DREAMTHORP

A Book of Essays Written in the Country

by

ALEXANDER SMITH

LondonGeorge Routledge & Sons, LimitedNew York: E. P. Dutton & Co. First Edition (in this series), July 1905Reprinted November, 1907Reprinted April, 1912

Contents

 DREAMTHORP ON THE WRITING OF ESSAYS OF DEATH AND THE FEAR OF DYING WILLIAM DUNBAR A LARK'S FLIGHT CHRISTMAS MEN OF LETTERS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN TO HIMSELF A SHELF IN MY BOOKCASE GEOFFREY CHAUCER BOOKS AND GARDENS ON VAGABONDS

DREAMTHORP

It matters not to relate how or when I became a denizen of Dreamthorp;it will be sufficient to say that I am not a born native, but that Icame to reside in it a good while ago now. The several towns andvillages in which, in my time, I have pitched a tent did not please, for one obscure reason or another; this one was too large, t'other toosmall; but when, on a summer evening about the hour of eight, I firstbeheld Dreamthorp, with its westward-looking windows painted by sunset, its children playing in the single straggling street, the mothersknitting at the open doors, the fathers standing about in long whiteblouses, chatting or smoking; the great tower of the ruined castlerising high into the rosy air, with a whole troop of swallows--bydistance made as small as gnats--skimming about its rents andfissures;--when I first beheld all this, I felt instinctively that myknapsack might be taken off my shoulders, that my tired feet mightwander no more, that at last, on the planet, I had found a home. Fromthat evening I have dwelt here, and the only journey I am like now tomake, is the very inconsiderable one, so far at least as distance isconcerned, from the house in which I live to the graveyard beside theruined castle. There, with the former inhabitants of the place, Itrust to sleep quietly enough, and nature will draw over our heads hercoverlet of green sod, and tenderly tuck us in, as a mother hersleeping ones, so that no sound from the world shall ever reach us, andno sorrow trouble us any more. 

The village stands far inland; and the streams that trot through thesoft green valleys all about have as little knowledge of the sea as thethree-years' child of the storms and passions of manhood. Thesurrounding country is smooth and green, full of undulations; andpleasant country roads strike through it in every direction, bound fordistant towns and villages, yet in no hurry to reach them. On theseroads the lark in summer is continually heard; nests are plentiful inthe hedges and dry ditches; and on the grassy banks, and at the feet ofthe bowed dikes, the blue-eyed speedwell smiles its benison on thepassing wayfarer. On these roads you may walk for a year and encounternothing more remarkable than the country cart, troops of tawny childrenfrom the woods, laden with primroses, and at long intervals--for peoplein this district live to a ripe age--a black funeral creeping in fromsome remote hamlet; and to this last the people reverently doff theirhats and stand aside. Death does not walk about here often, but whenhe does, he receives as much respect as the squire himself. Everythinground one is unhurried, quiet, moss-grown, and orderly. Season followsin the track of season, and one year can hardly be distinguished fromanother. Time should be measured here by the silent dial, rather thanby the ticking clock, or by the chimes of the church. Dreamthorp canboast of a respectable antiquity, and in it the trade of the builder isunknown. Ever since I remember, not a single stone has been laid onthe top of another. The castle, inhabited now by jackdaws andstarlings, is old; the chapel which adjoins it is older still; and thelake behind both, and in which their shadows sleep, is, I suppose, asold as Adam. A fountain in the market-place, all mouths and faces andcurious arabesques, --as dry, however, as the castle moat, --has atradition connected with it; and a great noble riding through thestreet one day several hundred years ago, was shot from a window by aman whom he had injured. The death of this noble is the chief linkwhich connects the place with authentic history. The houses are old, and remote dates may yet be deciphered on the stones above the doors;the apple-trees are mossed and ancient; countless generations ofsparrows have bred in the thatched roofs, and thereon have chirped outtheir lives. In every room of the place men have been born, men havedied. On Dreamthorp centuries have fallen, and have left no more tracethan have last winter's snowflakes. This commonplace sequence andflowing on of life is immeasurably affecting. That winter morning whenCharles lost his head in front of the banqueting-hall of his ownpalace, the icicles hung from the eaves of the houses here, and theclown kicked the snowballs from his clouted shoon, and thought but ofhis supper when, at three o'clock, the red sun set in the purple mist. On that Sunday in June while Waterloo was going on, the gossips, aftermorning service, stood on the country roads discussing agriculturalprospects, without the slightest suspicion that the day passing overtheir heads would be a famous one in the calendar. Battles have beenfought, kings have died, history has transacted itself; but, allunheeding and untouched, Dreamthorp has watched apple-trees redden, andwheat ripen, and smoked its pipe, and quaffed its mug of beer, andrejoiced over its new-born children, and with proper solemnity carriedits dead to the churchyard. As I gaze on the village of my adoption Ithink of many things very far removed, and seem to get closer to them. The last setting sun that Shakspeare saw reddened the windows here, andstruck warmly on the faces of the hinds coming home from the fields. The mighty storm that raged while Cromwell lay a-dying made all theoak-woods groan round about here, and tore the thatch from the veryroofs I gaze upon. When I think of this, I can almost, so to speak, lay my hand on Shakspeare and on Cromwell. These poor walls werecontemporaries of both, and I find something affecting in the thought. The mere soil is, of course, far older than either, but _it_ does nottouch one in the same way. A wall is the creation of a human hand, thesoil is not. 

This place suits my whim, and I like it better year after year. Aswith everything else, since I began to love it I find it graduallygrowing beautiful. Dreamthorp--a castle, a chapel, a lake, astraggling strip of gray houses, with a blue film of smoke overall--lies embosomed in emerald. Summer, with its daisies, runs up toevery cottage door. From the little height where I am now sitting, Isee it beneath me. Nothing could be more peaceful. The wind and thebirds fly over it. A passing sunbeam makes brilliant a whitegable-end, and brings out the colours of the blossomed apple-treebeyond, and disappears. I see figures in the street, but hear themnot. The hands on the church clock seem always pointing to one hour. Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine. I make a frame of myfingers, and look at my picture. On the walls of the next Academy'sExhibition will hang nothing half so beautiful!

My village is, I think, a special favourite of summer's. Everywindow-sill in it she touches with colour and fragrance; everywhere shewakens the drowsy murmurs of the hives; every place she scents withapple-blossom. Traces of her hand are to be seen on the weir besidethe ruined mill; and even the canal, along which the barges come andgo, has a great white water-lily asleep on its olive-coloured face. Never was velvet on a monarch's robe so gorgeous as the green mossesthat be-ruff the roofs of farm and cottage, when the sunbeam slants onthem and goes. The old road out towards the common, and the hoarydikes that might have been built in the reign of Alfred, have not beenforgotten by the generous adorning season; for every fissure has itsmossy cushion, and the old blocks themselves are washed by theloveliest gray-green lichens in the world, and the large loose stoneslying on the ground have gathered to themselves the peacefulest mossycoverings. Some of these have not been disturbed for a century. Summer has adorned my village as gaily, and taken as much pleasure inthe task, as the people of old, when Elizabeth was queen, took in theadornment of the May-pole against a summer festival. And, just think, not only Dreamthorp, but every English village she has made beautifulafter one fashion or another--making vivid green the hill slope onwhich straggling white Welsh hamlets hang right opposite the sea;drowning in apple-blossom the red Sussex ones in the fat valley. Andthink, once more, every spear of grass in England she has touched witha livelier green; the crest of every bird she has burnished; every oldwall between the four seas has received her mossy and lichenyattentions; every nook in every forest she has sown with pale flowers, every marsh she has dashed with the fires of the marigold. And in thewonderful night the moon knows, she hangs--the planet on which so manymillions of us fight, and sin, and agonise, and die--a sphere ofglow-worm light. 

Having discoursed so long about Dreamthorp, it is but fair that Ishould now introduce you to her lions. These are, for the most part, of a commonplace kind; and I am afraid that, if you wish to findromance in them, you must bring it with you. I might speak of the oldchurch-tower, or of the church-yard beneath it, in which the villageholds its dead, each resting-place marked by a simple stone, on whichis inscribed the name and age of the sleeper, and a Scripture textbeneath, in which live our hopes of immortality. But, on the whole, perhaps it will be better to begin with the canal, which wears on itsolive-coloured face the big white water-lily already chronicled. Sucha secluded place is Dreamthorp that the railway does not come near, andthe canal is the only thing that connects it with the world. It standshigh, and from it the undulating country may be seen stretching awayinto the gray of distance, with hills and woods, and stains of smokewhich mark the sites of villages. Every now and then a horse comesstaggering along the towing-path, trailing a sleepy barge filled withmerchandise. A quiet, indolent life these bargemen lead in the summerdays. One lies stretched at his length on the sun-heated plank; hiscomrade sits smoking in the little dog-hutch, which I suppose he callsa cabin. Silently they come and go; silently the wooden bridge liftsto let them through. The horse stops at the bridge-house for a drink, and there I like to talk a little with the men. They serve instead ofa newspaper, and retail with great willingness the news they havepicked up in their progress from town to town. I am told theysometimes marvel who the old gentleman is who accosts them from beneatha huge umbrella in the sun, and that they think him either very wise orvery foolish. Not in the least unnatural! We are great friends, Ibelieve--evidence of which they occasionally exhibit by requesting meto disburse a trifle for drink-money. This canal is a great haunt ofmine of an evening. The water hardly invites one to bathe in it, and adelicate stomach might suspect the flavour of the eels caught therein;yet, to my thinking, it is not in the least destitute of beauty. Abarge trailing up through it in the sunset is a pretty sight; and theheavenly crimsons and purples sleep quite lovingly upon its glossyripples. Nor does the evening star disdain it, for as I walk along Isee it mirrored therein as clearly as in the waters of theMediterranean itself. 

The old castle and chapel already alluded to are, perhaps, to astranger, the points of attraction in Dreamthorp. Back from the housesis the lake, on the green sloping banks of which, with broken windowsand tombs, the ruins stand. As it is noon, and the weather is warm, let us go and sit on a turret. Here, on these very steps, as oldballads tell, a queen sat once, day after day, looking southward forthe light of returning spears. I bethink me that yesterday, no furthergone, I went to visit a consumptive shoemaker; seated here I can singleout his very house, nay, the very window of the room in which he islying. On that straw roof might the raven alight, and flap his sablewings. There, at this moment, is the supreme tragedy being enacted. Awoman is weeping there, and little children are looking on with a sorebewilderment. Before nightfall the poor peaked face of the bowedartisan will have gathered its ineffable peace, and the widow will beled away from the bedside by the tenderness of neighbours, and thecries of the orphan brood will be stilled. And yet this presentindubitable suffering and loss does not touch me like the sorrow of thewoman of the ballad, the phantom probably of a minstrel's brain. Theshoemaker will be forgotten--I shall be forgotten; and long after, visitors will sit here and look out on the landscape and murmur thesimple lines. But why do death and dying obtrude themselves at thepresent moment? On the turret opposite, about the distance of agun-shot, is as pretty a sight as eye could wish to see. Two youngpeople, strangers apparently, have come to visit the ruin. Neither theballad queen, nor the shoemaker down yonder, whose respirations aregetting shorter and shorter, touches them in the least. They are merryand happy, and the gray-beard turret has not the heart to thrust afoolish moral upon them. They would not thank him if he did, I daresay. Perhaps they could not understand him. Time enough! Twentyyears hence they will be able to sit down at his feet, and count griefswith him, and tell him tale for tale. Human hearts get ruinous in somuch less time than stone walls and towers. See, the young man hasthrown himself down at the girl's feet on a little space of grass. Inher scarlet cloak she looks like a blossom springing out of a creviceon the ruined steps. He gives her a flower, and she bows her face downover it almost to her knees. What did the flower say? Is it to hide ablush? He looks delighted; and I almost fancy I see a proud colour onhis brow. As I gaze, these young people make for me a perfect idyl. The generous, ungrudging sun, the melancholy ruin, decked, like madLear, with the flowers and ivies of forgetfulness and grief, andbetween them, sweet and evanescent, human truth and love!

Love!--does it yet walk the world, or is it imprisoned in poems andromances? Has not the circulating library become the sole home of thepassion? Is love not become the exclusive property of novelists andplaywrights, to be used by them only for professional purposes?Surely, if the men I see are lovers, or ever have been lovers, theywould be nobler than they are. The knowledge that he is belovedshould--_must_ make a man tender, gentle, upright, pure. While yet ayoungster in a jacket, I can remember falling desperately in love witha young lady several years my senior, --after the fashion of youngstersin jackets. Could I have fibbed in these days? Could I have betrayeda comrade? Could I have stolen eggs or callow young from the nest?Could I have stood quietly by and seen the weak or the maimed bullied?Nay, verily! In these absurd days she lighted up the whole world forme. To sit in the same room with her was like the happiness ofperpetual holiday; when she asked me to run a message for her, or to doany, the slightest, service for her, I felt as if a patent of nobilitywere conferred on me. I kept my passion to myself, like a cake, andnibbled it in private. Juliet was several years my senior, and had alover--was, in point of fact, actually engaged; and, in looking back, Ican remember I was too much in love to feel the slightest twinge ofjealousy. I remember also seeing Romeo for the first time, andthinking him a greater man than Caesar or Napoleon. The worth Icredited him with, the cleverness, the goodness, the everything! Heawed me by his manner and bearing. He accepted that girl's love coollyand as a matter of course: it put him no more about than a crown andsceptre puts about a king. What I would have given my life topossess--being only fourteen, it was not much to part with afterall--he wore lightly, as he wore his gloves or his cane. It did notseem a bit too good for him. His self-possession appalled me. If Ihad seen him take the sun out of the sky, and put it into his breeches'pocket, I don't think I should have been in the least degree surprised. Well, years after, when I had discarded my passion with my jacket, Ihave assisted this middle-aged Romeo home from a roystering wine-party, and heard him hiccup out his marital annoyances, with the strangestremembrances of old times, and the strangest deductions therefrom. Didthat man with the idiotic laugh and the blurred utterance ever love?Was he ever capable of loving? I protest I have my doubts. But whereare my young people? Gone! So it is always. We begin to moralise andlook wise, and Beauty, who is something of a coquette, and of anexacting turn of mind, and likes attentions, gets disgusted with ourwisdom or our stupidity, and goes off in a huff. Let the baggage go!

The ruined chapel adjoins the ruined castle on which I am now sitting, and is evidently a building of much older date. It is a mere shellnow. It is quite roofless, ivy covers it in part; the stone tracery ofthe great western window is yet intact, but the coloured glass is gonewith the splendid vestments of the abbot, the fuming incense, thechanting choirs, and the patient, sad-eyed monks, who muttered _Aves_, shrived guilt, and illuminated missals. Time was when this placebreathed actual benedictions, and was a home of active peace. Atpresent it is visited only by the stranger, and delights but theantiquary. The village people have so little respect for it, that theydo not even consider it haunted. There are several tombs in theinterior bearing knights' escutcheons, which time has sadly defaced. The dust you stand upon is noble. Earls have been brought here indinted mail from battle, and earls' wives from the pangs ofchild-bearing. The last trumpet will break the slumber of a righthonourable company. One of the tombs--the most perfect of all in pointof preservation--I look at often, and try to conjecture what itcommemorates. With all my fancies, I can get no further than the oldstory of love and death. There, on the slab, the white figures sleep;marble hands, folded in prayer, on marble breasts. And I like to thinkthat he was brave, she beautiful; that although the monument is worn bytime, and sullied by the stains of the weather, the qualities which itcommemorates--husbandly and wifely affection, courtesy, courage, knightly scorn of wrong and falsehood, meekness, penitence, charity--are existing yet somewhere, recognisable by each other. Theman who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul, is not likelyto lose it in any other. 

In summer I spend a good deal of time floating about the lake. Thelanding-place to which my boat is tethered is ruinous, like the chapeland palace, and my embarkation causes quite a stir in the sleepy littlevillage. Small boys leave their games and mud-pies, and gather roundin silence; they have seen me get off a hundred times, but theirinterest in the matter seems always new. Not unfrequently an idlecobbler, in red night-cap and leathern apron, leans on a broken stile, and honours my proceedings with his attention. I shoot off, and thehuman knot dissolves. The lake contains three islands, each with asolitary tree, and on these islands the swans breed. I feed the birdsdaily with bits of bread. See, one comes gliding towards me, withsuperbly arched neck, to receive its customary alms! How wildlybeautiful its motions! How haughtily it begs! The green pasture landsrun down to the edge of the water, and into it in the afternoons thered kine wade and stand knee-deep in their shadows, surrounded bytroops of flies. Patiently the honest creatures abide the attacks oftheir tormentors. Now one swishes itself with its tail, --now itsneighbour flaps a huge ear. I draw my oars alongside, and let my boatfloat at its own will. The soft blue heavenly abysses, the wanderingstreams of vapour, the long beaches of rippled clouds, are glassed andrepeated in the lake. Dreamthorp is silent as a picture, the voices ofthe children are mute; and the smoke from the houses, the blue pillarsall sloping in one angle, float upward as if in sleep. Grave and sternthe old castle rises from its emerald banks, which long ago came downto the lake in terrace on terrace, gay with fruits and flowers, andwith stone nymph and satyrs hid in every nook. Silent and empty enoughto-day! A flock of daws suddenly bursts out from a turret, and roundand round they wheel, as if in panic. Has some great scandal exploded?Has a conspiracy been discovered? Has a revolution broken out? Theexcitement has subsided, and one of them, perched on the oldbanner-staff, chatters confidentially to himself as he, sideways, eyesthe world beneath him. Floating about thus, time passes swiftly, for, before I know where I am, the kine have withdrawn from the lake tocouch on the herbage, while one on a little height is lowing for themilkmaid and her pails. Along the road I see the labourers coming homefor supper, while the sun setting behind me makes the village windowsblaze; and so I take out my oars, and pull leisurely through watersfaintly flushed with evening colours. 

I do not think that Mr. Buckle could have written his "History ofCivilization" in Dreamthorp, because in it books, conversation, and theother appurtenances of intellectual life, are not to be procured. I amacquainted with birds, and the building of nests--with wild-flowers, and the seasons in which they blow, --but with the big world far away, with what men and women are thinking, and doing, and saying, I amacquainted only through the _Times_, and the occasional magazine orreview, sent by friends whom I have not looked upon for years, but bywhom, it seems, I am not yet forgotten. The village has but fewintellectual wants, and the intellectual supply is strictly measured bythe demand. Still there is something. Down in the village, andopposite the curiously-carved fountain, is a schoolroom which canaccommodate a couple of hundred people on a pinch. There are ourpublic meetings held. Musical entertainments have been given there bya single performer. In that schoolroom last winter an Americanbiologist terrified the villagers, and, to their simple understandings, mingled up the next world with this. Now and again some rare bird ofan itinerant lecturer covers dead walls with posters, yellow and blue, and to that schoolroom we flock to hear him. His rounded periods theeloquent gentleman devolves amidst a respectful silence. His audiencedo not understand him, but they see that the clergyman does, and thedoctor does; and so they are content, and look as attentive and wise aspossible. Then, in connexion with the schoolroom, there is a publiclibrary, where books are exchanged once a month. This library is akind of Greenwich Hospital for disabled novels and romances. Each ofthese books has been in the wars; some are unquestionable antiques. The tears of three generations have fallen upon their dusky pages. Theheroes and the heroines are of another age than ours. Sir CharlesGrandison is standing with his hat under his arm. Tom Jones plops fromthe tree into the water, to the infinite distress of Sophia. Mosescomes home from market with his stock of shagreen spectacles. Lovers, warriors, and villains, --as dead to the present generation of readersas Cambyses, --are weeping, fighting, and intriguing. These books, tattered and torn as they are, are read with delight to-day. Theviands are celestial if set forth on a dingy table-cloth. The gaps andchasms which occur in pathetic or perilous chapters are felt to bepersonal calamities. It is with a certain feeling of tenderness that Ilook upon these books; I think of the dead fingers that have turnedover the leaves, of the dead eyes that have travelled along the lines. An old novel has a history of its own. When fresh and new, and beforeit had breathed its secret, it lay on my lady's table. She killed theweary day with it, and when night came it was placed beneath herpillow. At the seaside a couple of foolish heads have bent over it, hands have touched and tingled, and it has heard vows and protestationsas passionate as any its pages contained. Coming down in the world, Cinderella in the kitchen has blubbered over it by the light of asurreptitious candle, conceiving herself the while the magnificentGeorgiana, and Lord Mordaunt, Georgiana's lover, the pot-boy round thecorner. Tied up with many a dingy brother, the auctioneer knocks thebundle down to the bidder of a few pence, and it finds its way to thequiet cove of some village library, where with some difficulty--as iffrom want of teeth--and with numerous interruptions--as if from lack ofmemory--it tells its old stories, and wakes tears, and blushes, andlaughter as of yore. Thus it spends its age, and in a few years itwill become unintelligible, and then, in the dust-bin, like poor humanmortals in the grave, it will rest from all its labours. It isimpossible to estimate the benefit which such books have conferred. How often have they loosed the chain of circumstance! What unfamiliartears--what unfamiliar laughter they have caused! What chivalry andtenderness they have infused into rustic loves! Of what weary hoursthey have cheated and beguiled their readers! The big, solemnhistory-books are in excellent preservation; the story-books aredefaced and frayed, and their out-of-elbows, condition is their pride, and the best justification of their existence. They are tashed, asroses are, by being eagerly handled and smelt. I observe, too, thatthe most ancient romances are not in every case the most severely worn. It is the pace that tells in horses, men, and books. There are Nestorswonderfully hale; there are juveniles in a state of dilapidation. Oneof the youngest books, "The Old Curiosity Shop, " is absolutely fallingto pieces. That book, like Italy, is possessor of the fatal gift; buthappily, in its case, every thing can be rectified ay a new edition. We have buried warriors and poets, princes and queens, but no one ofthese was followed to the grave by sincerer mourners than was LittleNell. 

Besides the itinerant lecturer, and the permanent library, we have theSunday sermon. These sum up the intellectual aids and furtherances ofthe whole place. We have a church and a chapel, and I attend both. The Dreamthorp people are Dissenters, for the most part; why, I nevercould understand; because dissent implies a certain intellectualeffort. But Dissenters they are, and Dissenters they are likely toremain. In an ungainly building, filled with hard gaunt pews, withoutan organ, without a touch of colour in the windows, with nothing tostir the imagination or the devotional sense, the simple peopleworship. On Sunday, they are put upon a diet of spiritual bread andwater. Personally, I should desire more generous food. But thelabouring people listen attentively, till once they fall asleep, andthey wake up to receive the benediction with a feeling of having donetheir duty. They know they ought to go to chapel, and they go. I golikewise, from habit, although I have long ago lost the power offollowing a discourse. In my pew, and whilst the clergyman is goingon, I think of the strangest things--of the tree at the window, of thecongregation of the dead outside, of the wheat-fields and thecorn-fields beyond and all around. And the odd thing is, that it isduring sermon only that my mind flies off at a tangent and busiesitself with things removed from the place and the circumstances. Whenever it is finished fancy returns from her wanderings, and I amalive to the objects around me. The clergyman knows my humour, and isgood Christian enough to forgive me; and he smiles good-humouredly whenI ask him to let me have the chapel keys, that I may enter, when in themood, and preach a sermon to myself. To my mind, an empty chapel isimpressive; a crowded one, comparatively a commonplace affair. Alone, I could choose my own text, and my silent discourse would not bewithout its practical applications. 

An idle life I live in this place, as the world counts it; but then Ihave the satisfaction of differing from the world as to the meaning ofidleness. A windmill twirling its arms all day is admirable only whenthere is corn to grind. Twirling its arms for the mere barren pleasureof twirling them, or for the sake of looking busy, does not deserve anyrapturous paean of praise. I must be made happy after my own fashion, not after the fashion of other people. Here I can live as I please, here I can throw the reins on the neck of my whim. Here I play with myown thoughts; here I ripen for the grave. 

ON THE WRITING OF ESSAYS

I have already described my environments and my mode of life, and outof both I contrive to extract a very tolerable amount of satisfaction. Love in a cottage, with a broken window to let in the rain, is not myidea of comfort; no more is Dignity, walking forth richly clad, to whomevery head uncovers, every knee grows supple. Bruin in winter-timefondly sucking his own paws, loses flesh; and love, feeding uponitself, dies of inanition. Take the candle of death in your hand, andwalk through the stately galleries of the world, and their splendidfurniture and array are as the tinsel armour and pasteboard goblets ofa penny theatre; fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory themelancholy blazon on a coffin lid. We argue fiercely about happiness. One insists that she is found in the cottage which the hawthorn shades. Another that she is a lady of fashion, and treads on cloth of gold. Wisdom, listening to both, shakes a white head, and considers that "agood deal may be said on both sides. "

There is a wise saying to the effect that "a man can eat no more thanhe can hold. " Every man gets about the same satisfaction out of life. Mr. Suddlechops, the barber of Seven Dials, is as happy as Alexander atthe head of his legions. The business of the one is to depopulatekingdoms, the business of the other to reap beards seven days old; buttheir relative positions do not affect the question. The one workswith razors and soap-lather the other with battle-cries andwell-greaved Greeks. The one of a Saturday night counts up his shabbygains and grumbles; the other on _his_ Saturday night sits down andweeps for other worlds to conquer. The pence to Mr. Suddlechops are asimportant as are the worlds to Alexander. Every condition of life hasits peculiar advantages, and wisdom points these out and is contentedwith them. The varlet who sang--

 "A king cannot swagger Or get drunk like a beggar, Nor be half so happy as I"--

had the soul of a philosopher in him. The harshness of the parlour isrevenged at night in the servants' hall. The coarse rich man rates hisdomestic, but there is a thought in the domestic's brain, docile andrespectful as he looks, which makes the matter equal, which wouldmadden the rich man if he knew it--make him wince as with a shrewdesttwinge of hereditary gout. For insult and degradation are not withouttheir peculiar solaces. You may spit upon Shylock's gaberdine, but theday comes when he demands his pound of flesh; every blow, every insult, not without a certain satisfaction, he adds to the account running upagainst you in the day-book and ledger of his hate--which at the propertime he will ask you to discharge. Every way we look we seeeven-handed nature administering her laws of compensation. Grandeurhas a heavy tax to pay. The usurper rolls along like a god, surroundedby his guards. He dazzles the crowd--all very fine; but look beneathhis splendid trappings and you see a shirt of mail, and beneath _that_a heart cowering in terror of an air-drawn dagger. Whom did the memoryof Austerlitz most keenly sting? The beaten emperor? or the mightyNapoleon, dying like an untended watch-fire on St. Helena?

Giddy people may think the life I lead here staid and humdrum, but theyare mistaken. It is true, I hear no concerts, save those in which thethrushes are performers in the spring mornings. I see no pictures, save those painted on the wide sky-canvas with the colours of sunriseand sunset. I attend neither rout nor ball; I have no deeperdissipation than the tea-table; I hear no more exciting scandal thanquiet village gossip. Yet I enjoy my concerts more than I would thegreat London ones. I like the pictures I see, and think them betterpainted, too, than those which adorn the walls of the Royal Academy;and the village gossip is more after my turn of mind than the scandalsthat convulse the clubs. It is wonderful how the whole world reflectsitself in the simple village life. The people around me are full oftheir own affairs and interests; were they of imperial magnitude, theycould not be excited more strongly. Farmer Worthy is anxious about thenext market; the likelihood of a fall in the price of butter and eggshardly allows him to sleep o' nights. The village doctor--happily wehave only one--skirrs hither and thither in his gig, as if man couldneither die nor be born without his assistance. He is continuallystanding on the confines of existence, welcoming the new-comer, biddingfarewell to the goer-away. And the robustious fellow who sits at thehead of the table when the Jolly Swillers meet at the Blue Lion onWednesday evenings is a great politician, sound of lung metal, andwields the village in the taproom, as my Lord Palmerston wields thenation in the House. His listeners think him a wiser personage thanthe Premier, and he is inclined to lean to that opinion himself. Ifind everything here that other men find in the big world. London isbut a magnified Dreamthorp. 

And just as the Rev. Mr. White took note of the ongoings of the seasonsin and around Hampshire Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks inthe tall elms, looked after the swallows in the cottage and rectoryeaves, played the affectionate spy on the private lives of chaffinchand hedge-sparrow, was eaves-dropper to the solitary cuckoo; so here Ikeep eye and ear open; take note of man, woman, and child; find many apregnant text imbedded in the commonplace of village life; and, out ofwhat I see and hear, weave in my own room my essays as solitary as thespider weaves his web in the darkened corner. The essay, as a literaryform, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded by some centralmood--whimsical, serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the essay, from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoongrows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern theinfinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires to start business with. Jacques, in"As You Like It, " had the makings of a charming essayist. It is notthe essayist's duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysicalmorasses, to cancel abuses, any more than it is the duty of the poet todo these things. Incidentally he may do something in that way, just asthe poet may, but it is not his duty, and should not be expected ofhim. Skylarks are primarily created to sing, although a whole choir ofthem may be baked in pies and brought to table; they were born to makemusic, although they may incidentally stay the pangs of vulgar hunger. The essayist is a kind of poet in prose, and if questioned harshly asto his uses, he might be unable to render a better apology for hisexistence than a flower might. The essay should be pure literature asthe poem is pure literature. The essayist wears a lance, but he caresmore for the sharpness of its point than for the pennon that flutterson it, than for the banner of the captain under whom he serves. Heplays with death as Hamlet plays with Yorick's skull, and he reads themorals--strangely stern, often, for such fragrant lodging--which arefolded up in the bosoms of roses. He has no pride, and is deficient ina sense of the congruity and fitness of things. He lifts a pebble fromthe ground, and puts it aside more carefully than any gem; and on anail in a cottage-door he will hang the mantle of his thought, heavilybrocaded with the gold of rhetoric. He finds his way into the Elysianfields through portals the most shabby and commonplace. 

The essayist plays with his subject, now whimsical, now in grave, nowin melancholy mood. He lies upon the idle grassy bank, like Jacques, letting the world flow past him, and from this thing and the other heextracts his mirth and his moralities. His main gift is an eye todiscover the suggestiveness of common things; to find a sermon in themost unpromising texts. Beyond the vital hint, the first step, hisdiscourses are not beholden to their titles. Let him take up the mosttrivial subject, and it will lead him away to the great questions overwhich the serious imagination loves to brood, --fortune, mutability, death, --just as inevitably as the runnel, trickling among the summerhills, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea; or as, turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are ledfinally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into the open country, withits waste places and its woods, where you are lost in a sense ofstrangeness and solitariness. The world is to the meditative man whatthe mulberry plant is to the silkworm. The essay-writer has no lack ofsubject-matter. He has the day that is passing over his head; and, ifunsatisfied with that, he has the world's six thousand years todepasture his gay or serious humour upon. I idle away my time here, and I am finding new subjects every hour. Everything I see or hear isan essay in bud. The world is everywhere whispering essays, and oneneed only be the world's amanuensis. The proverbial expression whichlast evening the clown dropped as he trudged homeward to supper, thelight of the setting sun on his face, expands before me to a dozenpages. The coffin of the pauper, which to-day I saw carried carelesslyalong, is as good a subject as the funeral procession of an emperor. Craped drum and banner add nothing to death; penury and disrespect takenothing away. Incontinently my thought moves like a slow-paced hearsewith sable nodding plumes. Two rustic lovers, whispering between thedarkening hedges, is as potent to project my mind into the tenderpassion as if I had seen Romeo touch the cheek of Juliet in themoon-light garden. Seeing a curly-headed child asleep in the sunshinebefore a cottage door is sufficient excuse for a discourse onchildhood; quite as good as if I had seen infant Cain asleep in the lapof Eve with Adam looking on. A lark cannot rise to heaven withoutraising as many thoughts as there are notes in its song. Dawn cannotpour its white light on my village without starting from their dim laira hundred reminiscences; nor can sunset burn above yonder trees in thewest without attracting to itself the melancholy of a lifetime. Whenspring unfolds her green leaves I would be provoked to indite an essayon hope and youth, were it not that it is already writ in the carols ofthe birds; and I might be tempted in autumn to improve the occasion, were it not for the rustle of the withered leaves as I walk through thewoods. Compared with that simple music, the saddest-cadenced wordshave but a shallow meaning. 

The essayist who feeds his thoughts upon the segment of the world whichsurrounds him cannot avoid being an egotist; but then his egotism isnot unpleasing. If he be without taint of boastfulness, ofself-sufficiency, of hungry vanity, the world will not press the chargehome. If a man discourses continually of his wines, his plate, histitled acquaintances, the number and quality of his horses, hismen-servants and maid-servants, he must discourse very skilfully indeedif he escapes being called a coxcomb. If a man speaks of death--tellsyou that the idea of it continually haunts him, that he has the mostinsatiable curiosity as to death and dying, that his thought mines inchurchyards like a "demon-mole"--no one is specially offended, and thatthis is a dull fellow is the hardest thing likely to be said of him. Only, the egotism that overcrows you is offensive, that exalts triflesand takes pleasure in them, that suggests superiority in matters ofequipage and furniture; and the egotism is offensive, because it runscounter to and jostles your self-complacency. The egotism which risesno higher than the grave is of a solitary and a hermit kind--it crossesno man's path, it disturbs no man's _amour propre_. You may offend aman if you say you are as rich as he, as wise as he, as handsome as he. You offend no man if you tell him that, like him, you have to die. Theking, in his crown and coronation robes, will allow the beggar to claimthat relationship with him. To have to die is a distinction of whichno man is proud. The speaking about one's self is not necessarilyoffensive. A modest, truthful man speaks better about himself thanabout anything else, and on that subject his speech is likely to bemost profitable to his hearers. Certainly, there is no subject withwhich he is better acquainted, and on which he has a better title to beheard. And it is this egotism, this perpetual reference to self, inwhich the charm of the essayist resides. If a man is worth knowing atall, he is worth knowing well. The essayist gives you his thoughts, and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them. He has nothing toconceal; he throws open his doors and windows, and lets him enter whowill. You like to walk round peculiar or important men as you like towalk round a building, to view it from different points, and indifferent lights. Of the essayist, when his mood is communicative, youobtain a full picture. You are made his contemporary and familiarfriend. You enter into his humours and his seriousness. You are madeheir of his whims, prejudices, and playfulness. You walk through thewhole nature of him, as you walk through the streets of Pompeii, looking into the interior of stately mansions, reading the satiricalscribblings on the walls. And the essayist's habit of not only givingyou his thoughts, but telling you how he came by them, is interesting, because it shows you by what alchemy the ruder world becomes transmutedinto the finer. We like to know the lineage of ideas, just as we liketo know the lineage of great earls and swift race-horses. We like toknow that the discovery of the law of gravitation was born of the fallof an apple in an English garden on a summer afternoon. Essays writtenafter this fashion are racy of the soil in which they grow, as youtaste the larva in the vines grown on the slopes of Etna, they say. There is a healthy Gascon flavour in Montaigne's Essays; and CharlesLamb's are scented with the primroses of Covent Garden. 

The essayist does not usually appear early in the literary history of acountry: he comes naturally after the poet and the chronicler. Hishabit of mind is leisurely; he does not write from any special stressof passionate impulse; he does not create material so much as hecomments upon material already existing. It is essential for him thatbooks should have been written, and that they should, at least to someextent, have been read and digested. He is usually full of allusionsand references, and these his reader must be able to follow andunderstand. And in this literary walk, as in most others, the giantscame first: Montaigne and Lord Bacon were our earliest essayists, and, as yet, they are our best. In point of style, these essays aredifferent from anything that could now be produced. Not only is thethinking different--the manner of setting forth the thinking isdifferent also. We despair of reaching the thought, we despair equallyof reaching the language. We can no more bring back their turns ofsentence than we can bring back their tournaments. Montaigne, in hisserious moods, has a curiously rich and intricate eloquence; andBacon's sentence bends beneath the weight of his thought, like a branchbeneath the weight of its fruit. Bacon seems to have written hisessays with Shakspeare's pen. There is a certain want of ease aboutthe old writers which has an irresistible charm. The language flowslike a stream over a pebbled bed, with propulsion, eddy, and sweetrecoil--the pebbles, if retarding movement, giving ring and dimple tothe surface, and breaking the whole into babbling music. There is aceremoniousness in the mental habits of these ancients. Theirintellectual garniture is picturesque, like the garniture of theirbodies. Their thoughts are courtly and high mannered. A singularanalogy exists between the personal attire of a period and its writtenstyle. The peaked beard, the starched collar, the quilted doublet, have their correspondences in the high sentence and elaborate ornament(worked upon the thought like figures upon tapestry) of Sidney andSpenser. In Pope's day men wore rapiers, and their weapons theycarried with them into literature, and frequently unsheathed them too. They knew how to stab to the heart with an epigram. Style went outwith the men who wore knee-breeches and buckles in their shoes. Wewrite more easily now; but in our easy writing there is ever a taint offlippancy: our writing is to theirs, what shooting-coat and wide-awakeare to doublet and plumed hat. 

Montaigne and Bacon are our earliest and greatest essayists, andlikeness and unlikeness exist between the men. Bacon wasconstitutionally the graver nature. He writes like one on whom pressesthe weight of affairs, and he approaches a subject always on itsserious side. He does not play with it fantastically. He livesamongst great ideas, as with great nobles, with whom he dare not be toofamiliar. In the tone of his mind there is ever something imperial. When he writes on building, he speaks of a palace with spaciousentrances, and courts, and banqueting-halls; when he writes on gardens, he speaks of alleys and mounts, waste places and fountains, of a garden"which is indeed prince-like. " To read over his table of contents, islike reading over a roll of peers' names. We have, taking them as theystand, essays treating _Of Great Place, Of Boldness, Of Goodness, andGoodness of Nature, Of Nobility, Of Seditions and Troubles, Of Atheism, Of Superstition, Of Travel, Of Empire, Of Counsel_, --a book plainly tolie in the closets of statesmen and princes, and designed to nurturethe noblest natures. Bacon always seems to write with his ermine on. Montaigne was different from all this. His table of contents reads, incomparison, like a medley, or a catalogue of an auction. He was quiteas wise as Bacon; he could look through men quite as clearly, andsearch them quite as narrowly; certain of his moods were quite asserious, and in one corner of his heart he kept a yet profoundermelancholy; but he was volatile, a humourist, and a gossip. He couldbe dignified enough on great occasions, but dignity and great occasionsbored him. He could stand in the presence with propriety enough, butthen he got out of the presence as rapidly as possible. When, in thethirty-eighth year of his age, he--somewhat world-weary, and with morescars on his heart than he cared to discover--retired to his chateau, he placed his library "in the great tower overlooking the entrance tothe court, " and over the central rafter he inscribed in large lettersthe device--"I DO NOT UNDERSTAND; I PAUSE; I EXAMINE. " When he beganto write his Essays he had no great desire to shine as an author; hewrote simply to relieve teeming heart and brain. The best method tolay the spectres of the mind is to commit them to paper. Speaking ofthe Essays, he says, "This book has a domestic and private object. Itis intended for the use of my relations and friends; so that, when theyhave lost me, which they will soon do, they may find in it somefeatures of my condition and humours; and by this means keep up morecompletely, and in a more lively manner, the knowledge they have ofme. " In his Essays he meant to portray himself, his habits, his modesof thought, his opinions, what fruit of wisdom he had gathered fromexperience sweet and bitter; and the task he has executed withwonderful fidelity. He does not make himself a hero. Cromwell wouldhave his warts painted; and Montaigne paints his, and paints them toowith a certain fondness. He is perfectly tolerant of himself and ofeverybody else. Whatever be the subject, the writing flows on easy, equable, self-satisfied, almost always with a personal anecdotefloating on the surface. Each event of his past life he considers afact of nature; creditable or the reverse, there it is; sometimes to bespeculated upon, not in the least to be regretted. If it is worthnothing else, it may be made the subject of an essay, or, at least, beuseful as an illustration. We have not only his thoughts, we see alsohow and from what they arose. When he presents you with a bouquet, younotice that the flowers have been plucked up by the roots, and to theroots a portion of the soil still adheres. On his daily life hisEssays grew like lichens upon rocks. If a thing is useful to him, heis not squeamish as to where he picks it up. In his eye there isnothing common or unclean; and he accepts a favour as willingly from abeggar as from a prince. When it serves his purpose, he quotes atavern catch, or the smart saying of a kitchen wench, with as muchrelish as the fine sentiment of a classical poet, or the gallant _bonmot_ of a king. Everything is important which relates to himself. That his mustache, if stroked with his perfumed glove, or handkerchief, will retain the odour a whole day, is related with as much gravity asthe loss of a battle, or the march of a desolating plague. Montaigne, in his grave passages, reaches an eloquence intricate and highlywrought; but then his moods are Protean, and he is constantlyalternating his stateliness with familiarity, anecdote, humour, coarseness. His Essays are like a mythological landscape--you hear thepipe of Pan in the distance, the naked goddess moves past, the satyrleers from the thicket. At the core of him profoundly melancholy, andconsumed by a hunger for truth, he stands like Prospero in theenchanted island, and he has Ariel and Caliban to do his behests andrun his errands. Sudden alternations are very characteristic of him. Whatever he says suggests its opposite. He laughs at himself and hisreader. He builds his castle of cards for the mere pleasure ofknocking it down again. He is ever unexpected and surprising. Andwith this curious mental activity, this play and linked dance ofdiscordant elements, his page is alive and restless, like the constantflicker of light and shadow in a mass of foliage which the wind isstirring. 

Montaigne is avowedly an egotist; and by those who are inclined to makethis a matter of reproach, it should be remembered that the value ofegotism depends entirely on the egotist. If the egotist is weak, hisegotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full ofdistinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains apossession of the race. If Shakspeare had left personal revelations, how we should value them; if, indeed, he has not in some sense leftthem--if the tragedies and comedies are not personal revelationsaltogether--the multiform nature of the man rushing towards the sun atonce in Falstaff, Hamlet, and Romeo. But calling Montaigne an egotistdoes not go a great way to decipher him. No writer takes the reader somuch into his confidence, and no one so entirely escapes the penalty ofconfidence. He tells us everything about himself, we think; and whenall is told, it is astonishing how little we really know. Theesplanades of Montaigne's palace are thoroughfares, men from everyEuropean country rub clothes there, but somewhere in the building thereis a secret room in which the master sits, of which no one but himselfwears the key. We read in the Essays about his wife, his daughter, hisdaughter's governess, of his cook, of his page, "who was never foundguilty of telling the truth, " of his library, the Gascon harvestoutside his chateau, his habits of composition, his favouritespeculations; but somehow the man himself is constantly eluding us. His daughter's governess, his page, the ripening Gascon fields, arenever introduced for their own sakes; they are employed to illustrateand set off the subject on which he happens to be writing. A brawl inhis own kitchen he does not consider worthy of being specially setdown, but he has seen and heard everything: it comes in his way whentravelling in some remote region, and accordingly it finds a place. Heis the frankest, most outspoken of writers; and that very frankness. And outspokenness puts the reader off his guard. If you wish topreserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness. The Essays are full ofthis trick. The frankness is as well simulated as the grape-branchesof the Grecian artist which the birds flew towards and pecked. WhenMontaigne retreats, he does so like a skilful general, leaving hisfires burning. In other ways, too, he is an adept in putting hisreader out. He discourses with the utmost gravity, but you suspectmockery or banter in his tones. He is serious with the most triflingsubjects, and he trifles with the most serious. "He broods eternallyover his own thought, " but who can tell what his thought may be for thenonce? He is of all writers the most vagrant, surprising, and, to manyminds, illogical. His sequences are not the sequences of other men. His writings are as full of transformations as a pantomime or a fairytale. His arid wastes lead up to glittering palaces, hisbanqueting-halls end in a dog-hutch. He begins an essay abouttrivialities, and the conclusion is in the other world. And thepeculiar character of his writing, like the peculiar character of allwriting which is worth anything, arises from constitutional turn ofmind. He is constantly playing at fast and loose with himself and hisreader. He mocks and scorns his deeper nature; and, like Shakspeare inHamlet, says his deepest things in a jesting way. When he is gayest, be sure there is a serious design in his gaiety. Singularly shrewd andpenetrating--sad, not only from sensibility of exquisite nerve andtissue, but from meditation, and an eye that pierced the surfaces ofthings--fond of pleasure, yet strangely fascinated by death--sceptical, yet clinging to what the Church taught and believed--lazily possessedby a high ideal of life, yet unable to reach it, careless perhaps oftento strive after it, and with no very high opinion of his own goodness, or of the goodness of his fellows--and with all these serious elements, an element of humour mobile as flame, which assumed a variety of forms, now pure fun, now mischievous banter, now blistering scorn--humour inall its shapes, carelessly exercised on himself and his readers--withall this variety, complexity, riot, and contradiction almost ofintellectual forces within, Montaigne wrote his bewilderingEssays--with the exception of Rabelais, the greatest ModernFrenchman--the creator of a distinct literary form, and to whom, downeven to our own day, even in point of subject-matter, every essayisthas been more or less indebted. 

Bacon is the greatest of the serious and stately essayists, --Montaignethe greatest of the garrulous and communicative. The one gives you histhoughts on Death, Travel, Government, and the like, and lets you makethe best of them; the other gives you his on the same subjects, but hewraps them up in personal gossip and reminiscence. With the last it isnever Death or Travel alone: it is always Death one-fourth, andMontaigne three-fourths; or Travel one-fourth, and Montaignethree-fourths. He pours his thought into the water of gossip, andgives you to drink. He gilds his pill always, and he always gilds itwith himself. The general characteristics of his Essays have beenindicated, and it is worth while inquiring what they teach, whatpositive good they have done, and why for three centuries they havecharmed, and still continue to charm. 

The Essays contain a philosophy of life, which is not specially high, yet which is certain to find acceptance more or less with men who havepassed out beyond the glow of youth, and who have made trial of theactual world. The essence of his philosophy is a kind of cynicalcommon-sense. He will risk nothing in life; he will keep to the beatentrack; he will not let passion blind or enslave him; he will gatherround him what good he can, and will therewith endeavour to be content. He will be, as far as possible, self-sustained; he will not risk hishappiness in the hands of man, or of woman either. He is shy offriendship, he fears love, for he knows that both are dangerous. Heknows that life is full of bitters, and he holds it wisdom that a manshould console himself, as far as possible, with its sweets, theprincipal of which are peace, travel, leisure, and the writing ofessays. He values obtainable Gascon bread and cheese more than theunobtainable stars. He thinks crying for the moon the foolishest thingin the world. He will remain where he is. He will not deny that a newworld may exist beyond the sunset, but he knows that to reach the newworld there is a troublesome Atlantic to cross; and he is not in theleast certain that, putting aside the chance of being drowned on theway, he will be one whit happier in the new world than he is in theold. For his part he will embark with no Columbus. He feels that lifeis but a sad thing at best; but as he has little hope of making itbetter, he accepts it, and will not make it worse by murmuring. Whenthe chain galls him, he can at least revenge himself by making jests onit. He will temper the despotism of nature by epigrams. He has readAesop's fable, and is the last man in the world to relinquish theshabbiest substance to grasp at the finest shadow. 

Of nothing under the sun was Montaigne quite certain, except that everyman--whatever his station--might travel farther and fare worse; andthat the playing with his own thoughts, in the shape of essay-writing, was the most harmless of amusements. His practical acquiescence inthings does not promise much fruit, save to himself; yet in virtue ofit he became one of the forces of the world--a very visible agent inbringing about the Europe which surrounds us today. He lived in themidst of the French religious wars. The rulers of his country wereexecrable Christians, but most orthodox Catholics. The burning ofheretics was a public amusement, and the court ladies sat out the play. On the queen-mother and on her miserable son lay all the blood of theSt. Bartholomew. The country was torn asunder; everywhere was battle, murder, pillage, and such woeful partings as Mr. Millais hasrepresented in his incomparable picture. To the solitary humourousessayist this state of things was hateful. He was a good Catholic inhis easy way; he attended divine service regularly; he crossed himselfwhen he yawned. He conformed in practice to every rule of the Church;but if orthodox in these matters, he was daring in speculation. Therewas nothing he was not bold enough to question. He waged war after hispeculiar fashion with every form of superstition. He worked under thefoundations of priestcraft. But while serving the Reformed cause, hehad no sympathy with Reformers. If they would but remain quiet, butkeep their peculiar notions to themselves, France would rest! That aman should go to the stake for an opinion, was as incomprehensible tohim as that a priest or king should send him there for an opinion. Hethought the persecuted and the persecutors fools about equally matched. He was easy-tempered and humane--in the hunting-field he could not bearthe cry of a dying hare with composure--martyr-burning had consequentlyno attraction for such a man. His scepticism came into play, hismelancholy humour, his sense of the illimitable which surrounds man'slife, and which mocks, defeats, flings back his thought upon himself. Man is here, he said, with bounded powers, with limited knowledge, withan unknown behind, an unknown in front, assured of nothing but that hewas born, and that he must die; why, then, in Heaven's name should heburn his fellow for a difference of opinion in the matter of surplices, or as to the proper fashion of conducting devotion? Out of hisscepticism and his merciful disposition grew, in that fiercelyintolerant age, the idea of toleration, of which he was the apostle. Widely read, charming every one by his wit and wisdom, his influencespread from mind to mind, and assisted in bringing about the changewhich has taken place in European thought. His ideas, perhaps, did notspring from the highest sources. He was no ascetic, he loved pleasure, he was tolerant of everything except cruelty; but on that account weshould not grudge him his meed. It is in this indirect way that greatwriters take their place among the forces of the world. In the longrun, genius and wit side with the right cause. And the man fightingagainst wrong to-day is assisted, in a greater degree than perhaps heis himself aware, by the sarcasm of this writer, the metaphor of that, the song of the other, although the writers themselves professedindifference, or were even counted as belonging to the enemy. 

Montaigne's hold on his readers arises from many causes. There is hisfrank and curious self-delineation; _that_ interests, because it is therevelation of a very peculiar nature. Then there is the positive valueof separate thoughts imbedded in his strange whimsicality and humour. Lastly, there is the perennial charm of style, which is never aseparate quality, but rather the amalgam and issue of all the mentaland moral qualities in a man's possession, and which bears the samerelation to these that light bears to the mingled elements that make upthe orb of the sun. And style, after all, rather than thought, is theimmortal thing in literature. In literature, the charm of style isindefinable, yet all-subduing, just as fine manners are in social life. In reality, it is not of so much consequence what you say, as how yousay it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some singleirradiating word. "But Shadwell never _deviates_ into sense, " forinstance. Young Roscius, in his provincial barn, will repeat you thegreat soliloquy of Hamlet, and although every word may be given withtolerable correctness, you find it just as commonplace as himself; thegreat actor speaks it, and you "read Shakspeare as by a flash oflightning. " And it is in Montaigne's style, in the strange freaks andturnings of his thought, his constant surprises, his curiousalternations of humour and melancholy, his careless, familiar form ofaddress, and the grace with which everything is done, that his charmlies, and which makes the hundredth perusal of him as pleasant as thefirst. 

And on style depends the success of the essayist. Montaigne said themost familiar things in the finest way. Goldsmith could not be termeda thinker; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month ofdry weather, the shower brightens the dusty shrubbery of a suburbanvilla. The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that whenthought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, becalled in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new. Loveis an old story enough, but in every generation it is re-born, in thedowncast eyes and blushes of young maidens. And so, although hefluttered in Eden, Cupid is young to-day. If Montaigne had lived inDreamthorp, as I am now living, had he written essays as I am nowwriting them, his English Essays would have been as good as his Gasconones. Looking on, the country cart would not for nothing have passedhim on the road to market, the setting sun would be arrested in itssplendid colours, the idle chimes of the church would be translatedinto a thoughtful music. As it is, the village life goes on, and thereis no result. My sentences are not much more brilliant than thespeeches of the clowns; in my book there is little more life than thereis in the market-place on the days when there is no market. 

OF DEATH AND THE FEAR OF DYING

Let me curiously analyse eternal farewells, and the last pressures ofloving hands. Let me smile at faces bewept, and the nodding plumes andslow paces of funerals. Let me write down brave heroicalsentences--sentences that defy death, as brazen Goliath the hosts ofIsrael. 

"When death waits for us is uncertain, let us everywhere look for him. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; who haslearnt to die, has forgot to serve. There is nothing of evil in lifefor him who rightly comprehends that death is no evil; to know how todie delivers us from all subjection and constraint. _Paulus Aemilius_answered him whom the miserable _king of Macedon_, his prisoner, sentto entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, '_Let himmake that request to himself_. ' In truth, in all things, if nature donot help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to performanything to purpose. I am, in my own nature, not melancholy, butthoughtful; and there is nothing I have more continually entertainedmyself withal than the imaginations of death, even in the gayest andmost wanton time of my age. In the company of ladies, and in theheight of mirth, some have perhaps thought me possessed of somejealousy, or meditating upon the uncertainty of some imagined hope, whilst I was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some onesurprised a few days before with a burning fever, of which he died, returning from an entertainment like this, with his head full of idlefancies of love and jollity, as mine was then; and for aught I knew, the same destiny was attending me. Yet did not this thought wrinkle myforehead any more than any other. " . . . . "Why dost thou fear thislast day? It contributes no more to thy destruction than every one ofthe rest. The last step is not the cause of lassitude, it does butconfer it. Every day travels toward death; the last only arrives atit. These are the good lessons our mother nature teaches. I haveoften considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war theimage of death--whether we look upon it as to our own particulardanger, or that of another--should, without comparison, appear lessdreadful than at home in our own houses, (for if it were not so, itwould be an army of whining milksops, ) and that being still in allplaces the same, there should be, notwithstanding, much more assurancein peasants and the meaner sort of people, than others of betterquality and education; and I do verily believe, that it is thoseterrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out, that moreterrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of living, the cries of mothers, wives and children, the visits of astonished andaffected friends, the attendance of pale and blubbered servants, a darkroom set round with burning tapers, our beds environed with physiciansand divines; in fine, nothing but ghostliness and horror round aboutus, render it so formidable, that a man almost fancies himself dead andburied already. Children are afraid even of those they love best, andare best acquainted with, when disguised in a vizor, and so are we; thevizor must be removed as well from things as persons; which being takenaway, we shall find nothing underneath but the very same death that amean servant, or a poor chambermaid, died a day or two ago, without anymanner of apprehension or concern. " [1]

"Men feare _death_ as children feare to goe in the darke; and as thatnatural feare in children is increased with tales, so in the other. Certainly the contemplation of _death_ as the _wages of sinne_, andpassage to another world, is holy and religious; but the feare of it asa tribute unto nature, is weake. Yet in religious meditations there issometimes mixture of vanitie and of superstition. You shal reade insome of the friars' books of _mortification_, that a man should thinkeunto himself what the paine is if he have but his finger-end pressed ortortured; and thereby imagine what the pains of _death_ are when thewhole body is corrupted and dissolved; when many times _death_ passethwith lesse paine than the torture of a Lemme. For the most vitallparts are not the quickest of sense. Groanes and convulsions, and adiscoloured face, and friends weeping, and blackes and obsequies, andthe like, shew _death_ terrible. It is worthy the observing, thatthere is no passion in the minde of man so weake but it mates andmasters the feare of _death_; and therefore death is no such terribleenemy when a man hath so many attendants about him that can winne thecombat of him. _Revenge_ triumphs over _death_, love subjects it, honour aspireth to it, _griefe_ fleeth to it, _feare_ pre-occupieth it;nay, we read, after _Otho_ the emperour had slaine himselfe, _pitty_, (which is the tenderest of affections, ) provoked many to die, out ofmeer compassion to their soveraigne, and as the truest sort offollowers. . . . . It is as naturall to die as to be born; and to alittle infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other. He thatdies in an earnest pursuit is like one that is wounded in hot blood, who for the time scarce feels the hurt; and, therefore, a minde mixtand bent upon somewhat that is good, doth avert the sadness of _death_. But above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is _Nunc Dimittis_, when a man hath obtained worthy ends and expectations. Death hath thisalso; that it openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envie. "[2]

These sentences of the great essayists are brave and ineffectual asLeonidas and his Greeks. Death cares very little for sarcasm or trope;hurl at him a javelin or a rose, it is all one. We build aroundourselves ramparts of stoical maxims, edifying to witness, but when theterror comes these yield as the knots of river flags to the shoulder ofBehemoth. 

Death is terrible only in presence. When distant, or supposed to bedistant, we can call him hard or tender names, nay, even poke our poorfun at him. _Mr. Punch_, on one occasion, when he wished to ridiculethe useful-information leanings of a certain periodical publication, quoted from its pages the sentence, "Man is mortal, " and people werefound to grin broadly over the exquisite stroke of humour. Certainlythe words, and the fact they contain, are trite enough. Utter thesentence gravely in any company, and you are certain to provokelaughter. And yet some subtile recognition of the fact of death runsconstantly through the warp and woof of the most ordinary humanexistence. And this recognition does not always terrify. The spectrehas the most cunning disguises, and often when near us we are unawareof the fact of proximity. Unsuspected, this idea of death lurks in thesweetness of music; it has something to do with the pleasures withwhich we behold the vapours of morning; it comes between the passionatelips of lovers; it lives in the thrill of kisses. "An inch deeper, andyou will find the emperor. " Probe joy to its last fibre, and you willfind death. And it is the most merciful of all the merciful provisionsof nature, that a haunting sense of insecurity should deepen theenjoyment of what we have secured; that the pleasure of our warm humanday and its activities should to some extent arise from a vagueconsciousness of the waste night which environs it, in which no arm israised, in which no voice is ever heard. Death is the ugly fact whichnature has to hide, and she hides it well. Human life were otherwisean impossibility. The pantomime runs on merrily enough; but when onceHarlequin lifts his vizor, Columbine disappears, the jest is frozen onthe Clown's lips, and the hand of the filching Pantaloon is arrested inthe act. Wherever death looks, _there_ is silence and trembling. Butalthough on every man he will one day or another look, he is coy ofrevealing himself till the appointed time. He makes his approacheslike an Indian warrior, under covers and ambushes. We have our partsto play, and he remains hooded till they are played out. We areagitated by our passions, we busily pursue our ambitions, we areacquiring money or reputation, and all at once, in the centre of ourdesires, we discover the "Shadow feared of man. " And so nature foolsthe poor human mortal evermore. When she means to be deadly, shedresses her face in smiles; when she selects a victim, she sends him apoisoned rose. There is no pleasure, no shape of good fortune, no formof glory in which death has not hid himself, and waited silently forhis prey. 

And death is the most ordinary thing in the world. It is as common asbirths; it is of more frequent occurrence than marriages and theattainment of majorities. But the difference between death and otherforms of human experience lies in this, that we can gain no informationabout it. The dead man is wise, but he is silent. We cannot wring hissecret from him. We cannot interpret the ineffable calm which gatherson the rigid face. As a consequence, when our thought rests on deathwe are smitten with isolation and loneliness. We are without companyon the dark road; and we have advanced so far upon it that we cannothear the voices of our friends. It is in this sense of loneliness, this consciousness of identity and nothing more, that the terror ofdying consists. And yet, compared to that road, the most populousthoroughfare of London or Pekin is a desert. What enumerator will takefor us the census of dead? And this matter of death and dying, likemost things else in the world, may be exaggerated by our own fears andhopes. Death, terrible to look forward to, may be pleasant even tolook back at. Could we be admitted to the happy fields, and hear theconversations which blessed spirits hold, one might discover that toconquer death a man has but to die; that by that act terror is softenedinto familiarity, and that the remembrance of death becomes but as theremembrance of yesterday. To these fortunate ones death may be but adate, and dying a subject fruitful in comparisons, a matter on whichexperiences may be serenely compared. Meantime, however, _we_ have notyet reached that measureless content, and death scares, piques, tantalises, as mind and nerve are built. Situated as we are, knowingthat it is inevitable, we cannot keep our thoughts from resting on itcuriously, at times. Nothing interests us so much. The Highland seerpretended that he could see the winding-sheet high upon the breast ofthe man for whom death was waiting. Could we behold any such visiblesign, the man who bore it, no matter where he stood--even if he were aslave watching Caesar pass--would usurp every eye. At the coronationof a king, the wearing of that order would dim royal robe, quench thesparkle of the diadem, and turn to vanity the herald's cry. Deathmakes the meanest beggar august, and that augustness would assertitself in the presence of a king. And it is this curiosity with regardto everything related to death and dying which makes us treasure up thelast sayings of great men, and attempt to wring out of them tangiblemeanings. Was Goethe's "Light--light, more light!" a prayer, or astatement of spiritual experience, or simply an utterance of the factthat the room in which he lay was filling with the last twilight? Inconsonance with our own natures, we interpret it the one way or theother--_he_ is beyond our questioning. For the same reason it is thatmen take interest in executions--from Charles I. On the scaffold atWhitehall, to Porteous in the Grassmarket execrated by the mob. Thesemen are not dulled by disease, they are not delirious with fever; theylook death in the face, and what in these circumstances they say and dohas the strangest fascination for us. 

What does the murderer think when his eyes are forever blinded by theaccursed nightcap? In what form did thought condense itself betweenthe gleam of the lifted axe and the rolling of King Charles's head inthe saw-dust? This kind of speculation may be morbid, but it is notnecessarily so. All extremes of human experience touch us; and we haveall the deepest personal interest in the experience of death. Out ofall we know about dying we strive to clutch something which may breakits solitariness, and relieve us by a touch of companionship. 

To denude death of its terrible associations were a vain attempt. Theatmosphere is always cold around an iceberg. In the contemplation ofdying the spirit may not flinch, but pulse and heart, colour andarticulation, are always cowards. No philosophy will teach thembravery in the stern presence. And yet there are considerations whichrob death of its ghastliness, and help to reconcile us to it. Thethoughtful happiness of a human being is complex, and in certain movedmoments, which, after they have gone, we can recognise to have been ourhappiest, some subtle thought of death has been curiously intermixed. And this subtle intermixture it is which gives the happy moment itscharacter--which makes the difference between the gladness of a child, resident in mere animal health and impulse, and too volatile to beremembered, and the serious joy of a man, which looks before and after, and takes in both this world and the next. Speaking broadly, it may besaid that it is from some obscure recognition of the fact of death thatlife draws its final sweetness. An obscure, haunting recognition, ofcourse; for if more than that, if the thought becomes palpable, defined, and present, it swallows up everything. The howling of thewinter wind outside increases the warm satisfaction of a man in bed;but this satisfaction is succeeded by quite another feeling when thewind grows into a tempest, and threatens to blow the house down. Andthis remote recognition of death may exist almost constantly in a man'smind, and give to his life keener zest and relish. His lights may burnthe brighter for it, and his wines taste sweeter. For it is on thetapestry or a dim ground that the figures come out in the boldestrelief and the brightest colour. 

If we were to live here always, with no other care than how to feed, clothe, and house ourselves, life would be a very sorry business. Itis immeasurably heightened by the solemnity of death. The brutes dieeven as we; but it is our knowledge that we have to die that makes ushuman. If nature cunningly hides death, and so permits us to play outour little games, it is easily seen that our knowing it to beinevitable, that to every one of us it will come one day or another, isa wonderful spur to action. We really do work while it is calledto-day, because the night cometh when no man can work. We may notexpect it soon--it may not have sent us a single _avant-courier_--yetwe all know that every day brings it nearer. On the supposition thatwe were to live here always, there would be little inducement toexertion. But, having some work at heart, the knowledge that we maybe, any day, finally interrupted, is an incentive to diligence. Wenaturally desire to have it completed, or at least far advanced towardcompletion, before that final interruption takes place. And knowingthat his existence here is limited, a man's workings have reference toothers rather than to himself, and thereby into his nature comes a newinflux of nobility. If a man plants a tree, he knows that other handsthan his will gather the fruit; and when he plants it, he thinks quiteas much of those other hands as of his own. Thus to the poet there isthe dearer life after life; and posterity's single laurel leaf isvalued more than a multitude of contemporary bays. Even the manimmersed in money-making does not make money so much for himself as forthose who may come after him. Riches in noble natures have a doublesweetness. The possessor enjoys his wealth, and he heightens thatenjoyment by the imaginative entrance into the pleasure which his sonor his nephew may derive from it when he is away, or the high uses towhich he may turn it. Seeing that we have no perpetual lease of lifeand its adjuncts, we do not live for ourselves. And thus it is thatdeath, which we are accustomed to consider an evil, really acts for usthe friendliest part, and takes away the commonplace of existence. Mylife, and your life, flowing on thus day by day, is a vapid enoughpiece of business; but when we think that it must _close_, a multitudeof considerations, not connected with ourselves but with others, rushin, and vapidity vanishes at once. Life, if it were to flow on foreverand _thus_, would stagnate and rot. The hopes, and fears, and regrets, which move and trouble it, keep it fresh and healthy, as the sea iskept alive by the trouble of its tides. In a tolerably comfortableworld, where death is not, it is difficult to see from what quarterthese healthful fears, regrets, and hopes could come. As it is, thereare agitations and sufferings in our lots enough; but we must rememberthat it is on account of these sufferings and agitations that we becomecreatures breathing thoughtful breath. As has already been said, deathtakes away the commonplace of life. And positively, when one looks onthe thousand and one poor, foolish, ignoble faces of this world, andlistens to the chatter as poor and foolish as the faces, one, in orderto have any proper respect for them, is forced to remember thatsolemnity of death, which is silently waiting. The foolishest personwill look grand enough one day. The features are poor now, but thehottest tears and the most passionate embraces will not seem out ofplace _then_. If you wish to make a man look noble, your best courseis to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes outin death. The passions which agitate, distort, and change, are goneaway forever, and the features settle back into a marble calm, which isthe man's truest image. Then the most affected look sincere, the mostvolatile, serious--all noble, more or less. And nature will not besurprised into disclosures. The man stretched out there may have beenvoluble as a swallow, but now--when he could speak to somepurpose--neither pyramid nor sphinx holds a secret more tenaciously. 

Consider, then, how the sense of impermanence brightens beauty andelevates happiness. Melancholy is always attendant on beauty, and thatmelancholy brings out its keenness as the dark green corrugated leafbrings out the wan loveliness of the primrose. The spectator enjoysthe beauty, but his knowledge that _it_ is fleeting, and that _he_fleeting, adds a pathetic something to it; and by that something thebeautiful object and the gazer are alike raised. 

Everything is sweetened by risk. The pleasant emotion is mixed anddeepened by a sense of mortality. Those lovers who have neverencountered the possibility of last embraces and farewells are novicesin the passion. Sunset affects us more powerfully than sunrise, simplybecause it is a setting sun, and suggests a thousand analogies. Amother is never happier than when her eyes fill over her sleepingchild, never does she kiss it more fondly, never does she pray for itmore fervently; and yet there is more in her heart than visible redcheek and yellow curl; possession and bereavement are strangely mingledin the exquisite maternal mood, the one heightening the other. Allgreat joys are serious; and emotion must be measured by its complexityand the deepness of its reach. A musician may draw pretty notes enoughfrom a single key, but the richest music is that in which the wholeforce of the instrument is employed, in the production of which everykey is vibrating; and, although full of solemn touches and majestictones, the final effect may be exuberant and gay. Pleasures which risebeyond the mere gratification of the senses are dependant for theirexquisiteness on the number and variety of the thoughts which theyevoke. And that joy is the greatest which, while felt to be joy, caninclude the thought of death and clothe itself with that crowningpathos. And in the minds of thoughtful persons every joy does, more orless, with the crowning pathos clothe itself. 

In life there is nothing more unexpected and surprising than thearrivals and departures of pleasure. If we find it in one placeto-day, it is vain to seek it there to-morrow. You cannot lay a trapfor it. It will fall into no ambuscade, concert it ever so cunningly. Pleasure has no logic; it never treads in its own footsteps. Into ourcommonplace existence it comes with a surprise, like a pure white swanfrom the airy void into the ordinary village lake; and just as theswan, for no reason that can be discovered, lifts itself on its wingsand betakes itself to the void again, _it_ leaves us, and our solepossession is its memory. And it is characteristic of pleasure that wecan never recognise it to be pleasure till after it is gone. Happinessnever lays its finger on its pulse. If we attempt to steal a glimpseof its features it disappears. It is a gleam of unreckoned gold. Fromthe nature of the case, our happiness, such as in its degree it hasbeen, lives in memory. We have not the voice itself; we have only itsecho. We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once. And while in the very heart and structure of the happy moment therelurked an obscure consciousness of death, the memory in which pasthappiness dwells is always a regretful memory. This is why the tritestutterance about the past, youth, early love, and the like, has alwaysabout it an indefinable flavour of poetry, which pleases and affects. In the wake of a ship there is always a melancholy splendour. Thefinest set of verses of our modern time describes how the poet gazed onthe "happy autumn fields, " and remembered the "days that were no more. "After all, a man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else ishe rich, in nothing else is he poor. 

In our warm imaginative youth, death is far removed from us, andattains thereby a certain picturesqueness. The grim thought stands inthe ideal world as a ruin stands in a blooming landscape. The thoughtof death sheds a pathetic charm over everything then. The young mancools himself with a thought of the winding-sheet and the charnel, asthe heated dancer cools himself on the balcony with the night-air. Theyoung imagination plays with the idea of death, makes a toy of it, justas a child plays with edge-tools till once it cuts its fingers. Themost lugubrious poetry is written by very young and tolerablycomfortable persons. When a man's mood becomes really serious he haslittle taste for such foolery. The man who has a grave or two in hisheart, does not need to haunt churchyards. The young poet uses deathas an antithesis; and when he shocks his reader by some flippant use ofit in that way, he considers he has written something mightily fine. In his gloomiest mood he is most insincere, most egotistical, mostpretentious. The older and wiser poet avoids the subject as he doesthe memory of pain; or when he does refer to it, he does so in areverential manner, and with some sense of its solemnity and of themagnitude of its issues. It was in that year of revelry, 1814, andwhile undressing from balls, that Lord Byron wrote his "Lara, " as heinforms us. Disrobing, and haunted, in all probability, by eyes inwhose light he was happy enough, the spoiled young man, who thenaffected death-pallors, and wished the world to believe that he felthis richest wines powdered with the dust of graves, --of which wine, notwithstanding, he frequently took more than was good for him, --wrote, "That sleep the loveliest, since it dreams the least. "

The sleep referred to being death. This was meant to take away thereader's breath; and after performing the feat, Byron betook himself tohis pillow with a sense of supreme cleverness. Contrast with thisShakspeare's far out-looking and thought-heavy lines--lines which, under the same image, represent death--

 "To die--to sleep;-- To sleep! perchance to dream;--ay, there's the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come!"

And you see at once how a man's notions of death and dying are deepenedby a wider experience. Middle age may fear death quite as little asyouth fears it; but it has learned seriousness, and it has no heart topoke fun at the lean ribs, or to call it fond names like a lover, or tostick a primrose in its grinning chaps, and draw a strange pleasurefrom the irrelevancy. 

The man who has reached thirty, feels at times as if he had come out ofa great battle. Comrade after comrade has fallen; his own life seemsto have been charmed. And knowing how it fared with hisfriends--perfect health one day, a catarrh the next, blinds drawn down, silence in the house, blubbered faces of widow and orphans, intimationof the event in the newspapers, with a request that friends will acceptof it, the day after--a man, as he draws near middle age, begins tosuspect every transient indisposition; to be careful of being caught ina shower, to shudder at sitting in wet shoes; he feels his pulse, heanxiously peruses his face in a mirror, he becomes critical as to thecolour of his tongue. In early life illness is a luxury, and draws outtoward the sufferer curious and delicious tendernesses, which are feltto be a full over-payment of pain and weakness; then there is thepleasant period of convalescence, when one tastes a core and marrow ofdelight in meats, drinks, sleep, silence; the bunch of newly-pluckedflowers on the table, the sedulous attentions and patient forbearanceof nurses and friends. Later in life, when one occupies a post, and isin discharge of duties which are accumulating against recovery, illnessand convalescence cease to be luxuries. Illness is felt to be a cruelinterruption of the ordinary course of things, and the sick person isharassed by a sense of the loss of time and the loss of strength. Heis placed _hors de combat_; all the while he is conscious that thebattle is going on around him, and he feels his temporary withdrawal amisfortune. Of course, unless a man is very unhappily circumstanced, he has in his later illnesses all the love, patience, and attentionwhich sweetened his earlier ones; but then he cannot rest in them, andaccept them as before as compensation in full. The world is ever withhim; through his interests and his affections he has meshed himself inan intricate net-work of relationships and other dependences, and afatal issue--which in such cases is ever on the cards--would destroyall these, and bring about more serious matters than the shedding oftears. In a man's earlier illnesses, too, he had not only no suchdefinite future to work out, he had a stronger spring of life and hope;he was rich in time, and could wait; and lying in his chamber now, hecannot help remembering that, as Mr. Thackeray expresses it, therecomes at last an illness to which there may be no convalescence. Whatif that illness be already come? And so there is nothing left for him, but to bear the rod with patience, and to exercise a humble faith inthe Ruler of all. If he recovers, some half-dozen people will be madehappy; if he does not recover, the same number of people will be mademiserable for a little while, and, during the next two or three days, acquaintances will meet in the street--"You've heard of poor So-and-so?Very sudden! Who would have thought it? Expect to meet you at ----'son Thursday. Good-bye. " And so to the end. Your death and my deathare mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will bestripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt heartsclose again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and althoughwe are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who arenear us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not missus much either. 

We are curious as to death-beds and death-bed sayings; we wish to knowhow the matter stands; how the whole thing looks to the dying. Unhappily--perhaps, on the whole, happily--we can gather no informationfrom these. The dying are nearly as reticent as the dead. Theinferences we draw from the circumstances of death, the pallor, thesob, the glazing eye, are just as likely to mislead us as not. Manfredexclaims, "Old man, 'tis not so difficult to die!" Sterling wroteCarlyle "that it was all very strange, yet not so strange as it seemedto the lookers on. " And so, perhaps, on the whole it is. The worldhas lasted six thousand years now, and, with the exception of those atpresent alive, the millions who have breathed upon it--splendidemperors, horny-fisted clowns, little children, in whom thought hasnever stirred--_have_ died, and what they have done, we also shall beable to do. It may not be so difficult, may not be so terrible, as ourfears whisper. The dead keep their secrets, and in a little while weshall be as wise as they--and as taciturn. 

[1] Montaigne. 

[2] Bacon. 

WILLIAM DUNBAR

If it be assumed that the North Briton is, to an appreciable extent, adifferent creature from the Englishman, the assumption is not likely toprovoke dispute. No one will deny us the prominence of our cheek-bones, and our pride in the same. How far the difference extends, whether itinvolves merit or demerit, are questions not now sought to be settled. Nor is it important to discover how the difference arose; how far chillerclimate and sourer soil, centuries of unequal yet not ingloriousconflict, a separate race of kings, a body of separate traditions, and apeculiar crisis of reformation issuing in peculiar forms of religiousworship, confirmed and strengthened the national idiosyncrasy. If adifference between the races be allowed, it is sufficient for the presentpurpose. _That_ allowed, and Scot and Southern being fecund in literarygenius, it becomes an interesting inquiry to what extent the greatliterary men of the one race have influenced the great literary men ofthe other. On the whole, perhaps, the two races may fairly cry quits. Not unfrequently, indeed, have literary influences arisen in the northand travelled southwards. There were the Scottish ballads, for instance, there was Burns, there was Sir Walter Scott, there is Mr. Carlyle. Theliterary influence represented by each of these arose in Scotland, andhas either passed or is passing "in music out of sight" in England. Theenergy of the northern wave has rolled into the southern waters. On theother hand, we can mark the literary influences travelling from the southnorthward. The English Chaucer rises, and the current of his influenceis long afterwards visible in the Scottish King James, and the Scottishpoet Dunbar. That which was Prior and Gay in London, became Allan Ramsaywhen it reached Edinburgh. Inspiration, not unfrequently, has travelled, like summer, from the south northwards; just as, when the day is over, and the lamps are lighted in London, the radiance of the setting sun islingering on the splintered peaks and rosy friths of the Hebrides. Allthis, however, is a matter of the past; literary influence can no longerbe expected to travel leisurely from south to north, or from north tosouth. In times of literary activity, as at the beginning of the presentcentury, the atmosphere of passion or speculation envelop the entireisland, and Scottish and English writers simultaneously draw from it whattheir peculiar natures prompt--just as in the same garden the rose drinkscrimson and the convolvulus azure from the superincumbent air. 

Chaucer must always remain a name in British literary history. Heappeared at a time when the Saxon and Norman races had become fused, andwhen ancient bitternesses were lost in the proud title of Englishman. Hewas the first great poet the island produced; and he wrote for the mostpart in the language of the people, with just the slightest infusion ofthe courtlier Norman element, which gives to his writings something ofthe high-bred air that the short upper-lip gives to the humancountenance. In his earlier poems he was under the influence of theProvençal Troubadours, and in his "Flower and the Leaf, " and other worksof a similar class, he riots in allegory; he represents the cardinalvirtues walking about in human shape; his forests are full of beautifulladies with coronals on their heads; courts of love are held beneath thespreading elm, and metaphysical goldfinches and nightingales, perchedamong the branches green, wrangle melodiously about the tender passion. In these poems he is fresh, charming, fanciful as the spring-time itself:ever picturesque, ever musical, and with a homely touch and stroke ofirony here and there, suggesting a depth of serious matter in him whichit needed years only to develop. He lived in a brilliant and stirringtime; he was connected with the court; he served in armies; he visitedthe Continent; and, although a silent man, he carried with him, whereverhe went, and into whatever company he was thrown, the most observant eyesperhaps that ever looked curiously out upon the world. There was nothingtoo mean or too trivial for his regard. After parting with a man, onefancies that he knew every line and wrinkle of his face, had marked thetravel-stains on his boots, and had counted the slashes of his doublet. And so it was that, after mixing in kings' courts, and sitting withfriars in taverns, and talking with people on country roads, andtravelling in France and Italy, and making himself master of theliterature, science, and theology of his time, and when perhaps touchedwith misfortune and sorrow, he came to see the depth of interest thatresides in actual life, --that the rudest clown even, with his sordidhumours and coarse speech, is intrinsically more valuable than a wholeforest full of goddesses, or innumerable processions of cardinal virtues, however well mounted and splendidly attired. It was in some such mood ofmind that Chaucer penned those unparalleled pictures of contemporary lifethat delight yet, after five centuries have come and gone. It isdifficult to define Chaucer's charm. He does not indulge in finesentiment; he has no bravura passages; he is ever master of himself andof his subject. The light upon his page is the light of common day. Although powerful delineations of passion may be found in his "Tales, "and wonderful descriptions of nature, and although certain of thepassages relating to Constance and Griselda in their deep distresses areunrivalled in tenderness, neither passion, nor natural description, norpathos, are his striking characteristics. It is his shrewdness, hisconciseness, his ever-present humour, his frequent irony, and his short, homely line--effective as the play of the short Roman sword--whichstrikes the reader most. In the "Prologue to the Canterbury Tales"--byfar the ripest thing he has done--he seems to be writing the easiest, most idiomatic prose, but it is poetry all the while. He is a poet ofnatural manner, dealing with out-door life. Perhaps, on the whole, thewriter who most resembles him--superficial differences apart--isFielding. In both there is constant shrewdness and common-sense, aconstant feeling of the comic side of things, a moral instinct whichescapes in irony, never in denunciation or fanaticism; no remarkablespirituality of feeling, an acceptance of the world as a pleasant enoughplace, provided good dinners and a sufficiency of cash are to be had, andthat healthy relish for fact and reality, and scorn of humbug of allkinds, especially of that particular phase of it which makes one appearbetter than one is, which--for want of a better term--we are accustomedto call _English_. Chaucer was a Conservative in all his feelings; heliked to poke his fun at the clergy, but he was not of the stuff of whichmartyrs are made. He loved good eating and drinking, and studiousleisure and peace; and although in his ordinary moods shrewd, andobservant, and satirical, his higher genius would now and then splendidlyassert itself--and behold the tournament at Athens, where kings arecombatants and Emily the prize; or the little boat, containing thebrain-bewildered Constance and her child, wandering hither and thither onthe friendly sea. 

Chaucer was born about 1328, and died about 1380; and although he had, both in Scotland and England, contemporaries and immediate successors, noone of them can be compared with him for a moment. The "Moral Gower" washis friend, and inherited his tediousness and pedantry without a sparkleof his fancy, passion, humour, wisdom, and good spirits. Occleve andLydgate followed in the next generation; and although their names areretained in literary histories, no line or sentence of theirs has found aplace in human memory. The Scottish contemporary of Chaucer was Barbour, who although deficient in tenderness and imagination, deserves praise forhis sinewy and occasionally picturesque verse. "The Bruce" is really afine poem. The hero is noble, resolute, and wise. Sir James Douglas isa very perfect, gentle knight. The old Churchman had the true poeticfire in him. He rises into eloquence in an apostrophe to Freedom, and hefights the battle of Bannockburn over again with great valour, shouting, and flapping of standards. In England, nature seemed to have exhaustedherself in Chaucer, and she lay quiescent till Lord Surrey and Sir ThomasWyatt came, the immediate precursors of Spenser, Shakspeare, and theircompanions. 

While in England the note of the nightingale suddenly ceased, to besucceeded by the mere chirping of the barn-door sparrows, the divine andmelancholy voice began to be heard further north. It was during thatmost barren period of English poetry--extending from Chaucer's death tillthe beginning of Elizabeth's reign--that Scottish poetry arose, suddenly, splendidly--to be matched only by that other uprising nearer our owntime, equally unexpected and splendid, of Burns and Scott. And it iscurious to notice in this brilliant outburst of northern genius how muchis owing to Chaucer; the cast of language is identical, the literary formis the same, there is the same way of looking at nature, the sameallegorical forests, the troops of ladies, the same processions ofcardinal virtues. James I. , whose long captivity in England made himacquainted with Chaucer's works was the leader of the poetic movementwhich culminated in Dunbar, and died away in Sir David Lindsay justbefore the noise and turmoil of the Reformation set in. In theconcluding stanza of the "Quair, " James records his obligation to those--

 "Masters dear, Gower and Chaucer, that on the steppes sate Of retorick, while they were livand here, Superlative as poets laureate Of morality and eloquence ornate. "

But while, during the reigns of the Jameses, Scottish genius was beingacted upon by the broader and deeper genius of England, Scotland, quiteunconsciously to herself, was preparing a liquidation in full of allspiritual obligations. For even then, in obscure nooks and corners, theScottish ballads were growing up, quite uncontrolled by critical rules, rude in structure and expression, yet, at the same time, full ofvitality, retaining in all their keenness the mirth of rustic festivals, and the piteousness of domestic tragedies. The stormy feudal time out ofwhich they arose crumbled by process of gradual decay, but they remained, made brighter by each succeeding summer, like the wildflowers that blowin the chinks of ruins. And when English poetry had become artificialand cold, the lucubrations of forgotten Scottish minstrels, full of thetouches that make the whole world kin, brought new life with them. Scotland had invaded England more than once, but the blue bonnets neverwent over the border so triumphantly as when they did so in the shape ofsongs and ballads. 

James IV. , if not the wisest, was certainly the most brilliant monarch ofhis name; and he was fortunate beyond the later Stuarts in this, thatduring his lifetime no new popular tide had set in which it behooved himto oppose or to float upon. For him in all its essentials to-day hadflowed quietly out of yesterday, and he lived unperplexed by fear ofchange. With something of a Southern gaiety of spirit, he was a merriermonarch than his dark-featured and saturnine descendant who bore theappellation. He was fond of martial sports, he loved to glitter attournaments, his court was crowded with singing men and singing women. Yet he had his gloomy moods and superstitious despondencies. He couldnot forget that he had appeared in arms against his father; even while hewhispered in the ear of beauty the iron belt of penance was fretting hisside, and he alternated the splendid revel with the cell of the monk. Inthese days, and for long after, the Borders were disturbed, and theHighland clans, setting royal authority at defiance, were throttling eachother in their mists. The Catholic religion was yet unsapped, and thewealth of the country resided in the hands of the nobles and thechurchmen. Edinburgh towered high on the ridge between Holyrood and theCastle, its streets reddened with feud at intervals, and its merchantsclustering round the Cathedral of St. Giles like bees in a honeycomb; andthe king, when he looked across the faint azure of the Forth, beheld thelong coast of Fife dotted with little towns, where ships were moored thattraded with France and Holland, and brought with them cargoes of silk andwines. James was a popular monarch; he was beloved by the nobles and bythe people. He loved justice, he cultivated his marine, and he built the_Great Michael_--the _Great Eastern_ of that day. He had valiant seamen, and more than once Barton sailed into Leith with a string of Englishprizes. When he fell with all his nobility at Flodden, there came uponScotland the woe with which she was so familiar--

 "Woe to that realme that haith an ower young king. "

A long regency followed; disturbing elements of religion entered into thelife of the nation, and the historical stream which had flowed smoothlyfor a series of years became all at once convulsed and turbulent, as ifit had entered upon a gorge of rapids. It was in this pleasantinterregnum of the reign of the fourth James, when ancient disorders hadto a certain extent been repressed, and when religious difficulties aheadwere yet undreamed of, that the poet Dunbar flourished--a nightingalesinging in a sunny lull of the Scottish historical storm. 

Modern readers are acquainted with Dunbar chiefly through the medium ofMr. David Laing's beautiful edition of his works published in 1834, andby good Dr. Irving's intelligent and admirable compacted "History ofScottish Poetry, " published the other day. Irving's work, if deficientsomewhat in fluency and grace of style, is characterised byconscientiousness of statement and by the ripest knowledge. Yet, despitethe researches of these competent writers, of the events of the poet'slife not much is known. He was born about 1460, and from an unquotableallusion in one of his poems, he is supposed to have been a native of theLothians. His name occurs in the register of the University of St. Andrews as a Bachelor of Arts. With the exception of these entries inthe college register, there is nothing authentically known of his earlylife. We have no portrait of him, and cannot by that means decipher him. We do not know with certainty from what family he sprang. Beyond whatlight his poems may throw on them, we have no knowledge of his habits andpersonal tastes. He exists for the most part in rumour, and the vagueshadows of things. It appears that in early life he became a friar ofthe order of St. Francis; and in the capacity of a travelling priesttells us that "he preached in Derntown kirk and in Canterbury;" that he"passed at Dover across the Channel, and went through Picardy teachingthe people. " He does not seem to have taken kindly to his profession. His works are full of sarcastic allusions to the clergy, and in nomeasured terms he denounces their luxury, their worldly-mindedness, andtheir desire for high place and fat livings. Yet these denunciationshave no very spiritual origin. His rage is the rage of a disappointedcandidate, rather than of a prophet; and, to the last, he seems to haveexpected preferment in the Church. Not without a certain pathos hewrites, when he had become familiar with disappointment, and the sicknessof hope deferred--

 "I wes in youth an nureiss knee, Dandely! bischop, dandely! And quhen that age now dois me greif, Ane sempill vicar I can nocht be. "

It is not known when he entered the service of King James. From hispoems it appears that he was employed as a clerk or secretary in severalof the missions despatched to foreign courts. It is difficult to guessin what capacity Dunbar served at Holyrood. He was all his life apriest, and expected preferment from his royal patron. We know that heperformed mass in the presence. Yet when the king in one of his darkmoods had withdrawn from the gaieties of the capital to the religiousgloom of the convent of Franciscans at Stirling, we find the poetinditing a parody on the machinery of the Church, calling on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and on all the saints of the calendar, to transport theprincely penitent from Stirling, "where ale is thin and small, " toEdinburgh, where there is abundance of swans, cranes, and plovers, andthe fragrant clarets of France. And in another of his poems, hedescribes himself as dancing in the queen's chamber so zealously that helost one of his slippers, a mishap which provoked her Majesty to greatmirth. Probably, as the king was possessed of considerable literarytaste, and could appreciate Dunbar's fancy and satire, he kept himattached to his person, with the intention of conferring a benefice onhim when one fell vacant; and when a benefice _did_ fall vacant, feltcompelled to bestow it on the cadet of some powerful family in thestate, --for it was always the policy of James to stand well with hisnobles. He remembered too well the deaths of his father andgreat-grandfather to give unnecessary offense to his great barons. Fromhis connexion with the court, the poet's life may be briefly epitomised. In August, 1500, his royal master granted Dunbar an annual pension of 10pounds for life, or till such time as he should be promoted to a beneficeof the annual value of 40 pounds. In 1501, he visited England in thetrain of the ambassadors sent thither to negotiate the king's marriage. The marriage took place in May, 1503, on which occasion the high-piledcapital wore holiday attire, balconies blazed with scarlet cloth, and theloyal multitude shouted as bride and bridegroom rode past, with thechivalry of two kingdoms in their train. Early in May, Dunbar composedhis most celebrated poem in honour of the event. Next year he said massin the king's presence for the first time, and received a liberal reward. In 1505, he received a sum in addition to his stated pension, and twoyears thereafter his pension was doubled. In August, 1510, his pensionwas increased to 80 pounds per annum, until he became possessed of abenefice of the annual value of 10 pounds or upwards. In 1513, Floddenwas fought, and in the confusion consequent on the king's death, Dunbarand his slowly-increasing pensions disappear from the records of things. We do not know whether he received his benefice; we do not know the dateof his death, and to this day his grave is secret as the grave of Moses. 

Knowing but little of Dunbar's life, our interest is naturallyconcentrated on what of his writings remain to us. And to modern eyesthe old poet is a singular spectacle. His language is different thanours; his mental structure and modes of thought are unfamiliar; in hisintellectual world, as we map it out to ourselves, it is difficult toconceive how a comfortable existence could be attained. Times, manners, and ideas have changed, and we look upon Dunbar with a certainreverential wonder and curiosity as we look upon Tantallon, standing up, grim and gray, in the midst of the modern landscape. The grand oldfortress is a remnant of a state of things which have utterly passedaway. Curiously, as we walk beside it, we think of the actual human lifeits walls contained. In those great fire-places logs actually burnedonce, and in winter nights men-at-arms spread out big palms against thegrateful heat. In those empty apartments was laughter, and feasting, andserious talk enough in troublous times, and births, and deaths, and thebringing home of brides in their blushes. This empty moat was filledwith water, to keep at bay long-forgotten enemies, and yonder loop-holewas made narrow, as a protection from long-moulded arrows. In Tantallonwe know the Douglasses lived in state, and bearded kings, and hung outbanners to the breeze; but a sense of wonder is mingled with ourknowledge, for the bothy of the Lothian farmer is even more in accordancewith our methods of conducting life. Dunbar affects us similarly. Weknow that he possessed a keen intellect, a blossoming fancy, a satirictouch that blistered, a melody that enchanted Northern ears; but then wehave lost the story of his life, and from his poems, with their wonderfulcontrasts, the delicacy and spring-like flush of feeling, the piety, thefreedom of speech, the irreverent use of the sacredest names, the"Flyting" and the "Lament for the Makars, " there is difficulty in makingone's ideas of him cohere. He is present to the imagination, and yetremote. Like Tantallon, he is a portion of the past. We are separatedfrom him by centuries, and that chasm we are unable to bridge properly. 

The first thing that strikes the reader of these poems is their varietyand intellectual range. It may be said that--partly from constitutionalturn of thought, partly from the turbulent and chaotic time in which helived, when families rose to splendour and as suddenly collapsed, whenthe steed that bore his rider at morning to the hunting-field returned atevening masterless to the castle-gate--Dunbar's prevailing mood of mindis melancholy; that he, with a certain fondness for the subject, as if itgave him actual relief, moralised over the sandy foundations of mortalprosperity, the advance of age putting out the lights of youth, andcancelling the rapture of the lover, and the certainty of death. This isa favourite path of contemplation with him, and he pursues it with agloomy sedateness of acquiescence, which is more affecting than if heraved and foamed against the inevitable. But he has the mobility of thepoetic nature, and the sad ground-tone is often drowned in the ecstasy oflighter notes. All at once the "bare ruined choirs" are covered with theglad light-green of spring. His genius combined the excellencies of manymasters. His "Golden Targe" and "The Thistle and the Rose" areallegorical poems, full of colour, fancy, and music. His "Two MarriedWomen and the Widow" has a good deal of Chaucer's slyness and humour. "The Dance of the Deadly Sins, " with its fiery bursts of imaginativeenergy, its pictures finished at a stroke, is a prophecy of Spenser andCollins, and as fine as anything they have accomplished; while his"Flytings" are torrents of the coarsest vituperation. And there arewhole flights of occasional poems, many of them sombre-coloured enough, with an ever-recurring mournful refrain, others satirical, but all flungoff, one can see, at a sitting; in the few verses the mood is exhausted, and while the result remains, the cause is forgotten even by himself. Several of these short poems are almost perfect in feeling and execution. The melancholy ones are full of a serious grace, while in the satirical alaughing devil of glee and malice sparkles in every line. Some of theselatter are dangerous to touch as a thistle--all bristling and angry withthe spikes of satiric scorn. 

In his allegorical poems--"The Golden Targe, " "The Merle and theNightingale, " "The Thistle and the Rose"--Dunbar's fancy has full scope. As allegories, they are, perhaps, not worth much; at all events, modernreaders do not care for the adventures of "Quaking Dread and HumbleObedience"; nor are they affected by descriptions of Beauty, attended byher fair damsels, Fair Having, Fine Portraiture, Pleasance, and LustyCheer. The whole conduct and machinery of such things are too artificialand stilted for modern tastes. Stately masques are no longer performedin earls' mansions; and when a sovereign enters a city, a fair lady, withwings, representing Loyalty, does not burst out of a pasteboard cloud andrecite a poetical address to Majesty. In our theatres the pantomime, which was originally an adumbration of human life, has become degraded. Symbolism has departed from the boards, and burlesque reigns in itsstead. The Lord Mavor's Show, the last remnant of the antiquespectacular taste, does not move us now; it is held a public nuisance; itprovokes the rude "chaff" of the streets. Our very mobs have becomecritical. Gog and Magog are dethroned. The knight feels the satiriccomments through his armour. The very steeds are uneasy, as if ashamed. But in Dunbar the allegorical machinery is saved from contempt by colour, poetry, and music. 

Quick surprises of beauty, and a rapid succession of pictures, keep theattention awake. Now it is--

 "May, of mirthful monethis queen, Betwixt April and June, her sisters sheen, Within the garden walking up and down. "

Now--

 "The god of windis, Eolus, With variand look, richt like a lord unstable. "

Now the nightingale--

 "Never sweeter noise was heard with livin' man, Nor made this merry, gentle nightingale; Her sound went with the river as it ran Out throw the fresh and flourished lusty vale. "

And now a spring morning--

 "Ere Phoebus was in purple cape revest, Up raise the lark, the heaven's minstrel fine In May, in till a morrow mirthfullest. 

 "Full angel-like thir birdis sang their hours Within their curtains green, in to their hours Apparelled white and red with bloomes sweet; Enamelled was the field with all colours, The pearly droppis shook in silver shours; While all in balm did branch and leavis fleet. To part fra Phoebus did Aurora greet, Her crystal tears I saw hing on the flours, Whilk he for love all drank up with his heat. 

 "For mirth of May, with skippis and with hops, The birdis sang upon the tender crops, With curious notes, as Venus' chapel clerks; The roses young, new spreading of their knops, Were powderit bricht with heavenly beriall drops, Through beams red, burning as ruby sparks; The skies rang for shouting of the larks, The purple heaven once scal't in silver slops, Oure gilt the trees, branches, leaves, and barks. "

The finest of Dunbar's poems in this style is "The Thistle and the Rose. "It was written in celebration of the marriage of James with the PrincessMargaret of England, and the royal pair are happily represented as thenational emblems. It, of course, opens with a description of a springmorning. Dame Nature resolves that every bird, beast, and flower shouldcompeer before her highness; the roe is commanded to summon the animals, the restless swallow the birds, and the "conjured" yarrow the herbs andflowers. In the twinkling of an eye they stand before the queen. Thelion and the eagle are crowned, and are instructed to be humble and just, and to exercise their powers mercifully:--

 "Then callit she all flouris that grew in field, Discerning all their seasons and effeirs, Upon the awful thistle she beheld And saw him keepit with a bush of spears: Consid'ring him so able for the weirs, A radius crown of rubies she him gave, And said, 'In field, go forth and fend the lave. '"

The rose, also, is crowned, and the poet gives utterance to the universaljoy on occasion of the marriage--type of peace between two kingdoms. Listen to the rich music of according voices:--

 "Then all the birds sang with voice on hicht, Whose mirthful soun' was marvellous to hear; The mavis sang, Hail Rose, most rich and richt, That does up flourish under Phoebus' sphere, Hail, plant of youth, hail Princess, dochter dear; Hail blosom breaking out of the bluid royal, Whose precious virtue is imperial. 

 "The merle she sang, Hail, Rose of most delight, Hail, of all floris queen an' sovereign! The lark she sang, Hail, Rose both red and white; Most pleasant flower, of michty colours twane: The nichtingale sang, Hail, Nature's suffragane, In beauty, nurture, and every nobleness, In rich array, renown, and gentleness. 

 "The common voice up raise of birdes small, Upon this wise, Oh, blessit be the hour That thou was chosen to be our principal! Welcome to be our Princess of honour, Our pearl, our pleasance, and our paramour, Our peace, our play, our plain felicity; Christ thee comfort from all adversity. "

But beautiful as these poems are, it is as a satirist that Dunbar hasperformed his greatest feats. He was by nature "dowered with the scornof scorn, " and its edge was whetted by life-long disappointment. LikeSpenser, he knew--

 "What Hell it is in suing long to bide. "

And even in poems where the mood is melancholy, where the burden is theshortness of life and the unpermanence of felicity, his satiric ragebreaks out in single lines of fire. And although his satire is oftenalmost inconceivably coarse, the prompting instinct is healthy at bottom. He hates Vice, although his hand is too often in the kennel to pelt herwithal. He lays his grasp on the bridle-rein of the sleek prelate, andupbraids him with his secret sins in language unsuited to modern ears. His greater satires have a wild sheen of imagination about them. Theyare far from being cold, moral homilies. His wrath or his contemptbreaks through the bounds of time and space, and brings the spiritualworld on the stage. He wishes to rebuke the citizens of Edinburgh fortheir habits of profane swearing, and the result is a poem, whichprobably gave Coleridge the hint of his "Devil's Walk. " Dunbar's satireis entitled the "Devil's Inquest. " He represents the Fiend passing upthrough the market, and chuckling as he listens to the strange oaths ofcobbler, maltman, tailor, courtier, and minstrel. He comments on what hehears and sees with great pleasantry and satisfaction. Here is theconclusion of the piece:--

 "Ane thief said, God that ever I chaip, Nor ane stark widdy gar me gaip, But I in hell for geir wald be. The Devil said, 'Welcome in a raip: Renounce thy God, and cum to me. '

 "The fishwives net and swore with granes, And to the Fiend saul flesh and banes; They gave them, with ane shout on hie. The Devil said, 'Welcome all at anes; Renounce your God, and cum to me. '

 "The rest of craftis great aiths swair, Their wark and craft had nae compair, Ilk ane unto their qualitie. The Devil said then, withouten mair, 'Renounce your God, and cum to me. '"

But the greatest of Dunbar's satires--in fact, the greatest of all hispoems--is that entitled "The Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins. " It isshort, but within its compass most swift, vivid, and weird. The picturesrise on the reader's eye, and fade at once. It is a singular compound offarce and earnest. It is Spenser and Hogarth combined--the wildestgrotesquerie wrought on a background of penal flame. The poet conceiveshimself in a dream, on the evening preceding Lent, and in his vision heheard Mahoun command that the wretched who "had ne'er been shriven"should dance before him. Immediately a hideous rout present themselves;"holy harlots" appear in their finery, and never a smile wrinkles thefaces of the onlookers; but when a string of "priests with their shavennecks" come in, the arches of the unnameable place shakes with thelaughter of all the fiends. Then "The Seven Deadly Sins" begin to leapat once:--

 "And first of all the dance was Pride, With hair wyld back and bonnet on side. "

He, with all his train, came skipping through the fire. 

 "Then Ire came in with sturt and strife; His hand was aye upon his knife;"

and with him came armed boasters and braggarts, smiting each other withswords, jagging each other with knives. Then Envy, trembling with secrethatred, accompanied by his court of flatterers, backbiters, calumniatorsand all the human serpentry that lurk in the palaces of kings. Then cameCovetousness, with his hoarders and misers, and these the fiends gave todrink of newly-molten gold. 

 "Syne Swearness, at the second bidding, Came like a sow out of a midding:"

and with him danced a sleepy crew, and Belial lashed them with abridle-rein, and the fiends gave them a turn in the fire to make themnimbler. Then came Lechery, led by Idleness, with a host of evilcompanions, "full strange of countenance, like torches burning bright. "Then came Gluttony, so unwieldy that he could hardly move:--

 "Him followed mony foul drunkart With can and callop, cup and quart, In surfeit and excess. "

"Drink, aye they cried, " with their parched lips; and the fiends gavethem hot lead to lap. Minstrels, it appears, are not to be found in thatdismal place:--

 "Nae minstrels played to them but doubt, For gleemen there were halden out By day and eik by nicht: Except a minstrel that slew a man, So to his heritage he wan, And entered by brieve of richt. "

And to the music of the solitary poet in hell, the strange shapes pass. The conclusion of this singular poem is entirely farcical. The devil isresolved to make high holiday:

 "Then cried Mahoun for a Hielan Padyane, Syne ran a fiend to fetch Makfadyane, Far north-wast in a neuck; Be he the coronach had done shout, Ersche men so gatherit him about, In hell great room they took. Thae tarmigants, with tag and tatter, Full loud in Ersche begoud to clatter, And roup like raven and rook. The Devil sae deaved was with their yell, That in the deepest pot of hell He smorit them with smook. "

There is one other poem of Dunbar's which may be quoted as a contrast towhat has been already given. It is remarkable as being the only one inwhich he assumes the character of a lover. The style of thought is quitemodern; bereave it of its uncouth orthography, and it might have beenwritten to-day. It is turned with much skill and grace. Theconstitutional melancholy of the man comes out in it; as, indeed, italways does when he finds a serious topic. It possesses more tendernessand sentiment than is his usual. It is the night-flower among his poems, breathing a mournful fragrance:--

 "Sweit rose of vertew and of gentilnes, Delytsum lyllie of everie lustynes, Richest in bontie, and in beutie cleir, And every vertew that to hevin is dear, Except onlie that ye ar mercyles, "Into your garthe this day I did persew: Thair saw I flowris that fresche wer of dew, Baith quhyte and reid most lustye wer to seyne, And halsum herbis upone stalkis grene: Yet leif nor flour fynd could I nane of rew. 

 "I doute that March, with his cauld blastis keyne, Hes slane this gentill herbe, that I of mene; Quhois pitewous deithe dois to my hart sic pane, That I wald mak to plant his rute agane, So comfortand his levis unto me bene. "

The extracts already given will enable the reader to form some idea ofthe old poet's general power--his music, his picturesque faculty, hiscolour, his satire. Yet it is difficult from what he has left to formany very definite image of the man. Although his poems are for the mostpart occasional, founded upon actual circumstances, or written to relievehim from the over-pressure of angry or melancholy moods, and although thewriter is by no means shy or indisposed to speak of himself, hispersonality is not made clear to us. There is great gap of time betweenhim and the modern reader; and the mixture of gold and clay in theproducts of his genius, the discrepancy of elements, beauty andcoarseness, Apollo's cheek, and the satyr's shaggy limbs, are explainablepartly from a want of harmony and completeness in himself, and partlyfrom the pressure of the half-barbaric time. His rudeness offends, hisnarrowness astonishes. But then we must remember that our advantages inthese respects do not necessarily arise from our being of a purer andnobler essence. We have these things by inheritance; they have beentransmitted to us along a line of ancestors. Five centuries share withus the merit of the result. Modern delicacy of taste and intellectualpurity--although we hold them in possession, and may add to their sheenbefore we hand them on to our children--are no more to be placed to ourpersonal credits than Dryden's satire, Pope's epigram, Marlborough'sbattles, Burke's speeches, and the victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Intellectual delicacy has grown like our political constitution. TheEnglish duke is not the creator of his own wealth, although in hiskeeping it makes the earth around him a garden, and the walls of hishouse bright with pictures. But our inability to conceive satisfactorilyof Dunbar does not arise from this alone. We have his works, but thenthey are not supplemented by personal anecdote and letters, and thereminiscences of contemporaries. Burns, for instance, --if limited to hisworks for our knowledge of him, --would be a puzzling phenomenon. He wasin his poems quite as spoken as Dunbar, but then they describe so wide anarea, they appear so contradictory, they seem often to lead in oppositedirections. It is, to a large extent, through his letters that Burns isknown, through his short, careless, pithy sayings, which imbeddedthemselves in the memories of his hearers, from the recollections of hiscontemporaries and their expressed judgments, and the multiformreverberations of fame lingering around such a man--these fill upinterstices between works, bring apparent opposition into intimaterelationship, and make wholeness out of confusion. Not on the stagealone, in the world also, a man's real character comes out best in hisasides. With Dunbar there is nothing of this. He is a name, and littlemore. He exists in a region to which rumour and conjecture have neverpenetrated. He was long neglected by his countrymen, and was brought tolight as if by accident. He is the Pompeii of British poetry. We havehis works, but they are like the circumvallations of a Roman camp on theScottish hillside. We see lines stretching hither and thither, but wecannot make out the plan, or divine what purposes were served. We onlyknow that every crumpled rampart was once a defence; that everyhalf-obliterated fosse once swarmed with men; that it was once a stationand abiding-place of human life, although for centuries now remitted tosilence and blank summer sunshine. 

A LARK'S FLIGHT

Rightly or wrongly, during the last twenty or thirty years a strongfeeling has grown up in the public mind against the principle, and astill stronger feeling against the practice, of capital punishments. Many people who will admit that the execution of the murderer may be, abstractly considered, just enough, sincerely doubt whether suchexecution be expedient, and are in their own minds perfectly certainthat it cannot fail to demoralise the spectators. In consequence ofthis, executions have become rare; and it is quite clear that manyscoundrels, well worthy of the noose, contrive to escape it. When, onthe occasion of a wretch being turned off, the spectators are few, itis remarked by the newspapers that the mob is beginning to lose itsproverbial cruelty, and to be stirred by humane pulses; when they arenumerous, and especially when girls and women form a majority, thecircumstance is noticed and deplored. It is plain enough that, if thenewspaper considered such an exhibition beneficial, it would not lamentover a few thousand eager witnesses: if the sermon be edifying, youcannot have too large a congregation; if you teach a moral lesson in agrand, impressive way, it is difficult to see how you can have too manypupils. Of course, neither the justice nor the expediency of capitalpunishments falls to be discussed here. This, however, may be said, that the popular feeling against them may not be so admirable a proofof enlightenment as many believe. It is true that the spectacle ispainful, horrible; but in pain and horror there is often hidden acertain salutariness, and the repulsion of which we are conscious is aslikely to arise from debilitation of public nerve, as from a higherreach of public feeling. To my own thinking, it is out of this painand hatefulness that an execution becomes invested with an idealgrandeur. It is sheer horror to all concerned--sheriffs, halbertmen, chaplain, spectators, Jack Ketch, and culprit; but out of all this, andtowering behind the vulgar and hideous accessories of the scaffold, gleams the majesty of implacable law. When every other fine morning adozen cut-purses were hanged at Tyburn, and when such sights did notrun very strongly against the popular current, the spectacle wasvulgar, and could be of use only to the possible cut-purses congregatedaround the foot of the scaffold. Now, when the law has become so farmerciful; when the punishment of death is reserved for the murderer;when he can be condemned only on the clearest evidence; when, as thedays draw slowly on to doom, the frightful event impending over onestricken wretch throws its shadow over the heart of every man, woman, and child in the great city; and when the official persons whose dutyit is to see the letter of the law carried out perform that duty at theexpense of personal pain, --a public execution is not vulgar, it becomespositively sublime. It is dreadful, of course; but its dreadfulnessmelts into pure awfulness. The attention is taken off the criminal, and is lost in a sense of the grandeur of justice; and the spectatorwho beholds an execution, solely as it appears to the eye, withoutrecognition of the idea which towers behind it, must be a veryunspiritual and unimaginative spectator indeed. 

It is taken for granted that the spectators of public executions--theartisans and country people who take up their stations overnight asclose to the barriers as possible, and the wealthier classes who occupyhired windows and employ opera-glasses--are merely drawn together by amorbid relish for horrible sights. He is a bold man who will standforward as the advocate of such persons--so completely is the popularmind made up as to their tastes and motives. It is not disputed thatthe large body of the mob, and of the occupants at windows, have beendrawn together by an appetite for excitement; but it is quite possiblethat many come there from an impulse altogether different. Justconsider the nature of the expected sight, --a man in tolerable healthprobably, in possession of all his faculties, perfectly able to realisehis position, conscious that for him this world and the next are sonear that only a few seconds divide them--such a man stands in theseeing of several thousand eyes. He is so peculiarly circumstanced, soutterly lonely, --hearing the tolling of his own death-bell, yet living, wearing the mourning clothes for his own funeral, --that he holds themultitude together by a shuddering fascination. The sight is apeculiar one, you must admit, and every peculiarity has itsattractions. Your volcano is more attractive than your ordinarymountain. Then consider the unappeasable curiosity as to death whichhaunts every human being, and how pathetic that curiosity is, in so faras it suggests our own ignorance and helplessness, and we see at oncethat people _may_ flock to public executions for other purposes thanthe gratification of morbid tastes: that they would pluck if they couldsome little knowledge of what death is; that imaginatively they attemptto reach to it, to touch and handle it through an experience which isnot their own. It is some obscure desire of this kind, a movement ofcuriosity not altogether ignoble, but in some degree pathetic; somerude attempt of the imagination to wrest from the death of the criminalinformation as to the great secret in which each is profoundlyinterested, which draws around the scaffold people from the countryharvest-fields, and from the streets and alleys of the town. Nothinginterests men so much as death. Age cannot wither it, nor custom staleit. "A greater crowd would come to see me hanged, " Cromwell isreported to have said when the populace came forth on a publicoccasion. The Lord Protector was right in a sense of which, perhaps, at the moment he was not aware. Death is greater than officialposition. When a man has to die, he may safely dispense with stars andribbands. He is invested with a greater dignity than is held in thegift of kings. A greater crowd _would_ have gathered to see Cromwellhanged, but the compliment would have been paid to death rather than toCromwell. Never were the motions of Charles I. So scrutinised as whenhe stood for a few moments on the scaffold that winter morning atWhitehall. King Louis was no great orator usually, but when on the 2dJanuary, 1793, he attempted to speak a few words in the Place De laRevolution, it was found necessary to drown his voice in a harsh rollof soldiers' drums. Not without a meaning do people come forth to seemen die. We stand in the valley, they on the hill-top, and on theirfaces strikes the light of the other world, and from some sign orsignal of theirs we attempt to discover or extract a hint of what it isall like. 

To be publicly put to death, for whatever reason, must ever be aserious matter. It is always bitter, but there are degrees in itsbitterness. It is easy to die like Stephen with an opened heaven aboveyou, crowded with angel faces. It is easy to die like Balmerino with achivalrous sigh for the White Rose, and an audible "God bless KingJames. " Such men die for a cause in which they glory, and aresupported thereby; they are conducted to the portals of the next worldby the angels, Faith, Pity, Admiration. But it is not easy to die inexpiation of a crime like murder, which engirdles you with tremblingand horror even in the loneliest places, which cuts you off from thesympathies of your kind, which reduces the universe to two elements--asense of personal identity, and a memory of guilt. In so dying, theremust be inconceivable bitterness; a man can have no other support thanwhat strength he may pluck from despair, or from the iron with whichnature may have originally braced heart and nerve. Yet, taken as awhole, criminals on the scaffold comport themselves creditably. Theylook Death in the face when he wears his cruelest aspect, and if theyflinch somewhat, they can at least bear to look. I believe that, forthe criminal, execution within the prison walls, with no witnesses savesome half-dozen official persons, would be infinitely more terriblethan execution in the presence of a curious, glaring mob. The daylightand the publicity are alien elements, which wean the man a little fromhimself. He steadies his dizzy brain on the crowd beneath and aroundhim. He has his last part to play, and his manhood rallies to play itwell. Nay, so subtly is vanity intertwined with our motives, thenoblest and the most ignoble, that I can fancy a poor wretch with thenoose dangling at his ear, and with barely five minutes to live, soothed somewhat with the idea that his firmness and composure willearn him the approbation, perhaps the pity, of the spectators. Hewould take with him, if he could, the good opinion of his fellows. This composure of criminals puzzles one. Have they looked at death solong and closely, that familiarity has robbed it of terror? Has lifetreated them so harshly, that they are tolerably well pleased to bequit of it on any terms? Or is the whole thing mere blind stupor anddelirium, in which thought is paralysed, and the man an automaton?Speculation is useless. The fact remains that criminals for the mostpart die well and bravely. It is said that the championship of Englandwas to be decided at some little distance from London on the morning ofthe day on which Thurtell was executed, and that, when he came out onthe scaffold, he inquired privily of the executioner if the result hadyet become known. Jack Ketch was not aware, and Thurtell expressed hisregret that the ceremony in which he was chief actor should take placeso inconveniently early in the day. Think of a poor Thurtell forced totake his long journey an hour, perhaps, before the arrival ofintelligence so important!

More than twenty years ago I saw two men executed, and the impressionthen made remains fresh to this day. For this there were many reasons. The deed for which the men suffered created an immense sensation. Theywere hanged on the spot where the murder was committed--on a risingground, some four miles north-east of the city; and as an attempt atrescue was apprehended, there was a considerable display of militaryforce on the occasion. And when, in the dead silence of thousands, thecriminals stood beneath the halters, an incident occurred, quitenatural and slight in itself, but when taken in connection with thebusiness then proceeding, so unutterably tragic, so overwhelming in itspathetic suggestion of contrast, that the feeling of it has neverdeparted, and never will. At the time, too, I speak of, I was veryyoung; the world was like a die newly cut, whose every impression isfresh and vivid. 

While the railway which connects two northern capitals was being built, two brothers from Ireland, named Doolan, were engaged upon it in thecapacity of navvies. For some fault or negligence, one of the brotherswas dismissed by the overseer--a Mr. Green--of that particular portionof the line on which they were employed. The dismissed brother wentoff in search of work, and the brother who remained--Dennis was theChristian name of him--brooded over this supposed wrong, and in hisdull, twilighted brain revolved projects of vengeance. He did notabsolutely mean to take Green's life, but he meant to thrash him withinan inch of it. Dennis, anxious to thrash Green, but not quite seeinghis way to it, opened his mind one afternoon, when work was over, tohis friends--fellow-Irishmen and navvies--Messrs. Redding and Hickie. These took up Doolan's wrong as their own, and that evening, by thedull light of a bothy fire, they held a rude parliament, discussingways and means of revenge. It was arranged that Green should bethrashed--the amount of thrashing left an open question, to be decided, unhappily, when the blood was up and the cinder of rage blown into aflame. Hickie's spirit was found not to be a mounting one, and it wasarranged that the active partners in the game should be Doolan andRedding. Doolan, as the aggrieved party, was to strike the first blow, and Redding, as the aggrieved party's particular friend, asked andobtained permission to strike the second. The main conspirators, witha fine regard for the feelings of the weaker Hickie, allowed him toprovide the weapons of assault, --so that by some slight filament of aidhe might connect himself with the good cause. The unambitious Hickieat once applied himself to his duty. He went out, and in due timereturned with two sufficient iron pokers. The weapons were examined, approved of, and carefully laid aside. Doolan, Redding, and Hickie atetheir suppers, and retired to their several couches to sleep, peacefully enough no doubt. About the same time, too, Green, theEnglish overseer, threw down his weary limbs, and entered on his lastsleep--little dreaming what the morning had in store for him. 

Uprose the sun, and uprose Doolan and Redding, and dressed, and thrusteach his sufficient iron poker up the sleeve of his blouse, and wentforth. They took up their station on a temporary wooden bridge whichspanned the line, and waited there. Across the bridge, as wasexpected, did Green ultimately come. He gave them good morning; asked, "why they were loafing about?" received no very pertinent answer, perhaps did not care to receive one; whistled--the unsuspectingman!--thrust his hands into his breeches pockets, turned his back onthem, and leaned over the railing of the bridge, inspecting theprogress of the works beneath. The temptation was really too great. What could wild Irish flesh and blood do? In a moment out from thesleeve of Doolan's blouse came the hidden poker, and the first blow wasstruck, bringing Green to the ground. The friendly Redding, who hadbargained for the second, and who, naturally enough, was in fear ofbeing cut out altogether, jumped on the prostrate man, and fulfilledhis share of the bargain with a will. It was Redding it was supposedwho sped the unhappy Green. They overdid their work--like youngauthors--giving many more blows than were sufficient, and then fled. The works, of course, were that morning in consternation. Redding andHickie were, if I remember rightly, apprehended in the course of theday. Doolan got off, leaving no trace of his whereabouts. 

These particulars were all learned subsequently. The first intimationwhich we schoolboys received of anything unusual having occurred, wasthe sight of a detachment of soldiers with fixed bayonets, trousersrolled up over muddy boots, marching past the front of the Cathedralhurriedly home to barracks. This was a circumstance somewhat unusual. We had, of course, frequently seen a couple of soldiers trudging alongwith sloped muskets, and that cruel glitter of steel which no one of uscould look upon quite unmoved; but in such cases, the deserter walkingbetween them in his shirt-sleeves, his pinioned hands covered frompublic gaze by the loose folds of his great-coat, explained everything. But from the hurried march of these mud-splashed men, nothing could begathered, and we were left to speculate upon its meaning. Gradually, however, before the evening fell, the rumour of a murder having beencommitted spread through the city, and with that I instinctivelyconnected the apparition of the file of muddy soldiers. Next day, murder was in every mouth. My school-fellows talked of it to thedetriment of their lessons; it flavoured the tobacco of the fustianartisan as he smoked to work after breakfast; it walked on 'Changeamongst the merchants. It was known that two of the persons implicatedhad been captured, but that the other, and guiltiest, was still atlarge; and in a few days out on every piece of boarding and blank wallcame the "Hue and cry"--describing Doolan like a photograph, to thecolour and cut of his whiskers, and offering 100 pounds as reward forhis apprehension, or for such information as would lead to hisapprehension--like a silent, implacable bloodhound following close onthe track of the murderer. This terrible broadsheet I read, wascertain that _he_ had read it also, and fancy ran riot over the ghastlyfact. For him no hope, no rest, no peace, no touch of hands gentlerthan the hangman's; all the world is after him like a roaring prairieof flame! I thought of Doolan, weary, foot-sore, heart-sore, enteringsome quiet village of an evening; and to quench his thirst, going up tothe public well, around which the gossips are talking, and hearing thatthey were talking of _him_; and seeing from the well itself IT glaringupon him, as if conscious of his presence, with a hundred eyes ofvengeance. I thought of him asleep in out-houses, and starting up inwild dreams of the policeman's hand upon his shoulder fifty times eremorning. He had committed the crime of Cain, and the weird of Cain hehad to endure. But yesterday innocent, how unimportant; to-daybloody-handed, the whole world is talking of him, and everything hetouches, the very bed he sleeps on, steals from him his secret, and iseager to betray!

Doolan was finally captured in Liverpool, and in the Spring Assize thethree men were brought to trial. The jury found them guilty, butrecommended Hickie to mercy on account of some supposed weakness ofmind on his part. Sentence was, of course, pronounced with the usualsolemnities. They were set apart to die; and when snug abed o'nights--for imagination is most mightily moved by contrast--I creptinto their desolate hearts, and tasted a misery which was not my own. As already said, Hickie was recommended to mercy, and therecommendation was ultimately in the proper quarter given effect to. 

The evening before the execution has arrived, and the reader has now toimagine the early May sunset falling pleasantly on the outskirts of thecity. The houses looking out upon an open square or space, have littleplots of garden-ground in their fronts, in which mahogany-colouredwall-flowers and mealy auriculas are growing. The side of this square, along which the City Road stretches northward, is occupied by ablind-asylum, a brick building, the bricks painted red and picked outwith white, after the tidy English fashion, and a high white cemeterywall, over which peers the spire of the Gothic Cathedral; and beyondthat, on the other side of the ravine, rising out of the populous cityof the dead, a stone John Knox looks down on the Cathedral, a Bibleclutched in his outstretched and menacing hand. On all this the Maysunset is striking, dressing everything in its warm, pleasant pink, lingering in the tufts of foliage that nestle around the asylum, anddipping the building itself one half in light, one half in tendershade. This open space or square is an excellent place for the gamesof us boys, and "Prisoner's Base" is being carried out with as muchearnestness as the business of life now by those of us who are left. The girls, too, have their games of a quiet kind, which we held in hugescorn and contempt. In two files, linked arm-in-arm, they alternatelydance towards each other and then retire, singing the while, in theirclear, girlish treble, verses, the meaning and pertinence of which timehas worn away--

 "The Campsie Duke's a-riding, a-riding, a-riding, "

being the oft-recurring "owercome, " or refrain. All this is going onin the pleasant sunset light, when by the apparition of certain waggonscoming up from the city, piled high with blocks and beams, and guardedby a dozen dragoons, on whose brazen helmets the sunset danced, everygame is dismembered, and we are in a moment a mere mixed mob of boysand girls, flocking around to stare and wonder. Just at this placesomething went wrong with one of the waggon wheels, and the processioncame to a stop. A crowd collected, and we heard some of the grown-uppeople say, that the scaffold was being carried out for the ceremony ofto-morrow. Then, more intensely than ever, one realised the conditionof the doomed men. _We_ were at our happy games in the sunset, _they_were entering on their last night on earth. After hammering and delaythe wheel was put to rights, the sunset died out, waggons and dragoonsgot into motion and disappeared; and all the night through, whetherawake or asleep, I saw the torches burning, and heard the hammersclinking, and witnessed as clearly as if I had been an onlooker, thehorrid structure rising, till it stood complete, with a huge cross-beamfrom which two empty halters hung, in the early morning light. 

Next morning the whole city was in commotion. Whether the authoritieswere apprehensive that a rescue would be attempted, or were anxiousmerely to strike terror into the hundreds of wild Irishry engaged onthe railway, I cannot say: in any case, there was a display of militaryforce quite unusual. The carriage in which the criminals--Catholicsboth--and their attendant priests were seated, was guarded by soldierswith fixed bayonets; indeed, the whole regiment then lying in the citywas massed in front and behind, with a cold, frightful glitter ofsteel. Besides the foot soldiers, there were dragoons, and two piecesof cannon; a whole little army, in fact. With a slenderer forcebattles have been won which have made a mark in history. What did theprisoners think of their strange importance, and of the tramp andhurly-burly all around? When the procession moved out of the city, itseemed to draw with it almost the entire population; and when once thecountry roads were reached, the crowds spread over the fields on eitherside, ruthlessly treading down the tender wheat braird. I got aglimpse of the doomed, blanched faces which had haunted me so long, atthe turn of the road, where, for the first time, the black cross-beamwith its empty halters first became visible to them. Both turned andregarded it with a long, steady look; that done, they again bent theirheads attentively to the words of the clergyman. I suppose in thatlong, eager, fascinated gaze they practically _died_--that for themdeath had no additional bitterness. When the mound was reached onwhich the scaffold stood, there was immense confusion. Around it awide space was kept clear by the military; the cannon were placed inposition; out flashed the swords of the dragoons; beneath and around onevery side was the crowd. Between two brass helmets I could see thescaffold clearly enough, and when in a little while the men, bareheadedand with their attendants, appeared upon it, the surging crowd becamestiffened with fear and awe. And now it was that the incident sosimple, so natural, so much in the ordinary course of things, and yetso frightful in its tragic suggestions, took place. Be it rememberedthat the season was early May, that the day was fine, that thewheat-fields were clothing themselves in the green of the young crop, and that around the scaffold, standing on a sunny mound, a wide spacewas kept clear. When the men appeared beneath the beam, each under hisproper halter, there was a dead silence, --every one was gazing toointently to whisper to his neighbour even. Just then, out of thegrassy space at the foot of the scaffold, in the dead silence audibleto all, a lark rose from the side of its nest, and went singing upwardin its happy flight. O heaven! how did that song translate itself intodying ears? Did it bring, in one wild burning moment, father andmother, and poor Irish cabin, and prayers said at bed-time, and thesmell of turf fires, and innocent sweethearting, and rising and settingsuns? Did it--but the dragoon's horse has become restive, and hisbrass helmet bobs up and down and blots everything; and there is asharp sound, and I feel the great crowd heave and swing, and hear ittorn by a sharp shiver of pity, and the men whom I saw so near but amoment ago are at immeasurable distance, and have solved the greatenigma, --and the lark has not yet finished his flight: you can see andhear him yonder in the fringe of a white May cloud. 

This ghastly lark's flight, when the circumstances are taken inconsideration, is, I am inclined to think, more terrible than anythingof the same kind which I have encountered in books. The artistic usesof contrast as background and accompaniment, are well known to natureand the poets. Joy is continually worked on sorrow, sorrow on joy;riot is framed in peace, peace in riot. Lear and the Fool always gotogether. Trafalgar is being fought while Napoleon is sitting onhorseback watching the Austrian army laying down its arms at Ulm. InHood's poem, it is when looking on the released schoolboys at theirgames that Eugene Aram remembers he is a murderer. And these two poorIrish labourers could not die without hearing a lark singing in theirears. It is nature's fashion. She never quite goes along with us. She is sombre at weddings, sunny at funerals, and she frowns onninety-nine out of a hundred picnics. 

There is a stronger element of terror in this incident of the lark thanin any story of a similar kind I can remember. 

A good story is told of an Irish gentleman--still known in Londonsociety--who inherited the family estates and the family banshee. Theestates he lost--no uncommon circumstance in the history of Irishgentlemen, --but the banshee, who expected no favours, stuck to him inhis adversity, and crossed the channel with him, making herself knownonly on occasions of death-beds and sharp family misfortunes. Thisgentleman had an ear, and, seated one night at the opera, the_keen_--heard once or twice before on memorable occasions--thrilledthrough the din of the orchestra and the passion of the singers. Hehurried home, of course, found his immediate family well, but on themorrow a telegram arrived with the announcement of a brother's death. Surely of all superstitions that is the most imposing which makes theother world interested in the events which befall our mortal lot. Forthe mere pomp and pride of it, your ghost is worth a dozen retainers, and it is entirely inexpensive. The peculiarity and supernatural worthof this story lies in the idea of the old wail piercing through thesweet entanglement of stringed instruments and extinguishing Grisi. Modern circumstances and luxury crack, as it were, and reveal for amoment misty and aboriginal time big with portent. There is aridiculous Scotch story in which one gruesome touch lives. Aclergyman's female servant was seated in the kitchen one Saturday nightreading the Scriptures, when she was somewhat startled by hearing atthe door the tap and voice of her sweetheart. Not expecting him, andthe hour being somewhat late, she opened it in astonishment, and wasstill more astonished to hear him on entering abuse Scripture-reading. He behaved altogether in an unprecedented manner, and in many waysterrified the poor girl. Ultimately he knelt before her, and laid hishead on her lap. You can fancy her consternation when glancing downshe discovered that, _instead of hair, the head was covered with themoss of the moorland_. By a sacred name she adjured him to tell who hewas, and in a moment the figure was gone. It was the Fiend, ofcourse--diminished sadly since Milton saw him bridge chaos--fallen fromworlds to kitchen-wenches. But just think how in the story, inhalf-pity, in half-terror, the popular feeling of homelessness, ofbeing outcast, of being unsheltered as waste and desert places, hasincarnated itself in that strange covering of the head. It is a truesupernatural touch. One other story I have heard in the mistyHebrides: A Skye gentleman was riding along an empty moorland road. All at once, as if it had sprung from the ground, the empty road wascrowded by a funeral procession. Instinctively he drew his horse to aside to let it pass, which it did without sound of voice, without treadof foot. Then he knew it was an apparition. Staring on it, he knewevery person who either bore the corpse or walked behind as mourners. There were the neighbouring proprietors at whose houses he dined, therewere the members of his own kirk-session, there were the men to whom hewas wont to give good-morning when he met them on the road or atmarket. Unable to discover his own image in the throng, he wasinwardly marvelling whose funeral it _could_ be, when the troop ofspectres vanished, and the road was empty as before. Then, rememberingthat the coffin had an invisible occupant, he cried out, "It is myfuneral!" and, with all his strength taken out of him, rode home todie. All these stories have their own touches of terror; yet I aminclined to think that my lark rising from the scaffold foot, andsinging to two such auditors, is more terrible than any one of them. 

CHRISTMAS

Over the dial-face of the year, on which the hours are months, the apexresting in sunshine, the base in withered leaves and snows, the finger oftime does not travel with the same rapidity. Slowly it creeps up fromsnow to sunshine; when it has gained the summit it seems almost to restfor a little; rapidly it rushes down from sunshine to the snow. Judgingfrom my own feelings, the distance from January to June is greater thanfrom June to January--the period from Christmas to Midsummer seems longerthan the period from Midsummer to Christmas. This feeling arises, Ishould fancy, from the preponderance of _light_ on that half of the dialon which the finger seems to be travelling upwards, compared with thehalf on which it seems to be travelling downwards. This light to theeye, the mind translates into time. Summer days are long, oftenwearisomely so. The long-lighted days are bracketed together by a littlebar of twilight, in which but a star or two find time to twinkle. Usually one has less occupation in summer than in winter, and thesurplusage of summer light, a stage too large for the play, wearies, oppresses, sometimes appalls. From the sense of time we can only shelterourselves by occupation; and when occupation ceases while yet some threeor four hours of light remain, the burden falls down, and is oftengreater than we can bear. Personally, I have a certain morbid fear ofthose endless summer twilights. A space of light stretching fromhalf-past 2 A. M. To 11 P. M. Affects me with a sense of infinity, ofhorrid sameness, just as the sea or the desert would do. I feel that fortoo long a period I am under the eye of the taskmaster. Twilight isalways in itself, or at least in its suggestions, melancholy; and thesemidsummer twilights are so long, they pass through such series of lovelychange, they are throughout so mournfully beautiful, that in the brainthey beget strange thoughts, and in the heart strange feelings. We seetoo much of the sky, and the long, lovely, pathetic, lingering eveninglight, with its suggestions of eternity and death, which one cannot forthe soul of one put into words, is somewhat too much for the comfort of asensitive human mortal. The day dies, and makes no apology for beingsuch an unconscionable time in dying; and all the while it colours ourthoughts with its own solemnity. There is no relief from this kind ofthing at midsummer. You cannot close your shutters and light yourcandles; that in the tone of mind which circumstances superinduce wouldbe brutality. You cannot take Pickwick to the window and read it by thedying light; that is profanation. If you have a friend with you, youcan't talk; the hour makes you silent. You are driven in on yourself-consciousness. The long light wearies the eye, a sense of timedisturbs and saddens the spirit; and that is the reason, I think, thatone half of the year seems so much longer than the other half; that onthe dial-plate whose hours are months, the restless finger _seems_ tomove more slowly when travelling upward from autumn leaves and snow tolight, than when it is travelling downward from light to snow andwithered leaves. 

Of all the seasons of the year, I like winter best. That peculiar burdenof time I have been speaking of, does not affect me now. The day isshort, and I can fill it with work; when evening comes, I have my lightedroom and my books. Should black care haunt me, I throw it off the scentin Spenser's forests, or seek refuge from it among Shakspeare's men andwomen, who are by far the best company I have met with, or am like tomeet with, on earth. I am sitting at this present moment with mycurtains drawn; the cheerful fire is winking at all the furniture in theroom, and from every leg and arm the furniture is winking to the fire inreturn. I put off the outer world with my great-coat and boots, and puton contentment and idleness with my slippers. On the hearth-rug, Pepper, coiled in a shaggy ball, is asleep in the ruddy light and heat. Animaginative sense of the cold outside increases my present comfort--justas one never hugs one's own good luck so affectionately as when listeningto the relation of some horrible misfortune which has overtaken others. Winter has fallen on Dreamthorp, and it looks as pretty when covered withsnow as when covered with apple blossom. Outside, the ground is hard asiron; and over the low dark hill, lo! the tender radiance that precedesthe morn. Every window in the little village has its light, and to thetraveller coming on, enveloped in his breath, the whole place shines likea congregation of glow-worms. A pleasant enough sight to him if his homebe there! At this present season, the canal is not such a pleasantpromenade as it was in summer. The barges come and go as usual, but atthis time I do not envy the bargemen quite so much. The horse comessmoking along; the tarpaulin which covers the merchandise is sprinkledwith hoar-frost; and the helmsman, smoking his short pipe for the mereheat of it, cowers over a few red cinders contained in a framework ofiron. The labour of the poor fellows will soon be over for a time; forif this frost continues, the canal will be sheathed in a night, and nextday stones will be thrown upon it, and a daring urchin venturing upon itwill go souse head over heels, and run home with his teeth in a chatter;and the day after, the lake beneath the old castle will be sheeted, andthe next, the villagers will be sliding on its gleaming face from ruddydawn at nine to ruddy eve at three; and hours later, skaters yetunsatisfied will be moving ghost-like in the gloom--now one, now another, shooting on sounding irons into a clear space of frosty light, chasingthe moon, or the flying image of a star! Happy youths leaning againstthe frosty wind!

I am a Christian, I hope, although far from a muscular one--consequentlyI cannot join the skaters on the lake. The floor of ice, with the peopleupon it, will be but a picture to me. And, in truth, it is in itspictorial aspect that I chiefly love the bleak season. As an artist, winter can match summer any day. The heavy, feathery flakes have beenfalling all the night through, we shall suppose, and when you get up inthe morning the world is draped in white. What a sight it is! It is theworld you knew, but yet a different one. The familiar look has gone, andanother has taken its place; and a not unpleasant puzzlement arises inyour mind, born of the patent and the remembered aspect. It reminds youof a friend who has been suddenly placed in new circumstances, in whomthere is much that you recognise, and much that is entirely strange. Howpurely, divinely white when the last snowflake has just fallen! Howexquisite and virginal the repose! It touches you like some perfectionof music. And winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is carefulin trifles. Pluck a single ivy leaf from the old wall, and see what ajeweller he is! How he has silvered over the dark-green reticulationswith his frosts! The faggot which the Tramp gathers for his fire isthicklier incrusted with gems than ever was sceptre of the Moguls. Gointo the woods, and behold on the black boughs his glories of pearl anddiamond--pendant splendours that, smitten by the noon-ray, melt intotears and fall but to congeal into splendours again. Nor does he work inblack and white alone. He has on his palette more gorgeous colours thanthose in which swim the summer setting suns; and with these, about threeo'clock, he begins to adorn his west, sticking his red hot ball of a sunin the very midst; and a couple of hours later, when the orb has fallen, and the flaming crimson has mellowed into liquid orange, you can see theblack skeletons of trees scribbled upon the melancholy glory. Nor need Ispeak of the magnificence of a winter midnight, when space, sombre blue, crowded with star and planet, "burnished by the frost, " is glitteringlike the harness of an archangel full panoplied against a battle day. 

For years and years now I have watched the seasons come and go aroundDreamthorp, and each in its turn interests me as if I saw it for thefirst time. But the other week it seems that I saw the grain ripen; thenby day a motley crew of reapers were in the fields, and at night a bigred moon looked down upon the stocks of oats and barley; then in mightywains the plenteous harvest came swaying home, leaving a largess on theroads for every bird; then the round, yellow, comfortable-looking stacksstood around the farm-houses, hiding them to the chimneys; then the woodsreddened, the beech hedges became russet, and every puff of wind maderustle the withered leaves; then the sunset came before the early dark, and in the east lay banks of bleak pink vapour, which are ever a prophecyof cold; then out of a low dingy heaven came all day, thick and silent, the whirling snow, --and so by exquisite succession of sight and soundhave I been taken from the top of the year to the bottom of it, frommidsummer, with its unreaped harvests, to the night on which I am sittinghere--Christmas, 1862. 

Sitting here, I incontinently find myself holding a levee of departedChristmas nights. Silently, and without special call, into my study ofimagination come these apparitions, clad in snowy mantles, brooched andgemmed with frosts. Their numbers I do not care to count, for I knowthey are the numbers of my years. The visages of two or three are sadenough, but on the whole 'tis a congregation of jolly ghosts. Thenostrils of my memory are assailed by a faint odour of plum-pudding andburnt brandy. I hear a sound as of light music, a whisk of women'sdresses whirled round in dance, a click as of glasses pledged by friends. Before one of these apparitions is a mound, as of a new-made grave, onwhich the snow is lying. I know, I know! Drape thyself not in whitelike the others, but in mourning stole of crape; and instead of dancemusic, let there haunt around thee the service for the dead! I know thatsprig of Mistletoe, O Spirit in the midst! Under it I swung the girl Iloved--girl no more now than I am a boy--and kissed her spite of blushand pretty shriek. And thee, too, with fragrant trencher in hand, overwhich blue tongues of flame are playing, do I know--most ancientapparition of them all. I remember thy reigning night. Back to verydays of childhood am I taken by the ghostly raisins simmering in aghostly brandy flame. Where now the merry boys and girls that thrusttheir fingers in thy blaze? And now, when I think of it, thee also wouldI drape in black raiment, around thee also would I make the burialservice murmur. 

Men hold the anniversaries of their birth, of their marriage, of thebirth of their first-born, and they hold--although they spread no feast, and ask no friends to assist--many another anniversary besides. On manya day in every year does a man remember what took place on that self-sameday in some former year, and chews the sweet or bitter herb of memory, asthe case may be. Could I ever hope to write a decent Essay, I shouldlike to write one "On the Revisiting of Places. " It is strange howimportant the poorest human being is to himself! how he likes to doubleback on his experiences, to stand on the place he has stood on before, tomeet himself face to face, as it were! I go to the great city in whichmy early life was spent, and I love to indulge myself in this whim. Theonly thing I care about is that portion of the city which is connectedwith myself. I don't think this passion of reminiscence is debased bythe slightest taint of vanity. The lamp-post, under the light of whichin the winter rain there was a parting so many years ago, I contemplatewith the most curious interest. I stare on the windows of the houses inwhich I once lived, with a feeling which I should find difficult toexpress in words. I think of the life I led there, of the good and thebad news that came, of the sister who died, of the brother who was born;and were it at all possible, I should like to knock at the once familiardoor, and look at the old walls--which could speak to me sostrangely--once again. To revisit that city is like walking away backinto my yesterdays. I startle myself with myself at the corners ofstreets, I confront forgotten bits of myself at the entrance to houses. In windows which to another man would seem blank and meaningless, I findpersonal poems too deep to be ever turned into rhymes--more pathetic, mayhap, than I have ever found on printed page. The spot of ground onwhich a man has stood is for ever interesting to him. Every experienceis an anchor holding him the more firmly to existence. It is for thisreason that we hold our sacred days, silent and solitary anniversaries ofjoy and bitterness, renewing ourselves thereby, going back uponourselves, living over again the memorable experience. The full yellowmoon of next September will gather into itself the light of the fullyellow moons of Septembers long ago. In this Christmas night all theother Christmas nights of my life live. How warm, breathing, full ofmyself is the year 1862, now almost gone! How bare, cheerless, unknown, the year 1863, about to come in! It stretches before me in imaginationlike some great, gaunt untenanted ruin of a Colosseum, in which nofootstep falls, no voice is heard; and by this night year its nakedchambers and windows, three hundred and sixty-five in number, will beclothed all over, and hidden by myself as if with covering ivies. Looking forward into an empty year strikes one with a certain awe, because one finds therein no recognition. The years behind have afriendly aspect, and they are warmed by the fires we have kindled, andall their echoes are the echoes of our own voices. 

This, then, is Christmas, 1862. Everything is silent in Dreamthorp. Thesmith's hammer reposes beside the anvil. The weaver's flying shuttle isat rest. Through the clear wintry sunshine the bells this morning rangfrom the gray church tower amid the leafless elms, and up the walk thevillagers trooped in their best dresses and their best faces--the lattera little reddened by the sharp wind: mere redness in the middle aged; inthe maids, wonderful bloom to the eyes of their lovers--and took theirplaces decently in the ancient pews. The clerk read the beautifulprayers of our Church, which seem more beautiful at Christmas than at anyother period. For that very feeling which breaks down at this time thebarriers which custom, birth, or wealth have erected between man and man, strikes down the barrier of time which intervenes between the worshipperof to-day and the great body of worshippers who are at rest in theirgraves. On such a day as this, hearing these prayers, we feel a kinshipwith the devout generations who heard them long ago. The devout lips ofthe Christian dead murmured the responses which we now murmur; along thisroad of prayer did their thoughts of our innumerable dead, our brothersand sisters in faith and hope, approach the Maker, even as ours atpresent approach Him. Prayers over, the clergyman--who is no Boanerges, or Chrysostom, golden-mouthed, but a loving, genial-hearted, pious man, the whole extent of his life from boyhood until now, full of charity andkindly deeds, as autumn fields with heavy wheaten ears; the clergyman, Isay--for the sentence is becoming unwieldy on my hands, and one mustdouble back to secure connexion--read out in that silvery voice of his, which is sweeter than any music to my ear, those chapters of the NewTestament that deal with the birth of the Saviour. And the red-facedrustic congregation hung on the good man's voice as he spoke of theInfant brought forth in a manger, of the shining angels that appeared inmid-air to the shepherds, of the miraculous star that took its station inthe sky, and of the wise men who came from afar and laid their gifts offrankincense and myrrh at the feet of the child. With the story everyone was familiar, but on that day, and backed by the persuasive melody ofthe reader's voice, it seemed to all quite new--at least, they listenedattentively as if it were. The discourse that followed possessed noremarkable thoughts; it dealt simply with the goodness of the Maker ofheaven and earth, and the shortness of time, with the duties ofthankfulness and charity to the poor; and I am persuaded that every onewho heard returned to his house in a better frame of mind. And so theservice remitted us all to our own homes, to what roast-beef andplum-pudding slender means permitted, to gatherings around cheerfulfires, to half-pleasant, half-sad remembrances of the dead and the absent. 

From sermon I have returned like the others, and it is my purpose to holdChristmas alone. I have no one with me at table, and my own thoughtsmust be my Christmas guests. Sitting here, it is pleasant to think howmuch kindly feeling exists this present night in England. By imaginationI can taste of every table, pledge every toast, silently join in everyroar of merriment. I become a sort of universal guest. With whatpropriety is this jovial season, placed amid dismal December rains andsnows! How one pities the unhappy Australians, with whom everything isturned topsy-turvy, and who hold Christmas at midsummer! The face ofChristmas glows all the brighter for the cold. The heart warms as thefrost increases. Estrangements which have embittered the whole year, melt in to-night's hospitable smile. There are warmer hand-shakings onthis night than during the by-past twelve months. Friend lives in themind of friend. There is more charity at this time than at any other. You get up at midnight and toss your spare coppers to the half-benumbedmusicians whiffling beneath your windows, although at any other time youwould consider their performance a nuisance, and call angrily for thepolice. Poverty, and scanty clothing, and fireless grates, come home atthis season to the bosoms of the rich, and they give of their abundance. The very red-breast of the woods enjoys his Christmas feast. Goodfeeling incarnates itself in plum-pudding. The Master's words, "The poorye have always with you, " wear at this time a deep significance. For atleast one night on each year over all Christendom there is brotherhood. And good men, sitting amongst their families, or by a solitary fire likeme, when they remember the light that shone over the poor clowns huddlingon the Bethlehem plains eighteen hundred years ago, the apparition ofshining angels overhead, the song "Peace on earth and good-will towardmen, " which for the first time hallowed the midnight air, --pray for thatstrain's fulfilment, that battle and strife may vex the nations no more, that not only on Christmas-eve, but the whole year round, men shall bebrethren owning one Father in heaven. 

Although suggested by the season, and by a solitary dinner, it is not mypurpose to indulge in personal reminiscence and talk. Let all that pass. This is Christmas-day, the anniversary of the world's greatest event. Toone day all the early world looked forward; to the same day the laterworld looks back. That day holds time together. Isaiah, standing on thepeaks of prophecy, looked across ruined empires and the desolations ofmany centuries, and saw on the horizon the new star arise, and was glad. On this night eighteen hundred years ago, Jove was discrowned, the Paganheaven emptied of its divinities, and Olympus left to the solitude of itssnows. On this night, so many hundred years bygone, the despairing voicewas heard shrieking on the Aegean, "Pan is dead, great Pan is dead!" Onthis night, according to the fine reverence of the poets, all things thatblast and blight are powerless, disarmed by sweet influence:--

 "Some say that ever 'gainst the season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated The bird of dawning singeth all night long; And then they say no spirit dares stir abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike; No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm: So hallowed and so gracious is the time. "

The flight of the Pagan mythology before the new faith has been afavourite subject with the poets; and it has been my custom for manyseasons to read Milton's "Hymn to the Nativity" on the evening ofChristmas-day. The bass of heaven's deep organ seems to blow in thelines, and slowly and with many echoes the strain melts into silence. Tomy ear the lines sound like the full-voiced choir and the rolling organof a cathedral, when the afternoon light streaming through the paintedwindows fills the place with solemn colours and masses of gorgeous gloom. To-night I shall float my lonely hours away on music:--

 "The oracles are dumb, No voice or hideous hum Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving: Apollo from his shrine Can no more divine With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. No nightly trance or breathed spell Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell. 

 "The lonely mountains o'er, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament: From haunted spring, and dale Edged with poplars pale, The parting genius is with sighing sent: With flower-enwoven tresses torn The nymphs in twilight shades of tangled thickets mourn. 

 "Peor and Baalim Forsake their temples dim With that twice-battered god of Palestine; And mooned Ashtaroth, Heaven's queen and mother both, Now sits not girt with tapers' holy shine! The Lybic Hammon shrinks his horn, In vain the Tyrian maids their wounded Thammuz mourn. 

 "And sullen Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol, all of blackest hue: In vain with cymbals' ring They call the grisly king In dismal dance about the furnace blue: The Brutish gods of Nile as fast, Isis, and Orus, and the dog Anubis haste. 

 "He feels from Juda's land The dreaded Infant's hand, The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne: Nor all the gods beside Dare longer there abide, Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine. Our Babe to shew His Godhead true Can in His swaddling bands control the damned crew. "

These verses, as if loath to die, linger with a certain persistence inmind and ear. This is the "mighty line" which critics talk about! Andjust as in an infant's face you may discern the rudiments of the futureman, so in the glorious hymn may be traced the more majestic lineamentsof the "Paradise Lost. "

Strangely enough, the next noblest dirge for the unrealmed divinitieswhich I can call to remembrance, and at the same time the most eloquentcelebration of the new power and prophecy of its triumph, has beenuttered by Shelley, who cannot in any sense be termed a Christian poet. It is one of the choruses in "Hellas, " and perhaps had he lived longeramongst us, it would have been the prelude to higher strains. Of this Iam certain, that before his death the mind of that brilliant genius wasrapidly changing, --that for him the cross was gathering attractions roundit, --that the wall which he complained had been built up between hisheart and his intellect was being broken down, and that rays of a strangesplendour were already streaming upon him through the interstices. Whata contrast between the darkened glory of "Queen Mab"--of which inafterlife he was ashamed, both as a literary work and as an expression ofopinion--and the intense, clear, lyrical light of this triumphant poem!--

 "A power from the unknown God, A Promethean conqueror came: Like a triumphal path he trod The thorns of death and shame. A mortal shape to him Was like the vapour dim Which the orient planet animates with light. Hell, sin, and slavery came Like bloodhounds mild and tame, Nor prey'd until their lord had taken flight. The moon of Mahomet Arose, and it shall set; While blazon'd, as on heaven's immortal noon, The Cross leads generations on. 

 "Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep, From one whose dreams are paradise, Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep, And day peers forth with her blank eyes: So fleet, so faint, so fair, The powers of earth and air Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem. Apollo, Pan, and Love, And even Olympian Jove, Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them. Our hills, and seas, and streams, Dispeopled of their dreams, Their water turned to blood, their dew to tears, Wailed for the golden years. "

For my own part, I cannot read these lines without emotion--not so muchfor their beauty as for the change in the writer's mind which theysuggest. The self-sacrifice which lies at the centre of Christianityshould have touched this man more deeply than almost any other. That itwas beginning to touch and mould him, I verily believe. He died and made_that_ sign. Of what music did that storm in Spezia Bay rob the world!

"The Cross leads generations on. " Believing as I do that my own personaldecease is not more certain than that our religion will subdue the world, I own that it is with a somewhat saddened heart that I pass my thoughtsaround the globe, and consider how distant is yet that triumph. Thereare the realms on which the crescent beams, the monstrous many-headedgods of India, the Chinaman's heathenism, the African's devil-rites. These are, to a large extent, principalities and powers of darkness withwhich our religion has never been brought into collision, save at trivialand far separated points, and in these cases the attack has never beenmade in strength. But what of our own Europe--the home of philosophy, ofpoetry, and painting? Europe, which has produced Greece, and Rome, andEngland's centuries of glory; which has been illumined by the fires ofmartyrdom; which has heard a Luther preach; which has listened to Dante's"mystic unfathomable song"; to which Milton has opened the door ofheaven--what of it? And what, too, of that younger America, starting inits career with all our good things, and enfranchised of many of ourevils? Did not the December sun now shining look down on thousandsslaughtered at Fredericksburg, in a most mad, most incomprehensiblequarrel? And is not the public air which European nations breathe atthis moment, as it has been for several years back, charged with thunder?Despots are plotting, ships are building, man's ingenuity is bent, as itnever was bent before, on the invention and improvement of instruments ofdeath; Europe is bristling with five millions of bayonets: and this isthe condition of a world for which the Son of God died eighteen hundredand sixty-two years ago! There is no mystery of Providence soinscrutable as this; and yet, is not the very sense of its mournfulness aproof that the spirit of Christianity is living in the minds of men?For, of a verity, military glory is becoming in our best thoughts abloody rag, and conquest the first in the catalogue of mighty crimes, anda throned tyrant, with armies, and treasures, and the cheers of millionsrising up like a cloud of incense around him, but a mark for thethunderbolt of Almighty God--in reality poorer than Lazarus stretched atthe gate of Dives. Besides, all these things are getting themselves tosome extent mitigated. Florence Nightingale--for the first time in thehistory of the world--walks through the Scutari hospitals, and "poor, noble, wounded and sick men, " to use her Majesty's tender phrases, kissher shadow as it falls on them. The Emperor Napoleon does not make warto employ his armies, or to consolidate his power; he does so for thesake of an "idea, " more or less generous and disinterested. The soul ofmankind would revolt at the blunt, naked truth; and the taciturn emperorknows this, as he knows most things. This imperial hypocrisy, like everyother hypocrisy, is a homage which vice pays to virtue. There cannot bea doubt that when the political crimes of kings and governments, thesores that fester in the heart of society, and all "the burden of theunintelligible world, " weigh heaviest on the mind, we have to thankChristianity for it. That pure light makes visible the darkness. TheSermon on the Mount makes the morality of the nations ghastly. TheDivine love makes human hate stand out in dark relief. This sadness, inthe essence of it nobler than any joy, is the heritage of the Christian. An ancient Roman could not have felt so. Everything runs on smoothlyenough so long as Jove wields the thunder. But Venus, Mars, and Minervaare far behind us now; the Cross is before us; and self-denial and sorrowfor sin, and the remembrance of the poor, and the cleansing of our ownhearts, are duties incumbent upon every one of us. If the Christian isless happy than the Pagan, and at times I think he is so, it arises fromthe reproach of the Christian's unreached ideal, and from the stings ofhis finer and more scrupulous conscience. His whole moral organisationis finer, and he must pay the noble penalty of finer organisations. 

Once again, for the purpose of taking away all solitariness of feeling, and of connecting myself, albeit only in fancy, with the proper gladnessof the time, let me think of the comfortable family dinners now beingdrawn to a close, of the good wishes uttered, and the presents made, quite valueless in themselves, yet felt to be invaluable from thefeelings from which they spring; of the little children, by sweetmeatslapped in Elysium; and of the pantomime, pleasantest Christmas sight ofall, with the pit a sea of grinning delight, the boxes a tier of beamingjuvenility, the galleries, piled up to the far-receding roof, a mass ofhappy laughter which a clown's joke brings down in mighty avalanches. Inthe pit, sober people relax themselves, and suck oranges, and quaffginger-pop; in the boxes, Miss, gazing through her curls, thinks theFairy Prince the prettiest creature she ever beheld, and Master, that tobe a clown must be the pinnacle of human happiness: while up in thegalleries the hard literal world is for an hour sponged out andobliterated; the chimney-sweep forgets, in his delight when the policemancomes to grief, the harsh call of his master, and Cinderella, when thedemons are foiled, and the long parted lovers meet and embrace in aparadise of light and pink gauze, the grates that must be scrubbedtomorrow. All bands and trappings of toil are for one hour loosened bythe hands of imaginative sympathy. What happiness a single theatre cancontain! And those of maturer years, or of more meditative temperament, sitting at the pantomime, can extract out of the shifting scenes meaningssuitable to themselves; for the pantomime is a symbol or adumbration ofhuman life. Have we not all known Harlequin, who rules the roast, andhas the pretty Columbine to himself? Do we not all know that rogue of aclown with his peculating fingers, who brazens out of every scrape, andwho conquers the world by good humour and ready wit? And have we notseen Pantaloons not a few, whose fate it is to get all the kicks and loseall the halfpence, to fall through all the trap doors, break their shinsover all the barrows, and be forever captured by the policeman, while thetrue pilferer, the clown, makes his escape with the booty in hispossession? Methinks I know the realities of which these things are butthe shadows; have met with them in business, have sat with them atdinner. But to-night no such notions as these intrude; and when thetorrent of fun, and transformation, and practical joking which rushed outof the beautiful fairy world gathered up again, the high-heaped happinessof the theatre will disperse itself, and the Christmas pantomime will bea pleasant memory the whole year through. Thousands on thousands ofpeople are having their midriffs tickled at this moment; in fancy I seetheir lighted faces, in memory I hear their mirth. 

By this time I should think every Christmas dinner at Dreamthorp orelsewhere has come to an end. Even now in the great cities the theatreswill be dispersing. The clown has wiped the paint off his face. Harlequin has laid aside his wand, and divested himself of his glitteringraiment; Pantaloon, after refreshing himself with a pint of porter, isrubbing his aching joints; and Columbine, wrapped up in a shawl, and withsleepy eyelids, has gone home in a cab. Soon, in the great theatre, thelights will be put out, and the empty stage will be left to ghosts. Hark! midnight from the church tower vibrates through the frosty air. Ilook out on the brilliant heaven, and see a milky way of powderysplendour wandering through it, and clusters and knots of stars andplanets shining serenely in the blue frosty spaces; and the armedapparition of Orion, his spear pointing away into immeasurable space, gleaming overhead; and the familiar constellation of the Plough dippingdown into the west; and I think when I go in again that there is oneChristmas the less between me and my grave. 

MEN OF LETTERS

Mr. Hazlitt has written many essays, but none pleasanter than thatentitled "My First Acquaintance with Poets, " which, in the edition editedby his son, opens the _Wintersloe_ series. It relates almost entirely toColeridge; containing sketches of his personal appearance, fragments ofhis conversation, and is filled with a young man's generous enthusiasm, belief, admiration, as with sunrise. He had met Coleridge, walked withhim, talked with him, and the high intellectual experience not only madehim better acquainted with his own spirit and its folded powers, but--asis ever the case with such spiritual encounters--it touched andilluminated the dead outer world. The road between Wem and Shrewsburywas familiar enough to Hazlitt, but as the twain passed along it on thatwinter day, it became etherealised, poetic--wonderful, as if leadingacross the Delectable Mountains to the Golden City, whose gleam isdiscernible on the horizon. The milestones were mute with attention, thepines upon the hill had ears for the stranger as he passed. Eloquencemade the red leaves rustle on the oak; made the depth of heaven seem asif swept by a breath of spring; and when the evening star appeared, Hazlitt saw it as Adam did while in Paradise and but one day old. "As wepassed along, " writes the essayist, "between Wem and Shrewsbury, and Ieyed the blue hill tops seen through the wintry branches, or the red, rustling leaves of the sturdy oak-trees by the wayside, a sound was in myears as of a siren's song. I was stunned, startled with it as from deepsleep; but I had no notion that I should ever be able to express myadmiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the lightof his genius shone into my soul, like the sun's rays glittering in thepuddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now, bursting from the deadly bands that bound them, my ideas float on wingedwords, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of otheryears. My soul has indeed remained in its original bondage, dark, obscure, with longings infinite and unsatisfied; my heart, shut up in theprison-house of this rude clay, has never found, nor will it ever find, aheart to speak to; but that my understanding also did not remain dumb andbrutish, or at length found a language to express itself, I owe toColeridge. " Time and sorrow, personal ambition thwarted and fruitlesslydriven back on itself, hopes for the world defeated and unrealised, changed the enthusiastic youth into a petulant, unsocial man; yet ever ashe remembered that meeting and his wintry walk from Wem to Shrewsbury, the early glow came back, and a "sound was in his ears as of a siren'ssong. "

We are not all hero-worshippers like Hazlitt, but most of us are so to alarge extent. A large proportion of mankind feel a quite peculiarinterest in famous writers. They like to read about them, to know whatthey said on this or the other occasion, what sort of house theyinhabited, what fashion of dress they wore, if they liked any particulardish for dinner, what kind of women they fell in love with, and whethertheir domestic atmosphere was stormy or the reverse. Concerning such menno bit of information is too trifling; everything helps to make out themental image we have dimly formed for ourselves. And this kind ofinterest is heightened by the artistic way in which time occasionallygroups them. The race is gregarious, they are visible to us in clumpslike primroses, they are brought into neighbourhood and flash light oneach other like gems in a diadem. We think of the wild geniuses who cameup from the universities to London in the dawn of the English drama. Greene, Nash, Marlowe--our first professional men of letters--how theycracked their satirical whips, how they brawled in taverns, how pinchedthey were at times, how, when they possessed money, they flung it fromthem as if it were poison, with what fierce speed they wrote, how theyshook the stage. Then we think of the "Mermaid" in session, withShakspeare's bland, oval face, the light of a smile spread over it, andBen Jonson's truculent visage, and Beaumont and Fletcher sitting togetherin their beautiful friendship, and fancy as best we can the drollery, therepartee, the sage sentences, the lightning gleams of wit, thethunder-peals of laughter. 

 "What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid? Heard words that hath been So nimble, and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came Had meant to put his whole soul in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Of his dull life. "

Then there is the "Literary Club, " with Johnson, and Garrick, and Burke, and Reynolds, and Goldsmith sitting in perpetuity in Boswell. The Doctorhas been talking there for a hundred years, and there will he talk formany a hundred more. And we of another generation, and with other thingsto think about, can enter any night we please, and hear what is going on. Then we have the swarthy ploughman from Ayrshire sitting at LordMonboddo's with Dr. Blair, Dugald Stewart, Henry Mackenzie, and the rest. These went into the presence of the wonderful rustic thoughtlesslyenough, and now they cannot return even if they would. They aredefrauded of oblivion. Not yet have they tasted forgetfulness and thegrave. The day may come when Burns will be forgotten, but till that dayarrives--and the eastern sky as yet gives no token of its approach--_him_they must attend as satellites the sun, as courtiers their king. Thenthere are the Lakers, --Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, De Quinceyburdened with his tremendous dream, Wilson in his splendid youth. Whattalk, what argument, what readings of lyrical and other ballads, whatcontempt of critics, what a hail of fine things! Then there is CharlesLamb's room in Inner Temple Lane, the hush of a whist table in onecorner, the host stuttering puns as he deals the cards; and sitting roundabout. Hunt, whose every sentence is flavoured with the hawthorn and theprimrose, and Hazlitt maddened by Waterloo and St. Helena, and Godwinwith his wild theories, and Kemble with his Roman look. And before themorning comes, and Lamb stutters yet more thickly--for there is a slightflavour of punch in the apartment--what talk there has been of Hogarth'sprints, of Izaak Walton, of the old dramatists, of Sir Thomas Browne's"Urn Burial, " with Elia's quaint humour breaking through everyinterstice, and flowering in every fissure and cranny of theconversation! One likes to think of these social gatherings of wit andgeniuses; they are more interesting than conclaves of kings orconvocations of bishops. One would like to have been the waiter at the"Mermaid, " and to have stood behind Shakspeare's chair. What was thatfunctionary's opinion of his guests? Did he listen and become witty byinfection? or did he, when his task was over, retire unconcernedly tochalk up the tavern score? One envies somewhat the damsel who broughtLamb the spirit-case and the hot water. I think of these meetings, and, in lack of companionship, frame for myself imaginary conversations--notso brilliant, of course, as Mr. Landor's, but yet sufficient to makepleasant for me the twilight hour while the lamp is yet unlit, and mysolitary room is filled with ruddy lights and shadows of the fire. 

Of human notabilities men of letters are the most interesting, and thisarises mainly from their outspokenness as a class. The writer makeshimself known in a way that no other man makes himself known. Thedistinguished engineer may be as great a man as the distinguished writer, but as a rule we know little about him. We see him invent a locomotive, or bridge a strait, but there our knowledge stops; we look at the engine, we walk across the bridge, we admire the ingenuity of the one, we aregrateful for the conveniency of the other, but to our apprehensions theengineer is undeciphered all the while. Doubtless he reveals himself inhis work as the poet reveals himself in his song, but then thisrevelation is made in a tongue unknown to the majority. After all, we donot feel that we get nearer him. The man of letters, on the other hand, is outspoken, he takes you into his confidence, he keeps no secret fromyou. Be you beggar, be you king, you are welcome. He is no respecter ofpersons. He gives without reserve his fancies, his wit, his wisdom; hemakes you a present of all that the painful or the happy years havebrought him. The writer makes his reader heir in full. Men of lettersare a peculiar class. They are never commonplace or prosaic--at leastthose of them that mankind care for. They are airy, wise, gloomy, melodious spirits. They give us the language we speak, they furnish thesubjects of our best talk. They are full of generous impulses andsentiments, and keep the world young. They have said fine things onevery phase of human experience. The air is full of their voices. Theirbooks are the world's holiday and playground, and into these neithercare, nor the dun, nor despondency can follow the enfranchised man. Menof letters forerun science as the morning star the dawn. Nothing hasbeen invented, nothing has been achieved, but has gleamed abright-coloured Utopia in the eyes of one or the other of these men. Several centuries before the Great Exhibition of 1851 rose in Hyde Park, a wondrous hall of glass stood, radiant in sunlight, in the verse ofChaucer. The electric telegraph is not so swift as the flight of Puck. We have not yet realised the hippogriff of Ariosto. Just consider what aworld this would be if ruled by the best thoughts of men of letters!Ignorance would die at once, war would cease, taxation would belightened, not only every Frenchman, but every man in the world, wouldhave his hen in the pot. May would not marry January. The race oflawyers and physicians would be extinct. Fancy a world the affairs ofwhich are directed by Goethe's wisdom and Goldsmith's heart! In such acase, methinks the millennium were already come. Books are a finer worldwithin the world. With books are connected all my desires andaspirations. When I go to my long sleep, on a book will my head bepillowed. I care for no other fashion of greatness. I'd as lief not beremembered at all as remembered in connection with anything else. Iwould rather be Charles Lamb than Charles XII. I would rather beremembered by a song than by a victory. I would rather build a finesonnet than have built St. Paul's. I would rather be the discoverer of anew image than the discoverer of a new planet. Fine phrases I value morethan bank notes. I have ear for no other harmony than the harmony ofwords. To be occasionally quoted is the only fame I care for. 

But what of the literary life? How fares it with the men whose days andnights are devoted to the writing of books? We know the famous men ofletters; we give them the highest place in our regards; we crown themwith laurels so thickly that we hide the furrows on their foreheads. Yetwe must remember that there are men of letters who have been equallysanguine, equally ardent, who have pursued perfection equallyunselfishly, but who have failed to make themselves famous. We know theships that come with streaming pennons into the immortal ports; we knowbut little of the ships that have gone on fire on the way thither, --thathave gone down at sea. Even with successful men we cannot know preciselyhow matters have gone. We read the fine raptures of the poet, but we donot know into what kind of being he relapses when the inspiration isover, any more than, seeing and hearing the lark shrilling at the gate ofheaven, we know with what effort it has climbed thither, or into whatkind of nest it must descend. The lark is not always singing; no more isthe poet. The lark is only interesting _while_ singing; at other timesit is but a plain brown bird. We may not be able to recognise the poetwhen he doffs his singing robes; he may then sink to the level of hisadmirers. We laugh at the fancies of the humourists, but he may havewritten his brilliant things in a dismal enough mood. The writer is notcontinually dwelling amongst the roses and lilies of life, he is notcontinually uttering generous sentiments, and saying fine things. Onhim, as on his brethren, the world presses with its prosaic needs. Hehas to make love and marry, and run the usual matrimonial risks. Theincome-tax collector visits him as well as others. Around his head atChristmas-times drives a snow-storm of bills. He must keep the wolf fromthe door, and he has only his goose-quills to confront it with. And hereit is, having to deal with alien powers, that his special temperamentcomes into play, and may work him evil. Wit is not worldly wisdom. Aman gazing on the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles onthe road. A man may be able to disentangle intricate problems, be ableto recall the past, and yet be cozened by an ordinary knave. The finestexpression will not liquidate a butcher's account. If Apollo puts hisname to a bill, he must meet it when it becomes due, or go into thegazette. Armies are not always cheering on the heights which they havewon; there are forced marches, occasional shortness of provisions, bivouacs on muddy plains, driving in of pickets, and the like, althoughthese inglorious items are forgotten when we read the roll of victoriesinscribed on their banners. The books of the great writer are onlyportions of the great writer. His life acts on his writings; hiswritings react on his life. His life may impoverish his books; his booksmay impoverish his life. 

 "Apollo's branch that might have grown full straight, "

may have the worm of a vulgar misery gnawing at its roots. The heat ofinspiration may be subtracted from the household fire; and those who sitby it may be the colder in consequence. A man may put all his goodthings in his books, and leave none for his life, just as a man mayexpend his fortune on a splendid dress, and carry a pang of hungerbeneath it. 

There are few less exhilarating books than the biographies of men ofletters, and of artists generally; and this arises from the pictures ofcomparative defeat which, in almost every instance, such books contain. In these books we see failure more or less, --seldom clear, victoriouseffort. If the art is exquisite, the marble is flawed; if the marble ispure, there is defect in art. There is always something lacking in thepoem; there is always irremediable defect in the picture. In thebiography we see persistent, passionate effort, and almost constantrepulse. If, on the whole, victory is gained, one wing of the army hasbeen thrown into confusion. In the life of a successful farmer, forinstance, one feels nothing of this kind; his year flows on harmoniously, fortunately; through ploughing, seed-time, growth of grain, the yellowingof it beneath meek autumn suns and big autumn moons, the cutting of itdown, riotous harvest-home, final sale, and large balance at thebanker's. From the point of view of almost unvarying success thefarmer's life becomes beautiful, poetic. Everything is an aid and helpto him. Nature puts her shoulder to his wheel. He takes the winds, theclouds, the sunbeams, the rolling stars into partnership, and, asking nodividend, they let him retain the entire profits. As a rule, the livesof men of letters do not flow on in this successful way. In their casethere is always either defect in the soil or defect in the husbandry. Like the Old Guard at Waterloo, they are fighting bravely on a lostfield. In literary biography there is always an element of tragedy, andthe love we bear the dead is mingled with pity. Of course the life of aman of letters is more perilous than the life of a farmer; more perilousthan almost any other kind of life which it is given a human being toconduct. It is more difficult to obtain the mastery over spiritual waysand means than over material ones, and he must command _both_. Properlyto conduct his life he must not only take large crops off his fields, hemust also leave in his fields the capacity of producing large crops. Itis easy to drive in your chariot two horses of one breed; not so easywhen the one is of terrestrial stock, the other of celestial; in everyrespect different--in colour, temper, and pace. 

At the outset of his career, the man of letters is confronted by the factthat he must live. The obtaining of a livelihood is preliminary toeverything else. Poets and cobblers are placed on the same level so far. If the writer can barter MSS. For sufficient coin, he may proceed todevelop himself; if he cannot so barter it, there is a speedy end ofhimself, and of his development also. Literature has become aprofession; but it is in several respects different from the professionsby which other human beings earn their bread. The man of letters, unlikethe clergyman, the physician, or the lawyer, has to undergo no specialpreliminary training for his work, and while engaged in it, unlike theprofessional persons named, he has no accredited status. Of course, toearn any success, he must start with as much special knowledge, with asmuch dexterity in his craft, as your ordinary physician; but then he isnot recognised till once he is successful. When a man takes aphysician's degree, he has done something; when a man betakes himself toliterary pursuits, he has done nothing--till once he is lucky enough tomake his mark. There is no special preliminary training for men ofletters, and as a consequence, their ranks are recruited from the vagranttalent of the world. Men that break loose from the professions, whostray from the beaten tracks of life, take refuge in literature. In itare to be found doctors, lawyers, clergymen, and the motley nation ofBohemians. Any one possessed of a nimble brain, a quire of paper, asteel-pen and ink-bottle, can start business. Any one who chooses mayenter the lists, and no questions are asked concerning his antecedents. The battle is won by sheer strength of brain. From all this it comesthat the man of letters has usually a history of his own: hisindividuality is more pronounced than the individuality of other men; hehas been knocked about by passion and circumstance. All his life he hashad a dislike for iron rules and common-place maxims. There is somethingof the gipsy in his nature. He is to some extent eccentric, and heindulges his eccentricity. And the misfortunes of men of letters--thevulgar and patent misfortunes, I mean--arise mainly from the want ofharmony between their impulsiveness and volatility, and the staidunmercurial world with which they are brought into conflict. They areunconventional in a world of conventions; they are fanciful, and areconstantly misunderstood in prosaic relations. They are wise enough intheir books, for there they are sovereigns, and can shape everything totheir own likings; out of their books, they are not unfrequentlyextremely foolish, for they exist then in the territory of an alienpower, and are constantly knocking their heads against existing orders ofthings. Men of letters take prosaic men out of themselves; but they areweak where the prosaic men are strong. They have their own way in theworld of ideas, prosaic men in the world of facts. From his practicalerrors the writer learns something, if not always humility and amendment. A memorial flower grows on every spot where he has come to grief; and thechasm he cannot over-leap he bridges with a rainbow. 

But the man of letters has not only to live, he has to develop himself;and his earning of money and his intellectual development should proceedsimultaneously and in proportionate degrees. Herein lies the maindifficulty of the literary life. Out of his thought the man must bringfire, food, clothing; and fire, food, clothing must in their turnssubserve thought. It is necessary, for the proper conduct of such alife, that while the balance at the banker's increases, intellectualresource should increase at the same ratio. Progress should not be madein the faculty of expression alone, --progress at the same time should bemade in thought; for thought is the material on which expression feeds. Should sufficient advance not be made in this last direction, in a shorttime the man feels that he has expressed himself, --that now he can onlymore or less dexterously repeat himself, --more or less prettily becomehis own echo. It is comparatively easy to acquire facility in writing;but it is an evil thing for the man of letters when such facility is theonly thing he has acquired, --when it has been, perhaps, the only thing hehas striven to acquire. Such miscalculation of ways and means suggestsvulgarity of aspiration, and a fatal material taint. In the life inwhich this error has been committed there can be no proper harmony, nosatisfaction, no spontaneous delight in effort. The man does notcreate, --he is only desperately keeping up appearances. He has at oncebecome "a base mechanical, " and his successes are not much higher thanthe successes of the acrobat or the rope-dancer. This want of properrelationship between resources of expression and resources of thought, orsubject-matter for expression, is common enough, and some slightsuspicion of it flashes across the mind at times in reading even the bestauthors. It lies at the bottom of every catastrophe in the literarylife. Frequently a man's first book is good, and all his afterproductions but faint and yet fainter reverberations of the first. Themen who act thus are in the long run deserted like worked-out mines. Aman reaches his limits as to thought long before he reaches his limits asto expression; and a haunting suspicion of this is one of the peculiarbitters of the literary life. Hazlitt tells us that, after one of hisearly interviews with Coleridge, he sat down to his Essay on the NaturalDisinterestedness of the Human Mind. "I sat down to the task shortlyafterwards for the twentieth time, got new pens and paper, determined tomake clean work of it, wrote a few sentences in the skeleton style of amathematical demonstration, stopped half-way down the second page, and, after trying in vain to pump up any words, images, notions, apprehensions, facts, or observations, from that gulf of abstraction inwhich I had plunged myself for four, or five years preceding, gave up theattempt as labour in vain, and shed tears of hopeless despondency on theblank unfinished paper. I can write fast enough now. Am I better than Iwas then? oh, no! One truth discovered, one pang of regret at not beingable to express it, is worth all the fluency and flippancy in the world. "This regretful looking back to the past, when emotions were keen andsharp, and when thought wore the novel dress of a stranger, and thisdissatisfaction with the acquirements of the present, is common enoughwith the man of letters. The years have come and gone, and he isconscious that he is not intrinsically richer, --he has only learned toassort and display his riches to advantage. His wares have neitherincreased in quantity nor improved in quality, --he has only procured awindow in a leading thoroughfare. He can catch his butterflies morecunningly, he can pin them on his cards more skilfully, but their wingsare fingered and tawdry compared with the time when they winnowed beforehim in the sunshine over the meadows of youth. This species of regret ispeculiar to the class of which I am speaking, and they often discernfailure in what the world counts success. The veteran does not look backto the time when he was in the awkward squad; the accountant does notsigh over the time when he was bewildered by the mysteries ofdouble-entry. And the reason is obvious. The dexterity which time andpractice have brought to the soldier and the accountant is pure gain: thedexterity of expression which time and practice have brought to thewriter is gain too, in its way, but not quite so pure. It may have beencultivated and brought to its degree of excellence at the expense ofhigher things. The man of letters lives by thought and expression, andhis two powers may not be perfectly balanced. And, putting aside itseffect on the reader, and through that, on the writer's pecuniaryprosperity, the tragedy of want of equipoise lies in this. When thewriter expresses his thought, it is immediately dead to him, howeverlife-giving it may be to others; he pauses midway in his career, he looksback over his uttered past--brown desert to him, in which there is nosustenance--he looks forward to the green _un_uttered future, andbeholding its narrow limits, knows it is all that he can call hisown, --on that vivid strip he must pasture his intellectual life. 

Is the literary life, on the whole, a happy one? Granted that the writeris productive, that he possesses abundance of material, that he hassecured the ear of the world, one is inclined to fancy that no life couldbe happier. Such a man seems to live on the finest of the wheat. If apoet, he is continually singing; if a novelist, he is supreme in hisideal world; if a humourist, everything smiles back upon his smile; if anessayist, he is continually saying the wisest, most memorable things. Hebreathes habitually the serener air which ordinary mortals can only atintervals respire, and in their happiest moments. Such conceptions ofgreat writers are to some extent erroneous. Through the medium of theirbooks we know them only in their active mental states, --in theirtriumphs; we do not see them when sluggishness has succeeded the effortwhich was delight. The statue does not come to her white limbs all atonce. It is the bronze wrestler, not the flesh and blood one, thatstands forever over a fallen adversary with pride of victory on his face. Of the labour, the weariness, the self-distrust, the utter despondency ofthe great writer, we know nothing. Then, for the attainment of merehappiness or contentment, any high faculty of imagination is aquestionable help. Of course imagination lights the torch of joy, itdeepens the carmine on the sleek cheek of the girl, it makes winesparkle, makes music speak, gives rays to the rising sun. But in all itssupreme sweetnesses there is a perilous admixture of deceit, which issuspected even at the moment when the senses tingle keenliest. And itmust be remembered that this potent faculty can darken as well asbrighten. It is the very soul of pain. While the trumpets are blowingin Ambition's ear, it whispers of the grave. It drapes Death in austeresolemnities, and surrounds him with a gloomy court of terrors. The lifeof the imaginative man is never a commonplace one: his lights arebrighter, his glooms are darker, than the lights and gloom of the vulgar. His ecstasies are as restless as his pains. The great writer has thisperilous faculty in excess; and through it he will, as a matter ofcourse, draw out of the atmosphere of circumstance surrounding him thekeenness of pleasure and pain. To my own notion, the best gifts of thegods are neither the most glittering nor the most admired. These gifts Itake to be, a moderate ambition, a taste for repose with circumstancesfavourable thereto, a certain mildness of passion, an even-beating pulse, an even-beating heart. I do not consider heroes and celebrated personsthe happiest of mankind. I do not envy Alexander the shouting of hisarmies, nor Dante his laurel wreath. Even were I able, I would notpurchase these at the prices the poet and the warrior paid. So far, then, as great writers--great poets, especially--are of imagination allcompact--a peculiarity of mental constitution which makes a man go shareswith every one he is brought into contact with; which makes him enterinto Romeo's rapture when he touches Juliet's cheek among cypressessilvered by the Verona moonlight, and the stupor of the blinded andpinioned wretch on the scaffold before the bolt is drawn--so far as thisspecial gift goes, I do not think the great poet, --and by virtue of it he_is_ a poet, --is likely to be happier than your more ordinary mortal. Onthe whole, perhaps, it is the great readers rather than the great writerswho are entirely to be envied. They pluck the fruits, and are spared thetrouble of rearing them. Prometheus filched fire from heaven, and hadfor reward the crag of Caucasus, the chain, the vulture; while they forwhom he stole it cook their suppers upon it, stretch out benumbed handstowards it, and see its light reflected in their children's faces. Theyare comfortable: he, roofed by the keen crystals of the stars, groansabove. 

Trifles make up the happiness or the misery of mortal life. The majorityof men slip into their graves without having encountered on their waythither any signal catastrophe or exaltation of fortune or feeling. Collect a thousand ignited sticks into a heap, and you have a bonfirewhich may be seen over three counties. If, during thirty years, theannoyances connected with shirt-buttons found missing when you arehurriedly dressing for dinner, were gathered into a mass and endured atonce, it would be misery equal to a public execution. If, from the samespace of time, all the little titillations of a man's vanity weregathered into one lump of honey and enjoyed at once, the pleasure ofbeing crowned would not perhaps be much greater. If the equanimity of anordinary man be at the mercy of trifles, how much more will theequanimity of the man of letters, who is usually the most sensitive ofthe race, and whose peculiar avocation makes sad work with the finetissues of the nerves. Literary composition is, I take it, with theexception of the crank, in which there is neither hope nor result, themost exhausting to which a human being can apply himself. Just considerthe situation. Here is your man of letters, tender-hearted as Cowper, who would not count upon his list of friends the man who tramplesheedlessly upon a worm; as light of sleep and abhorrent of noise asBeattie, who denounces chanticleer for his lusty proclamation of morningto his own and the neighbouring farmyards in terms that would beunmeasured if applied to Nero; as alive to blame as Byron, who declaredthat the praise of the greatest of the race could not take the sting fromthe censure of the meanest. Fancy the sufferings of a creature so builtand strung in a world which creaks so vilely on its hinges as this! Willsuch a man confront a dun with an imperturbable countenance? Will hethrow himself back in his chair and smile blandly when his chamber islanced through and through by the notes of a street bagpiper? When hisharrassed brain should be solaced by music, will he listen patiently tostupid remarks? I fear not. The man of letters suffers keenlier thanpeople suspect from sharp, cruel noises, from witless observations, fromsocial misconceptions of him of every kind, from hard utilitarian wisdom, and from his own good things going to the grave unrecognised andunhonoured. And, forced to live by his pen, to extract from his brainbread and beer, clothing, lodging, and income-tax, I am not surprisedthat he is oftentimes nervous, querulous, impatient. Thinking of thesethings, I do not wonder at Hazlitt's spleen, at Charles Lamb's punch, atColeridge's opium. I think of the days spent in writing, and of thenights which repeat the day in dream, and in which there is norefreshment. I think of the brain which must be worked out at length; ofScott, when the wand of the enchanter was broken, writing poor romances;of Southey sitting vacantly in his library, and drawing a feeblesatisfaction from the faces of his books. And for the man of lettersthere is more than the mere labour: he writes his book, and hasfrequently the mortification of seeing it neglected or torn to pieces. Above all men, he longs for sympathy, recognition, applause. He respectshis fellow-creatures, because he beholds in him a possible reader. Towrite a book, to send it forth to the world and the critics, is to asensitive person like plunging mother-naked into tropic waters wheresharks abound. It is true that, like death, the terror of criticismlives most in apprehension; still, to have been frequently criticised, and to be constantly liable to it, are disagreeable items in a man'slife. Most men endure criticism with commendable fortitude, just as mostcriminals when under the drop conduct themselves with calmness. Theybleed, but they bleed inwardly. To be flayed in the _Saturday Review_, for instance, --a whole amused public looking on, --is far from pleasant;and, after the operation, the ordinary annoyances of life probablymagnify themselves into tortures. The grasshopper becomes a burden. Touch a flayed man ever so lightly, and with ever so kindly an intention, and he is sure to wince. The skin of the man of letters is peculiarlysensitive to the bite of the critical mosquito; and he lives in a climatein which such mosquitoes swarm. He is seldom stabbed to the heart--he isoften killed by pin-pricks. 

But, to leave palisade and outwork, and come to the interior of thecitadel, it may be said that great writers, although they must everremain shining objects of regard to us, are not exempted from ordinarylimitations and conditions. They are cabined, cribbed, confined, even astheir more prosaic brethren. It is in the nature of every man to beendued with that he works in. Thus, in course of time, the merchantbecomes bound up in his ventures and his ledger; an indefinable flavourof the pharmacopoeia lingers about the physician; the bombasine andhorse-hair of the lawyer eat into his soul--his experiences are docketedin a clerkly hand, bound together with red tape, and put away inprofessional pigeon-holes. A man naturally becomes leavened by theprofession which he has adopted. He thinks, speaks, and dreams "shop, "as the colloquial phrase has it. Men of letters are affected by theirprofession just as merchants, physicians, and lawyers are. In course oftime the inner man becomes stained with ink, like blotting-paper. Theagriculturist talks constantly of bullocks--the man of letters constantlyof books. The printing-press seems constantly in his immediateneighbourhood. He is stretched on the rack of an unfavourablereview, --he is lapped in the Elysium of a new edition. The narrowingeffect of a profession is in every man a defect, albeit an inevitableone. Byron, who had a larger amount of common sense than any poet of hisday, tells us, in "Beppo, "

 "One hates an author that's _all author_; fellows In foolscap uniforms turn'd up with ink. "

And his lordship's "hate" in the matter is understandable enough. In hisown day, Scott and himself were almost the only distinguished authors whowere not "all authors, " just as Mr. Helps and Sir Edward Bulwer Lyttonare almost the only representatives of the class in ours. Thisprofessional taint not only resides in the writer, impairing his fulnessand completion; it flows out of him into his work, and impairs it also. It is the professional character which authorship has assumed which hastaken individuality and personal flavour from so much of our writing, andprevented to a large extent the production of enduring books. Ourwriting is done too hurriedly, and to serve a purpose too immediate. Literature is not so much an art as a manufacture. There is a demand, and too many crops are taken off the soil; it is never allowed to liefallow, and to nourish itself in peacefulness and silence. When so manycups are to be filled, too much water is certain to be put into theteapot. Letters have become a profession, and probably of allprofessions it is, in the long run, the least conducive to personalhappiness. It is the most precarious. In it, above all others, to beweak is to be miserable. It is the least mechanical, consequently themost exhausting; and in its higher walks it deals with a man's most vitalmaterial--utilises his emotions, trades on his faculties of love andimagination, uses for its own purposes the human heart by which he lives. These things a man requires for himself; and when they are in a largeproportion transported to an ideal world, they make the ideal world allthe more brilliant and furnished, and leave his ordinary existence allthe more arid and commonplace. You cannot spend money and have it; youcannot use emotion and possess it. The poet who sings loudly of love andlove's delights, may in the ordinary intercourse of life be all thecolder for his singing. The man who has been moved while describing animaginary death-bed to-day, is all the more likely to be unmoved whilestanding by his friend's grave to-morrow. Shakspeare, after emergingfrom the moonlight in the Verona orchard, and Romeo and Juliet's silveryinterchange of vows, was, I fear me, not marvellously enamoured of theautumn on Ann Hathaway's cheek. It is in some such way as this that aman's books may impoverish his life; that the fire and heat of his geniusmay make his hearth all the colder. From considerations like these, onecan explain satisfactorily enough to one's self the domesticmisadventures of men of letters--of poets especially. We know the poetsonly in their books; their wives know them out of them. Their wives seethe other side of the moon; and we have been made pretty well aware howthey have appreciated _that_. 

The man engaged in the writing of books is tempted to make such writingthe be-all and end-all of his existence--to grow his literature out ofhis history, experience, or observation, as the gardener grows out ofsoils brought from a distance the plants which he intends to exhibit. The cup of life foams fiercely over into first books; materials for thesecond, third, and fourth must be carefully sought for. The man ofletters, as time passes on, and the professional impulse works deeper, ceases to regard the world with a single eye. The man slowly merges intothe artist. He values new emotions and experiences, because he can turnthese into artistic shapes. He plucks "copy" from rising and settingsuns. He sees marketable pathos in his friend's death-bed. He carriesthe peal of his daughter's marriage-bells into his sentences or hisrhymes; and in these the music sounds sweeter to him than in the sunshineand the wind. If originally of a meditative, introspective mood, hisprofession can hardly fail to confirm and deepen his peculiartemperament. He begins to feel his own pulse curiously, and for apurpose. As a spy in the service of literature, he lives in the worldand its concerns. Out of everything he seeks thoughts and images, as outof everything the bee seeks wax and honey. A curious instance of thismode of looking at things occurs in Goethe's "Letters from Italy, " withwhom, indeed, it was fashion, and who helped himself out of the teemingworld to more effect than any man of his time:--

"From Botzen to Trent the stage is nine leagues, and runs through avalley which constantly increases in fertility. All that merelystruggles into vegetation on the higher mountains has here more strengthand vitality. The sun shines with warmth, and there is once more beliefin a Deity. 

"A poor woman cried out to me to take her child into my vehicle, as thesoil was burning its feet. I did her this service out of honour to thestrong light of Heaven. The child was strangely decked out, _but I couldget nothing from it in any way_. "

It is clear that out of all this the reader gains; but I cannot helpthinking that for the writer it tends to destroy entire and simpleliving--all hearty and final enjoyment in life. Joy and sorrow, deathand marriage, the comic circumstance and the tragic, what befalls him, what he observes, what he is brought into contact with, do not affect himas they affect other men; they are secrets to be rifled, stones to bebuilt with, clays to be moulded into artistic shape. In giving emotionalmaterial artistic form, there is indisputably a certain noble pleasure;but it is of a solitary and severe complexion, and takes a man out of thecircle and sympathies of his fellows. I do not say that this kind oflife makes a man selfish, but it often makes him _seem_ so; and theresults of this seeming, on friendship and the domestic relationships, for instance, are as baleful as if selfishness really existed. Thepeculiar temptation which besets men of letters, the curious playing withthought and emotion, the tendency to analyse and take everything topieces, has two results, and neither aids his happiness nor even hisliterary success. On the one hand, and in relation to the socialrelations, it gives him somewhat of an icy aspect, and so breaks thespring and eagerness of affectionate response. For the best affection isshy, reticent, undemonstrative, and needs to be drawn out by its like. If unrecognised, like an acquaintance on the street, it passes by, makingno sign, and is for the time being a stranger. On the other hand, thedesire to say a fine thing about a phenomenon, whether natural or moral, prevents a man from reaching the inmost core of the phenomenon. Entranceinto these matters will never be obtained by the most sedulous seeking. The man who has found an entrance cannot tell how he came there, and hewill never find his way back again by the same road. From this lawarises all the dreary conceits and artifices of the poets; it is throughthe operation of the same law that many of our simple songs and balladsare inexpressibly affecting, because in them there is no consciousness ofauthorship; emotion and utterance are twin born, consentaneous--likesorrow and tears, a blow and its pain, a kiss and its thrill. When a manis happy, every effort to express his happiness mars its completeness. Iam not happy at all unless I am happier than I know. When the tide isfull there is silence in channel and creek. The silence of the loverwhen he clasps the maid is better than the passionate murmur of the songwhich celebrates her charms. If to be near the rose makes thenightingale tipsy with delight, what must it be to be the rose herself?One feeling of the "wild joys of living--the leaping from rock to rock, "is better than the "muscular-Christianity" literature which our time hasproduced. I am afraid that the profession of letters interferes with theelemental feelings of life; and I am afraid, too, that in the majority ofcases this interference is not justified by its results. The entirenessand simplicity of life is flawed by the intrusion of an inquisitiveelement, and this inquisitive element never yet found anything which wasmuch worth the finding. Men live by the primal energies of love, faith, imagination; and happily it is not given to every one to _live_, in thepecuniary sense, by the artistic utilisation and sale of these. Youcannot make ideas; they must come unsought if they come at all. 

 "From pastoral graves extracting thoughts divine"

is a profitable occupation enough, if you stumble on the littlechurchyard covered over with silence, and folded among the hills. If yougo to the churchyard with intent to procure thought, as you go into thewoods to gather anemones, you are wasting your time. Thoughts must comenaturally, like wild flowers; they cannot be forced in a hot-bed--evenalthough aided by the leaf-mould of your past--like exotics. And it isthe misfortune of men of letters of our day that they cannot afford towait for this natural flowering of thought, but are driven to the forcingprocess, with the results which were to be expected. 

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF A MAN TO HIMSELF

The present writer remembers to have been visited once by a strangefeeling of puzzlement; and the puzzled feeling arose out of thefollowing circumstance:--He was seated in a railway-carriage, fiveminutes or so before starting, and had time to contemplate certainwaggons or trucks filled with cattle, drawn up on a parallel line, andquite close to the window at which he sat. The cattle wore amuch-enduring aspect; and, as he looked into their large, patient, melancholy eyes, --for, as before mentioned, there was no space to speakof intervening, --the feeling of puzzlement alluded to arose in hismind. And it consisted in an attempt to solve the existence beforehim, to enter into it, to understand it, and his inability toaccomplish it, or indeed to make any way toward the accomplishment ofit. The much-enduring animals in the trucks opposite hadunquestionably some rude twilight of a notion of a world; of objectsthey had some unknown cognisance; but he could get behind themelancholy eye within a yard of him, and look through it. How, fromthat window, the world shaped itself, he could not discover, could noteven fancy; and yet, staring on the animals, he was conscious of acertain fascination in which there lurked an element of terror. Thesewild, unkempt brutes, with slavering muzzles, penned together, lived, could choose between this thing and the other, could be frightened, could be enraged, could even love or hate; and gazing into a placid, heavy countenance, and the depths of a patient eye, not a yard away, hewas conscious of an obscure and shuddering recognition, of a life akinso far with his own. But to enter into that life imaginatively, and toconceive it, he found impossible. Eye looked upon eye, but the onecould not flash recognition on the other; and, thinking of this, heremembers, with what a sense of ludicrous horror, the idea came, --what, if looking on one another thus, some spark of recognition could beelicited; if some rudiment of thought could be detected; if there wereindeed a point at which man and ox could not compare notes? Supposesome gleam or scintillation of humour had lighted up the unwinking, amber eye? Heavens, the bellow of the weaning calf would be pathetic, shoe-leather would be forsworn, the eating of roast meat, hot or cold, would be cannibalism, the terrified world would make a sudden dash intovegetarianism! Happily before fancy had time to play another vagary, with a snort and pull the train moved on, and my truckful of hornedfriends were left gazing into empty space, with the same wistful, patient, and melancholy expression with which, for the space of fiveminutes or so, they had surveyed and bewildered me. 

A similar feeling of puzzlement to that which I have indicated, besetsone not unfrequently in the contemplation of men and women. You arebrought in contact with a person, you attempt to comprehend him, toenter into him, in a word to _be_ him, and, if you are utterly foiledin the attempt, you cannot flatter yourself that you have beensuccessful to the measure of your desire. A person interests, orpiques, or tantalises you, you do your best to make him out; yet striveas you will, you cannot read the riddle of his personality. From theinvulnerable fortress of his own nature he smiles contemptuously on thebeleaguering armies of your curiosity and analysis. And it is not onlythe stranger that thus defeats you; it may be the brother brought up bythe same fireside with you, the best friend whom you have known fromearly school and college days, the very child, perhaps, that bears yourname, and with whose moral and mental apparatus you think you are asfamiliar as with your own. In the midst of the most amicablerelationships and the best understandings, human beings are, at times, conscious of a cold feeling of strangeness--the friend is actuated by afeeling which never could actuate you, some hitherto unknown part ofhis character becomes visible, and while at one moment you stood insuch close neighbourhood, that you could feel his arm touch your own, in the next there is a feeling of removal, of distance, of empty spacebetwixt him and you in which the wind is blowing. You and he becomeseparate entities. He is related to you as Border peel is related toBorder peel on Tweedside, or as ship is related to ship on the sea. Itis not meant that any quarrel or direct misunderstanding should havetaken place, simply that feeling of foreignness is meant to beindicated which occurs now and then in the intercourse of the mostaffectionate; which comes as a harsh reminder to friends and loversthat with whatsoever flowery bands they may be linked, they areseparated persons, who understand, and can only understand, each otherpartially. It is annoying to be put out in our notions of men andwomen thus, and to be forced to rearrange them. It is a misfortune tohave to manoeuvre one's heart as a general has to manoeuvre his army. The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you maysurvey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the servants inthe world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest humanpersonality. And the worst of all this is, that love and friendshipmay be the outcome of a certain condition of knowledge; increase theknowledge, and love and friendship beat their wings and go. Everyman's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings. Intimacy is frequently the road to indifference, and marriage aparricide. From these accidents to the affections, and from theefforts to repair them, life has in many a patched and tinkered look. 

Love and friendship are the discoveries of ourselves in others, and ourdelight in the recognition; and in men, as in books, we only know that, the parallel of which we have in ourselves. We know only that portionof the world which we have travelled over; and we are never a whitwiser than our own experiences. Imagination, the falcon, sits on thewrist of Experience, the falconer; she can never soar beyond the reachof his whistle, and when tired she must return to her perch. Ourknowledge is limited by ourselves, and so also are our imaginations. And so it comes about, that a man measures everything by his ownfoot-rule; that if he is ignoble, all the ignobleness that is in theworld looks out upon him, and claims kindred with him; if noble, allthe nobleness in the world does the like. Shakspeare is always thesame height with his reader; and when a thousand Christians subscribeto one Confession of Faith, hardly to two of them does it mean the samething. The world is a great warehouse of raiment, to which every onehas access and is allowed free use; and the remarkable thing is, whatcoarse stuffs are often chosen, and how scantily some people areattired. 

We never get quit of ourselves. While I am writing, the spring isoutside, and this season of the year touches my spirit always with asense of newness, of strangeness, of resurrection. It shoots boyhoodagain into the blood of middle age. That tender greening of the blackbough and the red field, --that coming again of the new-oldflowers, --that re-birth of love in all the family of birds, withcooings, and caressings, and building of nests in wood and brake, --thatstrange glory of sunshine in the air, --that stirring of life in thegreen mould, making even churchyards beautiful, --seems like thecreation of a new world. And yet--and yet, even with the lamb in thesunny field, the lark mile-high in the blue, Spring has her melancholyside, and bears a sadder burden to the heart than Autumn, preaching ofdecay with all his painted woods. For the flowers that make sweet themoist places in the forest are not the same that bloomed the yearbefore. Another lark sings above the furrowed field. Nature rolls onin her eternal course, repeating her tale of spring, summer, autumn, winter; but life in man and beast is transitory, and other livingcreatures take their places. It is quite certain that one or other ofthe next twenty springs will come unseen by me, will awake no throb oftransport in my veins. But will it be less bright on that account?Will the lamb be saddened in the field? Will the lark be less happy inthe air? The sunshine will draw the daisy from the mound under which Isleep, as carelessly as she draws the cowslip from the meadow by theriverside. The seasons have no ruth, no compunction. They care notfor our petty lives. The light falls sweetly on graveyards, and onbrown labourers among the hay-swaths. Were the world depopulatedto-morrow, next spring would break pitilessly bright, flowers wouldbloom, fruit-tree boughs wear pink and white; and although there wouldbe no eye to witness, Summer would not adorn herself with one blossomthe less. It is curious to think how important a creature a man is tohimself. We cannot help thinking that all things exist for ourparticular selves. The sun, in whose light a system lives, warms me;makes the trees grow for me; paints the evening sky in gorgeous coloursfor me. The mould I till, produced from the beds of extinct oceans andthe grating of rock and mountain during countless centuries, existsthat I may have muffins to breakfast. Animal life, with its strangeinstincts and affections, is to be recognised and cherished, --for doesit not draw my burdens for me, and carry me from place to place, andyield me comfortable broadcloth, and succulent joints to dinner? Ithink it matter of complaint that Nature, like a personal friend towhom I have done kind services, will not wear crape at my funeral. Ithink it cruel that the sun should shine, and birds sing, and I lyingin my grave. People talk of the age of the world! So far as I amconcerned, it began with my consciousness, and will end with my decease. 

And yet, this self-consciousness, which so continually besets us, is initself a misery and a galling chain. We are never happy till byimagination we are taken out of the pales and limits of self. Wereceive happiness at second hand: the spring of it may be in ourselves, but we do not know it to be happiness, till, like the sun's light fromthe moon, it is reflected on us from an object outside. The admixtureof a foreign element sweetens and unfamiliarises it. Sheridan preparedhis good things in solitude, but he tasted for the first time hisjest's prosperity when it came back to him in illumined faces and aroar of applause. Your oldest story becomes new when you have a newauditor. A young man is truth-loving and amiable, but it is only whenthese fair qualities shine upon him from a girl's face that he issmitten by transport--only then is he truly happy. In that junction ofhearts, in that ecstasy of mutual admiration and delight, the finestepithalamium ever writ by poet is hardly worthy of the occasion. Thecountryman purchases oranges at a fair for his little ones; and when hebrings them home in the evening, and watches his chubby urchins, sitting up among the bed-clothes, peel and devour the fruit, he is forthe time-being richer than if he drew the rental of the orange-grovesof Seville. To eat an orange himself is nothing; to see _them_ eat itis a pleasure worth the price of the fruit a thousand times over. There is no happiness in the world in which love does not enter; andlove is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight inthe recognition. Apart from others no man can make his happiness; justas, apart from a mirror of one kind or another, no man can becomeacquainted with his own lineaments. 

The accomplishment of a man is the light by which we are enabled todiscover the limits of his personality. Every man brings into theworld with him a certain amount of pith and force, and to that pith orforce his amount of accomplishment is exactly proportioned. It is inthis way that every spoken word, every action of a man, becomesbiographical. Everything a man says or does is in consistency withhimself; and it is by looking back on his sayings and doings that wearrive at the truth concerning him. A man is one; and every outcome ofhim has a family resemblance. Goldsmith did _not_ "write like an angeland talk like poor Poll, " as we may in part discern from Boswell's"Johnson. " Strange, indeed, if a man talked continually the sheerestnonsense, and wrote continually the gracefulest humours; if a man waslame on the street, and the finest dancer in the ball-room. Todescribe a character by antithesis is like painting a portrait in blackand white--all the curious intermixtures and gradations of colour arelost. The accomplishment of a human being is measured by his strength, or by his nice tact in using his strength. The distance to which yourgun, whether rifled or smooth-bored, will carry its shot, depends uponthe force of its charge. A runner's speed and endurance depends uponhis depth of chest and elasticity of limb. If a poet's lines lackharmony, it instructs us that there is a certain lack of harmony inhimself. We see why Haydon failed as an artist when we read his life. No one can dip into the "Excursion" without discovering that Wordsworthwas devoid of humour, and that he cared more for the narrow Cumberlandvale than he did for the big world. The flavour of opium can bedetected in the "Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel. " A man's word ordeed takes us back to himself, as the sunbeam takes us back to the sun. It is the sternest philosophy, but on the whole the truest, that, inthe wide arena of the world, failure and success are not accidents aswe so frequently suppose, but the strictest justice. If you do yourfair day's work, you are certain to get your fair day's wage--in praiseor pudding, whichever happens to suit your taste. You may have seen atcountry fairs a machine by which the rustics test their strength ofarm. A country fellow strikes vigorously a buffer, which recoils, andthe amount of the recoil--dependent, of course, on the force with whichit is struck--is represented by a series of notches or marks. Theworld is such a buffer. A man strikes it with all his might; his markmay be 40, 000 pounds, a peerage, and Westminster Abbey, a name inliterature or art; but in every case his mark is nicely determined bythe force or the art with which the buffer is struck. Into the world aman brings his personality, and his biography is simply a catalogue ofits results. 

There are some men who have no individuality, just as there are somemen who have no face. These are to be described by generals, not byparticulars. They are thin, vapid, inconclusive. They are importantsolely on account of their numbers. For them the census enumeratorlabours; they form majorities; they crowd voting booths; they make themoney; they do the ordinary work of the world. They are valuable whenwell officered. They are plastic matter to be shaped by a workman'shand; and are built with as bricks are built with. In the aggregate, they form public opinion; but then, in every age, public opinion is thedisseminated thoughts of some half a dozen men, who are in allprobability sleeping quietly in their graves. They retain dead men'sideas, just as the atmosphere retains the light and heat of the setsun. They are not light--they are twilight. To know how to deal withsuch men--to know how to use them--is the problem which ambitious forceis called upon to solve. Personality, individuality, force ofcharacter, or by whatever name we choose to designate original andvigourous manhood, is the best thing which nature has in her gift. Theforceful man is a prophecy of the future. The wind blows here, butlong after it is spent the big wave which is its creature, breaks on ashore a thousand miles away. It is curious how swiftly influencestravel from centre to circumference. A certain empress invents agracefully pendulous crinoline, and immediately, from Paris to thepole, the female world is behooped; and neither objurgation of brother, lover, or husband, deaths by burning or machinery, nor all the wit ofthe satirists, are likely to affect its vitality. Never did an idea goround civilisation so rapidly. Crinoline has already a heaviermartyrology than many a creed. The world is used easily, if one canonly hit on the proper method; and force of character, originality, ofwhatever kind, is always certain to make its mark. It is a diamond, and the world is its pane of glass. In a world so commonplace as this, the peculiar man even should be considered a blessing. Humorousness, eccentricity, the habit of looking at men and things from an odd angle, are valuable, because they break the dead level of society and takeaway its sameness. It is well that a man should be known by somethingelse than his name; there are few of us who can be known by anythingelse, and Brown, Jones, and Robinson are the names of the majority. 

In literature and art, this personal outcome is of the highest value;in fact, it is the only thing truly valuable. The greatness of anartist or a writer does not depend on what he has in common with otherartists and writers, but on what he has peculiar to himself. The greatman is the man who does a thing for the first time. It was a difficultthing to discover America; since it has been discovered, it has beenfound an easy enough task to sail thither. It is this peculiarsomething resident in a poem or a painting which is its final test, --atall events, possessing it, it has the elements of endurance. Apartfrom its other values, it has, in virtue of that, a biographical one;it becomes a study of character; it is a window through which you canlook into a human interior. There is a cleverness in the world whichseems to have neither father nor mother. It exists, but it isimpossible to tell from whence it comes, --just as it is impossible tolift the shed apple-blossom of an orchard, and to discover, from itsbloom and odour, to what branch it belonged. Such clevernessillustrates nothing: it is an anonymous letter. Look at it ever solong, and you cannot tell its lineage. It lives in the catalogue ofwaifs and strays. On the other hand, there are men whose everyexpression is characteristic, whose every idea seems to come out of amould. In the short sentence, or curt, careless saying of such whenlaid bare, you can read their histories so far, as in the smallestsegment of a tree you can trace the markings of its rings. The firstdies, because it is shallow-rooted, and has no vitality beyond its own;the second lives, because it is related to and fed by something higherthan itself. The famous axiom of Mrs. Glass, that in order to makehare-soup you "must first catch your hare, " has a wide significance. In art, literature, social life, morals even, you must first catch yourman: that done, everything else follows as a matter of course. A manmay learn much; but for the most important thing of all he can findneither teachers nor schools. 

Each man is the most important thing in the world to himself; but whyis he to himself so important? Simply because he is a personality withcapacities of pleasure, of pain, who can be hurt, who can be pleased, who can be disappointed, who labours and expects his hire, in whoseconsciousness, in fact, for the time being, the whole universe lives. He is, and everything else is relative. Confined to his ownpersonality, making it his tower of outlook, from which only he cansurvey the outer world, he naturally enough forms a rather highestimate of its value, of its dignity, of its intrinsic worth. Thishigh estimate is useful in so far as it makes his condition pleasant, and it--or rather our proneness to form it--we are accustomed to callvanity. Vanity--which really helps to keep the race alive--has beentreated harshly by the moralists and satirists. It does not quitedeserve the hard names it has been called. It interpenetrateseverything a man says or does, but it inter-penetrates for a usefulpurpose. If it is always an alloy in the pure gold of virtue, it atleast does the service of an alloy--making the precious metal workable. Nature gave man his powers, appetites, aspirations, and along withthese a pan of incense, which fumes from the birth of consciousness toits decease, making the best part of life rapture, and the worst partendurable. But for vanity the race would have died out long ago. There are some men whose lives seem to us as undesirable as the livesof toads or serpents; yet these men breathe in tolerable content andsatisfaction. If a man could hear all that his fellows say ofhim--that he is stupid, that he is henpecked, that he will be in the_Gazette_ in a week, that his brain is softening, that he has said allhis best things--and if he could believe that these pleasant things aretrue, he would be in his grave before the month was out. Happily noman does hear these things; and if he did, they would only provokeinextinguishable wrath or inextinguishable laughter. A man receivesthe shocks of life on the buffer of his vanity. Vanity acts as hissecond and bottleholder in the world's prize-ring, and it fights himwell, bringing him smilingly up to time after the fiercest knock-downblows. Vanity is to a man what the oily secretion is to a bird, withwhich it sleeks and adjusts the plumage ruffled by whatever causes. Vanity is not only instrumental in keeping a man alive and in heart, but, in its lighter manifestations, it is the great sweetener of socialexistence. It is the creator of dress and fashion; it is the inventorof forms and ceremonies, to it we are indebted for all our traditionsof civility. For vanity in its idler moments is benevolent, is aswilling to give pleasure as to take it, and accepts as sufficientreward for its services a kind word or an approving smile. It delightsto bask in the sunshine of approbation. Out of man vanity makes_gentle_man. The proud man is cold, the selfish man hard andgriping--the vain man desires to shine, to please, to make himselfagreeable; and this amiable feeling works to the outside of suavity andcharm of manner. The French are the vainest people in Europe, and themost polite. 

As each man is to himself the most important thing in the world, eachman is an egotist in his thinkings, in his desires, in his fears. Itdoes not, however, follow that each man must be an egotist--as the wordis popularly understood--in his speech. But even although this werethe case, the world would be divided into egotists, likable andunlikable. There are two kinds of egotism, a trifling vaingloriouskind, a mere burning of personal incense, in which the man is at oncealtar, priest, censer, and divinity; a kind which deals with theaccidents and wrappages of the speaker, his equipage, his riches, hisfamily, his servants, his furniture and array. The other kind has notaint of self-aggrandisement, but is rooted in the faculties of loveand humour, and this latter kind is never offensive, because itincludes others, and knows no scorn or exclusiveness. The one is theoffspring of a narrow and unimaginative personality; the other of alarge and genial one. There are persons who are the terrors ofsociety. Perfectly innocent of evil intention, they are yet, with acertain brutal unconsciousness, continually trampling on other people'scorns. They touch you every now and again like a red-hot iron. Youwince, acquit them of any desire to wound, but find forgiveness a hardtask. These persons remember everything about themselves, and forgeteverything about you. They have the instinct of a flesh-fly for a raw. Should your great-grandfather have had the misfortune to be hanged, such a person is certain, on some public occasion, to make allusion toyour pedigree. He will probably insist on your furnishing him with asketch of your family tree. If your daughter has made a runawaymarriage--on which subject yourself and friends maintain a judicioussilence--he is certain to stumble upon it, and make the old sore smartagain. In all this there is no malice, no desire to wound; it arisessimply from want of imagination, from profound immersion in self. Animaginative man recognises at once a portion of himself in his fellow, and speaks to that. To hurt you is to hurt himself. Much of therudeness we encounter in life cannot be properly set down to cruelty orbadness of heart. The unimaginative man is callous, and although hehurts easily, he cannot be easily hurt in return. The imaginative manis sensitive, and merciful to others, out of the merest mercy tohimself. 

In literature, as in social life, the attractiveness of egotism dependsentirely upon the egotist. If he be a conceited man, full ofself-admirations and vainglories, his egotism will disgust and repel. When he sings his own praises, his reader feels that reflections arebeing thrown on himself, and in a natural revenge he calls the writer acoxcomb. If, on the other hand, he be loving, genial, humourous, witha sympathy for others, his garrulousness and his personal allusions areforgiven, because while revealing himself, he is revealing his readeras well. A man may write about himself during his whole life withoutonce tiring or offending; but to accomplish this, he must beinteresting in himself--be a man of curious and vagrant moods, giftedwith the cunningest tact and humour; and the experience which herelates must at a thousand points touch the experiences of his readers, so that they, as it were, become partners in his game. When X. Tellsme, with an evident swell of pride, that he dines constantly withhalf-a-dozen men-servants in attendance, or that he never drives abroadsave in a coach-and-six, I am not conscious of any special gratitude toX. For the information. Possibly, if my establishments boast only ofCinderella, and if a cab is the only vehicle in which I can afford toride, and all the more if I can indulge in _that_ only on occasions ofsolemnity, I fly into a rage, pitch the book to the other end of theroom, and may never afterwards be brought to admit that X. Is possessorof a solitary ounce of brains. If, on the other hand, Z. Informs methat every February he goes out to the leafless woods to hunt earlysnowdrops, and brings home bunches of them in his hat; or that heprefers in woman a brown eye to a blue, and explains by early lovepassages his reasons for the preference, I do not get angry; on thecontrary, I feel quite pleased; perhaps, if the matter is related withunusual grace and tenderness, it is read with a certain moisture anddimness of eye. And the reason is obvious. The egotistical X. Isbarren, and suggests nothing beyond himself, save that he is a gooddeal better off than I am--a reflection much pleasanter to him than itis to me; whereas the equally egotistical Z. , with a single sentenceabout his snowdrops, or his liking for brown eyes rather than for blue, sends my thoughts wandering away back among my dead spring-times, orwafts me the odours of the roses of those summers when the colour of aneye was of more importance than it now is. X. 's men-servants andcoach-and-six do not fit into the life of his reader, because in allprobability his reader knows as much about these things as he knowsabout Pharaoh; Z. 's snowdrops and preferences of colour do, becauseevery one knows what the spring thirst is, and every one in his timehas been enslaved by eyes whose colour he could not tell for his life, but which he knew were the tenderest that ever looked love, thebrightest that ever flashed sunlight. Montaigne and Charles Lamb areegotists of the Z. Class, and the world never wearies reading them: norare egotists of the X. School absolutely without entertainment. Several of these the world reads assiduously too, although for anotherreason. The avid vanity of Mr. Pepys would be gratified if made awareof the success of his diary; but curiously to inquire into the reasonof that success, _why_ his diary has been found so amusing, would notconduce to his comfort. 

After all, the only thing a man knows is himself. The world outside hecan know only by hearsay. His shred of personality is all he has; thanthat, he is nothing richer nothing poorer. Everything else is mereaccident and appendage. Alexander must not be measured by theshoutings of his armies, nor Lazarus at Dives' gates by his sores. Anda man knows himself only in part. In every nature, as in Australia, there is an unexplored territory--green, well-watered regions or meresandy deserts; and into that territory experience is making progressday by day. We can remember when we knew only the outer childishrim--and from the crescent guessed the sphere; whether, as we advanced, these have been realised, each knows for himself. 

A SHELF IN MY BOOKCASE

When a man glances critically through the circle of his intimate friends, he is obliged to confess that they are far from being perfect. Theypossess neither the beauty of Apollo, nor the wisdom of Solon, nor thewit of Mercutio, nor the reticence of Napoleon III. If pushed hard hewill be constrained to admit that he has known each and all get angrywithout sufficient occasion, make at times the foolishest remarks, andact as if personal comfort were the highest thing in their estimation. Yet, driven thus to the wall, forced to make such uncomfortableconfessions, our supposed man does not like his friends one whit theless; nay, more, he is aware that if they were very superior andfaultless persons he would not be conscious of so much kindly feelingtowards them. The tide of friendship does not rise high on the bank ofperfection. Amiable weaknesses and shortcomings are the food of love. It is from the roughnesses and imperfect breaks in a man that you areable to lay hold of him. If a man be an entire and perfect chrysolite, you slide off him and fall back into ignorance. My friends are notperfect--no more am I--and so we suit each other admirably. Theirweaknesses keep mine in countenance, and so save me from humiliation andshame. We give and take, bear and forbear; the stupidity they utterto-day salves the recollection of the stupidity I uttered yesterday; intheir want of wit I see my own, and so feel satisfied and kindlydisposed. It is one of the charitable dispensations of Providence thatperfection is not essential to friendship. If I had to seek my perfectman, I should wander the world a good while, and when I found him, andwas down on my knees before him, he would, to a certainty, turn the coldshoulder on me--and so life would be an eternal search, broken by thecoldness of repulse and loneliness. Only to the perfect being in animperfect world, or the imperfect being in a perfect world, is everythingirretrievably out of joint. 

On a certain shelf in the bookcase which stands in the room in which I amat present sitting--bookcase surmounted by a white Dante, looking outwith blind, majestic eyes--are collected a number of volumes which looksomewhat the worse for wear. Those of them which originally possessedgilding have had it fingered off, each of them has leaves turned down, and they open of themselves at places wherein I have been happy, and withwhose every word I am familiar as with the furniture of the room in whichI nightly slumber, each of them has remarks relevant and irrelevantscribbled on their margins. These favourite volumes cannot be calledpeculiar glories of literature; but out of the world of books have Isingled them, as I have singled my intimates out of the world of men. Iam on easy terms with them, and feel that they are no higher than myheart. Milton is not there, neither is Wordsworth; Shakspeare, if he hadwritten comedies only, would have been there to a certainty, but thepresence of the _five_ great tragedies, --Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Antony and Cleopatra--for this last should be always included among hissupreme efforts--has made me place him on the shelf where the mighty menrepose, himself the mightiest of all. Reading Milton is like dining offgold plate in a company of kings; very splendid, very ceremonious, andnot a little appalling. Him I read but seldom, and only on high days andfestivals of the spirit. Him I never lay down without feeling myappreciation increased for lesser men--never without the same kind ofcomfort that one returning from the presence feels when he doffsrespectful attitude and dress of ceremony, and subsides into old coat, familiar arm-chair, and slippers. After long-continued organ-music, thejangle of the jews-harp is felt as an exquisite relief. With the volumeson the special shelf I have spoken of, I am quite at home, and I feelsomehow as if they were at home with me. And as to-day the trees bend tothe blast, and the rain comes in dashes against my window, and as I havenothing to do and cannot get out, and wish to kill the hours in aspleasant a manner as I can, I shall even talk about them, as in sheerliking a man talks about the trees in his garden, or the pictures on hiswall. I can't expect to say anything very new or striking, but I cangive utterance to sincere affection, and that is always pleasant to one'sself and generally not ungrateful to others. 

First; then, on this special shelf stands Nathaniel Hawthorne's"Twice-Told Tales. "

It is difficult to explain why I like these short sketches and essays, written in the author's early youth, better than his later, morefinished, and better-known novels and romances. The world sets greaterstore by "The Scarlet Letter" and "Transformation" than by this littlebook--and, in such matters of liking against the judgment of the world, there is no appeal. I think the reason of my liking consists inthis--that the novels were written for the world, while the tales seemwritten for the author; in these he is actor and audience in one. Consequently, one gets nearer him, just as one gets nearer an artist inhis first sketch than in his finished picture. And after all, one takesthe greatest pleasure in those books in which a peculiar personality ismost clearly revealed. A thought may be very commendable as a thought, but I value it chiefly as a window through which I can obtain insight onthe thinker; and Mr. Hawthorne's personality is peculiar, and speciallypeculiar in a new country like America. He is quiet, fanciful, quaint, and his humour is shaded by a meditativeness of spirit. Although aYankee, he partakes of none of the characteristics of a Yankee. Histhinking and his style have an antique air. His roots strike downthrough the visible mould of the present, and draw sustenance from thegenerations under ground. The ghosts that haunt the chamber of his mindare the ghosts of dead men and women. He has a strong smack of thePuritan; he wears around him, in the New England town, something of thedarkness and mystery of the aboriginal forest. He is a shy, silent, sensitive, much ruminating man, with no special overflow of animalspirits. He loves solitude, and the things which age has made reverent. There is nothing modern about him. Emerson's writing has a coldcheerless glitter, like the new furniture in a warehouse, which will comeof use by and by; Hawthorne's, the rich, subdued colour of furniture in aTudor mansion-house--which has winked to long-extinguished fires, whichhas been toned by the usage of departed generations. In many of the"Twice-Told Tales" this peculiar personality is charmingly exhibited. Hewrites of the street or the sea-shore, his eye takes in every object, however trifling, and on these he hangs comments, melancholy andhumourous. He does not require to go far for a subject; he will stare onthe puddle in the street of a New England village, and immediately itbecomes a Mediterranean Sea with empires lying on its muddy shores. Ifthe sermon be written out fully in your heart, almost any text will besuitable--if you have to find your sermon _in_ your text, you may searchthe Testament, New and Old, and be as poor at the close of Revelation aswhen you started at the first book of Genesis. Several of the paperswhich I like best are monologues, fanciful, humourous, or melancholy; andof these, my chief favourites are "Sunday at Home, " "Night Sketches, ""Footprints on the Seashore, " and "The Seven Vagabonds. " This last seemsto me almost the most exquisite thing which has flowed from its author'spen--a perfect little drama, the place, a showman's waggon, the time, thefalling of a summer shower, full of subtle suggestions which, iffollowed, will lead the reader away out of the story altogether; andilluminated by a grave, wistful kind of humour, which plays in turns uponthe author's companions and upon the author himself. Of all Mr. Hawthorne's gifts, this gift of humour--which would light up the skulland cross-bones of a village churchyard, which would be silent at adinner-table--is to me the most delightful. 

Then this writer has a strangely weird power. He loves ruins like theivy, he skims the twilight like the bat, he makes himself a familiar ofthe phantoms of the heart and brain. He is fascinated by the jarredbrain and the ruined heart. Other men collect china, books, pictures, jewels; this writer collects singular human experiences, ancient wrongsand agonies, murders done on unfrequented roads, crimes that seem to haveno motive, and all the dreary mysteries of the world of will. To hischamber of horrors Madame Tussaud's is nothing. With proud, prosperous, healthy men, Mr. Hawthorne has little sympathy; he prefers a crackedpiano to a new one; he likes cobwebs in the corners of his rooms. Allthis peculiar taste comes out strongly in the little book in whose praiseI am writing. I read "The Minister's Black Veil, " and find it the firstsketch of "The Scarlet Letter. " In "Wakefield, "--the story of the manwho left his wife, remaining away twenty years, but who yet looked uponher every day to appease his burning curiosity as to her manner ofenduring his absence--I find the keenest analysis of an almostincomprehensible act. 

And then Mr. Hawthorne has a skill in constructing allegories which noone of his contemporaries, either English or American, possesses. Theseallegorical papers may be read with pleasure for their ingenuity, theirgrace, their poetical feeling; but just as, gazing on the surface of astream, admiring the ripples and eddies, and the widening rings made bythe butterfly falling into it, you begin to be conscious that there issomething at the bottom, and gradually a dead face wavers upwards fromthe oozy weeds, becoming every moment more clearly defined, so throughMr. Hawthorne's graceful sentences, if read attentively, begins to flashthe hidden meaning, a meaning, perhaps, the writer did not care toexpress formally and in set terms, and which he merely suggests andleaves the reader to make out for himself. If you have the book I amwriting about, turn up "David Swan, " "The Great Carbuncle, " "The FancyShow-box, " and after you have read these, you will understand what I mean. 

The next two books on my shelf--books at this moment leaning on the"Twice-Told Tales"--are Professor Aytoun's "Ballads of Scotland, " and the"Lyra Germanica. " These books I keep side by side with a purpose. Theforms of existence with which they deal seem widely separated; but astrong kinship exists between them, for all that. I open ProfessorAytoun's book, and all this modern life--with its railways, itsnewspapers, its crowded cities, its Lancashire distresses, its debates inParliament--fades into nothingness and silence. Scotland, from Edinburghrock to the Tweed, stretches away in rude spaces of moor and forest. Thewind blows across it, unpolluted by the smoke of towns. That which livesnow has not yet come into existence; what are to-day crumbling and iviedruins, are warm with household fires, and filled with human activities. Every Border keep is a home: brides are taken there in their blushes;children are born there; gray men, the crucifix held over them, diethere. The moon dances on a plump of spears, as the moss-troopers, bysecret and desert paths, ride over into England to lift a prey, and thebale-fire on the hill gives the alarm to Cumberland. Men live and marry, and support wife and little ones by steel-jacket and spear; and theFlower of Yarrow, when her larder is empty, claps a pair of spurs in herhusband's platter. A time of strife and foray, of plundering andburning, of stealing and reaving; when hate waits half a lifetime forrevenge, and where difficulties are solved by the slash of a sword-blade. I open the German book, and find a warfare conducted in a differentmanner. Here the Devil rides about wasting and destroying. Heretemptations lie in wait for the soul; here pleasures, like glitteringmeteors, lure it into marshes and abysses. Watch and ward are kept here, and to sleep at the post is death. Fortresses are built on the rock ofGod's promises--inaccessible to the arrows of the wicked, --and thereindwell many trembling souls. Conflict rages around, not conducted byBorder spear on barren moorland, but by weapons of faith and prayer inthe devout German heart;--a strife earnest as the other, with issues oflife and death. And the resemblance between the books lies in this, thatwhen we open them these past experiences and conditions of life gleamvisibly to us far down like submerged cities--all empty and hollow now, though once filled with life as real as our own--through transparentwaters. 

In glancing over these German hymns, one is struck by their adaptation tothe seasons and occurrences of ordinary life. Obviously, too, thewriter's religion was not a Sunday matter only, it had its place inweek-days as well. In these hymns there is little gloom, a healthy humancheerfulness pervades many of them, and this is surely as it ought to be. These hymns, as I have said, are adapted to the occasions of ordinarylife; and this speaks favourably of the piety which produced them. I donot suppose that we English are less religious than other nations, but weare undemonstrative in this, as in most things. We have the sinceresthorror of over-dressing ourselves in fine sentiments. We are a littleshy of religion. We give it a day entirely to itself, and make it astranger to the other six. We confine it in churches, or in the closetat home, and never think of taking it with us to the street, or into ourbusiness, or with us to the festival, or the gathering of friends. Dr. Arnold used to complain that he could get religious subjects treated in amasterly way, but could not get common subjects treated in a religiousspirit. The Germans have done better; they have melted down the Sundayinto the week. They have hymns embodying confessions of sin, hymns inthe near prospect of death: and they have--what is moreimportant--spiritual songs that may be sung by soldiers on the march, bythe artisan at the loom, by the peasant following his team, by the motheramong her children, and by the maiden sitting at her wheel listening forthe step of her lover. Religion is thus brought in to refine and hallowthe sweet necessities and emotions of life, to cheer its weariness, andto exalt its sordidness. The German life revolves like the villagefestival with the pastor in the midst--joy and laughter and merry gamesdo not fear the holy man, for he wears no unkindness in his eye, but hispresence checks everything boisterous or unseemly, --the rude word, thepetulant act, --and when it has run its course, he uplifts his hands andleaves his benediction on his children. 

The "Lyra Germanica" contains the utterances of pious German souls in allconditions of life during many centuries. In it hymns are to be foundwritten not only by poor clergymen, and still poorer precentors, byribbon-manufacturers and shoemakers, who, amid rude environments, had atouch of celestial melody in their hearts, but by noble ladies andgentlemen, and crowned kings. The oldest in the collection is onewritten by King Robert of France about the year 1000. It is beautifullysimple and pathetic. State is laid aside with the crown, pride with theroyal robe, and Lazarus at Dives' gate could not have written out of alowlier heart. The kingly brow may bear itself high enough before men, the voice may be commanding and imperious enough, cutting throughcontradiction as with a sword; but before the Highest all is humblenessand bended knees. Other compositions there are, scattered through thevolume, by great personages, several by Louisa Henrietta, Electress ofBrandenburg, and Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick, --all written twohundred years ago. These are genuine poems, full of faith and charity, and calm trust in God. They are all dead now, these noble gentlemen andgentlewomen; their warfare, successful or adverse, has been long closed;but they gleam yet in my fancy, like the white effigies on tombs in dimcathedrals, the marble palms pressed together on the marble breast, thesword by the side of the knight, the psalter by the side of the lady, andflowing around them the scrolls on which are inscribed the texts ofresurrection. 

This book contains surely one of the most touching of humancompositions, --a song of Luther's. The great Reformer's music resoundsto this day in our churches; and one of the rude hymns he wrote has sucha step of thunder in it that the father of Frederick the Great, Mr. Carlyle tells us, used to call it "God Almighty's Grenadier March. " Thisone I speak of is of another mood, and is soft as tears. To appreciateit thoroughly, one must think of the burly, resolute, humourous, andwithal tender-hearted man, and of the work he accomplished. He it was, the Franklin's kite, led by the highest hand, that went up into the papalthundercloud hanging black over Europe; and the angry fire that brokeupon it burned it not, and in roars of boltless thunder the apparitioncollapsed, and the sun of truth broke through the inky fragments on thenations once again. He it was who, when advised not to trust himself inWorms, declared, "Although there be as many devils in Worms as there aretiles on the house-tops, I will go. " He it was who, when brought to bayin the splendid assemblage, said, "It is neither safe nor prudent to doaught against conscience. Here stand I--I cannot do otherwise. God helpme. Amen. " The rock cannot move--the lightnings may splinter it. Thinkof these things, and then read Luther's "Christmas Carol, " with itstender inscription, "Luther--written for his little son Hans, 1546. "Coming from another pen, the stanzas were perhaps not much; coming from_his_, they move one like the finest eloquence. This song sunk deep intothe hearts of the common people, and is still sung from the dome of theKreuz Kirche in Dresden before daybreak on Christmas morning. 

There is no more delightful reading in the world than these Scottishballads. The mailed knight, the Border peel, the moonlight raid, thelady at her bower window--all these have disappeared from the actualworld, and lead existence now as songs. Verses and snatches of theseballads are continually haunting and twittering about my memory, as insummer the swallows haunt and twitter about the eaves of my dwelling. Iknow them so well, and they meet a mortal man's experience so fully, thatI am sure--with, perhaps, a little help from Shakspeare--I could conductthe whole of my business by quotation, --do all its love-making, pay allits tavern-scores, quarrel and make friends again, in their words, farbetter than I could in my own. If you know these ballads, you will findthat they mirror perfectly your every mood. If you are weary anddown-hearted, behold, a verse starts to your memory trembling with thevery sigh you have heaved. If you are merry, a stanza is dancing to thetune of your own mirth. If you love, be you ever so much a Romeo, hereis the finest language for your using. If you hate, here are words whichare daggers. If you like battle, here for two hundred years havetrumpets been blowing and banners flapping. If you are dying, plentifulare the broken words here which have hovered on failing lips. Turn whereyou will, some fragment of a ballad is sure to meet you. Go into theloneliest places of experience and passion, and you discover that you arewalking in human footprints. If you should happen to lift the firstvolume of Professor Aytoun's "Ballads of Scotland, " the book of its ownaccord will open at "Clerk Saunders, " and by that token you will guessthat the ballad has been read and re-read a thousand times. And what aballad it is! The story in parts is somewhat perilous to deal with, butwith what instinctive delicacy the whole matter is managed! Then whattragic pictures, what pathos, what manly and womanly love! Just fancyhow the sleeping lovers, the raised torches, and the faces of the sevenbrothers looking on, would gleam on the canvas of Mr. Millais!--

 "'For in may come my seven bauld brothers, Wi' torches burning bright. '

 "It was about the midnight hour, And they were fa'en asleep, When in and came her seven brothers, And stood at her bed feet. 

 "Then out and spake the first o' them, 'We 'll awa' and let them be. ' Then out and spake the second o' them, 'His father has nae mair than he. '

 "Then out and spake the third o' them, 'I wot they are lovers dear. ' Then out and spake the fourth o' them, 'They ha'e lo'ed for mony a year. '

 "Then out and spake the fifth o' them, 'It were sin true love to twain. ' ''Twere shame, ' out spake the sixth o' them, 'To slay a sleeping man!'

 "Then up and gat the seventh o' them, And never word spake he, But he has striped his bright-brown brand Through Saunders's fair bodie. 

 "Clerk Saunders he started, and Margaret she turn'd Into his arms as asleep she lay, And sad and silent was the night That was atween thir twae. "

Could a word be added or taken from these verses without spoiling theeffect? You never think of the language, so vividly is the pictureimpressed on the imagination. I see at this moment the sleeping pair, the bright burning torches, the lowering faces of the brethren, and theone fiercer and darker than the others. 

Pass we now to the Second Part--

 "Sae painfully she clam' the wa', She clam' the wa' up after him; Hosen nor shoon upon her feet She had na time to put them on. 

 "'Is their ony room at your head, Saunders? Is there ony room at your feet? Or ony room at your side, Saunders, Where fain, fain I wad sleep?'"

In that last line the very heart-strings crack. She is to be pitied farmore than Clerk Saunders, lying stark with the cruel wound beneath hisside, the love-kisses hardly cold yet upon his lips. 

It may be said that the books of which I have been speaking attain to thehighest literary excellence by favour of simplicity and unconsciousness. Neither the German nor the Scotsman considered himself an artist. TheScot sings a successful foray, in which perhaps he was engaged, and hesings as he fought. In combat he did not dream of putting himself in aheroic position, or of flourishing his blade in a manner to be admired. A thrust of a lance would soon have finished him if he had. The piousGerman is over-laden with grief, or touched by some blessing into suddenthankfulness, and he breaks into song as he laughs from gladness orgroans from pain. This directness and naturalness give Scottish balladand German hymn their highest charm. The poetic gold, if rough andunpolished, and with no elaborate devices carved upon it, is free atleast from the alloy of conceit and simulation. Modern writers might, with benefit to themselves, barter something of their finish anddexterity for that pure innocence of nature, and child-like simplicityand fearlessness, full of its own emotion, and unthinking of others or oftheir opinions, which characterise these old writings. 

The eighteenth century must ever remain the most brilliant andinteresting period of English literary history. It is interesting notonly on account of its splendour, but because it is so well known. Weare familiar with the faces of its great men by portraits, and with theevents of their lives by innumerable biographies. Every reader isacquainted with Pope's restless jealousy, Goldsmith's pitted countenanceand plum-coloured coat, Johnson's surly manners and countlesseccentricities, and with the tribe of poets who lived for months ignorantof clean linen, who were hunted by bailiffs, who smelt of stale punch, and who wrote descriptions of the feasts of the gods in twopennycook-shops. Manners and modes of thought had greatly changed since thecentury before. Macbeth, in silk stockings and scarlet coat, slew KingDuncan, and the pit admired the wild force occasionally exhibited by thebarbarian Shakspeare. In those days the Muse wore patches, and sat in asumptuous boudoir, and her worshippers surrounded her in high-heeledshoes, ruffles, and powdered wigs. When the poets wished to paintnature, they described Chloe sitting on a green bank watching her sheep, or sighing when Strephon confessed his flame. And yet, with all thisapparent shallowness, the age was earnest enough in its way. It was agood hater. It was filled with relentless literary feuds. Just recallthe lawless state of things on the Scottish Border in the oldentime, --the cattle-lifting, the house-burning, the midnight murders, thepowerful marauders, who, safe in numerous retainers and moated keep, badedefiance to law; recall this state of things, and imagine the quarrelsand raids literary, the weapons satire and wit, and you have a good ideaof the darker aspect of the time. There were literary reavers, who laiddesolate at a foray a whole generation of wits. There were literaryduels, fought out in grim hate to the very death. It was dangerous tointerfere in the literary _mêlée_. Every now and then a fine gentlemanwas run through with a jest, or a foolish Maecenas stabbed to the heartwith an epigram, and his foolishness settled for ever. 

As a matter of course, on this special shelf of books will be foundBoswell's "Life of Johnson"--a work in our literature unique, priceless. That altogether unvenerable yet profoundly venerating Scottishgentleman, --that queerest mixture of qualities, of force and weakness, blindness and insight, vanity and solid worth, --has written the finestbook of its kind which our nation possesses. It is quite impossible toover-state its worth. You lift it, and immediately the intervening yearsdisappear, and you are in the presence of the Doctor. You are made freeof the last century, as you are free of the present. You double yourexistence. The book is a letter of introduction to a whole knot ofdeparted English worthies. In virtue of Boswell's labours, we knowJohnson--the central man of his time--better than Burke did, orReynolds, --far better even than Boswell did. We know how he expressedhimself, in what grooves his thoughts ran, how he ate, drank, and slept. Boswell's unconscious art is wonderful, and so is the result attained. This book has arrested, as never book did before, time and decay. Bozzyis really a wizard: he makes the sun stand still. Till his work is done, the future stands respectfully aloof. Out of ever-shifting time he hasmade fixed and permanent certain years, and in these Johnson talks andargues, while Burke listens, and Reynolds takes snuff, and Goldsmith, with hollowed hand, whispers a sly remark to his neighbour. There havethey sat, these ghosts, for seventy years now, looked at and listened toby the passing generations; and there they still sit, the one voice goingon! Smile at Boswell as we may, he was a spiritual phenomenon quite asrare as Johnson. More than most he deserves our gratitude. Let us hopethat when next Heaven sends England a man like Johnson, a companion andlistener like Boswell will be provided. The Literary Club sits forever. What if the Mermaid were in like eternal session, with Shakspeare'slaughter ringing through the fire and hail of wit!

By the strangest freak of chance or liking, the next book on my shelfcontains the poems of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-law Rhymer. Thisvolume, adorned by a hideous portrait of the author, I can well rememberpicking up at a bookstall for a few pence many years ago. It seemscurious to me that this man is not in these days better known. A moresingular man has seldom existed, --seldom a more genuine. His firstbusiness speculation failed, but when about forty he commenced again, andthis time fortune made amends for her former ill-treatment. Hiswarehouse was a small, dingy place, filled with bars of iron, with a bustof Shakspeare looking down on the whole. His country-house containedbusts; of Achilles, Ajax, and Napoleon. Here is a poet who earned acompetence as an iron-merchant; here is a monomaniac on the Corn-laws, who loved nature as intensely as ever did Burns or Wordsworth. Here is aJohn Bright uttering himself in fiery and melodious verse, --Apollo withiron dust on his face, wandering among the Sheffield knife-grinders! Ifyou wish to form some idea of the fierce discontent which thirty yearsago existed amongst the working men of England, you should read theCorn-law Rhymes. The Corn-laws are to him the twelve plagues of Egyptrolled together. On account of them he denounces his country as theHebrew prophets were wont to denounce Tyre and Sidon. His rage breaksout into curses, which are _not_ forgiveness. He is maddened by thememory of Peterloo. Never, perhaps, was a sane human being so tyrannisedover by a single idea. A skeleton was found on one of the Derbyshirehills. Had the man been crossed in love? had he crept up there to die inthe presence of the stars? "Not at all, " cries Elliott; "he was a victimof the Corn-laws, who preferred dying on the mountain-top to receivingparish pay. " In his wild poem all the evil kings in Hades descend fromtheir thrones when King George enters. They only let slip the dogs ofwar; he taxed the people's bread. "Sleep on, proud Britoness!" heexclaims over a woman at rest in the grave she had purchased. In one ofhis articles in _Tait's Magazine_, he seriously proposed that tragediesshould be written showing the evils of the Corn-laws, and that on a givennight they should be performed in every theatre of the kingdom, so thatthe nation might, by the speediest possible process, be converted to thegospel of Free-trade. In his eyes the Corn-laws had gathered into theirblack bosoms every human wrong: repeal them, and lo! the new heavens andthe new earth! A poor and shallow theory of the universe, you will say;but it is astonishing what poetry he contrives to extract out of it. Itis hardly possible, without quotation, to give an idea of the rage andfury which pervade these poems. He curses his political opponents withhis whole heart and soul. He pillories them, and pelts them with deadcats and rotten eggs. The earnestness of his mood has a certain terrorin it for meek and quiet people. His poems are of the angriest, buttheir anger is not altogether undivine. His scorn blisters and scalds, his sarcasm flays; but then outside nature is constantly touching himwith a summer breeze or a branch of pink and white apple-blossom, and hismood becomes tenderness itself. He is far from being lachrymose; andwhen he is pathetic, he affects one as when a strong man sobs. His angeris not nearly so frightful as his tears. I cannot understand why Elliottis so little read. Other names not particularly remarkable I meet in thecurrent reviews--his never. His book stands on my shelf, but on no otherhave I seen it. This I think strange, because, apart from the intrinsicvalue of his verse as verse, it has an historical value. Evil times andembittered feelings, now happily passed away, are preserved in his books, like Pompeii and Herculaneum in Vesuvian lava. He was a poet of thepoor, but in a quite peculiar sense. Burns, Crabbe, Wordsworth, werepoets of the poor, but mainly of the peasant poor. Elliott is the poetof the English artisans, --men who read newspapers and books, who aremembers of mechanics' institutes, who attend debating societies, whodiscuss political measures and political men, who are tormented byideas, --a very different kind of persons altogether. It is easier tofind poetry beneath the blowing hawthorn than beneath the plumes offactory or furnace smoke. In such uninviting atmospheres EbenezerElliott found his; and I am amazed that the world does not hold it ingreater regard, if for nothing else than for its singularity. 

There is many another book on my shelf on which I might dilate, but thisgossiping must be drawn to a close. When I began, the wind was bendingthe trees, and the rain came against the window in quick, petulantdashes. For hours now, wind and rain have ceased, the trees aremotionless, the garden walk is dry. The early light of wintry sunset isfalling across my paper, and, as I look up, the white Dante opposite isdipped in tender rose. Less stern he looks, but not less sad, than hedid in the morning. The sky is clear, and an arm of bleak pink vapourstretches up into its depths. The air is cold with frost, and the rainwhich those dark clouds in the east hold will fall during the night insilent, feathery flakes. When I wake to-morrow, the world will bechanged, frosty forests will cover my bedroom panes, the tree brancheswill be furred with snows; and to the crumbs which it is my daily customto sprinkle on the shrubbery walk will come the lineal descendant of thecharitable redbreast that covered up with leaves the sleeping children inthe wood. 

GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Chaucer is admitted on all hands to be a great poet, but, by thegeneral public at least, he is not frequently read. He is like acardinal virtue, a good deal talked about, a good deal praised, honoured by a vast amount of distant admiration, but with littlepractical acquaintance. And for this there are many and obviousreasons. He is an ancient, and the rich old mahogany is neglected forthe new and glittering veneer. He is occasionally gross; often tediousand obscure; he frequently leaves a couple of lovers, to cite theopinions of Greek and Roman authors; and practice and patience arerequired to melt the frost of his orthography, and let his music flowfreely. In the conduct of his stories he is garrulous, homely, andslow-paced. He wrote in a leisurely world, when there was plenty oftime for writing and reading, long before the advent of the printer'sdevil or of Mr. Mudie. There is little of the lyrical element in him. He does not dazzle by sentences. He is not quotable. He does notshine in extracts so much as in entire poems. There is a pleasantequality about his writing; he advances through a story at an evenpace, glancing round him on everything with curious, humourous eyes, and having his say about everything. He is the prince ofstory-tellers, and however much he may move others, he is not movedhimself. His mood is so kindly that he seems always to have writtenafter dinner, or after hearing good news, --that he had received fromthe king another grant of wine, for instance, --and he discourses oflove and lovers' raptures, and the disappointments of life, halfsportively, half sadly, like one who has passed through all, felt thesweetness and the bitterness of it, and been able to strike a balance. He had his share of crosses and misfortune, but his was a nature whichtime and sorrow could only mellow and sweeten; and for all that hadcome and gone, he loved his "books clothed in black and red, " to sit atgood men's feasts; and if silent at table, as the Countess of Pembrokereported, the "stain upon his lip was wine. " Chaucer's face is to hiswritings the best preface and commentary; it is contented-looking, likeone familiar with pleasant thoughts, shy and self-contained somewhat, as if he preferred his own company to the noisy and rude companionshipof his fellows; and the outlines are bland, fleshy, voluptuous, as ofone who had a keen relish for the pleasures that leave no bittertraces. Tears and mental trouble, and the agonies of doubt, you cannotthink of in connexion with it; laughter is sheathed in it, the light ofa smile is diffused over it. In face and turn of genius he differs inevery respect from his successor, Spenser; and in truth, in Chaucer andSpenser we see the fountains of the two main streams of British song:the one flowing through the drama and the humourous narrative, theother through the epic and the didactic poem. Chaucer rooted himselffirmly in fact, and looked out upon the world in a half-humourous, half-melancholy mood. Spenser had but little knowledge of men as_men_; the cardinal virtues were the personages he was acquainted with;in everything he was "high fantastical, " and, as a consequence, heexhibits neither humour nor pathos. Chaucer was thoroughly national;his characters, place them where he may, --in Thebes or Tartary, --arenatives of one or other of the English shires. Spenser's genius wascountry-less as Ariel; search ever so diligently, you will not find anEnglish daisy in all his enchanted forests. Chaucer was tolerant ofeverything, the vices not excepted; morally speaking, an easy-goingman, he took the world as it came, and did not fancy himself a whitbetter than his fellows. Spenser was a Platonist, and fed his gravespirit on high speculations and moralities. Severe and chivalrous, dreaming of things to come, unsuppled by luxury, unenslaved by passion, somewhat scornful and self-sustained, it needed but a tyrannous king, an electrical political atmosphere, and a deeper interest in theologyto make a Puritan of him, as these things made a Puritan of Milton. The differences between Chaucer and Spenser are seen at a glance intheir portraits. Chaucer's face is round, good-humoured, constitutionally pensive, and thoughtful. You see in it that he hasoften been amused, and that he may easily be amused again. Spenser'sis of sharper and keener feature, disdainful, and breathing thatseverity which appertains to so many of the Elizabethan men. Afourteenth-century child, with delicate prescience, would have askedChaucer to assist her in a strait, and would not have beendisappointed. A sixteenth-century child in like circumstances wouldhave shrunk from drawing on herself the regards of the sterner-lookingman. We can trace the descent of the Chaucerian face and genius inShakspeare and Scott, of the Spenserian in Milton and Wordsworth. Inour day, Mr. Browning takes after Chaucer, Mr. Tennyson takes afterSpenser. 

Hazlitt, writing of the four great English poets, tells us, Chaucer'scharacteristic is intensity, Spenser's remoteness, Milton's sublimity, and Shakspeare's everything. The sentence is epigrammatic andmemorable enough; but so far as Chaucer is concerned, it requires alittle explanation. He is not intense, for instance, as Byron isintense, or as Wordsworth is intense. He does not see man like theone, nor nature like the other. He would not have cared much foreither of these poets. And yet, so far as straightforwardness indealing with a subject, and complete though quiet realisation of itgoes to make up intensity of poetic mood, Chaucer amply justifies hiscritic. There is no wastefulness or explosiveness about the oldwriter. He does his work silently, and with no appearance of effort. His poetry shines upon us like a May morning; but the streak over theeastern hill, the dew on the grass, the wind that bathes the brows ofthe wayfarer, are not there by haphazard: they are the results ofoccult forces, a whole solar system has had a hand in their production. From the apparent ease with which an artist works, one does not readilygive him credit for the mental force he is continuously putting forth. To many people, a chaotic "Festus" is more wonderful than a rounded, melodious "Princess. " The load which a strong man bears gracefullydoes not seem so heavy as the load which the weaker man staggers under. Incompletion is force fighting; completion is force quiescent, its workdone. Nature's forces are patent enough in some scarred volcanic moonin which no creature can breathe; only the sage, in some soft greenearth, can discover the same forces reft of fierceness and terror, andtranslated into sunshine, and falling dew, and the rainbow gleaming onthe shower. It is somewhat in this way that the propriety of Hazlitt'scriticism is to be vindicated. Chaucer is the most simple, natural, and homely of our poets, and whatever he attempts he does thoroughly. The Wife of Bath is so distinctly limned that she could sit for herportrait. You can count the embroidered sprigs in the jerkin of thesquire. You hear the pilgrims laugh as they ride to Canterbury. Thewhole thing is admirably life-like and seems easy, and in the seemingeasiness we are apt to forget the imaginative sympathy which bodiesforth the characters, and the joy and sorrow from which that sympathyhas drawn nurture. Unseen by us, the ore has been dug, and smelted insecret furnaces, and when it is poured into perfect moulds, we are aptto forget by what potency the whole thing has been brought about. 

And, with his noticing eyes, into what a brilliant, many tinted worldwas Chaucer born! In his day life had a certain breadth, colour, andpicturesqueness which it does not possess now. It wore a braver dress, and flaunted more in the sun. Five centuries effect a great change onmanners. A man may nowadays, and without the slightest suspicion ofthe fact, brush clothes with half the English peerage on a sunnyafternoon in Pall Mall. Then it was quite different. The fourteenthcentury loved magnificence and show. Great lords kept princely statein the country; and when they came abroad, what a retinue, what wavingof plumes, and shaking of banners, and glittering of rich dresses!Religion was picturesque, with dignitaries, and cathedrals, and fumingincense, and the Host carried through the streets. The franklin keptopen house, the city merchant feasted kings, the outlaw roasted hisvenison beneath the greenwood tree. There was a gallant monarch and agallant court. The eyes of the Countess of Salisbury shed influence;Maid Marian laughed in Sherwood. London is already a considerableplace, numbering, perhaps, two hundred thousand inhabitants, the housesclustering close and high along the river banks; and on the beautifulApril nights the nightingales are singing round the suburban villagesof Strand, Holborn, and Charing. It is rich withal; for after thebattle of Poitiers, Harry Picard, wine-merchant and Lord Mayor, entertained in the city four kings, --to wit, Edward, king of England, John, king of France, David, king of Scotland, and the king of Cyprus;and the last-named potentate, slightly heated with Harry's wine, engaged him at dice, and being nearly ruined thereby, the honestwine-merchant returned the poor king his money, which was received withall thankfulness. There is great stir on a summer's morning in thatWarwickshire castle, --pawing of horses, tossing of bridles, clanking ofspurs. The old lord climbs at last into his saddle and rides off tocourt, his favourite falcon on his wrist, four squires in immediateattendance carrying his arms; and behind these stretches a merrycavalcade, on which the chestnuts shed their milky blossoms. In theabsence of the old peer, young Hopeful spends his time as befits hisrank and expectations. He grooms his steed, plays with his hawks, feeds his hounds, and labours diligently to acquire grace and dexterityin the use of arms. At noon the portcullis is lowered, and out shootsa brilliant array of ladies and gentlemen, and falconers with hawks. They bend their course to the river, over which a rainbow is risingfrom a shower. Yonder young lady is laughing at our stripling squire, who seems half angry, half pleased: they are lovers, depend upon it. Afew years, and the merry beauty will have become a noble, graciouswoman, and the young fellow, sitting by a watch-fire on the eve ofCressy, will wonder if she is thinking of him. But the river isalready reached. Up flies the alarmed heron, his long blue legstrailing behind him; a hawk is let loose; the young lady's laugh hasceased as, with gloved hand shading fair forehead and sweet gray eye, she watches hawk and heron lessening in heaven. The Crusades are nowover, but the religious fervour which inspired them lingered behind; sothat, even in Chaucer's day, Christian kings, when their conscienceswere oppressed by a crime more than usually weighty, talked of makingan effort before they died to wrest Jerusalem and the sepulchre ofChrist from the grasp of the infidel. England had at this time severalholy shrines, the most famous being that of Thomas à Becket atCanterbury, which attracted crowds of pilgrims. The devout travelledin large companies: and, in the May mornings, a merry sight it was as, with infinite clatter and merriment, with bells, minstrels, andbuffoons, they passed through thorp and village, bound for the tomb ofSt. Thomas. The pageant of events, which seems enchantment whenchronicled by Froissart's splendid pen, was to Chaucer contemporaneousincident; the chivalric richness was the familiar and every-day dressof his time. Into this princely element he was endued, and he sawevery side of it, --the frieze as well as the cloth of gold. In the"Canterbury Tales" the fourteenth century murmurs, as the sea murmursin the pink-mouthed shells upon our mantelpieces. 

Of his life we do not know much. In his youth he studied law anddisliked it, --a circumstance common enough in the lives of men ofletters, from his time to that of Shirley Brooks. How he lived, whathe did when he was a student, we are unable to discover. Only for amoment is the curtain lifted, and we behold, in the old quaint peakedand gabled Fleet Street of that day, Chaucer thrashing a Franciscanfriar (friar's offence unknown), for which amusement he was nextmorning fined two shillings. History has preserved this for us, buthas forgotten all the rest of his early life, and the chronology of allhis poems. What curious flies are sometimes found in the historicamber! On Chaucer's own authority, we know that he served under EdwardIII. In his French campaign, and that he for some time lay in a Frenchprison. On his return from captivity he married; he was valet in theking's household, he was sent on an embassy to Genoa, and is supposedto have visited Petrarch, then resident at Padua, and to have heardfrom his lips the story of "Griselda, "--a tradition which one wouldlike to believe. He had his share of the sweets and the bitters oflife. He enjoyed offices and gifts of wine, and he felt the pangs ofpoverty and the sickness of hope deferred. He was comptroller of thecustoms for wools; from which post he was dismissed, --why, we know not;although one cannot help remembering that Edward made the writing outof the accounts in Chaucer's own hand the condition of his holdingoffice, and having one's surmises. Foreign countries, strange manners, meetings with celebrated men, love of wife and children, and theirdeaths, freedom and captivity, the light of a king's smile and itswithdrawal, furnished ample matter of meditation to his humane andthoughtful spirit. In his youth he wrote allegories full of ladies andknights dwelling in impossible forests and nursing impossible passions;but in his declining years, when fortune had done all it could for himand all it could against him, he discarded these dreams, and betookhimself to the actual stuff of human nature. Instead of the "Romanceof the Rose, " we have the "Canterbury Tales" and the first greatEnglish poet. One likes to fancy Chaucer in his declining days livingat Woodstock, with his books about him, and where he could watch thedaisies opening themselves at sunrise, shutting themselves at sunset, and composing his wonderful stories, in which the fourteenth centurylives, --riding to battle in iron gear, hawking in embroidered jerkinand waving plume, sitting in rich and solemn feast, the monarch on thedais. 

Chaucer's early poems have music and fancy, they are full of a naturaldelight in sunshine and the greenness of foliage; but they have littlehuman interest. They are allegories for the most part, more or lesssatisfactorily wrought out. The allegorical turn of thought, thedelight in pageantry, the "clothing upon" of abstractions with humanforms, flowered originally out of chivalry and the feudal times. Chaucer imported it from the French, and was proud of it in his earlypoems, as a young fellow of that day might be proud of his horsefurniture, his attire, his waving plume. And the poetic fashion thusset retained its vitality for a long while, --indeed, it was onlythoroughly made an end of by the French Revolution, which made an endof so much else. About the last trace of its influence is to be foundin Burns' sentimental correspondence with Mrs. M'Lehose, in which thelady is addressed as Clarinda, and the poet signs himself Sylvander. It was at best a mere beautiful gauze screen drawn between the poet andnature; and passion put his foot through it at once. After Chaucer'syouth was over, he discarded somewhat scornfully these abstractions andshows of things. The "Flower and the Leaf" is a beautiful-tinteddream; the "Canterbury Tales" are as real as anything in Shakspeare orBurns. The ladies in the earlier poems dwell in forests, and wearcoronals on their heads; the people in the "Tales" are engaged in theactual concerns of life, and you can see the splashes of mire upontheir clothes. The separate poems which make up the "Canterbury Tales"were probably written at different periods, after youth was gone, andwhen he had fallen out of love with florid imagery and allegoricalconceits; and we can fancy him, perhaps fallen on evil days and inretirement, anxious to gather up these loose efforts into oneconsummate whole. If of his flowers he would make a bouquet forposterity, it was of course necessary to procure a string to tie themtogether. These necessities, which ruin other men, are the fortunatechances of great poets. Then it was that the idea arose of a meetingof pilgrims at the Tabard in Southwark, of their riding to Canterbury, and of the different personages relating stories to beguile the tediumof the journey. The notion was a happy one, and the execution issuperb. In those days, as we know, pilgrimages were of frequentoccurrence; and in the motley group that congregated on such occasions, the painter of character had full scope. All conditions of people arecomprised in the noisy band issuing from the courtyard of the Southwarkinn on that May morning in the fourteenth century. Let us go nearer, and have a look at them. 

There is a grave and gentle Knight, who has fought in many wars, andwho has many a time hurled his adversary down in tournament before theeyes of all the ladies there, and who has taken the place of honour atmany a mighty feast. There, riding beside him, is a blooming Squire, his son, fresh as the month of May, singing day and night from verygladness of heart, --an impetuous young fellow, who is looking forwardto the time when he will flesh his maiden sword, and shout his firstwar-cry in a stricken field. There is an Abbot, mounted on a brownsteed. He is middle-aged, his bald crown shines like glass, and hisface looks as if it were anointed with oil. He has been a valianttrencher-man at many a well-furnished feast. Above all things, heloves hunting; and when he rides, men can hear his bridle ringing inthe whistling wind loud and clear as a chapel bell. There is a thin, ill-conditioned Clerk, perched perilously on a steed as thin andill-conditioned as himself. He will never be rich, I fear. He is agreat student, and would rather have a few books bound in black and redhanging above his bed than be sheriff of the county. There is aPrioress, so gentle and tender-hearted that she weeps if she hears thewhimper of a beaten hound, or sees a mouse caught in a trap. Thererides the laughing Wife of Bath, bold-faced and fair. She is an adeptin love-matters. Five husbands already "she has fried in their owngrease" till they were glad to get into their graves to escape thescourge of her tongue. Heaven rest their souls, and swiftly send asixth! She wears a hat large as a targe or buckler, brings theartillery of her eyes to bear on the young Squire, and jokes him abouthis sweetheart. Beside her is a worthy Parson, who delivers faithfullythe message of his Master. Although he is poor, he gives away the halfof his tithes in charity. His parish is waste and wide, yet ifsickness or misfortune should befall one of his flock, he rides, inspite of wind, or rain, or thunder, to administer consolation. Amongthe crowd rides a rich Franklin, who sits in the Guildhall on the dais. He is profuse and hospitable as summer. All day his table stands inthe hall covered with meats and drinks, and every one who enters iswelcome. There is a Ship-man, whose beard has been shaken by many atempest, whose cheek knows the kiss of the salt sea spray; a Merchant, with a grave look, clean and neat in his attire, and with plenty ofgold in his purse. There is a Doctor of Physic, who has killed moremen than the Knight, talking to a Clerk of Laws. There is a merryFriar, a lover of good cheer; and when seated in a tavern among hiscompanions, singing songs it would be scarcely decorous to repeat, youmay see his eyes twinkling in his head for joy, like stars on a frostynight. Beside him is a ruby-faced Sompnour, whose breath stinks ofgarlic and onions, who is ever roaring for wine, --strong wine, wine redas blood; and when drunk, he disdains English, --nothing but Latin willserve his turn. In front of all is a Miller, who has been drinkingover-night, and is now but indifferently sober. There is not a door inthe country that he cannot break by running at it with his head. Thepilgrims are all ready, the host gives the word, and they defilethrough the arch. The Miller blows his bagpipes as they issue from thetown; and away they ride to Canterbury, through the boon sunshine, andbetween the white hedges of the English May. 

Had Chaucer spent his whole life in seeking, he could not have selecteda better contemporary circumstance for securing variety of characterthan a pilgrimage to Canterbury. It comprises, as we see, all kindsand conditions of people. It is the fourteenth-century England inlittle. In our time, the only thing that could match it in thisrespect is Epsom down on the great race-day. But then Epsom down istoo unwieldy; the crowd is too great, and it does not cohere, save forthe few seconds when gay jackets are streaming towards thewinning-post. The Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales, " in which we makethe acquaintance of the pilgrims, is the ripest, most genial andhumourous, altogether the most masterly thing which Chaucer has leftus. In its own way, and within its own limits, it is the mostwonderful thing in the language. The people we read about are as realas the people we brush clothes with in the street, --nay, much _more_real; for we not only see their faces, and the fashion and texture oftheir garments, we know also what they think, how they expressthemselves, and with what eyes they look out on the world. Chaucer'sart in this Prologue is simple perfection. He indulges in noirrelevant description, he airs no fine sentiments, he takes no specialpains as to style or poetic ornament; but every careless touch tells, every sly line reveals character; the description of each man'shorse-furniture and array reads like a memoir. The Nun's pretty oathbewrays her. We see the bold, well-favoured countenance of the Wife ofBath beneath her hat, as "broad as a buckler or a targe"; and the horseof the Clerk, "as lean as is a rake, " tells tales of his master'scheer. Our modern dress is worthless as an indication of thecharacter, or even of the social rank, of the wearer; in the olden timeit was significant of personal tastes and appetites, of profession, andcondition of life generally. See how Chaucer brings out a character bytouching merely on a few points of attire and personal appearance:--

 "I saw his sleeves were purfiled at the hand With fur, and that the finest of the land; And for to fasten his hood under his chin He had of gold ywrought a curious pin. A love-knot in the greater end there was; His head was bald, and shone as any glass, And eke his face as if it was anoint. "

What more would you have? You could not have known the monk better ifyou had lived all your life in the monastery with him. The sleevesdaintly purfiled with fur give one side of him, the curious pin withthe love-knot another, and the shining crown and face complete thecharacter and the picture. The sun itself could not photograph moretruly. 

On their way the pilgrims tell tales, and these are as various as theirrelaters; in fact, the Prologue is the soil out of which they all grow. Dramatic propriety is everywhere instinctively preserved. "TheKnight's Tale" is noble, splendid, and chivalric as his own nature; thetale told by the Wife of Bath is exactly what one would expect. Withwhat good-humour the rosy sinner confesses her sins! how hilarious sheis in her repentance! "The Miller's Tale" is coarse andfull-flavoured, --just the kind of thing to be told by a rough, humourous fellow who is hardly yet sober. And here it may be said thatalthough there is a good deal of coarseness in the "Canterbury Tales, "there is not the slightest tinge of pruriency. There is such asingle-heartedness and innocence in Chaucer's vulgarest and broadeststories, such a keen eye for humour, and such a hearty enjoyment of it, and at the same time such an absence of any delight in impurity forimpurity's sake, that but little danger can arise from their perusal. He is so fond of fun that he will drink it out of a cup that is onlyindifferently clean. He writes often like Fielding, he never writes asSmollett sometimes does. These stories, ranging from the noble romanceof Palamon and Arcite to the rude intrigues of Clerk Nicholas, --the onefitted to draw tears down the cheeks of noble ladies and gentlemen; theother to convulse with laughter the midriffs of illiterateclowns, --give one an idea of the astonishing range of Chaucer's powers. He can suit himself to every company, make himself at home in everycircumstance of life; can mingle in tournaments where beauty is leaningfrom balconies, and the knights, with spear in rest, wait for the blastof the trumpet; and he can with equal ease sit with a couple of drunkenfriars in a tavern laughing over the confessions they hear, and singingquestionable catches between whiles. Chaucer's range is wide as thatof Shakspeare, --if we omit that side of Shakspeare's mind whichconfronts the other world, and out of which Hamlet sprang, --and his menand women are even more real, and more easily matched in the living andbreathing world. For in Shakspeare's characters, as in his language, there is surplusage, superabundance; the measure is heaped and runningover. From his sheer wealth, he is often the most _un_dramatic ofwriters. He is so frequently greater than his occasion, he has nosmall change to suit emergencies, and we have guineas in place ofgroats. Romeo is more than a mortal lover, and Mercutio more than amortal wit; the kings in the Shakspearian world are more kingly thanearthly sovereigns; Rosalind's laughter was never heard save in theForest of Arden. His madmen seem to have eaten of some "strange root. "No such boon companion as Falstaff ever heard chimes at midnight. Hisvery clowns are transcendental, with scraps of wisdom springing out oftheir foolishest speech. Chaucer, lacking Shakspeare's excess andprodigality of genius, could not so gloriously err, and his creationshave a harder, drier, more realistic look, are more like the people wehear uttering ordinary English speech, and see on ordinary countryroads against an ordinary English sky. If need were, any one of themcould drive pigs to market. Chaucer's characters are individualenough, their idiosyncrasies are sharply enough defined, but they areto some extent literal and prosaic; they are of the "earth, earthy;"out of his imagination no Ariel ever sprang, no half-human, half-brutish Caliban ever crept. He does not effloresce inillustrations and images, the flowers do not hide the grass; hispictures are masterpieces, but they are portraits, and the man isbrought out by a multiplicity of short touches, --caustic, satirical, and matter of fact. His poetry may be said to resemble an Englishcountry road, on which passengers of different degrees of rank arecontinually passing, --now knight, now boor, now abbot: Spenser's, forinstance, and all the more fanciful styles, to a tapestry on which awhole Olympus has been wrought. The figures on the tapestry are muchthe more noble-looking, it is true; but then they are dreams andphantoms, whereas the people on the country road actually exist. 

The "Knight's Tale"--which is the first told on the way toCanterbury--is a chivalrous legend, full of hunting, battle, andtournament. Into it, although the scene is laid in Greece, Chaucerhas, with a fine scorn of anachronism, poured all the splendour, colour, pomp, and circumstance of the fourteenth century. It isbrilliant as a banner displayed to the sunlight. It is real cloth ofgold. Compared with it, "Ivanhoe" is a spectacle at Astley's. Thestyle is everywhere more adorned than is usual, although even here, andin the richest parts, the short, homely, caustic Chaucerian line islargely employed. The "Man of Law's Tale, " again, is distinguished byquite a different merit. It relates the sorrows and patience ofConstance, and is filled with the beauty of holiness. Constance mighthave been sister to Cordelia; she is one of the white lilies ofwomanhood. Her story is almost the tenderest in our literature. AndChaucer's art comes out in this, that although she would spread herhair, nay, put her very heart beneath the feet of those who wrong her, we do not cease for one moment to respect her. This is a feat whichhas but seldom been achieved. It has long been a matter of reproach toMr. Thackeray, for instance, that the only faculty with which he giftshis good women is a supreme faculty of tears. To draw any very highdegree of female patience is one of the most difficult of tasks. Ifyou represent a woman bearing wrong with a continuous unmurmuringmeekness, presenting to blows, come from what quarter they may, nothingbut a bent neck, and eyelids humbly drooped, you are in nine cases outof ten painting elaborately the portrait of a fool; and if you missmaking her a fool, you are certain to make her a bore. Your patientwoman, in books and in life, does not draw on our gratitude. When hergoodness is not stupidity, --which it frequently is, --it is insulting. She walks about an incarnate rebuke. Her silence is an incessantcomplaint. A teacup thrown at your head is not half so alarming as hermeek, much-wronged, unretorting face. You begin to suspect that sheconsoles herself with the thought that there is another world, wherebrutal brothers and husbands are settled with for their behaviour totheir angelic wives and sisters in this. Chaucer's Constance isneither fool nor bore, although in the hands of anybody else she wouldhave been one or the other, or both. Like the holy religion which shesymbolises, her sweet face draws blessing and love wherever it goes; itheals old wounds with its beauty, it carries peace into the heart ofdiscord, it touches murder itself into soft and penitential tears. Inreading the old tender-hearted poet, we feel that there is something ina woman's sweetness and forgiveness that the masculine mind cannotfathom; and we adore the hushed step and still countenance of Constancealmost as if an angel passed. 

Chaucer's orthography is unquestionably uncouth at first sight; but itis not difficult to read if you keep a good glossary beside you foroccasional reference, and are willing to undergo a little trouble. Thelanguage is antique, but it is full of antique flavour. Wine ofexcellent vintage originally, it has improved through all the years ithas been kept. A very little trouble on the reader's part, in thereign of Anne, would have made him as intelligible as Addison; a verylittle more, in the reign of Queen Victoria, will make him moreintelligible than Mr. Browning. Yet somehow it has been a favouriteidea with many poets that he required modernisation, and that they werethe men to do it. Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth have tried their handson him. Wordsworth performed his work in a reverential enough spirit;but it may be doubted whether his efforts have brought the old poet asingle new reader. Dryden and Pope did not translate or moderniseChaucer, they committed assault and battery upon him. They turned hisexquisitely _naïve_ humour into their own coarseness, they put _doublesentendre_ into his mouth, they blurred his female faces, --as a pictureis blurred when the hand of a Vandal is drawn over its yet wetcolours, --and they turned his natural descriptions into the naturaldescriptions of "Windsor Forest" and the "Fables. " The grand oldwriter does not need translation or modernisation; but perhaps, if itbe done at all, it had better be reached in that way. For the benefitof younger readers, I subjoin short prose versions of two of the"Canterbury Tales, "--a story-book than which the world does not possessa better. Listen, then, to the tale the Knight told as the pilgrimsrode to Canterbury:--

"There was once, as old stories tell, a certain Duke Theseus, lord andgovernor of Athens. The same was a great warrior and conqueror ofrealms. He defeated the Amazons, and wedded the queen of that country, Hypolita. After his marriage, the duke, his wife, and his sisterEmily, with all their host, were riding towards Athens, when they wereaware that a company of ladies, clad in black, were kneeling two by twoon the highway, wringing their hands and filling the air withlamentations. The duke, beholding this piteous sight, reined in hissteed and inquired the reason of their grief. Whereat one of theladies, queen to the slain King Capeneus, told him that at the siege ofThebes (of which town they were), Creon, the conqueror, had thrown thebodies of their husbands in a heap, and would on no account allow themto be buried, so that their limbs were mangled by vultures and wildbeasts. At the hearing of this great wrong, the duke started down fromhis horse, took the ladies one by one in his arms and comforted them, sent Hypolita and Emily home, displayed his great white banner, andimmediately rode towards Thebes with his host. Arriving at the city, he attacked boldly, slew the tyrant Creon with his own hand, tore downthe houses, --wall, roof, and rafter, --and then gave the bodies to theweeping ladies that they might be honourably interred. While searchingamongst the slain Thebans, two young knights were found grievouslywounded, and by the richness of their armour they were known to be ofthe blood royal. These young knights, Palamon and Arcite by name, theduke carried to Athens and flung into perpetual prison. Here theylived year by year in mourning and woe. It happened one May morningthat Palamon, who by the clemency of his keeper was roaming about in anupper chamber, looked out and beheld Emily singing in the garden andgathering flowers. At the sight of the beautiful apparition he startedand cried, 'Ha!' Arcite rose up, crying, 'Dear cousin, what is thematter?' when he too was stricken to the heart by the shaft of herbeauty. Then the prisoners began to dispute as to which had the betterright to love her. Palamon said he had seen her first; Arcite saidthat in love each man fought for himself; and so they disputed day byday. Now, it so happened that at this time the Duke Perotheus came tovisit his old playfellow and friend Theseus, and at his intercessionArcite was liberated, on the condition that on pain of death he shouldnever again be found in the Athenian dominions. Then the two knightsgrieved in their hearts. 'What matters liberty?' said Arcite, --'I am abanished man! Palamon in his dungeon is happier than I. He can seeEmily and be gladdened by her beauty!' 'Woe is me!' said Palamon;'here must I remain in durance. Arcite is abroad; he may make sharpwar on the Athenian border, and win Emily by the sword. ' When Arcitereturned to his native city he became so thin and pale with sorrow thathis friends scarcely knew him. One night the god Mercury appeared tohim in a dream and told him to return to Athens, for in that citydestiny had shaped an end of his woes. He arose next morning and went. He entered as a menial into the service of the Duke Theseus, and in ashort time was promoted to be page of the chamber to Emily the bright. Meanwhile, by the help of a friend, Palamon, who had drugged his jailerwith spiced wine, made his escape, and, as morning began to dawn, hehid himself in a grove. That very morning Arcite had ridden fromAthens to gather some green branches to do honour to the month of May, and entered the grove in which Palamon was concealed. When he hadgathered his green branches he sat down, and, after the manner oflovers (who have no constancy of spirits), he began to pour forth hissorrows to the empty air. Palamon, knowing his voice, started up witha white face: 'False traitor Arcite! now I have found thee. Thou hastdeceived the Duke Theseus! I am the lover of Emily, and thy mortalfoe! Had I a weapon, one of us should never leave this grove alive!''By God, who sitteth above!' cried the fierce Arcite, 'were it not thatthou art sick and mad for love, I would slay thee here with my ownhand! Meats, and drinks, and bedding I shall bring thee to-night, tomorrow swords and two suits of armour: take thou the better, leave methe worse, and then let us see who can win the lady. ' 'Agreed, ' saidPalamon; and Arcite rode away in great fierce joy of heart. Nextmorning, at the crowing of the cock, Arcite placed two suits of armourbefore him on his horse, and rode towards the grove. When they met, the colour of their faces changed. Each thought, 'Here comes my mortalenemy; one of us must be dead. ' Then, friend-like, as if they had beenbrothers, they assisted each the other to rivet on the armour; thatdone, the great bright swords went to and fro, and they were soonstanding ankle-deep in blood. That same morning the Duke Theseus, hiswife, and Emily went forth to hunt the hart with hound and horn, and, as destiny ordered it, the chase led them to the very grove in whichthe knights were fighting. Theseus, shading his eyes from the sunlightwith his hand, saw them, and, spurring his horse between them, cried, 'What manner of men are ye, fighting here without judge or officer?'Whereupon Palamon said, 'I am that Palamon who has broken your prison;this is Arcite the banished man, who, by returning to Athens, hasforfeited his head. Do with us as you list. I have no more to say. ''You have condemned yourselves!' cried the duke; 'by mighty Mars thered, both of you shall die!' Then Emily and the queen fell at hisfeet, and, with prayers and tears and white hands lifted up, besoughtthe lives of the young knights, which was soon granted. Theseus beganto laugh when he thought of his own young days. 'What a mighty god isLove!' quoth he. 'Here are Palamon and Arcite fighting for my sister, while they know she can only marry one, Fight they ever so much, shecannot marry both. I therefore ordain that both of you go away, andreturn this day year, each bringing with him a hundred knights; and letthe victor in solemn tournament have Emily for wife. ' Who was glad nowbut Palamon! who sprang up for joy but Arcite!

"When the twelve months had nearly passed away, there was in Athens agreat noise of workmen and hammers. The duke was busy withpreparations. He built a large amphitheatre, seated, round and round, to hold thousands of people. He erected also three temples, --one forDiana, one for Mars, one for Venus; how rich these were, how full ofpaintings and images, the tongue cannot tell! Never was suchpreparation made in the world. At last the day arrived in which theknights were to make their entrance into the city. A noise of trumpetswas heard, and through the city rode Palamon and his train. With himcame Lycurgus, the king of Thrace. He stood in a great car of gold, drawn by four white bulls, and his face was like a griffin when helooked about. Twenty or more hounds used for hunting the lion and thebear ran about the wheels of his car; at his back rode a hundred lords, stern and stout. Another burst of trumpets, and Arcite entered withhis troop. By his side rode Emetrius, the king of India, on a baysteed covered with cloth of gold. His hair was yellow, and glitteredlike the sun; when he looked upon the people, they thought his face waslike the face of a lion; his voice was like the thunder of a trumpet. He bore a white eagle on his wrist, and tame lions and leopards ranamong the horses of his train. They came to the city on a Sundaymorning, and the jousts were to begin on Monday. What pricking ofsquires backwards and forwards, what clanking of hammers, what bayingof hounds, that day! At last it was noon of Monday. Theseus declaredfrom his throne that no blood was to be shed, that they should takeprisoners only, and that he who was once taken prisoner should on noaccount again mingle in the fray. Then the duke, the queen, Emily, andthe rest, rode to the lists with trumpets and melody. They had nosooner taken their places than through the gate of Mars rode Arcite andhis hundred, displaying a red banner. At the self-same moment Palamonand his company entered by the gate of Venus, with a banner white asmilk. They were then arranged in two ranks, their names were calledover, the gates were shut, the herald gave his cry, loud and clear rangthe trumpet, and crash went the spears, as if made of glass, when theknights met in battle shock. There might you see a knight unhorsed, asecond crushing his way through the press, armed with a mighty mace, athird hurt and taken prisoner. Many a time that day in the swayingbattle did the two Thebans meet, and thrice were they unhorsed. Atlast, near the setting of the sun, when Palamon was fighting withArcite, he was wounded by Emetrius, and the battle thickened at theplace. Emetrius, is thrown out of his saddle a spear's length. Lycurgus is overthrown, and rolls on the ground, horse and man; andPalamon is dragged by main force to the stake. Then Theseus rose upwhere he sat, and cried, 'Ho! no more; Arcite of Thebes hath wonEmily!' at which the people shouted so loudly that it almost seemed themighty lists would fall. Arcite now put up his helmet, and, curvetinghis horse through the open space, smiled to Emily, when a fire fromPluto started out of the earth; the horse shied, and his rider wasthrown on his head on the ground. When he was lifted, his breast wasbroken, and his face was as black as coal. Then there was grief inAthens; every one wept. Soon after, Arcite, feeling the cold deathcreeping up from his feet and darkening his face and eyes, calledPalamon and Emily to his bedside, when he joined their hands, and died. The dead body was laid on a pile, dressed in splendid war gear; hisnaked sword was placed by his side; the pile was heaped with gums, frankincense, and odours; a torch was applied; and when the flames roseup, and the smoky fragrance rolled to heaven, the Greeks galloped roundthree times, with a great shouting and clashing of shields. "

The Man of Law's tale runs in this wise:

"There dwelt in Syria once a company of merchants, who scented everyland with their spices. They dealt in jewels, and cloth of gold, andsheeny satins. It so happened that while some of them were dwelling inRome for traffic, the people talked of nothing save the wonderfulbeauty of Constance, the daughter of the emperor. She was so fair thatevery one who looked upon her face fell in love with her. In a shorttime the ships of the merchants, laden with rich wares, were furrowingthe green sea, going home. When they came to their native city theycould talk of nothing but the marvellous beauty of Constance. Theirwords being reported to the Sultan, he determined that none othershould be his wife; and for this purpose he abandoned the religion ofthe false prophet, and was baptised in the Christian faith. Ambassadors passed between the courts, and the day came at length whenConstance was to leave Rome for her husband's palace in Syria. Whatkisses and tears and lingering embraces! What blessings on the littlegolden head which was so soon to lie in the bosom of a stranger! Whatstate and solemnity in the procession which wound down from the shoreto the ship! At last it was Syria. Crowds of people were standing onthe beach. The mother of the Sultan was there; and when Constancestepped ashore, she took her in her arms and kissed her as if she hadbeen her own child. Soon after, with trumpets and melody and thetrampling of innumerable horses, the Sultan came. Everything was joyand happiness. But the smiling demoness, his mother, could not forgivehim for changing his faith, and she resolved to slay him that verynight, and seize the government of the kingdom. He and all his lordswere stabbed in the rich hall while they were sitting at their wine. Constance alone escaped. She was then put into a ship alone, with foodand clothes, and told that she might find her way back to Italy. Shesailed away, and was never seen by that people. For five years shewandered to and fro upon the sea. Do you ask who preserved her? Thesame God who fed Elijah with ravens, and saved Daniel in the horribleden. At last she floated into the English seas, and was thrown by thewaves on the Northumberland shore, near which stood a great castle. The constable of the castle came down in the morning to see the wofulwoman. She spoke a kind of corrupt Latin, and could neither tell hername nor the name of the country of which she was a native. She saidshe was so bewildered in the sea that she remembered nothing. The mancould not help loving her, and so took her home to live with himselfand his wife. Now, through the example and teaching of Constance, DameHermigild was converted to Christianity. It happened also that threeaged Christian Britons were living near that place in great fear oftheir pagan neighbours, and one of these men was blind. One day, asthe constable, his wife, and Constance were walking along thesea-shore, they were met by the blind man, who called out, 'In the nameof Christ, give me my sight, Dame Hermigild!' At this, on account ofher husband, she was sore afraid; but, encouraged by Constance, shewrought a great miracle, and gave the blind man his sight. But Satan, the enemy of all, wanted to destroy Constance, and he employed a youngknight for that purpose. This knight had loved her with a foulaffection, to which she could give no return. At last, wild forrevenge, he crept at night into Hermigild's chamber, slew her, and laidthe bloody knife on the innocent pillow of Constance. The next morningthere was woe and dolour in the house. She was brought before Alla, the king, charged with the murder. The people could not believe thatshe had done this thing; they knew she loved Hermigild so. Constancefell down on her knees and prayed to God for succour. Have you everbeen in a crowd in which a man is being led to death, and, seeing awild, pale face, know by that sign that you are looking upon the doomedcreature?--so wild, so pale looked Constance when she stood before theking and people. The tears ran down Alla's face. 'Go fetch a book, 'cried he; 'and if this knight swears that the woman is guilty, sheshall surely die. ' The book was brought, the knight took the oath, andthat moment an unseen hand smote him on the neck, so that he fell downon the floor, his eyes bursting out of his head. Then a celestialvoice was heard in the midst, crying, 'Thou hast slandered a daughterof Holy Church in high presence, and yet I hold my peace. ' A great awefell on all who heard, and the king and multitudes of his people wereconverted. Shortly after this, Alla wedded Constance with greatrichness and solemnity. At length he was called to defend his borderagainst the predatory Scots, and in his absence a man-child was born. A messenger was sent with the blissful tidings to the king's camp; but, on his way, the messenger turned aside to the dwelling of Donegild, theking's mother, and said, 'Be blithe, madam; the queen has given birthto a son, and joy is in the land. Here is the letter I bear to theking. ' The wicked Donegild said, 'You must be already tired; here arerefreshments. ' And while the simple man drank ale and wine, she forgeda letter, saying that the queen had been delivered of a creature sofiendish and horrible that no one in the castle could bear to look uponit. This letter the messenger gave to the king; and who can tell hisgrief! But he wrote in reply, 'Welcome be the child that Christ sends!Welcome, O Lord, be thy pleasure! Be careful of my wife and child tillmy return. ' The messenger on his return slept at Donegild's court, with the letter under his girdle. It was stolen while in his drunkensleep, and another put in its place, charging the constable not to letConstance remain three days in the kingdom, but to send her and herchild away in the same ship in which she had come. The constable couldnot help himself. Thousands are gathered on the shore. With a facewild and pale as when she came from the sea, and bearing her cryinginfant in her arms, she comes through the crowd, which shrinks back, leaving a lane for her sorrow. She takes her seat in the little boat;and while the cruel people gaze hour by hour from the shore, she passesinto the sunset, and away out into the night under the stars. WhenAlla returned from the war, and found how he had been deceived, he slewhis mother, in the bitterness of his heart. 

"News had come to Rome of the cruelty of the Sultan's mother toConstance, and an army was sent to waste her country. After the landhad been burned and desolated, the commander was crossing the seas intriumph, when he met the ship sailing in which sat Constance and herlittle boy. They were both brought to Rome, and although thecommander's wife and Constance were cousins, the one did not know theother. By this time, remorse for the slaying of his mother had seizedAlla's mind, and he could find no rest. He resolved to make apilgrimage to Rome in search of peace. He crossed the Alps with histrain, and entered the city with great glory and magnificence. One dayhe feasted at the commander's house, at which Constance dwelt; and ather request her little son was admitted, and during the progress of thefeast the child went and stood looking in the king's face. 'What fairchild is that standing yonder?' said the king. 'By St. John; I knownot!' quoth the commander; 'he has a mother, but no father that I knowof. ' And then he told the king--who seemed all the while like a manstunned--how he had found the mother and child floating about on thesea. The king rose from the table and sent for Constance; and when hesaw her, and thought on all her wrongs, he could not refrain fromtears. 'This is your little son, Maurice, ' she said, as she led him inby the hand. Next day she met the emperor her father in the street, and, falling down on her knees before him, said, 'Father, has theremembrance of your young child Constance gone out of your mind? I amthat Constance whom you sent to Syria, and who was thought to be lostin the sea. ' That day there was great joy in Rome; and soon afterwardsAlla, with his wife and child, returned to England, where they lived ingreat prosperity till he died. "

BOOKS AND GARDENS

Most men seek solitude from wounded vanity, from disappointed ambition, from a miscarriage in the passions; but some others from nativeinstinct, as a duckling seeks water. I have taken to my solitude, suchas it is, from an indolent turn of mind, and this solitude I sweeten byan imaginative sympathy which re-creates the past for me, --the past ofthe world, as well as the past which belongs to me as anindividual, --and which makes me independent of the passing moment. Isee every one struggling after the unattainable, but I struggle not, and so spare myself the pangs of disappointment and disgust. I have noventures at sea, and, consequently, do not fear the arrival of eviltidings. I have no desire to act any prominent part in the world, butI am devoured by an unappeasable curiosity as to the men who do act. Iam not an actor, I am a spectator only. My sole occupation issight-seeing. In a certain imperial idleness, I amuse myself with theworld. Ambition! What do I care for ambition? The oyster with muchpain produces its pearl. I take the pearl. Why should I produce oneafter this miserable, painful fashion? It would be but a flawed one, at best. These pearls I can pick up by the dozen. The production ofthem is going on all around me, and there will be a nice crop for thesolitary man of the next century. Look at a certain silent emperor, for instance: a hundred years hence _his_ pearl will be handed aboutfrom hand to hand; will be curiously scrutinised and valued; will beset in its place in the world's cabinet. I confess I should like tosee the completion of that filmy orb. Will it be pure in colour? Willits purity be marred by an ominous bloody streak? Of this I amcertain, that in the cabinet in which the world keeps these peculiartreasures, no one will be looked at more frequently, or will provoke agreater variety of opinions as to its intrinsic worth. Why should I beambitious? Shall I write verses? I am not likely to surpass Mr. Tennyson or Mr. Browning in that walk. Shall I be a musician? Theblackbird singing this moment somewhere in my garden shrubbery puts meto instant shame. Shall I paint? The intensest scarlet on an artist'spalette is but ochre to that I saw this morning at sunrise. No, no, let me enjoy Mr. Tennyson's verse, and the blackbird's song, and thecolours of sunrise, but do not let me emulate them. I am happier as itis. I do not need to make history, --there are plenty of people willingto save me trouble on that score. The cook makes the dinner, the guesteats it; and the last, not without reason, is considered the happierman. 

In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. Myinterests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With theflower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past. I go intomy library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morningair of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, andto the laugh of Eve. I see the Pyramids building; I hear the shoutingsof the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the marchof Cambyses. I sit as in a theatre, --the stage is time, the play isthe play of the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, whatprocessions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds ofcaptives are dragged at the chariot-wheels of conquerors! I hiss, orcry "Bravo, " when the great actors come on the shaking stage. I am aRoman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift Homer, and I shoutwith Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the unpeopled Syrianplains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham andIshmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob'sguile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendidfuneral procession, --all these things I find within the boards of myOld Testament. What a silence in those old books as of a half-peopledworld; what bleating of flocks; what green pastoral rest; whatindubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood andwar I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bellsof Rebekah's camels. O men and women so far separated yet so near, sostrange yet so well known, by what miraculous power do I know ye all!Books are the true Elysian fields, where the spirits of the deadconverse; and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. Whatking's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy suchwisdom? The wit of the ancient world is glancing and flashing there. There is Pan's pipe, there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in mylibrary at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I amoccasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They arenot collections of printed pages, they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of menand things of which it alone possesses knowledge. I call myself asolitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees morecompany than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than everdid Timour or Genghis Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign inmy library, but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees. 

The house I dwell in stands apart from the little town, and relatesitself to the houses as I do to the inhabitants. It sees everything, but is itself unseen, or, at all events, unregarded. My study-windowlooks down upon Dreamthorp like a meditative eye. Without meaning it, I feel I am a spy on the on-goings of the quiet place. Around my housethere is an old-fashioned rambling garden, with close-shaven grassyplots, and fantastically clipped yews which have gathered theirdarkness from a hundred summers and winters; and sun-dials in which thesun is constantly telling his age; and statues green with neglect andthe stains of the weather. The garden I love more than any place onearth; it is a better study than the room inside the house which isdignified by that name. I like to pace its gravelled walks, to sit inthe moss-house, which is warm and cosey as a bird's nest, and whereintwilight dwells at noonday; to enjoy the feast of colour spread for mein the curiously shaped floral spaces. My garden, with its silence andthe pulses of fragrance that come and go on the airy undulations, affects me like sweet music. Care stops at the gates, and gazes at mewistfully through the bars. Among my flowers and trees Nature takes meinto her own hands, and I breathe freely as the first man. It iscurious, pathetic almost, I sometimes think, how deeply seated in thehuman heart is the liking for gardens and gardening. The sicklyseamstress in the narrow city lane tends her box of sickliermignonette. The retired merchant is as fond of tulips as ever wasDutchman during the famous mania. The author finds a garden the bestplace to think out his thought. In the disabled statesman everyrestless throb of regret or ambition is stilled when he looks upon hisblossomed apple-trees. Is the fancy too far brought that this love forgardens is a reminiscence haunting the race of that remote time in theworld's dawn when but two persons existed, --a gardener named Adam, anda gardener's wife called Eve?

When I walk out of my house into my garden I walk out of my habitualself, my every-day thoughts, my customariness of joy or sorrow by whichI recognise and assure myself of my own identity. These I leave behindme for a time, as the bather leaves his garments on the beach. Thispiece of garden-ground, in extent barely a square acre, is a kingdomwith its own interests, annals, and incidents. Something is alwayshappening in it. To-day is always different from yesterday. Thisspring a chaffinch built a nest in one of my yew-trees. The particularyew which the bird did me the honour to select had been clipped longago into a similitude of Adam, and, in fact, went by his name. Theresemblance to a human figure was, of course, remote, but the intentionwas evident. In the black shock head of our first parent did the birdsestablish their habitation. A prettier, rounder, more comfortable nestI never saw, and many a wild swing it got when Adam bent his back, andbobbed and shook his head when the bitter east wind was blowing. Thenest interested me, and I visited it every day from the time the firststained turquoise sphere was laid in the warm lining of moss andhorse-hair, till, when I chirped, four red hungry throats, eager forworm or slug, opened out of a confused mass of feathery down. What ahungry brood it was, to be sure, and how often father and mother wereput to it to provide them sustenance! I went but the other day to havea peep, and, behold! brood and parent-birds were gone, the nest wasempty, Adam's visitors had departed. In the corners of my bedroomwindow I have a couple of swallows' nests, and nothing can bepleasanter in these summer mornings than to lie in a kind ofhalf-dream, conscious all the time of the chatterings and endearmentsof the man-loving creatures. They are beautifully restless, and arecontinually darting around their nests in the window-corners. All atonce there is a great twittering and noise; something of moment hasbeen witnessed, something of importance has occurred in theswallow-world, --perhaps a fly of unusual size or savour has beenbolted. Clinging with their feet, and with heads turned charminglyaside, they chatter away with voluble sweetness, then with a gleam ofsilver they are gone, and in a trice one is poising itself in the windabove my tree-tops, while the other dips her wing as she darts after afly through the arches of the bridge which lets the slow stream down tothe sea. I go to the southern wall, against which I have trained myfruit-trees, and find it a sheet of white and vermeil blossom; and as Iknow it by heart, I can notice what changes take place on it day byday, what later clumps of buds have burst into colour and odour. Whatbeauty in that blooming wall! the wedding-presents of a princess rangedfor admiration would not please me half so much; what delicatecolouring! what fragrance the thievish winds steal from it, withoutmaking it one odour the poorer! with what a complacent hum the bee goespast! My chaffinch's nest, my swallows, --twittering but a few monthsago around the kraal of the Hottentot, or chasing flies around the sixsolitary pillars of Baalbec, --with their nests in the corners of mybed-room windows, my long-armed fruit-trees flowering against my sunnywall, are not mighty pleasures, but then they are my own, and I havenot to go in search of them. And so, like a wise man, I am contentwith what I have, and make it richer by my fancy, which is as cheap assunlight, and gilds objects quite as prettily. It is the coins in myown pocket, not the coins in the pockets of my neighbour, that are ofuse to me. Discontent has never a doit in her purse, and envy is themost poverty stricken of the passions. 

His own children, and the children he happens to meet on the countryroad, a man regards with quite different eyes. The strange, sunburntbrats returning from a primrose-hunt and laden with floral spoils, maybe as healthy looking, as pretty, as well-behaved, as sweet-tempered, as neatly dressed as those that bear his name, --may be in every respectas worthy of love and admiration; but then they have the misfortune notto belong to him. That little fact makes a great difference. He knowsnothing about them; his acquaintance with them is born and dead in amoment. I like my garden better than any other garden, for the samereason. It is my own. And ownership in such a matter implies a greatdeal. When I first settled here, the ground around the house was sourmoorland. I made the walk, planted the trees, built the moss-house, erected the sun-dial, brought home the rhododendrons and fed them withthe mould which they love so well. I am the creator of every blossom, of every odour that comes and goes in the wind. The rustle of my treesis to my ear what his child's voice is to my friends the village doctoror the village clergyman. I know the genealogy of every tree and plantin my garden. I watch their growth as a father watches the growth ofhis children. It is curious enough, as showing from what sourcesobjects derive their importance, that if you have once planted a treefor other than commercial purposes, --and in that case it is usuallydone by your orders and by the hands of hirelings, --you have always init a peculiar interest. You care more for it than you care for all theforests of Norway or America. _You_ have planted it, and that issufficient to make it peculiar amongst the trees of the world. Thispersonal interest I take in every inmate of my garden, and thisinterest I have increased by sedulous watching. But, really, trees andplants resemble human beings in many ways. You shake a packet of seedinto your forcing-frame; and while some grow, others pine and die, orstruggle on under hereditary defect, showing indifferent blossoms latein the season, and succumb at length. So far as one could discover, the seeds were originally alike, --they received the same care, theywere fed by the same moisture and sunlight; but of no two of them arethe issues the same. Do I not see something of this kind in the worldof men, and can I not please myself with quaint analogies? Theseplants and trees have their seasons of illness and their sudden deaths. Your best rose-tree, whose fame has spread for twenty miles, is smittenby some fell disease; its leaves take an unhealthy hue, and in a day orso it is sapless, --dead. A tree of mine, the first last spring to putout its leaves, and which wore them till November, made this spring nogreen response to the call of the sunshine. Marvelling what ailed it, I went to examine, and found it had been dead for months; and yetduring the winter there had been no frost to speak of, and more thanits brothers and sisters it was in no way exposed. These are thetragedies of the garden, and they shadow forth other tragedies nearerus. In everything we find a kind of dim mirror of ourselves. Sterne, if placed in a desert, said he would love a tree; and I can fancy sucha love would not be altogether unsatisfying. Love of trees and plantsis safe. You do not run risk in your affections. They are mychildren, silent and beautiful, untouched by any passion, unpolluted byevil tempers; for me they leaf and flower themselves. In autumn theyput off their rich apparel, but next year they are back again, withdresses fair as ever; and--one can extract a kind of fancifulbitterness from the thought--should I be laid in my grave in winter, they would all in spring be back again, with faces a bright and withbreaths as sweet, missing me not at all. Ungrateful, the one I amfondest of would blossom very prettily if planted on the soil thatcovers me, --where my dog would die, where my best friend would perhapsraise an inscription!

I like flowering plants, but I like trees more, --for the reason, Isuppose, that they are slower in coming to maturity, are longer lived, that you can become better acquainted with them, and that in the courseof years memories and associations hang as thickly on their boughs asdo leaves in summer or fruits in autumn. I do not wonder that greatearls value their trees, and never, save in direst extremity, lift uponthem the axe. Ancient descent and glory are made audible in the proudmurmur of immemorial woods. There are forests in England whose leafynoises may be shaped into Agincourt and the names of the battle-fieldsof the Roses; oaks that dropped their acorns in the year that HenryVIII. Held his Field of the Cloth of Gold, and beeches that gaveshelter to the deer when Shakspeare was a boy. There they stand, insun and shower, the broad-armed witnesses of perished centuries; andsore must his need be who commands a woodland massacre. A greatEnglish tree, the rings of a century in its boll, is one of the noblestof natural objects; and it touches the imagination no less than theeye, for it grows out of tradition and a past order of things, and ispathetic with the suggestions of dead generations. Trees waving acolony of rooks in the wind to-day, are older than historic lines. Trees are your best antiques. There are cedars on Lebanon which theaxes of Solomon spared, they say, when he was busy with his Temple;there are olives on Olivet that might have rustled in the ears of theMaster and the Twelve; there are oaks in Sherwood which have tingled tothe horn of Robin Hood, and have listened to Maid Marian's laugh. Think of an existing Syrian cedar which is nearly as old as history, which was middle-aged before the wolf suckled Romulus! Think of anexisting English elm in whose branches the heron was reared which thehawks of Saxon Harold killed! If you are a notable, and wish to beremembered, better plant a tree than build a city or strike a medal; itwill outlast both. 

My trees are young enough, and if they do not take me away into thepast, they project me into the future. When I planted them, I knew Iwas performing an act, the issues of which would outlast me long. Myoaks are but saplings; but what undreamed-of English kings will theynot outlive! I pluck my apples, my pears, my plums; and I know thatfrom the same branches other hands will pluck apples, pears, and plumswhen this body of mine will have shrunk into a pinch of dust. I cannotdream with what year these hands will date their letters. A man doesnot plant a tree for himself, he plants it for posterity. And, sittingidly in the sunshine, I think at times of the unborn people who will, to some small extent, be indebted to me. Remember me kindly, ye futuremen and women! When I am dead, the juice of my apples will foam andspurt in your cider-presses, my plums will gather for you their mistybloom; and that any of your youngsters should be choked by one of mycherry-stones, merciful Heaven forfend!

In this pleasant summer weather I hold my audience in my garden ratherthan in my house. In all my interviews the sun is a third party. Every village has its Fool, and, of course, Dreamthorp is not withoutone. Him I get to run my messages for me, and he occasionally turns mygarden borders with a neat hand enough. He and I hold frequentconverse, and people here, I have been told, think we have certainpoints of sympathy. Although this is not meant for a compliment, Itake it for one. The poor faithful creature's brain has strangevisitors; now 't is fun, now wisdom, and now something which seems inthe queerest way a compound of both. He lives in a kind of twilightwhich obscures objects, and his remarks seem to come from another worldthan that in which ordinary people live. He is the only originalperson of my acquaintance; his views of life are his own, and form asingular commentary on those generally accepted. He is dull enough attimes, poor fellow; but anon he startles you with something, and youthink he must have wandered out of Shakspeare's plays into thisout-of-the-way place. Up from the village now and then comes to visitme the tall, gaunt, atrabilious confectioner, who has a hankering afterRed-republicanism, and the destruction of Queen, Lords, and Commons. Guy Fawkes is, I believe, the only martyr in his calendar. Thesourest-tempered man, I think, that ever engaged in the manufacture ofsweetmeats. I wonder that the oddity of the thing never strikeshimself. To be at all consistent, he should put poison in hislozenges, and become the Herod of the village innocents. One of hismany eccentricities is a love for flowers, and he visits me often tohave a look at my greenhouse and my borders. I listen to his truculentand revolutionary speeches, and take my revenge by sending the gloomyegotist away with a nosegay in his hand, and a gay-coloured flowerstuck in a button-hole. He goes quite unconscious of my floral satire. 

