it follows that the man would 
 remain longer unmarried than it is good for 
 him to be alone. On the point of seniority, 
 let us listen to the Duke and Viola — 
 
 Duke. " Let still the woman take 
 
 An older than herself; so wears she to him, 
 So sways she level in her husband's heart. 
 For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, 
 Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, 
 More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn 
 Than women's are. 
 
 Viola. I think it well, my Lord. 
 
 Dulce. Then let thy love be younger than thyself, 
 Or thy affection cannot hold the bent : 
 For women are as roses, whose fair flower 
 Being once displayed, doth fall that very hour." * 
 
 * " Twelfth Night," Act ii. Sc. 4. 
 
90 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 The woman should marry, therefore, rather 
 before than after that culminating period of 
 personal charm, which, varying much in 
 different individuals, is but a short period in 
 any, and occurs in early youth in almost all. 
 She should marry between twenty and thirty 
 years of age, but nearer the former than the 
 latter period. Now the man at such an age 
 would probably be too light for the man's 
 part in marriage ; and the more so when 
 marrying a wife equally young. For when 
 two very young people are joined together in 
 matrimony, it is as if one sweet-pea should 
 be put as a prop to another. The man, there- 
 fore, may be considered most marriageable 
 when he is nearer thirty than twenty, or 
 perhaps when he is a little beyond thirty. If 
 his marriage be deferred much longer, there 
 is some danger of his becoming hardened in 
 celibacy. In the case of a serious and 
 thoughtful man, it need not be deferred so 
 long ; for in such a case, a remark made in a 
 letter of Lord Bacon's will probably be veri- 
 fied — that a man finds himself seven years 
 older the day after his marriage. 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. &1 
 
 In these times men are disposed, I think, 
 to be rather too tardy than too precipitate in 
 marrying. Worldly prudence is strong in 
 us now, even to a vice ; and a competency, 
 or what is estimated to be a competency, is 
 not attainable at a very early age. A circle 
 of friends and relatives commonly resent, as 
 an injury to themselves, a poor marriage con- 
 tracted at an early age; and not without 
 reason, if the virtues of the parties con- 
 tracting it are not such as to justify it. But 
 that will be prudence in a prudent man which 
 is imprudence in another ; and one thing is 
 certain, that the prudence which postpones 
 marriage is excessive to a vice when it in- 
 volves other vices, and presents temptations 
 less likely to be resisted than those to which 
 a poor marriage lies open. 
 
 There are other motives and circumstances 
 besides those connected with prudence, which, 
 in the case of men, militate against early 
 marriages. If their first passion (as it hap- 
 pens with most first passions) have issued in 
 a disappointment, and if they have passed 
 
92 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 through their disappointment without being 
 betrayed, by the heart's abhorrence of its 
 vacuum, into some immediate marriage of 
 the pis-aller kind, resorted to for mere pur- 
 poses of repose, they will probably find that 
 a first seizure of the kind guarantees them 
 for a certain number of years against a 
 second. In the meantime, the many interests, 
 aspirations, and alacrities of youth, its keen 
 pursuits and its fresh friendships, fill up the 
 measure of life, and make the single heart 
 sufficient to itself. It is when these things 
 have partly passed away and life has lost 
 something of its original brightness, that men 
 begin to feel an insufficiency and a want. I 
 have known it to be remarked by a Roman 
 Catholic priest, as the result of much observa- 
 tion of life amongst his brethren, that the 
 pressure of their vow of celibacy was felt 
 most severely towards forty years of age. 
 
 If a man have fairly passed that period 
 without marrying or attempting marriage, 
 then, I think, or very soon after, he may con- 
 clude that there is no better fortune in store 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 93 
 
 for him, and dispose himself finally for the 
 life celibate. 
 
 " Till age, refrain not ; but if old, refrain," 
 
 says one of the shrewdest of the unpoetical 
 poets * And this abstinence from marriage 
 on the part of old men, is to be enjoined, not 
 only on their own account, but on account of 
 the offspring to which such marriages may 
 give birth. The sort of age in youth and 
 the weakness of constitution which is observ- 
 able in the offspring of old men, involves 
 national as well as individual evil, because it 
 tends to degeneracy of the race ; and amongst 
 the Romans, who were careful of their breed, 
 there was a law, the Lex Pappia, which 
 forbade the marriage of a man of more than 
 sixty years of age with a woman of less than 
 fifty. If the old man have male issue, there 
 will generally be further the evils to the son 
 of an ill-tended minority and a premature 
 independence. 
 
 The marriages of old men to young women 
 
 * Crabbe. 
 
94 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 are, for the most r part, as objectionable in 
 their motives as in their results; and the 
 mistake of such marriages is generally as 
 great as the moral misfeasance. There is no 
 greater error of age than to suppose that it 
 can recover the enjoyment of youth by pos- 
 sessing itself of what youth only can enjoy ; 
 and age will never appear so unlovely as 
 when it is seen with such an ill-sorted 
 accompaniment — 
 
 " A chaplet of forced flowers on Winter's brow 
 Seems not less inharmonious to me 
 Than the untimely snow on the green leaf." 
 
 For the young women who make such 
 marriages there is sometimes more to be said 
 than for the old men. When the motives 
 are mercenary there is nothing to be said 
 for them; and but little when the case is 
 one of weak consent to the mercenary base- 
 ness of parents, or when they sacrifice them- 
 selves (as they will sometimes allege) in a 
 rich alliance for the relief of a large family 
 of destitute brothers and sisters. These are 
 but beggarly considerations, and might be 
 
OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 05 
 
 equally pled in defence of a less disguised 
 prostitution. But a case will sometimes 
 occur in which a young woman is dazzled 
 by great achievements or renown ; and what 
 is heroical or illustrious may inspire a feeling 
 which, distinct though it be from that which 
 youth inspires in youth, is yet not unimagi- 
 native, and may suffice to sanctify the 
 marriage vow. And there is another case, 
 not certainly to be altogether vindicated and 
 yet not to be visited with much harshness of 
 censure, in which a woman who has had her 
 heart broken, seeks, in this sort of marriage, 
 such an asylum as, had she been a Roman 
 Catholic, she might have found in a convent. 
 Marriages of the old with the old are rare, 
 and are thought by some people to be ridi- 
 culous. They do not, however, fall within 
 the purview of the Lex Pappia, or of any 
 other prohibition that I am acquainted with, 
 and I hardly know why they should be so 
 unfrequent as they are. Solitude is ill suited 
 to old age, and the course of circumstances 
 tends too often to leave the old in solitude. 
 
96 OF CHOICE IN MARRIAGE. 
 
 Cases must be continually occurring in which 
 it would be for the comfort and happiness of 
 old friends of different sexes to live together ; 
 and if they cannot do so conveniently or 
 creditably without being married, I know 
 not why they should be laughed at for 
 marrying. It must be, no doubt, a totally dif- 
 ferent connection from that which is formed 
 in earlier life ; and it is one which might be, 
 perhaps, more fitly ratified by a civil con- 
 tract than by a religious ceremony; but 
 the lawful rights of a wife are necessary to 
 the female friend, in order that she may be 
 regarded with due respect by her husband's 
 relatives and by the world, and in order that 
 she may have authority in her household : 
 and if the marriage be ascribed to this 
 reasonable motive, instead of supposing any 
 which would be unreasonable and ridiculous, 
 it may be regarded, I think, as a wise and 
 commendable species of arrangement. 
 
OF WISDOM. 
 
 Wisdom is not the same with understand- 
 ing, talents, capacity, ability, sagacity, sense, 
 or prudence — not the same with any one of 
 these ; neither will all these together make it 
 up. It is that exercise of the reason into 
 which the heart enters — a structure of the 
 understanding rising out of the moral and 
 spiritual nature. 
 
 It is for this cause that a high order of 
 wisdom — that is, a highly intellectual 
 wisdom — is still more rare than a high 
 order of genius. When they reach the very 
 highest order they are one ; for each includes 
 the other, and intellectual greatness is 
 matched with moral strength. But they 
 hardly ever reach so high, inasmuch as great 
 intellect, according to the ways of Provi- 
 dence, almost always brings along with it 
 
98 OF WISDOM. 
 
 great infirmities — or, at least, infirmities 
 which appear great owing to the scale of 
 operation ; and it is certainly exposed to 
 unusual temptations ; for as power and pre- 
 eminence lie before it, so ambition attends it, 
 which, whilst it determines the will and 
 strengthens the activities, inevitably weakens 
 the moral fabric. 
 
 Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even 
 when the quality of the ambition is intellec- 
 tual. For ambition, even of this quality, is 
 but a form of self-love, which, seeking grati- 
 fication in the consciousness of intellectual 
 power, is too much delighted with the exer- 
 cise to have a single and paramount regard 
 to the end ; and it is not according to 
 wisdom that the end — that is, the moral 
 and spiritual consequences — should suffer 
 derogation in favour of the intellectual 
 means. God is love, and God is light; 
 whence it results that love is light ; and it is 
 only by following the effluence of that light, 
 that intellectual power issues into wisdom. 
 The intellectual power which loses that light 
 
OF WISDOM. 99 
 
 and issues into intellectual pride, is out of 
 the way to wisdom, and will not attain even 
 to intellectual greatness. For though many 
 arts, gifts, and attainments may co-exist in 
 much force with intellectual pride, an open 
 greatness cannot ; and of all the correspond- 
 encies between the moral and intellectual 
 nature, there is none more direct and imme- 
 diate than that of humility with capacious- 
 ness. If pride of intellect be indulged, it will 
 mark out to a man conscious of great talents 
 the circle of his own intellectual experiences 
 as the only one in which he can keenly 
 recognise and appreciate the intellectual uni- 
 verse ; and there is no order of intellectual 
 men which stands in a more strict limitation 
 than that of the man who cannot conceive 
 what he does not contain. Such men will 
 oftentimes dazzle the world, and exercise in 
 their day and generation much influence on 
 the many whose range is no wider than 
 theirs and whose force is less ; but the want 
 of spiritual and imaginative wisdom will stop 
 them there; and the understandings from 
 
 F 2 
 
 LOFC, 
 
100 OF WISDOM. 
 
 which mankind will seek a permanent and 
 authentic guidance, will be those which 
 have been exalted by love and enlarged by 
 humility. 
 
 If wisdom be defeated by ambition and 
 self-love when these are occupied with the 
 mere inward consciousness of intellectual 
 power, still more is it so when they are 
 eager to obtain recognition and admiration of 
 it from without. Men who are accustomed 
 to write or speak for effect, may write or 
 speak what is wise from time to time, because 
 they may be capable of thinking and intel- 
 lectually adopting what is wise : but they 
 will not be wise men ; because the love of 
 God, the love of man, and the love of truth 
 not having the mastery with them, the growth 
 and structure of their minds must needs be 
 perverted if not stunted. Thence it is that 
 so many men are observed to speak wisely 
 and yet act foolishly ; they are not deficient 
 in their understandings, but the wisdom of 
 the heart is wanting to their ends and objects, 
 and to those feelings which have the direction 
 
OF WISDOM. 101 
 
 of their acts. And if they do speak wisely, 
 it is not because they are wise ; for the per- 
 manent shape and organisation of the mind 
 proceeds from what we feel and do, and not 
 from what we speak, write, or think. There 
 is a great volume of truth in the admonition 
 which teaches us that the spirit of obedience 
 is to prepare the way, action to come next, 
 and that knowledge is not precedent to these, 
 but consequent : " Do the will of my Father 
 which is in heaven, and thou shalt know of 
 the doctrine." 
 
 Those who are much conversant with intel- 
 lectual men will observe, I think, that the 
 particular action of self-love by which their 
 minds are most frequently warped from 
 wisdom, is that which belongs to a pride and 
 pleasure taken in the exercise of the argu- 
 mentative faculty; whence it arises that 
 that faculty is enabled to assert a predomi- 
 nance over its betters. With such men, the 
 elements of a question which will make 
 effect in argument, — those which are, so far 
 as they go, demonstrative, — will be rated 
 
102 OF WISDOM. 
 
 above their value ; and those which are matter 
 of proportion and degree, not palpable, pon- 
 derable, or easily or shortly producible in 
 words, or which are matters of moral estima- 
 tion and optional opinion, will go for less 
 than they are worth, because they are not 
 available to ensure the victory or grace the 
 triumph of a disputant. 
 
 In some discussions, a wise man will be 
 silenced by argumentation, only because he 
 knows that the question should be determined 
 by considerations which lie beyond the reach 
 of argumentative exhibition. And indeed, 
 in all but purely scientific questions, argu- 
 ments are not to be submitted to by the 
 judgment as first in command; rather they 
 are to be used as auxiliaries and pioneers ; 
 the judgment should profit by them to the 
 extent of the services they can render, but 
 after their work is done, it should come to 
 its conclusions upon its own free survey. 
 I have seldom known a man with great 
 powers of argumentation abundantly in- 
 dulged, who could attain to an habitually 
 
OF WISDOM. 103 
 
 just judgment. In our courts of law, where 
 advocacy and debate are most in use, abi- 
 lity, sagacity, and intellectual power flourish 
 and abound, whilst wisdom is said to have 
 been disbarred. In our houses of parlia- 
 ment the case is somewhat otherwise; the 
 silent members, and those who take but 
 little part in debate, and indeed the coun- 
 try at large which may be said to listen, 
 exercise some subduing influence over the 
 spirit of argumentation, and the responsi- 
 bility for results restrains it, so that here 
 its predominance is much less than in the 
 courts of law; yet even in the houses of 
 parliament wisdom has been supposed to 
 have less to say to the proceedings than a 
 certain species of courage. 
 
