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 1895 
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 
 
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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 

maynard's 
 English • Classic • Series 
 
 BY 
 eToriN ROSKIN 
 
 .l-l-l-K-i— 1-|— |_|_|_T=F 
 
 r~ 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 Maynard, Merrill <k Co. 
 
 43, 45 & 47 East lOIS St. 
 
 
 ^0 
 
ENGLISH CLASSIC SERIES, 
 
 FOR 
 
 Classes in English Literature, Reading, Grammar, etc. 
 
 EDITED BY EMINENT ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SCHOLARS. 
 
 Each Volume contains a Sketch of the Author's Life, Prefatory and 
 Explanatory Notes, etc., etc. 
 
 Byron's Prophecy of Dante. 
 
 (Cantos I. and II.) 
 Milton's L' Allegro, and II Pen- 
 
 seroso. 
 Lord Bacon's Essays, Civil and 
 
 Moral. (Selected.) 
 Byron's Prisoner of Chillon. 
 Moore's Fire "Worshippers. 
 
 (Lalla Rookh. Selected.) 
 Goldsmith's Deserted Village. 
 Scott's Marmion. (Selections 
 
 from Canto VI.) 
 Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. 
 
 (Introduction and Canto I.) 
 Burns'sCotter'sSaturday Night, 
 
 and other Poems 
 Crabbe's The Village. 
 Campbell's Pleasures of Hope. 
 
 (Abridgment of Part I.) 
 Macaulay's Essay on Bunyan's 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress. 
 Macaulay's Armada, and other 
 
 Poems. 
 Shakespeare's Merchant of Ve- 
 nice. (Selections from Acts I., 
 
 in., and IV.) 
 Goldsmith's Traveller. 
 Hogg's Queen's Wake, andKil- 
 
 meny. 
 Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. 
 Addison's Sir Roger de Cover- 
 ley. 
 Gray's Elegy in a Country 
 
 Churchyard. 
 Scott's Lady of the Lake. (Canto 
 
 I.) 
 Shakespeare's As You Like It, 
 
 etc. (Selections.) 
 Shakespeare's King John, and 
 
 Bichard II. (Selections.) 
 Shakespeare's Henry IV., Hen- 
 ry V., Henry VI. (Selections.) 
 Shakespeare's Henry VIII., and 
 
 Julius Caesar. (Selections.) 
 Wordsworth's Excursion. (Bk.I.) 
 Pope's Essay on Criticism. 
 Spenser'sFaerieQueene. (Cantos 
 
 I. and II.) 
 Cowper's Task. (Book I.) 
 Milton's Comus. 
 Tennyson's Enoch Arden, The 
 
 Lotus Eaters, Ulysses, and 
 
 Tithonus. 
 
 31 Irving's Sketch Book. (Selec- 
 tions.) 
 
 32 Dickens's Christmas Carol,. 
 (Condensed.) 
 
 33 Carlyle's Hero as a Prophet. 
 
 34 Macaulay's Warren Hastings. 
 (Condensed.) 
 
 35 Goldsmith's Vicar of Wake- 
 field. (Condensed.) 
 
 36 Tennyson's The Two Voices., 
 and A Dream of Fair Women. 
 
 37 Memory Quotations. 
 
 38 Cavalier Poets. 
 
 39 Dryden's Alexander's, Feast, 
 and MacFlecknoe. 
 
 40 Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes. 
 
 41 Irving.'s Legend of Sleepy Hol- 
 low. 
 
 42 Lamb's Tales from Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 43 Le Row's How to Teach Read- 
 ing. 
 
 44 Webster's Bunker Hill Ora-| 
 tions. 
 
 45 The Academy Orthoepist. A 
 Manual of Pronunciation. 
 
 46 Milton's Lycidas, and Hymn 
 on the Nativity. 
 
 47 Bryant's Thanatopsis, and other 
 Poems. 
 
 48 Buskin's Modern Painters* 
 (Selections.) 
 
 49 The Shakespeare Speaker. 
 
 50 Thackeray's Roundabout Pa- 
 pers. 
 
 51 Webster's Oration on Adams 
 and Jefferson. 
 
 52 Brown's Rab and his Friends. 
 
 53 Morris's Life and Death of 
 Jason. 
 
 54 Burke's Speech OH American 
 Taxation. 
 
 55 Pope's Rape of the Lock. 
 
 56 Tennyson's Elaine. 
 
 57 Tennyson's In Memoriam. 
 
 58 Church's Story of the ^Eneid. 
 
 59 Church's Story of the Iliad. 
 
 60 Swift's Gulliver's Voyage to 
 Lilliput. 
 
 61 Macaulay's Essay on Lord Ba- 
 con. (Condensed.) 
 
 62 The Alcestis of Euripides. Em j- 
 lish Version by Rev. R. Potter.M.ii. I 
 
 (Additional numbers on next page.) 
 
MAYNARD'S ENGLISH CLASSIC SERIES No. 176. 
 
 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 FIRST LECTURE 
 
 Of Kings' Treasuries 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 WITH BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH, CRITICAL OPINIONS AND 
 NOTES 
 
 NEW YORK 
 MAYNARD, MERRILL, & CO. 
 
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Introduction. 
 
 John Ruskin was born in London, in 1819. His father was a 
 prosperous wine-merchant, who spent his leisure hours in the 
 study of art and the exercise of the pencil and brush. His early 
 education was conducted by his mother, a woman of unusual 
 culture, possessing a refined taste in literature. This maternal 
 ^tuition was almost puritanic in its severity. In addition to 
 daily reading from such books as Pope's "Homer," Scott's 
 "Xovels," and "Pilgrim's Progress," he was forced, he tells us, 
 "by steady, patient, daily toil, to learn long chapters of the 
 Bible by heart, as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, 
 hard names and all, from Genesis to the Af)ocalypse, about 
 once every year ; and to that discipline, patient, accurate, and re- 
 solute, I owe, not only a knowledge of the book I find occasion- 
 ally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, 
 and the best part of my taste in literature," By such discipline 
 in the knowledge of the Scriptures "she established my soul in 
 life," he says, and he regards it as "the most precious, and, on 
 the whole, the one essential part of my education." From the 
 training of his mother he passed to the school of the Rev. 
 Thomas Dale, and thence to Christ Church, Oxford. 
 
 It was the father of John Ruskin, however, who bestowed and 
 cultivated those artistic impulses which became the formative 
 principles of his life. The " power of hills " was early upon him, 
 and the most vivid impressions of his childhood, he tells us, 
 were of the beautiful in nature and art. He was in the habit of 
 accompanying his father in his business journeyings to various 
 parts of the kingdom, and thus became familiar with much of 
 the choicest English scenery, as well as with the art treasures 
 of all the famed halls and galleries. "In all mountain ground 
 and scenery, I had a pleasure, as early as I can remember," he 
 says. When three years and a half old, being asked by the artist 
 who was painting his portrait what he would like for the back- 
 ground, he replied, "blue hills." The care and excellence of 
 his father's instruction in matters of taste is attested by a signi- 
 ficant fact: "he never," says Ruskin, "allowed me to look at a 
 bad picture." After leaving Oxford he studied drawing and 
 painting under J. D. Harding and Copley Fielding, and his 
 work gave promise of eminence as an original artist. But it 
 was as a prophet of painting, not as a painter, that Ruskin was to 
 reveal himself to men. 
 
4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Ruskin's first contribution to literature was in the form of 
 poetry. As early as his ninth year he was writing tolerable 
 verses, and while at Oxford he won the Newdigate Prize for 
 English Poetry. A collection of these youthful poems was pub- 
 lished in 1850, entitled "Poems. J. R." But this, like his work 
 in painting, was aside from the true purpose of his genius, and 
 simply indicative of qualities which were to characterize his 
 future achievements. It is said that a copy of Rogers' " Italy," 
 illustrated by the famous landscape painter, J. M. W. Turner, 
 which had been presented to him by his father's business part- 
 ner, determined Ruskin's career. By this he was led to study, 
 to admire, and with advancing years, to comprehend the pur- 
 poses of the great artist, who had fallen under the ban of the 
 English critics for boldly introducing certain new ideas and 
 methods into landscape art. Indignant at the "shallow and 
 false criticism of the periodicals of the day on the works of this 
 great living artist," he determined to write in his defense, and 
 in 1843 the first volume of his masterly vindication appeared, 
 with the title, ' ' Modern Painters : their Superiority in the art of 
 Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters. By a Graduate 
 of Oxford." Thus at the age of twenty-four, Ruskin challenged 
 the verdict of his age, defied the critics, and denied the validity 
 of principles established for four hundred years. The book was 
 received with contempt and derision. But a new edition was 
 issued the following year, and two years later a second volume 
 appeared, with which his victory was assured. The third and 
 fourth volumes appeared in 1856 ; the fifth and last in 1860. But 
 long before the appearance of these last volumes he had practi- 
 cally achieved the main objects with which he began his work, 
 namely, "to vindicate Turner and to purify the public taste." 
 
 Ruskin's other works have added much to his usefulness, but 
 little to the reputation established by the first three volumes of 
 "Modern Painters," — a work which, says Leslie Stephen, "has 
 done more than any other of its kind to stimulate thought and 
 disperse antiquated fallacies." While preparing the materials 
 for the successive volumes of " Modern Painters," he gave to the 
 public two other works which alone would have placed him at 
 the head of his age as an art critic, "The Seven Lamps of Archi- 
 tecture," published in 1849, and "The Stones of Venice," in 1851 
 -1853. Some of the more important of his other works are " The 
 Political Economy of Art;" "Unto this Last," essays on Politi- 
 cal Economy; "Crown of Wild Olives," lectures on social 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 topics; "Sheep-Folds," a discussion of Church doctrine and 
 discipline; "The Queen of the Air," lectures on Greek myths; 
 several volumes of "Lectures," upon architecture, drawing, and 
 painting; and "Fors Clavigera," a series of letters to working 
 men, still in course of publication. 
 
 It is a tenet of Rus kin's art philosophy that the principles 
 fundamental to art are fundamental to all true life, and there- 
 fore applicable to every department of social progress. This 
 fact explains the wide and, in some respects, chimerical depart- 
 ure from his original field, which has caused him to be some- 
 what discredited as a thinker upon other subjects than those 
 directly pertaining to art. But the essential soundness of his 
 theories will hardly be questioned by any careful reader of his 
 early volumes, in which the broad principles of art, as he con- 
 ceived them, are unfolded. Certainly no one doubts the grand 
 sincerity with which he has pursued his purpose of improving 
 public taste and public morals. For half a century he has been 
 a maker of books, his works now numbering over forty volumes. 
 Freed from the routine of professional life by the possession of a 
 vast fortune, he has devoted his entire life to study and writing, 
 performing both with scrupulous thoroughness. The opinions 
 maintained in "Modern Painters " are grounded, he affirms, on 
 the results of a "laborious study of practical art from youth," 
 and " on familiar acquaintance with every important work of art 
 from Antwerp to Naples." One of the most striking features 
 of his works is the extensive and accurate knowledge of external 
 nature displayed, and the felicitous combination of science with 
 poetry. In the midst of this busy life of study Ruskin has been 
 a frequent lecturer in all the larger towns of England and at the 
 Universities. In 1867 he was appointed "Rode Lecturer" at 
 Cambridge, and from 1870 to 1879 he was " Slade Professor of 
 Art" at Oxford, to which position he has been recently recalled. 
 
 In studying the works of Ruskin we may regard him in three 
 aspects ; as a poet of nature, revealing and describing its beau- 
 ties ; as a thinker, applying himself to questions of social reform ; 
 and as a critic, realising, in Matthew Arnold's sense, the higher 
 creative function of criticism. This volume of selections is in- 
 tended simply to illustrate the first phase of his power ; and 
 this can be adequately done, in this manner, since it is possible 
 to remove without defacement many of the gems of poetic 
 description from their setting of expository prose. For his 
 opinions and theories of art and society, the student must go 
 to the original works. 
 
RUSKIN'S WORD-PAINTING. 
 
 •'Our best modern English word-painters are, amongst the poets, 
 Tennyson, Shelley, Byron, Scott, Wordsworth, and Keats, in the order 
 of excellence. And of prose writers, Ruskin stands quite alone; then 
 after him, but at a- great distance, come about a dozen others whom it 
 is needless to particularize. Of all these I give to Tennyson the first 
 place. Even Ruskin, the best prose word-painter who ever lived, says 
 that no description of his is worth four lines oi Tennyson . . . . ~ 
 Mr. Ruskin's art of description in prose is in every way wonderful. 
 He complained somewhere that his readers missed the arguments in 
 his books, and dashed at the descriptions. A novel complaint truly ! 
 What author but Mr. Ruskin ever found his descriptions dangerously 
 seductive? Other people's descriptions are skipped habitually by the 
 prudent reader. Mr. Ruskin's, it appears, do positive injury to the 
 graver and more argumentative parts of his writings. He is decidedly 
 the first author who has made landscape description too attractive. 
 And when we try to get at the reason for this attractiveness in his 
 word-pictures, we see that it is mainly owing to an unusual magnifi- 
 cence of language, and a studied employment of metaphor."— Philip 
 Gilbert Hamerton. 
 
 " Whatever he may call himself, it is as a painter of nature with 
 words that Ruskin is named with enthusiasm wherever men speak the 
 English tongue. It has been through his books, not through his pic- 
 tures, that he has mainly influenced his generation, and sent that 
 wave of passionate enthusiasm for nature into ten thousand young 
 hearts which has shown itself in the fresh, impetuous, exulting, and 
 sometimes weak and affected naturalism of our recent schools. . . . 
 A man gifted with pre-eminent sensibility to nature's beauty, with 
 pre-eminent ability to perceive nature's truth, lends a voice to the hills, 
 and adds a music to the streams ; he looks on the sea, and it becomes 
 more calmly beautiful ; on the clouds, and they are more radiantly 
 touched ; he becomes a priest of the mysteries, a dispenser of the 
 charities of nature ; and men call him poet. Ruskin stands among 
 a select and honored few who have thus interpreted nature's meaning, 
 and conveyed her bounty to mankind. He has spoken with a voice of 
 fascinating power of those pictures which never change, yet are ever 
 new ; which are old, yet not dimmed or defaced ; of the beauty of which 
 all art is an acknowledgment, of the admiration of which all art is the 
 result, but which, having hung in our view since childhood, we are apt 
 to pass lightly by. At his bidding we awake to a new consciousness 
 of the beauty and grandeur of the world."— Peter Bayne. 
 
