initial commit of ebook 13785HEADmain

13 files changed, 24680 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/13785-0.txt b/13785-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c2e2cf4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/13785-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4460 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13785 ***
+
+The Glory of English Prose
+
+Letters to my Grandson
+
+[Illustration: STEPHEN COLERIDGE
+FROM THE PORTRAIT BY BERNARD PARTRIDGE IN THE POSSESSION
+OF THE MESS OF THE SOUTH WALES CIRCUIT]
+
+The Glory of English Prose
+Letters to My Grandson
+
+By
+The Hon. Stephen Coleridge
+
+"The chief glory of every people arises from its authors"
+_Dr. Johnson_
+
+G.P. Putnam's Sons
+New York and London
+The Knickerbocker Press
+1922
+
+1922
+by
+Stephen Coleridge
+Made in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+If you have read, gentle reader, the earlier series of _Letters to my
+Grandson on the World about Him_, you are to understand that in the
+interval between those letters and these, Antony has grown to be a boy
+in the sixth form of his public school.
+
+It has not been any longer necessary therefore to study an extreme
+simplicity of diction in these letters.
+
+My desire has been to lead him into the most glorious company in the
+world, in the hope that, having early made friends with the noblest of
+human aristocracy, he will never afterwards admit to his affection and
+intimacy anything mean or vulgar.
+
+Many young people who, like Antony, are not at all averse from the
+study of English writers, stand aghast at the vastness of the what
+seems so gigantic an enterprise.
+
+In these letters I have acted as pilot for a first voyage through what is
+to a boy an uncharted sea, after which I hope and believe he will have
+learned happily to steer for himself among the islands of the blest.
+
+S.C.
+
+THE FORD,
+CHOBHAM.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+1. ON GOOD AND BAD STYLE IN PROSE
+2. ON THE GLORY OF THE BIBLE
+3. SIR WALTER RALEIGH
+4. ACT OF PARLIAMENT, 1532
+5. THE JUDICIOUS HOOKER AND SHAKESPEARE
+6. LORD CHIEF JUSTICE CREWE
+7. SIR THOMAS BROWNE AND MILTON
+8. JEREMY TAYLOR
+9. EVELYN'S DIARY
+10. JOHN BUNYAN
+11. DR. JOHNSON
+12. EDMUND BURKE
+13. GIBBON
+14. HENRY GRATTAN AND MACAULAY
+15. LORD ERSKINE
+16. ROBERT HALL
+17. LORD PLUNKET
+18. ROBERT SOUTHEY
+19. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
+20. LORD BROUGHAM
+21. SIR WILLIAM NAPIER
+22. RICHARD SHEIL
+23. THOMAS CARLYLE
+24. HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE
+25. CARDINAL NEWMAN
+26. LORD MACAULAY AGAIN
+27. PRESIDENT LINCOLN
+28. JOHN RUSKIN
+29. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
+30. MATTHEW ARNOLD
+31. SIR WILLIAM BUTLER
+32. LORD MORLEY
+33. HILAIRE BELLOC
+34. KING GEORGE THE FIFTH
+35. CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+The letters which I wrote "On the world about you" having shown you
+that throughout all the universe, from the blazing orbs in infinite space
+to the tiny muscles of an insect's wing, perfect design is everywhere
+manifest, I hope and trust that you will never believe that so
+magnificent a process and order can be without a Mind of which it is the
+visible expression.
+
+The chief object of those letters was to endorse your natural feeling of
+reverence for the Great First Cause of all things, with the
+testimony of your reason; and to save you from ever allowing
+knowledge of how the sap rises in its stalk to lessen your wonder at
+and admiration of the loveliness of a flower.
+
+I am now going to write to you about the literature of England and
+show you, if I can, the immense gulf that divides distinguished writing
+and speech from vulgar writing and speech.
+
+There is nothing so vulgar as an ignorant use of your own language.
+Every Englishman should show that he respects and honours the
+glorious language of his country, and will not willingly degrade it with
+his own pen or tongue.
+
+"We have long preserved our constitution," said Dr. Johnson; "let us
+make some struggles for our language."
+
+There is no need to be priggish or fantastic in our choice of words or
+phrases.
+
+Simple old words are just as good as any that can be selected, if you
+use them in their proper sense and place.
+
+By reading good prose constantly your ear will come to know the
+harmony of language, and you will find that your taste will unerringly
+tell you what is good and what is bad in style, without your being able
+to explain even to yourself the precise quality that distinguishes the
+good from the bad.
+
+Any Englishman with a love of his country and a reverence for its
+language can say things in a few words that will find their way straight
+into our hearts, Antony, and make us all better men. I will tell you a
+few of such simple sayings that are better than any more
+laboured writings.
+
+On the 30th of June, 1921, in the _Times_ In Memoriam column there
+was an entry:--
+
+"To the undying memory of officers, non-commissioned officers and
+men of the 9th and 10th battalions of the K.O.Y.L.I.[1] who were killed
+in the attack on Fricourt in the first battle of the Somme"; and below it
+there were placed these splendid words:--
+
+    "Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts."
+
+In February of 1913 news reached England of the death, after reaching
+the South Pole, of four explorers, Captain Scott, their leader,
+among them.