 Ambition and self-love will commonly 
 derange that proportion between the active 
 and passive understanding which is essential 
 to wisdom, and will lead a man to value 
 thoughts and opinions less according to their 
 worth and truth, than according as they are 
 his own or another's. The objection made 
 
104 OF WISDOM. 
 
 by Brutus to Cicero in the play, — that he 
 "would never follow anything which other 
 men began " — points to one corruption oper- 
 ated by self-love upon a great understanding. 
 Some preference a man may reasonably 
 accord to what is the growth of his own 
 mind apart from its absolute value, on the 
 ground of its specific usefulness to himself ; 
 for what is native to the soil will thrive 
 better and bear more fruit than what has 
 been transplanted : but, on the other hand, if a 
 man would enlarge the scope and diversify the 
 kinds of his thoughts and contemplations, he 
 should not think too much to apprehend nor 
 talk too much to listen. He should cherish 
 the thoughts of his own begetting with a 
 loving care and a temperate discipline — they 
 are the family of his mind and its chief 
 reliance — but he should give a hospitable 
 reception to guests and to travellers with 
 stories of far countries, and the family should 
 not be suffered to crowd the doors. 
 
 Even without the stimulant of self-love, 
 some minds, owing to a natural redundance 
 
OF WISDOM. 105 
 
 of activity and excess of velocity and fer- 
 tility, cannot be sufficiently passive to be 
 wise. A capability to take a thousand views 
 of a subject is hard to be reconciled with 
 directness and singleness of judgment ; and 
 he who can find a great deal to say for any 
 view, will not often go the straight road to 
 the one view that is right. If subtlety be 
 added to exuberance, the judgment is still 
 more endangered — 
 
 " Tell Wit how oft she wrangles 
 l In tickel points of niceness, 
 Tell Wisdom she entangles 
 Herself in over-wiseness." * 
 
 But when self-love is not at the root, there 
 is better hope for wisdom. Nature presents 
 us with various walks of intellectual life, and 
 such a selection may be made as shall render 
 a disproportion of the active to the passive 
 intellect less dangerous* Speculative wisdom 
 will suffer less by excess of thinking than 
 practical wisdom. There are fields to be 
 fought in which a wide range is more essential 
 
 * Sir Walter Raleigh. 
 f3 
 
106 OF WISDOM. 
 
 than an unerring aim. In some regions we 
 are to cultivate the surface; in others to 
 sink the shaft. No one intellect can be 
 equally available for opposite avocations, 
 and where there is no interference of self- 
 love, wisdom will be attained through a wise 
 choice of work. One eminent man of our times 
 has said of another, that " science was his 
 forte, and omniscience his foible." But that 
 instance was not an extreme one. Cases 
 have occurred in which wisdom has suffered 
 total overthrow; the greatest intellect and 
 the greatest folly have been known to 
 meet; and the universalist who handles 
 everything and embraces nothing, has 
 been seen to pass into a pursuer of the 
 mere vanities and frivolities of intellectual 
 display. 
 
 If, however, a man of genius be fortunately 
 free from ambition, there is yet another enemy 
 which will commonly lie in wait for his wis- 
 dom ; to wit, a great capacity of enjoyment. 
 This generally accompanies genius, and is, 
 perhaps, the greatest of all trials to the 
 
 
OF WISDOM. 107 
 
 moral and spiritual heart. It was a trial 
 too severe even for Solomon, 
 
 " whose heart, though large, 
 Beguiled by fair Idolatresses fell 
 To idols foul." * 
 
 The temptation by which such a man is 
 assailed consists in imagining that he has 
 within himself and by virtue of his tempera- 
 ment, sources of joy altogether independent 
 of conduct and circumstances. It is true 
 that he has these sources on this uncon- 
 ditional tenure for a time; and it is owing 
 to this very truth that his futurity is in 
 danger, — not in respect of wisdom only, but 
 also in respect of happiness. And if we look 
 to recorded examples, we shall find that a 
 great capacity of enjoyment does ordinarily 
 bring about the destruction of enjoyment 
 in its own ulterior consequences, having 
 uprooted wisdom by the way. 
 
 A man of genius, so gifted — or, let us rather 
 say, so tempted — lives until the consumma- 
 tion approaches, as if he possessed some elixir 
 
 * Paradise Lost. 
 
108 OF WISDOM. 
 
 or phylactery, reckless of consequences, be- 
 cause his happiness, being so inward to his 
 nature, seems to be inherent and indefeasible. 
 Wisdom is not wanted. The intellect, per- 
 haps, amidst the abundance of its joys, re- 
 joices in wise contemplations; but wisdom is 
 not adopted and domesticated in the mind, 
 owing to the fearlessness of the heart. For 
 wisdom will have no hold on the heart in 
 which joy is not tempered by fear. The fear 
 of the Lord, we know, is the beginning of it ; 
 and some hallowing and chastening influences 
 of fear will always go along with it. Fear, 
 indeed, is the mother of foresight ; spiritual 
 fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond the 
 grave ; temporal fear, of a foresight that falls 
 short ; but without fear there is neither the 
 one foresight nor the other ; and as pain has 
 been truly said to be the deepest thing in our 
 nature, so is it fear that will bring the depths 
 of our nature within our knowledge : — 
 
 " What sees rejoicing genius in the Earth ? 
 A thousand meadows with a thousand herds 
 Freshly luxuriant in a Mayday dawn ; 
 A thousand ships that caracole and prance 
 
OF WISDOM. 109 
 
 With freights of gold upon a sunny sea ; 
 
 A thousand gardens gladdened by all flowers, 
 
 That on the air breathe out an odorous beauty."" 
 
 Genius may see all this and rejoice; but it 
 will not exalt itself into wisdom, unless it 
 see also the meadow in the livid hues of 
 winter, the ship under bare poles, and the 
 flower when the beauty of the fashion of it 
 perishes. 
 
 It is true, however, that the cases are rare 
 and exceptional in which this dangerous 
 capacity of enjoyment is an unbroken habit, 
 so as to bring a steady and continuous pres- 
 sure upon the moral mind. A great capacity 
 of suffering belongs to genius also ; and it has 
 been observed that an alternation of joyful- 
 ness and dejection is quite as characteristic 
 of the man of genius as intensity in either 
 kind. Doubtless these alternations will 
 greatly enlarge his knowledge both of Man 
 and of the universe. The many moods of his 
 own mind will give him a penetrating and 
 experienced insight into many minds ; and 
 he will contemplate the universe and all that 
 
110 OF WISDOM. 
 
 goes on in it from many points of view. 
 Moreover, it is by re-action from the extreme 
 of one state, that the mind receives the most 
 powerful impulse towards another— in re- 
 silience that it has its plenary force. But 
 though these alternations of excess do thus 
 enlarge and enrich the understanding and 
 minister to wisdom so far forth, they must 
 yet, by the shocks which they occasion to the 
 moral will, do injury on the whole to that 
 composite edifice, built up of the moral and 
 rational mind, in which Wisdom has her 
 dwelling. The injury is not so great as in 
 the other case : better are winter and sum- 
 mer for the mind than the torrid zone — 
 feasts and fasts than a perpetual plenty — 
 but either way the temperament of genius is 
 hardly ever favourable to wisdom; that is, 
 the highest order of genius, or that which 
 includes wisdom, is of all things the most 
 rare. 
 
 On the other hand, wisdom without genius 
 (a far more precious gift than genius with- 
 out wisdom) is, by God's blessing upon the 
 
OF WISDOM. Ill 
 
 humble and loving heart, though not as often 
 met with as " the ordinary of Nature's sale- 
 work," yet not altogether rare ; for the 
 desire to be right will go a great way towards 
 wisdom. Intellectual guidance is the less 
 needed where there is little to lead astray 
 — where humility lets the heart loose to 
 the impulses of love. That we can be wise 
 by impulse will seem a paradox to some ; 
 but it is a part of that true doctrine which 
 traces wisdom to the moral as well as the 
 intellectual mind, and more surely to the 
 former than to the latter — one of those 
 truths which is recognised when we look 
 into our nature through the clearness of a 
 poetic spirit : — 
 
 " Moments there are in life — alas, how few ! — 
 When casting cold prudential doubts aside, 
 We take a generous impulse for our guide, 
 
 And following promptly what the heart thinks best, 
 Commit to Providence the rest ; 
 
 Sure that no after-reckoning will arise 
 
 Of shame or sorrow, for the heart is wise. 
 And happy they who thus in faith obey 
 
 Their better nature : err sometimes they may, 
 And some sad thoughts lie heavy in the breast, 
 
112 OF WISDOM. 
 
 Such as by hope deceived are left behind ; 
 But like a shadow these will pass away 
 From the pure sunshine of the peaceful mind."* 
 
 The doctrine of wisdom by impulse is no 
 doubt liable to be much misused and misap- 
 plied. The right to rest upon such a creed 
 accrues only to those who have so trained 
 their nature as to be entitled to trust it. It 
 is the impulse of the habitual heart which 
 the judgment may fairly follow upon occa- 
 sion — of the heart which, being habitually 
 humble and loving, has been framed by love 
 to wisdom. Some such fashioning love will 
 always effect ; for love cannot exist without 
 solicitude, solicitude brings thoughtfulness, 
 and it is in a thoughtful love that the wis- 
 dom of the heart consists. The impulse of 
 such a heart will take its shape and guidance 
 from the very mould in which it is cast, 
 without any application of the reason express; 
 and the most inadvertent motion of a wise 
 heart will for the most part be wisely di- 
 rected ; providentially, let us rather say ; for 
 
 * Southey's Oliver Newman. 
 
OF WISDOM. 113 
 
 Providence has no more eminent seat than 
 in the wisdom of the heart. 
 
 Wisdom by impulse, then, is to be trusted 
 in by those only who have habitually used 
 their reason to the full extent of its powers 
 in forming the heart and cultivating the 
 judgment, whilst, owing to its constitu- 
 tional deficiency, or to its peculiarity (for 
 the reason may be unserviceable from other 
 causes than deficiency), they are conscious 
 that their judgment is likely to be rather 
 perplexed than cleared by much think- 
 ing on questions on which they are called 
 upon to act or decide. Those in whom the 
 meditative faculty is peculiarly strong, will 
 often find themselves in this predicament ; 
 witness Christopher Hervie's complaint : — 
 
 " One while I think ; and then I am in pain 
 To think how to unthink that thought again." * 
 
 And they whose deliberative judgment is 
 weak and indecisive from a natural debility 
 of the reason, may act from impulse, and even 
 though the consequences be evil, may be held 
 
 * The Synagogue, 41. 
 
114 OF WISDOM. 
 
 to be wise according to their kind. For the 
 course they took may have been the wisest 
 for tliem, being founded upon a just measure- 
 ment of the insufficiencies of their under- 
 standing. And those who can take this just 
 measurement, and holding their opinions 
 with due diffidence, yet act in love and faith 
 and without fear, may be wise of heart, 
 though erring in judgment ; and though not 
 gifted with intellectual wisdom, may yet be 
 deemed to have as much understanding as 
 innocence has occasion for. 
 
 Upon this, however, the question will arise, 
 whether errors of the judgment are, as such, 
 absolutely void of offence ; and whether he 
 who has committed them may look back 
 upon them, whatever may have been their 
 consequences, without any compunctious 
 visitings. An eminent statesman is said to 
 have averred, that when he was conscious of 
 having taken a decision with all due care 
 and consideration, to the best of his judg- 
 ment and with the best intentions, he never 
 looked back to it with a moment's regret, 
 
OF WISDOM. 115 
 
 though the result might prove it to have been 
 wholly erroneous. This is a frame of mind 
 highly conducive to civil courage, and there- 
 fore not without its advantages in political 
 life. But it is not equally conducive to wis- 
 dom. Nor, perhaps, in this unqualified form, 
 is it to be altogether vindicated in morals. 
 At all events, so much regret might be felt, 
 if no more, as would suffice to awaken some 
 self-questionings, not merely as to the spe- 
 cific moral rectitude accompanying or proxi- 
 mately preceding the particular act, but as 
 to that general and life-long training of the 
 heart to wisdom, which gives the best assur- 
 ance of specific results, and of which, there- 
 fore, specific failures should suggest the 
 deficiency. Some short-comings of this kind 
 there must of course be in all human beings, 
 and they should be at all times aware of it ; 
 but it is in the order of Nature that this con- 
 sciousness should be quickened from time to 
 time by the contemplation of evil conse- 
 quences arising from specific errors of judg- 
 ment, however innocent in themselves ; which 
 
116 OF WISDOM. 
 
 contemplation, accompanied with a natural 
 regret, constitutes what may be called a 
 repentance of the understanding — not easily 
 to be escaped by a plain man, nor properly 
 to be repudiated by a philosopher. 
 