Sesame and Lilies 
 
 LECTURE I— SESAME 
 
 OF kings' treasuries 
 
 " You shall each have a cake of sesame, — and ten pound." 
 Lucian : The Fisherman 
 
 i. My first duty this evening is to ask your pardon for 
 the ambiguity of title under which the subject of lecture 
 has been announced : for indeed I am not going to talk 
 of kings, known as regnant, nor of treasuries, understood 
 to contain wealth ; but of quite another order of royalty, 5 
 and another material of riches, than those usually acknowl- 
 edged. I had even intended to ask your attention for a 
 little while on trust, and (as sometimes one contrives, in 
 taking a friend to see a favorite piece of scenery) to hide 
 what I wanted most to show, with such imperfect cunning 10 
 as I might, until we unexpectedly reached the best point 
 of view by winding paths. But — and as also I have heard 
 it said, by men practised in public address, that hearers 
 are never so much fatigued as by the endeavor to follow 
 • a speaker who gives them no clue to his purpose, — I will 15 
 take the slight mask off at once, and tell you plainly that 
 I want to speak to you about the treasures hidden in 
 books ; and about the way we find them, and the way we 
 lose them. A grave subject, you will say ; and a wide 
 
 Note.— The two lectures that form the volume "Sesame and Lilies '' were 
 delivered at Manchester in 1864. 
 The notes designated by an asterisk (*) are by Mr Ruskin. 
 
8 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 one ! Yes ; so wide that I shall make no effort to touch 
 the compass of it. I will try only to bring before you a 
 few simple thoughts about reading, which press themselves 
 upon me every day more deeply, as I watch the course of 
 5 the public mind with respect to our daily enlarging means 
 of education ; and the answeringly wider spreading on 
 the levels, of the irrigation of literature. 
 
 2. It happens that I have practically some connection 
 with schools for different classes of youth ; and I receive 
 I0 many letters from parents respecting the education of 
 their children. In the mass of these letters I am always 
 struck by the precedence which the idea of a " position 
 in life " takes above all other thoughts in the parents' — 
 more especially in the mothers' — minds. "The educa- 
 tion befitting such and such a station in life" — this is the 
 phrase, this the object, always. They never seek, as far 
 as I can make out, an education good in itself ; even the 
 conception of abstract Tightness in training rarely seems 
 reached by the writers. But, an education " which shall 
 2okeep a good coat on my son's back; — which shall enable 
 him to ring with confidence the visitor's bell at double- 
 belled doors ; which shall result ultimately in the establish- 
 ment of a double-belled door to his own house ; — in a word, 
 which shall lead to advancement in life ; — this we pray 
 25 for on bent knees — and this is all we pray for." It never 
 seems to occur to the parents that there may be an ed- 
 ucation which, in itself, is advancement in Life ; — that 
 any other than that may perhaps be advancement in 
 Death ; and that this essential education might be more 
 30 easily got, or given, than they fancy, if they set about it 
 
 21. Double-belled doors. In England it is common to find two bell handles 
 at a door, one of which is to be used only by visitors. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 9 
 
 in the right way ; while it is for no price, and by no favor, 
 to be got, if they set about it in the wrong. 
 
 3 Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and effective 
 in the mind of this busiest of countries, I suppose the 
 first — at least that which is confessed with the greatest 5 
 frankness, and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youth- 
 ful exertion — is this of " Advancement in life." May I 
 ask you to consider with me, what this idea practically in- 
 cludes, and what it should include ? 
 
 Practically, then, at present, " advancement in life " 10 
 means, becoming conspicuous in life ; obtaining a posi- 
 tion which shall be acknowledged by others to be respect- 
 able or honorable. We do not understand by this ad- 
 vancement, in general, the mere making of money, but 
 the being known to have made it; not the accomplish- 15 
 ment of any great aim, but the being seen to have accom- 
 plished it. In a word, we mean the gratification of our 
 thirst for applause. That thirst, if the last infirmity of 
 noble minds, is also the first infirmity of weak ones ; and, 
 on the whole, the strongest impulsive influence of average 20 
 humanity : the greatest efforts of the race have always 
 been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest catas- 
 trophes to the love of pleasure. 
 
 4. I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I 
 want you only to feel how it lies at the root of effort ; es- 25 
 pecially of all modern effort. It is the gratification of 
 vanity which is, with us, the stimulus of toil and balm of 
 repose ; so closely does it touch the very springs of life 
 that the wounding of our vanity is always spoken of (and 
 truly) as in its measure mortal; we call it " mortification," 30 
 using the same expression which we should apply to a 
 
 19. Last infirmity of noble minds. Milton's Lycidas, line 71. 
 
16 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 gangrenous and incurable bodily hurt. And although a 
 few of us may be physicians enough to recognize the 
 various effect of this passion upon health and energy, I 
 believe most honest men know, and would at once ac- 
 5 knowledge, its leading power with them as a motive. 
 The seaman does not commonly desire to be made cap- 
 tain only because he knows he can manage the ship better 
 than any other sailor on board. He wants to be made 
 captain that he may be called captain. The clergyman 
 
 10 does not usually want to be made a bishop only because 
 he believes that no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct 
 the diocese through its difficulties. He wants to be made 
 bishop primarily that he may be called " My Lord." And 
 a prince does not usually desire to enlarge, or a subject 
 
 15 to gain, a kingdom, because he believes that no one else 
 
 can as well serve the State, upon its throne ; but, briefly, 
 
 because he wishes to be addressed as " Your Majesty," 
 
 by as many lips as may be brought to such utterance. 
 
 5. This, then, being the main idea of " advancement 
 
 20 in life," the force of it applies, for all of us, according to 
 our station, particularly to that secondary result of such 
 advancement which we call " getting into good society." 
 We want to get into good society not that we may have 
 it, but that we may be seen in it ; and our notion of its 
 
 25 goodness depends primarily on its conspicuousness. 
 
 Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put 
 what I fear you may think an impertinent question ? I 
 never can go on with an address unless I feel, or know, 
 that my audience are either with me or against me : I do 
 
 30 not much care which, in beginning; but I must know 
 where they are ; and I would fain find out, at this instant, 
 whether you think I am putting the motives of popular 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 1 1 
 
 action too low. I am resolved, to-night, to state them low 
 enough to be admitted as probable ; for whenever, in my 
 writings on Political Economy, I assume that a little hon- 
 esty, or generosity, — or what used to be called " virtue " 
 — may be calculated upon as a human motive of action, 5 
 people always answer me, saying, " You must not calcu- 
 late on that : that is not in human nature : you must not 
 assume anything to be common to men but acquisitiveness 
 and jealousy; no other feeling ever has influence on them, 
 except accidentally, and in matters out of the way of IO 
 business." I begin, accordingly, to-night low in the scale 
 of motives ; but I must know if you think me right in doing 
 so. Therefore, let me ask those who admit the love of 
 praise to be usually the strongest motive in men's minds 
 in seeking advancement, and the honest desire of doing J 5 
 any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to hold 
 up their hands. (About a dozen hands held up — the audience, 
 partly, not being sure the lecturer is serious, a7id, partly, shy 
 of expressing opinion.) I am quite serious — I really do 
 want to know what you think; however, I can judge by 20 
 putting the reverse question. Will those who think that 
 duty is generally the first, and love of praise the second, 
 motive, hold up their hands ? (One hand reported to have 
 been held up, behind the lecturer.) Very good : I see you 
 are with me, and that you think I have not begun too near 2 5 
 the ground. Now, without teasing you by putting farther 
 question, I venture to assume that you will admit duty as 
 at least a secondary or tertiary motive. You think that 
 the desire of doing something useful, or obtaining some 
 real good, is indeed an existent collateral idea, though 3° 
 a secondary one, in most men's desire of advancement. 
 You will grant that moderately honest men desire place 
 
12 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 and office, at least in some measure, for the sake of benef- 
 icent power ; and would wish to associate rather with 
 sensible and well-informed persons than with fools and 
 ignorant persons, whether they are seen in the company 
 
 5 of the sensible ones or not. And finally, without being 
 troubled by repetition of any common truisms about the 
 preciousness of friends, and the influence of companions, 
 you will admit, doubtless, that according to the sincerity 
 of our desire that our friends may be true, and our com- 
 
 iopanions wise, — and in proportion to the earnestness and 
 discretion with which we choose both, will be, the general 
 chances of our happiness and usefulness. 
 
 6. But granting that we had both the will and the sense 
 to choose our friends well, how few of us have the power ! 
 
 1 5 or, at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere of choice ! 
 Nearly all our associations are determined by chance, or 
 necessity ; and restricted within a narrow circle. We can- 
 not know whom we would ; and those whom we know, we 
 cannot have at our side when we most need them. All 
 
 2othe higher circles of human intelligence are, to those 
 beneath, only momentarily and partially open. We may, 
 by good fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and 
 hear the sound of his voice ; or put a question to a man 
 of science, and be answered good-humoredly. We may 
 
 2 5 intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabinet minister, answered 
 probably with words worse than silence, being deceptive ; or 
 snatch, once or twice in our lives, the privilege of throw- 
 ing a bouquet in the path of a Princess, or arresting 
 the kind glance of a Queen. And yet these momentary 
 
 30 chances we covet ; and spend our years, and passions and 
 powers in pursuit of little more than these ; while, mean- 
 time, there is a society continually open to us, of people 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 13 
 
 who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank 
 or occupation; — talk to us in the best words they can 
 choose, and of the things nearest their hearts. And this 
 society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, and can 
 be kept waiting round us all day long, — kings and states- 5 
 men lingering patiently, not to grant audience, but to gain 
 it ! — in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, 
 our book-case shelves, — we make no account of that com- 
 pany, — perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all 
 day long ! 10 
 
 7. You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, 
 that the apathy with which we regard this company of the 
 noble, who are praying us to listen to them ; and the pas- 
 sion with which we pursue the company, probably of the 
 ignoble, who despise us, or who have nothing to teach us, 15 
 are grounded in this, — that we can see the faces of the 
 living men, and it is themselves, and not their sayings, 
 with which we desire to become familiar. But it is not 
 so. Suppose you never were to see their faces : — suppose 
 you could be put behind a screen in the statesman's 20 
 cabinet, or the prince's chamber, would you not be glad 
 to listen to their words, though you were forbidden to 
 advance beyond the screen ? And when the screen is 
 only a little less, folded in two instead of four, and you 
 can be hidden behind the cover of the two boards that 25 
 bind a book, and listen all day long, not to the casual 
 talk, but to the studied, determined, chosen addresses of 
 the wisest of men ; — this station of audience, and honor- 
 able privy council, you despise ! 
 
 8. But perhaps you will say that it is because the living 30 
 people talk of things that are passing, and are of im- 
 mediate interest to you, that you desire to hear them. 
 
i 4 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 Nay ; that cannot be so, for the living people will them- 
 selves tell you about passing matters, much better in their 
 writings than in their careless talk. But I admit that this 
 motive does influence you, so far as you prefer those rapid 
 5 and ephemeral writings to slow and enduring writings — | 
 books, properly so called. For all books are divisible into 
 two classes : the books of the hour, and the books of all 
 time. Mark this distinction — it is not one of quality only. 
 It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and the 
 
 10 good one that does. It is a distinction of* species. There 
 are good books for the hour, and good ones for all time ; 
 bad books for the hour, and bad ones for all time. I 
 must define the two kinds before I go farther. 
 
 9. The good book of the hour, then, — I do not speak 
 
 15 of the bad ones — is simply the useful or pleasant talk of 
 some person whom you cannot otherwise converse with,, 
 printed for you. Very useful often, telling you what you 
 need to know ; very pleasant often, as a sensible friend's 
 present talk would be. These bright accounts of travels ; 
 
 20 good-humored and witty discussions of question; lively 
 or pathetic story-telling in the form of novel ; firm fact- 
 telling, by the real agents concerned in the events of 
 passing history ; — all these books of the hour, multiply- 
 ing among us as education becomes more general, are a 
 
 2 5 peculiar possession of the present age : we ought to be 
 entirely thankful for them, and entirely ashamed of our- 
 selves if we make no good use of them. But we make 
 the worst possible use if we allow them to usurp the place 
 of true books : for, strictly speaking, they are not books 
 
 3° at all, but merely letters or newspapers in good print. 
 Our friend's letter may be delightful, or necessary, to-day : 
 whether worth keeping or not, is to be considered. The 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 15 
 
 newspaper may be entirely proper at breakfast time, but 
 assuredly it is not reading for all day. So, though bound 
 up in a volume, the long letter which gives you so pleasant 
 an account of the inns, and roads, and weather last year 
 at such a place, or which tells you that amusing story, or 5 
 gives you the real circumstances of such and such events, 
 however valuable for occasional reference, may not be, in 
 the real sense of the word, a " book " at all, nor in the 
 real sense, to be "read." A book is essentially not a 
 talked thing, but a written thing ; and written, not with a 10 
 view of mere communication, but of permanence. The 
 book of talk is printed only because its author cannot 
 speak to thousands of people at once ; if he could, he 
 would — the volume is mere multiplication of his voice. 
 You cannot talk to your friend in India; if you could, 15 
 you would ; you write instead : that is mere conveyance of 
 voice. But a book is written, not to multiply the voice 
 merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. The 
 author has something to. say which he perceives to be 
 true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he 20 
 knows, no one has yet said it ; so far as he knows, no one 
 else can say it. He is bound to say it, clearly and melo- 
 diously if he may; clearly, at all events. In the sum of 
 his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, 
 manifest to him ; — this, the piece of true knowledge, or 2 5 
 sight, which his share of sunshine and earth has per- 
 mitted him to seize. He would fain set it down forever ; 
 engrave it on rock, if he could ; saying, " This is the 
 best of me ; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, 
 loved, and hated, like another ; my life was. as the vapor, 3° 
 and is not ; but this I saw and knew : this, if anything of 
 mine, is worth your memory." That is his "writing" ; 
 
1 6 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 it is, in his small human way, and with whatever degree 
 of true inspiration is in him, his inscription, or scripture. 
 That is a " Book." 
 