+
+Shortly before the end, Captain Oates, a man of fortune who joined the
+expedition from pure love of adventure, knowing that his helplessness
+with frozen feet was retarding the desperate march of the others
+towards their ship, rose up and stumbled out of the tent into a
+raging blizzard, saying, "I dare say I shall be away some time."
+
+This was greatly said. His body was never found; but the rescue party
+who afterwards discovered the tent with the others dead in it, put up a
+cairn in the desolate waste of snow with this inscription:--
+
+    "Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L.E.G. Gates,
+    Inniskilling Dragoons, who, on their return from the Pole in
+    March, 1912, willingly walked to his death in a blizzard to try
+    and save his comrades beset with hardship."
+
+All this was done, said, and written, very nobly by all concerned.
+
+In St. Paul's Cathedral there lies a recumbent effigy of General Gordon,
+who gave his life for the honour of England at Khartoum, and upon it
+are engraven these words:--
+
+    "He gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his
+    sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God."
+
+Even the concentrated terseness of Latin cannot surpass these
+examples of the power of the simplest and shortest English sentences
+to penetrate to the heart.
+
+English can be used, by those who master it as an organ of expression,
+to convey deep emotion under perfect control, than which nothing is
+more moving, nothing better calculated to refine the mind, nothing
+more certain to elevate the character.
+
+Whenever a man has something fine to communicate to his fellow-men
+he has but to use English without affectation, honestly and simply, and
+he is in possession of the most splendid vehicle of human thought in
+the world.
+
+All the truly great writers of English speak with simplicity from
+their hearts, they all evince a spirit of unaffected reverence, they
+all teach us to look up and not down, and by the nobility of their
+works which have penetrated into every home where letters are
+cultivated, they have done an incalculable service in forming and
+sustaining the high character of our race.
+
+Clever flippant writers may do a trifling service here and there by
+ridiculing the pompous and deflating the prigs, but there is no
+permanence in such work, unless--which is seldom the case--it is totally
+devoid of personal vanity.
+
+Very little such service is rendered when it emanates from a writer who
+announces himself as equal if not superior to Shakespeare, and
+embellishes his lucubrations with parodies of the creeds.
+
+"A Gentleman with a Duster," has in his "Glass of Fashion" shown us
+that the Society depicted in the books of Colonel Repington and Mrs.
+Asquith is not the true and great Society that sustains England in its
+noble station among civilised peoples, and we may be sure that neither
+do these books in the faintest degree represent the true and living
+literature of the times. They will pass away and be forgotten as utterly
+as are the fashion plates and missing-word competitions of ten years
+ago.
+
+Therefore, Antony, be sure that the famous and living literature of
+England, that has survived all the shocks of time and changes of
+modern life, is the best and properest study for a man to fit him for
+life, to refine his taste, to aggravate his wisdom, and consolidate
+his character.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.]
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I alluded, in my first letter to you about English literature, to the
+necessity of your learning from the beginning the wide distinction
+between what is good and what is bad style.
+
+I do not know a better instance of a display of the difference between
+what is fine style and what is not, than may be made by putting side by
+side almost any sentence from the old authorised translation of the
+Bible and the same sentence from _The Bible in Modern Speech_.
+
+I will just put two quotations side by side:--
+
+    "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not,
+    neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in
+    all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."
+
+    "Learn a lesson from the wild lilies. Watch their growth. They
+    neither toil nor spin, and yet I tell you that not even Solomon
+    in all his magnificence could array himself like one of these."
+
+Here you can feel the perfect harmony and balance of the old version
+and the miserable commonplaceness of the effort of these misguided
+modern men.
+
+Again:--
+
+    "Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."
+
+This is mauled into:--
+
+    "Repent, he said, for the kingdom of the heavens is now close at
+    hand."
+
+These examples are perfectly suited to illustrate the immense
+difference that separates what is noble and fine in style and what is
+poor and third rate.
+
+If you recite the old version aloud you cannot escape the harmony and
+balance of the sentences, and nothing dignified or distinguished can be
+made of the wretched paraphrases of the two desecrators of the
+splendid old text.
+
+And, Antony, I would have you know that I, who have spent a long life
+in precious libraries, loving fine literature with all my heart, have long
+ago reverenced the old version of the Bible as the granite corner-stone
+upon which has been built all the noblest English in the world. No
+narrative in literature has yet surpassed in majesty, simplicity, and
+passion the story of Joseph and his brethren, beginning at the
+thirty-seventh and ending with the forty-fifth chapter of Genesis. There
+is surely nothing more moving and lovely in all the books in the British
+Museum than the picture of Joseph when he sees his little brother
+among his brethren:--
+
+    "And he lifted up his eyes, and saw his brother Benjamin, his
+    mother's son, and said, Is this your younger brother, of whom ye
+    spake to me? And he said, God be gracious unto thee, my son.
+
+    "And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his brother:
+    and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber, and
+    wept there."
+
+The whole of the forty-fifth chapter is touching and beautiful beyond
+all criticism, transcending all art. To read it is to believe every
+word of it to be true, and to recognise the sublimity of such a
+relation.
+
+No narrative of the great Greek writers reaches the heart so directly
+and poignantly as does this astonishing story. It moves swiftly and
+surely along from incident to incident till Joseph's loving soul can
+contain itself no more:--
+
+    "Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all of them that
+    stood by him; and he cried, Cause every man to go out from me.