 Yet when the consequences of an error of 
 judgment are irremediable, how often are 
 those who would animadvert upon it, met 
 with the admonition to "let the past be 
 past :" as if the past had no relations with 
 the future ; and as if the experience of our 
 errors of judgment, and the inquisition into 
 their sources, did not, by its very painfulness, 
 effect the deepest cultivation of the under- 
 standing, — that cultivation whereby what 
 is irremediable is itself converted into a 
 remedy. 
 
 The main scope and design of this disqui- 
 sition having been to inculcate that wisdom 
 is still more essentially a moral and spiritual 
 than it is an intellectual attribute, that genius 
 can mount to wisdom only by Jacob's ladder, 
 and that knowledge can only be converted 
 into wisdom by an application of the heart, — 
 
OF WISDOM. 117 
 
 I cannot better close it than with that decla- 
 ration of the nature of wisdom which is deli- 
 vered in the 28th chapter of the book of Job :— 
 
 " Whence then cometh wisdom ? and where 
 is the place of understanding ? 
 
 "Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all 
 Hying, and kept close from the fowls of the air. 
 
 " Destruction and death say, we have heard 
 the fame thereof with our ears. 
 
 " God understandeth the way thereof, and 
 he knoweth the place thereof. 
 
 " For he looketh to the ends of the earth, 
 and seeth under the whole Heaven ; 
 
 " To make the weight for the winds ; and 
 he weigheth the waters by measure. 
 
 " When he made a decree for the rain, and 
 a way for the lightning of the thunder : 
 
 "Then did he see it, and declare it; he 
 prepared it, yea, and searched it out. 
 
 " And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of 
 the Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from 
 evil is understanding." 
 
CHILDREN. 
 
 From the complaints which everybody 
 brings against everybody in the matter of the 
 management of children, one might be led to 
 suppose that such a thing as good manage- 
 ment of them did not exist amongst man- 
 kind. And no doubt this is so far true, that 
 on a subject on which so many and such 
 various kinds of errors may be committed, 
 the best management can be but very imper- 
 fect, and those who are complained of should 
 be willing to listen, in the assurance that real 
 errors there are, and for the chance of those 
 being the errors that are hit upon and 
 pointed out. 
 
 But remonstrance and admonition, whether 
 listened to or not, seem in general to be of as 
 little avail on these questions as theories and 
 
CHILDREN. 119 
 
 doctrines; and from the uselessness of all 
 these, and from the fact that thoughtful and 
 cultivated people are seen, not unfrequently, 
 to get as wrong as others, it may be inferred 
 that the most essential qualifications for 
 training a child well, are not of a nature to 
 be communicated by books or lectures on 
 education. They are, 1st, The desire to be 
 right in the matter ; 2nd, Sense ; 3rd, Kind- 
 ness ; and 4th, Firmness. 
 
 Where these are wanting, the wisest admo- 
 nitions in the world will be of no other use 
 than to relieve the mind of the person who 
 throws them away. 
 
 Theories, however, seem to have more 
 power to pervert the natural understanding, 
 in this case, than they have to enlighten it. 
 The doctrine of an eminent writer (of a gene- 
 ration now nearly gone), that a child should 
 be reasoned into obedience, had, in its day, 
 more of a misleading efficacy than might 
 have been thought possible ; and many a 
 parent was induced to believe that a child 
 should be taught to give its obedience, not 
 
120 CHILDREN. 
 
 because it was obedience, but because the 
 thing ordered was reasonable ; the little 
 casuists and controversialists being expected 
 to see the reason of things as readily in real 
 life, as in the dialogues between Tutor and 
 Charles. The common sense of mankind 
 has now made an end of this doctrine, and it 
 is known now, as it was before the transit 
 of that eminent person, that obedience — 
 prompt, implicit, unreasoning, and almost 
 unconscious — is the first thing to be taught 
 to a child, and that he can have no peace for 
 his soul without it. 
 
 The notion of setting up the reason to be 
 the pivot of humanity from the cradle for- 
 wards, belongs to a generation of fallacies 
 which have returned to the dust from 
 which they came ; but it included one error 
 in theories of education which will be found 
 to belong to many that are still extant : the 
 error of assuming that the parent is to be 
 perfect. Under the reasoning regimen, what 
 was to happen when the parent's reasons 
 were bad ? And in like manner, with respect 
 
CHILDREN. 121 
 
 to many less unnatural systems which are 
 recommended as if they were of universal 
 applicability, the question may be asked, 
 Will most parents be competent to give effect 
 to them ? And, bearing in mind the not in- 
 considerable number of mankind who labour 
 under imperfections of the understanding or 
 other disqualifying defects, I believe we shall 
 find that a few strong instincts and a few 
 plain rules, are all that can be appealed to 
 for general guidance in the management of 
 children. 
 
 That first and foremost rule of exacting 
 obedience, is so far from being subject to the 
 condition of showing reasons, that I believe 
 a parent with a strong will, although it be a 
 perverse one, will train a child better than a 
 parent of a reasonable mind, tainted by infir- 
 mity of purpose. For as " obedience is better 
 than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of 
 rams," so an authority which is absolute by 
 virtue of its own inherent strength, is better 
 than one which is shaken by a reference to 
 ends and purposes, and by reasonable doubts 
 
122 CHILDKEN. 
 
 as to whether they are the best and most 
 useful. Nor will the parent's perversity, 
 unless it be unkind or ill-tempered, occasion 
 the child half so much uneasiness in the one 
 case, as the child will suffer from those per- 
 versities of its own which will spring up in 
 the other ? For habits of instant and mecha- 
 nical obedience are those that give rest to the 
 child, and spare its health and temper ; whilst 
 a recusant or dawdling obedience will keep it 
 distracted in propensity, bringing a perpetual 
 pressure on its nerves and consequently on 
 its mental and bodily strength. 
 
 To enforce this kind of obedience our most 
 efficacious instrument is a clear and deter- 
 minate manner; because with children at 
 least this is the most significant expression of 
 an authoritative will. But it is an instru- 
 ment which those only can employ who 
 are authoritative by temperament; for an 
 assumed manner, or one which is not true to 
 the temperament, will be of no avail. Those 
 parents who are not gifted with this temper- 
 ament and this manner, must needs, if they 
 
CHILDREN. 123 
 
 do their duty, have recourse to punishments ; 
 of which, in the case of most children, those 
 are best which are sharp and soon over. 
 And let not the parents think that by a just 
 and necessary amount of punishment they 
 run any risk of impairing the child's affec- 
 tions. The risk is far greater of impairing 
 them by indulgence. A spoilt child never 
 loves its mother; never at least with the 
 same measure of love as if it were unspoilt. 
 And there is in human nature an essential 
 though somewhat mysterious connection of 
 love with fear, which, though chiefly recog- 
 nised in the relations between man and God, 
 is also discernible in the relations between 
 man and man, and especially in those between 
 parent and child. Love in either relation is 
 deepened by some degree — not oppressive or 
 too disturbing — some slight degree of fear ; 
 and the very truth of the text, that " perfect 
 love casteth out fear," shows that fear must 
 be there before the love is made perfect. 
 Therefore the parent who shrinks from in- 
 flicting just and proper punishments upon a 
 G 2 
 
124 CHILDREN. 
 
 child, deprives that child not only of the 
 rest to be found in duty and obedience, but 
 also of the blessings of a deeper love. 
 
 There is another way not much adverted 
 to by blind parents, in which children are 
 injured by undue indulgence. It prevents 
 them from benefiting by the general tendency 
 of mankind 'to have kind and friendly feelings 
 towards children. Such feelings are checked 
 and abated when it is seen that children are 
 unduly favoured by their parents. And when 
 the rights and comforts of others are sacri- 
 ficed for their sake, instead of being objects 
 for the protection and good offices of all 
 around them, they become odious in the same 
 manner as princes' favourites do, and their 
 parents' sins are visited upon them. 
 
 Then the repugnance which people feel 
 towards the objects of an unjust partiality, 
 provokes them to exaggerate the demerits of 
 the children,— -not probably to the face of the 
 parents, but in a way to go round to them, — 
 whereupon the parents come in with some 
 show of reason as protectors of injured inno- 
 
CHILDREN. 125 
 
 cence, and fortify themselves in their own 
 delusions by detecting injustice in the views 
 of others. It is not the nature of mankind to 
 be unjust to children, and where parents find 
 this injustice to prevail, they should look 
 for the source of it in their children or in 
 themselves. 
 
 Indeed, it is the nature of mankind to be 
 only too kind to children, and to take too 
 much notice of them ; and this is a reason 
 for not throwing them too much in the way 
 of strangers and casual visitors. When the 
 visitors are intelligent, and the parents are 
 not the sort of people to whom flattery is 
 acceptable, the children may be no worse for 
 meeting the visitors, though they should 
 never be sent for to be shown. But when the 
 parents are known to have open ears for the 
 praises of their children, there are hardly 
 any strangers so careful and conscientious 
 as not to say what is expected of them, and 
 very many will carry their blandishments to 
 an extreme of grossness and falseness. A 
 considerate visitor will observe the conduct 
 
126 CHILDEEN. 
 
 of a judicious parent towards a child, and be 
 guided by it ; but the instances are far more 
 frequent in which the folly of injudicious 
 parents is unscrupulously abetted by the 
 levity of others ; and the only consolation for 
 a rational bystander is that the children may 
 have more sense than their flatterers and 
 more discernment than their parents, and 
 be unflattered and ill-pleased (as will some- 
 times happen) by these coarse attempts at 
 adulation. 
 
 It is selfishness on the part of parents 
 which gives rise to undue indulgence of 
 children, — the selfishness of sacrificing those 
 for whom they care less to those for whom 
 they care more ; and the selfishness of the 
 parent for the child will invariably produce 
 selfishness of the child for himself. A spoilt 
 child is never generous. And selfishness is 
 induced in a child not only by too much 
 indulgence, but even by too much attention. 
 It will be most for a child's happiness and 
 well-being, both present and to come, that he 
 should feel himself, in respect to comforts 
 
CHILDREN. 127 
 
 and enjoyments, the most insignificant person 
 in the house. In that case he will have his 
 own resources, which will be more available 
 to him than any which perpetual attention 
 can minister; he will be subject to fewer 
 discontents ; and his affections will be more 
 cultivated by the occasional tokens of kind- 
 ness which a contented child will naturally 
 receive in sufficient abundance, than they 
 would be by continual endeavours to make 
 him happy. 
 
 And if continual attention to making him 
 happy will not produce happiness, neither 
 will continual attention to making him good 
 produce goodness. For if the child feels that 
 there is some one incessantly occupied with 
 his happiness and goodness, he will come to 
 be incessantly occupied with himself. Some- 
 thing must be left in a spirit of faith and 
 hope to Nature and God's providence. Parents 
 are the instruments, but they are not to be 
 all in all. Room must be left for some 
 liberty of action, for many an untended im- 
 pulse, for self-reliance, for temptations and 
 
128 CHILDREN. 
 
 trials, with their natural results of victory 
 with self-respect, or defeat with remorse. By 
 such treatment the child's moral nature, 
 being amply exercised, will be seasonably 
 strengthened ; and when he comes into the 
 world as a man, he will come with a man's 
 weapons of defence ; whereas if the child be 
 constantly watched and kept out of harm's 
 way, he will come into the world a moral 
 weakling. I was once present when an old 
 mother, who had brought up a large family of 
 children with eminent success, was asked by 
 a young one what she would recommend in 
 the case of some children who were too 
 anxiously educated, and her reply was — " I 
 think, my dear, a little wholesome neglect." 
 
 For similar reasons it may be well that 
 children should not be hedged in with any 
 great number of rules and regulations. Such 
 as are necessary to be established, they 
 should be required implicitly to observe. 
 But there should be none that are super- 
 fluous. It is only in rich families, where there 
 is a plentiful attendance of governesses and 
 
CHILDREN. 129 
 
 nurses, that many rules can be enforced; 
 and I believe that the constant attentions of 
 governesses and nurses is one of the greatest 
 moral disadvantages to which the children of 
 the rich are exposed. 
 
 I have heard a multiplicity of petty regu- 
 lations defended, on the ground that it was a 
 constant exercise of the child's sense of right 
 and wrong. But will a child be really the 
 better for always thinking about whether he 
 does right or wrong, that is,- — always thinking 
 about himself? Were it not well that, for 
 hours together, no question of right or wrong 
 should arise in his path? or at least none 
 that demands from him more than a half- 
 mechanical attention ? For the conscience 
 of a child may easily be worn out, both by 
 too much pressure and by over-stimulation. 
 I have known a child to have a conscience 
 of such extraordinary and premature sensi- 
 bility, that at seven years of age she would 
 be made ill by remorse for a small fault. 
 She was brought up by persons of excellent 
 understanding, with infinite care and affec- 
 
 G 3 
 
130 CHILDREN. 
 
 tion, and yet, by the time she was twenty 
 years of age, she had next to no conscience 
 and a hard heart. A person who had some 
 experience of precocious consciences once 
 observed to me, in respect to those children 
 who are said to be too good and too clever 
 to live, that it was very desirable they should 
 not. 
 