 10. Perhaps you think no books were ever so writ- 
 
 5 ten ? 
 
 But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, 
 or at all in kindness ? or do you think there is never any 
 honesty or benevolence in wise people ? None of us, I 
 hope, are so unhappy as to think that. Well, whatever 
 
 io bit of a wise man's work is honestly and benevolently 
 done, that bit is his book, or his piece of art.* It is 
 mixed alw r ays with evil fragments — ill-done, redundant, 
 affected work. But if you read rightly, you will easily ■ 
 discover the true bits, and those are the book. 
 
 15 11. Now, books of this kind have been written in all 
 ages by their greatest men, — by great readers, great 
 statesmen, and great thinkers. These are all at your 
 choice ; and Life is short. You have heard as much 
 before ; — yet, have you measured and mapped out this 
 
 20 short life and its possibilities? Do you know, if you 
 read this, that you cannot read that — that what you lose 
 
 * Note this sentence carefully, and compare the " Queen of the Air," § 106. 
 
 " Queen of the Air," § 106. " Thus far of Abbeville building. Now I have here 
 asserted two things,— first, the foundation of art in moral character; next, the- 
 foundation of moral character in war. I must make both assertions clearer and 
 prove them. 
 
 " First, of the foundation of art in moral character. Of course the art-gift and 
 amiability of disposition are two different things ; a good man is not necessarily a 
 painter, nor does an eye for color necessarily imply an honest mind. But great 
 art implies the union of both powers : it is the expression, by an art-gift, of a pure 
 soul. If the gift is not there, we can have no art at all; and if the soul — and a 
 right soul too — is not there, the art is bad, however dexterous." 
 
 2. Inscription or scripture. All through the lecture Mr. Ruskin attaches the 
 greatest value to the study of etymology. The wise teacher will counsel a liberal 
 use of the dictionary, and call attention to the author's frequent use of words in un- 
 usual meanings strictly in accordance with their original derivation. Both the 
 words " inscription " and "scripture " as derived from the Latin scribere, scriptum, 
 to write. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 17 
 
 to-day you cannot gain to-morrow ? Will you go and 
 gossip with your housemaid, or your stable-boy, when you 
 may talk with queens and kings ; or flatter yourselves 
 that it is with any worthy consciousness of your own 
 claims to respect, that you jostle with the hungry and 5 
 common crowd for entree here, and audience there, when 
 all the while this eternal court is open to you, with its 
 society, wide as the world, multitudinous as its days, the 
 chosen, and the mighty, of every place and time ? Into 
 that you may enter always ; in that you may take fellow- 10 
 ship and rank according to your wish ; from that, once 
 entered into it, you can never be an outcast but by your 
 own fault ; by your aristocracy of companionship there, 
 your own inherent aristocracy will be assuredly tested, 
 and the motives with which you strive to take high place 15 
 in the society of the living, measured, as to all the truth 
 and sincerity that are in them, by the place you desire to 
 take in this company of the Dead. 
 
 12. "The place you desire," and the place you fit 
 yourself for, I must also say ; because, observe, this court 20 
 of the past differs from all living aristocracy in this : — it 
 is open to labor and to merit, but to nothing else. No 
 wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, the 
 guardian of those Elysian gates. In the deep sense, no 
 vile or vulgar person ever enters there. At the portieres 25 
 of that silent Faubourg St. Germain, there is but brief 
 question : " Do you deserve to enter ? Pass. Do you 
 
 6. Entree. Entrance, especially the right to enter. 
 
 24. Elysian gates. The gates into Elysium, the abode of the blest. Only those 
 could enter Elysium who were fitted for it by a life of virtue upon earth. 
 
 25. Portieres. Gates. 
 
 26 Faubourg St. Germain. A district of Paris devoted to the residences of 
 the old French nobility. 
 
1 8 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 ask to be the companion of nobles ? Make yourself noble, 
 and you shall be. Do you long for the conversation of 
 the wise ? Learn to understand it, and you shall hear it. 
 But on other terms ? — no. If you will not rise to us, we 
 5 cannot stoop to you. The living lord may assume courtesy, 
 the living philosopher explain his thought to you with 
 considerate pain ; but here we neither feign nor interpret ; 
 you must rise to the level of our thoughts if you would 
 be gladdened by them, and share our feelings if you 
 
 I0 would recognize our presence." 
 
 13. This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that 
 it is much. You must, in a word, love these people, if 
 you are to be among them. No ambition is of any use. 
 They scorn your ambition. You must love them, and 
 
 15 show your love in these two following ways. 
 
 1. — First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and to 
 enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe ; 
 not to find your own expressed by them. If the person 
 who wrote the book is not wiser than you, you need not 
 
 20 read it ; if he be, he will think differently from you in 
 many respects. 
 
 Very ready we are to say of a book, " How good this 
 is — that's exactly what I think ! " But the right feeling 
 is, " How strange that is ! I never thought of that before, 
 
 25 and yet I see it is true ; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, 
 some day." But whether thus submissively or not, at 
 least be sure that you go to the author to get at his mean- 
 ing, not to find yours. Judge it afterwards if you think 
 yourself qualified to do so ; but ascertain it first. And 
 
 30 be sure also, if the author is worth anything, that you 
 will not get at his meaning all at once ; — nay, that at his 
 whole meaning you will not for a long time arrive in any 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 19 
 
 wise. Not that he does not say what he means, and in 
 strong words too ; but he cannot say it all ; and what is 
 more strange, will not, but in a hidden way and in par- 
 able, in order that he may be sure you want it. I cannot 
 quite see the reason of this, nor analyze that cruel reti- 5 
 cence in the breasts of wise men which makes them 
 always hide their deeper thought. They do not give it 
 you by way of help, but of reward ; and will make them- 
 selves sure that you deserve it before they allow you to 
 reach it. But it is the same with the physical type of 10 
 wisdom, gold. There seems, to you and me, no reason 
 why the electric forces of the earth should not carry 
 whatever there is of gold within it at once to the mountain 
 tops, so that kings and people might know that all the 
 gold they could get was there; and without any trouble 15 
 of digging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it 
 away, and coin as much as they needed. But Nature 
 does not manage it so. She puts it in little fissures in the 
 earth, nobody knows where ; you may dig long and find 
 none ; you must dig painfully to find any. 20 
 
 14. And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. 
 When you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, 
 " Am I inclined to work as an Australian miner would ? 
 Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order, and am I in 
 good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my 25 
 breath good, and my temper ? " And, keeping the figure 
 a little longer, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a 
 thoroughly useful one, the metal you are in search of 
 being the author's mind or meaning, his words are as the 
 rock which you have to crush and smelt in order to get at 3° 
 it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit, and learn- 
 ing ; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. 
 
20 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 Do not hope to get at any good author's meaning with- 
 out those tools and that fire ; often you will need sharpest, 
 finest chiselling, and patientest fusing, before you can 
 gather one grain of the metal. 
 5 15. And, therefore, first of all, I tell you earnestly and 
 authoritatively, (I know I am right in this,) you must get 
 into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring 
 yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable — nay, letter 
 by letter. For though it is only by reason of the oppo- 
 
 iosition of letters in the function of signs, to sounds 
 in the function of signs, that the study of books is 
 called "literature," and that a man versed in it is 
 called, by the consent of nations, a man of letters 
 instead of a man of books, or of words, you may 
 
 15 yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this real 
 fact, — that you might read all the books in the British 
 Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain an 
 utterly " illiterate," uneducated person ; but that if you 
 read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to 
 
 20 say, with real accuracy, — you are for evermore in some 
 measure an educated person. The entire difference be- 
 tween education and non-education (as regards the merely 
 intellectual part of it), consists in this accuracy. A well 
 educated gentleman may not know many languages, — 
 
 25 may not be able to speak any but his own, — may have 
 read very few books. But whatever language he knows, 
 he knows precisely ; whatever word he pronounces, he 
 pronounces rightly ; above all, he is learned in the peerage 
 of words ; knows the words of true descent and ancient 
 
 3° blood, at a glance, from words of modern canaille; re- 
 
 12. Literature. Derived from the Latin llttera, litera, a letter. 
 
 30. Canaille. A French term of contempt for the lower classes ; the rabble. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 2 1 
 
 members all their ancestry, their intermarriages, distant 
 relationships, and the extent to which they were admitted, 
 and offices they held, among the national noblesse of 
 words at any time, and in any country. But an unedu- 
 cated person may know, by memory, many languages, and 5 
 talk them all, and yet truly know not a word of any, — not 
 a word even of his own. An ordinarily clever and sen- 
 sible seaman will be able to make his way ashore at most 
 ports ; yet he has only to speak a sentence of any language 
 to be known for an illiterate person ; so also the accent, 10 
 or turn of expression of a single sentence, will at once 
 mark a scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so conclu- 
 sively admitted, by educated persons, that a false accent 
 or a mistaken syllable is enough, in the parliament of any 
 civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain degree of 15 
 inferior standing forever, f 
 
 16. And this is right ; but it is a pity that the accuracy 
 insisted on is not greater, and required to a serious pur- 
 pose. It is right that a false Latin quantity should excite 
 a smile in the House of Commons ; but it is wrong that 20 
 a false English meani?ig should not excite a frown there. 
 Let the accent of words be watched ; and closely : let 
 their meaning be watched more closely still, and fewer 
 will do the work. A few words, well chosen and distin- 
 guished, will do work that a thousand cannot, when every 25 
 one is acting, equivocally, in the function of another. 
 Yes ; and words, if they are not watched, will do deadly 
 work sometimes. There are masked words droning and 
 skulking about us in Europe just now, — (there never were 
 so many, owing to the spread of a shallow, blotching, 30 
 blundering, infectious " information," or rather deforma- 
 
 3. Noblesse. Nobility. 
 
2 2 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 tion, everywhere, and to the teaching of catechisms and 
 phrases at schools instead of human meanings) — there 
 are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody under- 
 stands, but which everybody uses, and most people will 
 
 5 also fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean 
 this or that, or the other, of things dear to them : for 
 such words wear chamaeleon cloaks — " groundlion " cloaks, 
 of the color of the ground of any man's fancy : on that 
 ground they lie in wait, and rend him with a spring from 
 
 io it. There never were creatures of prey so mischievous, 
 never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so deadly, 
 as these masked words ; they are the unjust stewards of 
 all men's ideas : whatever fancy or favorite instinct a man 
 most cherishes, he gives to his favorite masked word to 
 
 iS take care of for him ; the word at last comes to have an 
 infinite power over him, — you cannot get at him but by 
 its ministry. 
 
 17. And in languages so mongrel in breed as the 
 English, there is a fatal power of equivocation put into 
 
 20 men's hands, almost whether they will or no, in being 
 able to use Greek or Latin words for an idea when they 
 want it to be awful ; and Saxon or otherwise common 
 words when they want it to be vulgar. What a singular 
 and salutary effect, for instance, would be produced on 
 
 25 the minds of people who are in the habit of taking the 
 Form of the " Word " they live by, for the Power of which 
 that Word tells them, if we always either retained, or re- 
 fused, the Greek form " biblios," or biblion," as the right 
 expression for " book " — instead of employing it only in 
 
 7. Chamaeleon. Derived from the Greek x°^ on the ground 4 AeW lion, 
 groundlion. The Chamseleon is a small lizard which has the power of changing its 
 color to some extent according to its surroundings. 
 
 12. Unjust Stewards. Luke 16: 1-8. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 23 
 
 the one instance in which we wish to give dignity to the 
 idea, and translating it into English everywhere else. 
 How wholesome it would be for many simple persons if, 
 in such places (for instance) as Acts xix. 19, we retained 
 the Greek expression, instead of translating it, and they 5 
 had to read — " Many of them also which used curious 
 arts, brought their Bibles together, and burnt them before 
 all men ; and they counted the price of them, and found 
 it fifty thousand pieces of silver ! " Or if, on the other 
 hand, we translated where we retain it, and always spoke 10 
 of " the Holy Book," instead of " Holy Bible," it might 
 come into more heads than it does at present, that the 
 Word of God, by which the heavens were of old, and by 
 which they are now kept in store,* cannot be made a 
 present of to anybody in morocco binding ; nor sown on x 5 
 any wayside by help either of steam plough or steam 
 press ; but is nevertheless being offered to us daily, and 
 by us with contumely refused : and sown in us daily, and 
 by us, as instantly as may be, choked. 
 
 18. So, again, consider what effect has been produced 20 
 on the English vulgar mind by the use of the sonorous 
 Latin form " damno," in translating the Greek Karaitpiva, 
 when people charitably wish to make it forcible ; and the 
 substitution of the temperate " condemn " for it, when 
 they choose to keep it gentle; and what notable sermons 2 5 
 have been preached by illiterate clergymen on — " He 
 that believeth not shall be damned : " though they would 
 shrink with horror from translating Heb. xi. 7, "The 
 saving of his house, by which he damned the world," or 
 John viii. 10-11, " Woman, hath no man damned thee? 3° 
 She saith, No man, Lord. Jesus answered her, Neither 
 
 * z Peter, iii. 5-7, 
 
24 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 do I damn thee : go, and sin no more." And divisions in 
 the mind of Europe, which have cost seas of blood, and 
 in the defence of which the noblest souls of men have 
 been cast away in frantic desolation, countless as forest- 
 5 leaves — though, in the heart of them, founded on deeper 
 causes — have nevertheless been rendered practically pos- 
 sible, mainly, by the European adoption of the Greek 
 word for a public meeting, " ecclesia," to give peculiar 
 respectability to such meetings, when held for religious 
 
 to purposes; and other collateral equivocations, such as the 
 vulgar English one of using the word " priest " as a con- 
 traction for " presbyter." 
 