+
+    "And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known
+    unto his brethren.
+
+    "And he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh
+    heard.
+
+    "And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph; doth my father
+    yet live? And he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck, and wept;
+    and Benjamin wept upon his neck. Moreover he kissed all his
+    brethren and wept upon them.
+
+    "And after that his brethren talked with him."
+
+And this wonderful chapter ends thus:--
+
+    "And they went up out of Egypt, and came unto the land of Canaan
+    unto Jacob their father, and told him, saying, Joseph is yet
+    alive, and is governor over all the land of Egypt.
+
+    "And Jacob's heart fainted, for he believed them not.
+
+    "And they told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said unto
+    them: and when he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry
+    him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived:
+
+    "And Israel said, It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive: I will
+    go and see him before I die."
+
+If you read the story of Joseph through from start to finish, you will
+see that it is a perfect narrative of the life of a man without
+fault, who suffered much but without resentment, was great of heart in
+evil days, and, when Fortune placed him in a position of glory and
+greatness, showed a stainless magnanimity and a brotherly love that
+nothing could abate. It is the first and most perfect story in
+literature of the nobility of man's soul, and as such it must remain a
+treasured and priceless possession to the world's end.
+
+In the short Book of Ruth there lies embalmed in the finest English a
+very tender love story, set in all the sweet surroundings of the ripening
+corn, the gathered harvest, and the humble gleaners. Nothing can be
+more delightful than the direction of Boaz, the great land-owner, to his
+men, after he had espied Ruth in her beauty gleaning in his fields:--
+
+    "And when she was risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men,
+    saying, Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her
+    not:
+
+    "And let fall also some of the handfuls on purpose for her, and
+    leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not."
+
+This little gem in the books of the Bible inspired Hood to write one of
+his most perfect lyrics:--
+
+  "She stood breast high amid the corn
+  Clasped by the golden light of morn,
+  Like the sweetheart of the sun,
+  Who many a glowing kiss had won.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Thus she stood amid the stocks,
+  Praising God with sweetest looks.
+
+  Sure, I said, Heaven did not mean
+  Where I reap thou should'st but glean;
+  Lay thy sheaf adown and come,
+  Share my harvest and my home."
+
+That the Bible was translated into English at the time when the
+language was spoken and written in its most noble form, by men whose
+style has never been surpassed in strength combined with simplicity,
+has been a priceless blessing to the English-speaking race. The land of
+its birth, once flowing with milk and honey, has been for long centuries
+a place of barren rocks and arid deserts: Persians and Greeks and
+Romans and Turks have successively swept over it; the descendants
+of those who at different times produced its different books are
+scattered to the ends of the earth; but the English translation has for
+long years been the head corner-stone in homes innumerable as the
+sands of the sea in number.
+
+No upheavals of the earth, no fire, pestilence, famine, or slaughter, can
+ever now blot it out from the ken of men.
+
+When all else is lost we may be sure that the old English version of the
+Bible will survive. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words
+shall not pass away."
+
+Do not think it enough therefore, Antony, to hear it read badly and
+without intelligence or emotion, in little detached snippets, in church
+once a week.
+
+Read it for yourself, and learn to rejoice in the perfect balance,
+harmony, and strength of its noble style.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I could write you many letters like my last one about the Bible, and
+perhaps some day I will go back to that wonderful Book and write
+you some more letters about it; but now I will go on and tell you about
+some of the great writers of English prose that came after the
+translation of the Bible.
+
+Those translators were the great founders of the English language,
+which is probably on the whole the most glorious organ of human
+expression that the world has yet known.
+
+It blends the classic purity of Greek and the stately severity of Latin
+with the sanguine passions and noble emotions of our race.
+
+A whole life devoted to its study will not make you or me perfectly
+familiar with all the splendid passages that have been spoken and
+written in it. But I shall show in my letters, at least some of the
+glorious utterances scattered around me here in my library, so that
+you may recognise, as you ought, the pomp and majesty of the speech of
+England.
+
+One of the great qualities that was always present in the writings of
+Englishmen from the time of Elizabeth down to the beginning of the
+nineteenth century was its restraint.
+
+Those men never became hysterical or lost their perfect self-control.
+
+The deeper the emotion of the writer the more manifest became the
+noble mastery of himself.
+
+When Sir Walter Ralegh, that glorious son of Devon, from which county
+you and I, Antony, are proud to have sprung, lay in the Tower of
+London awaiting his cowardly and shameful execution the next day at
+the hands of that miserable James I., writing to his beloved wife, with a
+piece of coal, because they even denied him pen and ink, face to face
+with death, he yet observed a calm and noble language that is truly
+magnifical--to use the old Bible word.
+
+    "For the rest," he wrote, "when you have travailed and wearied
+    your thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit
+    down by sorrow in the end. Teach your son also to serve and fear
+    God while he is young, that the fear of God may grow up in him.
+    Then will God be a Husband unto you and a Father unto him; a
+    Husband and a Father which can never be taken from you.
+
+    "I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time when
+    all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world.
+
+    "Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it
+    at Sherburne, if the land continue, or in Exeter Church by my
+    father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me
+    away.