 These views are not, of course, to be 
 pushed too far. A child's conscience should 
 always have that sufficiency of exercise 
 which due discipline and the occasions of 
 life will not fail to supply, without factitious 
 duties or needless rules. And with respect 
 to the treatment of the conscience on the 
 point of sensibility, natural constitutions are 
 so diverse that it is difficult to speak gene- 
 rally ; but though I would not have it much 
 stimulated or unintermittingly worked upon 
 — though I would avoid to intimidate or 
 intenerate the conscience — I do not agree 
 with those who think that the appeals to it 
 should be invariably made with a judicial 
 calmness, and that all punishments should 
 
CHILDREN. 131 
 
 be inflicted dispassionately. Moral disap- 
 probation on the part of parents towards 
 children (as indeed on the part of men 
 towards men throughout all relations of life) 
 should not operate mechanically, bringing 
 with it, like a calculating machine, a propor- 
 tionate evil to be suffered as a consequence 
 of every evil act. It should operate accord- 
 ing to its own human nature, as a matter of 
 emotion, not only bringing an evil to be 
 suffered, but a moral sentiment to be recog- 
 nised and taken to heart — a passion which 
 should strike upon the moral sense. 
 
 According to the nature of the child and 
 of the fault, the emotion should be some- 
 times more of sorrow than of anger, some- 
 times more of anger than of sorrow. But it 
 were better for the child's conscience that 
 there should be some errors of emotion, than 
 that punishments should be cold and diy. 
 A parent should " be angry and sin not ; " 
 that is, the anger should be a just and moral 
 anger, and grave and governed ; but at the 
 same time it should be the real anger of 
 
132 CHILDREN. 
 
 flesh and blood, and not the mere vis motrix 
 of an instrument of discipline. In this way 
 the moral sentiments of the parent, if they 
 be virtuous, generous and just, will be im- 
 parted to the child : for it is a truth never to 
 be lost sight of in the treatment of our 
 children, that their characters are formed, 
 not by what we do, think, or teach, but by 
 what we feel and by what we are. 
 
 With respect to the intellectual cultivation 
 of children, it is very important that the 
 body, mind, and moral sense of the child 
 should proceed in their growth proportion- 
 ately and pari passu : — 
 
 " Por nature, crescent, does not grow alone 
 In thews and bulk ; but as this temple waxes, 
 The inward service of the mind and soul 
 Grows wide withal." * 
 
 As this temple waxes let it be ; not before 
 this temple waxes. Whichsoever of these 
 constituents of the human being, the body, 
 the intellect and the moral sense, shall 
 shoot forth prematurely and in advance of 
 
 Hamlet. 
 
CHILDREN. 133 
 
 the others, will run a great risk of being- 
 nipped and blighted. The intellectual is, of 
 the three — in these times at least — that 
 which is most liable to premature develop- 
 ment. The evil consequences of such deve- 
 lopment have been very generally perceived, 
 and many maxims are afloat against over- 
 education; but the ambition of parents is 
 commonly too strong for their wisdom and 
 prudence, and the over-education proceeds, 
 the maxims notwithstanding. And schools 
 and colleges and all tutors and teachers 
 being governed by the same spirit, it is diffi- 
 cult for a wise parent to give effect to wise 
 views, even when he heartily desires it. One 
 rule, however, it is in his own hands to 
 carry out, and this is, if he talk much to his 
 children, not to talk intellectually. The in- 
 tellectual talk of adults is apt, not only to sti- 
 mulate the child's intellect to efforts beyond 
 its strength, but also to overlay many intellec- 
 tual tastes which have their natural place 
 in childhood and which it is good for every 
 mind to have passed through. It is best for 
 
134 CHILDREN. 
 
 a child that he should admire cordially what 
 he does admire ; but if the intellectual tastes 
 and criticisms of the adult mind are brought 
 to bear upon him, he will try to admire 
 what he cannot and fail to admire what he 
 might. 
 
 On the other hand, I would not be under- 
 stood to recommend the sort of jocular non- 
 sense which some intellectual parents will 
 have recourse to in order to place their con- 
 versation on a level with a child's under- 
 standing ; nor do I observe that children are 
 fond of it, or at all flattered by it, but rather 
 the contrary. For it is a mistake to suppose 
 that any joke is good enough for a child. 
 Intelligent children, if not absolutely fasti- 
 dious as to jokes, (which certainly all children 
 are as to taste and manners), will not, how- 
 ever, accept as complacently as might be 
 wished, the mere good-natured disposition to 
 make them merry ; nor can they respond in 
 the manner that is sometimes expected from 
 them, to every well-meant effort of heavy 
 gambolling and forced facetiousness. What- 
 
CHILDREN. 135 
 
 ever is most simple and natural is most 
 pleasing to a child ; and if the parent be not 
 naturally light and gay, he had better be 
 grave with his children, only avoiding to be 
 deep or subtle in discourse. 
 
 But however parents may demean them- 
 selves, it is not desirable that they and their 
 children should be always together. Child- 
 ren and young people — and I should say 
 even adults — are not the better in their un- 
 derstandings for an exclusive association 
 with their superiors in understanding. Such 
 association should be occasional, not constant. 
 The inferior mind so associated may possibly 
 not be of a nature to be over-excited and 
 over-wrought; it may be safe from those 
 evils through defect of spontaneous force 
 and activity; but in that case another evil 
 arises ; it is led to adopt its opinions instead 
 of thinking them, and finds a short cut to 
 posts to which it would be better that it 
 should fight its way. In the case of a young 
 man who has been brought up in the con- 
 stant society of a parent greatly superior to 
 
136 CHILDREN. 
 
 himself, it will generally be found that he 
 has come by his opinions, not (as is best in 
 youth) partly through deference to authority, 
 partly through conflict with equals, and 
 partly by spontaneous impulse, but almost 
 entirely by adoption, as if they were certified 
 facts. And this leaves the mind unenlarged 
 and the judgment unexercised. 
 
 There is a class of opinions, however, — 
 those connected with the moral and spiritual 
 nature, — which are to be inculcated on a 
 different principle from those which concern 
 merely the cultivation of the intellect. For 
 these are opinions which are not to be valued 
 merely as opinions, but on account of the 
 feelings and affections which are to be incor- 
 porated with them. Great as is the import- 
 ance of true religious doctrine — which is, as 
 it were, the body of religion — it is, neverthe- 
 less, an importance subsidiary and derivative ; 
 it is derived from the efficacy of true religious 
 doctrine to cherish and protect the growth of 
 genuine religious feeling, which is the soul of 
 religion. The opinions are the organic struc- 
 
CHILDREN. 137 
 
 ture ; the feelings are the vital principle. It 
 is for the sake of the feelings that the organi- 
 sation is so important; and I think, there- 
 fore, that religious truths, or what the parent 
 believes to be religious truths, should be pre- 
 sented to children through the conveyance of 
 the feelings for implicit adoption, and not as 
 matters to be wrought out in the under- 
 standing. For the primary object, which is to 
 fix the feeling, will be in some measure frus- 
 trated — the feeling will be in some measure 
 abated or supplanted — if more thought be 
 called up than the feeling of its own mere 
 motion will naturally generate. 
 
 But if the religious beliefs of a child be not 
 founded in his reason, what, it may be asked, 
 will become of them when the credulous sim- 
 plicity of childhood shall be at an end, and 
 the thinking faculty shall have set itself to 
 work? I answer that whether his beliefs 
 have been founded in reason, or whether 
 they have been founded in love, receiving 
 from reason merely a collateral support, it 
 is probable that if the child be of an active 
 
138 CHILDREN. 
 
 and inquisitive understanding, the beliefs will, 
 at one period or another within childhood or 
 succeeding it, sustain some shock and trial. 
 But those who have taken much note of 
 human nature will have observed, I think, 
 that the reason is the weakest part of it, 
 (God forbid that it should not !) and that the 
 most reasonable opinions are seldom held 
 with much tenacity unless when they have 
 been adopted in the same way as that in 
 which prejudices are adopted ; that is when 
 they have been borne in upon the under- 
 standing by the feelings. Whilst I think, 
 therefore, that love is that constituent of 
 faith of which a child's nature is most capa- 
 ble, I also believe it to be that groundwork of 
 faith on which all nature must rest, if it 
 have any resting-place at all ; and love, there- 
 fore, inspiring the reason, but not reduced to 
 the reason, must be so imparted to the child 
 as to animate the growing and changing 
 forms of doctrine throughout the several 
 stages of childhood ; and when childhood 
 shall have been left behind, it is this, and 
 
CHILDREN. 139 
 
 nothing else, that can be relied upon to with- 
 stand the rashness of a youthful intellect, 
 flushed by its first discoveries. The struggle 
 will be great at this season in proportion to 
 the largeness of the nature and the force of 
 the elements at work ; and if a strong under- 
 standing should be too suddenly expanded, it 
 is probable that there will be some disruption 
 of the material fabric of doctrine in which 
 the spiritual feeling has hitherto had its 
 abode. But if the principle of love have 
 been cherished and made strong from the 
 first, the broken forms of doctrine will re~ 
 unite, and love, with whatever strivings and 
 wrestlings, will find an organic faith in which 
 to set up its rest and secure itself from 
 accidents of the intellect, as well as from 
 whatsoever the w T orld can do against it. 
 And in most cases (though not in all un- 
 happily) the faith will be the more strongly 
 founded for the conflict in which it has 
 been engaged. It was by Eros and Eris, by 
 Love and Strife, that Order was brought out 
 of Chaos. 
 
1 40 CHILDREN. 
 
 " I can just remember/' says a theologian 
 of the last century, " when the women first 
 taught me to say my prayers, I used to have 
 the idea of a venerable old man, of a com- 
 posed benign countenance, with his own 
 hair, clad in a morning gown of a grave- 
 coloured flowered damask, sitting in an elbow 
 chair."* And he proceeds to say, that in 
 looking back to these beginnings, he is in no 
 way disturbed at the grossness of his infant 
 theology. The image thus shaped by the 
 imagination of the child was in truth merely 
 one example of the various forms and con- 
 ceptions, fitted to divers states and seasons 
 and orders and degrees of the religious mind 
 whether infant or adult, which represent 
 the several approximations such minds, or 
 minds at such seasons, can respectively 
 make to the completeness of faith. These 
 imperfect ideas should be held to be recon- 
 ciled and comprehended in that complete- 
 ness, not rejected by it ; and the nearest 
 approximation which the greatest of human 
 
 * Lights of Nature and Gospel Blended, ch. iii., s. 1. 
 
CHILDREN. 141 
 
 minds can accomplish is surely to be regarded 
 as much nearer to the imperfection of an 
 infantine notion than to the fulness of truth. 
 The gown of flowered damask and the elbow 
 chair may disappear ; the anthropomorphism 
 of childhood may give place to the divine 
 incarnation of the Second Person in after 
 years ; and we may come to conceive of the 
 Deity as Milton did ..when his epithets were 
 most abstract : 
 
 " So spake the Sovran Presence." 
 
 But after all, these are but different grades of 
 imperfection in the forms of doctrinal faith ; 
 and if there be a devouter love on the part of' 
 the child for what is pictured in his imagina- 
 tion as a venerable old man, than in the 
 philosophic poet for the "Sovran Presence," 
 the child's faith has more of the efficacy of 
 religious truth in it than the poet's and phi- 
 losopher's. What we have to take care of in 
 the religious training of a child is, that the 
 love shall be indestructible and paramount ; 
 so that in all the transmutations of doctrine 
 
142 CHILDREN. 
 
 which after years may bring, from the palpa- 
 ble picturings of Tucker's infant imagination 
 to the " Three Incomprehensibles " of St. 
 Athanasius, he may preserve the same reli- 
 gious heart ; and whatever other knowledge 
 or supposed knowledge shall supervene, may 
 still " know that there is nothing better than 
 the fear of the Lord, and that there is nothing 
 sweeter than to take heed unto the com- 
 mandments of the Lord."* 
 
 * Ecclesiasticus, xxiii. 27. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 Let it not be too contemplative for action, 
 nor too active to afford room and space for 
 contemplation. The tendency of our times 
 is to bring every man of eminent abilities 
 into great outward activity, and thereby 
 perhaps in some cases to dam up and 
 divert to the turning of this mill or that, 
 the stream which should have flowed un- 
 broken " in omne vohibilis czvum" and made 
 itself a mirror to nature. But it may hap- 
 pen to a man of genius, conscious of this 
 tendency of the age, to throw himself too 
 much into the opposite extreme. His lean- 
 ings should be towards retirement, no doubt ; 
 but he should indulge them, though largely, 
 yet still with a measured freedom, not a 
 total abandonment. 
 