 19. Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the 
 habit you must form. Nearly every word in your lan- 
 
 r 5guage has been first a word of some other language — of 
 Saxon, German, French, Latin, or Greek ; (not to speak 
 of eastern and primitive dialects). And many words 
 have been all these ; — that is to say, have been Greek 
 first, Latin next, French or German next, and English 
 
 20 last : undergoing a certain change of sense and use on the 
 lips of each nation ; but retaining a deep vital meaning, 
 which all good scholars feel in employing them, even at 
 this day. If you do not know the Greek alphabet, learn 
 it ; young or old — girl or boy — whoever you may be, if 
 
 25 you think of reading seriously (which, of course, implies 
 that you have some leisure at command), learn your 
 Greek alphabet ; then get good dictionaries of all these 
 languages, and whenever you are in doubt about a word, 
 hunt it down patiently. Read Max Miiller's lectures 
 
 3° thoroughly, to begin with ; and, after that, never let a 
 
 2. Divisions in the mind of Europe. Religious wars. 
 
 8. Ecclesia. Cf. ecclesiastic. 
 
 29, Max MUller. A distinguished Gerrnan Sanscrit .scholar and philologist. 
 
OP KINGS' TREASURIES 25 
 
 word escape you that looks suspicious. It is severe work ; 
 but you will find it, even at first, interesting, and at last, 
 endlessly amusing. And the general gain to your char- 
 acter, in power and precision, will be quite incalculable. 
 
 Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to know, 5 
 Greek, or Latin, or French. It takes a whole life to learn 
 any language perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the 
 meanings through which the English word has passed ; 
 and those which in a good writer's work it must still bear. 
 
 20. And now, merely for example's sake, I will, with 10 
 your permission, read a few lines of a true book with you, 
 carefully ; and see what will come out of them. I will 
 take a book perfectly known to you all. No English 
 words are more familiar to us, yet few perhaps have been 
 read with less sincerity. I will take these few following 15 
 lines of Lycidas : — 
 
 " Last came, and last did go, 
 
 The pilot of the Galilean lake. 
 
 Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, 
 
 (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,) 
 
 He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake. 
 
 ' How well could I have spared for thee, young swain, 
 
 Enow of such as for their bellies' sake 
 
 Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold ! 
 
 Of other care they little reckoning make, 
 
 Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 
 
 And shove away the worthy bidden guest ; 
 
 Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold 
 
 A sheep-hook, or have learned aught else, the least 
 
 That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs ! 
 
 What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped ; 
 
 And when they list their lean and flashy songs 
 
 Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw ; 
 
 The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, 
 
 But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 
 
: 2 S SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ; 
 Besides what the grim Wolf with privy paw 
 Daily devours apace, and nothing said.' " 
 
 Let us think over this passage, and examine its words. 
 
 5 First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to 
 St. Peter, not only his full episcopal function, but the 
 very types of it which Protestants usually refuse most 
 passionately ? His " mitred " locks ! Milton was no 
 Bishop-lover ; how comes St. Peter to be " mitred " ? 
 
 io " Two massy keys he bore." Is this, then, the power of 
 the keys claimed by the Bishops of Rome and is it 
 acknowledged here by Milton only in a poetical license, * 
 for the sake of its picturesqueness, that he may get the 
 gleam of the golden keys to help his effect ? 
 
 *5 Do not think it. Great men do not play stage tricks 
 with the doctrines of life and death : only little men do 
 that. Milton means what he says ; and means it with 
 his might too — is going to put the whole strength of his 
 spirit presently into the saying of it. For though not a 
 
 20 lover of false bishops, he was a lover of true ones ; and 
 the Lake-pilot is here, in his thoughts, the type and head 
 of true episcopal power. For Milton reads that text, 
 Matthew, 16 : 19, "I will give unto thee the keys of the 
 kingdom of Heaven," quite honestly. Puritan though he 
 
 2 5 be, he would not blot it out of the book because there 
 have been bad bishops ; nay, in order to understand him, 
 we must understand that verse first ; it will not do to eye 
 it askance, or whisper it under our breath, as if it were 
 a weapon of an adverse sect. It is a solemn, universal 
 
 30 assertion, deeply to be kept in mind by all sects. But 
 perhaps we shall be better able to reason on it if we go on 
 a little farther, and come back to it. For clearly this 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 27 
 
 marked insistence on the power of the true episcopate is 
 to make us feel more weightily what is to be charged 
 against the false claimants of episcopates ; or generally, 
 against false claimants of power and rank in the body of 
 the clergy : they who, "for their bellies' sake, creep, and 5 
 intrude, and climb into the fold." 
 
 21. Never think Milton uses those three words to fill up 
 his verse, as a loose writer would. He needs all the 
 three; — specially those three, and no more than those — 
 
 " creep," and " intrude," and " climb ; " no other words 10 
 would or could serve the turn, and no more could be 
 added. For they exhaustively comprehend the three 
 classes, correspondent to the three characters, of men 
 who dishonestly seek ecclesiastical power. First, those 
 who "creep" into the fold; who do not care for office, 15 
 nor name, but for secret influence, and do all things 
 occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility of 
 office or conduct, so only that they may intimately discern, 
 and unawares direct, the minds of men. Then those who 
 " intrude " (thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, who 20 
 by natural insolence of heart, and stout eloquence of 
 tongue, and fearlessly perseverant self-assertion obtain 
 hearing and authority with the common crowd. Lastly, 
 those who "climb," who, by labor and learning, both 
 stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in the cause of their 25 
 own ambition, gain high dignities and authorities, and be- 
 come " lords over the heritage," though not " ensamples to 
 the flock." 
 
 22. Now go on : 
 
 " Of other care they little reckoning make, 
 Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast. 
 Blind mouths ' ' 
 
 28. . . . heritage, . . . flock. 1, Peter v. 3. 
 
2 8 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 I pause again, for this is a strange expression : a broken 
 metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly. 
 
 Not so ; its very audacity and pithiness are intended tc 
 
 make us look closer at the phrase and remember it. 
 
 5 Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate 
 
 contraries of right character, in the two great offices 
 
 of the Church — those of bishop and pastor. 
 
 A " Bishop " means " a person who sees." 
 
 A " Pastor " means " a person who feeds." 
 io The most unbishoply character a man can have is 
 therefore to be Blind. 
 
 The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to 
 be fed, — to be a Mouth. 
 
 Take the two reverses together, and you have " blind 
 15 mouths." We may advisably follow out this idea a little. 
 Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from 
 bishops desiring power more than light. They want 
 authority, not outlook. Whereas their real office is not to 
 rule ; though it may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke ; it 
 20 is the king's office to rule ; the bishop's office is to oversee 
 the flock ; to number it, sheep by sheep ; to be ready always 
 to give full account of it. Now, it is clear he cannot give 
 account of the souls, if he has not so much as numbered 
 the bodies of his flock. The first thing, therefore, that a 
 25 bishop has to do is at least to put himself in a position 
 in which, at any moment, he can obtain the history, from 
 childhood, of every living soul in his diocese, and of its 
 present state. Down in that back street, Bill and Nancy 
 knocking each other's teeth out ! — Does the bishop know 
 
 8. Bishop. The word is derived from the Greek epi over skopos inspector, thus 
 an episcopus or bishop is one who oversees. 
 
 9. Pastor. The Lati;i word for shepherd, from pascere, pashim, to feed, to 
 
 pasture. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 29 
 
 all about it ? Has he his eye upon them ? Has he had 'his 
 eye upon them ? Can he circumstantially explain to us 
 how Bill got into the habit of beating Nancy about the 
 head ? If he cannot he is no bishop, though he had 
 a mitre as high as Salisbury steeple ; he is no bishop, — 5 
 he has sought to be at the helm instead of the masthead ; 
 he has no sight of things. " Nay," you say, " it is not 
 his duty to look after Bill in the back street." What ! the 
 fat sheep that have full fleeces — you think it is only those 
 he should look after, while (go back to your Milton) " the 10 
 hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides what the 
 grim wolf, with privy paw" (bishops knowing nothing 
 about it) " daily devours apace, and nothing said " ? 
 
 " But that's not our idea of a bishop." * Perhaps not ; 
 but it was St. Paul's ; and it was Milton's. They may be 15 
 right, or we may be; but we must not think we are read- 
 ing either one or the other by putting our meaning into 
 their words. 
 
 23. I go on. 
 
 20 
 " But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw." 
 
 This is to meet the vulgar answer that " if the poor are 
 not looked after in their bodies, they are in their souls ; 
 they have spiritual food." 
 
 And Milton says, " They have no such thing as spiritual 25 
 food ; they are only swollen with wind." At first you may 
 think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But 
 again, it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your 
 Latin and Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning 
 
 * Compare the 13th Letter in "Time and Tide." 
 5. Salisbuiy. Salisbury cathedral in England is noted for having a spire 400 
 feet high, the loftiest in the United Kingdom. The cathedral was built in the 
 thirteenth century. 
 
$0 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 of " Spirit." It is only a contraction of the Latin word 
 " breath," and an indistinct translation of the Greek word 
 for "wind." The same word is used in writing, "The 
 wind bloweth where it listeth ; " and in writing, " So is 
 5 every one that is born of the spirit ; " born of the breath, 
 that is ; for it means the breath of God, in soul and body. 
 We have the true sense of it in our words " inspiration " 
 and " expire." Now, there are two kinds of breath with 
 which the flock may be filled; God's breath and man's. 
 
 io The breath of God is health, and life, and peace to them, 
 as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills ; but man''s 
 breath — the word which he calls spiritual — is disease and 
 contagion to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot in- 
 wardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a dead body 
 
 15 by the vapors of its own decomposition. This is liter- 
 ally true of all false religious teaching ; the first, and last, 
 and fatalest sign of it is that " puffing up." Your con- 
 verted children, who teach their parents ; your converted 
 convicts, who teach honest men ; your converted dunces, 
 
 20 who, having lived in cretinous stupefaction half their lives, 
 suddenly awaking to the fact of there being a God, fancy 
 themselves therefore His peculiar people and messengers ; 
 your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic 
 or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they 
 
 25 think themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong ; 
 and pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men 
 can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, 
 by work instead of act, and wish instead of work ; — these 
 are the true fog children — clouds, these, without water; 
 
 3° bodies, these, of putrescent vapor and skin, without blood 
 or flesh ; blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with — 
 
 2. Greek word.Tn/eO^a. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 31 
 
 corrupt, and corrupting, — " Swoln with wind, and the rank 
 mist they draw." 
 
 24. Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the 
 power of the keys, for now we can understand them. 
 Note the difference between Milton and Dante in their 5> 
 interpretation of this power : for once, the latter is weaker 
 in thought ; he supposes both the keys to be of the gate of 
 heaven ; one is of gold, the other of silver : they are given 
 by St. Peter to the sentinel angel ; and it is not easy to 
 determine the meaning either of the substances of the io> 
 three steps of the gate, or of the two keys. But Milton 
 makes one, of gold, the key of heaven ; the other, of iron, 
 the key of the prison in which the wicked teachers are to 
 be bound who "have taken away the key of knowledge, 
 yet entered not in themselves." 15 
 
 We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are 
 to see, and feed ; and of all who do so it is said, " He 
 that watereth, shall be watered also himself." But the 
 reverse is truth also. He that watereth not, shall be 
 withered himself ; and he that seeth not, shall himself be 20, 
 shut out of sight — shut into the perpetual prison-house. 
 And that prison opens here, as well as hereafter ; he who 
 is to be bound in heaven must first be bound on earth. 
 That command to the strong angels, of which the rock- 
 apostle is the image, " Take him, and bind him hand and 25 
 foot, and cast him out," issues, in its measure, against the 
 teacher, for every help withheld, and for every truth re- 
 fused, and for every falsehood enforced ; so that he is 
 
 1 1 . Two keys. See Purgatory, canto ix. It would be well for the teacher to, 
 read to the class a good translation of this passage and others mentioned later. 
 15. "... themselves." Luke 11,52. 
 18. " . . . himself." Proverbs n, 25. 
 26. "... out." Matthew 22,. 13. 
 
32 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 more strictly fettered the more he fetters, and farther out- 
 cast, as he more and more misleads, till at last the bars of 
 the iron cage close upon him, and as " the golden opes, 
 the iron shuts amain." 
 5 25. We have got something out of the lines, I think, 
 and much more is yet to be found in them ; but we have 
 done enough by way of example of the kind of word-by- 
 word examination of your author which is rightly called 
 " reading ; " watching every accent and expression, and 
 
 10 putting ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating 
 our own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as 
 to be able assuredly to say, " Thus Milton thought," not 
 " Thus I thought, in mis-reading Milton." And by this 
 process you will gradually come to attach less weight to 
 
 15 your own "Thus I thought" at other times. You will 
 begin to perceive that what you thought was a matter of 
 no serious importance ; — that your thoughts on any sub- 
 ject are not perhaps the clearest and wisest that could 
 be arrived at thereupon : — in fact, that unless you are a 
 
 20 very singular person, you cannot be said to have any 
 " thoughts " at all ; that you have no materials for them, 
 in any serious matters ;.*— no right to "think," but only 
 to try to learn more of the facts. Nay, most probably all 
 your life (unless, as I said, you are a singular person) you 
 
 25 will have no legitimate right to an " opinion " on any busi- 
 ness, except that instantly under your hand. What must 
 of necessity be done, you can always find out, beyond 
 question, how to do. Have you a house to keep in order, 
 a commodity to sell, a field to plough, a ditch to cleanse ? 
 
