THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY Z10.7 Jl5s2> THOMAS J. BROWN SECULAR ANNOTATIONS ON SCRIPTURE TEXTS. SECULAR ANNOTATIONS SCRIPTURE TEXTS. to , - bv ^ .... FRANCIS JACOX." 0 *''/ 6 ^ * A set of themes, with fugue-like variations ; Ajj* Of divers saws, with diverse applications ; Of texts, with near and far fetch'd annotations." Nicias Foxcar. THIRD EDITION. FIRST SERIES. iLontfon : HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW. MDCCCLXXII. CONTENTS. PAGE Fellowship in Achats Fall . . • . . « i Joshua xxii. 20. Silent Sympathy ••••«• « 6 Job ii. 13. The Tempter's "It is Written" 10 St. Matthew iv. 6, sq. Royalty Reminded of the Poor c . . . 15 Daniel iv. 27. Wind, Earthquake, Fire, and still small Voice . . 32 1 Kings xix. 11, 12. Haman Hanged on his own Gallows 4/ Esther vii. 10. To-day's sufficing Evil, and To-morrow's forecast Care . 47 St. Matthew vi. 34. Medicamental Music 55 1 Samuel xvi. 23. Free from Righteousness 60 Romans vi. 20. The Service of Freedom . • » 66 St. Matthew xi. 29, 30. The Discreet Silence of Folly 70 Proverbs xvii. 28. Penal Prevision 76 1 Samuel xxvii. 19, 20. Beatific Vision and Overshadowing Cloud .... 86 St. Luke ix. 34. The Spreading Gourd and the Speeding Worm ... 91 Jonah iv. 6-8. ^Self-praise .96 Jvik Proverbs xxvii. 2. ) Painted Face, Tired Head, and Exposed Skull. . . 101 ^ 2 Kings ix. 30, 35. f 822765 vi CONTENTS. PAGE The Carcase of Jezebel on the Face of the Field . . 104 2 Kings ix. 37. " Consider the Lilies " . . • . . 109 St. Matthew vi. 28. A Histrionic Aspect of Life . • . • . . .114 1 Corinthians vii. 31. Pharaoh's Alternations of Amendment and Relapse . 125 Exodus vii.-x. passim. Sleep and Death » .134 St. John xi. 11-14. Eliab and David in the Valley of Elah , . . 139 1 Samuel xvii. 28. The Prophet in his own Country 143 St. Luke iv. 24. Desired Boon : Realized Bane 147 Psalm cvi. 15 ; lxxviii. 22, sq. "And he Died" . 156 Genesis v. passim. An Ultra-Protester . . . . . . . . .165 St. Matthew xxvi. 33-35 ; 69-75. Fleeting Shadows . • .170 Job xiv. 2. Haran taken : Terah left 182 Genesis xi. 28. The Mote and the Beam . • 187 St. Matthew vii. 5. Strangers and Pilgrims 192 1 Peter ii. 11. The Falsity of the Familiar Friend 200 Psalm xli. 9. "Judge Not " 208 St. Matthew vii. 1. Part-Knowledge 224 1 Corinthians xiii. 9. ' Ruling the Waves 231 Psalm cxiv. 1-5 ; St. Mark iv. 39. In deadly Peril unawares 237 1 Samuel xxvi. 8-25. CONTENTS. vii PAGE No Leisure • ••••• 242 St. Mark vi. 31. A Prophylactic Knife to the Throat • . 249 Proverbs xxiii. 2. Hazael's abhorrent Repudiation of his future Self . 255 2 Kings viii. 13. The Open Right Hand's Secret from the Left . • . 259 St. Matthew vi. 3. To-morrow 0 . . 263 St. James iv. 13, 14. The Divine Authorship of Order 273 1 Corinthians xiv. 33, 40. Sweet Sleep and its Forfeiture ...... 282 Proverbs iii. 24. Once Denied, Thrice Denied ....... 286 St. Matthew xxvi. 69, sq. Linked Lies 290 Genesis xxvii. 19-24. A Time to Weep, and a time to Laugh .... 296 ECCLESIASTES Hi. 4. Disallowed Designs 301 Proverbs xix. 21. Man Devising: God Directing 305 Proverbs xvi. 9. A Pursebearer's Protest against Purposeless Waste . 309 St. John xii. 5. Light at Evening-time . . . . . , . .313 Zechariah xiv. 7. Wished-for Day 323 Acts xxvii. 29. The More than Brotherhood of a Bosom Friend . . 328 Proverbs xviii. 24. Many Years to enjoy Life : this Night to Die . . .333 St. Luke xii. 19, 20. Great Babylon Built : a Builder's Boast «... 337 Daniel iv. 29-33. Invocation and Inaction ^42 Exodus xiv. 15. viii CONTENTS, PAGE Co-operant Units 348 Ephesians iv. 16. Subordinate, not Superfluous ; or, Depreciated Membership 353 1 Corinthians xii. 22. The Wrath-dispelling Power of a Soft Answer . . 357 Proverbs xv. i. A Twice-told Tale of Years ....... 361 Ecclesiastes vi. 6. Daybreak no Solace : Nightfall no .Relief • . . 365 Deuteronomy xxviii. 36, 37. Buyer's Bargain and Boast 367 Proverbs xx. 14. Gray-haired Unawares 372 HosEAvii. 9. Restrained Anger 376 Proverbs xvi. 32. Evanescence of the Early Dew 381 Hosea vi. 3. Ears to Hear. 386 St. Luke viii. 8. Not Alone in the Valley of Shadows 389 Psalm xxiii. 4. SECULAR ANNOTATIONS ON SCRIPTURE TEXTS. FELLOWSHIP IN AC HAN'S FALL. Joshua xxii. 20. WHEN Achan the son of Zerah committed a trespass in the accursed thing, wrath fell not alone upon Achan, but upon all the congregation of Israel ; " and that man perished not alone in his iniquity." The text is one to arrest the thoughtless, and to suggest even to the most thoughtful matter for very serious consideration. " Should one man sin, and would God be wroth with all the congregation?" That deprecatory question had been put twenty years before Achan's trespass, by the congregation of Israel, in the matter of Korah, when they fell upon their faces and pleaded with God, the God of the spirits of all flesh. And some centuries later the confession of King David in time of pestilence took this form : that he had sinned and done wickedly ; but those sheep — those subjects of his, involved in the penalty of his transgression, and dying off like sheep in a flock to the right and left of him, seventy thousand of them from morning to evening, from Dan even to Beersheba, — what had they done ? If, indeed, says Dr. South, a man could be wicked and a villain to himself alone, the mischief would be so much the more tolerable. But the case, as he goes on to show, is much •otherwise : the guilt of the crime ligrits upon one, but the example of it sways a multitude ; especially if the criminal be of any note or eminence in the world. " For the fall of such a one by any temptation (be it never so plausible) is like that B FELLOWSHIP IN AC HAN'S FALL, of a principal stone or stately pillar, tumbling from a lofty edifice into the deep mire of the street ; it does not only plunge and sink into the black dirt itself, but also dashes or bespatters all that are about it or near it when it falls." It is by no very subtle and far-fetched reasoning that a living divine essays to show that we may sin in the persons of other men, and so may sin in other countries which we never saw, and in years after we are in our graves. For may we not, he asks, be partakers in other men's sins of which at their commission we knew not, indeed at whose commission we would shudder? May we not in the moral world sometimes set the great stone rolling down the hill, with little thought of the ruin it may deal below ? " Ah, you may live after you are dead,' to do mischief ; live in the evil thoughts you instilled, the false doctrines you taught, the perverted character you helped to form." And just as a righteous exemplar, " being dead, yet speaketh," and is a living means of good ages after he has been in^his grave, " so may you, insignificant though you be, have left some impress of yourself upon minds more powerful than your own, and so be exercising a power to do harm to people you have never heard of, years after you are dead." Thus it is that far down into unknown time, and far away into the unknown distance, the moral contagion of our sin may be proved to spread ; so that we may still be incurring guilt after the green turf is over us, and in lands which we have never seen and shall never see. " The evil principle we instilled, the evil example we set, may ripen into bitter fruit in the murderous blow which shall be dealt a century hence upon Australian plains ! " Well may the note of exclamation follow : how strange, yet how inevitable, the tie which may link our uneventful life with the stormy passions of numbers far away ! More wonderful than even the Atlantic cable is declared to be that unknown fibre, along which, from other men's sins, responsibility may thrill even to our departed souls : " a chain whose links are formed perhaps of idle words, of forgotten looks, of phrases of double meaning, of bad advice, of cynical sentiment hardly seriously meant ; yet carried on through life after life, through soul after soul, FELLOWSHIP IN A CHAN'S FALL. 3 till the little seed of evil sown by you has developed into some deed of guilt at which you shudder, but from participation in responsibility for which you cannot clear yourself." Every sin, we are in fine reminded, may waken its echo ; every sin is reduplicated and reiterated in other souls and lives. A distinguished French preacher, of the Reformed faith, has a striking discourse on what he entitles the solidarity of evil ; and he too dilates upon the mysterious links which connect together persons and acts that appear to have nothing in common, — suggesting melancholy examples of the contagion of guilt and its consequences, of the expansive power of cor- ruption and its almost boundless results. Our most powerful female writer of fiction has emphatically taught, if a striking story can teach, that there is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone ; you can't isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe ; evil spreads as necessarily as disease. "I know, I feel the terrible extent of suffering this sin of Arthur's has caused to others," — so the good rector tells one who cherishes vengeance on the wrong-doer; "but so does every sin cause suffering to others besides those who commit it." The problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed this speaker pronounces to be one that might well make us tremble to look into it; the evil consequences that may lie folded in a single act of selfish indulgence being a thought so awful that it ought surely to awaken some feeling less pre- sumptuous than a rash and vindictive desire to punish. In another of her books the same authoress takes pains to prove how deeply inherent it is in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins ; so inevitably diffusive is human suffering that we can conceive no retribution which does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain. There is a passage in one of Madame de Charriere's letters in which, avowing her full recognition of the fact that she B 2 4 FELLOWSHIP IN AC HAN'S FALL. must pay in person for the costly experience of life, she ex- presses the futile wish that others might not have to share in the costs, but owns with a sigh that the wish is futile, for one does nothing absolutely alone she says, and nothing so happens to us as to entirely exclude the participation of others : " On ne fait rien tout seut, et il ne nous arrive rien d nous seuls" We are taught by modern science that the slightest movement, of the smallest body, in the remotest region, produces results which are perpetual, which diffuse themselves through all space, and which, though they may be metamorphosed, cannot be destroyed.* Or again, as Mrs. Browning reminds us, — " Each creature holds an insular point in space : Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound, But all the multitudinous beings round, In all the countless worlds, with time and place For their conditions, down to the central base, Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound, Life answering life across the vast profound, In full antiphony. . • ." If no good work that a man does is lost — the smallest useful work, as an octogenarian essayist assures us, continuing to be useful long after the man is dead and forgotten, so neither do bad actions die with the doer. " Future generations suffer for the sin of their ancestors, and one great crime or act of folly causes the misery of unborn millions." So all things, it is added, hang together in one unbroken chain, of which we see a few links, but' the beginning and the end we see not and never shall see. Seneca was writing for all time when he said that no man's error is confined to himself, but affects all around him, whether by example, or consequences, or both : " nemo errat uni sibi" A latter-clay philosopher assigns to a place among the most * * 4 Wave your hand ; the motion which has apparently ceased is taken up by the air, from the air by the walls of the room, etc., and so by direct and re-acting waves, continually comminuted, but never destroyed." — Grove's Correlation of Physical Forces, FELLOWSHIP IN A CHAN'S FALL. 5 insoluble riddles propounded to mortal comprehension what he calls the fatal decree by which every crime is made to be the agony of many innocent persons as well as of the single guilty one. "Ah!" exclaims Hilda to guilty Miriam, in the story of "Transformation," — " now I understand how the sins of generations past have created an atmosphere of sin for those that follow. While there is a single guilty person in the universe, each innocent one must feel his innocence tortured by that guilt. Your deed, Miriam, has darkened the whole sky !" To apply the lines of a reflective poet, — 4 ' 'Tis not their own crimes only, men commit ; They harrow them into another's breast, And they shall reap the growth with bitter pain." Very forcibly Mr. Isaac Taylor warns us that in almost every event of life the remote consequences vastly outweigh the proximate in actual amount of importance ; and he under- takes to show, on principles even of mathematical calculation, that each individual of the human family holds in his hand the centre lines of an interminable web-work, on which are sustained the fortunes of multitudes of his successors ; the implicated consequences, if summed together, making up therefore a weight of human weal or woe that is reflected back with an incalculable momentum upon the lot of each The practical conclusion is that every one is bound to re- member that the personal sufferings or peculiar vicissitudes or toils through which he is called to pass are to be estimated and explained only in an immeasurably .small proportion if his single welfare is regarded, while their " full price and value are not to be computed unless the drops of the morning dew could be numbered." So the most popular of domestic story- tellers expatiates in an early work on the impossibility of wiping off from us, as with a wet cloth, the stains left by the fault of those who are near to us. Another of the tribe, but more "sensational " in subject and style, is keen to show how the influence of a man's evil deed slowly percolates through insidious channels of which he never dreams ; how the deed of folly or of guilt is still active for evil when the sinner who 6 SILENT SYMPATHY. committed it has forgotten his wickedness. "Who shall say- where or when the results of one man's evil-doing shall cease ? The seed of sin engenders no common root, shooting straight upwards through the earth, and bearing a given crop. It is the germ of a foul running weed, whose straggling suckers travel underground beyond the ken of mortal eye, beyond the power of mortal calculation." And so again the caustic showman of "Vanity Fair," in his last completed work, paused to explain how a culprit's evil behaviour of five and twenty years back, brought present grief and loss of rest to three unoffending persons; and he characteristically utters the wistful wish that we "could all take the punish- ment for our individual crimes on our individual shoulders," but laments the futility of any such wish, recognising as he does so plainly that when the culprit is condemned to hang, it is those connected with him who have to weep and suffer, and wear piteous mourning in their hearts long after he has jumped off the Tyburn ladder. We conclude with a suggestive stanza of Mr. Robert Browning's, worth learning by heart in more senses than one : he is speaking of the soul declaring itself by its fruit — the thing it does : — " Be Hate that fruit, or Love that fruit, It forwards the general deed of Man ; And each of the many helps to recruit The life of the race by a general plan, Each living his own, to boot." SILENT S YMPA THY. Job ii. 13. JOB'S friends have long since been a sort of bye-word. But be it not forgotten that the friendship of Eliphaz, Bil- dad, and Zophar, to the ruined and desolate man of Uz, evidences itself as very genuine in one or two salient points, before it came to be, what it is apt to be now exclusively con- SILENT SYMPATHY. ? sidered, all talk. Before the talk there was prolonged silence ; and before the silence there was lamentation of undoubted earnest. Coming from afar to mourn with him, and to comfort him, from afar off they caught sight of him, but so altered — heu, quantum, mutatus ! — that they lifted up their voice and wept ; and they rent each one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. And then they." sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him ; for they saw that his grief was very great." The sonnet of a Quaker poet has thus far vindicated the sincerity of their friendship, and on the ground of their silent sympathy : " However ye might err in after-speech, The mute expression of that voicelesss woe Whereby ye sought your sympathy to show With him of Uz, doth eloquently preach, — Teaching a lesson it were well to teach Some comforters, of utterance less slow, Prone to believe that they more promptly know Grief's mighty depths, and by their words can reach. Seven days and nights, in stillness as profound As that of chaos, patiently ye sate By the heart -stricken and the desolate. And though your sympathy might fail to sound The fathomless depth of his dark spirit's wound, Not less your silence was sublimely great." In his vivid picture of the desolation of a bereaved husband, Sir Richard Steele goes on to say, " I knew consolation would now be impertinent ; and therefore contented myself to sit by him, and condole with him in silence." " Les consolations indis- cretes" says Rousseau, " ne font qu'aigrir les violentes afflictions. L indifference et la froideur trouvent aisement des paroles, mais la tristesse et le silence sont alors le vrai la?tgage de PamitiL" Gray writes to Mason, while yet uncertain whether the latter is already a widower or not, — " If the last struggle be over . . . allow me (at least in idea, for what could I do were I present more than this,) to sit by you in silence, and pity from my heart, not her who is at rest, but you who lose her." So it 8 SILENT SYMPATHY. happened that Mason received this little billet at almost the precise moment when it would be most affecting. Horace Walpole, again, writes to an afflicted correspondent, — " I say no more, for time only, not words, can soften such afflictions, nor can any consolations be suggested, that do not more immediately occur to the persons afflicted. To moralize can comfort those only who do not want to be comforted." So Marcia replies to Lucia, in Addison's tragedy : " Lucia. What can I think or say to give thee comfort? Marcia. Talk not of comfort, 'tis for lighter ills." Words are words, says Shakspeare's Brabantio, and never yet heard he that the bruised heart was relieved through the ear. When, towards the close of Campbell's metrical tale of fair Wyoming, on Susquehanna's side, " prone to the dust, afflicted Waldegrave hid his face on earth, him watched, in gloomy ruth, his woodland guide ; but words had none to soothe the grief that knows not consolation's name." But the Oneyda chief was not on that account Waldegrave's least effi- cient comforter. What though others around him, less reticent, and more demonstrative, found utterance easy, and shaped their kind common-place meaning into kind common-place words ? " Of them that stood encircling his despair, he heard some friendly words, but knew not what they were." Wise- hearted, too, was Southey's young Arabian, in watching silently the frantic grief of the newly childless old diviner : in pitying silence Thalaba stood by, and gazed, and listened : " not with the officious hand of consolation, fretting the sore wound he could not hope to heal." It has been called the last triumph of affection and magnanimity, when a loving heart can respect the suffering silence of its beloved, and allow that lonely liberty in which alone some natures can find comfort. A late author portrayed in one of his tales a dull, common-place fellow enough, of limited intellect and attainments, whose, however, was one of those kind and honest natures fortunately endowed with subtle powers of perception that lie deeper than the head. Accordingly he is described, in the capacity of an unofhcious condoler, as appreciating perfectly the grief of his friend ; at SILENT S YMPA THY. 9 his side throughout the day, but never obtruding himself, never attempting jarring platitudes of condolence : "in a word he fully understood the deep and beautiful sympathy of silence." So with Adela and Caroline in The Bertrams, — interchanging those pressures of the hand, those mute marks of fellow-feeling, "which, we all know so well how to give when we long to lighten the sorrows which are too deep to be probed by words." But though we all may know so well how to give these mute marks, we do not all and always practice what we know. ; Tis true, 'tis pity ; pity 'tis 'tis true. Adam Bede's outburst of maddened feelings, uttered in tones of appealing anguish, when the loss of Hetty is first made clear to him, is noted in silence by the discreet rector, who is too wise to utter soothing words at present, as he watches in Adam that look of sudden age which sometimes comes over a young face in moments of terrible emotion. As Bartle Massey elsewhere describes this silent sympathizer, " Ay, he ; s good metal ; . . . says no more than's needful. He's not one of those that think they can comfort you with chattering, as if folks who stand by and look on knew a deal better what the trouble was than those who have to bear it." Madame de Sevigne frankly deposes of her capacity as re- gards wordy consolation : "Pour moije ne sais point de paroles dans une telle occasion" Mr. Tennyson submits what is appli- cable to any telle occasion, " That only silence suiteth best. Words weaker than your grief would make Grief more. 