144 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 " Fountain heads and pathless groves, 
 Places which pale passion loves " * — 
 
 should be, without question, his favourite 
 haunts : but he is not to forget that for the 
 cultivation of the highest order of poetry, it 
 is necessary that he should be conversant 
 with life and nature at large, and 
 
 " Know all qualities with a learned spirit 
 Of human dealings " f — - 
 
 that his poetry should spring out of his life, 
 and that his life should abound in duties 
 as well as in contemplations. 
 
 For that poetic vision which is the vision 
 of the introverted eye alone, has but a nar- 
 row scope : and observation comes of action, 
 and most of that action which is the most 
 responsible. And if it be true that " a man's 
 mind is sometimes wont to tell him more 
 than seven watchmen that sit above in an 
 high tower," t it is also true that that man 
 will hear most of all, who hearkens to his 
 own mind and to the seven watchmen 
 
 * Fletcher. t Shakspeare. 
 
 J Ecclesiasticus, xxxvii. 14. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 145 
 
 besides; whilst what he hears will turn to 
 knowledge, and will he fixed, amplified, and 
 defined, in proportion as there are deeds and 
 consequences to follow, and sweet or bitter 
 fruits. He is but a child in knowledge, how- 
 ever versed in meditation, who has not to 
 act, to suffer, and to teach, as well as to 
 inquire and to learn. If a meditative man 
 be used to be taken about a city in a car- 
 riage or led about it by a friend, it will be 
 long before he knows his way in it ; but not 
 so if he have to go about in it by himself, still 
 less if he have to lead another. 
 
 If, then, a poet would entitle himself to take 
 the highest rank in his art, — to be numbered, 
 that is, amongst the " poets sage," he should 
 be, to a moderate extent, mixed up with the 
 affairs of life. His mind should be not a 
 vessel only, but a vat. His wisdom should 
 be a tried and stirring wisdom. His specula- 
 tions should emanate from facts and events, 
 and his poetry should have its roots in the 
 common earth. 
 
 But it is difficult to say how this convers- 
 
146 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 ancy with men arid affairs is to be attempted 
 in these times, without losing hold of the 
 contemplative life altogether, and becoming 
 involved in the inordinate activities of the 
 age. If a profession be adopted, there is 
 hardly any which leaves a moderate degree 
 of leisure except to men of inferior abilities. 
 Men of eminent abilities embarked in a pro- 
 fession, are placed under obligations of 
 exertion which they cannot escape. In 
 trade, strenuous efforts are enforced upon 
 a man by the pressure of competition ; and 
 trading occupations are perhaps in other 
 respects unsuited to a poet. Political life 
 is not open to him unless circumstances 
 be favourable; and to a man who is alert 
 and excitable (as a poet must be supposed 
 to be,) it will prove too violent a diver- 
 sion from poetic pursuits ; and this, not from 
 the nature of the business only, but because 
 it commonly leads a man of quick sym- 
 pathies (which again must be supposed in 
 the poet's case), into a good deal of social 
 dissipation. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 147 
 
 " If life," says Cowley, 
 
 " If life should a well-ordered poem be, 
 (In which he only hits the white 
 Who joins true profit with the best delight,) 
 The more heroic strain let others take, 
 Mine the Pindaric way I '11 make, 
 The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free." 
 
 This liberty of life cannot, I think, in these 
 days — and in the case of a man of eminent 
 abilities — be secured, if a man be confined 
 to any of the established ruts in which life is 
 made to run. 
 
 If, then, neither professional, commercial, 
 nor political life will sort well with the life 
 poetic, there remains little besides casual 
 employments and the duties which accrue in 
 every station, to supply a poet with the 
 quota of action required for his purposes. 
 These, however, may suffice if they be sedu- 
 lously pursued. The poor are always with 
 us, and their affairs fall fitly into the hands 
 of educated men who have no professional 
 avocations. Let the poet be a man of for- 
 tune and the duties of a landlord are incum- 
 bent upon him, whilst those of a magistrate 
 h 2 
 
148 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 lie before him, with the whole field of county 
 business. If he be not a proprietor, yet one 
 place he must occupy — that of a parishioner, 
 with parochial functions ; and the vestry 
 will present, to an observant eye, as instruc- 
 tive an exponent of human nature, with 
 pretty nearly the same variety of features, as 
 the Lords spiritual and temporal with Her 
 Majesty's faithful Commons in Parliament 
 assembled. Nor is the business of a parish 
 to be regarded as unworthy the diligent at- 
 tention of a man of genius. It is not impos- 
 sible that, from time to time, it may require 
 the same species of ability as the business of 
 an empire, and exercise the same faculties in 
 its adjustment ; for the amount of prudence 
 and sagacity needful for the successful trans- 
 action of business depends comparatively 
 little on the scale of operation. Sometimes, 
 indeed, the larger the scale the easier the 
 task. 
 
 Furthermore, a man of judgment and 
 ability will find, as he advances in life, that 
 the duties of friendship and relationship will 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 149 
 
 multiply upon him more than upon men of 
 inferior capacity, if only he be found willing 
 to discharge them. And if he shall attain to 
 eminence as a poet, that, like every other 
 species of eminence, will bring with it no in- 
 considerable demands upon his activity. To 
 these may be added — if they should fall in 
 his way — casual and temporary employments 
 in the public service, taking care, however, 
 not to let that service fix itself upon him and 
 suck the blood out of his poetic veins. Milton 
 had employments of this nature ; and before 
 he should hold himself equipped for his great 
 enterprise in poetry, he deemed it indispen- 
 sable that to " industrious and select reading " 
 should be added " steady observation " and 
 "insight into all seemly and generous arts 
 and affairs." * Spenser and Cowley had such 
 employments also ; and many others might 
 be named, were they worthy to be named 
 after these. 
 
 But if a poet shall fail to find any field for 
 external activity which would admit also of 
 
 * Reason of Church Government, Book 2nd. 
 
150 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 leisure and retirement, or if he shall have an 
 invincible repugnance to an outward life, 
 (which may not unnaturally be his predica- 
 ment), then it behoves him the more to place 
 his life under a well-devised discipline, in 
 order that it may be, if not externally active, 
 yet orderly and sedulous. For by how much 
 a man shall reserve himself to a contem- 
 plative life, by so much will he need a more 
 constant and watchful self-regulation in the 
 conduct of it ; and by so much, also, will the 
 task of self-regulation be difficult and severe. 
 The regimen of external circumstance and of 
 obligations contracted to others, is an aid 
 which only a strong man can dispense with 
 in the ordering of his days and hours; and 
 moreover, if the course of the hours is to be 
 governed wholly from within and pro re natd 
 as it were, there will be some danger of self- 
 government being accompanied by too much 
 of self-occupation. 
 
 Nor is it to be forgotten that the man who 
 lies under no external obligation (none that 
 is apparent and palpable) to occupy himself 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 151 
 
 in one way or another, will become a prey to 
 many demands for small services, attentions 
 and civilities, such as will neither exercise 
 his faculties, add to his knowledge, nor leave 
 him to his thoughts. The prosecution of a 
 contemplative life is not an answer to any of 
 these demands ; for though the man who is 
 in the pursuit of an active calling is not 
 expected to give up his guineas for the sake 
 of affording some trifling gratification to some 
 friend or acquaintance or stranger, yet the 
 man who has renounced the active calling 
 and the guineas in order that he may possess 
 his soul in peace, is constantly expected to 
 give up his meditations, and no one counts 
 it for a sacrifice. Meditation, it is thought, 
 can always be done some other day. A man 
 without something indispensable to do, will 
 find his life to be involved in 'some of the 
 difficulties by which a woman's life is often 
 beset, one of which difficulties is the want of 
 a claim paramount upon her time. And 
 these difficulties will not be the less if the 
 poet have, as he ought to have, something 
 
152 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 of the woman in his nature; as he ought 
 to have, I aver ; because the poet should be 
 hie et hcee homo — the representative of human 
 nature at large and not of one sex only. With 
 the difficulties of a woman's life, the poet will 
 not find that any of its corresponding faci- 
 lities accrue ; he will find claims to be made 
 upon him as upon a man, and no indemnities 
 granted to him as a poet. Thus it is that in 
 the bustling crowds of this present world, a 
 meditative man finds himself, however pas- 
 sively disposed, in a position of oppugnancy 
 to those around him, and must struggle in 
 order to stand still. 
 
 But even if a poet devoted wholly to re- 
 tirement, should be able to seclude himself 
 from petty and unprofitable interruptions, 
 he would still be the better for methodising 
 his life by some severity of self-restraint. 
 Meditation is a wild business when there is 
 nothing else to be done. An excitable mind 
 will wander and waste itself if it be unen- 
 closed ; and nothing needs to be intermitted 
 more than the exercise of the imaginative 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 153 
 
 faculties. I have heard a man of ardent 
 religious feelings declare that his devotions 
 were more lively and spiritual after a day of 
 business than in a day consecrated to devo- 
 tional exercises ; and in like manner it may 
 happen with a poet that there shall be more 
 freshness and vigour in the contemplations 
 which spring up after compression than in 
 those which are the predetermined occupation 
 of the day. 
 
 Next to conversancy with life and affairs, 
 a poet should cultivate a conversancy with 
 external nature. The cultivation, indeed, 
 will come of itself, if his life be led where 
 nature is favourably presented to him ; and 
 not where it is soiled and obscured, as in the 
 smoky parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire, or 
 built out, as in great cities. If, however, 
 circumstances should oblige him to live in a 
 city, occasional visits to the country may still 
 do much for him — in some cases, perhaps, 
 even as much as constant residence. The 
 loss of continual intercourse with Nature is, 
 no doubt, a great loss to those who have an 
 h 3 
 
154 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 ever-flowing love and a never-failing admi- 
 ration of her; which are, indeed, supreme 
 amongst poetical gifts: but on the other hand, 
 if there be some shortcomings in this kind, 
 the benefits of continual residence will bear 
 a less proportion to those of occasional inter- 
 course. What we see rarely is seen with an 
 access of enjoyment which quickens obser- 
 vation and brightens recollection ; and if the 
 susceptibilities need to be stimulated, the 
 stimulation will redound more from what is 
 fresh than from what is familiar. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson has described — as he only 
 could — a sort of semi-seclusion, which would 
 seem to combine all that a poet could w r ant 
 to favour his intercourse with Nature and 
 with his kind : 
 
 " Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite 
 Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love : 
 News from the humming city comes to it 
 In sound of funeral or of marriage bells ; 
 And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear 
 The windy clanging of the minster clock ; 
 Although between it and the garden lies 
 A league of grass, washed by a slow, broad stream, 
 That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar, 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 155 
 
 Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on, 
 Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge, 
 Crowned with the minster-towers." * 
 
 It must be acknowledged, however, that 
 the greatest English Poets of past times did 
 undoubtedly live much in London ; and of 
 those, he who excelled most in the treatment 
 of external nature composed his best descrip- 
 tions from the images retained in his imagi- 
 nation when the knowledge of nature was at 
 one entrance quite shut out. 
 
 In our own times the greatest poets have 
 lived in the country; but indeed they had 
 good reasons for doing so, independently of 
 intercourse with nature. For the social life 
 of cities is much changed from what it was 
 two hundred years ago. In London, in the 
 present times, an eminent man is beset with 
 a multiplicity of social enjoyments and excite- 
 ments, the very waste-pipes of genial sensi- 
 bility; and the poet's imagination, instead 
 of forming a fund to be continually deepened 
 and widened by influx from secret sources, is 
 
 * The Gardener's Daughter. 
 
156 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 diffused and spread abroad and speedily dried 
 up. Such, at least, is the case with those 
 eminent men who are lively in discourse or 
 cordial and courteous in demeanour. Others, 
 perhaps, invested with an adequate unpopu- 
 larity, may be in little danger. " Me, though 
 blind," says a poet who seems not to have 
 perceived the perils of social popularity till 
 they had passed by him, — 
 
 "Me, though blind, 
 God's mercy spared, from social snares with ease 
 Saved by that gracious gift, inaptitude to please." 
 
 But social repulsiveness has its evils too, 
 when fully brought out in a metropolitan life : 
 the garb of hedgehog skins, though a coat of 
 proof, may be turned outside in, and not 
 worn with the equanimity with which that 
 sort of garment is said to have been worn by 
 the Saint. Whether, therefore, the poet be 
 socially unacceptable, or be courted, flattered 
 and caressed, but most in the latter case, 
 London, in these times, is not the place in 
 which his faculties will be most favourably 
 developed. 
 
THE HFE POETIC, 157 
 
 And a due appreciation of the temptations 
 to which a poet is exposed by popular admi- 
 ration and the courtings and wooings of 
 social life, may lead us to juster views than 
 are, I think, generally entertained of the ways 
 in which genius and art are to be cherished 
 by nations and governments. There is much 
 complaint made by the admirers of arts and 
 literature, that their professors are not suffi- 
 ciently advanced and honoured by the State 
 and by mankind. In my estimation they are 
 honoured more than is good either for them- 
 selves or for then- calling. Good for mankind 
 it may be to admire whatever is admirable 
 in genius or art ; but as to the poet himself, 
 a very moderate extent of favourable accept- 
 ance in his own times is all that can be 
 beneficial to him either as a man or as an 
 artist. He is by temperament but too excit- 
 able; with him the vita umbratilis is essential 
 to repose and self-possession ; and it is from 
 repose and self-possession, — 
 
 " Deep self-possession, an intense repose — "* 
 
 Coleridge. 
 