The village clergyman and the village doctor are great friends of mine;they come to visit me often, and smoke a pipe with me in my garden. The twain love and respect each other, but they regard the world fromdifferent points of view, and I am now and again made witness of agood-humoured passage of arms. The clergyman is old, unmarried, and ahumourist. His sallies and his gentle eccentricities seldom provokelaughter, but they are continually awakening the pleasantest smiles. Perhaps what he has seen of the world, its sins, its sorrows, itsdeath-beds, its widows and orphans, has tamed his spirit and put atenderness into his wit. I do not think I have ever encountered a manwho so adorns his sacred profession. His pious, devout nature producessermons just as naturally as my apple-trees produce apples. He is atree that flowers every Sunday. Very beautiful in his reverence forthe Book, his trust in it; through long acquaintance, its ideas havecome to colour his entire thought, and you come upon its phrases in hisordinary speech. He is more himself in the pulpit than anywhere else, and you get nearer him in his sermons than you do sitting with him athis tea-table, or walking with him on the country roads. He does notfeel confined in his orthodoxy; in it he is free as a bird in the air. The doctor is, I conceive, as good a Christian as the clergyman, but heis impatient of pale or limit; he never comes to a fence withoutfeeling a desire to get over it. He is a great hunter of insects, andhe thinks that the wings of his butterflies might yield very excellenttexts; he is fond of geology, and cannot, especially when he is in thecompany of the clergyman, resist the temptation of hurling a fossil atMoses. He wears his scepticism as a coquette wears her ribbons, --toannoy if he cannot subdue; and when his purpose is served, he puts hisscepticism aside, --as the coquette puts her ribbons. Great argumentsarise between them, and the doctor loses his field through his loss oftemper, --which, however, he regains before any harm is done; for theworthy man is irascible withal, and opposition draws fire from him. 

After an outburst, there is a truce between the friends for a while, till it is broken by theological battle over the age of the world, orsome other the like remote matter, which seems important to me only inso far as it affords ground for disputation. These truces are brokensometimes by the doctor, sometimes by the clergyman. T'other eveningthe doctor and myself were sitting in the garden, smoking each ameditative pipe. Dreamthorp lay below, with its old castle and itslake, and its hundred wreaths of smoke floating upward into the sunset. Where we sat, the voices of children playing in the street could hardlyreach us. Suddenly a step was heard on the gravel, and the next momentthe clergyman appeared, as it seemed to me, with a peculiar airiness ofaspect, and the light of a humourous satisfaction in his eye. Afterthe usual salutations, he took his seat beside us, lifted a pipe of thekind called "churchwarden" from the box on the ground, filled andlighted it, and for a little while we were silent all three. Theclergyman then drew an old magazine from his side pocket, opened it ata place where the leaf had been carefully turned down, and drew myattention to a short poem which had for its title, "Vanity Fair, "imprinted in German text. This poem he desired me to read aloud. Laying down my pipe carefully beside me, I complied with his request. It ran thus; for as after my friends went it was left behind, I havewritten it down word for word:--

 "The world-old Fair of Vanity Since Bunyan's day has grown discreeter No more it flocks in crowds to see A blazing Paul or Peter. 

 "Not that a single inch it swerves From hate of saint or love of sinner, But martyrs shock aesthetic nerves, And spoil the _goût_ of dinner. 

 "Raise but a shout, or flaunt a scarf, -- Its mobs are all agog and flying; They 'll cram the levee of a dwarf, And leave a Haydon dying. 

 "They live upon each newest thing, They fill their idle days with seeing; Fresh news of courtier and of king Sustains their empty being. 

 "The statelier, from year to year, Maintain their comfortable stations At the wide windows that o'erpeer The public square of nations;

 "While through it heaves, with cheers and groans, Harsh drums of battle in the distance, Frightful with gallows, ropes, and thrones, The medley of existence;

 "Amongst them tongues are wagging much: Hark to the philosophic sisters! To his, whose keen satiric touch, Like the Medusa, blisters!

 "All things are made for talk, --St. Paul; The pattern of an altar cushion; A Paris wild with carnival, Or red with revolution. 

 "And much they knew, that sneering crew, Of things above the world and under: They search'd the hoary deep; they knew The secret of the thunder;

 "The pure white arrow of the light They split into its colours seven; They weighed the sun; they dwelt, like night, Among the stars of heaven;

 "They 've found out life and death, --the first Is known but to the upper classes; The second, pooh! 't is at the worst A dissolution into gases. 

 "And vice and virtue are akin, As black and white from Adam issue, -- One flesh, one blood, though sheeted in A different coloured tissue. 

 "Their science groped from star to star;-- But then herself found nothing greater. What wonder?--in a Leyden jar They bottled the Creator. 

 "Fires fluttered on their lightning-rod; They cleared the human mind from error; They emptied heaven of its God, And Tophet of its terror. 

 "Better the savage in his dance Than these acute and syllogistic! Better a reverent ignorance Than knowledge atheistic!

 "Have they dispelled one cloud that lowers So darkly on the human creature? They with their irreligious powers Have subjugated nature. 

 "But, as a satyr wins the charms Of maiden in a forest hearted, He finds, when clasped within his arms, The outraged soul departed. "

 When I had done reading these verses, he clergyman glanced slyly along to see the effect of his shot. Thedoctor drew two or three hurried whiffs, gave a huge grunt of scorn, then, turning sharply, asked, "What is 'a reverent ignorance'? What is'a knowledge atheistic'?" The clergyman, skewered by the suddenquestion, wriggled a little, and then began to explain, --with no greatheart, however, for he had had his little joke out, and did not care tocarry it further. The doctor listened for a little, and then, layingdown his pipe, said, with some heat, "It won't do. 'Reverentignorance' and such trash is a mere jingle of words; _that_ you know aswell as I. You stumbled on these verses, and brought them up here tothrow them at me. They don't harm me in the least, I can assure you. There is no use, " continued the doctor, mollifying at the sight of hisfriend's countenance, and seeing how the land lay, --"there is no usespeaking to our incurious, solitary friend here, who could baskcomfortably in sunshine for a century, without once inquiring whencecame the light and heat. But let me tell you, " lifting his pipe andshaking it across me at the clergyman, "that science has done servicesto your cloth which have not always received the most gratefulacknowledgments. Why, man, " here he began to fill his pipe slowly, "the theologian and the man of science, although they seem to divergeand lose sight of each other, are all the while working to one end. Two exploring parties in Australia set out from one point; the one goeseast, and the other west. They lose sight of each other, they knownothing of one another's whereabouts; but they are all steering to onepoint, "--the sharp spirt of a fusee on the garden-seat came in here, followed by an aromatic flavour in the air, --"and when they do meet, which they are certain to do in the long run, "--here the doctor put thepipe in his mouth, and finished his speech with it there, --"the figureof the continent has become known, and may be set down in maps. Theexploring parties have started long ago. What folly in the one topooh-pooh or be suspicious of the exertions of the other. That partydeserves the greatest credit which meets the other more than halfway. "--"Bravo!" cried the clergyman, when the doctor had finished hisoration; "I don't know that I could fill your place at the bedside, butI am quite sure that you could fill mine in the pulpit. "--"I am notsure that the congregation would approve of the change, --I mightdisturb their slumbers;" and, pleased with his retort, his cheery laughrose through a cloud of smoke into the sunset. 

Heigho! mine is a dull life, I fear, when this little affair of thedoctor and the clergyman takes the dignity of an incident, and seemsworthy of being recorded. 

The doctor was anxious that, during the following winter, a shortcourse of lectures should be delivered in the village schoolroom, andin my garden he held several conferences on the matter with theclergyman and myself. It was arranged finally that the lectures shouldbe delivered, and that one of them should be delivered by me. I neednot say how pleasant was the writing out of my discourse, and how thepleasure was heightened by the slightest thrill of alarm at my owntemerity. My lecture I copied out in my most careful hand, and, as Ihad it by heart, I used to declaim passages of it ensconced in mymoss-house, or concealed behind my shrubbery trees. In these places Itried it all over, sentence by sentence. The evening came at lastwhich had been looked forward to for a couple of months or more. Thesmall schoolroom was filled by forms on which the people sat, and asmall reading-desk, with a tumbler of water on it, at the further end, waited for me. When I took my seat, the couple of hundred eyes struckinto me a certain awe. I discovered in a moment why the orator of thehustings is so deferential to the mob. You may despise everyindividual member of your audience, but these despised individuals, intheir capacity of a collective body, overpower you. I addressed thepeople with the most unfeigned respect. When I began, too, I foundwhat a dreadful thing it is to hear your own voice inhabiting thesilence. You are related to your voice, and yet divorced from it. Itis you, and yet a thing apart. All the time it is going on, you can becritical as to its tone, volume, cadence, and other qualities, as if itwas the voice of a stranger. Gradually, however, I got accustomed tomy voice, and the respect which I entertained for my hearers so farrelaxed that I was at last able to look them in the face. I saw thedoctor and the clergyman smile encouragingly, and my half-wittedgardener looking up at me with open mouth, and the atrabiliousconfectioner clap his hands, which made me take refuge in my paperagain. I got to the end of my task without any remarkable incident, ifI except the doctor's once calling out "hear" loudly, which brought theheart into my mouth, and blurred half a sentence. When I sat down, there were the usual sounds of approbation, and the confectionerreturned thanks, in the name of the audience. 

ON VAGABONDS

Call it oddity, eccentricity, humour, or what you please, it is evidentthat the special flavour of mind or manner which, independently offortune, station, or profession, sets a man apart and makes himdistinguishable from his fellows, and which gives the charm ofpicturesqueness to society, is fast disappearing from amongst us. Aman may count the odd people of his acquaintance on his fingers; and itis observable that these odd people are generally well stricken inyears. They belong more to the past generation than to the present. Our young men are terribly alike. For these many years back, the younggentlemen I have had the fortune to encounter are clever, knowing, selfish, disagreeable; the young ladies are of one pattern, like mintedsovereigns of the same reign, --excellent gold, I have no doubt, buteach bearing the same awfully proper image and superscription. Thereare no blanks in the matrimonial lottery nowadays, but the prizes areall of a value, and there is but one kind of article given for theticket. Courtship is an absurdity and a sheer waste of time. If a mancould but close his eyes in a ball-room, dash into a bevy of muslinbeauties, carry off the fair one that accident gives to his arms, hisraid would be as reasonable and as likely to produce happiness as themore ordinary methods of procuring a spouse. If a man has to chooseone guinea out of a bag containing one hundred and fifty, what can hedo? What wonderful wisdom can he display in his choice? There is noappreciable difference of value in the golden pieces. The latestcoined are a little fresher, that's all. An act of uniformity, withheavy penalties for recusants, seems to have been passed upon theEnglish race. That we can quite well account for this state of things, does not make the matter better, does not make it the less our duty tofight against it. We are apt to be told that men are too busy andwomen too accomplished for humour of speech or originality of characteror manner. In the truth of this lies the pity of it. If, with theexceptions of hedges that divide fields, and streams that run asmarches between farms, every inch of soil were drained, ploughed, manured, and under that improved cultivation rushing up intoastonishing wheaten and oaten crops, enriching tenant and proprietor, the aspect of the country would be decidedly uninteresting, and wouldpresent scant attraction to the man riding or walking through it. Insuch a world the tourists would be few. Personally, I should detest aworld all red and ruled with the ploughshare in spring, all coveredwith harvest in autumn. I wish a little variety. I desiderate moorsand barren places: the copse where you can flush the woodcock; thewarren where, when you approach, you can see the twinkle of innumerablerabbit tails; and, to tell the truth, would not feel sorry althoughReynard himself had a hole beneath the wooded bank, even if the demandsof his rising family cost Farmer Yellowleas a fat capon or two in theseason. The fresh, rough, heathery parts of human nature, where theair is freshest, and where the linnets sing, is getting encroached uponby cultivated fields. Every one is making himself and herself useful. Every one is producing something. Everybody is clever. Everybody is aphilanthropist. I don't like it. I love a little eccentricity. Irespect honest prejudices. I admire foolish enthusiasm in a young headbetter than a wise scepticism. It is high time, it seems to me, that amoral game-law were passed for the preservation of the wild and vagrantfeelings of human nature. 

I have advertised myself to speak of _vagabonds_, and I must explainwhat I mean by the term. We all know what was the doom of the firstchild born of man, and it is needless for me to say that I do not wishthe spirit of Cain more widely diffused amongst my fellow-creatures. By vagabonds, I do not mean a tramp or a gipsy, or a thimble-rigger, ora brawler who is brought up with a black eye before a magistrate in themorning. The vagabond as I have him in my mind's eye, and whom Idearly love, comes out of quite a different mould. The man I speak of, seldom, it is true, attains to the dignity of a churchwarden; he isnever found sitting at a reformed town-council board; he has a horrorof public platforms; he never by any chance heads a subscription listwith a donation of fifty pounds. On the other hand, he is very farfrom being a "ne'er-do-weel, " as the Scotch phrase it, or an imprudentperson. He does not play at "Aunt Sally" on a public race-course, hedoes not wrench knockers from the doors of slumbering citizens; he hasnever seen the interior of a police-cell. It is quite true, he has apeculiar way of looking at many things. If, for instance, he isbrought up with cousin Milly, and loves her dearly, and the childishaffection grows up and strengthens in the woman's heart, and there is afair chance for them fighting the world side by side, he marries herwithout too curiously considering whether his income will permit him togive dinner-parties, and otherwise fashionably see his friends. Veryimprudent, no doubt. But you cannot convince my vagabond. With thestrangest logical twist, which seems natural to him, he conceives thathe marries for his own sake, and not for the sake of his acquaintances, and that the possession of a loving heart and a conscience void ofreproach is worth, at any time an odd sovereign in his pocket. Thevagabond is not a favourite with the respectable classes. He isparticularly feared by mammas who have daughters to dispose of, --notthat he is a bad son, or likely to prove a bad husband or a treacherousfriend; but somehow gold does not stick to his fingers as it does tothe fingers of some men. He is regardless of appearances. He chooseshis friends neither for their fine houses nor their rare wines, but fortheir humours, their goodness of heart, their capacities of making ajoke and of seeing one, and for their abilities, unknown often as thewoodland violet, but not the less sweet for obscurity. As aconsequence, his acquaintance is miscellaneous, and he is often seen atother places than rich men's feasts. I do believe he is a gainer byreason of his vagrant ways. He comes in contact with the queer cornersand the out-of-the-way places of human life. He knows more of ourcommon nature, just as the man who walks through a country, and whostrikes off the main road now and then to visit a ruin, or a legendarycairn of stones, who drops into village inns, and talks with the peoplehe meets on the road, becomes better acquainted with it than the manwho rolls haughtily along the turnpike in a carriage and four. We losea great deal by foolish hauteur. No man is worth much who has not atouch of the vagabond in him. Could I have visited London thirty yearsago, I would rather have spent an hour with Charles Lamb than with anyother of its residents. He was a fine specimen of the vagabond, as Iconceive him. His mind was as full of queer nooks and tortuouspassages as any mansion-house of Elizabeth's day or earlier, where therooms are cosey, albeit a little low in the roof; where dusty stainedlights are falling on old oaken panellings; where every bit offurniture has a reverent flavour of ancientness; where portraits ofnoble men and women, all dead long ago, are hanging on the walls; andwhere a black-letter Chaucer with silver clasps is lying open on a seatin the window. There was nothing modern about him. The garden of hismind did not flaunt in gay parterres; it resembled those that Cowleyand Evelyn delighted in, with clipped trees, and shaven lawns, andstone satyrs, and dark, shadowing yews, and a sun-dial, with a Latinmotto sculptured on it, standing at the farther end. Lamb was theslave of quip and whimsey; he stuttered out puns to the detriment ofall serious and improving conversation, and twice or so in the year hewas overtaken in liquor. Well, in spite of these things, perhaps onaccount of these things, I love his memory. For love and charityripened in that nature as peaches ripen on the wall that fronts thesun. Although he did not blow his trumpet in the corners of thestreets, he was tried as few men are, and fell not. He jested, that hemight not weep. He wore a martyr's heart beneath his suit of motley. And only years after his death, when to admiration or censure he wasalike insensible, did the world know his story and that of his sisterMary. 

Ah, me! what a world this was to live in two or three centuries ago, when it was getting itself discovered--when the sunset gave up America, when a steel hand had the spoiling of Mexico and Peru! Then were the"Arabian Nights" commonplace, enchantments a matter of course, andromance the most ordinary thing in the world. Then man was courtingNature; now he has married her. Every mystery is dissipated. Theplanet is familiar as the trodden pathway running between towns. We nolonger gaze wistfully to the west, dreaming of the Fortunate Isles. Weseek our wonders now on the ebbed sea-shore; we discover our new worldswith the microscope. Yet, for all that time has brought and takenaway, I am glad to know that the vagabond sleeps in our blood, andawakes now and then. Overlay human nature as you please, here andthere some bit of rock, or mound of aboriginal soil, will crop out withthe wild-flowers growing upon it, sweetening the air. When the boythrows his Delectus or his Euclid aside, and takes passionately to thereading of "Robinson Crusoe" or Bruce's "African Travels, " do not shakeyour head despondingly over him and prophesy evil issues. Let the wildhawk try its wings. It will be hooded, and will sit quietly enough onthe falconer's perch ere long. Let the wild horse career over itsboundless pampas; the jerk of the lasso will bring it down soon enough. Soon enough will the snaffle in the mouth and the spur of the tamersubdue the high spirit to the bridle, or the carriage-trace. Perhapsnot; and, if so, the better for all parties. Once more there will be anew man and new deeds in the world. For Genius is a vagabond, Art is avagabond, Enterprise is a vagabond. Vagabonds have moulded the worldinto its present shape; they have made the houses in which we dwell, the roads on which we ride and drive, the very laws that govern us. Respectable people swarm in the track of the vagabond as rooks in thetrack of the ploughshare. Respectable people do little in the worldexcept storing wine-cellars and amassing fortunes for the benefit ofspendthrift heirs. Respectable well-to-do Grecians shook their headsover Leonidas and his three hundred when they went down to Thermopylae. Respectable Spanish churchmen with shaven crowns scouted the dream ofColumbus. Respectable German folks attempted to dissuade Luther fromappearing before Charles and the princes and electors of the Empire, and were scandalised when he declared that "Were there as many devilsin Worms as there were tiles on the house-tops, still would he on. "Nature makes us vagabonds, the world makes us respectable. 

In the fine sense in which I take the word, the English are thegreatest vagabonds on the earth, and it is the healthiest trait intheir national character. The first fine day in spring awakes thegipsy in the blood of the English workman, and incontinently he"babbles of green fields. " On the English gentleman lapped, in themost luxurious civilisation, and with the thousand powers and resourcesof wealth at his command, descends oftentimes a fierce unrest, aBedouin-like horror of cities and the cry of the money-changer, and ina month the fiery dust rises in the track of his desert steed, or inthe six months' polar midnight he hears the big wave clashing on theicy shore. The close presence of the sea feeds the Englishman'srestlessness. She takes possession of his heart like some faircapricious mistress. Before the boy awakes to the beauty of cousinMary, he is crazed by the fascinations of ocean. With her voices ofebb and flow she weaves her siren song round the Englishman's coastsday and night. Nothing that dwells on land can keep from her embracethe boy who has gazed upon her dangerous beauty, and who has heard hersinging songs of foreign shores at the foot of the summer crag. It iswell that in the modern gentleman the fierce heart of the Berserkerlives yet. The English are eminently a nation of vagabonds. The sunpaints English faces with all the colours of his climes. TheEnglishman is ubiquitous. He shakes with fever and ague in the swampyvalley of the Mississippi; he is drowned in the sand pillars as theywaltz across the desert on the purple breath of the simoom; he standson the icy scalp of Mont Blanc; his fly falls in the sullen Norwegianfiords; he invades the solitude of the Cape lion; he rides on hisdonkey through the uncausewayed Cairo streets. That wealthy people, under a despotism, should be travellers seems a natural thing enough. It is a way of escape from the rigours of their condition. But thatEngland--where activity rages so keenly and engrosses every class;where the prizes of Parliament, literature, commerce, the bar, thechurch, are hungered and thirsted after; where the stress and intensityof life ages a man before his time; where so many of the noblest breakdown in harness hardly halfway to the goal--should, year after year, send off swarms of men to roam the world, and to seek out danger forthe mere thrill and enjoyment of it, is significant of the indomitablepluck and spirit of the race. There is scant danger that the rust ofsloth will eat into the virtue of English steel. The English do thehard work and the travelling of the world. The least revolutionarynation of Europe, the one with the greatest temptations to stay athome, with the greatest faculty for work, with perhaps the sincerestregard for wealth, is also the most nomadic. How is this? It isbecause they are a nation of vagabonds; they have the "hungry heart"that one of their poets speaks about. 

There is an amiability about the genuine vagabond which takes captivethe heart. We do not love a man for his respectability, his prudenceand foresight in business, his capacity of living within his income, orhis balance at his banker's. We all admit that prudence is anadmirable virtue, and occasionally lament, about Christmas, when billsfall in, that we do not inherit it in a greater degree. But we speakabout it in quite a cool way. It does not touch us with enthusiasm. If a calculating-machine had a hand to wring, it would find few towring it warmly. The things that really move liking in human beingsare the gnarled nodosities of character, vagrant humours, freaks ofgenerosity, some little unextinguishable spark of the aboriginalsavage, some little sweet savour of the old Adam. It is quitewonderful how far simple generosity and kindliness of heart go insecuring affection; and, when these exist, what a host of apologistsspring up for faults and vices even. A country squire goes recklesslyto the dogs; yet if he has a kind word for his tenant when he meetshim, a frank greeting for the rustic beauty when she drops a courtesyto him on the highway, he lives for a whole generation in an odour ofsanctity. If he had been a disdainful, hook-nosed prime minister whohad carried his country triumphantly through some frightful crisis ofwar, these people would, perhaps, never have been aware of the fact;and most certainly never would have tendered him a word of thanks, evenif they had. When that important question, "Which is the greatest foeto the public weal--the miser or the spendthrift?" is discussed at theartisans' debating club, the spendthrift has all the eloquence on hisside--the miser all the votes. The miser's advocate is nowhere, and hepleads the cause of his client with only half his heart. In thetheatre, Charles Surface is applauded, and Joseph Surface is hissed. The novel-reader's affection goes out to Tom Jones, his hatred toBlifil. Joseph Surface and Blifil are scoundrels, it is true; butdeduct the scoundrelism, let Joseph be but a stale proverb-monger andBlifil a conceited prig, and the issue remains the same. Good humourand generosity carry the day with the popular heart all the world over. Tom Jones and Charles Surface are not vagabonds to my taste. They wereshabby fellows both, and were treated a great deal too well. But thereare other vagabonds whom I love, and whom I do well to love. With whataffection do I follow little Ishmael and his broken-hearted mother outinto the great and terrible wilderness, and see them faint beneath theardours of the sunlight! And we feel it to be strict poetic justiceand compensation that the lad so driven forth from human tents shouldbecome the father of wild Arabian men, to whom the air of cities ispoison, who work without any tool, and on whose limbs no conqueror hasever yet been able to rivet shackle or chain. Then there are Abraham'sgrandchildren, Jacob and Esau--the former, I confess, no favourite ofmine. His, up at least to his closing years, when parental affectionand strong sorrow softened him, was a character not amiable. He lackedgenerosity, and had too keen an eye on his own advancement. He did notinherit the noble strain of his ancestors. He was a prosperous man;yet in spite of his increase in flocks and herds, --in spite of hisvision of the ladder, with the angels ascending and descending uponit, --in spite of the success of his beloved son, --in spite of theweeping and lamentation of the Egyptians at his death, --in spite of hissplendid funeral, winding from the city by the pyramid and thesphinx, --in spite of all these things, I would rather have been thehunter Esau, with birthright filched away, bankrupt in the promise, rich only in fleet foot and keen spear; for he carried into the wildswith him an essentially noble nature--no brother with his mess ofpottage could mulct him of that. And he had a fine revenge; for whenJacob, on his journey, heard that his brother was near with fourhundred men, and made division of his flocks and herds, hisman-servants and maid-servants, impetuous as a swollen hill-torrent, the fierce son of the desert, baked red with Syrian light, leaped downupon him, and fell on his neck and wept. And Esau said, "What meanestthou by all this drove which I met?" and Jacob said, "These are to findgrace in the sight of my lord;" then Esau said, "I have enough, mybrother, keep that thou hast unto thyself. " O mighty prince, didstthou remember thy mother's guile, the skins upon thy hands and neck, and the lie put upon the patriarch, as, blind with years, he sat up inhis bed snuffing the savory meat? An ugly memory, I should fancy!

Commend me to Shakspeare's vagabonds, the most delightful in the world!His sweet-blooded and liberal nature blossomed into all finegenerosities as naturally as an apple-bough into pink blossoms andodours. Listen to Gonsalvo talking to the shipwrecked Milan noblescamped for the night in Prospero's isle, full of sweet voices, withAriel shooting through the enchanted air like a falling star;--

 "Had I the plantation of this isle, my lord, I' the commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service none; contract, succession, Bourne, bound of land, tilth, title, vineyard none; No use of metal coin, or wine, or oil; No occupation--all men idle--all! And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty; All things in common nature should produce, Without sweat or endurance; treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine Would I not have; but nature would bring forth Of its own kind all foison, all abundance, To feed my innocent people. I would with such perfection govern, sir, To excel the golden age. "

What think you of a world after that pattern? "As You Like it" is avagabond play, and, verily, if there waved in any wind that blows aforest peopled like Arden's, with an exiled king drawing the sweetest, humanest lessons from misfortune; a melancholy Jacques, stretched bythe river bank, moralising on the bleeding deer; a fair Rosalind, chanting her saucy cuckoo-song; fools like Touchstone--not like thoseof our acquaintance, my friends; and the whole place, from centre tocircumference, filled with mighty oak bolls, all carven with lovers'names, --if such a forest waved in wind, I say, I would, be my worldlyprospects what they might, pack up at once, and cast in my lot withthat vagabond company. For there I should find more gallantcourtesies, finer sentiments, completer innocence and happiness, morewit and wisdom, than I am like to do here even, though I search forthem from shepherd's cot to king's palace. Just to think how thosepeople lived! Carelessly as the blossoming trees, happily as thesinging birds, time measured only by the patter of the acorn on thefruitful soil! A world without debtor or creditor, passing rich, yetwith never a doit in its purse, with no sordid care, no regard forappearances; nothing to occupy the young but love-making, nothing tooccupy the old but perusing the "sermons in stones" and the musicalwisdom which dwells in "running brooks"! But Arden forest draws itssustenance from a poet's brain: the light that sleeps on its leafypillows is "the light that never was on sea or shore. " We but pleaseand tantalise ourselves with beautiful dreams. 

The children of the brain become to us actual existences, more actual, indeed, than the people who impinge upon us in the street, or who livenext door. We are more intimate with Shakspeare's men and women thanwe are with our contemporaries, and they are, on the whole, bettercompany. They are more beautiful in form and feature, and they expressthemselves in a way that the most gifted strive after in vain. What ifShakspeare's people could walk out of the play-books and settle downupon some spot of earth and conduct life there? There would be foundhumanity's whitest wheat, the world's unalloyed gold. The very windscould not visit the place roughly. No king's court could present yousuch an array. Where else could we find a philosopher like Hamlet? afriend like Antonio? a witty fellow like Mercutio? where else Imogen'spiquant's face? Portia's gravity and womanly sweetness? Rosalind's trueheart and silvery laughter? Cordelia's beauty of holiness? These wouldform the centre of the court, but the purlieus, how many-coloured!Malvolio would walk mincingly in the sunshine there; Autolycus wouldfilch purses. Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch would be eternalboon companions. And as Falstaff sets out homeward from the tavern, the portly knight leading the revellers like a three-decker a line offrigates, they are encountered by Dogberry, who summons them to standand answer to the watch as they are honest men. If Mr. Dickens'scharacters were gathered together, they would constitute a townpopulous enough to send a representative to Parliament. Let us enter. The style of architecture is unparalleled. There is an individualityabout the buildings. In some obscure way they remind one of humanfaces. There are houses sly-looking, houses wicked-looking, housespompous-looking. Heaven bless us! what a rakish pump! what aself-important town-hall! what a hard-hearted prison! The dead wallsare covered with advertisements of Mr. Sleary's circus. Newman Noggscomes shambling along. Mr. And the Misses Pecksniff come sailing downthe sunny side of the street. Miss Mercy's parasol is gay; papa'sneck-cloth is white, and terribly starched. Dick Swiveller leansagainst a wall, his hands in his pockets, a primrose held between histeeth, contemplating the opera of Punch and Judy, which is beingconducted under the management of Messrs. Codlings and Short. You turna corner and you meet the coffin of little Paul Dombey borne along. Who would have thought of encountering a funeral in this place? In theafternoon you hear the rich tones of the organ from Miss La Creevy'sfirst floor, for Tom Pinch has gone to live there now, and as you knowall the people as you know your own brothers and sisters, andconsequently require no letters of introduction, you go up and talkwith the dear old fellow about all his friends and your friends, andtowards evening he takes your arm, and you walk out to see poor Nelly'sgrave--a place which he visits often, and which he dresses with flowerswith his own hands. I know this is the idlest dreaming, but all of ushave a sympathy with the creatures of the drama and the novel. Aroundthe hardest cark and toil lies the imaginative world of the poets andromancists, and thither we sometimes escape to snatch a mouthful ofserener air. There our best lost feelings have taken a human shape. We suppose that boyhood with its impulses and enthusiasms has subsidedwith the gray cynical man whom we have known these many years. Not abit of it. It has escaped into the world of the poet, and walks alove-flushed Romeo in immortal youth. We suppose that the Mary offifty years since, the rose-bud of a girl that crazed our hearts, blossomed into the spouse of Jenkins, the stockbroker, and is now agrandmother. Not at all. She is Juliet leaning from the balcony, orPortia talking on the moonlight lawns at Belmont. There walk theshadows of our former selves. All that Time steals he takes thither;and to live in that world is to live in our lost youth, our lostgenerosities, illusions, and romances. 

In middle-class life, and in the professions, when a standard or idealis tacitly set up, to which every member is expected to conform on painof having himself talked about, and wise heads shaken over him, thequick feelings of the vagabond are not frequently found. Yet, thanksto Nature, who sends her leafage and flowerage up through all kinds of_débris_, and who takes a blossomy possession of ruined walls anddesert places, it is never altogether dead! And of vagabonds, not theleast delightful is he who retains poetry and boyish spirits beneaththe crust of a profession. Mr. Carlyle commends "central fire, " andvery properly commends it most when "well covered in. " In the case ofa professional man, this "central fire" does not manifest itself inwasteful explosiveness, but in secret genial heat, visible in fruits ofcharity and pleasant humour. The physician who is a humourist commendshimself doubly to a sick-bed. His patients are as much indebted fortheir cure to his smile, his voice, and a certain irresistiblehealthfulness that surrounds him, as they are to his skill and hisprescriptions. The lawyer who is a humourist is a man of ten thousand. How easily the worldly-wise face, puckered over a stiff brief, relaxesinto the lines of laughter. He sees many an evil side of human nature, he is familiar with slanders and injustice, all kinds of humanbitterness and falsity; but neither his hand nor his heart becomes"imbued with that it works in, " and the little admixture of acid, inevitable from his circumstances and mode of life, but heightens theflavour of his humour. But of all humourists of the professionalclass, I prefer the clergyman, especially if he is well stricken inyears, and has been anchored all his life in a country charge. He isnone of your loud wits. There is a lady-like delicacy in his mind, aconstant sense of his holy office, which warn him off dangeroussubjects. This reserve, however, does but improve the quality of hismirth. What his humour loses in boldness, it gains in depth andslyness. And as the good man has seldom the opportunity of making ajoke, or of procuring an auditor who can understand one, the dewyglitter of his eyes, as you sit opposite him, and his heartfeltenjoyment of the matter in hand, are worth going a considerable way towitness. It is not, however, in the professions that the vagabond iscommonly found. Over these that awful and ubiquitous female, Mrs. Grundy--at once Fate, Nemesis, and Fury--presides. The glare of hereye is professional danger, the pointing of her finger is professionaldeath. When she utters a man's name, he is lost. The true vagabond isto be met with in other walks of life, --among actors, poets, painters. These may grow in any way their nature directs. They are not requiredto conform to any traditional pattern. With regard to therespectabilities and the "minor morals, " the world permits them to belibertines. Besides, it is a temperament peculiarly sensitive, orgenerous, or enjoying, which at the beginning impels these to theirspecial pursuits; and that temperament, like everything else in theworld, strengthens with use, and grows with what it feeds on. We lookupon an actor, sitting amongst ordinary men and women, with a certaincuriosity, --we regard him as a creature from another planet, almost. His life and his world are quite different from ours. The orchestra, the foot-lights, and the green baize curtain, divide us. He is amonarch half his time--his entrance and his exit proclaimed by flourishof trumpet. He speaks in blank verse, is wont to take his seat atgilded banquets, to drink nothing out of a pasteboard goblet. Theactor's world has a history amusing to read, and lines of noble andsplendid traditions, stretching back to charming Nelly's time, andearlier. The actor has strange experiences. He sees the other side ofthe moon. We roar at Grimaldi's funny face: he sees the lines of painin it. We hear Romeo wish to be "a glove upon that hand that he mighttouch that cheek:" three minutes afterwards he beholds Romeo refreshhimself with a pot of porter. We see the Moor, who "loved not wisely, but too well, " smother Desdemona with the nuptial bolster: he sees themsit down to a hot supper. We always think of the actor as on thestage: he always thinks of us as in the boxes. In justice to the poetsof the present day, it may be noticed that they have improved on theirbrethren in Johnson's time, who were, according to Lord Macaulay, hunted by bailiffs and familiar with sponging-houses, and who, whenhospitably entertained, were wont to disturb the household of theentertainer by roaring for hot punch at four o'clock in the morning. Since that period the poets have improved in the decencies of life:they wear broadcloth, and settle their tailors' accounts even as othermen. At this present moment Her Majesty's poets are perhaps the mostrespectable of Her Majesty's subjects. They are all teetotallers; ifthey sin, it is in rhyme, and then only to point a moral. In past daysthe poet flew from flower to flower, gathering his honey; but he bore asting, too, as the rude hand that touched him could testily. He freelygathers his honey as of old, but the satiric sting has been taken away. He lives at peace with all men--his brethren excepted. About the truepoet still there is something of the ancient spirit, --the old "flashand outbreak of the fiery mind, "--the old enthusiasm and dash ofhumourous eccentricity. But he is fast disappearing from the catalogueof vagabonds--fast getting commonplace, I fear. Many people suspecthim of dulness. Besides, such a crowd of well-meaning, amiable, mostrespectable men have broken down of late years the pales of Parnassus, and become squatters on the sacred mount, that the claim of poets to bea peculiar people is getting disallowed. Never in this world's historywere they so numerous; and although some people deny that they arepoets, few are cantankerous enough or intrepid enough to assert thatthey are vagabonds. The painter is the most agreeable of vagabonds. His art is a pleasant one: it demands some little manual exertion, andit takes him at times into the open air. It is pleasant, too, in this, that lines and colours are so much more palpable than words, and theappeal of his work to his practised eye has some satisfaction in it. He knows what he is about. He does not altogether lose his criticalsense, as the poet does, when familiarity stales his subject, and takesthe splendour out of his images. Moreover, his work is more profitablethan the poet's. I suppose there are just as few great painters at thepresent day as there are great poets; yet the yearly receipts of theartists of England far exceed the receipts of the singers. A picturecan usually be painted in less time than a poem can be written. Asecond-rate picture has a certain market value, --its frame is at leastsomething. A second-rate poem is utterly worthless, and no one willbuy it on account of its binding. A picture is your own exclusiveproperty: it is a costly article of furniture. You hang it on yourwalls, to be admired by all the world. Pictures represent wealth: thepossession of them is a luxury. The portrait-painter is of all men themost beloved. You sit to him willingly, and put on your best looks. You are inclined to be pleased with his work, on account of the strongprepossession you entertain for his subject. To sit for one's portraitis like being present at one's own creation. It is an admirable excusefor egotism. You would not discourse on the falcon-like curve whichdistinguishes your nose, or the sweet serenity of your reposing lips, or the mildness of the eye that spreads a light over your countenance, in the presence of a fellow-creature for the whole world; yet you donot hesitate to express the most favourable opinion of the featuresstarting out on you from the wet canvas. The interest the paintertakes in his task flatters you. And when the sittings are over, andyou behold yourself hanging on your own wall, looking as it you coulddirect kingdoms or lead armies, you feel grateful to the artist. Heministers to your self-love, and you pay him his hire without wincing. Your heart warms towards him as it would towards a poet who addressesyou in an ode of panegyric, the kindling terms of which--a littleastonishing to your friends--you believe in your heart of hearts to bethe simple truth, and, in the matter of expression, not over-colouredin the very least. The portrait-painter has a shrewd eye forcharacter, and is usually the best anecdote-monger in the world. Hiscraft brings him into contact with many faces, and he learns to comparethem curiously, and to extract their meanings. He can interpretwrinkles; he can look through the eyes into the man; he can read awhole foregone history in the lines about the mouth. Besides, from thegood understanding which usually exists between the artist and hissitter, the latter is inclined somewhat to unbosom himself; littlethings leak out in conversation, not much in themselves, but pregnantenough to the painter's sense, who pieces them together, andconstitutes a tolerably definite image. The man who paints your faceknows you better than your intimate friends do, and has a clearerknowledge of your amiable weaknesses, and of the secret motives whichinfluence your conduct, than you oftentimes have yourself. A goodportrait is a kind of biography, and neither painter nor biographer cancarry out his task satisfactorily unless he be admitted behind thescenes. I think that the landscape painter, who has acquiredsufficient mastery in his art to satisfy his own critical sense, andwho is appreciated enough to find purchasers, and thereby to keep thewolf from the door, must be of all mankind the happiest. Other menlive in cities, bound down to some settled task and order of life; buthe is a nomad, and wherever he goes "Beauty pitches her tents beforehim. " He is smitten by a passionate love for Nature, and is privilegedto follow her into her solitary haunts and recesses. Nature is hismistress, and he is continually making declarations of his love. Whenone thinks of ordinary occupations, how one envies him, flecking hisoak-tree boll with sunlight, tinging with rose the cloud of the morningin which the lark is hid, making the sea's swift fringe of foaming laceoutspread itself on the level sands, in which the pebbles gleam foreverwet. The landscape painter's memory is inhabited by the fairestvisions, --dawn burning on the splintered peaks that the eagles know, while the valleys beneath are yet filled with uncertain light; thebright blue morn stretching over miles of moor and mountain; the slowup-gathering of the bellied thunder-cloud; summer lakes, and cattleknee-deep in them; rustic bridges forever crossed by old women inscarlet cloaks; old-fashioned waggons resting on the scrubby common, the waggoner lazy and wayworn, the dog couched on the ground, itstongue hanging out in the heat; boats drawn up on the shore at sunset;the fisher's children looking seawards, the red light full on theirdresses and faces; farther back, a clump of cottages, with bait-basketsabout the door, and the smoke of the evening meal coiling up into thecoloured air. These things are forever with him. Beauty, which is aluxury to other men, is his daily food. Happy vagabond, who lives thewhole summer through in the light of his mistress's face, and who doesnothing the whole winter except recall the splendour of her smiles!

The vagabond, as I have explained and sketched him, is not a man totremble at, or avoid as if he wore contagion in his touch. He isupright, generous, innocent, is conscientious in the performance of hisduties; and if a little eccentric and fond of the open air, he is fullof good nature and mirthful charity. He may not make money so rapidlyas you do, but I cannot help thinking that he enjoys life a great dealmore. The quick feeling of life, the exuberance or animal spiritswhich break out in the traveller, the sportsman, the poet, the painter, should be more generally diffused. We should be all the better and allthe happier for it. Life ought to be freer, heartier, more enjoyablethan it is at present. If the professional fetter must be worn, let itbe worn as lightly as possible. It should never be permitted to cankerthe limbs. We are a free people, --we have an unshackled press, --wehave an open platform, and can say our say upon it, no king or despotmaking us afraid. We send representatives to Parliament; the franchiseis always going to be extended. All this is very fine, and we do wellto glory in our privileges as Britons. But, although we enjoy greaterpolitical freedom than any other people, we are the victims of a pettysocial tyranny. We are our own despots, --we tremble at a neighbour'swhisper. A man may say what he likes on a public platform, --he maypublish whatever opinion he chooses, --but he dare not wear a peculiarfashion of hat on the street. Eccentricity is an outlaw. Publicopinion blows like the east wind, blighting bud and blossom on thehuman bough. As a consequence of all this, society is losingpicturesqueness and variety, --we are all growing up after one pattern. In other matters than architecture past time may be represented by thewonderful ridge of the Old Town of Edinburgh, where everything isindividual and characteristic: the present time by the streets andsquares of the New Town, where everything is gray, cold, andrespectable; where every house is the other's _alter ego_. It is truethat life is healthier in the formal square than in the piled-uppicturesqueness of the Canongate, --quite true that sanitary conditionsare better observed, --that pure water flows through every tenement likeblood through a human body, --that daylight has free access, and thatthe apartments are larger and higher in the roof. But every gain ispurchased at the expense of some loss; and it is best to combine, ifpossible, the excellences of the old and the new. By all means retainthe modern breadth of light, and range of space; by all means havewater plentiful, and bed-chambers ventilated, --but at the same timehave some little freak of fancy without, --some ornament about the door, some device about the window, --something to break the cold, gray, stonyuniformity; or, to leave metaphor, which is always dangerousground, --for I really don't wish to advocate Ruskinism and theGothic, --it would be better to have, along with our modernenlightenment, our higher tastes and purer habits, a greaterindividuality of thought and manner; better, while retaining all thatwe have gained, that harmless eccentricity should be respected, --thatevery man should be allowed to grow in his own way, so long as he doesnot infringe on the rights of his neighbour, or insolently thrusthimself between him and the sun. A little more air and light should belet in upon life. I should think the world has stood long enough underthe drill of Adjutant Fashion. It is hard work; the posture iswearisome, and Fashion is an awful martinet, and has a quick eye, andcomes down mercilessly on the unfortunate wight who cannot square histoes to the approved pattern, or who appears upon parade with a darn inhis coat, or with a shoulder-belt insufficiently pipe-clayed. It iskilling work. Suppose we try "standing at ease" for a little!