+
+    "The Everlasting, Infinite, Powerful and Inscrutable God, that
+    Almighty God that is goodness itself, mercy itself, the true life
+    and light, keep you and yours, and have mercy on me and teach me
+    to forgive my persecutors and false accusers, and send us to meet
+    in His Glorious Kingdom. My true wife, farewell. Bless my poor
+    boy, pray for me. My true God hold you both in His Arms.
+
+    "Written with the dying hand of, sometime thy husband, but now
+    alas! overthrown, yours that was, but now not my own.
+
+    "WALTER RALEGH."
+
+Sir Walter Ralegh, long before he came to his untimely end, had written
+in his great _History of the World_ a wonderful passage about death; it
+is justly celebrated, and is familiar to all men of letters throughout the
+world, so I will quote a portion of it for you:--
+
+    "The Kings and Princes of the world have always laid before them
+    the actions, but not the ends, of those great ones which preceded
+    them. They are always transported with the glory of the one, but
+    they never mind the misery of the other, till they find the
+    experience in themselves.
+
+    "They neglect the advice of God, while they enjoy life, or the
+    hope of it; but they follow the counsel of Death upon the first
+    approach. It is he that puts into man all the wisdom of the world,
+    without speaking a word; which God, with all the Words of His Law,
+    promises and threats, doth not infuse.
+
+    "Death which hateth and destroyeth man is believed; God which hath
+    made him and loves him is always deferred. It is, therefore, Death
+    alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. He tells the
+    proud and insolent that they are but abjects, and humbles them at
+    the instant; makes them cry, complain and repent; yea, even to
+    hate their fore-passed happiness.
+
+    "He takes account of the rich, and proves him a beggar; a naked
+    beggar which hath interest in nothing but in the gravel that fills
+    his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful
+    and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and
+    they acknowledge it.
+
+    "O eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou
+    hast persuaded; what none have dared thou hast done; and whom all
+    the world have flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and
+    despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched
+    greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered
+    it all over with these two narrow words--HIC JACET."
+
+Sir Walter Ralegh was born only a few miles down below Ottery St.
+Mary, in the same beautiful valley from which you and I, Antony, and
+the poet have come. The peal of bells in the old church tower at
+Otterton was given by him to the parish; and when "the lin lan lone of
+evening-bells" floats across between the hills that guard the river Otter,
+it should fall upon our ears as an echo of the melody that strikes upon
+our hearts in Ralegh's words.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+In looking through some very old Acts of Parliament not long ago I was
+rather surprised to find that in those old times our forefathers drew up
+their statutes in very stately English.
+
+In our own times Acts of Parliament frequently violate the simplest
+rules of grammar, and are sometimes so unintelligible as to need the
+labours of learned judges to find out what they mean!
+
+But it seems that in the great days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth Acts of
+Parliament were often written in resounding periods of solemn
+splendour of which the meaning is perfectly clear.
+
+In the twenty-fourth year of the great Henry, the Act denying and
+forbidding any jurisdiction of the Pope of Rome in England was passed.
+
+This Act, depriving the Pope of all power in England, marked a
+turning-point in history.
+
+It is headed with these words:--
+
+    THE PRE-EMINENCE, POWER, AND AUTHORITY OF THE KING OF ENGLAND.
+    1532.
+
+    "Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it
+    is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is
+    an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one
+    supreme head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the
+    imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of
+    all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms and by names of
+    spiritualty and temporalty being bounden and owen to bear next to
+    God a natural and humble obedience; he being also institute and
+    furnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with
+    plenary whole and entire power pre-eminence authority prerogative
+    and jurisdiction to render and yield justice and final
+    determination to all manner of folk residents or subjects within
+    this his realm, in all causes matters debates contentions
+    happening to occur insurge or begin within the limits thereof
+    without restraint or provocation to any foreign princes or
+    potentates of the world ... all causes testamentary, causes of
+    matrimony and divorces, rights of tithes, oblations and obventions
+    ... shall be from hence-forth heard examined licenced clearly
+    finally and definitely adjudged and determined within the King's
+    jurisdiction and authority and not elsewhere."
+
+The words "Empire" and "Imperial" are in the present day degraded
+from their ancient high estate by an appropriation of them to advertise
+soap or cigarettes or what not; and we even are confronted with the
+"Imperial" Cancer Research Fund, the money of which has been
+employed in artificially inflicting cancer on hundreds of thousands of
+living animals--a performance utterly repugnant to a great many of the
+inhabitants in the "Empire"!
+
+But people indifferent to the dictates of mercy are not likely to have
+much reverence for words, however august.
+
+Henry VIII., we may be sure, would never have allowed these solemn
+words to be used by people with something to sell, or by scientific
+disease-mongers.
+
+They were great people who could draw up their statutes in splendid
+passages of sustained nobility.
+
+Let us, Antony, salute them across the centuries.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+One of the great creators of English prose who lived at the same time
+as Ralegh and Shakespeare was Richard Hooker, who is generally
+known as "the Judicious Hooker."
+
+He was born in Devon, two years after Ralegh, in 1554.
+
+He must very early in life have made his mark as a man of learning and
+piety, for when he was only thirty-one he was made Master of the
+Temple. The controversies in which he there found himself involved
+induced him to retire when he was only thirty-seven into the country,
+for the purpose of writing his famous books, _The Laws of Ecclesiastical
+Polity_.