158 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 that all genuine emanations of poetic genius 
 proceed. To the poet, solitude itself is an 
 excitement, into which none that is adventi- 
 tious should intrude : the voices which come 
 to him in solitude should not be mixed with 
 acclamations from without; and the voices 
 which proceed from him should not be con- 
 founded by the amiable intrusion of their 
 own echoes, apt, when quickly reverberated, 
 to be too intently listened for. 
 
 It is true that he must have some more or 
 less conscious anticipation of sympathy to 
 come ; he must feel that his voice will not be 
 as the voice of one crying in the desert, but 
 that his just thoughts, his glorious visions, 
 his passions, and "the high reason of his 
 fancies," will, in their due time of maturity, 
 and after so many revolutions of the seasons 
 as are needful for the ripening of such results, 
 reach the hearts of multitudes, and find an 
 echo in the ages that are unborn. But these 
 anticipations of what is distant are not of a 
 nature to agitate or disturb the mind in its 
 self-communion. They serve to animate his 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 159 
 
 lighter efforts, and they support him in his 
 severer labours and more strenuous studies ; 
 but they do not dissipate or distract the mind. 
 It is far otherwise in respect to contempora- 
 neous and immediate admiration ; and I doubt 
 whether any high endeavour of poetic art 
 ever has been or ever will be promoted by 
 the stimulation of popular applause. 
 
 Still less would poetic art be advanced by 
 rewards in the shape of civil honours and 
 distinctions; and the proposals which have 
 been made for so rewarding it betray, when 
 they are examined, the inconsistency of the 
 views on which they are founded. It would 
 probably be admitted by their authors that 
 poetic art should not be accounted in any 
 respect inferior to military or political art. 
 Yet has any one entertained the notion of 
 assigning to the greatest poet of an age, civil 
 honours and distinctions tantamount to those 
 which are assigned to the greatest soldier or 
 politician ? The creation of a Duke of Rydal, 
 with an appanage of 10,000/. a year, is 
 not the sort of measure which has been 
 
160 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 suggested, and probably there is no one who 
 would not acknowledge it to be absurd. Yet 
 it could be hardly more absurd than the 
 assignment to our greatest poets, of titular 
 distinctions, which, being the highest that 
 are proposed as a reward of poetic genius, are 
 yet amongst the lowest that would be consi- 
 dered worthy the acceptance of a meritorious 
 general officer or a serviceable county 
 member. The truth is, that civil honours 
 and titular distinctions are altogether unfit 
 for great poets ; who, being but two or three 
 in a century, are to be distinguished by the 
 rarity of their kind. 
 
 With regard to pensions, were they intended 
 merely as honorary rewards, they would be 
 open to the same objections. If they were 
 supposed to have reference to the dignity of 
 the calling, such pensions as are given to 
 Lord Chancellors and Ambassadors should 
 pitch the scale, rather than such as are given 
 to Clerks and Collectors of Customs. But 
 they are assigned upon different principles, 
 and their sufficiency is to be brought to 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 161 
 
 another test. In treating of the life which a 
 poet ought to lead, I have left out of the 
 account one material question, — whether it 
 be such a life as it is likely that he will be 
 able to lead. And as there is no reason to 
 suppose him one of the few who are born to 
 a competency, the renunciation which I have 
 recommended of all professional and com- 
 mercial pursuits, and also of all public em- 
 ployments except such as are casual and 
 temporary, may well suggest the inquiry in 
 what manner he is to be maintained ? Not, 
 certainly, on the profits of poetry ; for unless 
 he apply himself merely to please and pam- 
 per and not to elevate or instruct, his poetry 
 will do little indeed towards procuring him 
 a subsistence ; it will probably not even yield 
 him such a return as would suffice to support 
 a labouring man for one month out of the 
 twelve. This has been the case with the 
 greatest poets, if not during the whole, at 
 least during the greater part of their lives ; 
 and even when their poetry has attained to 
 what may be called popularity, it is still a 
 
162 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 popularity which extends only to the culti- 
 vated, as distinguished from the merely edu- 
 cated classes, and does not bring with it any 
 very profitable sale. 
 
 If poetry, then, be unavailable, will the poet 
 be enabled to subsist by the aid of prose ? This 
 will probably be his best resource ; but even 
 prose will fail to return a profit, unless it be 
 written for the market. Having been almost 
 the only resource of one who was at once an 
 eminent poet and in general literature the 
 most distinguished writer of his age, Mr. 
 Southey, his example may be fairly adduced 
 as showing what can be made of it under the 
 most favourable circumstances. By a small 
 pension and the office of laureate (yielding 
 together about 200/. per annum), he was ena- 
 bled to insure his life, so as to make a 
 moderate posthumous provision for his family; 
 and it remained for him to support himself 
 and them, so long as he should live, by his 
 writings. With unrivalled industry, infinite 
 stores of knowledge, extraordinary talents, a 
 delightful style, and the devotion of about 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 163 
 
 one-half of his time to writing what should 
 be marketable rather than what he would 
 have desired to write, he defrayed the cost of 
 that frugal and homely way of life which he 
 deemed to be the happiest and the best. So 
 far it may be said that all was well ; and cer- 
 tainly never was man more contented with a 
 humble lot than he. But at sixty years of 
 age he had never yet had one year's income 
 in advance; and when between sixty and 
 seventy his powers of writing failed, had it 
 not been for the timely grant of an additional 
 pension,* his means of subsistence would 
 have failed too. It was owing to this grant 
 alone that the last years of a life of such 
 literary industry as was the wonder of his 
 time, were not harassed by pecuniary diffi- 
 culties ; and at his death the melancholy 
 spectacle was presented, of enormous prepa- 
 rations thrown away, one great labour of his 
 life half-finished, and other lofty designs 
 which had been cherished in his heart of 
 
 Through the care of Sir R. Peel . 
 
164 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 hearts from youth to age, either merely 
 inchoate or altogether unattempted. 
 
 We mourn over the lost books of Tacitus 
 and Pliny, and rake in the ruins of Hercu- 
 laneum to recover them ; but 3001. a-year — 
 had it been given in time — might have 
 realized for us works, over the loss of which 
 our posterity may perhaps mourn as much 
 or more ! 
 
 " Things incomplete, and purposes betrayed, 
 Make sadder transits o'er Truth's mystic glass, 
 Than noblest objects utterly decayed." * 
 
 If one moiety of Mr. Southey's time f — ap- 
 plied to procure, by marketable literature, 
 the means of subsistence — is found to leave 
 such miserable results as these, it may easily 
 be imagined what fortune would attend the 
 efforts in marketable prose (always assuming 
 
 * Wordsworth. 
 
 t I will allow myself to note here, whether or not it be to the 
 purpose, that the only son of the author of the Book of the 
 Church — a most active and exemplary clergyman with a large 
 family — is left (unavoidably perhaps, but the well-wishers of 
 the Church must surely wish that it could be avoided) to 
 struggle with the world, on a hard-working poverty-stricken 
 curacy. This he does, however, in a spirit of manly contented- 
 ness worthy of his father. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 165 
 
 them, of course, to be good and worthy and 
 not the mere suppliance of the literary toy- 
 shop) of a man of like poetical gifts, but not 
 endowed with the same grace and facility in 
 composition, the same unwearied industry 
 and almost unexampled productiveness. 
 
 Pensions to poets, then, in such cases — 
 and, indeed, pensions to all writers, poetical 
 or other, in the higher and graver and there- 
 fore less popular and lucrative walks of 
 literature — may be deemed, I think, though 
 not appropriate as honours or rewards, yet 
 desirable as providing a subsistence which 
 may not be attainable in other ways 
 without great injury to the interests of 
 literature. The provision should be suited 
 to the retired and homely way of life by 
 which the true dignity of a poet will be best 
 sustained and in which his genius will have 
 its least obstructed development ; but it 
 should be a provision calculated — if pru- 
 dently managed — to make his life, in its 
 pecuniary elements, easy and untroubled. I 
 say "if prudently managed," because as to 
 
166 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 the wants of a spendthrift poet or of one who 
 is incompetent to the management of his 
 affairs, they are wants which it is hard to 
 measure and impossible to supply. If the 
 pensions now given to men of letters, to scien- 
 tific men, and to artists, be of such amount 
 as would enable them, living frugally, to give 
 all or most of their time, with an easy mind, 
 to those arts and pursuits by which they 
 may best consult the great and perdurable 
 interests committed by Providence to their 
 charge, then the amount is sufficient, 
 though it be but little ; and the fact which 
 is so often brought forward, that it is 
 less than the ordinary emoluments of 
 trades, professions, or the humbler walks 
 of the public service, is not material to the 
 case. If the pensions, on the other hand, 
 be of less amount than will effect this 
 purpose, then I think that the just ground 
 on which the grant of such pensions is to be 
 rested, — that is, the true interests of men of 
 genius themselves, and, through them, the 
 interests of literature and art, — require that 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 167 
 
 they should be advanced in amount so far 
 as may be sufficient for this purpose, and 
 no farther. 
 
 It is not only to secure to him the undis- 
 turbed possession of his time and the undi- 
 verted direction of his endeavours, that it is 
 expedient to make some sufficient pecuniary 
 provision for a poet : such a provision is impor- 
 tant also as a safeguard to his character and 
 conduct ; for few indeed are the men whose 
 character and conduct are unimpaired by pecu- 
 niary difficulties ; and though wise men will 
 hardly be involved in such difficulties, let their 
 need be what it may, and though none but a 
 wise man can be a great poet, yet the wisdom 
 of the wisest may be weak in action ; it ma}^ 
 be infirm of purpose ; through emotions or 
 abstractions it may be accessible to one inroad 
 or another ; and though I am far from claim- 
 ing any peculiar indulgence for the infirmities 
 of men of genius — on the contrary in my 
 mind nothing can be more erroneous than to 
 extend indulgence to moral aberrations pre- 
 cisely in those cases in which, operating to 
 
168 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 the corruption of the greatest gifts, they are 
 the most malign and pernicious, — yet, for 
 this very reason, whilst refusing them any 
 indult or absolution, I would claim for men 
 of genius all needful protection — more per- 
 haps than ought to be needful — in order 
 that no danger that can be avoided may 
 attend the great national and universal inte- 
 rests involved in their life and character. 
 For never let this truth depart from the 
 minds of poets or of those who would cherish 
 and protect them — that the poet and the man 
 are one and indivisible ; that as the life and 
 character is, so is the poetry ; that the poetry 
 is the fruit of the whole moral, spiritual, 
 intellectual and practical being; and how- 
 soever in the imperfection of humanity, 
 fulfilments may have fallen short of aspira- 
 tions and the lives of some illustrious poets 
 may have seemed to be at odds with greatness 
 and purity, yet in so far as the life has 
 faltered in wisdom and virtue, failing thereby 
 to be the nurse of high and pure imaginations, 
 the poet, we may be sure, has been shorn of 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 169 
 
 his beams; and whatsoever splendour may 
 remain to him, even though to our otherwise 
 bedarkened eyes wandering in a terrestrial 
 dimness, it may seem to be consummate and 
 the very " offspring of Heaven first-born," yet 
 it is a reduced splendour and a merely abor- 
 tive offspring as compared with what it might 
 have been, and with what it is in the bounty 
 of God to create, by the conjunction of the 
 like gifts of high reason, ardent imagination, 
 efflorescence of fancy and intrepidity of im- 
 pulse, with a heart subdued to Him and a 
 pure and unspotted life. Out of the heart 
 are the issues of life, and out of the life are 
 the issues of poetry. 
 
 And the greatest of those poets whose 
 lives, though perhaps less blemished in reality 
 than evil report would have them to be, are 
 certainly not free from reproach, have seen 
 and acknowledged all this, and have known 
 what they have lost. If the little that has 
 come down to us concerning Shakspeare 
 includes somewhat against him, we know 
 also from himself how it was by himself 
 
170 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 regarded; and what is to the present pur- 
 • pose, we know that he imputed the evil 
 courses into which he was betrayed to the 
 way of life forced upon him by the want of a 
 competency : — 
 
 " Oh, for my sake do thou with Fortune chide, 
 The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 
 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 
 Than public means which public manners breeds. 
 
 Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, 
 And almost thence my nature is subdued 
 
 To that it works in, like the dyer's hand." * 
 
 And we know further, that when he had 
 attained to a competency (would that it had 
 been earlier !) he followed that way of life 
 no longer. 
 