'Twere better I should cease." Miss Procter sings the praises of a true comforter in little Efhe, — " just I think that she does not try, — only looks with a wistful wonder why grown people should ever cry." It is such a comfort to be able to cry in peace, adds that sweet singer (with larmes dans la voix) : " And my comforter knows a lesson Wiser, truer than all the rest : — That to help and to heal a sorrow, Love and silence are always best." io THE TEMPTER'S "IT IS WRITTEN: THE TEMPTER'S "IT IS WRITTEN." Matthew iv. 6. " T T is written," said the Tempter, quoting Scripture for X his purpose, when it was his hour and the power of darkness, in the day of temptation in the wilderness. The quotation was refuted on the spot, and the Tempter was foiled. But his failure has not deterred mankind, at sundry times and in divers manners, from venturing on the same appeal, with no very unlike design. The wise as serpents (there was a serpent in Eden) who are not also harmless as doves, have now and then essayed to round a sophistic period, or clench an immoral argument, with an // is written. Among the crowd of pilgrims who throng the pages of his allegory, Bunyan depicts one Mr. Selfwill, who holds that a man may follow the vices as well as the virtues of pilgrims ; and that if he does both, he shall certainly be saved. But what ground has he for so saying ? is Mr. Greatheart , s query. And old Mr. Honesty replies, " Why, he said he had Scripture for his warrant." He could cite David's practice in one bad direction, and Sarah's lying in another, and Jacob's dissimula- tion in a third. And what they did, he might do too. 66 1 have heard him plead for it, bring Scripture for it, bring argu- ments for it," etc., quoth old Honesty with a degree of indigna- tion that dees credit to his name. " The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul, producing holy witness, Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the core.'' Such is Antonio's stricture on Shylock's appeal to Jacob's practice, " When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban's sheep " ; and there is a parallel passage in the next act, where Bassanio is the speaker : — " In religion, What damned error but some sober brow Will bless it and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament ? n THE TEMPTER'S " IT IS WRITTEN:' u Against divines, indeed, of every school and age, the re- proach of citing a text in support of doctrine or practice the reverse of divine, has been freely cast, with more or less of reason. Orthodox and heterodox, each has flung against the other his retort uncourteous. " Have not all heretics the same pretence To plead the Scriptures in their own defence ? How did the Nicene Council then decide That strong debate ? Was it by Scripture tried ? No, sure ; to that the rebel would not yield : Squadrons of texts he marshall'd in the field. # * * * * With texts point-blank and plain he faced the foe ; And did not Satan tempt our Saviour so ? " A Dublin synod of the Irish Roman Catholic bishops, a few years since, which distinguished itself by its enthusiasm for Pope Pius IX., against the King of Italy, and by its arrogation of a divine right of practical monopoly in overseeing the schools and colleges of Ireland, was made the theme of comment by unsympathetic British critics; who remarked that when the question of education is stirred in such quarters, the dullest heretic can divine that the national system is to be denounced; and that it is easy to guess at the text of Scripture to be quoted in support of the pretensions of the Church. " The command to ' go and teach all nations } vested in the successors of the Apostles a rightful monopoly of instruction in Greek, mathe- matics, and civil engineering/' According to the same elastic authority, the " Puritans," we are reminded, were justified in shooting and hanging their enemies, because Samuel hewed Agag in pieces, or because Phineas arose and executed judg- ment. " There never was a proposition which could not be proved by a text ; and perhaps the effect is more complete when the citation is taken from the Vulgate." Gray's malicious lines against Lord Sandwich, a notorious evil-liver, as candidate for the High Stewardship in the University of Cambridge, include this stanza, supposed to be uttered by a representative THE TEMPTER'S "IT IS WRITTEN: D.D., of the old port-wine school, and a staunch supporter of his profligate lordship : " Did not Israel filch from th' Egyptians of old Their jewels of silver and jewels of gold ? The prophet of Bethel, we read, told a lie ; He * drinks — so did Noah : — he swears — so do I." Gray's jeu cT esprit was, throughout, not in the best of taste ; but it was vastly relished at the time, as an election squib. The reference to spoiling the Egyptians is a well worked one in the history of quotations. Coleridge has a story of a Mameluke Bey, whose " precious logic " extorted a large con- tribution from the Egyptian Jews. " These books, the Penta teuch, are authentic?" "Yes." "Well, the debt then is acknowledged : and now the receipt, or the money, or your heads ! The Jews borrowed a large treasure from the Egypt- ians ; but you are the Jews, and on you, therefore, I call for the repayment." Such conclusions, from such premises, and backed by such vouchers, are open to logicians of every order, sacred and profane. " Hence comment after comment, spun as fine As bloated spiders draw the flimsy line ; Hence the same word that bids our lusts obey, Is misapplied to sanctify their sway. If stubborn Greek refuse to be his friend, Hebrew or Syriac shall be forced to bend : If languages and copies all cry, No ! Somebody proved it centuries ago." Burns was never any too backward in having his fling at a " minister " ; and there is exceptional (and perhaps exception- able) gusto in his averment that, " E'en ministers, they have been kenn'd, In holy rapture, A rousing whid, at times, to vend, And nail't wi' Scripture." There was a time in the life of Diderot when that freest of free-thinkers made a living, such as it was, by writing sermons * The Candidate, Lord Sandwich. THE TEMPTER'S "IT IS WRITTEN:' 13 to order — half a dozen of them, for instance, a missionary be- spoke for the Portuguese colonies, and is said to have paid for them very handsomely at fifty crowns each. Mr. Carlyle is caustic in his commemoration of this incident in Denis Diderot's career. " Further, he made sermons, to order ; as the Devil is said to quote Scripture." In Mr. Carlyle's latest and longest history, we find once and again the like allusion. Frederick William, and his advisers, bent on a certain match for the Princess Wilhelmina, which the queen, her mother, as stead- fastly opposed, took to quoting Scripture by way of subduing her majesty's resistance. " There was much discourse, suasive, argumentative. Grumkow quoting Scripture on her majesty, as the devil can on occasion," says Wilhelmina. "Express scriptures, 1 Wives, be obedient to your husbands/ and the like texts; but her majesty, on the Scripture side, too, gave him as much as he brought." And at a later stage of the negotiation, the same Grumkow appears again, citing the Vulgate to a con- fidential correspondent, in reference to their political schemings. " But 1 Si Deus est nobiscum 9 — ' If God be for us, who can be against us ? ' For the Grumkow can quote Scripture ; nay, solaces himself with it, which is a feat beyond what the devil is competent to." Shakespeare embodies in Richard of Gloster a type of the political intriguer of this complexion ; as where that usurper thus answers the gulled associates who urge him to be avenged on the opposite faction : "But then I sigh, and with a piece of Scripture, Tell them, that God bids us do good for evil. And thus I clothe my naked villany With old odd ends, stolen forth of holy writ ; And seem a saint when most I play the devil." An unmitigated scoundrel in one of Mr. Dickens's books is represented as overtly grudging his old father the scant remnant of his days, and citing holy writ for sanction of his complaint. " Why, a man of any feeling ought to be ashamed of being eighty — let alone any more. Where's his religion, I should like to know, when he goes flying in the face of the Bible like that ? Threescore and ten's the mark ; and no man with a conscience, THE TEMPTER'S "IT IS WRITTEN." and a proper sense of what's expected of him, has any business to live longer." Whereupon the author interposes this paren- thetical comment, and highly characteristic it is : " Is any one surprised at Mr. Jonas making such a reference to such a book for such a purpose ? Does any one doubt the old saw that the devil . . . quotes Scripture for his own ends ? If he will take the trouble to look about him, he may find a greater number of confirmations of the fact in the occurrences of a single day than the steam-gun can discharge balls in a minute." Fiction would supply us with abundant illustrations — fiction in' general, and Sir Walter Scott in particular. As where Simon of Hackburn, the martial borderer, backs his hot appeal to arms, for the avenging a deed of wrong, by an equivocal refer- ence to holy writ. " Let women sit and greet at hame, men must do as they have been done by; it is the Scripture says it." " Haud your tongue, sir," exclaims one of the seniors, sternly \ " dinna abuse the Word that gate ; ye dinna ken what ye speak about." Or as where the Templar essays to corrupt the Jewess by citing the examples of David and Solomon : " If thou deadest the Scriptures," retorts Rebecca, " and the lives of the saints, only to justify thine own licence and profligacy, thy crime is like that of him w r ho extracteth poison from the most healthful and necessary herbs." One other example. Undy Scott, that plausible scamp of Mr. Trollope's making, propounds an immoral paradox, to the scope of which one of his dupes is bold enough to object But how is the objector disposed of? " 4 Judge not, and ye shall not be judged/ said Undy, quoting Scripture, as the devil did before him." Dupes can quote Scripture, too, and perhaps that is more demoralizing stilL For Cowper did not rhyme without reason when he declared,, that "Of all the arts sagacious dupes invent, To cheat themselves, and gain the world's assent 9 The worst is-— Scripture warped from its intent*'* ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. *5 ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. Daniel iv. 27. REAT was Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, even as the VJT tree that he saw in his dream ; for, by the avowal of the Hebrew prophet who interpreted that dream, the king was indeed become strong, and his greatness was grown, and reached unto the heaven, and his dominion unto the ends of the earth. But sentence had gone forth, as against the tree, so against the king. Nebuchadnezzar was to be degraded ; despoiled of his kingdom, cast down from his throne, and driven from men, to eat grass as oxen. This counsel, however, the prophet urged upon the sovran, that he should break off his sins by righteousness, and his " iniquities by showing mercy to the poor " ; if it might be a lengthening of his tranquillity, or a healing of his error. What error ? That of which ex-king Lear accused himself, when he owned, amid words of frenzy, all however with more or less of tragic significance in them, that he had taken too little care of this, — of sympathy with desolate indigence, and of readiness to relieve the sufferings of the destitute and forlorn. The storm is raging on the heath, and faithful Kent implores his aged master to take shelter, such as it is, within a hovel hard by 3 some friendship will it lend him against the tempest ; the tyranny of the open night's too rough for nature to endure. But Lear would be let alone. "Wilt break my heart?" he exclaims, in answer to Kent's fresh entreaty : Kent had rather break his own. Again the drenched, discrowned old man is urged to enter the hovel on the heath. But he stays outside, to reason on his past and present, till reason gives way. Kent may think it a matter of moment that this contentious storm invades them to the skin ; and so it is to him. But Lear has deeper griefs to shatter him; and "where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt." Let Kent go in, by all means : tfye king enjoins it — at least the ex- king desires it : let Kent seek his own ease — and perhaps Lear will follow him in. Mean- i6 ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. while, in draggling robes, drenched to the skin, chilled to the heart, Lear's thoughts perforce are turned to " houseless poverty," to the indigent and vagrant creatures once, and so lately, his subjects, equally exposed to the downpour of the wrathful skies, of whom he had seldom, if ever, thought till now. Poor naked wretches, he apostrophises them, whereso- ever they are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, — how shall their houseless heads, and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness, defend them from seasons such as these ? And then, in an outburst of repentant self-reproach, he that had been King of Britain breaks forth into the avowal, ! " O, I have ta'en Too little care of this ! Take physic, pomp 5 Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel ; That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the heavens more just." Between the history of Lear and that of Gloster, in the same play, there is a curious and significant parallel maintained throughout. And it is observable that when Gloster too, another duped and outcast father, is wandering in his turn on the same heath, and is accosted by " poor mad Tom/' — the 1 sightless, miserable father thus addresses the " naked fellow 1 whose identity he so little suspects : " Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven's plagues Have humbled to all strokes : that I am wretched, Makes thee the happier : — Heavens, deal so still ! Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man, That slaves your ordinance, that will not see Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly ; So distribution should undo the excess, And each man have enough." Strictly a parallel passage to the one just cited from the lips of Lear, even as the disastrous personal experiences of King of Britain and Duke of Gloster were along parallel lines, as we have said. The words of Amos, the herdman of Tekoa, include a de- nunciation of woe to them that lie upon beds of ivory, and ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall, and drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with costly ointments, and chant to the sound of the viol, — but are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. As the minor prophet with his woe to them that are thus at ease in Zion, so a major prophet declares this to have been the iniquity of a doomed race — pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idle- ness, with disregard of all means to strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. Lazarus the beggar was, as" some scholars interpret the passage, " content to be fed " on the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table ; in which case he would not appear to have been refused the crumbs : indeed, had this been the case, it would scarcely, they contend, have been omitted in the rebuke of Abraham. "The rich man's sins were ravenousness and negligence rather than inhumanity." * He took too little care of this — that beggary lay in helpless prostration before his doorway, the while he clothed himself in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. La Bruyere observes that "la sante et les richesses otent aux hommes l'experience du mal, leur inspirent la durete pour leurs semblables and adds, that "les gens d ej a charges de leur propre misere sont ceux qui entrent davantage, par leur compassion, dans celle d'autrui." If these by comparison be- come wondrous kind, it is their fellow-feeling that makes them so. Haud ignari mali, miseris succurrere discunt. In another chapter of his " Characters,'' La Bruyere sketches the portrait of one he styles Champagne, who " au sortir d'un long diner qui lui enfle Testomac, et dans les douces fumees d'un vin d'Avenay ou de Sillery, signe un ordre qu'on lui presente, qui oterait le pain a toute une province, si Ton n'y remediait : il est excusable. Quel moyen de comprendre, dans la pre- miere heure de la digestion, qu'on puisse quelque part mourir de faim ? " // est excusable, on the principle of Horace Walpole's similar plea, or apology, for unheeding royalty. He writes to * See on the scope of the words kiriBvix&v x°P rao '^ i/ai (St. Luke xvi. 2l), Analecta Theologtca (Rev. W. Trollope's) in loc. C ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. Miss Hannah More that he used to hate that king and t'other prince — but that on reflection he found the censure ought to fall on human nature in general. "They are made of the same stuff as we, and dare we say what we should be in their situation ? Poor creatures ! think how they are educated, or rather corrupted, early, how flattered ! To be educated pro- perly, they should be led through hovels [as Lear was on the heath — somewhat late in life], and hospitals, and prisons. Instead of being reprimanded (and perhaps immediately after- wards sugar-filum' d) for not learning their Latin or French grammar, they now and then should be kept fasting; and, if they cut their finger, should have no plaster till it festered. No part of a royal brat's memory, which is good enough, should be burthened but with the remembrance of human suffering. " " II y a une espece de honte detre heureux a la vue de : certaines miseres" writes La Bruyere again. Adam Smith, how- ever, made a dead set against what he calls those "whining and melancholy moralists," who he complains^ are perpetually re- proaching us with our happiness, while so many of our bre- thren are in misery, who regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity, which does not think of the many wretches that are at ev£ry instant labouring under all sorts of calamities, in the languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, etc. " Commiser- ation for those miseries which we never saw, which we never heard of, but which we may be assured are at all times infest- ing such numbers of our fellow-creatures, ought, they think, to damp the pleasures of the fortunate, and to render a certain melancholy dejection habitual to all men." Adam Smith op- poses this " extreme sympathy " as altogether absurd and un- reasonable ; as unattainable too, so that a certain affected and sentimental sadness is the nearest approach that can be made to it; and he further declares that this disposition of mind, though it could be attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other purpose than to render miserable the person who possessed it. This, of course, is assuming the wretchedness in question to be beyond the sympathiser's relief. ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. 