 3° There need be no two opinions about the proceedings ; it 
 
 * Modern " education " for the most part signifies giving people the faculty of 
 thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to them. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 33 
 
 is at your peril if you have not much more than an 
 " opinion " on the way to manage such matters. And 
 also, outside of your own business, there are one or two 
 subjects on which you are bound to have but one opinion. 
 That roguery and lying are objectionable, and are in- 5 
 stantly to be flogged out of the way whenever discovered ; 
 — that covetousness and love of quarrelling are danger- 
 ous dispositions even in children, and deadly dispositions 
 in men and nations ; — that in the end, the God of heaven 
 and earth loves active, modest, and kind people, and hates 10 
 idle, proud, greedy, and cruel. ones; — on these general 
 facts you are bound to have but one, and that a very 
 strong, opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, gov- 
 ernments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the whole, 
 you can know nothing, — judge nothing; that the best 15 
 you can do, even though you may be a well-educated per- 
 son, is to be silent, and strive to be wiser every day, and 
 to understand a little more of the thoughts of others, 
 which so soon as you try to do honestly, you will discover 
 that the thoughts even of the wisest are very little more 2 ° 
 than pertinent questions. To put the difficulty into a 
 clear shape, and exhibit to you the grounds for indecision, 
 that is all they can generally do for you ! — and well for 
 them and for us, if indeed they are able " to mix the 
 music with our thoughts, and sadden us with heavenly 25 
 doubts," This writer, from whom I have been reading 
 to you, is not among the first or wisest : he sees shrewdly 
 as far as he sees, and therefore it is easy to find out his 
 full meaning; but with the greater men, you cannot 
 fathom their meaning ; they do not even wholly measure 30 
 it themselves, — it is so wide. Suppose I had asked you, 
 for instance, to seek for Shakespeare's opinion, instead of 
 3 
 
34 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 Milton's, on this matter of Church authority ? — or of 
 Dante's ? Have any of you, at this instance, the least 
 idea what either thought about it ? Have you ever bal- 
 anced the scene with the bishops in Richard III. against 
 
 5 the character of Cranmer ? the description of St. Francis 
 and St. Dominic against that of him who made Virgil 
 wonder to gaze upon him, — " disteso, tanto vilmente, nelF 
 eterno esilio ; " or of him whom Dante stood beside, " come 
 '1 frate che confessa lo perndo assassin ? " * Shakespeare 
 
 io and Alighieri knew men better than most of us, I pre- 
 sume ! They were both in the midst of the main struggle 
 between the temporal and spiritual powers. They had an 
 opinion, we may guess. But where is it ? Bring it into 
 court ! Put Shakespeare's or Dante's creed into articles, 
 
 15 and send it up for trial by the Ecclesiastical Courts ! 
 
 26. You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and 
 many a day, to come at the real purposes and teaching 
 of these great men ; but a very little honest study of them 
 will enable you to perceive that what you took for your 
 
 20 own "judgment" was mere chance prejudice, and 
 drifted, helpless, entangled weed of castaway thought; 
 nay, you will see that most men's minds are indeed little 
 better than rough heath wilderness, neglected and stub- 
 born, partly barren, partly overgrown with pestilent brakes 
 
 25 and venomous, wind-sown herbage of evil surmise ; that 
 the first thing you have to do for them, and yourself, is 
 
 * Dantes Inferno xxiii. 125, 126 ; xix. 49, 50. 
 
 5. Cranmer. (1489-1556.) Archbishop of Canterbury and a leading reformer. 
 
 6. Description of St. Francis and St. Dominic. See Dante's Paradise, 
 cantos 11 and 12. 
 
 7. "Disteso, etc." "Thus abjectly extended on the cross in banishment 
 eternal." 
 
 8. "Come," etc., "Like the friar that doth shrive a wretch for murder 
 doom'd." 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 35 
 
 eagerly and scornfully to set fire to this; burn all the 
 jungle into wholesome ash-heaps, and then plough and 
 sow. All the true literary work before you, for life, must 
 begin with obedience to that order, " Break up your 
 fallow ground, and sow not among thorns." 5 
 
 27. II. * Having then faithfully listened to the great 
 teachers, that you may enter into their Thoughts, you 
 have yet this higher advance to make ;— you have to 
 enter into their Hearts. As you go to them first for clear 
 sight, so you must stay with them, that you may share at 10 
 last their just and mighty Passion. Passion, or " sensa- 
 tion/' I am not afraid of the word : still less of the thing* 
 You have heard many outcries against sensation lately ; 
 but, I can tell you, it is not less sensation we want, but 
 more. The ennobling difference between one man and 15 
 another, — between one animal and another, — is precisely 
 in this, that one feels more than another. If we were 
 sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily got for us ; 
 
 if we were earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut 
 in two by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might 20 
 not be good for us. But being human creatures, it is good 
 for us ; nay, we are only human in so far as we are sensi- 
 tive ; and our honor is precisely in proportion to our 
 passion. 
 
 28. You know I said of that great and pure society of 2 5 
 the Dead, that it would allow " no vain or vulgar person 
 to enter there." What do you think I meant by a 
 
 " vulgar " person ? What do you yourselves mean by 
 ' vulgarity ? " You will find it a fruitful subject of thought ; 
 but, briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of 3° 
 
 * Compare § 13 above. 
 
 5. " . . . among thorns. " Jeremiah iv. 3. 
 
36 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 sensation. Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an 
 untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind ; 
 but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a dreadful callous- 
 ness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort 
 
 5 of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, 
 without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand 
 and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened 
 conscience, that men become vulgar ; they are forever 
 vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of 
 
 10 sympathy — of quick understanding, — of all that, in deep 
 insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may be 
 called the " tact " or " touch-faculty," of body and soul : 
 that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure 
 woman has above all creatures ; — fineness and fulness of 
 
 15 sensation, beyond reason; — the guide and sanctifier of 
 reason itself. Reason can but determine what is true : — 
 it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can 
 recognize what God has made good. 
 
 29. We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, 
 
 20 not merely to know from them what is true, but chiefly to 
 feel with them what is just. Now, to -feel with them, we 
 must be like them ; and none of us can become that 
 without pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and 
 tested knowledge, — not the first thought that comes, — so* 
 
 25 the true passion is disciplined and tested passion, — not 
 the first passion that comes. The first that come are the 
 vain, the false, the treacherous ; if you yield to them, they 
 will lead you wildly and far, in vain pursuit, in hollow en- 
 thusiasm, till you have no true purpose and no true passion 
 
 30 left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity is in 
 
 12. Tact. Derived from the Latin tangere, tactum, to touch. The sensitive 
 plant is a Mimosa. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 37 
 
 itself wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined. Its 
 nobility is in its force and justice ; it is wrong when it is 
 weak, and felt for paltry cause. There is a mean wonder, 
 as of a child who sees a juggler tossing golden balls, 
 and this is base, if you will. But do you think that the 5 
 wonder is ignoble, or the sensation less, with which 
 every human soul is called to watch the golden halls of 
 heaven tossed through the night by the Hand that made 
 them ? There is a mean curiosity, as of a child opening 
 a forbidden door, or a servant prying into her master's 10 
 business ; — and a noble curiosity, questioning, in the front 
 of danger, the source of the great river beyond the sand, — 
 
 \ the place of the great continent beyond the sea ; — a nobler 
 curiosity still, which questions of the source of the River 
 of Life, and of the space of the Continent of Heaven — *5 
 things which " the angels desire to look into." So the 
 anxiety is ignoble, with which you linger over the course 
 and catastrophe of an idle tale ; but do you think the 
 anxiety is less or greater, with which you watch, or ought 
 
 ±o watch, the dealings of fate and destiny with the life of 20 
 an agonized nation ? Alas ! it is the narrowness, selfish- 
 ness, minuteness, of your sensation that you have to de- 
 plore in England at this day ; — sensation which spends 
 itself in bouquets and speeches ;" in revellings and junket- 
 ings ; in sham fights and gay puppet shows, while you 2 5 
 can look on and see noble nations murdered, man by 
 man, without an effort or a tear. 
 
 30. I said " minuteness " and " selfishness " of sensa- 
 tion, but it would have been enough to have said " in 
 justice" or "unrighteousness" of sensation. For as in 3° 
 
 16. "... to look into." 1 Peter i. 2. 
 
 21. An agonized nation. This lecture was delivered in 1864, and was thus 
 composed during our civil war. * 
 
38 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned from a 
 vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such 
 nations have been) better to be discerned from a mob, 
 than in this, — that their feelings are constant and just, 
 ^ results of due contemplation, and of equal thought. You 
 can talk a mob into anything ; its feelings may be — 
 usually are — on the whole, generous and right; but it has 
 no foundation for them, no hold of them ; you may tease 
 or tickle it into any, at your pleasure ; it thinks by in- 
 
 iofection, for the most part, catching an opinion like a cold, 
 and there is nothing so little that it will not roar itself 
 wild about, when the fit is on ; — 'nothing so great but it 
 will forget in an hour, when the fit is past. But a gentle- 
 man's, or a gentle nation's, passions are just, measured, 
 
 15 and continuous. A great nation, for instance, does not 
 spend its entire national wits for a couple of months in 
 weighing evidence of a single ruffian's having done a 
 single murder ; and for a couple of years see its own 
 children murder each other by their thousands or tens of 
 
 20 thousands a day, considering only what the effect is likely 
 to be on the price of cotton, and caring nowise to deter- 
 mine which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither dpes 
 a great nation send its poor little boys to jail for stealing 
 six walnuts ; and allow its bankrupts to steal their 
 
 25 hundreds of thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich 
 with poor men's savings, to close their doors "under 
 circumstances over which they have no control," with a 
 " by your leave " ; and large landed estates to be bought 
 by men who have made their money by going with armed 
 
 30 steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium at 
 the cannon's mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the 
 foreign nation, the common highwayman's demand of 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 39 
 
 " your money or your life," into that of " your money and 
 your life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives of 
 its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, 
 and rotted out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake 
 of sixpence a life extra per week to its landlords ; # and 5 
 then debate, with drivelling tears, and diabolical sym- 
 pathies, whether it ought not piously to save, and nursingly 
 cherish, the lives of its murderers. Also, a great nation 
 having made up its mind that hanging is quite the whole- 
 somest process for its homicides in general, can yet with i 
 mercy distinguish between the degrees of guilt in homi- 
 cides ; and does not yelp like a pack of frost-pinched 
 wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy crazed boy, 
 or gray-haired clodpate Othello, " perplexed i' the ex- 
 treme," at the very moment that it is sending a Minister 15 
 of the Crown to make polite speeches to a man who is 
 bayoneting young girls in their fathers' sight, and killing 
 noble youths in cold blood, faster than a country butcher 
 kills lambs in spring. And, lastly, a great nation does 
 not mock Heaven and its Powers, by pretending belief in 2 © 
 a revelation which asserts the love of money to be the 
 root of all evil, and declaring, at the same time, that it is 
 actuated, and intends to be actuated, in all chief national 
 deeds and measures, by no other love. 
 
 31. My friends, I do not know why any of us should 25 
 talk about reading. We want some sharper discipline 
 than that of reading ; but, at all events, be assured, we 
 
 * See note at end of lecture. I have put it in large type, because the course 
 of matters since it was written has made it perhaps better worth attention. 
 
 14. An unhappy crazed boy, or gray=haired clodpate Othello. An 
 allusion to some sensational murders of the day. By Othello the author means of 
 course a jealous husband who has killed his wife. 
 
 15. "Perplexed i' the extreme." Othello, act V., scene 2. 
 
40 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 cannot read. No reading is possible for a people with its 
 mind in this-state. No sentence of any great writer is in- 
 
 . telligible to them. It is simply and sternly impossible for 
 the English public, at this moment, to understand any 
 
 5 thoughtful writing,— so incapable of thought has it be- 
 come in its insanity of avarice. Happily, our disease is, 
 as yet, little worse than this incapacity of thought ; it is 
 not corruption of the inner nature ; we ring true still, 
 when anything strikes home to us ; and though the idea 
 
 io that everything should "pay" has infected our every pur- 
 pose so deeply, that even when we would play the good 
 Samaritan, we never take out our twopence and give 
 them to the host, without saying, " When I come again, 
 thou shalt give me fourpence," there is a capacity of 
 
 15 noble passion left in our hearts' core. We show it in our 
 work — in our war, — even in those unjust domestic affec- 
 tions which make us furious at a small private wrong, 
 while we are polite to a boundless public one. : we are 
 still industrious to the last hour of the day, though we 
 
 20 add the gambler's fury to the laborer's patience ; we are 
 still brave to the death, though incapable of discerning 
 true cause for battle ; and are still true in affection to our 
 own flesh, to the death, as the sea-monsters are, and the 
 rock-eagles. And there is hope for a nation while this 
 
 25 can be still said of it. As long as it holds its life in its 
 hand, ready to give it for its honor (though a foolish 
 honor), for its love (though a selfish love), and for its bus- 
 iness (though a base business), there is hope for it. But 
 hope only ; for this instinctive, reckless virtue cannot last. 
 
 30 No nation can last, which has made a mob of itself, how- 
 ever generous at heart. It must discipline its passions, 
 and direct them, or they will discipline it, one day, with 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 41 
 
 scorpion-whips. Above all, a nation cannot last as a 
 money-making mob : it cannot with impunity, — it cannot 
 with existence, — go on despising literature, despising 
 science, despising art, despising nature, despising com- 
 passion, and concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you 5 
 think these are harsh or wild words ? Have patience 
 with me but a little longer. I will prove their truth to 
 you, clause by clause. 
 
 32. I. I say first we have despised literature. What 
 do we, as a nation, care about books ? How much do 10 
 you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or 
 private, as compared with what we spend on our horses ? 
 If a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad 
 — a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horse- 
 maniac, though men ruin themselves every day by their 15 
 horses, and you do not hear of people ruining themselves 
 by their books. Or, to go lower still, how much do you 
 think the contents of the book-shelves of the United 
 Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared 
 with the contents of its wine-cellars ? What position 20 
 would its expenditure on literature take, as compared 
 with its expenditure on luxurious eating ? We talk of 
 food for the mind, as of food for the body : now a good 
 book contains such food inexhaustibly ; it is a provision 
 for life, and for the best part of us ; yet how long most 25 
 people would look at the best book before they would 
 give the price of a large turbot for it ! Though there 
 have been men who have pinched their stomachs and 
 bared their backs to buy a book, whose libraries were 
 cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than most men's 3°^ 
 dinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and 
 more the pity ; for, indeed, a precious thing is all the 
 
42 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 more precious to us if it has been won by work or econ- 
 omy ; and if public libraries were half as costly as 
 public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what brace- 
 lets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes 
 5 suspect there was good in reading, as well as in munching 
 and sparkling ; whereas the very cheapness of literature 
 is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth 
 reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything 
 which is not worth much ; nor is it serviceable, until it 
 
 iohas been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; 
 and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you 
 want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he needs in 
 an armory, or a housewife bring the spice she needs 
 from her store. Bread of flour is good ; but there is bread, 
 
 15 sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book ; and 
 the family must be poor indeed which, once in their lives, 
 cannot, for such multipliable barley-loaves, pay their 
 baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and we are 
 filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other's books out 
 
 20 of circulating libraries ! 
 
 32>- II. I say we have despised science. "What!" 
 you exclaim, "are we not foremost in all discovery,* and 
 is not the whole world giddy by reason, or unreason, of 
 our inventions?" Yes, but do you suppose that is nation- 
 
 25 al work ? That work is all done in spite of the nation ; by 
 private people's zeal and money. We are glad enough, 
 indeed, to make our profit of science ; we snap up any- 
 thing in the way of a scientific bone that has meat on it, 
 eagerly enough ; but if the scientific man comes for a 
 
 3° bone or a crust to us, that is another story. What have 
 
 * Since this was written, the answer has become definitely — No ; we having sur- 
 rendered the field of Arctic discovery to the Continental nations, as being ourselves 
 too poor to pay for ships. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 43 
 
 we publicly done for science ? We are obliged to know 
 what o'clock it is, for the safety of our ships, and there- 
 fore we pay for an Observatory ; and we allow ourselves, 
 in the person of our Parliament, to be annually tormented 
 into doing something, in a slovenly way, for the British 5 
 Museum; sullenly apprehending that to be a place for 
 keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse our children. If any- 
 body will pay for their own telescope, and resolve another 
 nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it were our 
 own ; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires sud- 10 
 denly perceives that the earth was indeed made to be 
 something else than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it 
 himself, and tells us where the gold is, and where the 
 coals, we understand that there is some use in that ; and 
 very properly knight him : but is the accident of his hav- 15 
 ing found out how to employ himself usefully any credit 
 to us ? (The negation of such discovery among his brother 
 squires may perhaps be some discredit to us, if we would 
 consider of it.) But if you doubt these generalities, here 
 is one fact for us all to meditate upon, illustrative of our 20 
 love of science. Two years ago there was a collection of 
 the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria : the best 
 in existence^ containing many specimens unique for per- 
 fectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a 
 whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being an- 25 
 nounced by that fossil). This collection, of which the 
 mere market worth, among private buyers, would probably 
 
 3. Observatory. At Greenwich. 
 
 8. Their own telescope. It should be " his own," of course. 
 
 22. Fossils of Solenhofen. Near Aichstadt, in Bavaria, occurs a famous de- 
 posit of limestone, prolific in fossils. 
 
 24. One. The archa-opteryx macrura, a fossil of a creature, at the time thought 
 to be a sort of feathered lizard, but shown by Professor Owen to be a true, but very 
 anomalous bird. 
 
44 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 have been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was 
 offered to the English nation for seven hundred : but we 
 would not give seven hundred, and the whole series would 
 have been in the Munich museum at this moment, if Pro- 
 cessor Owen * had not, with loss of his own time, and 
 patient tormenting of the British public in person of its 
 representatives, got leave to give four hundred pounds at 
 once, and himself become answerable for the other three ! 
 which the said public will doubtless pay him eventually, 
 
 io but sulkily, and caring nothing about the matter all the 
 while ; only always ready to cackle if any credit comes of 
 it. Consider, I beg of you, arithmetically, what this fact 
 means. Your annual expenditure for public purposes (a 
 third of it for military apparatus), is at least fifty millions. 
 
 15 Now ^700 is to ^"50,000,000, roughly, as seven-pence to 
 two thousand pounds. Suppose, then, a gentleman of un- 
 known income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured 
 from the fact that he spent two thousand a year on his 
 park walls and footmen only, professes himself fond of 
 
 20 science ; and that one of his servants comes eagerly to 
 tell him that an unique collection of fossils, giving clue to 
 a new era of creation, is to be had for the sum of seven- 
 pence sterling ; and that the gentleman, who is fond of 
 science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, an- 
 
 25 swers, after keeping his servant waiting several months, 
 " Well ! I'll give you four-pence for them, if you will be 
 answerable for the extra three-pence yourself, till next 
 year ! " 
 
 * I state this fact without Professor Owen's permission, which of course he could 
 not with propriety have granted, had I asked it : but I consider it so important that 
 the public should be aware of the fact, that I do what seems to me right, though 
 rude. 
 
 5. Sir Richard Owen. A distinguished English anatomist and zoologist, born 
 in 1804. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 45 
 
 34. III. I say you have despised Art! "What!" 
 you again answer, "have we not Art exhibitions, miles 
 long? and do not we pay thousands of pounds for single 
 pictures ? and have we not Art schools and institutions, 
 more than ever nation had before ? " Yes, truly, but all 5 
 that is for the sake of the shop. You would fain sell can- 
 vas as well as coals, and crockery as well as iron ; you 
 would take every other nation's bread out of its mouth if 
 you could ; * not being able to do that, your ideal of life 
 is to stand in thoroughfares of the world, like Ludgate 10 
 apprentices, screaming to every passer-by, " What d'ye 
 lack ? " You know nothing of your own faculties or cir- 
 cumstances ; you fancy that, among your damp, flat, fat 
 fields of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as the 
 Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or the Italian under 15 
 his volcanic cliffs ; — that Art may be learned as book- 
 keeping is, and when learned, will give you more books to 
 keep. You care for pictures, absolutely, no more than 
 you do for the bills pasted on your dead walls. There is 
 always room on the wall for the bills to be read, — never 20 
 for the pictures to be seen. You do not know what 
 pictures you have (by repute) in the country, nor whether 
 they are false or true, nor whether they are taken care of 
 or not ; in foreign countries, you calmly see the noblest 
 existing pictures in the world rotting in abandoned wreck 25 
 — (in Venice you saw the Austrian guns deliberately 
 pointed at the palaces containing them), and if you heard 
 
 * That was our real idea of " Free Trade " — " All the trade to myself." You 
 find now that by " competition " other people can manage to sell something as well 
 as you — and now we call for Protection again. Wretches ! 
 
 11. Ludgate apprentices. The apprentices of old London used to stand at 
 the doors of the shops and try to get customers by the cry " What d'ye lack ? " Lud- 
 gate Hill is still a busy London street. 
 
 26. In Venice. In August 1849. 
 
46 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 that all the fine pictures in Europe were made into sand- 
 bags to-morrow on the Austrian forts, it would not trouble 
 you so much as the chance of a brace or two of game less 
 in your own bags, in a day's shooting. That is your na- 
 
 5 tional love of Art. 
 
 35. IV. You have despised nature; that is to say, all 
 the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The 
 French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of 
 France ; you have made racecourses of the cathedrals of 
 
 10 the earth. Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in 
 railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their 
 altars.* You have put a railroad-bridge over the falls of 
 Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne 
 by Tell's chapel ; you have destroyed the Clarens shore 
 
 1 5 of the Lake of Geneva; there is not a quiet valley in 
 England that you have not filled with bellowing fire ; 
 there is no particle left of English land which you have 
 not trampled coal ashes into f — nor any foreign city in 
 which the spread of your presence is not marked among 
 
 20 its fair old streets and happy gardens by a consuming 
 white leprosy of new hotels and perfumers' shops : the 
 Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so 
 reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, 
 which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again, 
 
 25 with " shrieks of delight." When you are past shrieking, 
 having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, 
 you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, 
 and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, 
 
 * I meant that the beautiful places of the world — Switzerland, Italy, South Ger- 
 many, and so on — are, indeed, the truest cathedrals— places to be reverent in, and to 
 worship in ; and that we only care to drive through them ; and to eat and drink at 
 their most sacred places. 
 
 t I was singularly struck, some years age, by finding all the river shore at Rich- 
 mond, in Yorkshire, black in its earth, from the mere drift of soot-laden air from 
 places many miles away. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 47 
 
 and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction. 
 I think nearly the two sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever 
 seen in humanity, taking the deep inner significance of 
 them, are the English mobs in the valley of Chamouni> 
 amusing themselves with firing rusty howitzers ; and the $ 
 Swiss vintagers of Zurich expressing their Christian thanks 
 for the gift of the vine, by assembling in knots in the 
 " towers of the vineyards," and slowly loading and firing 
 horse-pistols from morning till evening. It is pitiful, to 
 have dim conceptions of duty ; more pitiful, it seems to 10 
 me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth. 
 
 36. Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no 
 need of words of mine for proof of this. I will merely 
 print one of the newspaper paragraphs which I am in the 
 habit of cutting out and throwing into my store-drawer ; 15 
 •here is one from a " Daily Telegraph " of an early date 
 this year (1865) ; (date which, though by me carelessly left 
 unmarked, is easily discoverable ; for on the back of the 
 slip, there is the announcement that " yesterday the seventh 
 of the special services of this year was performed by the 20 
 Bishop of Ripon in St, Paul's " ;) it relates only one of 
 such facts as happen now daily ; this by chance having 
 taken a form in which it came before the coroner. I will 
 print the paragraph in red. Be sure, the facts themselves 
 are written in that color, in a book which we shall all of 2 5 
 us, literate or illiterate, have to read our page of, some day. 
 
 " An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy 
 coroner, at the White Horse tavern, Christ Church, Spital- 
 fields, respecting the death of Michael Collins, aged 58 
 
 5. Firing rusty howitzers. To hear the reverb rations among the mountains. 
 
 8. Towers of the vineyards. Vineyards were guarded in biblical times by 
 small towers erected in their midst, 2 Chr. xxvi 10; Isa, v. 10; Micah, iv. 8; Matt. 
 xxi 33, and travellers in Palestine see them in use to this day. 
 
 24. In red. In the English edition the next paragraph is printed in red ink. 
 
48 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 years. Mary Collins, a miserable-looking woman, said 
 that she lived with the deceased and his son in a room at 
 2, Cobb's Court, Christ Church. Deceased was a 'trans- 
 lator ' of boots. Witness went out and bought old boots ; 
 5 deceased and his son made them into good ones, and 
 then witness sold them for what she could get at the 
 shops, which was very little indeed. Deceased and his 
 son used to work night and day to try and get a little 
 bread and tea, and pay for the room (2s. a week), so as to 
 
 IO keep the home together. On Friday-night week deceased 
 got up from his bench and began to shiver. He threw 
 down the boots, saying, ' Somebody else must finish them 
 when I am gone, for I can do no more.' There was no fire 
 and he said, ' I would be better if I was warm.' Witness 
 
 ^therefore took two pairs of translated boots * to sell at 
 the shop, but she could only get 14^/. for the two pairs,' 
 for the people at the shop said, ' We must have our 
 profit.* Witness got 141b. of coal, and a little tea and 
 bread. Her son sat up the whole night to make the 
 
 20 ' translations,' to get money, but deceased died on Satur- 
 day morning. The family never had enough to eat. — 
 Coroner : ' It seems to me deplorable that you did not go 
 into the workhouse.' Witness: ' We wanted the comforts 
 of our little home.' A juror asked what the comforts 
 
 2 , were, for he only saw a little straw in the corner of the 
 room, the windows of which were broken. The witness 
 began to cry, and said that they had a quilt and other 
 little things. The deceased said he never would go into 
 the workhouse. In summer, when the season was good, 
 
 ~ they sometimes made as much as 10s. profit in the week. 
 
 * One of the things which we must very resolutely enforce, for the good of all 
 classes, in our future arrangements, must be that they wear no " translated " 
 article of dress. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 49 
 
 They then always saved towards the next week, which 
 was generally a bad one. In winter they made not half 
 so much. For three years they had been getting from 
 bad to worse. — Cornelius Collins said that he had assisted 
 his father since 1847. They used to work so far into the 5 
 night that both nearly lost their eyesight. Witness now 
 had a film over his eyes. Five years ago deceased ap- 
 plied to the parish for aid. The relieving officer gave 
 him a 41b. loaf, and told him if he came again he should 
 get the ; stones.'* That disgusted deceased, and he would 10 
 have nothing to do with them since. They got worse and 
 worse until last Friday week, when they had not even a 
 halfpenny to buy a candle. Deceased then lay down on 
 the straw, and said he could not live till morning : — A 
 juror : ' You are dying of starvation yourself, and you 1 5 
 ought to go into the house until the summer.' — Witness : 
 1 If we went in, we should die. When we come out in 
 the summer, we should be like people dropped from the 
 sky. No one would know us, and we would not have 
 
 * This abbreviation of the penalty of useless labor is curiously coincident in 
 verbal form with a certain passage which some of us may remember. It may per- 
 haps be well to preserve beside this paragraph another cutting out of my store- 
 drawer, from the " Morning Post." of about a parallel date, Friday, March ioth, 
 
 1865: — "The salons of Mme. C , who did the honors with clever imitative 
 
 grace and elegance, were crowded with princes, dukes, marquises, and counts — in 
 fact, with the same male company as one meets at the parties of the Princess Met- 
 ternich and Madame Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English peers and members of 
 Parliament were present, and appeared to enjoy the animated and dazzling improper 
 scene. On the second floor the supper tables were loaded with every delicacy of 
 the season. That your readers may form some idea of the dainty fare of the Parisian 
 demi-monde, I copy the menu of the supper, which was served to all the guests 
 (about 200) seated at four o'clock. Choice Yquem, Johannisberg. Lafntte, and 
 Tokay, and champagne of the finest vintages were served most lavishly throughout 
 the morning. After supper dancing was resume'd with increased animation, and the 
 ball terminated with a citable diabolique and a caucatt d'enfer at seven in the 
 morning. (Morning service — ' Ere the fresh lawns appeared, under the opening 
 eyelids of the Morn.) Here is the menu : — ' Consomme de volaille a la Bagra- 
 tion; 16 hors-d'ceuvres varies. Bouchees a la Talleyrand. Saumons froids, sauce 
 Ravigote. Filets de bceuf en Bellevue, timbales milanaises, chaudfroid de gibier. 
 Dindes truffees. Pates de foies gras, buissons d'ecrevisses, salades venetiennes, 
 gelees blanches aux fruits, gateaux mancini, parisiens et parisiennes. Fromages 
 glacis. Ananas. Dessert.' " 
 
 4 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 even a room. I could work now if I had food, for my 
 sight would get better.' Dr. G. P. Walker said deceased 
 died from syncope, from exhaustion from want of food. 
 The deceased had had no bedclothes. For four months 
 5 he had had nothing but bread to eat. There was not a 
 particle of fat in the body. There was no disease, but if 
 there had been medical attendance, he might have sur- 
 vived the syncope or fainting. The coroner having re- 
 marked upon the painful nature of the case, the jury re- 
 
 10 turned the following verdict, ' That deceased died from 
 exhaustion from want of food and the common necessaries 
 of life ; also through want of medical aid.' " 
 
 37. " Why would witness not go into the workhouse ? " 
 you ask. Well, the poor seem to have a prejudice against 
 
 15 the workhouse which the rich have not; for of course 
 every one who takes a pension from Government goes into 
 the workhouse on a grand scale : * only the workhouses for 
 the rich do not involve the idea of work, and should be 
 called play-houses. Bnt the poor like to die independ- 
 
 20 ently, it appears ; perhaps if we made the play-houses for 
 them pretty and pleasant enough, or gave them their pen- 
 sions at home, and allowed them a little introductory 
 peculation with the public money, their minds might be 
 reconciled to the conditions. Meantime, here are the 
 
 25 facts : we make our relief either so insulting to them, or so 
 painful, that they rather die than take it at our hands ; or, 
 for third alternative, we leave them so untaught and 
 foolish that they starve like brute creatures, wild and dumb, 
 not knowing what to do, or what to ask. I say, you 
 
 * Please observe this statement, and think of it, and consider how it happens that 
 a poor old woman will be ashamed to take a shilling a week from the country — but 
 uo one is ashamed to take a pension of a thousand a year. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 5 i 
 
 despise compassion ; if you did not, such a newspaper 
 paragraph would be as impossible in a Christian country as 
 a deliberate assassination permitted in its public streets.* 
 " Christian " did I say ? Alas, if we were but wholesomely 
 ^-Christian, it would be impossible : it is our imaginary 5 
 Christianity that helps us to commit these crimes, for we 
 revel and luxuriate in our faith, for the lewd sensation of 
 it ; dressing it up, like everything else, in fiction. The 
 dramatic Christianity of the organ and aisle, of dawn- 
 service and twilight-revival — the Christianity which we 10 
 do not fear to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our 
 play about the devil, in our Satanellas, — Roberts, — Fausts ; 
 chanting hymns through traceried windows for back-ground 
 effect, and artistically modulating the " Dio " through 
 
 * I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the " Pall Mall Gazette" established ; 
 for the power of the press in the hands of highly-educated men, in independent posi- 
 tion, and of honest purpose, may indeed become all that it has been hitherto vainly 
 vaunted to be. Its editor will therefore, I doubt not, pardon me, in that, by very 
 reason of my respect for the journal, I do not let pass unnoticed an article in its third 
 number, page 5, which was wrong in every word of it, with the intense wrongness 
 which only an honest man can achieve who has taken a false turn of thought in the 
 outset, and is following it, regardless of consequences. It contained at the end this 
 notable passage r — 
 
 "The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction — aye, and the bedstead and 
 blankets of affliction, are the very utmost that the law ought to give to outcasts merely 
 as outcasts.'''' I merely put beside this expression of the gentlemanly mind of Eng- 
 land in 1865, a part of the message which Isaiah was ordered to "lift up his voice 
 like a trumpet " in declaring to the gentlemen of his day : " Ye fast for strife, and to 
 smite with the fist of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to deal 
 thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out( margin, 
 'afflicted') to thy house?" The falsehood on which the writer had mentally 
 founded himself, as previously stated by him, was this : " To confound the functions 
 of the dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a charitable in- 
 stitution, is a great and pernicious error." This sentence is so accurately and ex- 
 quisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus reversed in our minds before we can 
 deal'with any existing problem of national distress. "To understand that the dis- 
 pensers of the poor rates are the almoners of the nation, and should distribute its alms 
 with a gentleness and freedom of hand as much greater and franker than that possible 
 to individual charity, as the collective national wisdom and power may be supposed 
 greater than those of any single person, is the foundation of all law respecting 
 pauperism." (Since this was written the " Pall Mall Gazette" has become a mere 
 party paper — like the rest ; but it writes well, and does more good than mischief on 
 the whole.) 
 
 12. Satanellas,— Roberts,— Faust. The opera Satanella is by Balfe; Robert 
 le Diable by Meyerbeer, and Faust by Gounod. 
 
 14. Dio. God, in Italian. 
 
SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 variation on variation of mimicked prayer : (while we 
 distribute tracts, next day, for the benefit of uncultivated 
 swearers, upon what we suppose to be the signification of 
 the Third Commandment ; — ) this gas-lighted, and gas-in- 
 5 spired Christianity, we are triumphant in, and draw back 
 the hem of our robes from the touch of the heretics who 
 dispute it. But to do a piece of common Christian right- 
 eousness in a plain English word or deed ; to make Christian 
 law any rule of life, and found one National act or hope 
 
 10 thereon, — we know too well what our faith comes to for 
 that ! You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke 
 than true action or passion out of your modern English re- 
 ligion. You had better get rid of the smoke, and the organ 
 pipes, both : leave them, and the Gothic windows, and the 
 
 15 painted glass, to the property man ; give up yourcarburetted 
 hydrogen ghost in one healthy expiration, and look after 
 Lazarus at the doorstep. For there is a true Church wher- 
 ever one hand meets another helpfully, and that is the 
 only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall 
 
 20 be. 
 
 38. All these pleasures then, and all these virtues, I 
 repeat, you nationally despise. You have, indeed, men 
 among you who do not ; by whose work, by whose strength,, 
 by whose life, by whose death, you live, and never thank 
 
 25 them. Your wealth, your amusement, your pride, would 
 all be alike impossible, but for those whom you scorn or 
 forget. The policeman, who is walking up and down the 
 black lane all night to watch the guilt you have created 
 there ; and may have his brains beaten out, and be maimed 
 
 3° for life, at any moment, and never be thanked ; the sailor 
 wrestling with the sea's rage ; the quiet student poring 
 over his book or his vial ; the common worker, without 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 53 
 
 praise, and nearly without bread, fulfilling his task as your 
 horses drag your carts, hopeless, and spurned of all ; these 
 are the men by whom England lives ; but they are not the 
 nation ; they are only the body and nervous force of it, 
 acting still from old habit in a convulsive perseverance, 5 
 while the mind is gone. Our National wish and purpose 
 are only to be amused ; our National religion is the per- 
 formance of church ceremonies, and preaching of soporific 
 truths (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work, while 
 we amuse ourselves ; and the necessity for this amusement to 
 is fastening on us, as a feverous disease of parched throat 
 and wandering eyes — senseless, dissolute, merciless. How 
 literally that word Z^-Ease, the Negation and possibility 
 of Ease, expresses the entire moral state of our English 
 Industry and its Amusements ! 15 
 
 39. When men are rightly occupied, their amusement 
 grows out of their work, as the color-petals out of a fruit- 
 ful flower ; — when they are faithfully helpful and com- 
 passionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, per- 
 petual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to 20 
 the body. But now, having no true business, we pour 
 our whole masculine energy into the false business of 
 money-making ; and having no true emotion, we must 
 have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not 
 innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly 25 
 as the idolatrous Jews with their pictures on cavern walls, 
 which men had to dig to detect. The justice we do not 
 execute, we mimic in the novel and on the stage; for the 
 beauty we destroy in nature, we substitute the metamor- 
 phosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature of us 30 
 imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of some kind) for 
 
 26. Idolatrous Jews. Ezek. viii. 7, 8, 9. 
 
54 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 the noble grief we should have borne with our fellows, 
 and the pure tears we should have wept with them, we 
 gloat over the pathos of the police court, and gather the 
 night-dew of the grave. 
 5 40. It is difficult to estimate the true significance of 
 these things ; the facts are frightful enough ; — the measure 
 of national fault involved in them is perhaps not as great as 
 it would at first seem. We permit, or cause, thousands of 
 deaths daily, but we mean no harm ; we set fire td 
 
 10 houses, and ravage peasants' fields, yet we should be 
 sorry to find we had injured anybody. We are still kind 
 at heart ; still capable of virtue, but only as children are. 
 Chalmers, at the end of his long life, having had much 
 power with the public, being plagued in some serious mat- 
 
 i5ter by a reference to "public opinion," uttered the im- 
 patient exclamation, " The public is just a great baby ! " 
 And the reason that I have allowed all these graver sub- 
 jects of thought to mix themselves up with an inquiry into 
 methods of reading, is that, the more I see of our national 
 
 20 faults or miseries, the more they resolve themselves into 
 conditions of childish illiterateness and want of education 
 in the most ordinary habits of thought. It is, I repeat, 
 not vice, not selfishness, not dulness of brain, which we 
 have to lament ; but an unreachable schoolboy's reckless- 
 
 2 5 ness, only differing from the true schoolboy's in its inca- 
 pacity of being helped, because it acknowledges no master. 
 41. There is a curious type of us given in one of the 
 lovely, neglected works of the last of our great painters. 
 It is a drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, and of its 
 
 30 brook, and valley, and hills, and folded morning sky be- 
 
 13. Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847). A famous Scottish divine. 
 28. Last of our great painters. J. M. W. Turner. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 
 
 55 
 
 yond. And unmindful alike of these, and of the dead 
 who have left these for other valleys and for other skies, 
 a group of schoolboys have piled their little books upon 
 a grave, to strike them off with stones. So, also, we play 
 with the words of the dead that would teach us, and 5 
 strike them far from us with our bitter, reckless will ; 
 little thinking that those leaves which the wind scatters 
 had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the 
 seal of an enchanted vault— nay, the gate of a great city 
 of sleeping kings, who would awake for us, and walk with 10 
 us, if we knew but how to call them by their names. 
 How often, even if we lift the marble entrance gate, do we 
 but wander among those old kings in their repose, and 
 finger the robes they lie in, and stir the crowns on their 
 foreheads, and still they are silent to us, and seem but a 15 
 dusty imagery ; because we know not the incantation of 
 the heart that would wake them; — which, if they once 
 heard, they would start up to meet us in their power of 
 long ago, narrowly to look upon us, and consider us ; and, 
 as the fallen kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, saying, 20 
 " Art thou also become weak as we — art thou also become 
 one 01 us ? " so would these kings, with their undimmed, 
 unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, " Art thou also become 
 pure and mighty of heart as we ? art thou also become 
 one of us ? " 25 
 
 42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — " magnanimous" 
 — to be this, is indeed to be great in life ; to become this 
 increasingly, is,- indeed, to " advance in life," — in life itself 
 — not in the trappings of it. My friends, do you remem- 
 ber that old Scythian custom, when the head of a house 30 
 died ? How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in 
 his chariot, and carried about to his friends' houses ; and 
 
56 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 each of them placed him at his table's head, and all 
 feasted in his presence ? Suppose it were offered, to you 
 in plain words, as it is offered to you in dire facts, that 
 you should gain this Scythian honor, gradually, while you 
 5 yet thought yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this : 
 You shall die slowly ; your blood shall daily grow cold, 
 your flesh petrify, your heart beat at last only as a rusted 
 group of iron valves. Your life shall fade from you, and 
 sink through the earth into the ice of Caina ; but, day by 
 
 10 day, your body shall be dressed more gayly, and set in 
 higher chariots, and have more orders on its breast — 
 crowns on its head, if you will. Men shall bow before it, 
 stare and shout round it, crowd after it up and down the' 
 streets ; build palaces for it, feast with it at their tables' 
 
 15 heads all the night long; your soul shall stay enough 
 within it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the 
 golden dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown- 
 edge on the skull ; — no more. Would you take the offer, 
 verbally made by the death-angel ? Would the meanest 
 
 20 among us take it, think you ? Yet practically and verily 
 we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure ; many of us 
 grasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts 
 it, who desires to advance in life without knowing what 
 life is ; who means only that he is to get more horses, and 
 
 25 more footmen, and more fortune, and more public honor, 
 and — not more personal soul. He only is advancing in 
 life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood warmer, 
 whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living * 
 peace. And the men who have this life in them are the 
 
 '"to Se <f)p6vr)iJ.a. row TrcevjuiaTo? £0)17 /cal eip^vrj." [Greek Testament, Rom. 
 viii. 6.] 
 
 9. Caina. The place to which murderers are doomed. Dante's Inferno. 
 
 29. Living peace. The words are from Romans viii. 6 : "To be spiritual 
 minded is life and peace." 
 
OF KINGS" TREASURIES 57 
 
 true lords or kings of the earth — they, and they only All 
 other kingships, so far as they are true, are only the prac- 
 tical issue and expression of theirs ; if less than this, they 
 are either dramatic royalties, — costly shows, set off, in- 
 deed, with real jewels instead of tinsel — but still only the $, 
 toys of nations ; or else, there are no royalties at all, but 
 tyrannies, or the mere active and practical issue of national 
 folly ; for which reason I have said of them elsewhere, 
 " Visible governments are the toys of some nations, the 
 diseases of others, the harness of some, the burdens of 10 
 more." 
 
 43. But I have no words for the wonder with which I 
 hear Kinghood still spoken of, even among thoughtful 
 men, as if governed nations were a personal property, and 
 might be bought and. sold, or otherwise acquired, as 15 
 sheep, of whose flesh their king was to feed, and whose 
 fleece he was to gather ; as if Achilles' indignant epithet 
 of base kings, "people-eating," were the constant and 
 proper title of all monarchs ; and enlargement of a king's 
 dominion meant the same thing as the increase of a 20 
 private man's estate ! Kings who think so, however 
 powerful, can no more be the true kings of the nation 
 than gadflies are the kings of a horse ; they suck it, and 
 may drive it wild, but ''do not guide it. They and 
 their courts, and their armies are, if one could see clearly, 25 
 only a large species of marsh mosquito, with bayonet 
 proboscis and melodious, band-mastered trumpeting, in 
 the summer air ; the twilight being, perhaps sometimes 
 fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glittering mists 
 of midge companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule 30 
 quietly, if at all, and hate ruling ; too many of them make 
 
 17. Epithet. Iliad, Book 1, Hue 231, 
 
58 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 " il gran rifiuto" ; and if they do not, the mob, as soon as 
 they are likely to become useful to it, is pretty sure to 
 make its "gran rifiuto " of them. 
 