 We have now plotted out for the poet a life, 
 contemplative but not inactive, orderly, dutiful, 
 observant, conversant with human affairs 
 and with nature; and though homely and 
 retired, yet easy as regards pecuniary circum- 
 stances. But some particulars remain to be 
 added. As his life of contemplation is to be 
 varied by practical activity upon occasion, so 
 
 * lllth Sonnet. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 171 
 
 should his solitude be varied by occasional 
 companionship. In youth his companions 
 will probably be chosen very much for the 
 sake of their intellectual powers and acquire- 
 ments ; and whilst we are young we are most 
 open to cultivation from such companionship. 
 Afterwards, truth and kindness come to be, 
 if not all in all, yet at least of all qualities 
 the most essential ; and to one who, learning 
 from books what books can teach, would 
 desire to make more direct inquisition into 
 the secrets of human nature, it is far less 
 important that companionship should be in- 
 tellectual than that it should be confidential 
 The poet being himself frank and unreserved, 
 (as I think poets for the most part will be 
 found to be), should beget frankness aud 
 unreserve on the part of his companions, who 
 should come to him for advice and sympathy 
 in all the emergencies of life. " I have got 
 into this or that dilemma or difficulty, what 
 am I to do?" "I have fallen in love with 
 this or that young lady, what will become of 
 me?" "I have been ill-used and betrayed, 
 i2 
 
172 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 shall I forgive it, or shall I resent it?" The 
 poet's companions, making hasty resort to 
 him under such circumstances, the inmost 
 thoughts of their hearts disclosed by the 
 passion of the time, whilst a friendly or per- 
 haps even an impassioned interest is excited 
 in the heart of the poet, the result will be a 
 living knowledge, and a judgment, by as 
 much as it is responsibly and affectionately 
 exercised, by so much the more deeply culti- 
 vated. This is the companionship which, 
 being indeed essential to any one who would 
 bring out his better nature and fulfil his 
 duties as a man, is eminently essential to 
 a poet. 
 
 There is another companionship to be 
 considered, — that of books. The reading by 
 which Milton proposed to prepare himself to 
 write poetry was, as appears by a passage to 
 which I have already referred, "select read- 
 ing." In these times I think that a poet 
 should feed chiefly (not of course exclu- 
 sively) on the literature of the seventeenth 
 century. The diction and the movement 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 173 
 
 of that literature, both in verse and in what 
 Dryden calls " that other harmony," are, in 
 my apprehension, far more fitted than the 
 literature which has followed it, to be used 
 for the training of the mind to poetry. 
 There was no writing public nor reading 
 populace in that age. The age was the 
 worse for that, but the written style of the 
 age was the better. The writers were few 
 and intellectual ; and they addressed them- 
 selves to learned, or, at least, to studious 
 and diligent readers. The structure of their 
 language is in itself an evidence that they 
 counted upon another frame of mind and a 
 different pace and speed in reading, from 
 that which can alone be looked to by the 
 writers of these days. Their books were not 
 written to be snatched up, run through, 
 talked over and forgotten ; and their diction, 
 therefore, was not such as lent wings to haste 
 and impatience, making everything so clear 
 that he who ran or flew might read. Rather 
 it was so constructed as to detain the reader 
 over what was pregnant and profound, and 
 
174 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 compel him to that brooding and prolific 
 posture of the mind, by which, if he had 
 wings, they might help him to some more 
 genial and profitable employment than that 
 of running like an ostrich through a desert. 
 And hence those characteristics of diction 
 by which these writers are made more 
 fit than those who have followed them 
 to train the ear and utterance of a poet. 
 For if we look at the long-suspended sen- 
 tences of those days, with all their convolu- 
 tions and intertextures — the many parts 
 waiting for the ultimate wholeness — we 
 shall perceive that without distinctive move- 
 ment and rhythmical significance of a very 
 high order, it would be impossible that they 
 could be sustained in any sort of clearness. 
 One of these writer's sentences is often in 
 itself a work of art, having its strophes and 
 antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls, 
 by which the reader, though conscious of 
 plural voices and running divisions of 
 thought, is not however permitted to disso- 
 ciate them from their mutual concert and 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 175 
 
 dependency, but required, on the contrary, to 
 give them entrance into his mind, opening it 
 wide enough for the purpose, as one com- 
 pacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences 
 thus elaborately constructed, and complex 
 though musical, are not easy to a remiss 
 reader, but they are clear and delightful to 
 an intent reader. Sentences, on the other 
 hand, such as are demanded in these times 
 by the reading commonalty, and written by 
 those who aspire to be their representatives 
 in the republic of letters, he under little 
 obligation to address themselves to the ear 
 of the mind. Sense is to be taken in by so 
 little at a time, that it matters not greatly 
 what sound goes with it ; or, at all events, 
 one movement and one tune, which all the 
 world understands, is as much as our sen- 
 tence can make room for or our reader will 
 take time for ; and as matter and style will 
 ever re-act upon each other, I fear there is a 
 tendency in our popular writers to stop 
 short of that sort of matter to which brief 
 bright sentences are not appropriate and 
 
176 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 all-sufficient. However this be, the finer 
 melodies of language will always be found 
 in those compositions which deal with many 
 considerations at once — some principal, some 
 subordinate, some exceptional, some grada- 
 tional, some oppugnant ; and deal with them 
 compositely, by blending whilst they distin- 
 guish. And so much am I persuaded of the 
 connection between true intellectual harmony 
 of language and this kind of composition, 
 that I would rather seek for it in an Act of 
 Parliament — if any arduous matter of legis- 
 lation be in hand — than in the productions 
 of our popular writers, however lively and 
 forcible. An Act of Parliament, in such 
 subject-matter, is studiously written and 
 expects to be diligently read, and it generally 
 comprises compositions of the multiplex 
 character which has been described. It is a 
 kind of writing, therefore, to which some 
 species of rhythmical movement is indispen- 
 sable, as any one will find who attempts to 
 draft a difficult and comprehensive enact- 
 ment, with the omission of all the words 
 
THE LIFE "POETIC. 177 
 
 which speak to the ear only and are super- 
 fluous to the sense. 
 
 Let me not be misunderstood as presuming 
 to find fault generally and indiscriminately 
 with our modern manner* of writing. It 
 may be adapted to its age and its purposes ; 
 which purposes, as bearing directly upon 
 living multitudes, have a vastness and rao- 
 mentousness of their own. All that it con- 
 cerns me to aver is, that the purpose which 
 it will not answer is that of training the ear 
 of a poet to rhythmical melodies. And how 
 little it lends itself to any high order of 
 poetical purposes, may be judged by the 
 dreary results of every attempt which is 
 made to apply it to purposes of a cognate 
 character — to prayers, for example, and spi- 
 ritual exercises. Compare our modern com- 
 positions of this kind with the language of 
 the liturgy — a language which, though for the 
 most part short and ejaculatory and not de- 
 manding to be rhythmic in order to be under- 
 stood, partakes, nevertheless, in the highest 
 degree, of the musical expressiveness which 
 i 3 
 
178 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 pervaded the compositions of the time. Listen 
 to it in all its varieties of strain and cadence, 
 sudden or sustained, — now holding on in 
 assured strength, now sinking in a soft con- 
 trition, and anon soaring in the joyfulness of 
 faith, — confession, absolution, exultation, each 
 to its appropriate music, and these again 
 contrasted with the steady statements of the 
 doxologies ; — Let us listen, I say, to this 
 language, which is one effusion of celestial 
 harmonies, and compare with it the flat and 
 uninspired tones and flagging movements of 
 those compounds of petition and exhortation 
 (from their length and multifariousness pe- 
 culiarly demanding rhythmic support) which 
 are to be found in modern collections of 
 prayers for the use of families. I think the 
 comparison will constrain us to acknowledge 
 that short sentences in long succession, how- 
 ever clear in construction and correct in 
 grammar, if they have no rhythmic impulse — 
 though they may very well deliver them- 
 selves of what the writer thinks and means 
 — will fail to bear in upon the mind any 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 179 
 
 adequate impression of what he feels — his 
 hopes and fears, his joy, his gratitude, his 
 compunction, his anguish and tribulation ; 
 or, indeed, any assurance that he had not 
 merely framed a document of piety, in which 
 he had carefully set down whatever was 
 most proper to he said on the mornings and 
 evenings of each day. These compositions 
 have been, by an illustrious soldier, desig- 
 nated " fancy prayers," and this epithet may 
 be suitable to them in so far as they make 
 no account of authority and prescription ; 
 but neither to the fancy nor to the imagina- 
 tion do they appeal through any utterance 
 which can charm the ear. 
 
 I come back, then, to the position that a 
 poet should make companions chiefly of those 
 writers who have written in the confidence 
 that their books would be learned and in- 
 wardly digested, and whose language was 
 framed for patient and erudite ears and an 
 attitude of the mind like that in which St. 
 Paul listened to Gamaliel, sitting at Ms feet, 
 And I think that he should rather avoid anv 
 
180 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 habitual resort to books, however delightful in 
 their kind, such as are written in these times 
 and for these times, to catch the fugacious or 
 stimulate the sluggish reader ; books such as 
 may be read in the captiousness of haste by a 
 lawyer with an appointment to keep and a 
 watch on the table, or in an inapprehensive 
 weariness by a country gentleman after a day 
 of field sports. 
 
 Moreover, by this abstinence, and by a 
 conversancy with elder models in the matter 
 of diction, the poet will be enabled to employ 
 as his own, by the habit which is a second 
 nature, that slightly archaistic colouring of 
 language, which, being removed from what is 
 colloquial and familiar, at the same time that 
 it has no incongruity or unnatural strange- 
 ness, is, I think, in these times at least (as 
 by Spenser and others it was deemed to be 
 formerly also), the best costume in which 
 poetry can be clothed, combining what is 
 common to other ages with what is charac- 
 teristic of its own. At the same time the 
 true poet will be choice and chary, as well as 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 181 
 
 moderate, in the use of archaisms ; by no 
 means detaining or reviving old forms of 
 speech, which, being intrinsically bad, are in 
 a way to be worthily forgotten. The wells 
 of English were not altogether undefiled in 
 any age ; and they who aspire to be what 
 poets ought to be, the conservators of lan- 
 guage, will proceed, not by obstructing the 
 expurgation of their mother tongue, — a pro- 
 cess which, as well as its corruption, is con- 
 tinually on foot, — but by remanding to their 
 more derivative significations, words which 
 are beginning to go astray, and by observing 
 with a keener insight the latent metaphorical 
 fitness or unfitness by which all language is 
 pervaded. 
 
 Nor is it to be supposed that the true poet 
 will betray his trust in the conservation of 
 his country's tongue, through any latitude 
 popularly permitted to him for convenience 
 of rhyme or rhythm. For whatever may be 
 meant by those who speak of poetical license, 
 that phrase would mislead us much, were we 
 to suppose that the language of poetry is not 
 
182 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 required to be precise for the most part, and 
 beyond all other language apt and discrimina- 
 tive. And though this peculiar aptitude will 
 escape many of the poet's readers (if he have 
 many), and much of it will not be recognised 
 at once even by the more skilful few, yet in 
 this, as in other matters of art, it is what can 
 be fully appreciated only by continual study, 
 that will lay the strongest foundations of 
 fame. The " hsec placuit semel " should be, 
 to the poet, of infinitely less account than the 
 " hsec decies repetita placebit :" nor is he 
 worthy of the name of a poet who would not 
 rather be read a hundred times by one reader 
 than once by a hundred. 
 
 When that great man of whom I have 
 already made mention, speaks of his life as 
 led in his library and with his books, those to 
 which he adverts as his never-failing friends, 
 are the books of other times; and a poet's 
 feelings as to this companionship could not be 
 more expressively conveyed than in the verses 
 in which he has given them utterance : — 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 183 
 
 " My days among the dead are past, 
 Around me I behold 
 Where'er these casual eyes are cast, 
 
 The mighty minds of old : 
 My never-failing friends are they, 
 With whom I converse day by day. 
 
 " With them I take delight in weal, 
 
 And seek relief in woe ; 
 And while I understand and feel 
 
 How much to them I owe, 
 My cheeks have often been bedewed 
 With tears of thoughtful gratitude. 
 
 " My thoughts are with the dead : with them 
 
 I live in long past years ; 
 Their virtues love, their faults condemn, 
 
 Partake their hopes and fears : 
 And from their lessons, seek and find 
 Instruction with an humble mind. 
 
 " My hopes are with the dead. Anon 
 
 My place with them will be ; 
 And I with them shall travel on 
 
 Through all eternity ; 
 Yet leaving here a name, I trust, 
 That will not perish in the dust." 
 