19 Dr. Smith may be supposed to have had in view Thomson's celebrated passage : " Ah ! little think the gay licentious proud, Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround ; They, who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth, And wanton, often cruel, riot waste ; Ah ! little think they, while they dance along, How many feel this very moment death And all the sad variety of pain." Many variations on that theme of sad variety the poet sings : moving accidents by flood and fire, — pining want, and dun- geon glooms, — the many who drink the cup of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread of misery — sore pierced by wintry winds, how many shrink into the sordid hut of cheerless poverty (the hovel on the heath again), etc., etc., etc. " Thought fond man Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills That one incessant struggle render life One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate, Vice in his high career would stand appalled, And heedless rambling impulse learn to think ; The conscious heart of charity would warm, And her wide wish benevolence dilate ; The social tear would rise, the social sigh, And into clear perfection, gradual bliss, Refining still, the social passions work." This may, perhaps, said Baron Alderson, in winding up a charge to a grand jury, whom he exhorted at that winter season to show sympathy and kindness to the distressed, — this, per- haps, may be one of the objects for which God sends suffering, that it may tend to re-unite those whom prosperity has severed. So Burns — " O ye who, sunk in beds of down, Feel not a want but what yourselves create, Think for a moment on his wretched fate Whom friends and fortune quite disown. Ill-satisfied keen nature's clam'rous call, Stretch'd on his straw he lays himself to sleep, While through the ragged roof and chinky wall, Chill, o'er his slumbers, piles the drifty heap. *,*### ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. Affliction's sons are brothers in distress : A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss ! " Again and again the question recurs, to quote from an able casuist on casual chanty, why one man should be literally dying of want, whilst another is able to send bim a cheque for ^ioo without thinking about it, or knowing that the money is gone? If Dives, it is asked, feels bound to give Lazarus so much, where does he draw the line? If the demand upon the superfluities of the rich is to be measured by the wants of the poor, why stop at ;£ioo rather than ^iooo or ^10,000 or ^100,000? "This is the question which lies at the root of half the melancholy sarcasms and still more melancholy wit of the present day. The writings of such men as Hood are little more than embodiments of it in a variety of forms, ludicrous or pathetic. It forms the burden of a whole class of literature, not the less influential because it is somewhat vague in its doctrines, and rests rather on sentiments than on dogmas." Now this writer believes it to be always the best to look such questions in the face, and to attempt at least to give the true answer to them. And the answer, at least in part, in this instance, he takes to be that the antithesis is only sentimental, and not logical. The poverty of the very poor is not, he contends, either a cause or an effect of the riches of the very rich, nor would it be relieved by their permanent impoverish- ment. " That it is not a cause of their riches, is obvious from the fact that if by any change pauperism and misery were suddenly abolished, the rich would be all the richer. " But not to follow out a line of argument that would take us too far afield, we may advert to a corresponding essay, in the same Review, if not by the same contributor, — in which a picture is drawn of a rich man at church, who hears some stray verses in the second lesson, or some eloquent menace from the pulpit, which makes him very uncomfortable about the contrast be- tween his own easy life and the massive wretchedness of Spitalfields or Poplar. The uneasiness is supposed to rankle in him for some time, spoiling his digestion, and making him very cross to his wife and daughters. Not that he "for a ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. 21 moment dreams of literally obeying the texts in the New Testa ment that have hit him hard ; for he has a shrewd notion that they imply a very different state of society from the busy nineteenth century. He feels that he has no time for visiting the sick, and that if he had, the sick would think him a great nuisance ; and he knows that when he got to the bedside, he would probably be at his wits' ends for anything to say, and would end by twisting his watch-chain, and remarking that it was a cold day." The practical inference is, that if he is to do any of the corporal works of mercy, he must do them by com- mission ; — and so, at last, the irritation in his conscience throws itself out in the form of a liberal cheque upon his bankers. He, at least, will vindicate himself, so far as that vicarious beneficence may avail, from any possible charge of branded fellowship with such as the poet of the Seasons depicts, in "The cruel wretch Who, all day long in sordid pleasure rolled, Himself, a useless load, has squandered vile Upon his scoundrel train, what might have cheered A drooping family of modest worth." Horace Walpole, on being complimented by letter on the patience with which he bore an acute attack of his chronic malady, replies : " If people of easy fortunes cannot bear illness with temper, what are the poor to do, who have none of our comforts and alleviations? The affluent, I fear, do not con- sider what a benefit-ticket has fallen to their lot out of millions not so fortunate ; yet less do they reflect that chance, not merit, drew the prize out of the wheel." Crabbe portrays this non- reflecting complacency in one of his metrical tales : "Month after month was passed, and all were spent In quiet comfort and in rich content : Miseries there were, and woes, the world around, But these had not her pleasant dwelling found ; She knew that mothers grieved, and widows wept, And she was sorry, said her prayers, and slept. Thus passed the seasons, and to Dinah's board Gave what the seasons to the rich afford ; For she indulged," etc. 22 ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. Not so serenely does Bishop Jeremy Taylor imagine a gazer from the skies to look down on the sorrows of this earth of ours, in the celebrated paragraph beginning, " But if we could from one of the battlements of heaven espy how many men and women lie fainting and dying," etc. And, by the way, there is another of Crabbe's Tales, in which, too late, a self-upbraiding spirit thus accuses itself for neglecting a ruined wrong-doer, whose death she has just discovered : " To have this money in my purse — to know What grief was his, and what to grief we owe ; To see him often, always to conceive How he must pine and languish, groan and grieve ;* And every day in ease and peace to dine, And rest in comfort ! — what a heart is mine ! " Richard Savage, as Mr. Whitehead pictures him, bitterly conversant with cold and hunger, a houseless vagrant through the streets by night, and a famishing lounger in them by day, apostrophises Mr. Overseer in his pursy prosperity, much as I (mutatis mutandis) Lear apostrophises pomp. " Turn out, fat J man of substance, and bob for wisdom and charity on the II banks of Southwark. They are best taken at night, when God only sees you — when the east wind is abroad, making you shake like the sinner who was hanged for breaking into your dwelling-house. 'The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold,' sayest thou? It is so. But tell me whether, on the fourth night, when thou liest stretched on thy blessed bed, thy heart ] is not warmer than it was wont to be — whether thou dost not | pray prayers of long omission — whether thou wilt not, in the { morning, bethink thee of the poor, and relieve them out of thy I abundance? Sayest thou, no? God help thee!" As Van den Bosch tells the big-wigs of Ghent, * Earlier in the tale there is a touch to remind us of Lear on the heath : "'Know you his conduct?' 'Yes, indeed, I know, And how he wanders in the wind and snow ; Safe in our rooms the threatening storm we hear, But he feels strongly what we faintly fear.'" ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. 23 4 4 Ah, sirs, you know not, you, who lies afield . When nights are cold, with frogs for bedfellows ; You know not, you, who fights and sheds his blood, And fasts and fills his belly with the east wind." Diderot rose one Shrove Tuesday morning, and groping in his pocket, found nothing wherewith to dine that day — which he spent in wandering about Paris and its precincts. He was ill when he got back to his quarters, went to bed, and was treated by his landlady to a little toast and wine. " That day," he often told a friend, in after life, " I swore that, if ever I came to have anything, I would never in my life refuse a poor man help, never condemn my fellow-creature to a day as painful." As the sailor says, after the wreck, in one of Mr. Roscoe's tragedies: "We may be wrecked a dozen times, for what our betters care ; but being aboard themselves, they see some spice of danger in it, and that breeds a fellow-feeling." And, proverbially, a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. Mr. Ruskin demands whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world. "Luxury is indeed possible in the future — innocent and ex- quisite ; luxury for all, and by the help of all ; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant ; the crudest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold." Gibbon records to the honour of at least one Pontiff's temporal government of Rome, that he — Gregory the Great — relieved by the bounty of each day, and of every hour, the instant distress of the sick and needy — his treasurers being continually summoned to satisfy, in his name, the requirements of indigence and merit. " Nor would the pontiff indulge himself in a frugal repast, till he had sent the dishes from his own table to some objects deserving of his compassion." A non possumus this, in its beneficent nisi priiis scope, more appre- ciable by Protestants at least than that of some other Holy Fathers. A sovran's interest in the sufferings of his or her subjects is always of exceptional interest in the eyes of fellow- subjects. Leigh Hunt knew this, when he pictured, in her ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. early happy wifehood, our Sovran Lady the Queen of these realms, " Too generous-happy to endure The thought of all the woful poor Who that same night lay down their heads In mockeries of starving beds, In cold, in wet, disease, despair, In madness that will say no prayer ; With wailing infants some ; and some By whom the little clay lies dumb ; And some, whom feeble love's excess, Through terror, tempts to murderousness. And at that thought che big drops rose In pity for her people's woes ; And this glad mother and great queen Weeping for the poor was seen, And vowing in her princely will That they should thrive and bless her still." Madame de Chevreuse, in a popular French romance, is made to say to, and at, Anne of Austria, that kings are so far removed from other people, from the " vulgar herd," that they forget that others ever stand in need of the bare necessaries of life. She likens them to the dweller on African mountains, who, gazing from the verdant table-land, refreshed by the rills of melted snow, cannot comprehend that the dwellers in the plains, below^ him are perishing from hunger and thirst in the midst of their lands, burnt up by the heat of the sun. When, in the same romance — by courtesy historical ; only the proportion of history to romance in it is much about that of Falstaff's bread bill to his running account for sack — one of Anne of Austria's sons, the reigning king, young Lewis the Fourteenth, is substituted in the Bastille for his ill-starred brother, and so comes to taste of suffering in propria persona, — the royal prisoner tries to remember at what hour the first repast is served to the captives in that fortress — but his ignorance of this detail occasions a feeling of remorse that smites him like the keen thrust of a dagger: "that he should have lived for five and twenty years a king, and in the ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. 25 enjoyment of every happiness, without having bestowed a moment's thought [O, I have ta'en too little thought of this !] on the misery of those who had been unjustly deprived of their liberty. The king blushed for very shame. He felt that Heaven, in permitting this fearful humiliation, did no more than render to the man the same torture as was inflicted by that man upon so many others." — It is in a glowing descrip- tion of one of the great fetes at Versailles under the auspices of this, the Grand Monarque, that M. Arsene Houssaye delivers himself of this pensive aside : " Et la musique de Lulli acheve d'enivrer tout ce beau monde, qui ne pense pas un seul instant que pres de la, a la grille meme du chateau des merveilles, une pauvre femme prie et pleure, tout affamee, pour ses enfants. Qu'importe ! passe ton chemin, et reviens plus tard. Comment t'appelles-tu, bonne femme ? — Je m'appelle la France : je reviendrai" Part of the education of the royal heir apparent of the Incas consisted in a course of gymnastic training, with competitive trials of skill — during which, for a period of thirty days, " the royal neophyte fared no better than his comrades, sleeping on the bare ground, going unshod, and wearing a mean attire, — a mode of life, it was supposed, which might tend to inspire him with more sympathy with the destitute." It is to royalty that Jeanie Deans is pleading, when she exclaims, " Alas ! it is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves, that we think on other people's sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then. . . . But when the hour of trouble comes — and seldom may it visit your leddyship — and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low — lang and late may it be yours— O my leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly." An English traveller in Russia, discussing the difficulty with which news of starving peasants reaches the ears of the czar, and tracing the roundabout track by which, at last, when many have died, and many more are dying, a stifled wail penetrates through the " official cotton, 26 ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. stuffed ears of district police auditoria, district chambers of domains, military chiefs of governments, and imperial chan- celleries without number," and comes soughing into the private cabinet of the czar at the Winter Palace or Peterhoff, — goes on to say: "The empress, good soul, sheds tears when she hears of the dreadful sufferings of the poor people so many hundred versts orf. The imperial children, I have no doubt, wonder why, if the peasants have no bread to eat, they don't take to plum-cake ; the Emperor is affected, but goes to work," etc. Which last expression, by the way, reminds us of a quasi quotation by Mr. Carlyle of Shakespeare's text in juxtaposition with mention of the greatest of czars : " Descend, O Donothing Pomp ; quit thy down-cushions ; expose thyself to learn what wretches feel, and how to cure it ! The czar of Russia became a dusty toiling shipwright ; . . . and his aim was small to thine." There was a miserable day in the Highland wanderings of Prince Charles when, with Ned Burke and Donald Macleod for companions^ after roving about all night, excessively faint for want of food, he was obliged to subsist on meal stirred in brine — there being no fresh water within reach. The prince is said to have expressed himself thankful for even this nauseous food — " salt-water drammock" — and to have declared, on the occasion, that if ever he mounted a throne, he should not fail to remember " those who dined with him to-day." When Flora Macdonald and Lady Clanranald, not long afterwards, came to the royal outcast, — on entering the hut they found him engaged in roasting the heart and liver of a sheep on a wooden spit; a sight at which some of the party could not help shedding tears. " Charles, always the least con- cerned at his distressing circumstances, though never forgetting the hopes inspired by his birth, jocularly observed that it would be well perhaps for all kings if they had to come through such a fiery ordeal as he was enduring." At a subsequent period we find him living for days together on a few handfuls of oatmeal and about a pound of butter — referring to which he afterwards told a Highland gentleman that he had ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. 27 come to know what a quarter of a peck of meal was, having once subsisted on such a quantity for the better part of a week. Another time we find him spending the night in an open cave, on the top of a high hill between the Braes of Glenmorriston and Strathglass, — a cave too narrow to let him stretch himself, and in which he lay drenched to the skin, with no possibility of getting a fire to dry him. "Without food, and deprived of sleep by the narrowness and hardness of his bed, the only comfort he could obtain was the miserable one of smoking a pipe." Hardly was Lear himself more thoroughly exposed to feel what wretches feel, on that night beside the hovel on the heath. In that paradoxical essay of his, on saying grace before meat, Charles Lamb remarks that the indigent man, who hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into whose minds the con- ception of wanting a dinner could never, but by some extreme theory, have entered. According to the essayist, the heats of epicurism put out the gentle flame of devotion : the incense which rises round is pagan, and the belly-god intercepts it for his own. " The very excess of the provision beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion between the end and means. The Giver is veiled by his gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning thanks — for what ? — for having so much, while so many starve. It is to praise the gods amiss." Taking for his text the apprenticeship of good Abbot Sam- son at St. Edmund's shrine, Mr. Carlyle moralises on how much would many a Serene Highness have learnt, had he travelled through the world with water-jug and empty wallet, sine om?ii exfiensa, and returned only to sit down at the foot of St. Edmund's shrine to shackles and bread and water. Pa- triotism itself, a political economist has remarked, can never be generated by a passive enjoyment of good ; the evil tendency of which he bids us see by merely looking to a city like Lon- don ; where the rich who live together in streets of fine houses many miles long, and have every comfort provided for them 28 ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. without their interference, and need nothing from the poor but what they buy for money, and conclude that the same State which cares for them will care equally for the poor, — such rich men, it is alleged, have every inducement to become isolated from all but the few with whom it is pleasant to live. We may choose, says Professor Kingsley, to look at the masses in the gross as subjects for statistics — and of course, where possible, for profits. " There is One above who knows every thirst, and ache, and sorrow, and temptation of each slattern, and gin-drinker, and street boy. The day will come when He will require an account of these neglects of ours — not in the gross." Mrs. Gaskell ably describes the fear of Margaret Hale, in " North and South/' lest, in her West-end ease, she should become sleepily deadened into forgetfulness of anything be- yond the life that was lapping her round with luxury. " There might be toilers and moilers there in London, but she never saw them ; the very servants lived in an underground world of their own, of which she knew neither the hopes nor the fears ; they only seemed to start into existence when some want or whim of their master and mistress needed them/' Mr. Thack- eray presents Ethel Newcome in the fairest light when he shows her studious to become acquainted with her indigent neigh- bours — giving much time to them and thought ; visiting from house to house without ostentation ; awe-stricken by that spectacle of poverty which we have with us always, of which the sight rebukes our selfish griefs into silence, the thought compels us to charity, humility, and devotion. " Death never dying out ; hunger always crying ; and children born to it day after day, — our young London lady, flying from the splendours and follies in which her life had been passed, found herself in the presence of these ; threading darkling alleys which swarmed with wretched life ; sitting by naked beds, whither by God's blessing she was sometimes enabled to carry a little comfort and consolation ; or whence she came heart-stricken by the over- powering misery, or touched by the patient resignation, of the new friends to whom fate had directed her." No longer ignara mali, miseris succurrere discit. An essayist of Mr. Thackeray's ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. 29 school, on the topic of parliamentary trains, breaks out, or off, into the apostrophe : " Ah, judges of Amontillado sherry ; crushers of walnuts with silver crackers ; connoisseurs who prefer French to Spanish olives, and are curious about the yellow seal ; gay riders in padded chariots ; proud cavaliers of blood- horses,— you don't know how painfully and slowly, almost ago- nisingly, the poor have to scrape and save, and deny themselves the necessaries of life, to gather together the penny-a-mile fare." Lord Jeffrey eagerly asserted the even painful interest with which one of Mr. Dickens's Christmas books affected him : " sanative, I dare say, to the spirit, but making us despise and loathe our- selves for passing our days in luxury, while better and gentler creatures are living such lives as make us wonder that such things can be in a society of human beings, or even in the world of a good God." Lord Lytton has compared the stray glimpses one gets of want and misery, to looking through a solar microscope at the monsters in a drop of water, when the • gazer wonders how things so terrible have hitherto been un- known to him : " Lapped in your sleek comforts, and lolling on the sofa of your patent conscience . . . you are startled and dismayed " at the sight : you say within yourself, " Can such things be ? I never dreamed of this before ! I thought what was invisible to me was non-existent in itself — I will remember this dread experiment." The like is the moral of Hood's poem of the Lady's Dream. From grief exempt, she had never dreamt of such a world of woe as appals her in apocalyptic visions of the night ; never dreamt till now of the hearts that daily break, and the tears that hourly fall, and the many, many troubles of life that grieve this earthly ball — disease, and hunger, and pain, and want ; but now she dreams of them all — of the naked she might have clad, the famished she might have fed, the sorrowing she might have solaced ; of each pleading that, long ago, she scanned with a heedless eye. " I drank the richest draughts ; And ate whatever is good — Fish, and flesh, and fowl, and fruit Supplied my hungry mood ; 3o ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. But I never remembered the wretched ones That starve for want of food. I dressed as the noble dress, In cloth of silver and gold, With silk, and satin, and costly furs, In many an ample fold ; But I never remembered the naked limbs That froze with winter's cold. The wounds I might have healed ! The human sorrow and smart ! And yet it never was in my soul To play so ill a part : But evil is wrought by want of Thought [So Lear's " O, I have ta'en too little thought of this !"] As well as want of Heart ! She clasped her fervent hands, And the tears began to stream ; Large, and bitter, and fast they fell, Remorse was so extreme ; And yet, O yet, that many a dame Would dream the Lady's Dream ! * An Edinburgh Reviewer of mortality in trades and profes- sions, dwelling on the fatal conditions under which very many classes earn their daily bread, and sometimes not so much as that, — observes that the great middle and upper classes, accustomed to be furnished with all the appliances of easy life and luxury, seldom give a thought as to the manner in which their wants are supplied. " Accustomed to sip the honey, it never strikes us that perhaps its product involves in some cases the life of the working-bee. The lady, who, from the silken ease of her fauteuil, surveys her drawing-room, may learn a lesson of compassion for the poor workmen in nearly every article that lies before her." To take one example out of the many upon which Dr. Wynter dilates — the case of the silverer of looking-glasses : " If the charming belle, as she surveys her beauty in the glass, could but for a moment see reflected this poor shattered human creature, with trembling muscles, brown visage, and blackened teeth, she would doubtless start with ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR. 31 horror ; but, as it is, the slaves of luxury and vanity drop out of life unobserved and uncared for, as the stream of travellers disappeared one by one through the bridge of Mirza." " O let those cities that of plenty's cup, And her prosperities, so largely taste, With their superfluous riots, hear these tears! The misery of Tharsus may be theirs." The moral of the eastern tale of Nourjahad is practical and pertinent. He delivers himself up to luxury and riot. He forgets that there are wants and distresses among his fellow- creatures. He lives only for himself, and his heart becomes as hard as the coffers which hold his misapplied treasures. But before it is too late he is awakened to remorse, and looks back with shame and horror on his past life. What shall he do to expiate his offences ? One thing at least is within his power, and that will he do at once : expend his riches in the relief of want — nor rest until he has found out every family in Ormuz whom calamity has overtaken, that he may restore them to prosperity. Henceforth he spends his days in his closet, laying plans for the benefit of his fellow-creatures. Ben Jon- son's Sordido promises the like amendment : — " Pardon me, gentle friends, I'll make fair 'mends For my foul errors past; . . . My barns and garners shall stand open still To all the poor that come, and my best grain Be made alms-bread, to feed half-famished mouths. Though hitherto amongst you I have lived Like an unsavoury muck -hill to myself, Yet now my gathered heaps, being spread abroad, Shall turn to better and more fruitful uses. O how deeply The bitter curses of the poor do pierce ! I am by wonder changed ; come in with me And witness my repentance : now I prove No life is blest that is not graced with love." So again with the rich man in one of Crabbe's Borough sketches from life ; that rich man, to wit, who " built a house, both large and high, And entered in and set him down to sigh 3 2 WIND, EARTHQUAKE, FIRE, ETC. And planted ample woods and gardens fair, And walked with anguish and compunction there ; The rich man's pines to every friend a treat, He saw with pain and he refused to eat ; His daintiest food, his richest wines, were all Turned by remorse to vinegar and gall : The softest down by living body pressed The rich man bought, and tried to take his rest ; But care had thorns upon his pillow spread, And scattered sand and nettles in his bed : Nervous he grew — would often sigh and groan, — He talked but little, and he walked alone ; Till by his priest convinced, that from one deed Of genuine love would joy and health proceed, He from that time with care and zeal began- To seek and soothe the grievous ills of man ; And as his hands their aid to grief apply, He learns to smile and he forgets to sigh. Now he can drink his wine and taste his food, And feel the blessings Heaven has dealt are good ; And since the suffering seek the rich man's door, He sleeps as soundly as when young and poor." WIND, EARTHQUAKE, FIRE, AND STILL SMALL VOICE. i Kings xix. n, 12. WHILE Elijah stood upon the mount before the Lord, there arose a great and strong wind that rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks ; but the Lord was not in the wind : and after the wind an earthquake ; but the Lord was not in the earthquake : and after the earthquake a fire ; but the Lord was not in the fire : and after the fire a still small voice. We are not told that the Lord was not in the still small voice. We find that He was. And with that voice He addressed Elijah, reasoned with him, admonished, sustained, and directed him. May it not be said, in applying and adapting the narrative, which things are an allegory ? The import of the narrative sublimely anticipates the homely fable WIND, EARTHQUAKE, FIRE, ETC. 33 of sun and wind. Wind, earthquake, and fire, are mighty agents; but they may pass by without tangible result as regards real influence on the spirit of man ; whereas the gentle influence of a still small voice speaks home to it at once, and it responds to the strain, and is subdued by the spell. The drift of the present annotations, in their applied sense, finds expression in Ben Jonson's reminder : " There is A way of working more by love than fear : Fear works on servile natures, not the free," In Landor's Parable of Asabel, the angel's gentleness wrought upon that turbulent, refractory spirit, "even as the quiet and silent water wins itself an entrance where tempest and fire pass over." It is written that other angels did look up with loving and admiration into the visage of this angel on his return ; and he told the younger and more zealous of them, that whenever they would descend into the gloomy vortex of the human heart, under the softness and serenity of their voice and countenance its turbulence would subside. Plutarch tells us of Fabius Maximus, that he thought it hard that, while those who breed dogs and horses soften their stubborn tempers, and bring down their fierce spirits by care and kindness, rather than with whips and chains, he who has the command of men should not endeavour to correct their errors by gentleness and goodness, but treat them in even a harsher and more violent manner than gardeners do the wild fig-trees, pears, and olives, whose nature they subdue by cultivation, and which by that means they bring to produce very agreeable fruit.* # Plentiful illustrations might be drawn from Plutarch to the same effect. There is Mutius Scsevola, for instance, addressing Porsenna : "Your threatenings I regarded not, but am subdued by your generosity." There is Porsenna himself, who, as Publicola found, could not be quelled by dint of arms, but whom he converted into a friend to Rome, by " the gentle arts of persuasion." There is young Alexander, afterwards to be, or to be called, the Great, whose astute father saw that he did not easily submit to authority, because he would not be forced to anything, but that he might be led to his duty by the gentler hand of reason ; and therefore, as 34 WIND, EARTHQUAKE, FIRE, We read of the distinguished Spanish author and statesman, Fermin Caballero, that while under the care of a kind and judicious instructor, he, as a boy, made rapid advance in the study of classical literature; but that on being removed from this tutor, and subjected to harsh and grinding discipline, he lapsed into idleness and obstinacy beyond all control- Not the least wise of the maxims to be culled from the pages of Terence is that in which satius esse credit Picdore et liberalitate liberos retinere, qua?n metu. Southey insists that no man was ever more thoroughly ignorant of the nature of children than John Wesley, as when he enjoins : "Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod, and to cry softly ; from that age make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it." If Wesley had been a father himself, urges that tenderest of fathers, Robert the Rhymer, " he would have known that children are more easily governed by love than by fear." And as with children, so with men, who are but children of a larger growth ; and especially so with women, if we may take the word of one of Shakspeare's most winsome women for it : " You may ride us With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs, ere With spur we heat an acre." a wise father, who knew his own son, Philip took the method of per- suasion rather than of command. What Plutarch says of the gentler hand of reason, reminds us of Swift's account of the Houyhnhnms, that " they have no conception how a rational creature can be compelled, but only advised or exhorted." And by the way, Swift remarks in a letter on England's harsh rule over the Irish, " Supposing even the size of a native's understanding just equal to that of a dog or a horse, I have often seen these two animals civilized by rewards at least as much as by punishments." But to return to Plutarch. There is his Flaminius, again, whose appoint- ment to the command in the war with Macedon, he calls very fortunate for Rome, since what was required was "a general who did not want to do everything by force and violence, but rather by gentleness and per- suasion." As Claudian says, Peragit tranqnilla potestas quod violenta nequit. Fear, observes Adam Smith, is in almost all cases a wretched instrument of government, and ought in particular never to be employed against any order of men who have the smallest pretensions to independency. ' ' To attempt to terrify them, serves only to irritate their bad humours, and to confirm them in an opposition which -more gentle usage perhaps might easily induce them, either to soften, or to lay aside altogether." AND STILL SMALL VOICE. 35 So with Landor's Filippa, on whom harsh treatment and com- pulsory measures are simply thrown away : " Rudeness can neither move nor discompose her : A word, a look, of kindness, instantly Opens her heart and brings her cheek upon you. " And as with men and women, so with peoples, who are made up of men and women. And yet, although, as the author of the " Wealth of Nations " expresses it, management and per- suasion are always the easiest and safest instruments of government, as force and violence are the worst and most dangerous ; such, it seems, is the natural insolence of man, that he almost always disdains to use the good instrument, except when he cannot or dare not use the bad one. Not that nations are without diversities of character, and so of suscep- tibility to diverse modes of government. Gibbon apologises, as it were, for Diocletian's utter destruction of those proud cities, Busiris and Coptos, and for his severe treatment of Egypt in general, by the remark, that the character of the Egyptian nation, insensible to kindness, but extremely susceptible to fear, could alone justify this excessive rigour. The tone is that of the courtier Crispe, to Phocas, in Corneille's " Heraclius :" " II faut agir de force avec de tels esprits . . . La violence est juste oil la douceur est vaine." And Coke maintains that if they are the best whom love in- duces, they are the most whom fear restrains : Si meliores sunt quos ducit amor, p lures sunt quos corrigit timor. La Fontaine's fable of the fishes and the flute-playing shepherd, intimates the sheer futility of wasting sweet sounds on ears not to be so caught. There are men, sententiously quoth Dr. Tempest, in the " Last Chronicle of Barset," who are deaf as adders to courtesy, but who are compelled to obedience at once by ill-usage. Educationists must provide for the contingency of having to deal with abnormal natures of this crabbed and distorted kind. But as exceptions only. The Jesuits are confessedly masters of the arts of education ; and the rule of the Jesuits is to lead 36 WIND, EARTHQUAKE, FIRE, not to drive, their pupils ; to allure and win, not to coerce and constrain them. Winsome womankind is mistress of the like arts. Those of the sex who are winsome, it has been said, with their plastic manners and non-aggressive force, always have their own way in the end. "They coax and flatter for their rights, and consequently they aire given privileges in excess of their rights ; whereas the women who take their rights, as things to which they are entitled without favour, lose them and their privileges together/' Kitely's advice is good, in " Every Man in his Humour," and of general application ; " But rather use the soft persuading way, Whose powers will work more gently, and compose The imperfect thoughts you labour to reclaim ; More winning, than enforcing the consent." f The first bishop sent from Iona for the Northumbrian Church was Corman, a man described by Dean Milman as of austere and inflexible character, who, finding more resistance than he expected to his doctrines, in a full assembly of the nation sternly reproached the Northumbrians for their ob- stinacy, and declared that he would no longer waste his labours on so irreclaimable a race. A gentle voice was heard : " Brother, have you not been too harsh with your unlearned hearers? Should you not, like the apostles, have fed them with the milk of Christian doctrine, till they could receive the full feast of our sublimer truths?" All eyes, it is added, were turned on Aidan, a humble but devout monk ; and by general acclamation that discreet and gentle teacher was saluted as bishop. The same historian describes Aldhelm of Malmes- bury, in minstrel's garb, arresting the careless crowd of church- goers on a bridge they must pass, and having fully enthralled their attention by the sweetness of his song, anon introducing into it some of the solemn truths of religion ; thus succeeding in winning to the faith many hearts, which he would have attempted in vain to move by severer language, or even by the awful excommunication of the Church.* When Fenelon was * The history of Latin Christianity supplies abundant examples, more or AND STILL SMALL VOICE. 37 intrusted by Lewis the Fourteenth with a mission to Poitou, to convert the Protestants, he refused the aid of dragoons, and resorted to suavity of persuasion alone as an instrument of conversion. Of the Protestant missions in the west of Ireland, complaint has been made of their being conducted too offen- sively, like raids upon heathendom : the Romanist, who might possibly open his bosom to the warm rays of charity, only folds the cloak of his hereditary faith more closely round him, when assailed by the bitter wind of a propagandism which J seeks its way to the heart by violence and insult* It is at once, on the one part pleasant, on the other painful, to find the Lord Treasurer Burleigh, who had ever been the fast friend of Whitgift, frequently expressing his dis- approbation of the primate's severity against non-conformists, and his wish " that the spirit of gentleness might win, rather than severity." And being here on Elizabethan ground, let us less pertinent. Columban and his disciples are characterized as having had little of the gentle and winning perseverance of missionaries : they had been accustomed to dictate to trembling sovereigns ; and their haughty and violent demeanour provoked the pagans, instead of weaning them from their idolatries (iii. 106). So of Boniface (v. 167) : it was in the tone of a master that he commanded the world to peace, a tone which provoked resistance. "It was not by persuasive influence, which might lull the conflicting passions of men, and enlighten them as to their real interests." Contrast with these the temper and policy of Pope Eugenius III. (iii. 407), whose "skilful and well-timed use of means more becoming the head of Christendom than arms and excommunications, wrought wonders in his favour ; " and who, by his gentleness and charity, gradually supplanted the senate in the attachment of the Roman people : "the fierce and intractable people were yielding to this gentler influence." On a later page we come across the able portraiture of our Henry II., as drawn by a churchman who was warning Becket as to the formidable adversary he had undertaken to oppose : " He will sometimes be softened by humility and patience, but will never submit to compulsion," etc. Ariste a raison when he counsels Geronte, in Gresset's "Le Mechant," as the bi en plus sage course of dealing with a difficult subject, "Que vous le rameniez par raison, par douceur, Que d'aller opposer la colere a l'humeur." * " Such access as Protestantism has gained to the minds of the Catho- lics in Ireland, it owes, not to the thunders of any missionary Boanerges, but to men like the [latfe] Archbishop of Dublin [Whately], and the Dean of Elpliin, who have taken a very different course, and presented Protestant Christianity to their neighbours in a very different form." — Saturday Review, xi. 71. 38 WIND, EARTHQUAKE, FIRE, note Mr. Froude's reference to the diverse procedure of Cecil and Throgmorton in their several dealings with the queen, — she being one of the many strong-willed people, on whom menaces and reproaches operate only as a spur. Cecil under- stood best Elizabeth's disposition. " By 6 practices,' by 6 bye- ways/ as he afterwards described it, by affecting to humour what he was passionately anxious to prevent, he was. holding his mistress under delicate control; and he dreaded lest his light leading-strings should be broken by a ruder touch/' As with the queen, so with her people. When Catherine de Medici expressed astonishment to Sir Thomas Smith, at a certain deference paid by his sovereign to the nation she ruled, " Madam," he replied, " her people be not like your people ; they must be trained by douceur and persuasion, not by rigour and violence." The greatest of Russian empresses emulated in this respect the greatest of English queens. Indeed, her tendency to indulgence was imputed to Catharine II. as a fault, advantage being taken of her constant reluctance to punish. But how far greater things did she, on the whole, achieve with her subjects, exclaims Mr. Herman Merivale, "thus gently led, than those of her predecessors and successors who employed on them in such abundance the more forcible methods of government !" Mr. Freeman, in the course of showing that Harold's way of bringing in the proud Danes of the North to his obedience was not exactly the same as" William's way, describes him as determining, with that noble and generous daring which is sometimes the highest prudence, to trust himself in the hands of the people who refused to acknowledge him. " These his enemies, who would not that he should reign over them, in- stead of being brought and slain before him, were to be won over by the magic of his personal presence in their own land." To apply what the Gaulish ambassador says of a great Roman in Jonson's tragedy, " This magistrate hath struck an awe into me, And by his sweetness won a more regard Unto his place, than all the boisterous moods AND STILL SMALL VOICE. 39 That ignorant greatness practiseth, to fill The large, unfit authority it wears." The Antwerp authorities had reason and experience on their side when they sought to persuade the Prince of Parma, in 1585, that the hearts of, not the Antwerpers only, but of the Hollanders and Zealanders, were easily to be won at that moment : give them religious liberty, and "govern them by gen- tleness rather than by Spanish grandees/' and a reconciliation would speedily be ensured. Two years later, but then two years too late, we find the prince averring that he liked " to proceed rather by the ways of love than of rigour and effusion of blood.'' This was in answer to Queen Elizabeth, who, at a previous juncture, angrily derided any " slight and mild kind of dealing with a people so ingrate," and was all for corrosives instead of lenitives for such festering wounds. Rulers, who fail to secure what they wish by gentle means, are apt very soon to resort to the less excellent way ; like Chilperic, the " Nero of France,'' coaxing the Jew Priscus to turn Christian ; first em- ploying argument, then trying blandishments, and anon taking to more powerful reasoning by throwing the Jew into prison. Tytler remarks of the "violent instructions" enforced by Henry VIII. on his envoy to James V., that had the overbearing Tudor adopted a suaver tone, a favourable impression might have been made ; but the King o' Scots was " not to be threatened into a compliance with a line of policy which, if suggested in a tone of conciliation, his judgment might have approved," and his unwounded sense of self-respect have consented to carry into effect. Simon the glover, in Scott's story of mediaeval Perth, is well described as watchful over the tactics his daughter employs towards Henry Smith, " whom he knew to be as ductile, when influenced by his affections, as he was fierce and intractable when assailed by hostile remonstrances or threats." Par un chemin plus doux, says a shrewd counsellor in Racine, vous pourrez le ramener ; whereas les menaces le rendront plus farouche. Archbishop Whately deprecates the bullying and\ browbeating system in vogue with certain barristers, and WIND, FIRE, AND STILL SMALL VOICE. declares it to be a mistake as a means of eliciting truth : he cites his own observation of the marked success of the opposite mode of questioning, and maintains that, generally speaking, a quiet, gentle, and straightforward examination will be the most adapted to elicit truth ; the browbeating and blustering which are likeliest to confuse an honest, simple-minded witness, being just what the dishonest one is the best prepared for. " The more the storm blusters, the more carefully he wraps round him the cloak which a warm sunshine will often induce him to throw off." / We are told of Dr. Beattie, in his relations as a professor / with his class, that his sway was absolute, because it was founded in reason and affection; that he never employed a harsh epithet in finding fault with any of his pupils ; and that when, instead of a rebuke, which they were conscious they deserved, they met merely with a mild reproof, it was conveyed 'n such a manner as to throw, not only the delinquent, but sometimes the whole class into tears. Fielding's boy-hero is at once in tears when the kind squire takes him in hand, instead of the harsh tutor ; his " guilt now flew in his face more than any severity could make it. He could more easily bear the lashes of Thwackum than the generosity of Airworthy." Mrs. Fry used to bear eager record of the docility she had found, and the gratitude she had experienced, from female prisoners, though the most abandoned of their sex : kind treatment, even with restraint obviously for their good, was so new to them, that it called forth, as Sir Samuel Romilly says, " even in the most depraved, grateful and generous feelings." True to the life is the picture Mr. Reade has drawn of the effect on the actress, of a young wife coming to her as a supplicant, instead of inveighing against her, — coming with faith in her goodness, and sobbing to her for pity: "a big tear rolled down her cheek, and proved her something more than an actress." In another of his books he illustrates the truth that men can resist the remonstrances that wound them, and so irritate them, better than they can those gentle appeals which rouse no anger, but soften the whole heart "The old people stung HAM AN HANGED ON HIS OWN GALLOWS. 41 him ; but Mercy, without design, took a surer way. She never said a word; but sometimes, when the discussions were at their height, she turned her dove-like eyes on him, with a look so loving, so humbly inquiring, so timidly imploring, that his heart melted within him." So with Janet Dempster, in George Eliot's story of clerical life, who " was not to be made meek by cruelty ; she would repent of nothing in the face of injustice, though she was subdued in a moment by a word or a look that recalled the old days of fondness." In fine, we may conclude with the conclusion of old Master Knowell, in the Elizabethan play: M There is a way of winning more by love, And urging of the modesty, than fear : Force works on servile natures, not the free. He that 's compelled to goodness, may be good, But 'tis but for that fit ; where others, drawn By softness and example, get a habit." HAM AN HANGED ON HIS OWN GALLOWS. Esther vii. 10. HARBONAH was one of the chamberlains of that king Ahasuerus, who reigned from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces. And Har- bonah it was that said before the king, — when Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the Jews' enemy, had gone one step too far in his enmity to the Jews, and had let his vaulting ambition overleap itself in his insolent confidence in royal favour, — Harbonah it was that prompted royal vengeance with the suggestive reminder, — " Behold also, the gallows fifty cubits high, which Haman had made for Mordecai, who had spoken good for the king, standeth in the house of Haman." Then the king said — catching at once at the chamberlain's sugges- tion — " Hang him thereon." " So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai." Somewhat musty is the adage that no law is more equitable than that bv which the deviser of death perishes by his own 42 HAM AN HANGED device : nec lex est cequior ulla, quam necis artificem arte fierire sua. Musty it might be even in Harbonah's days \ but the chamberlain, in the excitement of so signal an example, would feel that time cannot stale, nor custom wither, the force and import of that retributive law. Mr. de Quincey, in his memorable narrative of the revolt of the Tartars, or flight of the Kalmuck Khan and his people from the Russian territories to the frontiers of China (1771), relates in conclusion how Zebek-Dorchi, the author and originator of this great Tartar exodus, perished after a manner specially gratifying to those who compassed his ruin; the Chinese morality being exactly of that kind which approves in everything the lex talioiiis. "Finally, Zebek-Dorchi was in- vited to the imperial lodge, together with all his accomplices ; and under the skilful management of the Chinese nobles in the emperor's establishment, the murderous artifices of these Tartar chieftains were made to recoil upon themselves, and the whole of them perished by assassination at a great imperial banquet." Iterated and reiterated in holy writ is the retributive law that the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness ; that transgressors shall be taken in their own naughtiness ; that he that seeketh mischief it shall come unto him. The presidents and princes under King Darius, who sought occasion against Daniel, and persuaded their reluctant sovereign to cast the prophet into the den of lions, who however wrought him no manner of hurt, — upon them the lex talionis vindicated its literal severity when they in their turn were cast into the lions' den, and the lions had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in pieces or ever they came at the bottom of the den. The early ballads of almost every literature delight in these retributive surprises. Genuine was the zest of our fathers for such a retort as that of William of Cloudesly on the Justice who is having him measured for his grave : — u * I have seen as great a marvel,' said Cloudesly, ' As between this and prime He that maketh a grave for me Himself may lie therein.' " ON HIS OWN GALLOWS. 43 So fond is popular history of teaching this sort of philosophy by examples, that examples to the purpose are widely accepted which are yet not historical. Cardinal Balue, under Louis XI., is pointed out in his iron cage, as a malignant inventor punished in and through his own invention ; but Michelet has exposed the fallacy of supposing Balue the inventor of those iron cages which had long been known in Italy. Still he had the " merit" of being their importer into France ; and the lex talio?iis has its application to him. One remembers of course the Regent Morton hugged to death by the " maiden " he had been the means of introducing into Scotland. The French doctor, Guillotin, is even now not uncommonly believed to have perished in the reign of terror by the instrument invented by and named after him ; whereas he quietly died in his bed, many, many years later than that. But the Revolution history is well stored with instances like that of Charier, condemned to death by the criminal tribunal at Lyons, — the guillotine, which he had sent for from Paris to destroy his enemies, being first destined to sever his own head from his body. A bungling executioner prolonged the last agonies of this man, who in fact was hacked to death, not decapitated. He tasted slowly, as Lamartme says, of the death, a thirst for which he had so often sought to excite in the people ; " he was glutted with blood, but it was his own." Alison recognises in the death of Murat a memorable instance of the moral retribution which often attends upon " great deeds of iniquity, and by the instru- mentality of the very acts which appeared to place them beyond its reach/' He underwent in 1815 the very fate to which, seven years before, he had consigned a hundred Spaniards at Madrid, guilty of no other crime than that of defending their country ; and this, as Sir Archibald adds, " by the application of a law to his own case, which he himself had introduced, to check the attempts of the Bourbons to regain a throne which he had usurped." No man, Lord Macaulay affirms, ever made a more unscrupulous use of the legislative power for the destruction of his enemies than Thomas Cromwell ; and it was by an unscrupulous use of the legislative power that he was 44 HAMAN HANGED himself destroyed. Those who tauntingly reminded Fenwick, when attainted in 1696, that he had supported the bill which attainted Monmouth, were warned that they might perhaps themselves be tauntingly reminded in some dark and terrible hour, that they had supported the bill which attainted Fenwick. " God forbid that our tyrants should ever be able to plead, in justification of the worst that they can inflict upon us, pre- cedents furnished by ourselves ! " Again, it is in recording how, late in life, a horrible calumny settled upon Cicero, that Mr. de Quincey, without lending a moment's credit to the foul insinuation, nevertheless is free to recognise the equity of this retribution revolving upon one who, he asserts, had so often slandered others in the same malicious way. "At last the poisoned chalice came round to his own lips, and at a moment when it wounded the most acutely." Scepe, as Seneca has it, in magistrum scelera redierunt sua. For " in these cases We still have judgment here; that we but teach Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague the inventor : this even-handed justice Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice To our own lips." Plutarch rejoices in showing in Hercules an avenger who adapted the special mode of vengeance to the distinctive deserts of the wrong-doer. He punished with the very mode of punishment devised by those who were now made to suffer it. Antaeus he killed in wrestling, and Termerus by breaking his skull, — it being the speciality of Termerus to destroy the passengers he met by dashing his head against theirs. Theseus was the imitator of Hercules in this retributive system ; he punished Sinis, a bandit, — who used to kill travellers by binding them to the boughs of two pine-trees, which were then allowed to swing back and separate — by making an end of him in the self-same way ; Procrustes again he stretched on his own bed. Phalaris, the tyrant of Agrigentum, infamous for his cruelty, and specially for the device devised for him by Perillus ON HIS OWN GALLOWS. 45 of a brazen bull in which he burnt his victims — this Phalaris first tried the device on this Perillus ; and when Phalaris was deposed an indignant mob practised upon him the self-same torture to which he had subjected so many. And ever memor- able among other tales of antiquity, — old wives' fables if you will, but then have not all fables a moral ? — is that of Diomedes, who was devoured by the horses he had himself taught to feed on the flesh and blood of men. " Ashes always fly back in the face of him that throws them," is a proverb in the Yoruba language, quoted by Archbishop Trench as equivalent to our "Harm watch, harm catch," and perhaps to the Spanish, " He that sows thorns, let him not walk barefoot." An over- ruling Power disposes of what the malignity of man proposes, and u Thus doth it force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms. " The psalmist felt that he was praying in accordance with the Divine will, when he prayed that the ungodly might fall into their own nets together, while he ever escaped them. So again with his prayer that the mischief of their own lips might fall upon the heads of them that compassed him about. For it was a matter at once of faith and of experience with the psalmist, that the evil deviser and evil-doer, travailing with mischief, conceiving sorrow, and bringing forth ungodliness, who had graven and digged up a pit, was apt to fall himself into the destruction that he made for other. " For his travail shall come upon his own head, and his wickedness shall fall on his own pate." Owen Feltham delights to recall, from the stores of ancient and mediaeval story, how Bagoas, a Persian nobleman, having poisoned Artaxerxes and Artamenes, was detected by Darius, and forced to drink poison himself ; how Diomedes, as we have already seen, for the beasts he had fed on human flesh was by Hercules made food ; and how Pope Alexander VI., having designed the poisoning of his friend Cardinal Adrian, by his cup-bearer's mistake of the bottle, took the draught himself, " and so died by the same engine which he himself 46 HAM AN HANGED ON HIS OWN GALLOWS. had appointed to kill another" — a sort of enginery glanced at in Ben Jonson : — , "I have you in a purse-net, Good master Picklock, with your worming brain, And wriggling engine-head " too clever by half. Luther, in his Table-talk, welcomes the import of the Jewish story of Og, king of Bashan, who they say had lifted a great rock to throw at his enemies, " but God made a hole in the middle, so that it slipped down upon the giant's neck, and he could never rid himself of it." The fourth book of Southey's " Thalaba " closes with a shriek from Lobaba the sorcerer, which this final stanza sufficiently explains : — " What, wretch, and hast thou raised The rushing terrors of the wilderness, To fall on thine own head ? Death! death! inevitable death! Driven by the breath of God, A column of the desert met his way." Nor, among the lyrical pieces of the same poet, be forgotten that ballad of the Inchcape rock, which tells how the bell put up by the abbot of Aberbrothok to warn ships of their peril, was taken down by a sea pirate, Sir Ralph the Rover, who in the words of an old Scottish topographer, " a yeare thereafter perished upon the same rocke, with ship and goodes, in the righteous judgment of God." Many and many " stories have been told of men whose lives Were infamous, and so their end. I mean That the red murderer has himself been murdered ; The traitor struck with treason ; he who let The orphan perish came himself to want: Thus justice and great God have ordered it ! So that the scene of evil has been turned Against the actor ; pain paid back with pain ; And poison given for poison." Prescott's narrative of the decline and fall of Luna, minister under John II. of Castile, is pointed with this moral to adorn the tale ; that " by one of those dispensations of Providence which often confound the plans of the wisest, the column TO-DAY'S SUFFICING EVIL. which the minister had so artfully raised for his support served only to crush him." Scepe inter eunt aliis meditantes necem ; and that by the very means mediated. " For 'tis the sport, to have the engineer Hoist with his own petard," says Hamlet, in vindictive anticipation of such an issue, or rather upshot. The guilty king, his uncle, suggests misgivings lest his arrows, by a certain mischance, might " have reverted to my bow again, And not where I had aimed them; " and arrows, so returning, are by poetical justice apt to do the foiled bowman a mischief. That king's fellow-conspirator, Laertes, is thus punished, and owns it : — " Osric. How is't, Laertes ? Laertes. Why as a woodcock to my own springe, Osric 5 I am justly killed with mine own treachery." And so is the king himself ; and he, Laertes testifies, — "is justly served : It is a poison tempered by himself" for Hamlet, which Claudius has just drank of, and drinking died. The tragedy of the prince of Denmark does indeed abound in instances of what Horatio calls " Accidental judgments, casual slaughters, And deaths put on by cunning and forced cause ; And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fallen on the inventors' heads." TO-DAY'S SUFFICING EVIL, AND TO-MORROWS FORECAST CARE. St. Matthew vi. 34. WITH a divine calm fall those words from the Sermon of the Mount — spoken as never man spake — which bid us take "no thought for the morrow; for the morrow TO-DAY'S SUFFICING EVIL, shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Pagan philosophy had, and natural theism has, its approxi- mation to the same point of view. Horace is all for letting the mind enjoy the enjoyable present, and for leaving no room or resting-place for the sole of the foot of Black Care, raven and unclean bird that she is. The morrow may be hers, but to-day at least is his, and the morrow shall take care for the things of itself: " Laetus in prsesens animus quod ultra est Oderit curare. " David Hume, again, meets the doctrine that we should always have before our eyes, death, disease, poverty, blindness, calumny, and the like, as ills which are incident to human nature, and which may befall us to-morrow, — by the answer, that if we confine ourselves to a general and distant reflection on the ills of human life, such a vague procedure can have no effect to prepare us for them ; and that if, on the other hand, by close and intense meditation we render them present and intimate to us, we realise the true secret for poisoning all our pleasures, and rendering us perpetually miserable. He grieves more than need be, who begins to grieve before he need, is one of Seneca's sententious sayings : Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet quam necesse est. One of Mrs. Gore's women of the world — who might probably be counted by the hundred — is sprightly and smart in her rebuke of her husband and his sister for their delight in perplexing the brightest moments of existence by all the agonies of second sight, and whom she represents as quite indignant when they find her sympathy waiting the actual occurrence of evil. " I hate/' she says, " to turn back my head towards the dark shadow that- follows me, or direct my telescope towards a coming storm. " And herein was she wise, if not with all the wisdom of those Christian morals, of which we have so impressive an expositor in Sir Thomas Browne. " Leave future occurrences to their uncer- tainties," writes the fine old physician, Religiosus Medicus, " think that which is present thy own ; and, since 'tis easier to AND TO-MORROWS FORECAST CARE. 49 foretell an eclipse than a foul day at some distance, look for little regular below. Attend with patience the uncertainty of things, and what lieth yet unexerted in the chaos of futurity." Shaks- peare's noble Roman, at the dawn of the day of battle on which so much depends, is natural man enough to utter the aspiration : " O, that a man might know The end of this day's business, ere it come ! " But he is also stoic philosopher enough to check that pros- pective yearning, with the reflection, " But it sufficeth that the day will end, And then the end is known." Swift opens his Birthday Address to Stella with the assurance, " This day, whate'er the fates decree, Shall still be kept with joy by me : This day, then, let us not be told, That you are sick and I grown old; Nor think on our approaching ills, And talk of spectacles and pills ; To-morrow will be time enough To hear such mortifying stuff." For once, however, it is only in the opening verses that the dean is jocose ; and he soon turns aside from his strain of levity to bid Stella accept some serious lines "from not the gravest of divines." Schleiermacher, in one of his rather gushing letters, —for he, too, though nothing of a Swift, and though of real weight in divinity, was not in all senses the gravest of divines -implores his "dearest Jette" not to look so much into the future. He cannot beg this too earnestly and too often, he says -so depressed is Jette apt to be by anticipation of things to come, and from a perverse habit of condensing advent difficult ties. "It is easy to see through one pane of glass, but through ten placed one upon another we cannot see. Does this prove • that each one is not transparent ? or are we ever called upon to : took through more than one at a time ? Double panes we only have recourse to for warmth ; and just so it is with life. We have but to live one moment at a time. Keep each one isolated, ana you will easily see. your way through them." So again writes good Frederick Perthes to his wife, whose fearful and TO-DAY'S SUFFICING FVIL, hopeful longings, he tells her, are indeed guarantees for the great future beyond the grave, but whom he urges to bear in mind that a vigorous grasp of the present is our duty so long as we are upon earth. It is the present moment, he reminds her, that supplies the energy and decision that fit us for life ; retro- spect brings sadness, and the dark future excites fears, so that we should be crippled in our exertions were we not to lay a vigorous grasp upon the present. And u Labour with what zeal you will, Something still remains undone ; Something uncompleted still Waits the rising of the sun. By the bedside, on the stair, At the threshold, near the gates, With its menace or its prayer, Like a mendicant it waits ; Waits, and will not go away ; Waits, and will not be gainsaid : By the cares of yesterday Each to-day is heavier made ; Till at length the burden seems Greater than our strength can bear ; Heavy as the weight of dreams Pressing on us everywhere. And we stand from day to day, Like the dwarfs of times gone by, Who, as Northern legends say, On their shoulders held the sky." Quite exceptional is the temperament impersonated by Wordsworth in one who seemed a man of cheerful yesterdays and confident to-morrows. Longfellow has his midnight reflection on To-morrow ; him- self a watcher and contemplative, his little ones asleep : and thus the pens'ees end : * ' To-morrow ! the mysterious, unknown guest, Who cries to me, * Remember Barmecide, And tremble to be happy with the rest.' And I make answer, * I am satisfied ; I dare not ask ; I know not what is best ; God hath already said what shall betide.' n AND TO-MORROW'S FORECAST CARE. 51 There is never, observes Madame d'Arblay, in her diary, such a superfluity of actual happiness as to make it either rational ^ or justifiable to feed upon expected misery. " That portion of philosophy which belongs to making the most of the present day, grows upon me strongly; and, as I have suffered infinitely from its neglect, it is what I most encourage, and, indeed, re- quire/' Kindly ordained, she takes it, is the concealment of " the day of sorrow ; And enough is the present tense of toil — For this world, to all, is a stiffish soil — And the mind flies back with a glad recoil From the debts not due till to-morrow." It is one of Scott's young heroes who opens a letter of trou- blous tidings with the confession that, until now, he had rarely known what it was to sustain a moment's real sorrow ; what he called such was, he now felt assured, only the weariness of mind which, having nothing actually present to complain of, turns upon itself, and becomes anxious about the future — disregard- ing the Scriptural monition that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Is there, Armstrong asks, Kvpico kol ovk dv6pw7rois> The law of 62 FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS. the Spirit of life makes free from the law of sin and death, that the righteousness of spiritual law may be fulfilled in those who sometime were free from righteousness. Freedom from righteousness is, in fact, identical with that bondage of corruption from which they are delivered into the glorious liberty of the children of God. He that is so called, being free, is yet Christ's servant, dovXos. And, as a servant, whatsoever he doeth he is to do heartily, as to the Lord, and not to men — r $ yap Kvp'ico Xpio-ry AOYAEYEI. Goethe's biographer tells us how he would assert, against the encyclopedists, that " whatever frees the intellect, without at the same time giving us command over ourselves, is pernicious;" or would utter one of his profound and pregnant yv&pai such as Nur das Gesetz kann uns die Freiheit geben, i.e., only within the circle of law can there be true freedom. " We are not free when we acknowledge no higher power, but when we acknowledge it, and in reverence raise ourselves by proving that a Higher lives in us." We may wrest to our purpose the lines of Schiller, in Wallensteins Tod: " Nay, let it not afflict you that your power Is circumscribed. Much liberty, much error ! The narrow path of duty is securest." Liberty of will is likened by Jeremy Taylor to the motion of a magnetic needle towards the north, full of trembling and uncertainty till it be fixed in the beloved point : " it wavers as long as it is free, and is at rest when it can choose no more." What is liberty ? asks M. Jules Simon ; and answers, The power of doing or not doing. But, he proceeds to inquire, can this liberty exist independent of law ? — cette liberte peut-elle subsister sans regie ? Nay, liberty without rule, or law, so far from ennobling him who possesses it, degrades him. Liberty is not given to us to withdraw us from the authority of law, but that we may obey it in recognising its great First Cause. Un- restrained liberty is our ruin ; liberty subjected to law, and that an immovable law, is the instrument and the token of our true greatness. Wordsworth philosophically affirms that "all men FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS. 63 may find cause, when life is at a weary pause, and they have panted up the hill of duty with reluctant will," to " Be thankful, even though tired and faint, For the rich bounties of constmint ; Whence oft invigorating transports flow, That choice lacked courage to bestow." The truth admits of exemplification in a thousand minor details of every-day life. Mrs. Gaskell relates how she heard Charlotte Bronte declare, in reference to the " exact punctuality and obedience to the laws of time and place " enforced by her somewhat despotic aunt on the motherless family at Haworth parsonage, that no one but themselves could tell the value of this control in after life : " with their impulsive natures it was positive repose to have learnt obedience to external laws." In the last of her own fictions— and, though unfinished, the ripest and best— Mrs. Gaskell herself suggestively observes of a patient who, when a medical adviser is at length called in, finds it a great relief to be told what to do, what to eat, drink, and avoid, that " such decisions ab extra are sometimes a wonder- ful relief to those whose habit has been to decide, not only for themselves, but for every one else ; " and that occasionally the relaxation of the strain which a character for infallible wisdom brings with it does much to restore health. M. de Vigny, in one of his highly finished historiettes, speculates on the nature and power of the instinct which seems to urge mankind, as by a kind of necessity, to seek pleasure in obedience, and to feel a desire to depose, as it were, their free agency and consequent responsibility in other hands ; as if thereby a burden was laid down, too weighty to be voluntarily supported; and how this sensation of relief seems to give a secret feeling of complacency, and a freedom to the act of obedience, which reconcile it to the pride of human nature. Soldiers, observes Sir Walter Scott, are always most pleased when they are best in order for per- forming their military service ; and licence or inactivity, how- ever acceptable at times, are not, when continued, so agreeable to men of the camp as strict discipline and a prospect of employment. "I have heard men talk of the blessings of 64 FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS. freedom," says Wamba to himself, when suddenly freed from sharing the captivity of his master ; " but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it." So Elia, in his essay on The Superannuated Man, to whom life being now one long holiday has no holiday henceforth ; where he expatiates on the sight of " busy faces to recreate the idle man, who contemplates them ever passing by — the very face of business a charm by contrast to his relaxation from it." Many an individual experience can put its own private inter- pretation on the averment of one of Rousseau's corres- pondents — Ce lien si redoute me delivre d'une servitude beaucoup phis redoubtable. Of significant application again is De Quincey's denial of the truth of Lessing's aesthetical assertion, that the sense of neces- sary and absolute limitation is banished from the idea of a fine art. On the contrary, he maintains this sense is indispensable as a means of resisting (and therefore realizing) the sense of freedom : " the freedom of a fine art is found not in the absence of restraint, but in the conflict with it. " So in literature. That certain rules of composition sustain themselves at all is due, according to Mr. W. Caldwell Roscoe, to the fact that creative genius of a high order is not impatient of forms, but rather loves, on the contrary, to have certain limits defined for it, and to be freed to some extent from " the weight of too much liberty." Shakspeare, he adds, did not fret because tragedies are limited to five acts, nor Milton quarrel with the formal conditions of an epic poem. Here again shall we find in Wordsworth a passage to the point : — " In truth the prison, unto which we doom Ourselves, no prison is : and hence for me, In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground ; Pleased, if some souls (for such there needs must be), Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found." The biographer of Edward Irving tells us how deeply he was affected when the decision of the presbytery against him FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS. 65 removed him from the range of their control, so that, " notwith- standing all his independence, the profound loyalty of his soul was henceforth baulked of its healthful necessities. ,, He felt himself with a pang to be cast unnaturally free of restraint — " that lawful, sweet restraint, ... to which the tender dutifulness so seldom wanting to great genius naturally clings."* Habits of instant and mechanical obedience are affirmed by Sir Henry Taylor to be those that give rest to the child, and spare its health and temper. Men are but children of a larger growth ; and though as regards obedience to a Father which is in heaven, " mechanical " obedience may not be the word, yet is cheerfully implicit obedience the thing; obedience is the privilege of the child. " For obedience is nobler than freedom. What's free ? The vexed straw on the wind, the frothed spume on the sea. * Another type of mind, deficient in the higher attributes of independence, is often feverishly eager to sink its sense of individual responsibility by- seeking what is called " rest in the Church." Dr. Bungener represents his Julian, when committed to the Bastile, as rather rejoicing at than terrified by the despotism of the hand laid upon him ; and in the same way, on taking holy orders, he, being " subdued in heart, enslaved in mind, tired of being his own master, only to create his own torments," flatters himself that he gives the Church complete power over his faculties at the same time that he gives her plenary power over his actions. To the baser sort, remarks Sir James Stephen, no yoke is so galling as that of self control, no deliverance so welcome as that of being handsomely rid of free agency. "With such men mental slavery readily becomes a habit, a fashion, and a pride. To the abject many the abdication of self- government is a willing sacrifice." One of our acutest essayists on social subjects comments on the readiness of a man to exult in the fact that he has done something which he cannot undo, and has pledged himself to a course from which he cannot draw back, as more commonly the sign of a weak than of a strong nature. "The comfort of plunging right into the stream is unspeakable to anybody who has been accustomed to stand shivering and irresolute on the bank." When a person of this sort, it is justly observed, has brought himself to take the plunge, his exultation and fearlessness are wonderful : the knowledge that the Rubicon is crossed, and the die cast, seems to relieve him from the necessity of further resolution. " He has set in motion a machine which will of itself wind off results and consequences for him with- out more ado on his own part ; and this is an order of release from the demands of circumstances upon his will, for which he cannot be too thankful." F 66 THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM. The great ocean itself, as it rolls and it swells, In the bonds of a boundless obedience dwells." The next section takes up the same theme under another heading, and with afresh set of variations. THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM: St. Matthew xi. 29, 30. IT is in tones of winning promise and invitation that men are offered the wearing of Christ's yoke. Let all who are weary and heavy laden come to Him : come, that they may take His yoke upon them. There is a seeming paradox in the invitation. Should not the weary be invited by promised freedom from all yoke-bearing? Should not the heavy-laden be attracted by a pledge of -entire immunity from burdens grievous to be borne, whether heavy or light? Not so. Christ's yoke is easy, but it is a yoke. The burden he imposes is light, but a burden of some sort He does impose. Being made free from sin, men become the servants — servitors, slaves even, SoCAoi, of righteousness. But in so being made free from sin, and becoming servants, dovXoi, to God, they have their fruit unto holiness, and the end everlasting life. And the yoke of privilege promised by Christ diners from the irksome bonds and rigid constraint of scribes and rabbis ; a yoke which, says St. Peter, neither we nor our fathers were able to bear, inasmuch as it implies and involves a purely spiritual service — that we should serve (doiikeveiv) m newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter. "If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." Keble says of men, in the " Christian Year," that, " Freely they own, or heedless prove, The curse of lawless hearts, the joy of self-control.*' The joy of self-control. For what Wordsworth expressively calls " unchartered freedom," as revelled in by those who THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM. 67 ignore a holy and happy-making law of duty, is not in the long run, a boon, but a bane. True, that, as Cowper has it, "'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower " Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume, And we are weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil." But the constraint that sweetens liberty is excepted ; the con- trol that enfranchises from servitude to self, and exalts to a liberty which monarchs cannot grant : " 'Tis liberty of heart, derived from Heaven," " and held by charter ;" " a clean escape from tyrannizing lust." " Grace makes the slave a freeman for " He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves beside." Byron was drawing on his own bitter experience when he wrote the lines, "Lord of himself — that heritage of woe, That fearful empire which the human breast But holds to rob the heart within of rest. " Imlac, the sage, describes, in " Rasselas " the placid flow of life enjoyed by a devout brotherhood, whose " time is regularly distributed; one duty succeeds another, so that they are not left open to the distraction of unguided choice, nor lost in the shades of listless inactivity. There is a certain task to be performed at an appropriated hour," and the constraint is to them a pledge of happiness, hallowed as it is with a Divine sanction, and promissory of " an ' ampler ether, a diviner air " to come, in which they shall breathe more freely, and inhale more deeply, the breath of life. Freedom is not the being free to do nothing, or to do just what one likes, and when, and how, without why or wherefore. La liberte rtest pas oisivete, says La Bruyere ; and then he proceeds to say what liberty is : " C'est le choix de travail et de l'exercice : etre libre, en un mot, n'est pas ne rien faire, c'est etre seul arbitre de ce qu'on fait, ou de ce qu'on ne fait point. Quel bien en ce sens que la liberte!" But how much worthier of that note of admiration the gospel de- finitions, explicit or implicit, of ce que c'est la liberte ! F 2 63 THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM. There is a touching suggestiveness in what Frederick Perthes says in a letter after the death of his wife. All his doings and plannings for four and twenty years past had been solely, he declares, in reference to her. " But now all this is o ver. I am no longer bound ; I can do what I will, and next to the yearning after her, I am most oppressed in my solitude by the consciousness of freedom." Fain would he be in those dear bonds again ; to apply a passage in one of Shakspeare's minor poems, he " In her fillet still would bide, And, true to bondage, would not break from thence." Or as Ferdinand says of Miranda, in the " Tempest," " All corners else o' the earth Let liberty make use of ; space enough Have I in such a prison." In this sense may be applied in earnest what Butler writes in sport, of an independent spirit who " Disdains control, and yet can be Nowhere, but in a prison, free." So the sculptor in Hawthorne's tale of "Transformation," intent on winning winsome Hilda for his own, " would try if it were possible to take this shy, yet frank and innocently fearless creature captive, and imprison her in his heart, and make her sensible of a larger freedom there than in all the world besides." "I have read somewhere," says a simple maiden in one of Lord Lytton's fictions, " that the slave is gay in his holiday from toil ; if you free him, the gaiety vanishes, and he cares no more for the dance under the palm-tree." Don Alphonse, in Madame de Re'musat's " Lettres Espagnoles," writes to his sister an account of the courtiers 7 embarrassment on being released by the king from ceremonial attendance, and allowed to do each one as he liked. " L'improvisation en tout est chose assez difficile, et particulierement celle de la liberte. II faut que je confesse que nous n'avons su que faire de la notre." The moral of the fable may be read THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM. in Landor's lines, supposed to be indited by the caged nightingales so tenderly tended by Agapenthe, and brought to Athens for her from Thessaly, and who bid the reader think not u That we would gladly fly again To gloomy wood or windy plain, Certain we are we ne'er should find A care so provident, so kind. . . > O may you prove, as well as we, That e'en in Athens there may be A sweeter thing than liberty." Apply, again, to the general subject the special fact, by way of illustration, that restrictions and shackles are essential to rhythmic writing, and voluntary thraldom the natural con- dition of poetry. The Chevalier de la Faye, in his " Apology " for the supposed difficulties of rhyme in our Cisalpine dialects (one Italian poet being " distinguishable among his fellow- captives by the light aerial nature of his fetters,") suggests an ingenious parallel to the jets d'eau that ornament the gardens of the Tuilenes, Versailles, and St. Cloud, in a copy of verses which have been thus Englished by Father Prout : — u From the rhyme's restrictive rigour Thought derives its impulse oft, Genius draws new strength and vigour, Fancy springs and shoots aloft. So, in leaden conduits pent, Mounts the liquid element, By pressure forced to climb : And he who feared the rule's restraint Finds but a friendly ministrant In Reason's helpmate, Rhyme. " Pithy and pertinent too are Mr. Coventry Patm ore's lines on those who " Live by law, not like the fool, But like the bard, who freely sings In strictest bonds of rhyme and rule, And finds in them, not bonds, but wings." They who so live are in every sense the happier, without an 7o THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY. " except these bonds," but because of them. They find in them not bonds, but wings ; and thenceforth have free course, and go on their way rejoicing. They, like the repentant rebels in Shakspeare's " King John," and by the same river metaphor, " Leaving their rankness and irregular course, Stoop low within those bounds they had o'erlook'd, And calmly run on in obedience.' 1 What they are no longer free to do, is to do ill. And that freedom is as perfect servitude as the service of God is perfect freedom. In fine, and in the words (but expanding the meaning) of one of Samuel Butler's metrical reflections : — ' * Law does not put the least restraint Upon our freedom, but maintain't ; Or if it does, 'tis for our good, To give us freer latitude ; For wholesome laws preserve us free By stinting of our liberty." THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY. Proverbs xvii. 28. IT is written among the Proverbs of Solomon, that " Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise." Even the fool that shutteth his lips is esteemed a man of understand- ing. The wise king declares in another place, that a fool's mouth is his destruction, and that his lips are the snare of his soul. Let him keep his mouth closed, and his folly is an unknown quantity ; out of sight, out of mind. Let him keep his lips shut, and wisdom shall be imputed unto him. Of him lookers- on will say, a discreet man that. For they are only lookers-on, not listeners. To listen would break the spell. As it is, they are apt to count him as deep as he is still. Do not still waters run deep ? Sir Thomas Browne — himself a silent man, but no fool ; quite the other way — bids us, in one of his stately sentences, THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY. think not silence the wisdom of fools ; but if rightly timed, the honour of wise men, who have not the infirmity, but the virtue of taciturnity, and speak not out of the abundance, but the well-weighed thoughts of the heart. " Such silence may be eloquence, and speak thy worth above the power of words." Would the author of " Vulgar Errors/' however, have sanc- tioned for one moment the reference of the proverb on reticent foolishness to that limbo ? On the contrary, the drift of his argument is wholly in favour of the proverb ; for, if the silence of the wise is wisdom, as he contends, much more is a tongue- tied condition expedient in the fool. Stultitiam dissimulare non potes nisi taciturnitate, says the Latin adage : there is no way to conceal folly but by holding your tongue. There is something at once of pathos and almosj: of humorous reproach, in the appeal of the Man of Uz, in his extremity, to his too didactic and complacently dogmatical friends : " Oh that ye would altogether hold your peace ! and it should be your wisdom/' Montaigne exclaims, " To how many blockheads of my time has a cold and taciturn demeanour procured the credit of prudence and capacity ! " Note the counsel of Carlo to Sogliardo, in one of Ben Jonson's heaviest comedies : " When anything is propounded above your capacity, smile at it, make two or three faces, and 'tis excellent; they'll think you've travelled ; though you argue a whole day in silence thus, and discourse in nothing but laughter, 'twill pass." Elsewhere rare Ben cites approvingly the " witty saying," about one who was taken for a great and weighty man so long as he held his peace : " This man might have been a counsellor of state, till he spoke ; but having spoken, not the beadle of the ward.' ; Denouncing in his strong dialect the vapid verbiage of shallow praters, Mr. Carlyle exclaims, " Even Triviality, Imbecility, that can sit silent, how respectable is it in comparison ! " Michelet says of the Spanish grandees of Charles the Fifth's time, that the haughty silence they maintained, scarce deigning even a syllable of reply, served them admirably to conceal 72 THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY. their dearth of ideas. Silence and imperturbability, according to the author of "The Gentle Life," are the two requisites for a man to get on in the world. If there are two things not to be hidden — love and a cough — there is a third, contends Nello, the barber of Florence, and that is ignorance, when once a man is obliged to do something besides wagging his head. Charles Lamb shrewdly observes that a man may do very well with a very little knowledge, and scarce be found out, in a mixed company \ everybody being so much more ready to produce his own than to call for a display of your acquisitions. But in a tete-a-tete, he adds, there is no shuffling \ the truth will out. The Abbe de Choisy hugged himself on the success of a discreet silence during his residence in Batavia, where he had special reasons to beware of committing, and of exposing, him- self. " Often when I utter not a word, they suppose it is because I don't choose to talk ; whereas the real motive for my silence is a profound ignorance, such as it is best to keep con- cealed from the gaze of mortals." Moliere's sprightly chevalier, Dorante, counsels a fatuous marquis not to talk of what he knows nothing at all about — bidding him hope that in virtue of a scrupulously observed silence, he and the like of him may haply come to be regarded as clever fellows. "Et songez qu'en ne disant mot, on croira peut-etre que vous etes d'habiles gens." A story is told of Zeuxis, how he reproved a certain Megabyzus, high priest of great Diana of the Ephesians, who discoursed of pictures in the painter's studio with so reck- less an audacity of ignorance, that the very lads who were grinding colours there could not refrain from giggling ; where- upon quoth Zeuxis to his too-eloquent friend, " As long as you kept from talking, you were the admiration of these boys, who were all wonder at your rich attire, and the number of your servants ; but now that you have ventured to expatiate upon the arts, of which you know simply nothing, they are laughing at you outright." Plutarch tells the same story of Apelles. Again to draw upon Moliere : a fool who keeps his folly tongue- tied, is not to be distinguished from a savant who hold his peace: THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY. 73 " Un sot qui ne dit mot ne se distingue pas D'un savant qui se tait." Not to be distinguished, possibly, from a savant who talks, and talks to the purpose too. There are two opposite ways, on Washington Irving's show- ing, by which some men get into notice — one by talking a vast deal and thinking a little, and the other by holding their tongues and not thinking at all. By the first, he says, many a vapouring, superficial pretender acquires the reputation of a man of quick parts ; by the other, many a vacant dunder-pate, like the owl, the stupidest of birds, comes to be complimented, by a discerning world, with all the attributes of wisdom. Silent, quiet people, as Miss Jewsbury incidentally remarks, have a charmed mystery about them which gives them a great advantage over more demonstrative mortals ; "nobody knows exactly what they think, nor the impression made on them by anything ; all within them has the prestige of an oracle ; the extent of what they indicate is unknown ; and what little is uttered goes so far." The best, perhaps, as well as the best- known of all stories illustrative of our theme, is that of Coleridge admiring a certain dinner-guest, so impregnable in his sublime reserve, so inexorably proof against every temptation to join in the table-talk, such a model (in appearance) of dignified superiority — until there was carried in that unlucky dish of apple-dumplings, the very first glance at which roused Sir Oracle to the enthusiastic outburst, "Them are the jockeys for me ! " Goldsmith had, long before, recorded a somewhat parallel passage of disenchantment. His travelled Chinese, Lien Chi Altangi, is present at a dinner-party of dignitaries and dons in whose company and from whose converse he expects to find a feast of reason as well as^ttrftle, and a flow of soul as well as claret. Their silence before dinner is served, rather puzzles and disappoints the eager expectant ; who, however, accounts for and excuses it by the reflection, that men of wisdom are ever slow of speech, and deliver nothing unadvisedly. " Silence," says Confucius, " is a friend that will never be- tray." The dons and dignitaries were now by the man- 74 THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY. darin's surmise, inventing maxims, or hard sayings, for their mutual instruction, when some one should think proper to begin. " My curiosity was now wrought up to the highest pitch ; I impatiently looked round to see if any were going to interrupt the mighty pause ; when at last one of the company declared that there was a sow in his neighbourhood that far- rowed fifteen pigs at a litter." Broken at once was the spell, and disillusion was the Chinaman's doom. Pope, being satirist of the first class, as well as poet of (say) the second, took care, in his imitative stanzas on Silence, not to be all sentiment and rhapsodical rapture on that subject. Hence, one of his stanzas begins, " Silence, the knave's repute and another declares Dulness to be her bosom-friend : " And in thy bosom lurks in Thought's disguise ; Thou varnisher of fools, and cheat of all the wise." The moral of one of Gay's fables is to the purpose — that one, namely, in which a young dog, ignorant of game, gives tongue . as lustily as if he knew all about it, and gets well lashed for his pains. To the astounded puppy's remonstrance the whip- bearing huntsman replies : — " Had not thy forward noisy tongue Proclaim 'd thee always in the wrong, Thou might'st have mingled with the rest, And ne'er thy foolish nose confess'd ; But fools, to talking ever prone, Are sure to make their follies known." So a French satirist of the last century bids le sot remember, that by simply holding his tongue, he will acquire not a little respect — hopeless as the reminder in such a case may be ; for you might as well counsel the coward not to tremble, as the fool not to expose himself in words, words, words : 1 Souvenez-vous qu'un sot doit garder le silence, II serait respecte beaucoup plus qu'il ne pense ; Mais vouloir le contraindre a ne jamais parler, C'est, sans espoir, defendre au poltron ne trembler." Could it but be enforced, the one injunction to be laid upon THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY, 75 the fool might be condensed into an applied line from Moliere, where Orgon bids Dorine hold her tongue, and regard that as a standing order : — " Taisez-vous. C'est le mot qu'il vous faut toujours dire." All silent people, Lord Lytton affirms, can seem conven- tionally elegant. And he tells the story of a groom married to a rich lady, and in consequent trepidation as to the probability of being ridiculed by the guests in his new home and her old one, to whom an Oxford clergyman gave this bit of advice : "Wear a black coat, and hold your tongue." The groom took the hint, and, we are assured, was always considered the most gentlemanly man in the county. Elsewhere, again, the same author relates his meeting with a diplomatist of weighty name, a stock example of political success, but of whom he could make nothing whatever, except indeed that he was a preposter- ous numskull. When, therefore, the Prime Minister, some days later, spoke to our author of this " superior man," he got for a reply, " Well, I don't think much of him. I spent the other day with him, and found him insufferably dull." " Indeed ! " said the minister, with something of horror in his tone ; " why then, I see how it is. Lord has been positively talking to you ! " Had he but altogether held his peace, it had been his wisdom. According to La Bruyere, everything tells in favour of the man who talks but little ; the presumption is that he is a superior man ; and if, in point of fact, he is not a sheer blockhead, the presumption then is that he is very superior indeed. His com- parative freedom from folly is positively presumed to exist in the superlative degree. In another place the same observant philosopher describes in his best style the sort of people who, by a grand talent for silence, win golden opinions from all sorts of men ; they look wise, and now and then enforce and re- enforce the look by a timely shrug of the shoulders, or significant shake of the head ; but the assumed depth of wisdom don't really go two inches down ; scratch the surface, and you come to the bottom at once. 7 6 PENAL PREVISION. For, as Shakspeare has it, " There are a sort of men whose visages Do cream and mantle like a standing pond ; And do a wilful stillness entertain, With purpose to be dress'd in an opinion Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit. O, my Antonio, I do know of those, That therefore only are reputed wise, For saying nothing ; who, I am very sure, If they should speak, would " not be reputed wise, but the uttermost opposite, whatever that may be called. PENAL PREVISION. I Samuel xxvii. 19, 20. WHY had Saul disquieted Samuel, to bring him up from the place of the dead, by the midnight agency of the " wise woman " of Endor? Because he would fain pry into futurity, and learn from supernatural sources his coming fate. The desired foresight was vouchsafed him. By to-morrow he and his sons were to be with the dead-and-gone seer, whose spirit ' he had rashly invoked. The prevision had its present penalty. " Then Saul fell straightway all along on the earth, and was sore afraid, because of the words of Samuel." The secret things belong unto the Lord our God, and only those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children. The tree of fore- knowledge of good and evil may offer fruit that is pleasant to the sight, and seemingly to be desired to make one wise ; but it is fatal food, not to be eaten of, nor to be touched, by any but the venturesome profane. Indulged to his cost with previsions of what should befall his ; posterity, Milton's Adam, at sight of the Flood and its ravages, breaks out into the exclamation, ' ' O visions ill foreseen ! Better had I Lived ignorant of future ! so had borne PENAL PREVISION. 77 My part of evil only, each day's lot Enough to bear." Warned by so distressful an experience, he would have no man seek henceforth to be foretold what shall befall him or his children ; " evil he may be sure, which neither his foreknowing can prevent ; and he the future evil shall, no less in appre- hension than in substance, feel grievous to bear." It has been asked what would become of men, were their future absolutely foreknown by them : would they not become in imagination, and therefore in reality, the passive slaves of an inevitable fate, with all hope extinguished, all fear intensified, awaiting in terror the foreseen evil, and looking with indifference on the promised good, darkened as it would be by the shadow of intervening calamities, and stripped of the bright colouring of hope ? And yet, " With eager search to dart the soul, Curiously vain, from pole to pole, And from the planets' wandering spheres To extort the number of our years, And whether all those years shall flow Serenely smooth, and free from woe, Or rude misfortune shall deform Our life with one continual storm ; Or if the scene shall motley be Alternate joy and misery, — Is a desire which, more or less, All men feel, though few confess/ 5 So at least affirms the author of the " Rosciad/' — who in another of his writings puts the query : " Tell me, philosopher, is it a crime To pry into the secret womb of time ; Or, born in ignorance, must we despair To reach events, and read the future there ? " Assuredly, says Cicero, the ignorance of evils to come is of more advantage than the knowledge of them : certe ignoratio futurorum malorum utilior est quam scientia. And Horace, in a celebrated passage : 73 PENAL PREVISION. " Prudens futuri temporis exitum Caliginosa nocte premit Deus : Ridetque, si mortalis ultra Fas trepidat. " . . . Caliginosa nox forms a thick black curtain. * ' What hangs behind that curtain ? — would'st thou learn ? If thou art wise, thou would'st not." A thoughtful mind, sententiously observes Miss Clarissa Harlowe, is not a blessing to be coveted, unless it has such a happy vivacity with it as her friend Miss Howe's : a vivacity which enables one to enjoy the present, without being anxious about the future. It is, according to Goldsmith, the happy confidence in bright illusions that gives life its true relish, and keeps up our spirits amidst every distress and disappointment. " How much less would be done, if a man knew how little he can do ! How wretched a creature would he be, if he saw the end as well as the beginning of his projects ! He would have nothing left but to sit down in torpid despair, and exchange enjoyment for actual calamity.'' The warrior in Mr. Roscoe's tragedy argues judiciously when he says, " What is't to me, that I should vex my soul In dim forebodings of what is to be ? It is enough I know, and ache to know, What on this bridge of time I have to do, Not overlook the abysm till my head fail." Fortunately for us mortals, Mr. Froude says, necessary as any future may be, and inevitable as by our own actions we may have made it, it is kindly kept from us wrapt up in clouds, and we are not made wretched about it by anticipation. " O my fortune," prays Agrippina, in one of Jonson's Roman tragedies, " let it be sudden thou preparest against me ; strike all my powers of understanding blind, and ignorant of destiny to come ! " Seek to know no more, is in vain the joint appeal of the three witches to Macbeth, beside the magic caldron in the cave; but as to the future of Banquo's issue he will be satisfied. Cranmer, predicting a glorious reign for the infant Elizabeth, parenthesises a sigh on the common lot — " Would I had known no more ! but she must die." PENAL PREVISION. 79 Shakspeare's King Henry the Fourth, again, in one place utters the aspiration, " O Heaven ! that one might read the book of fate !" Hardly an aspiration, however, as the context shows; a privilege to be deprecated rather; for could there be foreseen all the changes and chances of one's mortal life, " how chances mock, and changes fill the cup of alteration with divers liquors/ ' " O, if this were seen, The happiest youth, — viewing his progress through, What perils past, what crosses to ensue, — Would shut the book, and sit him down and die." Mr. de Quincey describes an Installation of the Knights of St. Patrick at which he was present, during the Lord- Lieutenancy of Lord Cornwallis — the narrator's companions on that occasion being Lord and Lady Castlereagh, who " were both young at this time, and both wore an impressive appearance of youthful happiness ; neither, happily for their peace of mind, able to pierce that cloud of years, not much more than twenty, which divided them from the day destined in one hour to wreck the happiness of both." Vision ill fore- seen it were to know the times and the seasons, the manner how, and the place where. "O tell me, cried Ereenia, for from thee Nought can be hidden, when the end will be. Seek not to know, old Casyapa replied, What pleaseth Heaven to hide. Dark is the abyss of Time. But light enough to guide your steps is given ; Whatever weal or woe betide, Turn never from the way of truth aside, And leave the event, in holy hope, to Heaven. w The hermit in Scott's " Talisman," who, after failing to read aright the fate of others, has to own himself uncertain whether he may not have miscalculated his own, — withdraws from the action of the story with the reflection that God will not have us break into His council-house, or spy out His hidden mysteries. "We must wait His time with watching and prayer — with 8o PENAL PREVISION. fear and with hope. I came hither the stern seer — the proud prophet, skilled, as I thought, to instruct princes, and gifted even with supernatural powers, but burdened with a weight which I deemed no shoulders but mine could have borne. But my bands have been broken ! I go hence humble in mine ignorance," etc. In Scott's other and less popular Tale of the Crusaders, Eveline deprecates the Lady of Baldringham's offer to show her niece how the balance of fate inclines, and shrinks from the asserted privilege " enjoyed" by their house of looking forward beyond the points of present time, and seeing in the very bud the thorns or flowers which are one day to encircle their head. " For my own sake, noble kinswoman," answered Eveline, " I would decline such fore- knowledge, even were it possible to acquire it without trans- gressing the rules of the Church. Could I have foreseen ' what has befallen me within these last unhappy days, I had lost the enjoyment of every happy moment before that time." So again reasons the Italian adept, Baptista Damiotti, in one of Sir Walter's shorter tales, when dismissing the two agitated ladies who have been consulting his magic mirror. " Few," he added, in a melancholy tone, " leave this house as well in ! health as they entered it. t Such being the consequence of,' seeking knowledge by mysterious means, I leave you to judge of the condition of those who have the power of grati- fying such irregular curiosity." Cowper observes in one of his letters that man often prophesies without knowing it; but that did he foresee, what is always foreseen by him who dictates what he supposes to be his own, he would suffer by anticipation as well as by consequence ; and wish perhaps as ardently for the happy ignorance to which he is at present so much indebted, as some have foolishly and inconsiderately done, for a knowledge that would be but another name for misery. Even in the ecstasy of rapturous foresight the Seer exclaims, " Visions of glory, spare my aching sight, Ye unborn ages, crowd not on my soul I" When Harold and Haco, "pale king and dark youth," in PENAL PREVISION. 81 Lord Lytton's historical novel, would read the riddle of the future, and " climb to heaven through the mysteries of hell," the witch bids them — poor "worms" — crawl back to the clay — to the earth : " One such night as the hag ye despise enjoys as her sport and her glee, would freeze your veins, and sear the life in your eyeballs/ ' etc., etc. What says the wizard, again, in Tasso ? " But that I should the sure events unfold Of things to come, or destinies foretel, Too rash is your desire, your wish too bold. " Cagliostro, professing to foresee the fate of La Perouse, is importunately asked by his fellow-guests at that memorable dinner-party commemorated by M. Dumas, why then he did not forewarn and save that brave man before setting out. At the very least, why not have told him to " beware of unknown isles M — that he might at any rate have had the chance of avoiding them ? But, " I assure you no, count," is the mystic's reply ; " and, if he had believed me, it would only have been the more horrible, for the unfortunate man would have seen himself approaching those isles destined to be fatal to him, without the power to escape from them. Therefore he would have died, not one, but a hundred deaths, for he would have gone through it all by anticipation. Hope, of which I should have deprived him, is what best sustains a man under all trials." " Yes," says Condorcet, the sceptical and sententious, " the veil which hides from us our future, is the only real good which God has vouchsafed to man." And what again, to the same purport, says the Hermit Monk to Alpine's Lord : — *' Roderick, it is a fearful strife For man endowed with mortal life, Whose shroud of sentient clay can still Feel feverish pang and fainting chill, . 'Tis hard for such to view, unfuii'd, The curtain of the future world. Yet witness every quaking limb, My sunken pulse, mine eyeballs dim, My soul with harrowing anguish torn, — This for my chieftain have I borne ! *' 32 PENAL PREVISION. And therefore, says Sir Thomas Browne, in his moralisings on the undesirableness of all such foresight, " and therefore the wisdom of astrologers, who speak of future things, hath wisely softened the severity of their doctrines; and even in their sad predictions, while they tell us of inclination not coaction from the stars, they kill us not with Stygian oaths and merciless necessity, but leave us hopes of evasion." Tant mieux for those who, like Hudibras, . . . " still gape to anticipate The cabinet-designs of fate, Apply to wizards to foresee What shall, and what shall never be ; " like Hudibras, bursting with the wish, 11 Oh, that I could enucleate And solve the problem of my fate ; Or find, by necromantic art, How far the destinies take my part ! " Vanity and vexation of spirit, these visionary previsions allJ Sacred, therefore, be, in Thomson's phrase, the veil that kindly' clouds a light too keen for mortals, . . . " for those that here in dust Must cheerful toil out their appointed years." In a feeling paragraph on the pains of a first separation, Miss Ferrier observes, or rather asks, if in the long and dreary interval that ensues, it were foreseen what griefs were to be borne, what ties severed, what hearts seared or broken — " who of woman born could bear the sight and live ? But 'tis in mercy these things are hidden from our eyes." Looking back upon a certain year's accumulated troubles, Mrs. Gaskeli's Margaret Hale " wondered how they had been borne. If she could have anticipated them, how she would have shrunk away and hid herself from the coming time !" And yet day by day, it is explained, had of itself, and by itself, been very endurable — small, keen, bright little spots of positive enjoy- ment having come sparkling into the very middle of sorrows. PENAL PREVISION. 83 Margaret Hale does but exemplify in prose what Home's Lady Randolph enunciates in sonorous verse : " Had some good angel oped to me the book Of Providence, and let me read my life, My heart had broke when I beheld the sum Of ills which one by one I have endured.'* Whereupon the lady's faithful Anna remarks : * " That God, whose ministers good angels are, Hath shut the book, in mercy to mankind. " Not but that this doctrine has found special recusants, if too generally taken, or, in their own instance, too particularly applied. " I have somewhere read," says Caleb Williams, " that Heaven in mercy hides from us the future incidents of our life. My own experience does not well accord with this assertion." And mentioning one critical occasion, he adds, that this once at least he should have been saved from insup- portable labour and indescribable anguish, could he have fore- seen what was then impending. — Sometimes the natural com- plaint is like that of Duke Ferdinand in John Webster's tragedy: " Oh, most imperfect light of human reason, That mak'st us so unhappy to foresee What we can least prevent ! " Sometimes a solace is found in such a reflection as this : "Then did I see how that presentient shroud Of grief, which raiseth many a fond complaint In mortal bosoms, is a friendly cloud. Storms fall less heavily which men fore-paint. And the struck spirit utterly would faint, Hurl'd from full joy." To be ignorant of evils to come, as well as forgetful of past, Sir Thomas Browne hails as a merciful provision of nature, "whereby we digest the mixture of our few and evil days." In another of his works the fine old physician would have us, in the heyday of prosperity, " think of sullen vicissi- tudes," but beat not our brains to foreknow them. " Be armed against such obscurities, rather by submission than fore-know- 84 PENAL PREVISION. ledge. The knowledge of future evils modifies present felicities, and there is more content in the uncertainty or ignorance of them. This favour our Saviour vouchsafed unto Peter, when he foretold not his death in plain terms, and so by an ambi- guous and cloudy delivery damped not the spirit of His dis- ciples. But in the assured fore-knowledge of the deluge, Noah lived many years under the affliction of a flood, and Jerusalem was taken unto Jeremy before it was besieged." Holy George Herbert is scarcely more quaint in verse than Sir Thomas Browne in prose : ' ' Only the present is thy part and fee. And happy thou, If, though thou didst not beat thy future brow, Thou couldst well see What present things required of thee. They ask enough ; why shouldst thou further go ? Raise not the mud Of future depths, but drink the clear and good. Dig not for woe In times to come ; for it will grow. Man and the present fit ; if he provide He breaks the square. This hour is mine : if for the next I care, I grow too wide, And do crusade upon death's side : For death each hour environs and surrounds. He that would know And care for future chances, cannot go Unto those grounds, But thro' a churchyard which them bounds.' 7 The assured knowledge of the exact minute of one's death may be treated religiously as a privilege, after the manner of appeals by gaol-chaplains to condemned-cell criminals ; as where the clergyman of the Tolbooth Church bade Wilson and Robertson, convicted Porteous rioters, not despair on account of the suddenness of the summons, " but rather to feel this comfort in their misery, that, though all who now [in that church] lifted the voice, or bent the knee in conjunction with PENAL PREVISION. 8? them, lay under the same sentence of certain death, they only had the advantage of knowing the precise moment at which it should be executed upon them." But how does Professor Henry Rogers treat the question, in its practical aspect, in his so-called " Vision about Prevision"?" The seer, or foreseer, in that fantasiestuck, when asked, concerning those who consult him as to the future, whether some at least do not wish to know the hour of their death — that they may duly prepare for it? answers, "That least of all. Not a soul will hear his tale told to the end ; they won't let us unveil to them the hour or the mode of their dissolution. . . . They prefer having a veil thrown over the closing scene of their life. Like other play-goers, they do not like death to be actually exhibited on the stage, and willingly let the curtain fall ere the catastrophe." Well, but the seer himself : he at any rate is above that weak- ness : he at any rate has inquired into the secret of his end ? " For what purpose ? " is his reply : is not that knowledge the very misery of prisoners in the condemned cell ? are they not accounted miserable precisely because they are to die just that day month ? will not hundreds, who pity them for that very circumstance, in fact die before them ? and yet are not these accounted happy in comparison, because they know it not ? " E'en the great shadow, Death, lost half its gloom In kind oblivion of impending doom," says one philosophical poet. Another, and a greater, in a poem on presentiments, has this among many stanzas addressed to them : " 'Tis said, that warnings ye dispense, Emboldened by a keener sense ; That men have lived for whom, With dread precision, ye made clear The hour that in a distant year Should knell them to the tomb. Unwelcome insight !" that is the comment, that the note of exclamation, with which Wordsworth commences the stanza, next ensuing. When death has invaded the quiet rectory in Miss Tytler's Huguenot story, 86 BEATIFIC VISION we have each servant mysteriously and fanatically delivering her experience in the matter of corpse-candles, death-spells, death-watches, etc., so that one might have learned for all one's life afterwards to look on one's death as a dark fate, haunting and hovering over one's own person and those of beloved friends, from which there is no escape, not even by prayer and fasting ; might have learned to " look out for it in dim prognostications, to watch for it, and anticipate its cruel blows in incipient madness. — 6 Our Bibles say we know not the day nor the hour/ said Grand'mere ; 6 but He knows — that is enough.' 99 One of La Bruyere's pensees sur la mort is, that " ce qu'il y a de certain dans la mort, est un peu adouci par ce qui est incertain : c'est un indefini dans le terns, qui tient quelque chose de Tinfini, et de ce qu'on appelle eternite." Byron indeed utters the remonstrant query, But his sigh was little in the spirit of the Psalmist's prayer to be made to know his end, and the measure of his days, what it was. BEATIFIC VISION AND OVERSHADOWING CLOUD. O the three favoured apostles it was granted by their JL Master to be eye-witnesses of His majesty, when they were with Him on the holy mount. They saw the fashion of His countenance altered, and His raiment become white and glistering. They saw with Him in glory Moses, whose burial-place no man knew, and Elijah, who was translated that he should not see death. And Peter said it was good to be there, and he desired to make that mount of transfigura- tion a dwelling-place, and to prolong the splendours of that beatific vision. Three tabernacles he proposed to rear, in that eager impetuosity which so often marked his character ; Ah ! why do darkening shades conceal The hour when man must cease to be ? " St. Luke ix. 34. AND OVERSHADOWING CLOUD. 87 at present scarcely knowing what he said, but conscious of a privileged apocalypse, and deprecating its speedy with- drawal. But " while he thus spake, there came a cloud, and overshadowed them; and they feared as they entered into the cloud." So it was again at a later day, and upon another mount, when the risen Master was asked by His assembled apostles would He at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? Brief was the reply, and no sooner uttered than, while they beheld— gazed wistfully, hopingly, longingly, on the Presence they had so lately lost, and were now eager to retain — while they beheld, " He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight." The overshadowing cloud to mar the sunshine is one of the commonest of common-places in man's experience. Perpetually being verified in prosaic reality, all too real, is the poet's image — *' Across the sunbeam, with a sudden gloom, A ghostly shadow flitted," Medio de fo?ite leporum surgit amari aliquid. The very exuberance of human happiness tends to suggest its opposite. Gibbon felt simply as a man when he felt what he has described in a memorable passage relating to his sense of gratified triumph at the conclusion of his magnum opus. It was between the hours of eleven and twelve, he records, on a calm night in June, that he wrote the last lines of his last page in a summer-house in his garden at Lausanne. After laying down his pen, he took several turns in a covered walk of acacias, which commanded a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. " I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting 33 BEATIFIC VISION leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my history the life of the historian must be short and precarious. " It is the common lot. It is but another reading of the complaint in Prior's pastorals — 6 'Yet thus beloved, thus loving to excess, Yet thus receiving and returning bliss, In this great moment, in this golden Now, * # * * # A melancholy tear afflicts my eye, And my heart labours with a sudden sigh ; Invading fears repel my coward joy, And ills foreseen the present bliss destroy.'' Or as elsewhere the same poet gloomily exclaims, and fruitlessly supplicates — " O impotent estate of human life, Where hope and fear maintain eternal strife ! Where fleeting joy does lasting doubt inspire, And most we question what we most desire ! Amongst Thy various gifts, great Heaven, bestow Our cup of love unmixed ; forbear to throw Bitter ingredients in ; nor pall the draught With nauseous grief." Hardly can it be called, though the author of "The Ring and the Book " does call it, — . . . ' ' strange how, even when most secure In our domestic peace, a certain dim And flitting shade can sadden all ; it seems A restlessness of heart, a silent yearning, A sense of something wanting, incomplete." A thought comes over us sometimes in our career of pleasure, Lord Lytton remarks, or in the exultation of our ambitious pursuits, a thought comes over us like a cloud, that around us and about us Death, Shame, Crime, Despair, are busy at their work. He tells us what he has read somewhere of an enchanted land where the inmates walked along voluptu- ous gardens, and built palaces, and heard music, and made merry ; while around and within the land were deep caverns, where the gnomes and the fiends dwelt; and ever and AND OVERSHADOWING CLOUD. 89 anon their groans and laughter, and the sounds of their un- utterable toils or ghastly revels, travelled to the upper air, mixing in an awful strangeness with the summer festivity and buoyant occupation of those above. And this he claims to be a picture of human life. Always there is a black spot in our sunshine, exclaims Mr. Carlyle ; and he tells us what it is, " the shadow of ourselves." At a seeming crisis of assured prosperity the heroine of a French roman is made to exclaim, " The future is all our own — the radiant future, without cloud or obstacle, pure in the immensity of its horizon, and extending beyond the reach of sight." But while she thus speaks her features suddenly assume an expression of touching melancholy, as she adds, in a voice of profound emotion, " And yet — at this very hour — so many unfortunate creatures are suffering pain ! " So with the young hero in one of Mr. Hannay's fictions : " In that moment he felt that he had attained a new stage of life ; yet, an instant's reaction seized him, as in every fruition through one's progress in time comes that curious moment's speck, the touch of an unseen hand, that seems to tell you, 6 Too much joy is not for you here/ It passed away, having just dashed his triumph as it always does." At a later stage in this adventurer's career the ebb of his spirits is made the text of a paragraph comparing them to a ship in the tropics, where a light wind comes, and dies again, and leaves you becalmed, or the horizon blackens suddenly and death seems impending in the unhealthy air. " Few things are more touching than that peculiar melancholy which some- times comes over one in theatres or at feasts, and reminds us of the dark element in nature and the heart . . . which chills the philosopher and the pleasure-taker. . . . When the light southerner of old got a glimpse of it he called for his lyre and his garlands ; but roses will not charm it away from the deep heart of the child of the Teuton, and he sees its awful shadow trembling in the wine." The English Opium- eater somewhere professes to derive from the spectacle of 90 BEATIFIC VISION. dancing, where the motion is continuous and the music not of a trivial character but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, " the very grandest form of passionate sadness which can belong to any spectacle whatever." Wordsworth is treating of presentiments when he says that — " The laughter of the Christmas hearth With sighs of self-exhausted mirth They feelingly reprove." And of such is Currer Bell too treating in a passage that tells of the writer's fancy budding fresh and her heart basking in sunshine; only these feelings "were well kept in check by the secret but ceaseless consciousness of anxiety lying in wait on enjoyment, like a tiger crouched in a jungle. The breathing of that beast of prey was in my ear always." 'E| fjftovrjs yap (fr>v€Tai to 8v