+
+It is the first great book on the English Church, and it is full of
+magnificent prose. It was divided into eight parts; and in the first one,
+before he had got far into it, he penned the exclamatory description of
+law which will live as long as the language:--
+
+    "Her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world;
+    all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as
+    feeling her care, the greatest as not exempted from her power."
+
+And in the same first part will be found a passage on the Deity which
+portrays faithfully for us the humble wisdom of both the man and his
+age:--
+
+    "Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into
+    the doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and
+    joy to make mention of His name; yet our soundest knowledge is to
+    know that we know Him not as indeed He is, neither can know Him;
+    and our safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we
+    confess without confession that His glory is inexplicable, His
+    greatness above our capacity to reach. He is above and we upon
+    earth; therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few."
+
+Shakespeare was born ten years later than Hooker, in 1564, and his
+share in founding English prose as we know it is, of course, not
+comparable with that of Hooker, for of Shakespeare's prose there
+remains for us but little. Whenever he rose to eloquence he clothed
+himself in verse as with an inevitable attribute, but on the rare
+occasions when he condescended to step down from the great line to
+"the other harmony of prose" he is as splendid as in all else. In
+_Hamlet_ we have this sudden passage:--
+
+    "I have of late, (but wherefore I know not), lost all my mirth,
+    foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
+    with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to
+    me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look
+    you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
+    fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me,
+    than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
+
+    "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in
+    faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action,
+    how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of
+    the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this
+    quintessence of dust?"
+
+And the most beautiful letter in the world is that written by Antonio to
+Bassanio in _The Merchant of Venice_. When it is remembered that it
+was out of his friendship for Bassanio that Antonio entered into his
+bond with Shylock, the supreme exquisiteness of the few words from
+friend to friend render this letter unsurpassable:--
+
+    "Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow
+    cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit, and
+    since, in paying it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are
+    cleared between you and me if I might see you at my death;
+    notwithstanding, use your pleasure; if your love do not persuade
+    you to come, let not my letter."
+
+Well did Shakespeare know that such a letter must make an instant
+appeal to the sweet heart of Portia: "O love!" she cries, "despatch all
+business, and be gone!"
+
+All great poets are masters of a splendid prose, and had Shakespeare
+written some notable work of prose we may be sure it would even have
+surpassed the noble utterances of all his wonderful contemporaries.
+
+It has been said that no language in the world has yet ever lasted in its
+integrity for over a thousand years. Perhaps printing may confer a
+greater stability on present languages; but whenever English is
+displaced, the sun of the most glorious of all days will have set.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I do not think that men of letters often search through the old law
+reports for specimens of fine prose, but I believe that here and there,
+in that generally barren field, a nugget of pure gold may be discovered
+by an industrious student.
+
+Much noble prose delivered from the bench down the centuries has
+been lost for ever, for the judges of England have often been
+gentlemen of taste, scholarship, and eloquence. I have found one very
+splendid passage that has somehow survived the wrecks of nearly four
+hundred years.
+
+Lord Chief Justice Crewe, who became Chief Justice of England in 1624,
+delivered in the case of the Earl of Oxford the following noble tribute to
+the great house of De Vere:--
+
+    "I heard a great peer of this realm, and learned, say, when he
+    lived, there was no king in Christendom had such a subject as
+    Oxford. He came in with the Conqueror, Earl of Guienne; shortly
+    after the Conquest made Great Chamberlain, above 400 years ago, by
+    Henry I., the Conqueror's son; confirmed by Henry II. This great
+    honour--this high and noble dignity--hath continued ever since, in
+    the remarkable surname De Vere, by so many ages, descents, and
+    generations, as no other kingdom can produce such a peer in one
+    and the selfsame name and title. I find in all this time but two
+    attainders of this noble family, and those in stormy and
+    tempestuous time, when the government was unsettled, and the
+    kingdom in competition. I have laboured to make a covenant with
+    myself, that affection may not press upon judgment, for I suppose
+    that there is no man that hath any apprehension of gentry or
+    nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of so noble
+    a name and fame, and would take hold of a twig or twine-thread to
+    uphold it. And yet Time hath his revolutions: there must be an end
+    to all temporal things, _finis rerum_,--and end of names and
+    dignities, and whatsoever is _terrene_; and why not of De Vere?
+    For where is De Bohun?--where is Mowbray?--where is Mortimer? Nay,
+    what is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are
+    entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality. And yet, let
+    the name and dignity of De Vere stand so long as it pleases God."
+
+And alas! we can now ask, Where is De Vere? This great Earldom of
+Oxford was created in 1142, and has disappeared long ago in the limbo
+of peerages said to be in abeyance.
+
+In these days, Antony, when peerages are bought by men successful in
+trade and sold by men successful in intrigue, such elevations in rank
+have ceased to be regarded as the necessary concomitants of "great
+honour" and "high and noble dignity"; so that it has long been more
+reputable in the House of Lords to be a descendant than an ancestor.
+But among the older great families there still remains a pride that has
+descended unsullied through many generations, which serves as a fine
+deterrent from evil deeds, and a constant incentive to honour--and in
+England the history of great names can never be totally ignored, even
+though the country may be ruled by persons who do not know who
+were their own grandfathers.
+
+Nothing is more ridiculous and cheap than to sneer at honourable
+descent from famous ancestors; it divertingly illustrates the fable of the
+sour grapes.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+You will have seen from the extracts I have already quoted to you of
+the writers of the Elizabethan age that the style of all of them
+possesses something large and resonant, something that may be said
+to constitute the "grand style" in prose; and this quite naturally without
+effort, and without the slightest touch of affectation.
+
+A great writer who came immediately after the Elizabethans--namely,
+Sir Thomas Browne, who lived from 1605 to 1682--displays the
+development in his style of something less simple and more precious
+than ruled in the former generation.
+
+It is difficult to select any passage from his works where all is so good.
+He was curious and exact in his choice of words and commanded a wide
+vocabulary. There is deliberate ingenuity in the framing of his
+sentences, which arrests attention and markedly distinguishes his style.
+His _Urn Burial_, in spite of its elaboration, reaches a grave and solemn
+splendour.
+
+The fifth chapter, which begins by speaking of the dead who have
+"quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests,"
+rises to a very noble elevation as English prose.
+
+Here I quote one paragraph of it, characteristic of the whole:--
+
+    "Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares
+    with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly
+    remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction
+    leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and
+    sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.
+    Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are slippery, or fall
+    like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity.
+    To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a
+    merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our
+    few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into
+    cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of
+    repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of
+    subsistency with a transmigration of their souls,--a good way to
+    continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural
+    successions they could not but act something remarkable in such
+    variety of beings, and, enjoying the fame of their passed selves,
+    make accumulation of glory unto their last durations. Others,
+    rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were
+    content to recede into the common being, and make one particle of
+    the public soul of all things, which was no more than to return
+    into their unknown and divine original again. Egyptian ingenuity
+    was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in sweet
+    consistencies, to attend the return of their souls. But all was
+    vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which
+    Cambyses or Time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is
+    become merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for
+    balsams."
+
+Milton was a contemporary of Sir Thomas Browne, and, like all great
+poets, was a master of resounding prose. All that he wrote, both in
+verse and prose, is severely classic in its form. His _Samson Agonistes_
+is perhaps the finest example of a play written in English after the
+manner of the Greek dramas.
+
+Milton wrote _The Areopagitica_ in defence of the liberty of
+publishers and printers of books. And it stands for all time as the
+first and greatest argument against interference with the freedom of
+the press.
+
+The Areopagitæ were judges at Athens in its more flourishing time, who
+sat on Mars Hill and made decrees and passed sentences which were
+delivered in public and commanded universal respect.
+
+I will quote one of the finest passages in this great and splendid
+utterance:--
+
+    "I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church
+    and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean
+    themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison,
+    and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not
+    absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them
+    to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they
+    do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of
+    that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively,
+    and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons' teeth;
+    and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
+
+    "And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good
+    almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a
+    reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book
+    kills reason itself; kills the Image of God as it were in the eye.
+    Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the
+    precious life-blood of a master-spirit; embalmed and treasured up
+    on purpose to a life beyond life.
+
+    "'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof, perhaps, there is
+    no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss
+    of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the
+    worse.
+
+    "We should be wary, therefore, what persecutions we raise against
+    the living labours of public men; how we spill that seasoned life
+    of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of
+    homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and, if it
+    extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the
+    execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but
+    strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason
+    itself; slays an immortality rather than a life."
+
+This is a fine defence of the inviolability of a good and proper book.
+
+A bad book will generally die of itself, but there is something horribly
+malignant about a wicked book, as it must always be worse than a
+wicked man, for a man can repent, but a book cannot.
+
+It is the men of letters who keep alive the books of the great from
+generation to generation, and they are never likely to preserve a
+wicked book from oblivion. Ultimately such go to light fires and
+encompass groceries.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Milton, of whom I wrote in my last letter, was five years older than
+Jeremy Taylor, of whom I am going to write to-day. The latter's
+writings differ very much from Milton's, although they were
+contemporaries for the whole of the former's life.
+
+From the grave and august periods of Milton to the sweet beauty of
+Jeremy Taylor is as the passing from out the austere halls of Justice to
+lovely fields full of flowers.
+
+Your and my great kinsman, Coleridge, pronounced Jeremy Taylor to be
+the most eloquent of all divines; and Coleridge was a great critic.
+
+Indeed, there seems to dwell permanently in Jeremy Taylor's mind a
+compelling sweetness and serenity.
+
+His parables, though sometimes perhaps almost of set purpose fanciful,
+are always full of beauty.
+
+How can anyone withhold sympathy and affection from the writer of
+such a passage as this:--
+
+    "But as, when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning,
+    he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits
+    of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to
+    matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over
+    the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those
+    which decked the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a veil
+    because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man
+    tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face
+    and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud
+    often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets
+    quickly, so is a man's reason and his life."
+
+Again:--
+
+    "No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many
+    delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty
+    conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their
+    stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their
+    imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of
+    joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society;
+    but he that loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness at
+    home, and broods a nest of sorrows; and blessing itself cannot
+    make him happy; so that all the commandments of God enjoining a
+    man to 'love his wife' are nothing but so many necessities and
+    capacities of joy. 'She that is loved, is safe; and he that loves,
+    is joyful,' Love is a union of all things excellent; it contains
+    in it proportion and satisfaction, and rest and confidence."
+
+Again:--
+
+    "So have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring
+    upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and
+    climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the
+    loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular
+    and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest,
+    than it could recover by the liberation and frequent weighing of
+    his wings; till the little creature was forced to sit down and
+    pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a
+    prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned
+    music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes through the
+    air, about his ministries here below; so is the prayer of a good
+    man."
+
+Again:--
+
+    "I am fallen into the hands of publicans and sequestrators, and
+    they have taken all from me; what now? Let me look about me. They
+    have left me the sun and moon, fire and water, a loving wife, and
+    many friends to pity me, and some to relieve me, and I can still
+    discourse; and unless I list, they have not taken away my merry
+    countenance and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they
+    still have left me the Providence of God, and all the promises of
+    the Gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my
+    charity to them too; and still I sleep and digest, I eat and
+    drink, I read and meditate; I can walk in my neighbor's pleasant
+    fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in
+    all that in which God delights, that is, in virtue and wisdom, in
+    the whole creation, and in God Himself."
+
+Here, Antony, is true wisdom. True, indeed, is it that no one can take
+away from you your merry countenance, your cheerful spirit, and your
+good conscience unless you choose; keep all three, Antony, throughout
+your life, and you will be happy yourself and make everyone about you
+happy, and that is to make a little heaven of your earthly home.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Some day, no doubt, you will read some of the celebrated diaries that
+have come down to us. The best known of such books is _Pepys's
+Diary_ which was written in a kind of shorthand, and so lay
+undeciphered from his death in 1703 for more than a century. One of
+its merits is its absolute self-revelation; for Pepys exposes to us his
+character without a shadow of reserve in all its vanity; and the other is
+the faithful picture it gives us of the time of the Restoration.
+
+But, though less popular, _Evelyn's Diary_ is, I think, in many ways
+superior to that of Pepys.[1]
+
+There is a quiet, unostentatious dignity about Evelyn which is
+altogether absent in the garrulous Pepys, and, indeed I find something
+very beautiful and touching in the grief Evelyn pours forth upon the
+death of his little son of five years old:--
+
+    "The day before he died," writes Evelyn, "he call'd to me and in a
+    more serious manner than usual, told me that for all I loved him
+    so dearly I should give my house, land, and all my fine things, to
+    his Brother Jack, he should have none of them; and next morning
+    when he found himself ill, and that I persuaded him to keepe his
+    hands in bed, he demanded whether he might pray to God with his
+    hands un-joyn'd; and a little after, whilst in great agonie,
+    whether he should not offend God by using His holy name so often
+    calling for ease. What shall I say of his frequent pathetical
+    ejaculations utter'd of himselfe: Sweete Jesus save me, deliver
+    me, pardon my sinns, let Thine angels receive me!
+
+    "So early knowledge, so much piety and perfection! But thus God
+    having dress'd up a Saint for himselfe, would not longer permit
+    him with us, unworthy of ye future fruites of this incomparable
+    hopefull blossome. Such a child I never saw: for such a child I
+    blesse God in whose bosome he is! May I and mine become as this
+    little child, who now follows the child Jesus that Lamb of God in
+    a white robe whithersoever he goes; even so, Lord Jesus, _fiat
+    voluntas tua!_ Thou gavest him to us, Thou hast taken him from us,
+    blessed be ye name of ye Lord! That I had anything acceptable to
+    Thee was from Thy grace alone, since from me he had nothing but
+    sin, but that Thou hast pardon'd! Blessed be my God for ever,
+    Amen! I caused his body to be coffin'd in lead, and reposited on
+    the 30th at 8 o'clock that night in the church at Deptford,
+    accompanied with divers of my relations and neighbours among whom
+    I distributed rings with this motto: _Dominus abstulit_;
+    intending, God willing, to have him transported with my owne body
+    to be interr'd in our dormitory in Wotton Church, in my dear
+    native county of Surrey, and to lay my bones and mingle my dust
+    with my fathers, if God be gracious to me and make me fit for Him
+    as this blessed child was. The Lord Jesus sanctify this and all my
+    other afflictions, Amen! Here ends the joy of my life, and for
+    which I go even mourning to my grave."
+
+This great love and reverence for little children is peculiarly in accord
+with Christianity, for we should remember that it was the WISE men,
+who, when they had journeyed far across the world to salute the King
+of kings, laid their offerings down at the feet of a little child.
+
+Is there not something to reverence in faith and resignation such as are
+here expressed by Evelyn? Were not these men of old with their
+unshakable faith and simple piety better and happier than those who in
+these days know so much more and believe so much less?
+
+We, no doubt, have the knowledge, but perhaps they had the wisdom.
+
+I think, Antony, that in the history of England we shall have
+difficulty in finding any of our greatest men whose hearts and minds
+were not filled with a reverence for God and a faith in something
+beyond the blind forces which are all that Science has to offer
+mankind as a guide of life.
+
+All who have acted most nobly from the days of Ralegh and Sir Thomas
+More, down to the days of Gordon of Khartoum, and down again to our
+own days when the youth of England upheld the invincible valour,
+self-sacrifice, and glory of their race in the greatest of all wars,--all
+have been filled with the love of God and have found therein a perfect
+serenity in the face of death, and that peace which passeth all
+understanding.
+
+The character of our race rests indubitably upon that faith, and he
+who lifts his voice, or directs his pen, to tear it down, had better
+never have been born.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Another diary that you should read by and by is that of
+Henry Grabb Robinson.]