 With regard to the habitual reading of books 
 in foreign languages, whether living lan- 
 guages or other, I, being but very imperfectly 
 
184 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 acquainted with any but my own, am not 
 competent to say what would be the effect of 
 it upon a poet's diction and numbers ; but 
 this subject is one which would deserve to be 
 investigated by some duly qualified critic * 
 Milton, I think, though he greatly enriched 
 his store of poetical images and materials by 
 his conversancy with Latin, Greek, and Italian 
 books, did yet suffer injury on the other hand 
 in the perverting of his diction to the Latin ; 
 his numbers, however, (for numbers are less 
 than diction accessible to foreign influence), 
 remaining unwarped and eminently his 
 country's and his own. Dante had no indi- 
 
 * Since the first and second editions of this book were pub- 
 lished, I have been informed by Mr. Crabbe Robinson, the friend 
 of Schiller and of most of the other great men of letters of his 
 times in England and Germany, — indeed I may add, the friend 
 of all men, great and small, who stand in need of his friendship, 
 — that being one day with Schiller in his library, and observing 
 on the shelves a collection of German translations of Shakspeare, 
 he inquired how it was that Schiller, who understood English, 
 could require these translations, Schiller's answer was, that he 
 was in the habit of reading as little as possible in foreign lan- 
 guages, because it was his business to write German, and he 
 thought that by reading in other languages he should lose his 
 nicer perceptions of what belonged to his own. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 185 
 
 genous literature to assist him in the mould- 
 ing of his verse, being himself the founder of 
 the Italian as a literate language; and he 
 rebukes with some severity of disdain, those 
 who were " tarn obscense rationis," as to mag- 
 nify the language of their native country 
 above every other. " For myself/' he says, 
 " whose country is the world, being native to 
 that as the fish to the sea, though I drank the 
 waters of the Arno before I had a tooth in my 
 head, and have so loved Florence as, by reason 
 of my love, to undergo an unjust banishment, 
 yet have I holden my judgment subject to my 
 reason rather than to my senses ; and as to 
 Florence whence I am sprung, regard it 
 though I may as the place in the world most 
 pleasant to me, yet when I revolve the works 
 of the poets and other writers by wiiom the 
 world has been described in all its particulars 
 from pole to pole, I am strong and absolute 
 in the opinion, derived from other evidence 
 than that of the senses, that there are regions 
 and cities more delightful and noble than 
 those of Tuscany, and languages better both 
 
186 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 for their use and their charm than the 
 Latian."* 
 
 It would be matter of much interest to know 
 from competent critics, how far the operation 
 of these sentiments is to be traced in the fabric 
 of Dante's verse, he having had, as it were, to 
 build it up from the ground ; or how far the 
 native genius of the language has ruled 
 supreme. If Milton, however, have accepted 
 foreign aid, and perhaps Dante also, yet 
 
 * " Nam quicunque tarn obscense rationis est ut locum suae 
 nationis deliciosissimum credat esse sub sole, huic etiam prae 
 cunctis proprium vulgare licebit, id est maternam locutionem, 
 prseponere : . . . . Nos autem, cui mundus est patria velut 
 piscibus sequor, quamquam Sarnum biberimus ante dentes, et 
 Florentiam adeo diligamus ut, quia dileximus, exilium patiamur 
 injuste, ratione magis quam sensu spatulas nostri judicii podia- 
 mus : et quamvis ad voluptatem nostram, sive nostrse sensuali- 
 tatis quietem, in terris amoenior locus quam Florentia non existat, 
 revolventes et poetarum, et aliorum scriptorum volumina, quibus 
 mundus universaliter et membratim describitur, ratiocinantesque 
 in nobis situationes varias mundi locorum et eorum habitudinem 
 ad utrumque polum et circulum sequatoreum, multas esse perpen- 
 dimus firmiterque censemus, et magis nobiles et magis deliciosas 
 et regiones et urbes, quam Thusciam et Florentiam, unde sum 
 oriundus et civis, et plerasque nationes et gentes delectabiliori 
 atque utiliori sermone uti, quam Latinos." — De Vulgari Eloquio, 
 1 — 6. I extract the passage, because in translating I have 
 abridged it. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 187 
 
 Shakspeare is a signal example of the all- 
 sufficiency of national resources; having, with 
 his "small Latin and less Greek," so large 
 and various a vocabulary, it hardly seems 
 possible that any extent of erudition could 
 have bettered it, and a structure of language 
 so flexible and multiform, that it could not 
 have been more so had there been a con- 
 fluence of twenty tributary tongues at its 
 formation. 
 
 Having considered, if not sufficiently, yet at 
 sufficient length, after what manner a poet is 
 to live, it may be well, before I conclude, to 
 inquire at what period of his life he should 
 deem himself to be prepared for the exercise 
 of his vocation on a large scale. And from 
 the nature of some of the preparations which 
 have been treated of as indispensable, it will 
 plainly appear that this period will not arrive 
 in early youth. For if contemplation, action, 
 conversancj^with life and affairs, varied duties, 
 much solitude in its turn, with observation of 
 Nature, and reading select and severe if not 
 extensive, be, as I have deemed them to be. 
 
188 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 essential requisites for the writing of poetry 
 in its higher and graver kinds, some not 
 inconsiderable tract of matured life must 
 have been travelled through before these fruits 
 can have been gathered. And with this hypo- 
 thesis our literary history and biography will 
 be found to accord. Milton, at twenty-three 
 years of age, thought that he ripened slowly ; 
 and when he supposed himself less happy in 
 that respect than others, doubtless it was 
 because his own deficiencies were better 
 known to him than theirs : — 
 
 " How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, 
 Stolen, on his wing, my three-and-twentieth year, 
 My hasting days fly on with full career, 
 
 But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth. 
 
 Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth 
 That I towards manhood am arrived so near, 
 And inward ripeness doth much less appear, 
 
 Than some more timely happy spirits indueth," 
 
 Even in his twenty-ninth year he regarded 
 his poetical efforts (and comparing himself 
 with himself, perhaps we may say with rea- 
 son,) as a plucking of the " berries harsh and 
 crude." But the history of poetry at large 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 189 
 
 would show, I think, that Milton's poetical 
 faculties were not of slower growth than 
 those of other poets of the high and intellec- 
 tual orders ; and that at all events the period 
 of the culmination of such poets is in middle 
 life. And with regard to exceptional cases 
 — instances of high achievement at other 
 periods, — whilst a few may be cited as be- 
 longing to the periods short of middle life, 
 more illustrious examples still will be found 
 belonging to periods beyond it. Pope wrote 
 verses with singular grace and dexterity in 
 his early youth: but, on the other hand, 
 Dryden when he produced the " Alexander's 
 Feast," was in his sixty-seventh year; and "are 
 not the gleanings of the grapes of Ephraim 
 better than the vintage of Abiezer ? " Goethe 
 may be quoted as an authority as well as an 
 example. When the poet, in the Prologue 
 to the Faust, sighs after his lost youth, his 
 friend reproves him, and whilst admitting 
 that youth is propitious to divers other ends 
 and exercises, declares that, for the purposes 
 of poetry, the elder is the better man : — 
 
190 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 " The cunning hand of art to fling 
 With spirit o'er the accustom'd string ; 
 To seem to wander, yet to bend 
 Each motion to the harmonious end : 
 Such is the task our ripened age imposes, 
 Which makes our day more glorious ere it closes." * 
 
 Nor is it only the poetry of the highest 
 intellectual order which is better written 
 after youth than in youth. Even for amorous 
 poetry, there is a richer vein than that of 
 youth's temperament, and a more attractive 
 art than youth can attain to. Let the mas- 
 ters of erotic verse be mustered, and it will 
 appear I think, that few or none of them 
 wrote consummately in early youth, whilst 
 the best of them gave utterance to their best 
 strains long after they had sung their " Vixi 
 Puellis." The sense of proportion, which is 
 required equally in the lighter as in the 
 graver kinds of poetry, is naturally imperfect 
 in youth, through undue ardour in particu- 
 lars; and no very young poet will be content 
 to sacrifice special felicities to general effect. 
 
 * Lord F. Egerton's translation. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 191 
 
 Nor can there well exist, at an early period 
 of life, that rare and peculiar balance of all 
 the faculties, which, even more perhaps 
 than a peculiar force in any, constitutes a 
 great poet: — the balance of reason with 
 imagination, passion with self-possession, 
 abundance with reserve, and inventive con- 
 ception with executive ability. 
 
 On the whole, therefore, it is not desirable 
 that a poet should prosecute any great en- 
 terprise in early youth ; nor is it likely that 
 his lighter efforts will be worth much. 
 Nevertheless, it is the period for practice and 
 exercise ; and a poet must and will write 
 much verse in youth, and he will be much 
 the better for it ; nor will he write it with the 
 purpose of throwing it away. If he be 
 affected with the usual impatience of an 
 ardent temperament in early life, it will 
 perhaps be best for him to publish ; for till he 
 have rid himself of this impatience, he will not 
 go to work with an ambition sufficiently long- 
 sighted and a steady preference of ulterior 
 to early results. And publication, if unsuc- 
 
192 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 cessful, (as the juvenile publications of great 
 poets are almost sure to be), is a sedative of 
 much virtue and efficacy in such cases. " Be 
 not ambitious of an early fame," says Mr. 
 Landor, " for such is apt to shrivel and drop 
 under the tree." Early success puts an end 
 to severe study and strenuous endeavour; 
 whereas early failure in those in whom there 
 is genuine poetic genius, and what commonly 
 accompanies it — 
 
 " Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse — " * 
 
 acts as a sort of narcotic stimulant, allaying 
 impatience, but quickening the deeper mind. 
 
 The outset of a poet's life, and the conduct 
 of it " net mezzo del cammin " — the seasons in 
 which his poetry is sown and reaped — are 
 most important to the interests of the art 
 and of mankind. The manner in which it 
 shall be drawn to a close may be supposed 
 to be important chiefly to the poet himself: 
 yet it is not altogether so ; and a few words 
 
 * Wordsworth. 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 193 
 
 may not be wasted in speaking of that latter 
 autumn of a poet's life which succeeds his 
 harvest-home. With poets whose life reaches 
 its three-score-years-and-ten, this will be a 
 period of some years' duration. For the fact 
 that by some great poets some short poetical 
 efforts have been hazarded in old age with 
 eminent success, should not certainly lead 
 to the conclusion that an old man should 
 occupy himself in adding to the bulk of his 
 poetical works, (especially if already volumi- 
 nous), when he can no longer hope to en- 
 hance their rateable and specific value. It 
 is important to every poet to keep his works 
 within compass. Moreover, the intensities 
 of life should be allowed to come to their 
 natural close some steps short of the grave ; 
 and passionate writing should not be ex- 
 tended over this period, even if the imagina- 
 tion have not ceased to be impassioned. 
 
 There are other ways, at once congenial 
 with the poetic life and consentaneous with 
 its decline, in which the activities that remain 
 may be gently exercised, when the passion 
 
194 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 has been laid to rest. The long education of 
 a poet's life (for as long as he lives he should 
 learn) will have enabled him to detect, at the 
 end of it, many faults in his writings which 
 he knew not of before ; and there will be 
 many faults, also, of which he was cognisant, 
 but which, in the eagerness of his productive 
 years, he had not found leisure or inclination 
 to amend. In his old age, as long as the 
 judgment and the executive power over 
 details shall be unimpaired,— as long as the 
 hand shall not have lost its cunning,— the 
 work of correction may be carried on to 
 completeness, and the poet's house be put 
 in order. Some caution will be requisite. 
 Age is prone to fastidiousness; and if the 
 poet can no longer go along with the ardours 
 of his younger years, he should take care 
 lest he quench them with too cold a touch. 
 Age, too, is vacillating : and if he have lost 
 his clearness and decisiveness of choice, he 
 should not deal with any delinquencies of 
 his younger verse except those which are 
 flagrant; and in all his corrections, indeed, 
 
THE LIFE POETIC. 195 
 
 the presumption should be in favour of the 
 first draft, which should have the benefit of 
 the doubt if there be one; otherwise the 
 works may be the worse for the last hand. 
 But, subject to these conditions, there seems 
 to be no employment better suited to the old 
 age of a poet, than that of purifying and 
 making less perishable that which he trusts 
 may be the earthly representative of his im- 
 mortal part. 
 
 For such purpose and in so far forth, he 
 may permit himself, even at a period when 
 "the last infirmity" should be on its last 
 legs, to be occupied with himself and his 
 fame. But when his own works are as he 
 would wish to leave them, nothing of that 
 which is peculiar to him as a poet and not 
 common to him as a man, will so well become 
 his latter days, as to look beyond himself 
 and have regard to the future fortunes of 
 his art involved in the rising generation 
 of poets. It should be his desire and his 
 joy to cherish the lights by which his own 
 shall be succeeded, and, perhaps, out-shone. 
 
196 THE LIFE POETIC. 
 
 The personal influence of an old poet upon 
 a young one — youth and age being har- 
 monised by the sympathies of the art — may 
 do what no writings can, to mould those 
 spirits by which, hereafter, many are to be 
 moulded ; and as the reflex of a glorious 
 sunset will sometimes tinge the eastern sky, 
 the declining poet may communicate to those 
 who are to come after him, not guidance 
 only, but the very colours of his genius, 
 the temper of his moral mind, and the in- 
 spiration of his hopes and promises. That 
 done, or ceasing to be practicable through 
 efflux of light, it will only remain for the 
 poet to wait in patience and peace, 
 
 " While night 
 Invests the sea, and wished morn delays." * 
 
 * Paradise Lost. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 LONDON : 
 BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIABS.