Virginibus Puerisque..........................................................................................................................................1

WITH the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare's characters are what we call marrying men. Mercutio,

as he was own cousin to Benedick and Biron, would have come to the same end in the long run. Even Iago

had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous. People like Jacques and the Fool in LEAR, although we

can hardly imagine they would ever marry, kept single out of a cynical humour or for a broken heart, and not,

as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and preference for the single state. For that matter, if you turn

to George Sand's French version of AS YOU LIKE IT (and I think I can promise you will like it but little),

At least there seems to have been much less hesitation over marriage in Shakespeare's days; and what

hesitation there was was of a laughing sort, and not much more serious, one way or the other, than that of

Panurge. In modern comedies the heroes are mostly of Benedick's way of thinking, but twice as much in

earnest, and not one quarter so confident. And I take this diffidence as a proof of how sincere their terror is.

They know they are only human after all; they know what gins and pitfalls lie about their feet; and how the

shadow of matrimony waits, resolute and awful, at the crossroads. They would wish to keep their liberty;

but if that may not be, why, God's will be done! "What, are you afraid of marriage?" asks Cecile, in MAITRE

GUERIN. "Oh, mon Dieu, non!" replies Arthur; "I should take chloroform." They look forward to marriage

much in the same way as they prepare themselves for death: each seems inevitable; each is a great Perhaps,

and a leap into the dark, for which, when a man is in the blue devils, he has specially to harden his heart. That

splendid scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles, took the news of marriages much as an old man hears the deaths of

his contemporaries. "C'est desesperant," he cried, throwing himself down in the armchair at Madame

Schontz's; "c'est desesperant, nous nous marions tous!" Every marriage was like another gray hair on his

head; and the jolly church bells seemed to taunt him with his fifty years and fair round belly.

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts either to marry

or not to marry. Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age. The friendships of men are vastly

agreeable, but they are insecure. You know all the time that one friend will marry and put you to the door; a

second accept a situation in China, and become no more to you than a name, a reminiscence, and an

occasional crossed letter, very laborious to read; a third will take up with some religious crotchet and treat

you to sour looks thenceforward. So, in one way or another, life forces men apart and breaks up the goodly

fellowships for ever. The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they

endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a

dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness

reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's

bright eyes he may be left, in a month, destitute of all. Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy. Instead of

on two or three, you stake your happiness on one life only. But still, as the bargain is more explicit and

complete on your part, it is more so on the other; and you have not to fear so many contingencies; it is not

every wind that can blow you from your anchorage; and so long as Death withholds his sickle, you will

always have a friend at home. People who share a cell in the Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited

isle, if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some possible ground of compromise. They will

learn each other's ways and humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may lean

their whole weight. The discretion of the first years becomes the settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom

But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It certainly narrows and damps the spirits of generous men.

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. It is not

only when Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, but when Ladislaw marries above him with

Dorothea, that this may be exemplified. The air of the fireside withers out all the fine wildings of the

husband's heart. He is so comfortable and happy that he begins to prefer comfort and happiness to everything

else on earth, his wife included. Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling; today "his first duty is to

his family," and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down vintages and husbanding the health of an

invaluable parent. Twenty years ago this man was equally capable of crime or heroism; now he is fit for

neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak without constraint; you will not wake him. It is not for nothing

that Don Quixote was a bachelor and Marcus Aurelius married ill. For women, there is less of this danger.

Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so much more of life, and puts her in the way of so

much more freedom and usefulness, that, whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some benefit. It

is true, however, that some of the merriest and most genuine of women are old maids; and that those old

maids, and wives who are unhappily married, have often most of the true motherly touch. And this would

seem to show, even for women, some narrowing influence in comfortable married life. But the rule is none

the less certain: if you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife.

I am often filled with wonder that so many marriages are passably successful, and so few come to open

failure, the more so as I fail to understand the principle on which people regulate their choice. I see women

marrying indiscriminately with staring burgesses and ferretfaced, whiteeyed boys, and men dwell in

contentment with noisy scullions, or taking into their lives acidulous vestals. It is a common answer to say the

good people marry because they fall in love; and of course you may use and misuse a word as much as you

please, if you have the world along with you. But love is at least a somewhat hyperbolical expression for such

lukewarm preference. It is not here, anyway, that Love employs his golden shafts; he cannot be said, with

any fitness of language, to reign here and revel. Indeed, if this be love at all, it is plain the poets have been

fooling with mankind since the foundation of the world. And you have only to look these happy couples in

the face, to see they have never been in love, or in hate, or in any other high passion, all their days. When you

see a dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes set your affections upon one particular peach or nectarine, watch

it with some anxiety as it comes round the table, and feel quite a sensible disappointment when it is taken by

some one else. I have used the phrase "high passion." Well, I should say this was about as high a passion as

generally leads to marriage. One husband hears after marriage that some poor fellow is dying of his wife's

love. "What a pity!" he exclaims; "you know I could so easily have got another!" And yet that is a very happy

union. Or again: A young man was telling me the sweet story of his loves. "I like it well enough as long as

her sisters are there," said this amorous swain; "but I don't know what to do when we're alone." Once more: A

married lady was debating the subject with another lady. "You know, dear," said the first, "after ten years of

marriage, if he is nothing else, your husband is always an old friend." "I have many old friends," returned the

other, "but I prefer them to be nothing more." "Oh, perhaps I might PREFER that also!" There is a common

note in these three illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the god goes among us with a

limping gait and blear eyes. You wonder whether it was so always; whether desire was always equally dull

and spiritless, and possession equally cold. I cannot help fancying most people make, ere they marry, some

such table of recommendations as Hannah Godwin wrote to her brother William anent her friend, Miss Gay.

It is so charmingly comical, and so pat to the occasion, that I must quote a few phrases. "The young lady is in

every sense formed to make one of your disposition really happy. She has a pleasing voice, with which she

accompanies her musical instrument with judgment. She has an easy politeness in her manners, neither free

nor reserved. She is a good housekeeper and a good economist, and yet of a generous disposition. As to her

internal accomplishments, I have reason to speak still more highly of them: good sense without vanity, a

penetrating judgment without a disposition to satire, with about as much religion as my William likes, struck

me with a wish that she was my William's wife." That is about the tune: pleasing voice, moderate good looks,

unimpeachable internal accomplishments after the style of the copybook, with about as much religion as my

To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love, most people would die unwed; and among the

others, there would be not a few tumultuous households. The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely

suitable for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love is rather too violent a passion to make, in all

cases, a good domestic sentiment. Like other violent excitements, it throws up not only what is best, but what

is worst and smallest, in men's characters. Just as some people are malicious in drink, or brawling and

virulent under the influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous, and exacting when they are in

love, who are honest, downright, goodhearted fellows enough in the everyday affairs and humours of the

How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that people choose in comparatively cold blood, how is it

they choose so well? One is almost tempted to hint that it does not much matter whom you marry; that, in

fact, marriage is a subjective affection, and if you have made up your mind to it, and once talked yourself

fairly over, you could "pull it through" with anybody. But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we

regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police, there must be degrees in the freedom

and sympathy realised, and some principle to guide simple folk in their selection. Now what should this

principle be? Are there no more definite rules than are to be found in the Prayerbook? Law and religion

forbid the bans on the ground of propinquity or consanguinity; society steps in to separate classes; and in all

this most critical matter, has common sense, has wisdom, never a word to say? In the absence of more

magisterial teaching, let us talk it over between friends: even a few guesses may be of interest to youths and

In all that concerns eating and drinking, company, climate, and ways of life, community of taste is to be

sought for. It would be trying, for instance, to keep bed and board with an early riser or a vegetarian. In

matters of art and intellect, I believe it is of no consequence. Certainly it is of none in the companionships of

men, who will dine more readily with one who has a good heart, a good cellar, and a humorous tongue, than

with another who shares all their favourite hobbies and is melancholy withal. If your wife likes Tupper, that

is no reason why you should hang your head. She thinks with the majority, and has the courage of her

opinions. I have always suspected public taste to be a mongrel product, out of affectation by dogmatism; and

felt sure, if you could only find an honest man of no special literary bent, he would tell you he thought much

of Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of him written in very obscure English and wearisome to

read. And not long ago I was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I found the honest man. He was a

fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a clever painter, and with an eye for certain poetical effects of sea and

ships. I am not much of a judge of that kind of thing, but a sketch of his comes before me sometimes at night.

How strong, supple, and living the ship seems upon the billows! With what a dip and rake she shears the

flying sea! I cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the wing with so much force and spirit,

was what you call commonplace in the last recesses of the heart. And yet he thought, and was not ashamed to

have it known of him, that Ouida was better in every way than William Shakespeare. If there were more

people of his honesty, this would be about the staple of lay criticism. It is not taste that is plentiful, but

courage that is rare. And what have we in place? How many, who think no otherwise than the young painter,

have we not heard disbursing secondhand hyperboles? Have you never turned sick at heart, O best of critics!

when some of your own sweet adjectives were returned on you before a gaping audience? Enthusiasm about

art is become a function of the average female being, which she performs with precision and a sort of

haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well regulated machine. Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is

carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives with the best, and outHerods Herod for some shameful

moments. When you remember that, you will be tempted to put things strongly, and say you will marry no

one who is not like George the Second, and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry and painting.

The word "facts" is, in some ways, crucial. I have spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren,

mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird's eye neckcloths; and each

understood the word "facts" in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get no nearer the principle

of their division. What was essential to them, seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come to no

compromise as to what was, or what was not, important in the life of man. Turn as we pleased, we all stood

back to back in a big ring, and saw another quarter of the heavens, with different mountaintops along the

skyline and different constellations overhead. We had each of us some whimsy in the brain, which we

believed more than anything else, and which discoloured all experience to its own shade. How would you

have people agree, when one is deaf and the other blind? Now this is where there should be community

between man and wife. They should be agreed on their catchword in "FACTS OF RELIGION," or "FACTS

OF SCIENCE," or "SOCIETY, MY DEAR"; for without such an agreement all intercourse is a painful strain

upon the mind. "About as much religion as my William likes," in short, that is what is necessary to make a

happy couple of any William and his spouse. For there are differences which no habit nor affection can

reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry with the Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel

Budget, the wife of the successful merchant! The best of men and the best of women may sometimes live

together all their lives, and, for want of some consent on fundamental questions, hold each other lost spirits to

A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people who would spend years together and not bore

themselves to death. But the talent, like the agreement, must be for and about life. To dwell happily together,

they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and born with a faculty for willing compromise. The woman

must be talented as a woman, and it will not much matter although she is talented in nothing else. She must

know her METIER DE FEMME, and have a fine touch for the affections. And it is more important that a

person should be a good gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the thousand and one

nothings of the day and hour, than that she should speak with the tongues of men and angels; for a while

together by the fire, happens more frequently in marriage than the presence of a distinguished foreigner to

dinner. That people should laugh over the same sort of jests, and have many a story of "grouse in the

gunroom," many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale, is a better

preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things higher and better sounding in the world's ears. You

could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else. You can forgive

people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you

had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a

I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, could never so much as understand the meaning of the

word POLITICS, and has given up trying to distinguish Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own politics,

ask her about other men or women and the chicanery of everyday existence the rubs, the tricks, the vanities

on which life turns and you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to make

plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a share of the higher and more poetical understanding,

frank interest in things for their own sake, and enduring astonishment at the most common. She is not to be

deceived by custom, or made to think a mystery solved when it is repeated. I have heard her say she could

wonder herself crazy over the human eyebrow. Now in a world where most of us walk very contentedly in

the little lit circle of their own reason, and have to be reminded of what lies without by specious and clamant

exceptions earthquakes, eruptions of Vesuvius, banjos floating in midair at a SEANCE, and the like a

mind so fresh and unsophisticated is no despicable gift. I will own I think it a better sort of mind than goes

necessarily with the clearest views on public business. It will wash. It will find something to say at an odd

moment. It has in it the spring of pleasant and quaint fancies. Whereas I can imagine myself yawning all

night long until my jaws ached and the tears came into my eyes, although my companion on the other side of

The question of professions, in as far as they regard marriage, was only interesting to women until of late

days, but it touches all of us now. Certainly, if I could help it, I would never marry a wife who wrote. The

practice of letters is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an hour or two's work, all the more human

portion of the author is extinct; he will bully, backbite, and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not much better.

But painting, on the contrary, is often highly sedative; because so much of the labour, after your picture is

once begun, is almost entirely manual, and of that skilled sort of manual labour which offers a continual

series of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity, into good humour. Alas! in letters there is

nothing of this sort. You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always something else to think

of, and cannot pause to notice your loops and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first law stationer

could put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of

livelihood, when he copied out the HELOISE for DILETTANTE ladies; and therein showed that strange

eccentric prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insanities. It would be well for all

of the GENUS IRRITABILE thus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain work. To find the

right word is so doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there is no satisfaction in a year of it; but

we all know when we have formed a letter perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost equally

certain he has found a right tone or a right colour, or made a dexterous stroke with his brush. And, again,

painters may work out of doors; and the fresh air, the deliberate seasons, and the "tranquillising influence" of

the green earth, counterbalance the fever of thought, and keep them cool, placable, and prosaic.

A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage of love, for absences are a good influence in love and

keep it bright and delicate; but he is just the worst man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit is too

frequently torn open and the solder has never time to set. Men who fish, botanise, work with the

turninglathe, or gather seaweeds, will make admirable husbands and a little amateur painting in

watercolour shows the innocent and quiet mind. Those who have a few intimates are to be avoided; while

those who swim loose, who have their hat in their hand all along the street, who can number an infinity of

acquaintances and are not chargeable with any one friend, promise an easy disposition and no rival to the

wife's influence. I will not say they are the best of men, but they are the stuff out of which adroit and capable

women manufacture the best of husbands. It is to be noticed that those who have loved once or twice already

are so much the better educated to a woman's hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most

uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilising. Lastly (and this is, perhaps,

the golden rule), no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that

this "ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, spreads over all the world. Michelet rails against it because it

renders you happy apart from thought or work; to provident women this will seem no evil influence in

married life. Whatever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate

ambition, whatever makes for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic happiness.

These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will probably amuse him more when he differs than when he

agrees with them; at least they will do no harm, for nobody will follow my advice. But the last word is of

more concern. Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts lightheaded, variable men by its very

awfulness. They have been so tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for islands in

the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will risk all for solid ground below their feet. Desperate

pilots, they run their seasick, weary bark upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if marriage were the royal road

through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring,

or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those

who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a

wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them,

and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this that it is a field of

HOPE, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence. From first to last, and in the face of smarting

disillusions, we continue to expect good fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so confidently,

that we judge it needless to deserve them. I think it improbable that I shall ever write like Shakespeare,

conduct an army like Hannibal, or distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths of virtue; and yet I

have my bydays, hope prompting, when I am very ready to believe that I shall combine all these various

excellences in my own person, and go marching down to posterity with divine honours. There is nothing so

monstrous but we can believe it of ourselves. About ourselves, about our aspirations and delinquencies, we

have dwelt by choice in a delicious vagueness from our boyhood up. No one will have forgotten Tom

Sawyer's aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die TEMPORARILY!" Or, perhaps, better still, the inward

resolution of the two pirates, that "so long as they remained in that business, their piracies should not again be

sullied with the crime of stealing." Here we recognise the thoughts of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased

well, when? not, I think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twentyfive; nor yet at thirty; and possibly,

to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man, after centuries of

civilisation, still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not altogether quit of

youth, when he is already old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England. We advance in years

somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the phrase

goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first

beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our

faculties; and grandfather William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.

The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous irrationality are nowhere better displayed than in questions

of conduct. There is a character in the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, one Mr. LINGERAFTERLUST with

whom I fancy we are all on speaking terms; one famous among the famous for ingenuity of hope up to and

beyond the moment of defeat; one who, after eighty years of contrary experience, will believe it possible to

continue in the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt of theft. Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a

remarkable turningpoint in our career. Any overt act, above all, is felt to be alchemic in its power to change.

A drunkard takes the pledge; it will be strange if that does not help him. For how many years did Mr. Pepys

continue to make and break his little vows? And yet I have not heard that he was discouraged in the end. By

such steps we think to fix a momentary resolution; as a timid fellow hies him to the dentist's while the tooth is

But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you can neither prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is

no hocuspocus in morality; and even the "sanctimonious ceremony" of marriage leaves the man unchanged.

This is a hard saying, and has an air of paradox. For there is something in marriage so natural and inviting,

that the step has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever many aching preoccupations; it is

to afford us unfailing and familiar company through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest and

passive kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is approached not only through the delights of

courtship, but by a public performance and repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard

with him if he cannot be good and fortunate and happy within such august circumvallations.

And yet there is probably no other act in a man's life so hotheaded and foolhardy as this one of marriage.

For years, let us suppose, you have been making the most indifferent business of your career. Your

experience has not, we may dare to say, been more encouraging than Paul's or Horace's; like them, you have

seen and desired the good that you were not able to accomplish; like them, you have done the evil that you

loathed. You have waked at night in a hot or a cold sweat, according to your habit of body, remembering with

dismal surprise, your own unpardonable acts and sayings. You have been sometimes tempted to withdraw

entirely from this game of life; as a man who makes nothing but misses withdraws from that less dangerous

one of billiards. You have fallen back upon the thought that you yourself most sharply smarted for your

misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that you were nobody's enemy but your own. And then you

have been made aware of what was beautiful and amiable, wise and kind, in the other part of your behaviour;

and it seemed as if nothing could reconcile the contradiction, as indeed nothing can. If you are a man, you

have shut your mouth hard and said nothing; and if you are only a man in the making, you have recognised

that yours was quite a special case, and you yourself not guilty of your own pestiferous career.

Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept these apologies; let us agree that you are nobody's enemy but

your own; let us agree that you are a sort of moral cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you with the

unmingled pity due to such a fate. But there is one thing to which, on these terms, we can never agree: we

can never agree to have you marry. What! you have had one life to manage, and have failed so strangely, and

now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin with it the management of some one else's? Because you have

been unfaithful in a very little, you propose yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You strip yourself by such a

step of all remaining consolations and excuses. You are no longer content to be your own enemy; you must

be your wife's also. You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern attitude; dealing cruel blows about you in life,

yet only half responsible, since you came there by no choice or movement of your own. Now, it appears, you

must take things on your own authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and for all that your wife

suffers, no one is responsible but you. A man must be very certain of his knowledge ere he undertake to guide

a ticketofleave man through a dangerous pass; you have eternally missed your way in life, with

consequences that you still deplore, and yet you masterfully seize your wife's hand, and, blindfold, drag her

after you to ruin. And it is your wife, you observe, whom you select. She, whose happiness you most desire,

you choose to be your victim. You would earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or bad investment. If she

were to marry some one else, how you would tremble for her fate! If she were only your sister, and you

thought half as much of her, how doubtfully would you entrust her future to a man no better than yourself!

Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more bypath meadows, where you may innocently

linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even

wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support. Suppose, after you

are married, one of those little slips were to befall you. What happened last November might surely happen

February next. They may have annoyed you at the time, because they were not what you had meant; but how

will they annoy you in the future, and how will they shake the fabric of your wife's confidence and peace! A

thousand things unpleasing went on in the CHIAROSCURO of a life that you shrank from too particularly

realising; you did not care, in those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would recognise your

failures with a nod, and so, good day. But the time for these reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced a

witness into your life, the scene of these defeats, and can no longer close the mind's eye upon uncomely

passages, but must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions. And your witness is not only the

judge, but the victim of your sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties, but she must

herself share feelingly in their endurance. And observe, once more, with what temerity you have chosen

precisely HER to be your spy, whose esteem you value highest, and whom you have already taught to think

you better than you are. You may think you had a conscience, and believed in God; but what is a conscience

to a wife? Wise men of yore erected statues of their deities, and consciously performed their part in life

before those marble eyes. A god watched them at the board, and stood by their bedside in the morning when

they woke; and all about their ancient cities, where they bought and sold, or where they piped and wrestled,

there would stand some symbol of the things that are outside of man. These were lessons, delivered in the

quiet dialect of art, which told their story faithfully, but gently. It is the same lesson, if you will but how

harrowingly taught! when the woman you respect shall weep from your unkindness or blush with shame at

your misconduct. Poor girls in Italy turn their painted Madonnas to the wall: you cannot set aside your wife.

To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even

And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem than mere single virtue; for in marriage there are two

ideals to be realised. A girl, it is true, has always lived in a glass house among reproving relatives, whose

word was law; she has been bred up to sacrifice her judgments and take the key submissively from dear papa;

and it is wonderful how swiftly she can change her tune into the husband's. Her morality has been, too often,

an affair of precept and conformity. But in the case of a bachelor who has enjoyed some measure both of

privacy and freedom, his moral judgments have been passed in some accordance with his nature. His sins

were always sins in his own sight; he could then only sin when he did some act against his clear conviction;

the light that he walked by was obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any grit and spirit put

their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this comparative certainty a huge welter of competing jurisdictions.

It no longer matters so much how life appears to one; one must consult another: one, who may be strong,

must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother I am willing to consider is (to make a bull for

once) my wife. For her, and for her only, I must waive my righteous judgments, and go crookedly about my

life. How, then, in such an atmosphere of compromise, to keep honour bright and abstain from base

capitulations? How are you to put aside love's pleadings? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn suddenly

about into the rabbi of precision; and after these years of ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who

has found you out? In this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to morality in married life.

Daily they drop a little lower from the first ideal, and for a while continue to accept these changelings with a

gross complacency. At last Love wakes and looks about him; finds his hero sunk into a stout old brute, intent

on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine divested of her angel brightness; and in the flash of that first

Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man, and the wife commonly enough a woman; and when

this is the case, although it makes the firmer marriage, a thick additional veil of misconception hangs above

the doubtful business. Women, I believe, are somewhat rarer than men; but then, if I were a woman myself, I

daresay I should hold the reverse; and at least we all enter more or less wholly into one or other of these

camps. A man who delights women by his feminine perceptions will often scatter his admirers by a chance

explosion of the under side of man; and the most masculine and direct of women will some day, to your dire

surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of personation. Alas! for the man, knowing her to

be at heart more candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through these mazes in the quest for truth.

The proper qualities of each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other. Between the Latin and the

Teuton races there are similar divergences, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy. And in the good,

plain, cutanddry explanations of this life, which pass current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this

difficulty has been turned with the aid of pious lies. Thus, when a young lady has angelic features, eats

nothing to speak of, plays all day long on the piano, and sings ravishingly in church, it requires a rough

infidelity, falsely called cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after all. Yet so it is: she may be a

talebearer, a liar, and a thief; she may have a taste for brandy, and no heart. My compliments to George

Eliot for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of satire she has transmuted to the ends of art, by the

companion figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for the education of young men. That doctrine

of the excellence of women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false. It is better to face the fact, and

know, when you marry, that you take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties; whose weak

But it is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to

magnify the natural differences between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but

principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching

one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very small field of

experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is

more largely displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They are taught to follow

different virtues, to hate different vices, to place their ideal, even for each other, in different achievements.

What should be the result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and the two flustered people in the

gig have each possessed themselves of a rein, we know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So,

when I see a raw youth and a green girl, fluted and fiddled in a dancing measure into that most serious

contract, and setting out upon life's journey with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some

make shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the boy does almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl

will shudder at as a debasing vice; what is to her the mere common sense of tactics, he will spit out of his

mouth as shameful. Through such a sea of contrarieties must this green couple steer their way; and contrive to

love each other; and to respect, forsooth; and be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the little men and

And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold back from marriage is in the same case with him

who runs away from battle. To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push

forward pluckily and make a fall. It is lawful to pray God that we be not led into temptation; but not lawful to

skulk from those that come to us. The noblest passage in one of the noblest books of this century, is where

the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in the partial fall and but imperfect triumph, of the younger hero. (1)

Without some such manly note, it were perhaps better to have no conscience at all. But there is a vast

difference between teaching flight, and showing points of peril that a man may march the more warily. And

the true conclusion of this paper is to turn our back on apprehensions, and embrace that shining and

courageous virtue, Faith. Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the

salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; openeyed Faith is built upon

a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for

unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory.

Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a

man is indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a

sense of his infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still

preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is

like himself erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better

things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry,

should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent

playthings; that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held,

become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in

imperfection, and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of

mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will

become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly support

your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be I wisely glad that you

retain the sense of blemishes; for the faults of married people continually spur up each of them, hour by hour,

to do better and to meet and love upon a higher ground. And ever, between the failures, there will come

THERE is only one event in life which really astonishes a man and startles him out of his prepared opinions.

Everything else befalls him very much as he expected. Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable variety

indeed, but with little that is either startling or intense; they form together no more than a sort of background,

or running accompaniment to the man's own reflections; and he falls naturally into a cool, curious, and

smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a conception of life which expects tomorrow to be after the

pattern of today and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his friends and acquaintances

under the influence of love. He may sometimes look forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible

expectation. But it is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the philosopher

to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a

piece of the person's experience. I remember an anecdote of a wellknown French theorist, who was debating

a point eagerly in his CENACLE. It was objected against him that he had never experienced love. Whereupon

he arose, left the society, and made it a point not to return to it until he considered that he had supplied the

defect. "Now," he remarked, on entering, "now I am in a position to continue the discussion." Perhaps he had

not penetrated very deeply into the subject after all; but the story indicates right thinking, and may serve as an

When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not without something of the nature of dismay that the man

finds himself in such changed conditions. He has to deal with commanding emotions instead of the easy

dislikes and preferences in which he has hitherto passed his days; and he recognises capabilities for pain and

pleasure of which he had not yet suspected the existence. Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the

one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is

out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful,

meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the

experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state

in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our

laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one masterthought that even the

trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a

wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellowcreature. And all the while their

acquaintances look on in stupor, and ask each other, with almost passionate emphasis, what soandso can

see in that woman, or suchanone in that man? I am sure, gentlemen, I cannot tell you. For my part, I cannot

think what the women mean. It might be very well, if the Apollo Belvedere should suddenly glow all over

into life, and step forward from the pedestal with that godlike air of his. But of the misbegotten changelings

who call themselves men, and prate intolerably over dinnertables, I never saw one who seemed worthy to

inspire love no, nor read of any, except Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his youth. About women

I entertain a somewhat different opinion; but there, I have the misfortune to be a man.

There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, and bid him stand and deliver. Hard work, high

thinking, adventurous excitement, and a great deal more that forms a part of this or the other person's spiritual

bill of fare, are within the reach of almost any one who can dare a little and be patient. But it is by no means

in the way of every one to fall in love. You know the difficulty Shakespeare was put into when Queen

Elizabeth asked him to show Falstaff in love. I do not believe that Henry Fielding was ever in love. Scott, if it

were not for a passage or two in ROB ROY, would give me very much the same effect. These are great

names and (what is more to the purpose) strong, healthy, highstrung, and generous natures, of whom the

reverse might have been expected. As for the innumerable army of anaemic and tailorish persons who occupy

the face of this planet with so much propriety, it is palpably absurd to imagine them in any such situation as a

loveaffair. A wet rag goes safely by the fire; and if a man is blind, he cannot expect to be much impressed

by romantic scenery. Apart from all this, many lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under

some unfavourable star. There is the nice and critical moment of declaration to be got over. From timidity or

lack of opportunity a good half of possible love cases never get so far, and at least another quarter do there

cease and determine. A very adroit person, to be sure, manages to prepare the way and out with his

declaration in the nick of time. And then there is a fine solid sort of man, who goes on from snub to snub; and

if he has to declare forty times, will continue imperturbably declaring, amid the astonished consideration of

men and angels, until he has a favourable answer. I daresay, if one were a woman, one would like to marry a

man who was capable of doing this, but not quite one who had done so. It is just a little bit abject, and

somehow just a little bit gross; and marriages in which one of the parties has been thus battered into consent

scarcely form agreeable subjects for meditation. Love should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed,

the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair

of children venturing together into a dark room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang

of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression

of their own trouble in each other's eyes. There is here no declaration properly so called; the feeling is so

plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what it is in his own heart, he is sure of what it is in the

This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence of

years, disproves coldblooded and cynical conclusions, and awakens dormant sensibilities. Hitherto the man

had found it a good policy to disbelieve the existence of any enjoyment which was out of his reach; and thus

he turned his back upon the strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed himself to look exclusively on what

was common and dull. He accepted a prose ideal, let himself go blind of many sympathies by disuse; and if

he were young and witty, or beautiful, wilfully forewent these advantages. He joined himself to the following

of what, in the old mythology of love, was prettily called NONCHALOIR; and in an odd mixture of feelings,

a fling of selfrespect, a preference for selfish liberty, and a great dash of that fear with which honest people

regard serious interests, kept himself back from the straightforward course of life among certain selected

activities. And now, all of a sudden, he is unhorsed, like St. Paul, from his infidel affectation. His heart,

which has been ticking accurate seconds for the last year, gives a bound and begins to beat high and

irregularly in his breast. It seems as if he had never heard or felt or seen until that moment; and by the report

of his memory, he must have lived his past life between sleep and waking, or with the preoccupied attention

of a brown study. He is practically incommoded by the generosity of his feelings, smiles much when he is

alone, and develops a habit of looking rather blankly upon the moon and stars. But it is not at all within the

province of a prose essayist to give a picture of this hyperbolical frame of mind; and the thing has been done

already, and that to admiration. In ADELAIDE, in Tennyson's MAUD, and in some of Heine's songs, you get

the absolute expression of this midsummer spirit. Romeo and Juliet were very much in love; although they

tell me some German critics are of a different opinion, probably the same who would have us think Mercutio

a dull fellow. Poor Antony was in love, and no mistake. That lay figure Marius, in LES MISERABLES, is

also a genuine case in his own way, and worth observation. A good many of George Sand's people are

thoroughly in love; and so are a good many of George Meredith's. Altogether, there is plenty to read on the

subject. If the root of the matter be in him, and if he has the requisite chords to set in vibration, a young man

may occasionally enter, with the key of art, into that land of Beulah which is upon the borders of Heaven and

within sight of the City of Love. There let him sit awhile to hatch delightful hopes and perilous illusions.

One thing that accompanies the passion in its first blush is certainly difficult to explain. It comes (I do not

quite see how) that from having a very supreme sense of pleasure in all parts of life in lying down to sleep,

in waking, in motion, in breathing, in continuing to be the lover begins to regard his happiness as beneficial

for the rest of the world and highly meritorious in himself. Our race has never been able contentedly to

suppose that the noise of its wars, conducted by a few young gentlemen in a corner of an inconsiderable star,

does not reecho among the courts of Heaven with quite a formidable effect. In much the same taste, when

people find a great todo in their own breasts, they imagine it must have some influence in their

neighbourhood. The presence of the two lovers is so enchanting to each other that it seems as if it must be the

best thing possible for everybody else. They are half inclined to fancy it is because of them and their love that

the sky is blue and the sun shines. And certainly the weather is usually fine while people are courting. . . In

point of fact, although the happy man feels very kindly towards others of his own sex, there is apt to be

something too much of the magnifico in his demeanour. If people grow presuming and selfimportant over

such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life without

some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is to love and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted

lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other men. An overweening sense of the passion and

importance of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. To women, they feel very nobly, very purely, and

very generously, as if they were so many JoanofArc's; but this does not come out in their behaviour; and

they treat them to Grandisonian airs marked with a suspicion of fatuity. I am not quite certain that women do

not like this sort of thing; but really, after having bemused myself over DANIEL DERONDA, I have given

If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous superstition, that the pleasure of the pair is somehow blessed

to others, and everybody is made happier in their happiness, would serve at least to keep love generous and

greathearted. Nor is it quite a baseless superstition after all. Other lovers are hugely interested. They strike

the nicest balance between pity and approval, when they see people aping the greatness of their own

sentiments. It is an understood thing in the play, that while the young gentlefolk are courting on the terrace, a

rough flirtation is being carried on, and a light, trivial sort of love is growing up, between the footman and the

singing chambermaid. As people are generally cast for the leading parts in their own imaginations, the reader

can apply the parallel to real life without much chance of going wrong. In short, they are quite sure this other

loveaffair is not so deep seated as their own, but they like dearly to see it going forward. And love,

considered as a spectacle, must have attractions for many who are not of the confraternity. The sentimental

old maid is a commonplace of the novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human being, to be sure,

who can look on at this pretty madness without indulgence and sympathy. For nature commends itself to

people with a most insinuating art; the busiest is now and again arrested by a great sunset; and you may be as

pacific or as coldblooded as you will, but you cannot help some emotion when you read of welldisputed

Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true as

between the sweethearts. To do good and communicate is the lover's grand intention. It is the happiness of the

other that makes his own most intense gratification. It is not possible to disentangle the different emotions,

the pride, humility, pity and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an unexpected caress. To

make one's self beautiful, to dress the hair, to excel in talk, to do anything and all things that puff out the

character and attributes and make them imposing in the eyes of others, is not only to magnify one's self, but

to offer the most delicate homage at the same time. And it is in this latter intention that they are done by

lovers; for the essence of love is kindness; and indeed it may be best defined as passionate kindness:

kindness, so to speak, run mad and become importunate and violent. Vanity in a merely personal sense exists

no longer. The lover takes a perilous pleasure in privately displaying his weak points and having them, one

after another, accepted and condoned. He wishes to be assured that he is not loved for this or that good

quality, but for himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive to set forward. For, although it may

have been a very difficult thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act of Antony and

Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of art before every one in this world who cares to set about

explaining his own character to others. Words and acts are easily wrenched from their true significance; and

they are all the language we have to come and go upon. A pitiful job we make of it, as a rule. For better or

worse, people mistake our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation. And generally we rest pretty

content with our failures; we are content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once a man is

moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a point of honour to clear such dubieties away. He cannot

have the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance; and his pride revolts at being loved in a

He discovers a great reluctance to return on former periods of his life. To all that has not been shared with

her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes and dispositions, he can look back only by a difficult and repugnant

effort of the will. That he should have wasted some years in ignorance of what alone was really important,

that he may have entertained the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is a burthen almost

too heavy for his selfrespect. But it is the thought of another past that rankles in his spirit like a poisoned

wound. That he himself made a fashion of being alive in the bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is

deplorable enough in all good conscience. But that She should have permitted herself the same liberty seems

A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically

inconvenient. This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which it merely attends, like an illhumoured courtier, is

itself artificial in exactly the same sense and to the same degree. I suppose what is meant by that objection is

that jealousy has not always been a character of man; formed no part of that very modest kit of sentiments

with which he is supposed to have begun the world: but waited to make its appearance in better days and

among richer natures. And this is equally true of love, and friendship, and love of country, and delight in

what they call the beauties of nature, and most other things worth having. Love, in particular, will not endure

any historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it is one of the most incontestable facts in the world;

but if you begin to ask what it was in other periods and countries, in Greece for instance, the strangest doubts

begin to spring up, and everything seems so vague and changing that a dream is logical in comparison.

Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the consequences of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure; but there it is.

It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we reflect on the past of those we love. A bundle of

letters found after years of happy union creates no sense of insecurity in the present; and yet it will pain a

man sharply. The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each other: but this preexistence of both occurs to

the mind as something indelicate. To be altogether right, they should have had twin birth together, at the

same moment with the feeling that unites them. Then indeed it would be simple and perfect and without

reserve or afterthought. Then they would understand each other with a fulness impossible otherwise. There

would be no barrier between them of associations that cannot be imparted. They would be led into none of

those comparisons that send the blood back to the heart. And they would know that there had been no time

lost, and they had been together as much as was possible. For besides terror for the separation that must

follow some time or other in the future, men feel anger, and something like remorse, when they think of that

other separation which endured until they met. Some one has written that love makes people believe in

immortality, because there seems not to be room enough in life for so great a tenderness, and it is

inconceivable that the most masterful of our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of a few

years. Indeed, it seems strange; but if we call to mind analogies, we can hardly regard it as impossible.

"The blind bowboy," who smiles upon us from the end of terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his

birdbolts among a fleeting generation. But for as fast as ever he shoots, the game dissolves and disappears

into eternity from under his falling arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck; the other has but time to make

one gesture and give one passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment. When the generation is

gone, when the play is over, when the thirty years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of

the world, we may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying loves, and the sweethearts

who despised mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste,

a few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy stamp from the

AMONG sayings that have a currency in spite of being wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a

half truth upon another subject which is accidentally combined with the error, one of the grossest and

broadest conveys the monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and hard to tell a lie. I wish heartily

it were. But the truth is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly uttered. Even with

instruments specially contrived for such a purpose with a foot rule, a level, or a theodolite it is not easy to

be exact; it is easier, alas! to be inexact. From those who mark the divisions on a scale to those who measure

the boundaries of empires or the distance of the heavenly stars, it is by careful method and minute,

unwearying attention that men rise even to material exactness or to sure knowledge even of external and

constant things. But it is easier to draw the outline of a mountain than the changing appearance of a face; and

truth in human relations is of this more intangible and dubious order: hard to seize, harder to communicate.

Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial sense not to say that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of fact

I was never out of England, not to say that I have read Cervantes in the original when as a matter of fact I

know not one syllable of Spanish this, indeed, is easy and to the same degree unimportant in itself. Lies of

this sort, according to circumstances, may or may not be important; in a certain sense even they may or may

not be false. The habitual liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife and friends; while

another man who never told a formal falsehood in his life may yet be himself one lie heart and face, from

top to bottom. This is the kind of lie which poisons intimacy. And, VICE VERSA, veracity to sentiment,

truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your friends, never to feign or falsify emotion that is the truth

L'ART DE BIEN DIRE is but a drawingroom accomplishment unless it be pressed into the service of the

truth. The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to

affect him precisely as you wish. This is commonly understood in the case of books or set orations; even in

making your will, or writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one thing you can

never make Philistine natures understand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, remains as unseizable to

their wits as a high flight of metaphysics namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by means of

this difficult art of literature, and according to a man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and the

fulness of his intercourse with other men. Anybody, it is supposed, can say what he means; and, in spite of

their notorious experience to the contrary, people so continue to suppose. Now, I simply open the last book I

have been reading Mr. Leland's captivating ENGLISH GIPSIES. "It is said," I find on p. 7, "that those who

can converse with Irish peasants in their own native tongue form far higher opinions of their appreciation of

the beautiful, and of THE ELEMENTS OF HUMOUR AND PATHOS IN THEIR HEARTS, than do those

who know their thoughts only through the medium of English. I know from my own observations that this is

quite the case with the Indians of North America, and it is unquestionably so with the gipsy." In short, where

a man has not a full possession of the language, the most important, because the most amiable, qualities of his

nature have to lie buried and fallow; for the pleasure of comradeship, and the intellectual part of love, rest

upon these very "elements of humour and pathos." Here is a man opulent in both, and for lack of a medium

he can put none of it out to interest in the market of affection! But what is thus made plain to our

apprehensions in the case of a foreign language is partially true even with the tongue we learned in childhood.

Indeed, we all speak different dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another loose and meagre; but the

speech of the ideal talker shall correspond and fit upon the truth of fact not clumsily, obscuring lineaments,

like a mantle, but cleanly adhering, like an athlete's skin. And what is the result? That the one can open

himself more clearly to his friends, and can enjoy more of what makes life truly valuable intimacy with

those he loves. An orator makes a false step; he employs some trivial, some absurd, some vulgar phrase; in

the turn of a sentence he insults, by a side wind, those whom he is labouring to charm; in speaking to one

sentiment he unconsciously ruffles another in parenthesis; and you are not surprised, for you know his task to

be delicate and filled with perils. "O frivolous mind of man, light ignorance!" As if yourself, when you seek

to explain some misunderstanding or excuse some apparent fault, speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still

recently incensed, were not harnessing for a more perilous adventure; as if yourself required less tact and

eloquence; as if an angry friend or a suspicious lover were not more easy to offend than a meeting of

indifferent politicians! Nay, and the orator treads in a beaten round; the matters he discusses have been

discussed a thousand times before; language is readyshaped to his purpose; he speaks out of a cut and dry

vocabulary. But you may it not be that your defence reposes on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as

touched upon in Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must venture forth into zones of thought

still unsurveyed, and become yourself a literary innovator? For even in love there are unlovely humours;

ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may yet have sprung from a kind sentiment. If the injured one could

read your heart, you may be sure that he would understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be shown

it has to be demonstrated in words. Do you think it is a hard thing to write poetry? Why, that is to write

I should even more admire "the lifelong and heroic literary labours" of my fellowmen, patiently clearing up

in words their loves and their contentions, and speaking their autobiography daily to their wives, were it not

for a circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my admiration by equal parts. For life, though largely, is

not entirely carried on by literature. We are subject to physical passions and contortions; the voice breaks and

changes, and speaks by unconscious and winning inflections; we have legible countenances, like an open

book; things that cannot be said look eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked into the body as a

dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with appealing signals. Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a flush or

a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the heart, and speak more directly to the hearts of others. The

message flies by these interpreters in the least space of time, and the misunderstanding is averted in the

moment of its birth. To explain in words takes time and a just and patient hearing; and in the critical epochs

of a close relation, patience and justice are not qualities on which we can rely. But the look or the gesture

explains things in a breath; they tell their message without ambiguity; unlike speech, they cannot stumble, by

the way, on a reproach or an allusion that should steel your friend against the truth; and then they have a

higher authority, for they are the direct expression of the heart, not yet transmitted through the unfaithful and

sophisticating brain. Not long ago I wrote a letter to a friend which came near involving us in quarrel; but we

met, and in personal talk I repeated the worst of what I had written, and added worse to that; and with the

commentary of the body it seemed not unfriendly either to hear or say. Indeed, letters are in vain for the

purposes of intimacy; an absence is a dead break in the relation; yet two who know each other fully and are

bent on perpetuity in love, may so preserve the attitude of their affections that they may meet on the same

Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the face; pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot follow the

changes of the voice. And there are others also to be pitied; for there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature,

who have been denied all the symbols of communication, who have neither a lively play of facial expression,

nor speaking gestures, nor a responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory speech: people truly made

of clay, people tied for life into a bag which no one can undo. They are poorer than the gipsy, for their heart

can speak no language under heaven. Such people we must learn slowly by the tenor of their acts, or through

yea and nay communications; or we take them on trust on the strength of a general air, and now and again,

when we see the spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or change our estimate. But these will be uphill

intimacies, without charm or freedom, to the end; and freedom is the chief ingredient in confidence. Some

minds, romantically dull, despise physical endowments. That is a doctrine for a misanthrope; to those who

like their fellowcreatures it must always be meaningless; and, for my part, I can see few things more

desirable, after the possession of such radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos, than to have a

lively and not a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with every feeling; to be elegant and

delightful in person, so that we shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing, and may never discredit

speech with uncouth manners or become unconsciously our own burlesques. But of all unfortunates there is

one creature (for I will not call him man) conspicuous in misfortune. This is he who has forfeited his

birthright of expression, who has cultivated artful intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a pet

monkey, and on every side perverted or cut off his means of communication with his fellowmen. The body

is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passersby to come and

love us. But this fellow has filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly coloured. His house may be

admired for its design, the crowd may pause before the stained windows, but meanwhile the poor proprietor

Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to refrain from open lies. It is possible to avoid

falsehood and yet not tell the truth. It is not enough to answer formal questions. To reach the truth by yea and

nay communications implies a questioner with a share of inspiration, such as is often found in mutual love.

YEA and NAY mean nothing; the meaning must have been related in the question. Many words are often

necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; the most that

we can hope is by many arrows, more or less far off on different sides, to indicate, in the course of time, for

what target we are aiming, and after an hour's talk, back and forward, to convey the purport of a single

principle or a single thought. And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point entirely, a wordy,

prolegomenous babbler will often add three new offences in the process of excusing one. It is really a most

delicate affair. The world was made before the English language, and seemingly upon a different design.

Suppose we held our converse not in words, but in music; those who have a bad ear would find themselves

cut off from all near commerce, and no better than foreigners in this big world. But we do not consider how

many have "a bad ear" for words, nor how often the most eloquent find nothing to reply. I hate questioners

and questions; there are so few that can be spoken to without a lie. "DO YOU FORGIVE ME?" Madam and

sweetheart, so far as I have gone in life I have never yet been able to discover what forgiveness means. "IS IT

STILL THE SAME BETWEEN US?" Why, how can it be? It is eternally different; and yet you are still the

friend of my heart. "DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?" God knows; I should think it highly improbable.

The cruellest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth,

and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished

because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to

betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue? And,

again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth conveyed through a lie. Truth to facts is not always truth to

sentiment; and part of the truth, as often happens in answer to a question, may be the foulest calumny. A fact

may be an exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which you must neither garble nor belie. The

whole tenor of a conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate statement; the beginning and the end

define and travesty the intermediate conversation. You never speak to God; you address a fellowman, full of

his own tempers; and to tell truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but to convey a true

impression; truth in spirit, not truth to letter, is the true veracity. To reconcile averted friends a Jesuitical

discretion is often needful, not so much to gain a kind hearing as to communicate sober truth. Women have

an ill name in this connection; yet they live in as true relations; the lie of a good woman is the true index of

"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful passage I remember to have read in any modern

author, (1) "two to speak truth one to speak and another to hear." He must be very little experienced, or

have no great zeal for truth, who does not recognise the fact. A grain of anger or a grain of suspicion

produces strange acoustical effects, and makes the ear greedy to remark offence. Hence we find those who

have once quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever ready to break the truce. To speak truth there

must be moral equality or else no respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to degenerate

into a verbal fencing bout, and misapprehensions to become ingrained. And there is another side to this, for

the parent begins with an imperfect notion of the child's character, formed in early years or during the

equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only the facts which suit with his preconception; and

wherever a person fancies himself unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up the effort to speak truth.

With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more between lovers (for mutual understanding is love's

essence), the truth is easily indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the other. A hint taken, a look

understood, conveys the gist of long and delicate explanations; and where the life is known even YEA and

NAY become luminous. In the closest of all relations that of a love well founded and equally shared

speech is half discarded, like a roundabout, infantile process or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two

communicate directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer words contrive to share their good

and evil and uphold each other's hearts in joy. For love rests upon a physical basis; it is a familiarity of

nature's making and apart from voluntary choice. Understanding has in some sort outrun knowledge, for the

affection perhaps began with the acquaintance; and as it was not made like other relations, so it is not, like

them, to be perturbed or clouded. Each knows more than can be uttered; each lives by faith, and believes by a

natural compulsion; and between man and wife the language of the body is largely developed and grown

strangely eloquent. The thought that prompted and was conveyed in a caress would only lose to be set down

Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others, that we must strive and do battle for the truth. Let but a

doubt arise, and alas! all the previous intimacy and confidence is but another charge against the person

AND SO COMPLETELY!" Let but that thought gain entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal. Appeal

to the past; why, that is your crime! Make all clear, convince the reason; alas! speciousness is but a proof

For a strong affection such moments are worth supporting, and they will end well; for your advocate is in

your lover's heart and speaks her own language; it is not you but she herself who can defend and clear you of

the charge. But in slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent union? Indeed, is it worth while? We are all

INCOMPRIS, only more or less concerned for the mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; all fawning at

each other's feet like dumb, neglected lap dogs. Sometimes we catch an eye this is our opportunity in the

ages and we wag our tail with a poor smile. "IS THAT ALL?" All? If you only knew! But how can they

know? They do not love us; the more fools we to squander life on the indifferent.

But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear, is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand

others that we can get our own hearts understood; and in matters of human feeling the clement judge is the

THERE is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs. The sentiments of a man while he

is full of ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same

person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should be listened to like an oracle. Most

of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious

attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of

humanity, this is no doubt very properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of proposition is any less

true than the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel

Budgett the Successful Merchant. The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is still in his countinghouse

counting out his money; and doubtless this is a consideration. But we have, on the other hand, some bold and

magnanimous sayings common to high races and natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side,

and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile

such sayings with their proverbs. According to the latter, every lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never

to forget your umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser flight of achievement than to go

smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the

It is a still more difficult consideration for our average men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down

to Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have inculcated the same ideal of manners, caution, and

respectability, those characters in history who have most notoriously flown in the face of such precepts are

spoken of in hyperbolical terms of praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of our

commercial centres. This is very bewildering to the moral sense. You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble

but honest and reputable livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a colonelling, in the company of

rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France; surely a melancholy example for one's daughters! And then

you have Columbus, who may have pioneered America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent

navigator. His life is not the kind of thing one would like to put into the hands of young people; rather, one

would do one's utmost to keep it from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating influence

in life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly

irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must

engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national

life. They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they assist at a performance of the

LYONS MAIL. Persons of substance take in the TIMES and sit composedly in pit or boxes according to the

degree of their prosperity in business. As for the generals who go galloping up and down among bombshells

in absurd cocked hats as for the actors who raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the

stage they must belong, thank God! to a different order of beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds

careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or read about like characters in ancient and rather fabulous annals.

Our offspring would no more think of copying their behaviour, let us hope, than of doffing their clothes and

painting themselves blue in consequence of certain admissions in the first chapter of their school history of

Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs hold their own in theory; and it is another instance

of the same spirit, that the opinions of old men about life have been accepted as final. All sorts of allowances

are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age. It is held to be

a good taunt, and somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman waggles his head

and says: "Ah, so I thought when I was your age." It is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts:

"My venerable sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours." And yet the one is as good as the other:

"Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is but knowledge in the making." All opinions, properly so called, are

stages on the road to truth. It does not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really considered

the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far. This does not apply to formulae got by rote, which

are stages on the road to nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword in your mouth is

not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There

are too many of these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an oath and by way of an

argument. They have a currency as intellectual counters; and many respectable persons pay their way with

nothing else. They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory in the background. The imputed virtue of folios

full of knockdown arguments is supposed to reside in them, just as some of the majesty of the British Empire

dwells in the constable's truncheon. They are used in pure superstition, as old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way

of an exorcism. And yet they are vastly serviceable for checking unprofitable discussion and stopping the

mouths of babes and sucklings. And when a young man comes to a certain stage of intellectual growth, the

examination of these counters forms a gymnastic at once amusing and fortifying to the mind.

Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. They were

very good places to pass through, and I am none the less at my destination. All my old opinions were only

stages on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to something else. I am no more

abashed at having been a redhot Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a sucking infant.

Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to convince you

of the fact. And in the meanwhile you must do something, be something, believe something. It is not possible

to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and blank; and even if you could do so, instead of coming

ultimately to the right conclusion, you would be very apt to remain in a state of balance and blank to

perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing to be ashamed of in the

retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian. For my

part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for

the moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces: their blindness

being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see that my own

scheme would not answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard propounded would depress some elements

of goodness just as much as they encouraged others. Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with

years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions. I

submit to this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing

animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better I daresay it is deplorably

for the worse. I have no choice in the business, and can no more resist this tendency of my mind than I could

prevent my body from beginning to totter and decay. If I am spared (as the phrase runs) I shall doubtless

outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume

myself on the immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in

the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly,

and suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to

these and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying

towards the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error.

As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous

possibilities, now chilled with a glimpse of prudence, we may compare the headlong course of our years to a

swift torrent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed against a boulder, now he grapples for a

moment to a trailing spray; at the end, he is hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We

have no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories; we are spun round and round

and shown this or the other view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold to their opinions. We take a sight

at a condition in life, and say we have studied it; our most elaborate view is no more than an impression. If

we had breathing space, we should take the occasion to modify and adjust; but at this breakneck hurry, we are

no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in love than married or jilted, no sooner one age than we begin to

be another, and no sooner in the fulness of our manhood than we begin to decline towards the grave. It is in

vain to seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views in a medium so perturbed and fleeting. This is no

cabinet science, in which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a pistol to our head; we are

confronted with a new set of conditions on which we have not only to pass a judgment, but to take action,

before the hour is at an end. And we cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things, our

identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest in

the masquerade. In the course of time, we grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved. Milton is

not so dull as he once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so amusing. It is decidedly harder to climb trees, and not

nearly so hard to sit still. There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide and seek has

somehow lost in zest. All our attributes are modified or chanced and it will be a poor account of us if our

views do not modify and change in a proportion. To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to

have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well

birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having

brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole

And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea. SI JEUNESSE

SAVAIT, SI VIEILLESSE POUVAIT, is a very pretty sentiment, but not necessarily right. In five cases out

of ten, it is not so much that the young people do not know, as that they do not choose. There is something

irreverent in the speculation, but perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise resolutions of age

than we are always willing to admit. It would be an instructive experiment to make an old man young again

and leave him all his SAVOIR. I scarcely think he would put his money in the Savings Bank after all; I doubt

if he would be such an admirable son as we are led to expect; and as for his conduct in love, I believe firmly

he would outHerod Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to the blush. Prudence is a wooden

juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin walks with the portly air of a high priest, and after whom dances

many a successful merchant in the character of Atys. But it is not a deity to cultivate in youth. If a man lives

to any considerable age, it cannot be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his

It is customary to say that age should be considered, because it comes last. It seems just as much to the point,

that youth comes first. And the scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to add that age, in a majority of

cases, never comes at all. Disease and accident make short work of even the most prosperous persons; death

costs nothing, and the expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To be suddenly

snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man has been grudging

himself his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it

becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce. The victim is dead and

he has cunningly overreached himself: a combination of calamities none the less absurd for being grim. To

husband a favourite claret until the batch turns sour, is not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how much

more with a whole cellar a whole bodily existence! People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness in

the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all its

admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than

improbable, old age. We should not compliment a hungry man, who should refuse a whole dinner and reserve

all his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or not. If there be such a

thing as imprudence in the world, we surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous

waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we have heard the mermaidens singing, and

know that we shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill

of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have a pipe before we go!

Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous preparation for old age is only trouble thrown away. We fall

on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes to meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded, the

heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort of equable jogtrot of feeling is substituted

for the violent ups and downs of passion and disgust; the same influence that restrains our hopes, quiets our

apprehensions; if the pleasures are less intense, the troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, this

period for which we are asked to hoard up everything as for a time of famine, is, in its own right, the richest,

easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by managing its own work and following its own happy inspiration, youth

is doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full, busy youth is your only prelude to a selfcontained

and independent age; and the muff inevitably develops into the bore. There are not many Doctor Johnsons, to

set forth upon their first romantic voyage at sixtyfour. If we wish to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves'

kitchen in the East End, to go down in a diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it while we are still

young. It will not do to delay until we are clogged with prudence and limping with rheumatism, and people

begin to ask us: "What does Gravity out of bed?" Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world

to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to

see sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting

verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud HERNANI. There is some

meaning in the old theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his greensickness and got done with

it for good, is as little to be depended on as an unvaccinated infant. "It is extraordinary," says Lord

Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best preserved of youths up to the date of his last novel, (1) "it is

extraordinary how hourly and how violently change the feelings of an inexperienced young man." And this

mobility is a special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of indestructible virginity; a magic armour, with which

he can pass unhurt through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest passages. Let him voyage,

speculate, see all that he can, do all that he may; his soul has as many lives as a cat; he will live in all

weathers, and never be a halfpenny the worse. Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair

chance, were probably little worth saving from the first; they must have been feeble fellows creatures made

of putty and packthread, without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness, in their composition; we may

sympathise with their parents, but there is not much cause to go into mourning for themselves; for to be quite

When the old man waggles his head and says, "Ah, so I thought when I was your age," he has proved the

youth's case. Doubtless, whether from growth of experience or decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer;

but he thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so while they were young, since there was

dew in the morning or hawthorn in May; and here is another young man adding his vote to those of previous

generations and rivetting another link to the chain of testimony. It is as natural and as right for a young man

to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild

thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for

By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more than usually tempted to offer their advice, let me

recommend the following little tale. A child who had been remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of lead

soldiers) found himself growing to the level of acknowledged boyhood without any abatement of this childish

taste. He was thirteen; already he had been taunted for dallying overlong about the playbox; he had to blush if

he was found among his lead soldiers; the shades of the prisonhouse were closing about him with a

vengeance. There is nothing more difficult than to put the thoughts of children into the language of their

elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my

playthings, in the meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle jeers. At the same

time, I am sure that playthings are the very pick of life; all people give them up out of the same pusillanimous

respect for those who are a little older; and if they do not return to them as soon as they can, it is only because

they grow stupid and forget. I shall be wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of their foolish world; but

so soon as I have made enough money, I shall retire and shut myself up among my playthings until the day I

die." Nay, as he was passing in the train along the Esterel mountains between Cannes and Frejus, he

remarked a pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and decided that this should be his Happy

Valley. Astrea Redux; childhood was to come again! The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not

unworthy of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the reader has probably anticipated, it is never likely to be carried into

effect. There was a worm i' the bud, a fatal error in the premises. Childhood must pass away, and then youth,

as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in

changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and

to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of

You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. They may have been over the score on one side, just as

those of age are probably over the score on the other. But they had a point; they not only befitted your age

and expressed its attitude and passions, but they had a relation to what was outside of you, and implied

criticisms on the existing state of things, which you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you

now see that they were partial. All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is

incomplete. The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put

by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society. When the torrent

sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the

scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in

universal atheism. Generous lads irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of

everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a young fool; so are these cocksparrow

revolutionaries. But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a

theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a

forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling

images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of

himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in

downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and

such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have

not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own

natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all

best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings

In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there is a strong probability that age is not much more so.

Undying hope is coruler of the human bosom with infallible credulity. A man finds he has been wrong at

every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.

Mankind, after centuries of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional millennium. Since we

have explored the maze so long without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to

explore much longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of ornamental

water. How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth

I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation, which I take the liberty to reproduce. "What I advance is

true," said one. "But not the whole truth," answered the other. "Sir," returned the first (and it seemed to me

there was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), "Sir, there is no such thing as the whole truth!" Indeed, there

is nothing so evident in life as that there are two sides to a question. History is one long illustration. The

forces of nature are engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it into our backward intelligences. We never pause for

a moment's consideration but we admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast sways humanity exactly by disregarding

this great truth, and dinning it into our ears that this or that question has only one possible solution; and your

enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, dominates things for a while and shakes the world out of a doze; but when

once he is gone, an army of quiet and uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other side and

demolish the generous imposture. While Calvin is putting everybody exactly right in his INSTITUTES, and

hot headed Knox is thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the other side in his library in

Perigord, and predicting that they will find as much to quarrel about in the Bible as they had found already in

the Church. Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than

that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what

agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very

face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that

there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the

maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every

ceremony of politeness, is the only "one undisturbed song of pure concent" to which we are ever likely to

JUST now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of

LESErespectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short

of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and

enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so

called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic

formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the

presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and

a disenchantment for those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination, votes for the

sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, it "goes for" them. And while such an one is ploughing

distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the

meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is

touched in a very delicate place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome for

these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and

unmoved by their success? It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when

all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical;

financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the

unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for

speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty

with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much

may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is

what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others,

and that a man has written a book of travels in Montenegro, is no reason why he should never have been to

It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in youth. For though here and there a Lord

Macaulay may escape from school honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their

medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin the world bankrupt. And the same

holds true during all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffering others to educate him. It must have been

a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book

diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring

upon books will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other

things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become impossible, by the time a man has to use

spectacles and cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty

bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your

back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry

that you regret; you would rather cancel some lacklustre periods between sleep and waking in the class. For

my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a

case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though

I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain other

odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on

that mighty place of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out yearly

many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in

the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers,

he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and

smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he

may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not education,

what is? We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the conversation that should

"Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou

"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly

done by persons in my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what

manner of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn by rootofheart a lesson

Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and shaking his cane with a very

threatful countenance, broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would have all such rogues

And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spread its

Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it

does not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged direction, with

a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you.

It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a telescope. SainteBeuve, as he

grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go

hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus,

or in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person,

looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true

education than many another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be

found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of

looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory

with a lumber of words, onehalf of which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may learn

some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all

varieties of men. Many who have "plied their book diligently," and know all about some one branch or

another of accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl like demeanour, and prove dry,

stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain

underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with

them by your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has

been a great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has

never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent

purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his halfcrowns, for

a share of the idler's knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has another and more

important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of

other people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical indulgence. He will not be heard

among the dogmatists. He will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he

finds no outoftheway truths, he will identify himself with no very burning falsehood. His way takes him

along a byroad, not much frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, and

leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense. Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect;

and while others behold the East and West, the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort

of morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shadows running speedily and in many different

directions into the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the generations, the shrill doctors and the

plangent wars, go by into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, a man may see, out of the

Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful landscape; many firelit parlours; good people laughing,

drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution; and the old shepherd telling

Extreme BUSYNESS, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a

faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of

deadalive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some

conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how

they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random

provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity

lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they CANNOT be

idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated

to furious moiling in the gold mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry

and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so

for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was

nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet

very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of

the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have

gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own

affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life

of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of

amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched,

he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the

pipe is smoked out, the snuffbox empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable

But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends

and relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual

devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

And it is not by any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he has to do. To an

impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are

to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world at large,

as phases of idleness. For in that Theatre, not only the walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and

diligent fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the benches, do really play

a part and fulfil important offices towards the general result. You are no doubt very dependent on the care of

your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and

the policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is there not a thought of gratitude in your heart

for certain other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your dinner with

good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of

borrowing shirts; and yet they were better people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was

neither sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long faced Barabbases whom the world could

better have done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote, who had

never done him anything he could call a service, than to his whole circle of ostentatious friends; for he

thought a good companion emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in the world who

cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done them at the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a

churlish disposition. A man may send you six sheets of letterpaper covered with the most entertaining

gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you think the

service would be greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a compact with the devil?

Do you really fancy you should be more beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the

while for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties because, like the quality of mercy, they

are not strained, and they are twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a

jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and, among generous

people, received with confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being

happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they

are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the

street after a marble, with so jolly an air that he set every one he passed into a good humour; one of these

persons, who had been delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave

him some money with this remark: "You see what sometimes comes of looking pleased." If he had looked

pleased before, he had now to look both pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this encouragement of

smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am

prepared to deal largely in the opposite commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a

fivepound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though

another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the fortyseventh proposition;

they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.

Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary

precept; but thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it is

one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows

for a moment, I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to

interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely

from all fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes

among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper

before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil feature in other

people's lives. They would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his services in the

Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the wellhead. It is better

to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hagridden by a peevish uncle.

And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? For what cause do they embitter their own and other

people's lives? That a man should publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his

great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a

thousand fall, there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc she should be at home

minding women's work, she answered there were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare

gifts! When nature is "so careless of the single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our

own is of exceptional importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in

Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well,

the scythe to the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not

many works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a

man of limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a

tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; for although

tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious in

themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the services of no single individual are

indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go

and labour themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep

scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should

set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid: and fine young men who work themselves into a decline,

and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been

whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny? and that this

lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the bull'seye and centrepoint of all the universe? And

yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical

or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the

BY a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are sent when health deserts us are often singularly

beautiful. Often, too, they are places we have visited in former years, or seen briefly in passing by, and kept

ever afterwards in pious memory; and we please ourselves with the fancy that we shall repeat many vivid and

pleasurable sensations, and take up again the thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we let it fall. We

shall now have an opportunity of finishing many pleasant excursions, interrupted of yore before our curiosity

was fully satisfied. It may be that we have kept in mind, during all these years, the recollection of some valley

into which we have just looked down for a moment before we lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; it

may be that we have lain awake at night, and agreeably tantalised ourselves with the thought of corners we

had never turned, or summits we had all but climbed: we shall now be able, as we tell ourselves, to complete

all these unfinished pleasures, and pass beyond the barriers that confined our recollections.

The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led away when hope and memory are both in one story, that I

daresay the sick man is not very inconsolable when he receives sentence of banishment, and is inclined to

regard his ill health as not the least fortunate accident of his life. Nor is he immediately undeceived. The stir

and speed of the journey, and the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep between two days

of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves into something of their old quickness and

sensibility. And so he can enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and plain,

vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will

transmute, as in the fable, into withered leaves. And so too he can enjoy the admirable brevity and simplicity

of such little glimpses of country and country ways as flash upon him through the windows of the train; little

glimpses that have a character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow might see them from the

wing, or Iris as she went abroad over the land on some Olympian errand. Here and there, indeed, a few

children huzzah and wave their hands to the express; but for the most part it is an interruption too brief and

isolated to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease from browsing; a girl sits balanced on the projecting

tiller of a canal boat, so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a leaping fish would be enough to

overthrow the dainty equilibrium, and yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and wood and iron have been

precipitated roaring past her very ear, and there is not a start, not a tremor, not a turn of the averted head, to

indicate that she has been even conscious of its passage. Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of railway

travel. The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart

becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; and while the body is borne forward in the flying

chain of carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at unfrequented stations; they make haste

up the poplar alley that leads toward the town; they are left behind with the signalman as, shading his eyes

Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of wonder and delight with which he will learn that he has

passed the indefinable line that separates South from North. And this is an uncertain moment; for sometimes

the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the occasion of some slight association, a colour, a flower, or

a scent; and sometimes not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern sunshine peeping through

the PERSIENNES, and the southern patois confusedly audible below the windows. Whether it come early or

late, however, this pleasure will not end with the anticipation, as do so many others of the same family. It will

leave him wider awake than it found him, and give a new significance to all he may see for many days to

come. There is something in the mere name of the South that carries enthusiasm along with it. At the sound

of the word, he pricks up his ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties and to get by heart the

permanent lines and character of the landscape, as if he had been told that it was all his own an estate out of

which he had been kept unjustly, and which he was now to receive in free and full possession. Even those

who have never been there before feel as if they had been; and everybody goes comparing, and seeking for

the familiar, and finding it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would think they were coming home

It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down in his chosen corner, that the invalid begins to understand

the change that has befallen him. Everything about him is as he had remembered, or as he had anticipated.

Here, at his feet, under his eyes, are the olive gardens and the blue sea. Nothing can change the eternal

magnificence of form of the naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves of the railway,

can utterly deform the suavity of contour of one bay after another along the whole reach of the Riviera. And

of all this, he has only a cold head knowledge that is divorced from enjoyment. He recognises with his

intelligence that this thing and that thing is beautiful, while in his heart of hearts he has to confess that it is

not beautiful for him. It is in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit; in vain that he chooses out points of

view, and stands there, looking with all his eyes, and waiting for some return of the pleasure that he

remembers in other days, as the sick folk may have awaited the coming of the angel at the pool of Bethesda.

He is like an enthusiast leading about with him a stolid, indifferent tourist. There is some one by who is out

of sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of the occasion; and that some one is

himself. The world is disenchanted for him. He seems to himself to touch things with muffled hands, and to

see them through a veil. His life becomes a palsied fumbling after notes that are silent when he has found and

struck them. He cannot recognise that this phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes

He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and amenity of the climate, and to fancy that in the

rigours of the winter at home, these dead emotions would revive and flourish. A longing for the brightness

and silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for the hale rough weather; for the tracery

of the frost upon his window panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes, and the white roofs

relieved against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of which these yearnings are made, is of the flimsiest: if

but the thermometer fall a little below its ordinary Mediterranean level, or a wind come down from the

snowclad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the

grim wintry streets at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his memory. The hopeless, huddled attitude of

tramps in doorways; the flinching gait of barefoot children on the icy pavement; the sheen of the rainy streets

towards afternoon; the meagreanatomy of the poor defined by the clinging of wet garments; the high

canorous note of the Northeaster on days when the very houses seem to stiffen with cold: these, and such as

these, crowd back upon him, and mockingly substitute themselves for the fanciful winter scenes with which

he had pleased himself a while before. He cannot be glad enough that he is where he is. If only the others

could be there also; if only those tramps could lie down for a little in the sunshine, and those children warm

their feet, this once, upon a kindlier earth; if only there were no cold anywhere, and no nakedness, and no

For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all. If it is only rarely that anything penetrates vividly into his

numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings with it a joy that is all the more poignant for its very rarity.

There is something pathetic in these occasional returns of a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he will

be stirred and awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps from very trivial sources; as a friend

once said to me, the "spirit of delight" comes often on small wings. For the pleasure that we take in beautiful

nature is essentially capricious. It comes sometimes when we least look for it; and sometimes, when we

expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for days together, in the very homeland of the

beautiful. We may have passed a place a thousand times and one; and on the thousand and second it will be

transfigured, and stand forth in a certain splendour of reality from the dull circle of surroundings; so that we

see it "with a child's first pleasure," as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake side. And if this falls out

capriciously with the healthy, how much more so with the invalid. Some day he will find his first violet, and

be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be

transmuted into colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may see a group of

washerwomen relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower gatherers in the

tempered daylight of an olivegarden; and something significant or monumental in the grouping, something

in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic of the dress of these southern women, will come

borne to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are the

richer by one more beautiful experience. Or it may be something even slighter: as when the opulence of the

sunshine, which somehow gets lost and fails to produce its effect on the large scale, is suddenly revealed to

him by the chance isolation as he changes the position of his sunshade of a yard or two of roadway with

its stones and weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the oliveyards themselves. Even the

colour is indeterminate and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now gray, now blue; now

tree stands above tree, like "cloud on cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the

whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows. But every one

sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may have arrived on other provocations; and their

recollection may be most vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their heads; of tropical

effects, with canes and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief of cypresses; of the troubled, busylooking

groups of seapines, that seem always as if they were being wielded and swept together by a whirlwind; of

the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and the scented underwood; of the empurpled

hills standing up, solemn and sharp, out of the greengold air of the east at evening.

There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one such moment of intense perception; and it is on

the happy agreement of these many elements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole

delight of the moment must depend. Who can forget how, when he has chanced upon some attitude of

complete restfulness, after long uneasy rolling to and fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the

landscape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just broken forth, or a great artist had only then

completed, by some cunning touch, the composition of the picture? And not only a change of posture a

snatch of perfume, the sudden singing of a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air from an invisible sea, the

light shadow of a travelling cloud, the merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most infinitesimal

nerve of a man's body not one of the least of these but has a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings

And if the external conditions are thus varied and subtle, even more so are those within our own bodies. No

man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end, because the world is in his heart; and so it

is impossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to end, that agreement of harmonious

circumstances that creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these

circumstances are hidden from us for ever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have reckoned up

all that we can see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken into account some sensibility more delicate

than usual in the nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain, which is

indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid

views and great pictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers together

these scattered details for its delight, and makes out of certain colours, certain distributions of graduated light

and darkness, that intelligible whole which alone we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, relating in one of his

essays how he went on foot from one great man's house to another's in search of works of art, begins

suddenly to triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he was more capable of enjoying their

costly possessions than they were; because they had paid the money and he had received the pleasure. And

the occasion is a fair one for self complacency. While the one man was working to be able to buy the

picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently

improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself a fortune, and the other has made for himself

a living spirit. It is a fair occasion for selfcomplacency, I repeat, when the event shows a man to have

chosen the better part, and laid out his life more wisely, in the long run, than those who have credit for most

wisdom. And yet even this is not a good unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in a less degree,

the possession of a brain that has been thus improved and cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a

man's enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable cares and disappointments. The happiness of such an one

comes to depend greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and harmonise the coarser

elements of beauty. And thus a degree of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly disagreeable,

is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his

pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment of the

It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life of the invalid resembles a premature old age. Those

excursions that he had promised himself to finish, prove too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and the

barrierhills are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits far out on the promontory, many a

comely fold of wood on the mountain side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as

inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The sense of distance grows upon him

wonderfully; and after some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he falls

contentedly in with the restrictions of his weakness. His narrow round becomes pleasant and familiar to him

as the cell to a contented prisoner. Just as he has fallen already out of the mid race of active life, he now falls

out of the little eddy that circulates in the shallow waters of the sanatorium. He sees the country people come

and go about their everyday affairs, the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; the stir of man's

activity is all about him, as he suns himself inertly in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a

patriarchal impersonality of interest, such as a man may feel when he pictures to himself the fortunes of his

In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of other men, there is no inharmonious prelude to the last

quietude and desertion of the grave; in this dulness of the senses there is a gentle preparation for the final

insensibility of death. And to him the idea of mortality comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its

wont, less as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesimal gradation, and the last step on a long

decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and every moment the movements grow feebler and smaller and

the attitude more restful and easy, until sleep overtakes us at a stride and we move no more, so desire after

desire leaves him; day by day his strength decreases, and the circle of his activity grows ever narrower; and

he feels, if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the passion of life, thus gradually inducted into the slumber

of death, that when at last the end comes, it will come quietly and fitly. If anything is to reconcile poor spirits

to the coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a mild approach as this; not to hale us forth with

violence, but to persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in. It is not so much, indeed, death that

approaches as life that withdraws and withers up from round about him. He has outlived his own usefulness,

and almost his own enjoyment; and if there is to be no recovery; if never again will he be young and strong

and passionate, if the actual present shall be to him always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of

the faraway past; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a

twilight that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly await the perfect darkness. He will pray for

And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are many and kindly. The sight of children has a significance

for him such as it may have for the aged also, but not for others. If he has been used to feel humanely, and to

look upon life somewhat more widely than from the narrow loophole of personal pleasure and advancement,

it is strange how small a portion of his thoughts will be changed or embittered by this proximity of death. He

knows that already, in English counties, the sower follows the ploughman up the face of the field, and the

rooks follow the sower; and he knows also that he may not live to go home again and see the corn spring and

ripen, and be cut down at last, and brought home with gladness. And yet the future of this harvest, the

continuance of drought or the coming of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever. For he has long

been used to wait with interest the issue of events in which his own concern was nothing; and to be joyful in a

plenty, and sorrowful for a famine, that did not increase or diminish, by one half loaf, the equable sufficiency

of his own supply. Thus there remain unaltered all the disinterested hopes for mankind and a better future

which have been the solace and inspiration of his life. These he has set beyond the reach of any fate that only

menaces himself; and it makes small difference whether he die five thousand years, or five thousand and fifty

years, before the good epoch for which he faithfully labours. He has not deceived himself; he has known

from the beginning that he followed the pillar of fire and cloud, only to perish himself in the wilderness, and

that it was reserved for others to enter joyfully into possession of the land. And so, as everything grows

grayer and quieter about him, and slopes towards extinction, these unfaded visions accompany his sad

decline, and follow him, with friendly voices and hopeful words, into the very vestibule of death. The desire

of love or of fame scarcely moved him, in his days of health, more strongly than these generous aspirations

move him now; and so life is carried forward beyond life, and a vista kept open for the eyes of hope, even

Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of his friends; or shall we not say rather, that by their

thought for him, by their unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains woven into the very stuff of life,

beyond the power of bodily dissolution to undo? In a thousand ways will he survive and be perpetuated.

Much of Etienne de la Boetie survived during all the years in which Montaigne continued to converse with

him on the pages of the everdelightful essays. Much of what was truly Goethe was dead already when he

revisited places that knew him no more, and found no better consolation than the promise of his own verses,

that soon he too would be at rest. Indeed, when we think of what it is that we most seek and cherish, and find

most pride and pleasure in calling ours, it will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our decease, would

suffer loss more truly than ourselves. As a monarch who should care more for the outlying colonies he knows

on the map or through the report of his vicegerents, than for the trunk of his empire under his eyes at home,

are we not more concerned about the shadowy life that we have in the hearts of others, and that portion in

their thoughts and fancies which, in a certain faraway sense, belongs to us, than about the real knot of our

identity that central metropolis of self, of which alone we are immediately aware or the diligent service of

arteries and veins and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we know (as we know a proposition in Euclid)

to be the source and substance of the whole? At the death of every one whom we love, some fair and

honourable portion of our existence falls away, and we are dislodged from one of these dear provinces; and

they are not, perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a long series of such impoverishments, till their life and

influence narrow gradually into the meagre limit of their own spirits, and death, when he comes at last, can

NOTE. To this essay I must in honesty append a word or two of qualification; for this is one of the points

A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from particular obligations; he jogs on the footpath way,

himself pursuing butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to the advance of the human species and the

coming of the kingdom of justice and love. As he grows older, he begins to think more narrowly of man's

action in the general, and perhaps more arrogantly of his own in the particular. He has not that same

unspeakable trust in what he would have done had he been spared, seeing finally that that would have been

little; but he has a far higher notion of the blank that he will make by dying. A young man feels himself one

too many in the world; his is a painful situation: he has no calling; no obvious utility; no ties, but to his

parents. and these he is sure to disregard. I do not think that a proper allowance has been made for this true

cause of suffering in youth; but by the mere fact of a prolonged existence, we outgrow either the fact or else

the feeling. Either we become so callously accustomed to our own useless figure in the world, or else and

this, thank God, in the majority of cases we so collect about us the interest or the love of our fellows, so

multiply our effective part in the affairs of life, that we need to entertain no longer the question of our right to

And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies himself dying, will get cold comfort from the very

youthful view expressed in this essay. He, as a living man, has some to help, some to love, some to correct; it

may be, some to punish. These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon the man himself. It is he, not

another, who is one woman's son and a second woman's husband and a third woman's father. That life which

began so small, has now grown, with a myriad filaments, into the lives of others. It is not indispensable;

another will take the place and shoulder the discharged responsibility; but the better the man and the nobler

his purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret the extinction of his powers and the deletion of his

personality. To have lived a generation, is not only to have grown at home in that perplexing medium, but to

have assumed innumerable duties. To die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base, something of the

air of a betrayal. A man does not only reflect upon what he might have done in a future that is never to be his;

but beholding himself so early a deserter from the fight, he eats his heart for the good he might have done

already. To have been so useless and now to lose all hope of being useful any more there it is that death and

memory assail him. And even if mankind shall go on, founding heroic cities, practising heroic virtues, rising

steadily from strength to strength; even if his work shall be fulfilled, his friends consoled, his wife remarried

by a better than he; how shall this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a career which was his only business in

this world, which was so fitfully pursued, and which is now so ineffectively to end?

THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their

consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, and has no parallel upon earth. It outdoes all

other accidents because it is the last of them. Sometimes it leaps suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug;

sometimes it lays a regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of years. And when the business

is done, there is sore havoc made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which many subsidiary

friendships hung together. There are empty chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night. Again, in taking

away our friends, death does not take them away utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon

intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed. Hence a whole chapter of sights and customs striking

to the mind, from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of mediaeval Europe. The poorest

persons have a bit of pageant going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable;

and, in order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we must

accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door. All

this, and much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of poets, has gone a great way to put

humanity in error; nay, in many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down with every

circumstance of logic; although in real life the bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, have

As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of

death, few have less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances. We have all heard of cities in South

America built upon the side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous neighbourhood, the

inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving

gardens in the greenest corner of England. There are serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the

myrtles overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and

at any moment living ruin may leap skyhigh into the moonlight, and tumble man and his merrymaking in

the dust. In the eyes of very young people, and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably reckless

and desperate in such a picture. It seems not credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas, should

find appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to smell

of highhanded debauch when it is carried on so close to a catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems,

could hardly be relished in such circumstances without something like a defiance of the Creator. It should be

a place for nobody but hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere borndevils drowning care in a

And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the situation of these South American citizens forms only a

very pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind. This world itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in

overcrowded space, among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in contrary directions, may

very well come by a knock that would set it into explosion like a penny squib. And what, pathologically

looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards? The least of these is as

dangerous to the whole economy as the ship's powder magazine to the ship; and with every breath we

breathe, and every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in peril. If we clung as devotedly as some

philosophers pretend we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened as they make out we are, for

the subversive accident that ends it all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would follow them

into battle the bluepeter might fly at the truck, but who would climb into a seagoing ship? Think (if these

philosophers were right) with what a preparation of spirit we should affront the daily peril of the

dinnertable: a deadlier spot than any battlefield in history, where the far greater proportion of our ancestors

have miserably left their bones! What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so much more dangerous

than the wildest sea? And what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take in

life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our

contemporaries going through. By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a

mere miracle, and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that

he will never see the day. Do the old men mind it, as a matter of fact? Why, no. They were never merrier;

they have their grog at night, and tell the raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their own age,

or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived

some one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter

them like so much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and they go on, bubbling with

laughter, through years of man's age compared to which the valley at Balaklava was as safe and peaceful as a

village cricketgreen on Sunday. It may fairly be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a

much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his

Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along

the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The whole way is one wilderness of snares, and the end of it, for those

who fear the last pinch, is irrevocable ruin. And yet we go spinning through it all, like a party for the Derby.

Perhaps the reader remembers one of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he encouraged a vast

concourse of holidaymakers on to his bridge over Baiae bay; and when they were in the height of their

enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards among the company, and had them tossed into the sea. This is

no bad miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory race of man. Only, what a chequered picnic we

have of it, even while it lasts! and into what great waters, not to be crossed by any swimmer, God's pale

We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork of a gingerbeer bottle, and the earthquake swallows

us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech,

incredible, that we should think so highly of the gingerbeer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake?

The love of Life and the fear of Death are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more we

think about them. It is a wellknown fact that an immense proportion of boat accidents would never happen

if people held the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast; and yet, unless it be some martinet of a

professional mariner or some landsman with shattered nerves, every one of God's creatures makes it fast. A

We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we import into daily talk with noble

inappropriateness. We have no idea of what death is, apart from its circumstances and some of its

consequences to others; and although we have some experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has

flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess at the meaning of the word LIFE. All literature,

from Job and Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human

state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living to the Definition

of Life. And our sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapour, or a

show, or made out of the same stuff with dreams. Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at the same

work for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged over the problem, and piles of words have been

heaped one upon another into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy has the honour of laying

before us, with modest pride, her contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent Possibility of

Sensation. Truly a fine result! A man may very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, surely, not

a Permanent Possibility of Sensation! He may be afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a

club, or even an undertaker's man; but not certainly of abstract death. We may trick with the word life in its

dozen senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms of all the philosophies on earth, but one

fact remains true throughout that we do not love life, in the sense that we are greatly preoccupied about its

conservation; that we do not, properly speaking, love life at all, but living. Into the views of the least careful

there will enter some degree of providence; no man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing hour; but although

we have some anticipation of good health, good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self approval,

the sum of these anticipations does not amount to anything like a general view of life's possibilities and

issues; nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at all the most scrupulous of their personal safety. To be

deeply interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly the mixed texture of human experience,

rather leads a man to disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw. For surely the love of living is

stronger in an Alpine climber roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff fence, than in a creature

who lives upon a diet and walks a measured distance in the interest of his constitution.

There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life

to the dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be hardly decent; and melancholy unbelievers

yearning for the tomb as if it were a world too far away. Both sides must feel a little ashamed of their

performances now and again when they draw in their chairs to dinner. Indeed, a good meal and a bottle of

wine is an answer to most standard works upon the question. When a man's heart warms to his viands, he

forgets a great deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of contemplation. Death may be knocking at the

door, like the Commander's statue; we have something else in hand, thank God, and let him knock. Passing

bells are ringing all the world over. All the world over, and every hour, some one is parting company with all

his aches and ecstasies. For us also the trap is laid. But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to

entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us

if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curiosity

of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.

We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for caring about the Permanence of the Possibility, a man's head

is generally very bald, and his senses very dull, before he comes to that. Whether we regard life as a lane

leading to a dead wall a mere bag's end, as the French say or whether we think of it as a vestibule or

gymnasium, where we wait our turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; whether we

thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic poetrybooks, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look

justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount into a bathchair, as a step towards the hearse; in

each and all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion possible: that a man should stop his ears

against paralysing terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single mind. No one surely could have

recoiled with more heartache and terror from the thought of death than our respected lexicographer; and yet

we know how little it affected his conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh and lively

vein he spoke of life. Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple

brass, did not recoil before twentyseven individual cups of tea. As courage and intelligence are the two

qualities best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious

estate in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all abashed before the fact. A frank and somewhat

headlong carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in maudlin regret over the past, stamps the

And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend and a good citizen to boot. We do not go to

cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase,

has most time to consider others. That eminent chemist who took his walks abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted

wholly upon tepid milk, had all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his own digestion. So

soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a

paralysis of generous acts. The victim begins to shrink spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a

regulated temperature, and takes his morality on the principle of tin shoes and tepid milk. The care of one

important body or soul becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world begin to come thin and

faint into the parlour with the regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equably forward over blood and

rain. To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruplemonger ends by standing stockstill. Now the man who has

his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be

dashingly used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different acquaintance of the world, keeps all his

pulses going true and fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running towards anything better than

wildfire, he may shoot up and become a constellation in the end. Lord look after his health, Lord have a care

of his soul, says he; and he has at the key of the position, and swashes through incongruity and peril towards

his aim. Death is on all sides of him with pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us; unfortunate

surprises gird him round; mimmouthed friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal

synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something

pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare,

push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!" cried Nelson in his

bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain satisfaction of

living, of being about their business in some sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation tread

down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the stumblingblocks of prudence. Think of the heroism of

Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried

him through triumphantly until the end! Who, if he were wisely considerate of things at large, would ever

embark upon any work much more considerable than a halfpenny post card? Who would project a serial

novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had each fallen in midcourse? Who would find heart enough to begin to

And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this is! To forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a

regulated temperature as if that were not to die a hundred times over, and for ten years at a stretch! As if it

were not to die in one's own lifetime, and without even the sad immunities of death! As if it were not to die,

and yet be the patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but the

sensations carefully held at arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is better to

lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die

daily in the sickroom. By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he

hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week. It is not only in

finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour. A spirit goes out of the man who means

execution, which out lives the most untimely ending. All who have meant good work with their whole

hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has

beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of

mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in midcareer, laying out vast projects, and

planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should

be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does

not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an

end in sandy deltas? When the Greeks made their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I

cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in their eye. For surely, at whatever age it overtake the

man, this is to die young. Death has not been suffered to take so much as an illusion from his heart. In the

hotfit of life, atiptoe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of

the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing with him

clouds of glory, this happystarred, full blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.

IT seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world where there are so many marriages and decisive battles,

and where we all, at certain hours of the day, and with great gusto and despatch, stow a portion of victuals

finally and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And it would seem also, on a hasty view, that the

attainment of as much as possible was the one goal of man's contentious life. And yet, as regards the spirit,

this is but a semblance. We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in

an endless series. There is always a new horizon for onwardlooking men, and although we dwell on a small

planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that

our hopes are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the term of life. To be truly

happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An

aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and

which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich.

Life is only a very dull and ill directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who

have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may

very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist

with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning

with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees

the world in the most enchanted colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting: and the

man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the

possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal so compact and comprehensive that he should never

hunger any more; suppose him, at a glance, to take in all the features of the world and allay the desire for

knowledge; suppose him to do the like in any province of experience would not that man be in a poor way

One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his knapsack reads with circumspection, pausing often

to reflect, and often laying the book down to contemplate the landscape or the prints in the inn parlour; for he

fears to come to an end of his entertainment, and be left companionless on the last stages of his journey. A

young fellow recently finished the works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright, with the ten

notebooks upon Frederick the Great. "What!" cried the young fellow, in consternation, "is there no more

Carlyle? Am I left to the daily papers?" A more celebrated instance is that of Alexander, who wept bitterly

because he had no more worlds to subdue. And when Gibbon had finished the DECLINE AND FALL, he

had only a few moments of joy; and it was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labours.

Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; our hopes are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we

come to an end of nothing here below. Interests are only plucked up to sow themselves again, like mustard.

You would think, when the child was born, there would be an end to trouble; and yet it is only the beginning

of fresh anxieties; and when you have seen it through its teething and its education, and at last its marriage,

alas! it is only to have new fears, new quivering sensibilities, with every day; and the health of your children's

children grows as touching a concern as that of your own. Again, when you have married your wife, you

would think you were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you have

only ended courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning love are often difficult tasks to

overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which both

man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill. The true love story commences at the altar, when there lies

before the married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a lifelong struggle towards

an unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable, from the very fact that they are two instead of

"Of making books there is no end," complained the Preacher; and did not perceive how highly he was

praising letters as an occupation. There is no end, indeed, to making books or experiments, or to travel, or to

gathering wealth. Problem gives rise to problem. We may study for ever, and we are never as learned as we

would. We have never made a statue worthy of our dreams. And when we have discovered a continent, or

crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or another plain upon the further side. In the

infinite universe there is room for our swiftest diligence and to spare. It is not like the works of Carlyle,

which can be read to an end. Even in a corner of it, in a private park, or in the neighbourhood of a single

hamlet, the weather and the seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there for a lifetime there

There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one thing that can be perfectly attained: Death. And from

a variety of circumstances we have no one to tell us whether it be worth attaining.

A strange picture we make on our way to our chimaeras, ceaselessly marching, grudging ourselves the time

for rest; indefatigable, adventurous pioneers. It is true that we shall never reach the goal; it is even more than

probable that there is no such place; and if we lived for centuries and were endowed with the powers of a

god, we should find ourselves not much nearer what we wanted at the end. O toiling hands of mortals! O

unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some

conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little

do ye know your own blessednes; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is

THERE is one story of the wars of Rome which I have always very much envied for England. Germanicus

was going down at the head of the legions into a dangerous river on the opposite bank the woods were full

of Germans when there flew out seven great eagles which seemed to marshal the Romans on their way;

they did not pause or waver, but disappeared into the forest where the enemy lay concealed. "Forward!" cried

Germanicus, with a fine rhetorical inspiration, "Forward! and follow the Roman birds." It would be a very

heavy spirit that did not give a leap at such a signal, and a very timorous one that continued to have any doubt

of success. To appropriate the eagles as fellowcountrymen was to make imaginary allies of the forces of

nature; the Roman Empire and its military fortunes, and along with these the prospects of those individual

Roman legionaries now fording a river in Germany, looked altogether greater and more hopeful. It is a kind

of illusion easy to produce. A particular shape of cloud, the appearance of a particular star, the holiday of

some particular saint, anything in short to remind the combatants of patriotic legends or old successes, may

be enough to change the issue of a pitched battle; for it gives to the one party a feeling that Right and the

If an Englishman wishes to have such a feeling, it must be about the sea. The lion is nothing to us; he has not

been taken to the hearts of the people, and naturalised as an English emblem. We know right well that a lion

would fall foul of us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman or a Moldavian Jew, and we do not carry him

before us in the smoke of battle. But the sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene of our greatest

triumphs and dangers; and we are accustomed in lyrical strains to claim it as our own. The prostrating

experiences of foreigners between Calais and Dover have always an agreeable side to English prepossessions.

A man from Bedfordshire, who does not know one end of the ship from the other until she begins to move,

swaggers among such persons with a sense of hereditary nautical experience. To suppose yourself endowed

with natural parts for the sea because you are the countryman of Blake and mighty Nelson, is perhaps just as

unwarrantable as to imagine Scotch extraction a sufficient guarantee that you will look well in a kilt. But the

feeling is there, and seated beyond the reach of argument. We should consider ourselves unworthy of our

descent if we did not share the arrogance of our progenitors, and please ourselves with the pretension that the

sea is English. Even where it is looked upon by the guns and battlements of another nation we regard it as a

kind of English cemetery, where the bones of our seafaring fathers take their rest until the last trumpet; for I

suppose no other nation has lost as many ships, or sent as many brave fellows to the bottom.

There is nowhere such a background for heroism as the noble, terrifying, and picturesque conditions of some

of our sea fights. Hawke's battle in the tempest, and Aboukir at the moment when the French Admiral blew

up, reach the limit of what is imposing to the imagination. And our naval annals owe some of their interest to

the fantastic and beautiful appearance of old warships and the romance that invests the sea and everything

seagoing in the eyes of English lads on a halfholiday at the coast. Nay, and what we know of the misery

between decks enhances the bravery of what was done by giving it something for contrast. We like to know

that these bold and honest fellows contrived to live, and to keep bold and honest, among absurd and vile

surroundings. No reader can forget the description of the THUNDER in RODERICK RANDOM: the

disorderly tyranny; the cruelty and dirt of officers and men; deck after deck, each with some new object of

offence; the hospital, where the hammocks were huddled together with but fourteen inches space for each; the

cockpit, far under water, where, "in an intolerable stench," the spectacled steward kept the accounts of the

different messes; and the canvas enclosure, six feet square, in which Morgan made flip and salmagundi,

smoked his pipe, sang his Welsh songs, and swore his queer Welsh imprecations. There are portions of this

business on board the THUNDER over which the reader passes lightly and hurriedly, like a traveller in a

malarious country. It is easy enough to understand the opinion of Dr. Johnson: "Why, sir," he said, "no man

will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail." You would fancy any one's spirit

would die out under such an accumulation of darkness, noisomeness, and injustice, above all when he had not

come there of his own free will, but under the cutlasses and bludgeons of the pressgang. But perhaps a

watch on deck in the sharp sea air put a man on his mettle again; a battle must have been a capital relief; and

prize money, bloodily earned and grossly squandered, opened the doors of the prison for a twinkling.

Somehow or other, at least, this worst of possible lives could not overlie the spirit and gaiety of our sailors;

they did their duty as though they had some interest in the fortune of that country which so cruelly oppressed

them, they served their guns merrily when it came to fighting, and they had the readiest ear for a bold,

Most men of high destinies have highsounding names. Pym and Habakkuk may do pretty well, but they

must not think to cope with the Cromwells and Isaiahs. And you could not find a better case in point than that

of the English Admirals. Drake and Rooke and Hawke are picked names for men of execution. Frobisher,

Rodney, Boscawen, FoulWeather, Jack Byron, are all good to catch the eye in a page of a naval history.

Cloudesley Shovel is a mouthful of quaint and sounding syllables. Benbow has a bulldog quality that suits the

man's character, and it takes us back to those English archers who were his true comrades for plainness,

tenacity, and pluck. Raleigh is spirited and martial, and signifies an act of bold conduct in the field. It is

impossible to judge of Blake or Nelson, no names current among men being worthy of such heroes. But still

it is odd enough, and very appropriate in this connection, that the latter was greatly taken with his Sicilian

title. "The signification, perhaps, pleased him," says Southey; "Duke of Thunder was what in Dahomey

would have been called a STRONG NAME; it was to a sailor's taste, and certainly to no man could it be more

applicable." Admiral in itself is one of the most satisfactory of distinctions; it has a noble sound and a very

proud history; and Columbus thought so highly of it, that he enjoined his heirs to sign themselves by that title

But it is the spirit of the men, and not their names, that I wish to speak about in this paper. That spirit is truly

English; they, and not Tennyson's cottonspinners or Mr. D'Arcy Thompson's Abstract Bagman, are the true

and typical Englishmen. There may be more HEAD of bagmen in the country, but human beings are

reckoned by number only in political constitutions. And the Admirals are typical in the full force of the word.

They are splendid examples of virtue, indeed, but of a virtue in which most Englishmen can claim a moderate

share; and what we admire in their lives is a sort of apotheosis of ourselves. Almost everybody in our land,

except humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been depressed by exceptionally aesthetic

surroundings, can understand and sympathise with an Admiral or a prizefighter. I do not wish to bracket

Benbow and Tom Cribb; but, depend upon it, they are practically bracketed for admiration in the minds of

many frequenters of alehouses. If you told them about Germanicus and the eagles, or Regulus going back to

Carthage, they would very likely fall asleep; but tell them about Harry Pearce and Jem Belcher, or about

Nelson and the Nile, and they put down their pipes to listen. I have by me a copy of BOXIANA, on the

flyleaves of which a youthful member of the fancy kept a chronicle of remarkable events and an obituary of

great men. Here we find piously chronicled the demise of jockeys, watermen, and pugilists Johnny Moore,

of the Liverpool Prize Ring; Tom Spring, aged fiftysix; "Pierce Egan, senior, writer OF BOXIANA and

other sporting works" and among all these, the Duke of Wellington! If Benbow had lived in the time of this

annalist, do you suppose his name would not have been added to the glorious roll? In short, we do not all feel

warmly towards Wesley or Laud, we cannot all take pleasure in PARADISE LOST; but there are certain

common sentiments and touches of nature by which the whole nation is made to feel kinship. A little while

ago everybody, from Hazlitt and John Wilson down to the imbecile creature who scribbled his register on the

flyleaves of BOXIANA, felt a more or less shamefaced satisfaction in the exploits of prizefighters. And

the exploits of the Admirals are popular to the same degree, and tell in all ranks of society. Their sayings and

doings stir English blood like the sound of a trumpet; and if the Indian Empire, the trade of London, and all

the outward and visible ensigns of our greatness should pass away, we should still leave behind us a durable

Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own flagship, the VENERABLE, and only one other vessel, heard that

the whole Dutch fleet was putting to sea. He told Captain Hotham to anchor alongside of him in the

narrowest part of the channel, and fight his vessel till she sank. "I have taken the depth of the water," added

he, "and when the VENERABLE goes down, my flag will still fly." And you observe this is no naked Viking

in a prehistoric period; but a Scotch member of Parliament, with a smattering of the classics, a telescope, a

cocked hat of great size, and flannel underclothing. In the same spirit, Nelson went into Aboukir with six

colours flying; so that even if five were shot away, it should not be imagined he had struck. He too must

needs wear his four stars outside his Admiral's frock, to be a butt for sharpshooters. "In honour I gained

them," he said to objectors, adding with sublime illogicality, "in honour I will die with them." Captain

Douglas of the ROYAL OAK, when the Dutch fired his vessel in the Thames, sent his men ashore, but was

burned along with her himself rather than desert his post without orders. Just then, perhaps the Merry

Monarch was chasing a moth round the suppertable with the ladies of his court. When Raleigh sailed into

Cadiz, and all the forts and ships opened fire on him at once, he scorned to shoot a gun, and made answer

with a flourish of insulting trumpets. I like this bravado better than the wisest dispositions to insure victory; it

comes from the heart and goes to it. God has made nobler heroes, but he never made a finer gentleman than

Walter Raleigh. And as our Admirals were full of heroic superstitions, and had a strutting and vainglorious

style of fight, so they discovered a startling eagerness for battle, and courted war like a mistress. When the

news came to Essex before Cadiz that the attack had been decided, he threw his hat into the sea. It is in this

way that a schoolboy hears of a halfholiday; but this was a bearded man of great possessions who had just

been allowed to risk his life. Benbow could not lie still in his bunk after he had lost his leg; he must be on

deck in a basket to direct and animate the fight. I said they loved war like a mistress; yet I think there are not

many mistresses we should continue to woo under similar circumstances. Trowbridge went ashore with the

CULLODEN, and was able to take no part in the battle of the Nile. "The merits of that ship and her gallant

captain," wrote Nelson to the Admiralty, "are too well known to benefit by anything I could say. Her

misfortune was great in getting aground, WHILE HER MORE FORTUNATE COMPANIONS WERE IN

THE FULL TIDE OF HAPPINESS." This is a notable expression, and depicts the whole greathearted,

bigspoken stock of the English Admirals to a hair. It was to be "in the full tide of happiness" for Nelson to

destroy five thousand five hundred and twentyfive of his fellowcreatures, and have his own scalp torn

open by a piece of langridge shot. Hear him again at Copenhagen: "A shot through the mainmast knocked the

splinters about; and he observed to one of his officers with a smile, `It is warm work, and this may be the last

to any of us at any moment;' and then, stopping short at the gangway, added, with emotion, `BUT, MARK

I must tell one more story, which has lately been made familiar to us all, and that in one of the noblest ballads

in the English language. I had written my tame prose abstract, I shall beg the reader to believe, when I had no

notion that the sacred bard designed an immortality for Greenville. Sir Richard Greenville was ViceAdmiral

to Lord Thomas Howard, and lay off the Azores with the English squadron in 1591. He was a noted tyrant to

his crew: a dark, bullying fellow apparently; and it is related of him that he would chew and swallow

wineglasses, by way of convivial levity, till the blood ran out of his mouth. When the Spanish fleet of fifty

sail came within sight of the English, his ship, the REVENGE, was the last to weigh anchor, and was so far

circumvented by the Spaniards, that there were but two courses open either to turn her back upon the

enemy or sail through one of his squadrons. The first alternative Greenville dismissed as dishonourable to

himself, his country, and her Majesty's ship. Accordingly, he chose the latter, and steered into the Spanish

armament. Several vessels he forced to luff and fall under his lee; until, about three o'clock of the afternoon, a

great ship of three decks of ordnance took the wind out of his sails, and immediately boarded.

Thenceforward, and all night long, the REVENGE, held her own singlehanded against the Spaniards. As

one ship was beaten off, another took its place. She endured, according to Raleigh's computation, "eight

hundred shot of great artillery, besides many assaults and entries." By morning the powder was spent, the

pikes all broken, not a stick was standing, "nothing left overhead either for flight or defence;" six feet of

water in the hold; almost all the men hurt; and Greenville himself in a dying condition. To bring them to this

pass, a fleet of fifty sail had been mauling them for fifteen hours, the ADMIRAL OF THE HULKS and the

ASCENSION of Seville had both gone down alongside, and two other vessels had taken refuge on shore in a

sinking state. In Hawke's words, they had "taken a great deal of drubbing." The captain and crew thought they

had done about enough; but Greenville was not of this opinion; he gave orders to the master gunner, whom he

knew to be a fellow after his own stamp, to scuttle the REVENGE where she lay. The others, who were not

mortally wounded like the Admiral, interfered with some decision, locked the master gunner in his cabin,

after having deprived him of his sword, for he manifested an intention to kill himself if he were not to sink

the ship; and sent to the Spaniards to demand terms. These were granted. The second or third day after,

Greenville died of his wounds aboard the Spanish flagship, leaving his contempt upon the "traitors and dogs"

who had not chosen to do as he did, and engage fifty vessels, well found and fully manned, with six inferior

craft ravaged by sickness and short of stores. He at least, he said, had done his duty as he was bound to do,

Some one said to me the other day that they considered this story to be of a pestilent example. I am not

inclined to imagine we shall ever be put into any practical difficulty from a superfluity of Greenvilles. And

besides, I demur to the opinion. The worth of such actions is not a thing to be decided in a quaver of

sensibility or a flush of righteous commonsense. The man who wished to make the ballads of his country,

coveted a small matter compared to what Richard Greenville accomplished. I wonder how many people have

been inspired by this mad story, and how many battles have been actually won for England in the spirit thus

engendered. It is only with a measure of habitual foolhardiness that you can be sure, in the common run of

men, of courage on a reasonable occasion. An army or a fleet, if it is not led by quixotic fancies, will not be

led far by terror of the Provost Marshal. Even German warfare, in addition to maps and telegraphs, is not

above employing the WACHT AM RHEIN. Nor is it only in the profession of arms that such stories may do

good to a man. In this desperate and gleeful fighting, whether it is Greenville or Benbow, Hawke or Nelson,

who flies his colours in the ship, we see men brought to the test and giving proof of what we call heroic

feeling. Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my club smokingroom, that they are a prey to prodigious

heroic feelings, and that it costs them more nobility of soul to do nothing in particular, than would carry on

all the wars, by sea or land, of bellicose humanity. It may very well be so, and yet not touch the point in

question. For what I desire is to see some of this nobility brought face to face with me in an inspiriting

achievement. A man may talk smoothly over a cigar in my club smokingroom from now to the Day of

Judgment, without adding anything to mankind's treasury of illustrious and encouraging examples. It is not

over the virtues of a curateandteaparty novel, that people are abashed into high resolutions. It may be

because their hearts are crass, but to stir them properly they must have men entering into glory with some

pomp and circumstance. And that is why these stories of our seacaptains, printed, so to speak, in capitals,

and full of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than any material benefit in all the books of

political economy between Westminster and Birmingham. Greenville chewing wineglasses at table makes no

very pleasant figure, any more than a thousand other artists when they are viewed in the body, or met in

private life; but his work of art, his finished tragedy, is an eloquent performance; and I contend it ought not

only to enliven men of the sword as they go into battle, but send back merchant clerks with more heart and

There is another question which seems bound up in this; and that is Temple's problem: whether it was wise of

Douglas to burn with the ROYAL OAK? and by implication, what it was that made him do so? Many will

"To what do Caesar and Alexander owe the infinite grandeur of their renown, but to fortune? How many men

has she extinguished in the beginning of their progress, of whom we have no knowledge; who brought as

much courage to the work as they, if their adverse hap had not cut them off in the first sally of their arms?

Amongst so many and so great dangers, I do not remember to have anywhere read that Caesar was ever

wounded; a thousand have fallen in less dangers than the least of these he went through. A great many brave

actions must be expected to be performed without witness, for one that comes to some notice. A man is not

always at the top of a breach, or at the head of an army in the sight of his general, as upon a platform. He is

often surprised between the hedge and the ditch; he must run the hazard of his life against a henroost; he must

dislodge four rascally musketeers out of a barn; he must prick out single from his party, as necessity arises,

Thus far Montaigne, in a characteristic essay on GLORY. Where death is certain, as in the cases of Douglas

or Greenville, it seems all one from a personal point of view. The man who lost his life against a henroost, is

in the same pickle with him who lost his life against a fortified place of the first order. Whether he has missed

a peerage or only the corporal's stripes, it is all one if he has missed them and is quietly in the grave. It was by

a hazard that we learned the conduct of the four marines of the WAGER. There was no room for these brave

fellows in the boat, and they were left behind upon the island to a certain death. They were soldiers, they said,

and knew well enough it was their business to die; and as their comrades pulled away, they stood upon the

beach, gave three cheers, and cried "God bless the king!" Now, one or two of those who were in the boat

escaped, against all likelihood, to tell the story. That was a great thing for us; but surely it cannot, by any

possible twisting of human speech, be construed into anything great for the marines. You may suppose, if you

like, that they died hoping their behaviour would not be forgotten; or you may suppose they thought nothing

on the subject, which is much more likely. What can be the signification of the word "fame" to a private of

marines, who cannot read and knows nothing of past history beyond the reminiscences of his grandmother?

But whichever supposition you make, the fact is unchanged. They died while the question still hung in the

balance; and I suppose their bones were already white, before the winds and the waves and the humour of

Indian chiefs and Spanish governors had decided whether they were to be unknown and useless martyrs or

honoured heroes. Indeed, I believe this is the lesson: if it is for fame that men do brave actions, they are only

It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to decompose actions into little personal motives, and

explain heroism away. The Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral at heart, not by ungrateful carping,

but in a heat of admiration. But there is another theory of the personal motive in these fine sayings and

doings, which I believe to be true and wholesome. People usually do things, and suffer martyrdoms, because

they have an inclination that way. The best artist is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity, but the one

who loves the practice of his art. And instead of having a taste for being successful merchants and retiring at

thirty, some people have a taste for high and what we call heroic forms of excitement. If the Admirals courted

war like a mistress; if, as the drum beat to quarters, the sailors came gaily out of the forecastle, it is because

a fight is a period of multiplied and intense experiences, and, by Nelson's computation, worth "thousands" to

any one who has a heart under his jacket. If the marines of the WAGER gave three cheers and cried "God

bless the king," it was because they liked to do things nobly for their own satisfaction. They were giving their

lives, there was no help for that; and they made it a point of selfrespect to give them handsomely. And there

were never four happier marines in God's world than these four at that moment. If it was worth thousands to

be at the Baltic, I wish a Benthamite arithmetician would calculate how much it was worth to be one of these

four marines; or how much their story is worth to each of us who read it. And mark you, undemonstrative

men would have spoiled the situation. The finest action is the better for a piece of purple. If the soldiers of the

BIRKENHEAD had not gone down in line, or these marines of the WAGER had walked away simply into

the island, like plenty of other brave fellows in the like circumstances, my Benthamite arithmetician would

assign a far lower value to the two stories. We have to desire a grand air in our heroes; and such a knowledge

of the human stage as shall make them put the dots on their own i's, and leave us in no suspense as to when

they mean to be heroic. And hence, we should congratulate ourselves upon the fact that our Admirals were

The heroes themselves say, as often as not, that fame is their object; but I do not think that is much to the

purpose. People generally say what they have been taught to say; that was the catchword they were given in

youth to express the aims of their way of life; and men who are gaining great battles are not likely to take

much trouble in reviewing their sentiments and the words in which they were told to express them. Almost

every person, if you will believe himself, holds a quite different theory of life from the one on which he is

patently acting. And the fact is, fame may be a forethought and an afterthought, but it is too abstract an idea

to move people greatly in moments of swift and momentous decision. It is from something more immediate,

some determination of blood to the head, some trick of the fancy, that the breach is stormed or the bold word

spoken. I am sure a fellow shooting an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much thought about fame as most

commanders going into battle; and yet the action, fall out how it will, is not one of those the muse delights to

celebrate. Indeed it is difficult to see why the fellow does a thing so nameless and yet so formidable to look

at, unless on the theory that he likes it. I suspect that is why; and I suspect it is at least ten per cent of why

Lord Beaconsfield and Mr. Gladstone have debated so much in the House of Commons, and why Burnaby

THROUGH the initiative of a prominent citizen, Edinburgh has been in possession, for some autumn weeks,

of a gallery of paintings of singular merit and interest. They were exposed in the apartments of the Scotch

Academy; and filled those who are accustomed to visit the annual spring exhibition, with astonishment and a

sense of incongruity. Instead of the too common purple sunsets, and peagreen fields, and distances executed

in putty and hog's lard, he beheld, looking down upon him from the walls of room after room, a whole army

of wise, grave, humorous, capable, or beautiful countenances, painted simply and strongly by a man of

genuine instinct. It was a complete act of the Human DrawingRoom Comedy. Lords and ladies, soldiers and

doctors, hanging judges, and heretical divines, a whole generation of good society was resuscitated; and the

Scotchman of today walked about among the Scotchmen of two generations ago. The moment was well

chosen, neither too late nor too early. The people who sat for these pictures are not yet ancestors, they are still

relations. They are not yet altogether a part of the dusty past, but occupy a middle distance within cry of our

affections. The little child who looks wonderingly on his grandfather's watch in the picture, is now the

veteran Sheriff EMERITIS of Perth. And I hear a story of a lady who returned the other day to Edinburgh,

after an absence of sixty years: "I could see none of my old friends," she said, "until I went into the Raeburn

It would be difficult to say whether the collection was more interesting on the score of unity or diversity.

Where the portraits were all of the same period, almost all of the same race, and all from the same brush,

there could not fail to be many points of similarity. And yet the similarity of the handling seems to throw into

more vigorous relief those personal distinctions which Raeburn was so quick to seize. He was a born painter

of portraits. He looked people shrewdly between the eyes, surprised their manners in their face, and had

possessed himself of what was essential in their character before they had been many minutes in his studio.

What he was so swift to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas almost in the moment of conception. He had

never any difficulty, he said, about either hands or faces. About draperies or light or composition, he might

see room for hesitation or afterthought. But a face or a hand was something plain and legible. There were no

two ways about it, any more than about the person's name. And so each of his portraits are not only (in

Doctor Johnson's phrase, aptly quoted on the catalogue) "a piece of history," but a piece of biography into the

bargain. It is devoutly to be wished that all biography were equally amusing, and carried its own credentials

equally upon its face. These portraits are racier than many anecdotes, and more complete than many a volume

of sententious memoirs. You can see whether you get a stronger and clearer idea of Robertson the historian

from Raeburn's palette or Dugald Stewart's woolly and evasive periods. And then the portraits are both signed

and countersigned. For you have, first, the authority of the artist, whom you recognise as no mean critic of the

looks and manners of men; and next you have the tacit acquiescence of the subject, who sits looking out upon

you with inimitable innocence, and apparently under the impression that he is in a room by himself. For

Raeburn could plunge at once through all the constraint and embarrassment of the sitter, and present the face,

clear, open, and intelligent as at the most disengaged moments. This is best seen in portraits where the sitter

is represented in some appropriate action: Neil Gow with his fiddle, Doctor Spens shooting an arrow, or Lord

Bannatyne hearing a cause. Above all, from this point of view, the portrait of LieutenantColonel Lyon is

notable. A strange enough young man, pink, fat about the lower part of the face, with a lean forehead, a

narrow nose and a fine nostril, sits with a drawingboard upon his knees. He has just paused to render

himself account of some difficulty, to disentangle some complication of line or compare neighbouring values.

And there, without any perceptible wrinkling, you have rendered for you exactly the fixed look in the eyes,

and the unconscious compression of the mouth, that befit and signify an effort of the kind. The whole pose,

the whole expression, is absolutely direct and simple. You are ready to take your oath to it that Colonel Lyon

had no idea he was sitting for his picture, and thought of nothing in the world besides his own occupation of

Although the collection did not embrace, I understand, nearly the whole of Raeburn's works, it was too large

not to contain some that were indifferent, whether as works of art or as portraits. Certainly the standard was

remarkably high, and was wonderfully maintained, but there were one or two pictures that might have been

almost as well away one or two that seemed wanting in salt, and some that you can only hope were not

successful likenesses. Neither of the portraits of Sir Walter Scott, for instance, were very agreeable to look

upon. You do not care to think that Scott looked quite so rustic and puffy. And where is that peaked forehead

which, according to all written accounts and many portraits, was the distinguishing characteristic of his face?

Again, in spite of his own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John Brown, I cannot consider that Raeburn was

very happy in hands. Without doubt, he could paint one if he had taken the trouble to study it; but it was by

no means always that he gave himself the trouble. Looking round one of these rooms hung about with his

portraits, you were struck with the array of expressive faces, as compared with what you may have seen in

looking round a room full of living people. But it was not so with the hands. The portraits differed from each

other in face perhaps ten times as much as they differed by the hand; whereas with living people the two go

pretty much together; and where one is remarkable, the other will almost certainly not be commonplace.

One interesting portrait was that of Duncan of Camperdown. He stands in uniform beside a table, his feet

slightly straddled with the balance of an old sailor, his hand poised upon a chart by the finger tips. The mouth

is pursed, the nostril spread and drawn up, the eyebrows very highly arched. The cheeks lie along the jaw in

folds of iron, and have the redness that comes from much exposure to salt sea winds. From the whole figure,

attitude and countenance, there breathes something precise and decisive, something alert, wiry, and strong.

You can understand, from the look of him, that sense, not so much of humour, as of what is grimmest and

driest in pleasantry, which inspired his address before the fight at Camperdown. He had just overtaken the

Dutch fleet under Admiral de Winter. "Gentlemen," says he, "you see a severe winter approaching; I have

only to advise you to keep up a good fire." Somewhat of this same spirit of adamantine drollery must have

supported him in the days of the mutiny at the Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his own flagship, the

VENERABLE, and only one other vessel, and kept up active signals, as though he had a powerful fleet in the

Another portrait which irresistibly attracted the eye, was the halflength of Robert M'Queen, of Braxfield,

Lord JusticeClerk. If I know gusto in painting when I see it, this canvas was painted with rare enjoyment.

The tart, rosy, humorous look of the man, his nose like a cudgel, his face resting squarely on the jowl, has

been caught and perpetuated with something that looks like brotherly love. A peculiarly subtle expression

haunts the lower part, sensual and incredulous, like that of a man tasting good Bordeaux with half a fancy it

has been somewhat too long uncorked. From under the pendulous eyelids of old age the eyes look out with a

halfyouthful, halffrosty twinkle. Hands, with no pretence to distinction, are folded on the judge's stomach.

So sympathetically is the character conceived by the portrait painter, that it is hardly possible to avoid some

movement of sympathy on the part of the spectator. And sympathy is a thing to be encouraged, apart from

humane considerations, because it supplies us with the materials for wisdom. It is probably more instructive

to entertain a sneaking kindness for any unpopular person, and, among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, than to

give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation against his abstract vices. He was the last judge on the

Scotch bench to employ the pure Scotch idiom. His opinions, thus given in Doric, and conceived in a lively,

rugged, conversational style, were full of point and authority. Out of the bar, or off the bench, he was a

convivial man, a lover of wine, and one who "shone peculiarly" at tavern meetings. He has left behind him an

unrivalled reputation for rough and cruel speech; and to this day his name smacks of the gallows. It was he

who presided at the trials of Muir and Skirving in 1793 and 1794; and his appearance on these occasions was

scarcely cut to the pattern of today. His summing up on Muir began thus the reader must supply for

himself "the growling, blacksmith's voice" and the broad Scotch accent: "Now this is the question for

consideration Is the panel guilty of sedition, or is he not? Now, before this can be answered, two things

must be attended to that require no proof: FIRST, that the British constitution is the best that ever was since

the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it better." It's a pretty fair start, is it not, for a political

trial? A little later, he has occasion to refer to the relations of Muir with "those wretches," the French. "I

never liked the French all my days," said his lordship, "but now I hate them." And yet a little further on: "A

government in any country should be like a corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed

interest, which alone has a right to be represented. As for the rabble who have nothing but personal property,

what hold has the nation of them? They may pack up their property on their backs, and leave the country in

the twinkling of an eye." After having made profession of sentiments so cynically antipopular as these,

when the trials were at an end, which was generally about midnight, Braxfield would walk home to his house

in George Square with no better escort than an easy conscience. I think I see him getting his cloak about his

shoulders, and, with perhaps a lantern in one hand, steering his way along the streets in the mirk January

night. It might have been that very day that Skirving had defied him in these words: "It is altogether

unavailing for your lordship to menace me; for I have long learned to fear not the face of man;" and I can

fancy, as Braxfield reflected on the number of what he called GRUMBLETONIANS in Edinburgh, and of

how many of them must bear special malice against so upright and inflexible a judge, nay, and might at that

very moment be lurking in the mouth of a dark close with hostile intent I can fancy that he indulged in a

sour smile, as he reflected that he also was not especially afraid of men's faces or men's fists, and had hitherto

found no occasion to embody this insensibility in heroic words. For if he was an inhumane old gentleman

(and I am afraid it is a fact that he was inhumane), he was also perfectly intrepid. You may look into the

queer face of that portrait for as long as you will, but you will not see any hole or corner for timidity to enter

Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if I were even to name half of the portraits that were remarkable

for their execution, or interesting by association. There was one picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane Hill,

which you might palm off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by, you saw the white head of John

Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman who, playing with pieces of cork on his own diningtable, invented

modern naval warfare. There was that portrait of Neil Gow, to sit for which the old fiddler walked daily

through the streets of Edinburgh arm in arm with the Duke of Athole. There was good Harry Erskine, with his

satirical nose and upper lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to pop out; Hutton the geologist, in

quakerish raiment, and looking altogether trim and narrow, and as if he cared more about fossils than young

ladies; fullblown John Robieson, in hyperbolical red dressinggown, and, every inch of him, a fine old man

of the world; Constable the publisher, upright beside a table, and bearing a corporation with commercial

dignity; Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, if ever anybody heard a cause since the world began; Lord Newton

just awakened from clandestine slumber on the bench; and the second President Dundas, with every feature

so fat that he reminds you, in his wig, of some droll old court officer in an illustrated nursery storybook, and

yet all these fat features instinct with meaning, the fat lips curved and compressed, the nose combining

somehow the dignity of a beak with the good nature of a bottle, and the very double chin with an air of

intelligence and insight. And all these portraits are so pat and telling, and look at you so spiritedly from the

walls, that, compared with the sort of living people one sees about the streets, they are as bright new

sovereigns to fishy and obliterated sixpences. Some disparaging thoughts upon our own generation could

hardly fail to present themselves; but it is perhaps only the SACER VATES who is wanting; and we also,

painted by such a man as Carolus Duran, may look in holiday immortality upon our children and

Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are by no means of the same order of merit. No one, of course, could be

insensible to the presence of Miss Janet Suttie or Mrs. Campbell of Possil. When things are as pretty as that,

criticism is out of season. But, on the whole, it is only with women of a certain age that he can be said to have

succeeded, in at all the same sense as we say he succeeded with men. The younger women do not seem to be

made of good flesh and blood. They are not painted in rich and unctuous touches. They are dry and

diaphanous. And although young ladies in Great Britain are all that can be desired of them, I would fain hope

they are not quite so much of that as Raeburn would have us believe. In all these pretty faces, you miss

character, you miss fire, you miss that spice of the devil which is worth all the prettiness in the world; and

what is worst of all, you miss sex. His young ladies are not womanly to nearly the same degree as his men are

masculine; they are so in a negative sense; in short, they are the typical young ladies of the male novelist.

To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with young and pretty sitters; or he had stupefied himself with

sentimentalities; or else (and here is about the truth of it) Raeburn and the rest of us labour under an obstinate

blindness in one direction, and know very little more about women after all these centuries than Adam when

he first saw Eve. This is all the more likely, because we are by no means so unintelligent in the matter of old

women. There are some capital old women, it seems to me, in books written by men. And Raeburn has some,

such as Mrs. Colin Campbell, of Park, or the anonymous "Old lady with a large cap," which are done in the

same frank, perspicacious spirit as the very best of his men. He could look into their eyes without trouble; and

he was not withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from recognising what he saw there and unsparingly

putting it down upon the canvas. But where people cannot meet without some confusion and a good deal of

involuntary humbug, and are occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very different vein of thought,

there cannot be much room for intelligent study nor much result in the shape of genuine comprehension.

Even women, who understand men so well for practical purposes, do not know them well enough for the

purposes of art. Take even the very best of their male creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will

find he has an equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he has a comb at the back of his head. Of

course, no woman will believe this, and many men will be so very polite as to humour their incredulity.

THE regret we have for our childhood is not wholly justifiable: so much a man may lay down without fear of

public ribaldry; for although we shake our heads over the change, we are not unconscious of the manifold

advantages of our new state. What we lose in generous impulse, we more than gain in the habit of generously

watching others; and the capacity to enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at soldiers.

Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no longer see the devil in the bedcurtains nor lie awake to

listen to the wind. We go to school no more; and if we have only exchanged one drudgery for another (which

is by no means sure), we are set free for ever from the daily fear of chastisement. And yet a great change has

overtaken us; and although we do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we take our pleasure differently. We need

pickles nowadays to make Wednesday's cold mutton please our Friday's appetite; and I can remember the

time when to call it red venison, and tell myself a hunter's story, would have made it more palatable than the

best of sauces. To the grown person, cold mutton is cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology

ever invented by man will make it better or worse to him; the broad fact, the clamant reality, of the mutton

carries away before it such seductive figments. But for the child it is still possible to weave an enchantment

over eatables; and if he has but read of a dish in a storybook, it will be heavenly manna to him for a week.

If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and exercise, if he is not something positive in his tastes, it

means he has a feeble body and should have some medicine; but children may be pure spirits, if they will,

and take their enjoyment in a world of moonshine. Sensation does not count for so much in our first years as

afterwards; something of the swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us; we see and touch and hear

through a sort of golden mist. Children, for instance, are able enough to see, but they have no great faculty for

looking; they do not use their eyes for the pleasure of using them, but for byends of their own; and the

things I call to mind seeing most vividly, were not beautiful in themselves, but merely interesting or enviable

to me as I thought they might be turned to practical account in play. Nor is the sense of touch so clean and

poignant in children as it is in a man. If you will turn over your old memories, I think the sensations of this

sort you remember will be somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a blunt, general sense of heat

on summer days, or a blunt, general sense of wellbeing in bed. And here, of course, you will understand

pleasurable sensations; for overmastering pain the most deadly and tragical element in life, and the true

commander of man's soul and body alas! pain has its own way with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant,

upon the fairy garden where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely than it rules upon the field of battle,

or sends the immortal war god whimpering to his father; and innocence, no more than philosophy, can

protect us from this sting. As for taste, when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated sugar which delight

a youthful palate, "it is surely no very cynical asperity" to think taste a character of the maturer growth. Smell

and hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many scents, many voices, and a great deal of spring

singing in the woods. But hearing is capable of vast improvement as a means of pleasure; and there is all the

world between gaping wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the emotion with which a man listens to

At the same time, and step by step with this increase in the definition and intensity of what we feel which

accompanies our growing age, another change takes place in the sphere of intellect, by which all things are

transformed and seen through theories and associations as through coloured windows. We make to ourselves

day by day, out of history, and gossip, and economical speculations, and God knows what, a medium in

which we walk and through which we look abroad. We study shop windows with other eyes than in our

childhood, never to wonder, not always to admire, but to make and modify our little incongruous theories

about life. It is no longer the uniform of a soldier that arrests our attention; but perhaps the flowing carriage

of a woman, or perhaps a countenance that has been vividly stamped with passion and carries an adventurous

story written in its lines. The pleasure of surprise is passed away; sugarloaves and watercarts seem mighty

tame to encounter; and we walk the streets to make romances and to sociologise. Nor must we deny that a

good many of us walk them solely for the purposes of transit or in the interest of a livelier digestion. These,

indeed, may look back with mingled thoughts upon their childhood, but the rest are in a better case; they

know more than when they were children, they understand better, their desires and sympathies answer more

nimbly to the provocation of the senses, and their minds are brimming with interest as they go about the

According to my contention, this is a flight to which children cannot rise. They are wheeled in perambulators

or dragged about by nurses in a pleasing stupor. A vague, faint, abiding, wonderment possesses them. Here

and there some specially remarkable circumstance, such as a watercart or a guardsman, fairly penetrates into

the seat of thought and calls them, for half a moment, out of themselves; and you may see them, still towed

forward sideways by the inexorable nurse as by a sort of destiny, but still staring at the bright object in their

wake. It may be some minutes before another such moving spectacle reawakens them to the world in which

they dwell. For other children, they almost invariably show some intelligent sympathy. "There is a fine fellow

making mud pies," they seem to say; "that I can understand, there is some sense in mud pies." But the doings

of their elders, unless where they are speakingly picturesque or recommend themselves by the quality of

being easily imitable, they let them go over their heads (as we say) without the least regard. If it were not for

this perpetual imitation, we should be tempted to fancy they despised us outright, or only considered us in the

light of creatures brutally strong and brutally silly; among whom they condescended to dwell in obedience

like a philosopher at a barbarous court. At times, indeed, they display an arrogance of disregard that is truly

staggering. Once, when I was groaning aloud with physical pain, a young gentleman came into the room and

nonchalantly inquired if I had seen his bow and arrow. He made no account of my groans, which he accepted,

as he had to accept so much else, as a piece of the inexplicable conduct of his elders; and like a wise young

gentleman, he would waste no wonder on the subject. Those elders, who care so little for rational enjoyment,

and are even the enemies of rational enjoyment for others, he had accepted without understanding and

We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes until the bucklers ring, ride far and fast,

marry, fall, and die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly what a child

cannot do, or does not do, at least, when he can find anything else. He works all with lay figures and stage

properties. When his story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of a sword and have a

setto with a piece of furniture, until he is out of breath. When he comes to ride with the king's pardon, he

must bestride a chair, which he will so hurry and belabour and on which he will so furiously demean himself,

that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody with spurring, at least fiery red with haste. If his romance

involves an accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in person about the chest of drawers and fall bodily upon

the carpet, before his imagination is satisfied. Lead soldiers, dolls, all toys, in short, are in the same category

and answer the same end. Nothing can stagger a child's faith; he accepts the clumsiest substitutes and can

swallow the most staring incongruities. The chair he has just been besieging as a castle, or valiantly cutting to

the ground as a dragon, is taken away for the accommodation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing abashed;

he can skirmish by the hour with a stationary coalscuttle; in the midst of the enchanted pleasance, he can

see, without sensible shock, the gardener soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner. He can make

abstraction of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he puts his eyes into his pocket, just as we hold our

noses in an unsavoury lane. And so it is, that although the ways of children cross with those of their elders in

a hundred places daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as lie in the same element. So may

the telegraph wires intersect the line of the highroad, or so might a landscape painter and a bagman visit the

People struck with these spectacles cry aloud about the power of imagination in the young. Indeed there may

be two words to that. It is, in some ways, but a pedestrian fancy that the child exhibits. It is the grown people

who make the nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve the text. One out of a dozen reasons

why ROBINSON CRUSOE should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their level in this matter to a

nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts and had, in so many words, to PLAY at a great variety of

professions; and then the book is all about tools, and there is nothing that delights a child so much. Hammers

and saws belong to a province of life that positively calls for imitation. The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of

the most ancient Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are successively simulated to the running

burthen "On a cold and frosty morning," gives a good instance of the artistic taste in children. And this need

for overt action and lay figures testifies to a defect in the child's imagination which prevents him from

carrying out his novels in the privacy of his own heart. He does not yet know enough of the world and men.

His experience is incomplete. That stagewardrobe and sceneroom that we call the memory is so ill

provided, that he can overtake few combinations and body out few stories, to his own content, without some

external aid. He is at the experimental stage; he is not sure how one would feel in certain circumstances; to

make sure, he must come as near trying it as his means permit. And so here is young heroism with a wooden

sword, and mothers practice their kind vocation over a bit of jointed stick. It may be laughable enough just

now; but it is these same people and these same thoughts, that not long hence, when they are on the theatre of

life, will make you weep and tremble. For children think very much the same thoughts and dream the same

dreams, as bearded men and marriageable women. No one is more romantic. Fame and honour, the love of

young men and the love of mothers, the business man's pleasure in method, all these and others they

anticipate and rehearse in their play hours. Upon us, who are further advanced and fairly dealing with the

threads of destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a hint for their own mimetic reproduction.

Two children playing at soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of the scarlet beings whom

both are busy imitating. This is perhaps the greatest oddity of all. "Art for art" is their motto; and the doings

of grown folk are only interesting as the raw material for play. Not Theophile Gautier, not Flaubert, can look

more callously upon life, or rate the reproduction more highly over the reality; and they will parody an

execution, a deathbed, or the funeral of the young man of Nain, with all the cheerfulness in the world.

The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, in conscious art, which, though it be derived from

play, is itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely upon philosophical interests beyond the

scope of childhood. It is when we make castles in the air and personate the leading character in our own

romances, that we return to the spirit of our first years. Only, there are several reasons why the spirit is no

longer so agreeable to indulge. Nowadays, when we admit this personal element into our divagations we are

apt to stir up uncomfortable and sorrowful memories, and remind ourselves sharply of old wounds. Our

daydreams can no longer lie all in the air like a story in the ARABIAN NIGHTS; they read to us rather like

the history of a period in which we ourselves had taken part, where we come across many unfortunate

passages and find our own conduct smartly reprimanded. And then the child, mind you, acts his parts. He

does not merely repeat them to himself; he leaps, he runs, and sets the blood agog over all his body. And so

his play breathes him; and he no sooner assumes a passion than he gives it vent. Alas! when we betake

ourselves to our intellectual form of play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed, we rouse many hot

feelings for which we can find no outlet. Substitutes are not acceptable to the mature mind, which desires the

thing itself; and even to rehearse a triumphant dialogue with one's enemy, although it is perhaps the most

satisfactory piece of play still left within our reach, is not entirely satisfying, and is even apt to lead to a visit

In the child's world of dim sensation, play is all in all. "Making believe" is the gist of his whole life, and he

cannot so much as take a walk except in character. I could not learn my alphabet without some suitable

MISEENSCENE, and had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down to my book. Will you

kindly question your memory, and find out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith and soberness,

and for how much you had to cheat yourself with some invention? I remember, as though it were yesterday,

the expansion of spirit, the dignity and selfreliance, that came with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even

when there was none to see. Children are even content to forego what we call the realities, and prefer the

shadow to the substance. When they might be speaking intelligibly together, they chatter senseless gibberish

by the hour, and are quite happy because they are making believe to speak French. I have said already how

even the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be gulled and led by the nose with the fag end of an old

song. And it goes deeper than this: when children are together even a meal is felt as an interruption in the

business of life; and they must find some imaginative sanction, and tell themselves some sort of story, to

account for, to colour, to render entertaining, the simple processes of eating and drinking. What wonderful

fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern upon teacups! from which there followed a code of rules

and a whole world of excitement, until teadrinking began to take rank as a game. When my cousin and I

took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven the course of the meal. He ate his with sugar, and

explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and explained it to be a

country suffering gradual inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still

unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived

in cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious,

as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how in fine, the

food was of altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it

with these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting moments I ever had over a meal, were in the case of calves'

feet jelly. It was hardly possible not to believe and you may be sure, so far from trying, I did all I could to

favour the illusion that some part of it was hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the

secret tabernacle of the golden rock. There, might some miniature RED BEARD await his hour; there, might

one find the treasures of the FORTY THIEVES, and bewildered Cassim beating about the walls. And so I

quarried on slowly, with bated breath, savouring the interest. Believe me, I had little palate left for the jelly;

and though I preferred the taste when I took cream with it, I used often to go without, because the cream

Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with right minded children. It is thus that hideandseek has so

pre eminent a sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of romance, and the actions and the excitement to which it

gives rise lend themselves to almost any sort of fable. And thus cricket, which is a mere matter of dexterity,

palpably about nothing and for no end, often fails to satisfy infantile craving. It is a game, if you like, but not

a game of play. You cannot tell yourself a story about cricket; and the activity it calls forth can be justified on

no rational theory. Even football, although it admirably simulates the tug and the ebb and flow of battle, has

presented difficulties to the mind of young sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at least one little boy

who was mightily exercised about the presence of the ball, and had to spirit himself up, whenever he came to

play, with an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a sort of talisman bandied about in

To think of such a frame of mind, is to become disquieted about the bringing up of children. Surely they

dwell in a mythological epoch, and are not the contemporaries of their parents. What can they think of them?

what can they make of these bearded or petticoated giants who look down upon their games? who move upon

a cloudy Olympus, following unknown designs apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the tenderest

solicitude for children, and yet every now and again reach down out of their altitude and terribly vindicate the

prerogatives of age? Off goes the child, corporally smarting, but morally rebellious. Were there ever such

unthinkable deities as parents? I would give a great deal to know what, in nine cases out of ten, is the child's

unvarnished feeling. A sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at best very feeble; above all, I

should imagine, a sense of terror for the untried residue of mankind go to make up the attraction that he feels.

No wonder, poor little heart, with such a weltering world in front of him, if he clings to the hand he knows!

The dread irrationality of the whole affair, as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to forget. "O,

why," I remember passionately wondering, "why can we not all be happy and devote ourselves to play?" And

when children do philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much the same purpose.

One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of these considerations; that whatever we are to expect at the hands

of children, it should not be any peddling exactitude about matters of fact. They walk in a vain show, and

among mists and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and unconcerned about realities; speech is a

difficult art not wholly learned; and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach them what we

mean by abstract truthfulness. When a bad writer is inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of

years, we charge him with incompetence and not with dishonesty. And why not extend the same allowance to

imperfect speakers? Let a stockbroker be dead stupid about poetry, or a poet inexact in the details of business,

and we excuse them heartily from blame. But show us a miserable, unbreeched, human entity, whose whole

profession it is to take a tub for a fortified town and a shavingbrush for the deadly stiletto, and who passes

threefourths of his time in a dream and the rest in open selfdeception, and we expect him to be as nice

upon a matter of fact as a scientific expert bearing evidence. Upon my heart, I think it less than decent. You

do not consider how little the child sees, or how swift he is to weave what he has seen into bewildering

fiction; and that he cares no more for what you call truth, than you for a gingerbread dragoon.

I am reminded, as I write, that the child is very inquiring as to the precise truth of stories. But indeed this is a

very different matter, and one bound up with the subject of play, and the precise amount of playfulness, or

playability, to be looked for in the world. Many such burning questions must arise in the course of nursery

education. Among the fauna of this planet, which already embraces the pretty soldier and the terrifying Irish

beggarman, is, or is not, the child to expect a Bluebeard or a Cormoran? Is he, or is he not, to look out for

magicians, kindly and potent? May he, or may he not, reasonably hope to be cast away upon a desert island,

or turned to such diminutive proportions that he can live on equal terms with his lead soldiery, and go a

cruise in his own toy schooner? Surely all these are practical questions to a neophyte entering upon life with a

view to play. Precision upon such a point, the child can understand. But if you merely ask him of his past

behaviour, as to who threw such a stone, for instance, or struck such and such a match; or whether he had

looked into a parcel or gone by a forbidden path, why, he can see no moment in the inquiry, and it is ten to

one, he has already half forgotten and half bemused himself with subsequent imaginings.