 44. Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some 
 5 day, if ever day comes when he will estimate his dominion 
 
 by the force of it, — not the geographical boundaries. It 
 matters very little whether Trent cuts you a cantel out 
 here, or Rhine rounds you a castle less there. But it 
 does matter to you, king of men, whether you can verily 
 
 10 say to this man "Go," and he goeth ; and to another, 
 " Come," and he cometh. Whether you can turn your 
 people, as you can Trent — and where it is that you bid 
 them come, and where go. It matters to you, king of 
 men, whether your people hate you, and die by you, or 
 
 15 love you, and live by you. You may measure your 
 dominion by multitudes, better than by miles ; and count 
 degrees of love-latitude, not from, but to, a wonderfully 
 warm and infinite equator. 
 
 45. Measure! — nay, you cannot measure. Who shall 
 20 measure the difference between the power of those who 
 
 " do and teach," and who are greatest in the kingdoms of 
 earth, as of heaven — and the power of those who undo, 
 and consume — whose power, at the fullest, is only the 
 power of the moth and the rust ? Strange ! to think how 
 
 25 the Moth-kings lay up treasures for the moth ; and the 
 Rust-kings, who are to their people's strength as rust to 
 armor, lay up treasures for the rust; and the Robber- 
 kings, treasures for the robber; but how few kings have 
 ever laid up treasures that needed no guarding — treasures 
 
 30 of which, the more thieves there were, the better! 
 
 1. " Gran rifiuto." The great refusal. " Rifiuto " in Italian means refusal, 
 and abdication. 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 59 
 
 Broidered robe, only to be rent ; helm and sword, only to 
 be dimmed ; jewel and gold, only to be scattered ; — there 
 have been three kinds of kings who have gathered these. 
 Suppose there ever should arise a Fourth order of kings, 
 who had read, in some obscure writing of long ago, that S 
 there was a Fourth kind of treasure, which the jewel and 
 gold could not equal, neither should it be valued with 
 pure gold. A web made fair in the weaving, by Athena's 
 shuttle ; an armor, forged in divine fire by Vulcanian 
 force ; a gold to be mined in the very sun's red heart, T ° 
 where he sets over the Delphian cliffs ; — deep pictured 
 tissue ; — impenetrable armor ; — potable gold ; — the three 
 great Angels of Conduct, Toil, and Thought, still calling 
 to us, and waiting at the posts of our doors, to lead us, 
 with their winged power, and guide us, with their unerring T 5 
 eyes, by the path which no fowl knoweth, and which the 
 vulture's eye has not seen ! Suppose kings should ever 
 arise, who heard and believed this word, and at last 
 gathered and brought forth treasures of — Wisdom — for 
 their people ? 20 
 
 46. Think what an amazing business that would be ! 
 How inconceivable, in the state of our present national 
 wisdom ! That we should bring up our peasants to a 
 book exercise instead of a bayonet exercise ! — organize, 
 drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies of 25 
 thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers ! — find national 
 amusement in reading-rooms as well as rifle-grounds ; give 
 prizes for a fair shot at a fact, as well as for a leaden 
 
 9. Athena's shuttle. The Greek goddess Athena was the patroness of the 
 art of weaving. 
 
 10. Vulcanian force. Vulcan was the god of fire and the forge. 
 
 11. Delphian cliffs. The oracle in the temple of Apollo at Delphi was the 
 most revered in Greece. In the temple was stored much of the treasure belonging 
 to the Grecian States. 
 
60 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 splash on a target. What an absurd idea it seems, 
 put fairly in words, that the wealth of the capitalists 
 of civilized nations should ever come to support litera- 
 ture instead of war ! 
 5 47. Have yet patience with me, while I read you a 
 single sentence out of the only book, properly to be called 
 a book, that I have yet written myself, the one that will 
 stand, (if anything stand,) surest and longest of all work 
 of mine : — 
 
 10 " It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in Europe 
 that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which supports unjust wars. 
 Just wars do not need so much money to support them ; for most of 
 the men who wage such, wage them gratis; but for an unjust war, 
 men's bodies and souls have both to be bought ; and the best tools 
 
 1 5 of war for them besides, which makes such war costly to the maxi- 
 mum ; not to speak of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, 
 between nations which have not grace nor honesty enough in all 
 their multitudes to buy an hour's peace of mind with ; as, at present, 
 France and England, purchasing of each other ten millions sterling 
 
 20 worth of consternation, annually (a remarkably light crop, half 
 thorns and half aspen leaves, sown, reaped, and granaried 
 by the ' science ' of the modern political economist, teaching covet- 
 ousness instead of truth). And, all unjust war being supportable, if 
 not by pillage of the enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these 
 
 2 5 loans are repaid by subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to 
 have no will in the matter, the capitalists' will being the primary root 
 of the war; but its real root is thecovetousness of the whole nation, 
 rendering it incapable of faith, frankness, or justice, and bringing 
 about, therefore, in due time, his own separate loss and punishment 
 
 30 to each person." 
 
 48. France and England literally, observe, buy panic of 
 each other ; they pay, each of them, for ten thousand- 
 thousand pounds'-worth of terror, a year. Now suppose, 
 instead of buying these ten millions' worth of panic 
 35 annually, they made up their minds to be at peace with 
 
OF KINGS' TREASURIES 61 
 
 each other, and buy ten millions' worth of knowledge 
 annually ; and that each nation spent its ten thousand- 
 thousand pounds a year in founding royal libraries, royal 
 art galleries, royal museums, royal gardens, and places of 
 rest. Might it not be better somewhat for both French 5 
 and English ? 
 
 49. It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. 
 Nevertheless, I hope it will not be long before royal or 
 national libraries will be founded in every considerable 
 city, with a royal series of books in them ; the same series 10 
 in every one of them, chosen books, the best in every 
 kind, prepared for that national series in the most perfect 
 way possible ; their text printed all on leaves of equal 
 size, broad of margin, and divided into pleasant volumes, 
 light in the hand, beautiful, and strong, and thorough as 15 
 examples of binders' work ; and that these great libraries 
 will be accessible to all clean and orderly persons at all 
 times of the day and evening ; strict law being enforced 
 for this cleanliness and quietness. 
 
 50. I could shape for you other plans, for art galleries, 20 
 and for natural history galleries, and for many precious — 
 many, it seems to me, needful — things ; but this book plan 
 
 is the easiest and needfullest, and would prove a consider- 
 able tonic to what we call our British Constitution, which 
 has fallen dropsical of late, and has an evil thirst, and evil 25 
 hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You have got its 
 corn laws repealed for it ; try if you cannot get corn laws es- 
 tablished for it, dealing in a better bread ; — bread made of 
 that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which 
 
 27. Corn laws. The vexatious corn laws which prohibited the importation of 
 grain into England except when the price rose above a certain rate, were repealed 
 in 1846. 
 
 29. Sesame. In the story cf " Ali Babaand the Forty Thieves " in the Arabian 
 Nights, entrance to the robbers' cave is gained by pronouncing the words, " Open, 
 Sesame." 
 
62 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 opens doors ; — doors, not of robbers', but of Kings' 
 Treasuries. 
 
 Note to § 30. 
 
 Respecting the increase of rent by the deaths of the poor, 
 5 for evidence of which, see the preface to the Medical 
 Officer's report to the Privy Council, just published, there 
 are suggestions in its preface which will make some stir 
 among us, I fancy, respecting which let me note these 
 points following : — 
 
 10 There are two theories on the subject of land now 
 abroad, and in contention ; both false. 
 
 The first is that, by Heavenly law, there have always 
 existed, and must continue to exist, a certain number of 
 hereditarily sacred persons to whom the earth, air and water 
 
 15 of the world belong, as personal property ; of which earth, 
 air, and water, these persons may, at their pleasure, permit 
 or forbid, the rest of the human race to eat, to breathe, or 
 to drink. This theory is not for many years longer tenable. 
 The adverse theory is that a division of the land of the 
 
 20 world among the mob of the world would immediately 
 elevate the said mob into sacred personages ; that houses 
 would then build themselves, and corn grow of itself ; and 
 that everybody would be able to live, without doing any 
 work for his living. This theory would also be found 
 
 25 highly untenable in practice. 
 
 It will, however, require some rough experiments and 
 rougher catastrophes, before the generality of persons will 
 be convinced that no law concerning anything — least of all 
 concerning land, for either holding or dividing it, or renting 
 
 30 it high, or renting it low — would be of the smallest ultimate 
 use to the people, so long as the general contest for life, and 
 for the means of life, remains one of mere brutal competi- 
 
OF KINGS' l^REASURIES 63 
 
 tion. That contest, in an unprincipled nation, will take one 
 deadly form or another, whatever laws you make against 
 it. For instance, it would be an entirely wholesome law 
 for England, if it could be carried, that maximum limits 
 should be assigned to incomes according to classes ; and 5 
 that every nobleman's income should be paid to him as a 
 fixed salary or pension by the nation ; and not squeezed 
 by him in variable sums, at discretion, out of the tenants 
 of his land. But if you could get such a law passed to- 
 morrow, and if, which would be farther necessary, you 10 
 could fix the value of the assigned income by making a 
 given weight of pure bread for a given sum, a twelve- 
 month would not pass before another currency would have 
 been tacitly established, and the power of accumulated 
 wealth would have re-asserted itself in some other article, 15 
 or some other imaginary sign. There is only one cure for 
 public distress — and that is public education, directed to 
 make men thoughtful, merciful, and just. There are, 
 indeed, many laws conceivable which would gradually 
 better and strengthen the national temper ; but, for the 20 
 most part, they are such as the national temper must be 
 much bettered before it would bear. A nation in its youth 
 may be helped by laws, as a weak child by backboards, 
 but when it is old it cannot that way strengthen its crooked 
 spine. 25 
 
 And besides ; the problem of land, at its worst, is a bye 
 one ; distribute the earth as you will, the principal question 
 remains inexorable, — Who is to dig it ? Which of us, in 
 brief word, is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest — 
 and for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean 30 
 work, and for what pay ? Who is to do no work, and for 
 what pay? And there are curious moral and religious 
 
6 4 SESAME AND LILIES 
 
 questions Connected with these. How far is it lawful to 
 suck a portion of the soul out of a great many persons, in 
 order to put the abstracted psychical quantities together 
 and make one very beautiful or ideal soul ? If we had to 
 
 5 deal with mere blood instead of spirit, (and the thing 
 might literally be done — as it has been done with infants 
 before now) — so that it were possible by taking a certain 
 quantity of blood from the arms of a given number of the 
 mob, and putting it all into one person, to make a more 
 
 io azure-blooded gentleman of him, the thing would of course 
 be managed ; but secretly, I should conceive. But now, 
 because it is brain and soul that we abstract, not visible 
 blood, it can be done quite openly, and we live, we gentle- 
 men, on delicatest prey, after the manner of weasels ; that 
 
 15 is to say, we keep a certain number of clowns digging and 
 ditching, and generally stupefied, in order that we, being 
 fed gratis, may have all the thinking and feeling to our- 
 selves. Yet there is a great deal to be said for this. A 
 highly-bred and trained English, French, Austrian, or 
 
 20 Italian gentleman (much more a lady), is a great produc- 
 tion, — a better production than most statues ; being 
 beautifully colored as well as shaved, and plus all the 
 brains ; a glorious thing to look at, a wonderful thing to 
 talk to ; and you cannot have it, any more than a pyramid 
 
 25 or a church, but by sacrifice of much contributed life. 
 And it is, perhaps, better to build a beautiful human 
 creature than a beautiful dome or steeple — and more 
 delightful to look up reverently to a creature far above 
 us, than to a wall ; only the beautiful human creature will 
 
 30 have some duties to do in return — duties of living belfry 
 and rampart — of which presently. 
 
English Classic Series-continued. 
 
 68 The Antigone of Sophocles. 
 
 English Version by Thos. Franck- 
 lin, D.D. 
 
 64 Elizabeth Barrett Browning. 
 
 (Selected Poems.) 
 
 65 Robert Browning. (Selected 
 
 Poems.) 
 
 66 Addison's Spectator. (Selec'ns.) 
 
 67 Scenes from George Eliot's 
 
 Adam Bede. 
 
 68 Matthew Arnold's Culture and 
 
 Anarchy. 
 
 69 DeQuincey's Joan of Arc. 
 
 70 Carlyle's Essay on Burns. 
 
 71 Byron's Childe Harold's Pil- 
 
 grimage. 
 
 72 Poe's Raven, and other Poems. 
 
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 (Double Number.) 
 
 75 Webster's Reply to Hayne. 
 
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 78 American Patriotic Selections: 
 
 Declaration of Independence, 
 Washington's Farewell Ad- 
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 79 & 80 Scott's Lady of the Lake. 
 
 (Condensed.) 
 
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 85 Shelley's Skylark, Adonais, and 
 
 other Poems. 
 
 86 Dickens's Cricket on the 
 
 Hearth. 
 
 87 Spencer's Philosophy of Style. 
 
 88 Lamb's Essays of Elia. 
 
 89 Cowper's Task, Book II. 
 
 90 "Wordsworth's Selected Poems. 
 
 91 Tennyson's The Holy Grail, and 
 
 Sir Galahad. 
 
 92 Addison's Cato. 
 
 93 Irving's Westminster Abbey, 
 
 and Christmas Sketches. 
 64 & 95 Macaulay's Earl .of Chat- 
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 96 Early English Ballads. 
 
 97 Skelton, Wyatt, and Surrey, 
 
 (Selected Poems.) 
 
 98 Edwin Arnold. (Selected Poems.) 
 
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 100 Fuller and Hooker. (Selections.) 
 
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 110-111 Milton's Samson Agonis- 
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 115-116 Herodotus's Stories of 
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 117 Irving' s Alhambra. 
 
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 119 Burke's Speech on Concilia- 
 
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 124 Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum. 
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 (Selected.) 
 
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 Arthur, and The Passing of 
 Arthur. 
 
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 the Wonderful Lamp. 
 
 135-36 The Psalter. 
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 139-40 Scott's Kenilworth. (Con- 
 
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 143 Gods and Heroes of the North. 
 
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 Version.) 
 
 150 Bow- Wow and Mew-Mew. By 
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 Carroll. 
 
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 First half of Sesame and Lilies, 
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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