It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland, where they figure so prettily pretty like flowers

and innocent like dogs. They will come out of their gardens soon enough, and have to go into offices and the

witnessbox. Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent! Let them doze among their playthings yet a

little! for who knows what a rough, warfaring existence lies before them in the future?

IT must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of

seeing the country. There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as good; and none more vivid, in spite of

canting dilettantes, than from a railway train. But landscape on a walking tour is quite accessory. He who is

indeed of the brotherhood does not voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain jolly humours of the

hope and spirit with which the march begins at morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the evening's

rest. He cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack on, or takes it off, with more delight. The excitement of the

departure puts him in key for that of the arrival. Whatever he does is not only a reward in itself, but will be

further rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure in an endless chain. It is this that so few

can understand; they will either be always lounging or always at five miles an hour; they do not play off the

one against the other, prepare all day for the evening, and all evening for the next day. And, above all, it is

here that your overwalker fails of comprehension. His heart rises against those who drink their curacoa in

liqueur glasses, when he himself can swill it in a brown john. He will not believe that the flavour is more

delicate in the smaller dose. He will not believe that to walk this unconscionable distance is merely to stupefy

and brutalise himself, and come to his inn, at night, with a sort of frost on his five wits, and a starless night of

darkness in his spirit. Not for him the mild luminous evening of the temperate walker! He has nothing left of

man but a physical need for bedtime and a double nightcap; and even his pipe, if he be a smoker, will be

savourless and disenchanted. It is the fate of such an one to take twice as much trouble as is needed to obtain

happiness, and miss the happiness in the end; he is the man of the proverb, in short, who goes further and

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone. If you go in a company, or even in

pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but name; it is something else and more in the nature of a

picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be

able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your

own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And then you must be

open to all impressions and let your thoughts take colour from what you see. You should be as a pipe for any

wind to play upon. "I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of walking and talking at the same time. When I am

in the country I wish to vegetate like the country," which is the gist of all that can be said upon the matter.

There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the morning. And so

long as a man is reasoning he cannot surrender himself to that fine intoxication that comes of much motion in

the open air, that begins in a sort of dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that passes

During the first day or so of any tour there are moments of bitterness, when the traveller feels more than

coldly towards his knapsack, when he is half in a mind to throw it bodily over the hedge and, like Christian

on a similar occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing." And yet it soon acquires a property of easiness. It

becomes magnetic; the spirit of the journey enters into it. And no sooner have you passed the straps over your

shoulder than the lees of sleep are cleared from you, you pull yourself together with a shake, and fall at once

into your stride. And surely, of all possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is the best. Of course,

if he WILL keep thinking of his anxieties, if he WILL open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk armin

arm with the hag why, wherever he is, and whether he walk fast or slow, the chances are that he will not be

happy. And so much the more shame to himself! There are perhaps thirty men setting forth at that same hour,

and I would lay a large wager there is not another dull face among the thirty. It would be a fine thing to

follow, in a coat of darkness, one after another of these wayfarers, some summer morning, for the first few

miles upon the road. This one, who walks fast, with a keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated in his own

mind; he is up at his loom, weaving and weaving, to set the landscape to words. This one peers about, as he

goes, among the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the dragonflies; he leans on the gate of the pasture,

and cannot look enough upon the complacent kine. And here comes another, talking, laughing, and

gesticulating to himself. His face changes from time to time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger

clouds his forehead. He is composing articles, delivering orations, and conducting the most impassioned

interviews, by the way. A little farther on, and it is as like as not he will begin to sing. And well for him,

supposing him to be no great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid peasant at a corner; for on such

an occasion, I scarcely know which is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer the confusion of

your troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of your clown. A sedentary population, accustomed, besides, to the

strange mechanical bearing of the common tramp, can in no wise explain to itself the gaiety of these

passersby. I knew one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic, because, although a fullgrown person

with a red beard, he skipped as he went like a child. And you would be astonished if I were to tell you all the

grave and learned heads who have confessed to me that, when on walking tours, they sang and sang very ill

and had a pair of red ears when, as described above, the inauspicious peasant plumped into their arms from

round a corner. And here, lest you should think I am exaggerating, is Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay

ON GOING A JOURNEY, which is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who have not read it:

"Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road

before me, and a three hours' march to dinner and then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on

Bravo! After that adventure of my friend with the policeman, you would not have cared, would you, to

publish that in the first person? But we have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pretend to be

as dull and foolish as our neighbours. It was not so with Hazlitt. And notice how learned he is (as, indeed,

throughout the essay) in the theory of walking tours. He is none of your athletic men in purple stockings, who

walk their fifty miles a day: three hours' march is his ideal. And then he must have a winding road, the

Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, one thing in the great master's practice that seems to

me not wholly wise. I do not approve of that leaping and running. Both of these hurry the respiration; they

both shake up the brain out of its glorious openair confusion; and they both break the pace. Uneven walking

is not so agreeable to the body, and it distracts and irritates the mind. Whereas, when once you have fallen

into an equable stride, it requires no conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents you from

thinking earnestly of anything else. Like knitting, like the work of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises

and sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind. We can think of this or that, lightly and laughingly, as a

child thinks, or as we think in a morning dose; we can make puns or puzzle out acrostics, and trifle in a

thousand ways with words and rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to gather ourselves

together for an effort, we may sound the trumpet as loud and long as we please; the great barons of the mind

will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one, at home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on

In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much variance in the mood. From the exhilaration of the start,

to the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly great. As the day goes on, the traveller moves from

the one extreme towards the other. He becomes more and more incorporated with the material landscape, and

the openair drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts along the road, and sees

everything about him, as in a cheerful dream. The first is certainly brighter, but the second stage is the more

peaceful. A man does not make so many articles towards the end, nor does he laugh aloud; but the purely

animal pleasures, the sense of physical wellbeing, the delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles

tighten down the thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and bring him to his destination still

Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You come to a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep

ways meet under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink

into yourself, and the birds come round and look at you; and your smoke dissipates upon the afternoon under

the blue dome of heaven; and the sun lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns

aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an evil conscience. You may dally as long as you

like by the roadside. It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and

watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I

was going to say, to live for ever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a

summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy. I know a

village where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of the days of the week than by a sort of

instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of the month, and she is

generally wrong; and if people were aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of

spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede

out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the

hours out each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a wager. And all these foolish pilgrims

would each bring his own misery along with him, in a watchpocket! It is to be noticed, there were no clocks

and watches in the muchvaunted days before the flood. It follows, of course, there were no appointments,

and punctuality was not yet thought upon. "Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says

Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a

modern man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of life he

has still a flaw at heart, he still has his business habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are more

mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost free.

But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour comes. There are no such pipes to be smoked as those

that follow a good day's march; the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry and

aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you will own there was never such grog;

at every sip a jocund tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If you read a book

and you will never do so save by fits and starts you find the language strangely racy and harmonious; words

take a new meaning; single sentences possess the ear for half an hour together; and the writer endears himself

to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence of sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had written

yourself in a dream. To all we have read on such occasions we look back with special favour. "It was on the

10th of April, 1798," says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, "that I sat down to a volume of the new

HELOISE, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." I should wish to quote more,

for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume

of Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocketbook on such a journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs;

If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset,

or lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that you

taste Joviality to the full significance of that audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel

so clean and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever you do is done with pride and

a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a

hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to play its

part freely, as in a child or a man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provincial

humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now grave and beautiful like an old

Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and surly weather imprisons you by the fire. You

may remember how Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been "happy

thinking." It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes,

and haunted, even at night, by flaming dialplates. For we are all so busy, and have so many faroff projects

to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no

time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when

we must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed world for most of us, when we find we

can pass the hours without discontent and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to be doing, to be writing,

to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget

that one thing, of which these are but the parts namely, to live. We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to

and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would

not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking. To sit still and contemplate, to

remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be

everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to remain where and what you are is not this to

know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness? After all, it is not they who carry flags, but they

who look upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun of the procession. And once you are at that, you

are in the very humour of all social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big, empty words. If you ask

yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you go back into that

kingdom of light imaginations, which seem so vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth, and so

momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic

stars, cannot stop to split differences between two degrees of the infinitesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe

You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into the darkness, your body full of delicious

pains, your mind enthroned in the seventh circle of content; when suddenly the mood changes, the

weathercock goes about, and you ask yourself one question more: whether, for the interval, you have been

the wisest philosopher or the most egregious of donkeys? Human experience is not yet able to reply; but at

least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the kingdoms of the earth. And whether it was

wise or foolish, tomorrow's travel will carry you, body and mind, into some different parish of the infinite.

THE world in which we live has been variously said and sung by the most ingenious poets and philosophers:

these reducing it to formulae and chemical ingredients, those striking the lyre in highsounding measures for

the handiwork of God. What experience supplies is of a mingled tissue, and the choosing mind has much to

reject before it can get together the materials of a theory. Dew and thunder, destroying Atilla and the Spring

lambkins, belong to an order of contrasts which no repetition can assimilate. There is an uncouth, outlandish

strain throughout the web of the world, as from a vexatious planet in the house of life. Things are not

congruous and wear strange disguises: the consummate flower is fostered out of dung, and after nourishing

itself awhile with heaven's delicate distillations, decays again into indistinguishable soil; and with Caesar's

ashes, Hamlet tells us, the urchins make dirt pies and filthily besmear their countenance. Nay, the kindly

shine of summer, when tracked home with the scientific spyglass, is found to issue from the most portentous

nightmare of the universe the great, conflagrant sun: a world of hell's squibs, tumultuary, roaring aloud,

inimical to life. The sun itself is enough to disgust a human being of the scene which he inhabits; and you

would not fancy there was a green or habitable spot in a universe thus awfully lighted up. And yet it is by the

blaze of such a conflagration, to which the fire of Rome was but a spark, that we do all our fiddling, and hold

The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed;

now by the woodside on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until he charmed the hearts of upland

ploughmen. And the Greeks, in so figuring, uttered the last word of human experience. To certain

smokedried spirits matter and motion and elastic aethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled

professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all ductile and congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all

the classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph; goatfooted, with a gleeful and an angry look, the type of the

shaggy world: and in every wood, if you go with a spirit properly prepared, you shall hear the note of his

For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; where the salt and tumbling sea receives clear rivers

running from among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel. What is it

the birds sing among the trees in pairingtime? What means the sound of the rain falling far and wide upon

the leafy forest? To what tune does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning, and the bright

fish are heaped inside the boat? These are all airs upon Pan's pipe; he it was who gave them breath in the

exultation of his heart, and gleefully modulated their outflow with his lips and fingers. The coarse mirth of

herdsmen, shaking the dells with laughter and striking out high echoes from the rock; the tune of moving feet

in the lamplit city, or on the smooth ballroom floor; the hooves of many horses, beating the wide pastures in

alarm; the song of hurrying rivers; the colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live touch of hands; and the

voice of things, and their significant look, and the renovating influence they breathe forth these are his

joyful measures, to which the whole earth treads in choral harmony. To this music the young lambs bound as

to a tabor, and the London shopgirl skips rudely in the dance. For it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts;

and to look on the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all created things. Some are vocal under

a good influence, are pleasing whenever they are pleased, and hand on their happiness to others, as a child

who, looking upon lovely things, looks lovely. Some leap to the strains with unapt foot, and make a halting

figure in the universal dance. And some, like sour spectators at the play, receive the music into their hearts

with an unmoved countenance, and walk like strangers through the general rejoicing. But let him feign never

so carefully, there is not a man but has his pulses shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and sets the

Alas if that were all! But oftentimes the air is changed; and in the screech of the night wind, chasing navies,

subverting the tall ships and the rooted cedar of the hills; in the random deadly levin or the fury of headlong

floods, we recognise the "dread foundation" of life and the anger in Pan's heart. Earth wages open war against

her children, and under her softest touch hides treacherous claws. The cool waters invite us in to drown; the

domestic hearth burns up in the hour of sleep, and makes an end of all. Everything is good or bad, helpful or

deadly, not in itself, but by its circumstances. For a few bright days in England the hurricane must break forth

and the North Sea pay a toll of populous ships. And when the universal music has led lovers into the paths of

dalliance, confident of Nature's sympathy, suddenly the air shifts into a minor, and death makes a clutch from

his ambuscade below the bed of marriage. For death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and

into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's

corpse. It is no wonder, with so traitorous a scheme of things, if the wise people who created for us the idea

of Pan thought that of all fears the fear of him was the most terrible, since it embraces all. And still we

preserve the phrase: a panic terror. To reckon dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat that

runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold back the hand from the rose because of the thorn,

and from life because of death: this it is to be afraid of Pan. Highly respectable citizens who flee life's

pleasures and responsibilities and keep, with upright hat, upon the midway of custom, avoiding the right hand

and the left, the ecstasies and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they could hear their attitude

mythologically expressed, and knew themselves as toothchattering ones, who flee from Nature because they

fear the hand of Nature's God! Shrilly sound Pan's pipes; and behold the banker instantly concealed in the

There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation

of the sum of man's experience. Sometimes the mood is brought about by laughter at the humorous side of

life, as when, abstracting ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, or seated in ships and

speedy trains, with the planet all the while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all their hurry, they

travel backforemost through the universe of space. Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and

sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least, there will always be hours when we refuse to be put off by the feint

of explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead some palpitating image of our estate, that shall

represent the troubled and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art.

Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared

to the reality of which it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the

earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and

Romance herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back to the old myth, and hear the

goatfooted piper making the music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and when a glen invites

our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our hearts quail at the

thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.

CITIES given, the problem was to light them. How to conduct individual citizens about the burgesswarren,

when once heaven had withdrawn its leading luminary? or since we live in a scientific age when once our

spinning planet has turned its back upon the sun? The moon, from time to time, was doubtless very helpful;

the stars had a cheery look among the chimneypots; and a cresset here and there, on church or citadel,

produced a fine pictorial effect, and, in places where the ground lay unevenly, held out the right hand of

conduct to the benighted. But sun, moon, and stars abstracted or concealed, the nightfaring inhabitant had to

fall back we speak on the authority of old prints upon stable lanthorns two stories in height. Many holes,

drilled in the conical turretroof of this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of dazzlement into the bearer's eyes;

and as he paced forth in the ghostly darkness, carrying his own sun by a ring about his finger, day and night

swung to and fro and up and down about his footsteps. Blackness haunted his path; he was beleaguered by

goblins as he went; and, curfew being struck, he found no light but that he travelled in throughout the

Closely following on this epoch of migratory lanthorns in a world of extinction, came the era of oillights,

hard to kindle, easy to extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour of their endurance. Rudely puffed the winds

of heaven; roguishly clomb up the alldestructive urchin; and, lo! in a moment night reestablished her void

empire, and the cit groped along the wall, suppered but bedless, occult from guidance, and sorrily wading in

the kennels. As if gamesome winds and gamesome youths were not sufficient, it was the habit to sling these

feeble luminaries from house to house above the fairway. There, on invisible cordage, let them swing! And

suppose some cranenecked general to go speeding by on a tall charger, spurring the destiny of nations,

redhot in expedition, there would indubitably be some effusion of military blood, and oaths, and a certain

crash of glass; and while the chieftain rode forward with a purple coxcomb, the street would be left to

The conservative, looking before and after, draws from each contemplation the matter for content. Out of the

age of gas lamps he glances back slightingly at the mirk and glimmer in which his ancestors wandered; his

heart waxes jocund at the contrast; nor do his lips refrain from a stave, in the highest style of poetry, lauding

progress and the golden mean. When gas first spread along a city, mapping it forth about evenfall for the eye

of observant birds, a new age had begun for sociality and corporate pleasureseeking, and begun with proper

circumstance, becoming its own birthright. The work of Prometheus had advanced by another stride.

Mankind and its supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of seafog; sundown no longer

emptied the promenade; and the day was lengthened out to every man's fancy. The cityfolk had stars of their

It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so clear, as their originals; nor indeed was their lustre so

elegant as that of the best wax candles. But then the gas stars, being nearer at hand, were more practically

efficacious than Jupiter himself. It is true, again, that they did not unfold their rays with the appropriate

spontaneity of the planets, coming out along the firmament one after another, as the need arises. But the

lamplighters took to their heels every evening, and ran with a good heart. It was pretty to see man thus

emulating the punctuality of heaven's orbs; and though perfection was not absolutely reached, and now and

then an individual may have been knocked on the head by the ladder of the flying functionary, yet people

commended his zeal in a proverb, and taught their children to say, "God bless the lamplighter!" And since his

passage was a piece of the day's programme, the children were well pleased to repeat the benediction, not, of

course, in so many words, which would have been improper, but in some chaste circumlocution, suitable for

God bless him, indeed! For the term of his twilight diligence is near at hand; and for not much longer shall

we watch him speeding up the street and, at measured intervals, knocking another luminous hole into the

dusk. The Greeks would have made a noble myth of such an one; how he distributed starlight, and, as soon as

the need was over, re collected it; and the little bull'seye, which was his instrument, and held enough fire

to kindle a whole parish, would have been fitly commemorated in the legend. Now, like all heroic tasks, his

labours draw towards apotheosis, and in the light of victory himself shall disappear. For another advance has

been effected. Our tame stars are to come out in future, not one by one, but all in a body and at once. A sedate

electrician somewhere in a back office touches a spring and behold! from one end to another of the city,

from east to west, from the Alexandra to the Crystal Palace, there is light! FIAT LUX, says the sedate

electrician. What a spectacle, on some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of Hampstead Hill, when in a

moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the design of the monstrous city flashes into vision a glittering

hieroglyph many square miles in extent; and when, to borrow and debase an image, all the evening

streetlamps burst together into song! Such is the spectacle of the future, preluded the other day by the

experiment in Pall Mall. Starrise by electricity, the most romantic flight of civilisation; the compensatory

benefit for an innumerable array of factories and bankers' clerks. To the artistic spirit exercised about

Thirlmere, here is a crumb of consolation; consolatory, at least, to such of them as look out upon the world

But the conservative, while lauding progress, is ever timid of innovation; his is the hand upheld to counsel

pause; his is the signal advising slow advance. The word ELECTRICITY now sounds the note of danger. In

Paris, at the mouth of the Passage des Princes, in the place before the Opera portico, and in the Rue Drouot at

the FIGARO office, a new sort of urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, obnoxious to the

human eye; a lamp for a nightmare! Such a light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, or

along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to heighten horror. To look at it only once is to fall in love

with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance fit to eat by. Mankind, you would have thought, might have

remained content with what Prometheus stole for them and not gone fishing the profound heaven with kites

to catch and domesticate the wildfire of the storm. Yet here we have the levin brand at our doors, and it is

proposed that we should henceforward take our walks abroad in the glare of permanent lightning. A man

need not be very superstitious if he scruple to follow his pleasures by the light of the Terror that Flieth, nor

very epicurean if he prefer to see the face of beauty more becomingly displayed. That ugly blinding glare

may not improperly advertise the home of slanderous FIGARO, which is a backshop to the infernal regions;

but where soft joys prevail, where people are convoked to pleasure and the philosopher looks on smiling and

silent, where love and laughter and deifying wine abound, there, at least, let the old mild lustre shine upon the