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+In these letters I am never going to quote to you anything that does
+not seem to me to rise to a level of merit well above ordinary proper
+prose. There are many writers whose general correctness and
+excellence is not to be questioned or denied whom I shall not select in
+these letters for your particular admiration.
+
+By and by, when your own love of literature impels you to excursions in
+all directions, you may perhaps come to differ from my judgment, for
+everyone's taste must vary a little from that of others.
+
+English prose in its excellence follows the proportions manifested by the
+contours of the elevation of the world's land.
+
+Vast tracts lie very near the sea-level, of such are the interminable
+outpourings of newspapers and novels and school books. And, as each
+ascent from the sea-level is reached, less and less land attains to it,
+and when the snow-line is approached only a very small proportion
+indeed of the land aspires so high.
+
+So among writers, those who climb to the snow-line are a slender band
+compared to all the inhabitants of the lower slopes and plains.
+
+In these letters I do not intend to mistake a pedlar for a mountaineer,
+nor a hearthstone for a granite peak. Time slowly buries deep in
+oblivion the writings of the industrious and the dull.
+
+Born fifteen years later than Jeremy Taylor, of whom I wrote in a
+former letter, John Bunyan in 1660, being a Baptist, suffered the
+persecution then the lot of all dissenters, and was cast into Bedford
+gaol, where he lay for conscience' sake for twelve years. "As I walked
+through the wilderness of this world," said he, "I lighted on a certain
+place where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as
+I slept I dreamed a dream"; and the dream which he dreamed has
+passed into all lands, and has been translated into all languages, and
+has taken its place with the Bible and with the _Imitation of Christ_ as
+a guide of life.
+
+The force of simplicity finds here its most complete expression; the
+story wells from the man's heart, whence come all great things:--
+
+    "Then said the Interpreter to Christian, 'Hast thou considered
+    all these things?'
+
+    "_Christian._ 'Yes, and they put me in hope and fear.'
+
+    "_Interpreter._ 'Well, keep all things so in thy mind that they
+    may be as a goad in thy sides, to prick thee forward in the way
+    thou must go.'
+
+    "Then Christian began to gird up his loins, and to address himself
+    to his journey.
+
+    "Then said the Interpreter, 'The Comforter be always with thee,
+    good Christian, to guide thee in the way that leads to the city.'
+
+    "So Christian went on his way.
+
+    "Now I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian had to
+    go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was called
+    Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run,
+    but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back.
+    He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending, and upon
+    that place stood a cross, and a little below in the bottom a
+    sepulchre.
+
+    "So I saw in my dream that just as Christian came up with the
+    cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off
+    his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came
+    to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no
+    more.
+
+    "Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry
+    heart, 'He hath given me rest by His sorrow, and life by His
+    death.'
+
+    "Then he stood awhile to look and wonder, for it was very
+    surprising to him that the sight of the cross should thus ease him
+    of his burden.
+
+    "He looked, therefore, and looked again, even till the springs
+    that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks."
+
+Bunyan died in 1688, and Dr. Johnson was born in 1709. Many years,
+therefore, elapsed between the time when they each displayed their
+greatest powers.
+
+The interval was occupied by many reputable worldly-wise writers, but I
+do not myself find, between these two masters of English prose,
+anyone who wrote passages of such great lustre that I can quote them
+for your admiration.
+
+You will have noticed, Antony, that all the writers whom I have quoted,
+and who reached the true nobility of speech necessary to command our
+tribute of unstinted praise, have been men of manifest piety and
+reverence.
+
+And you will find it difficult to discover really great and eloquent prose
+from the pen of any man whose heart is not filled with a simple faith in
+the goodness of God.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have come now to Dr. Johnson, and it is almost a test of a true man
+of letters that he should love him.
+
+He was rugged and prejudiced, but magnanimous; impatient with the
+presumptuous, tender to modest ignorance, proudly independent of the
+patronage of the great, and was often doing deeds of noble
+self-sacrifice by stealth.
+
+Through long years of hard, unremitting toil for his daily bread he lived
+bravely and sturdily, with no extraneous help but his stout oak stick--an
+unconquerable man.
+
+His prose rises on occasion to a measured and stately grandeur above
+the reach of any of his contemporaries.
+
+It was not often that he unveiled to the public gaze the beatings of his
+own noble heart, or invited the world to contemplate the depression
+and suffering amid which his unending labours were accomplished.
+
+The concluding page of the preface to the first edition of the great
+_Dictionary_ is, therefore, the more precious and moving. I know not
+why this majestic utterance came to be deleted in later editions;
+certainly it sanctifies, and as it were crowns with a crown of sorrow, the
+greatest work of his life; and with reverent sympathy and unstinted
+admiration I reproduce it here:--
+
+    "Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot ultimately be
+    defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to
+    degeneration: we have long preserved our constitution, let us make
+    some struggles for our language.
+
+    "In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature forbids
+    to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of years, to
+    the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield the palm of
+    philology to the nations of the continent. The chief glory of
+    every people arises from its authors; whether I shall add anything
+    by my own writings to the reputation of English literature, must
+    be left to time: much of my life has been lost under the pressure
+    of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been
+    spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I
+    shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my
+    assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the
+    propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth;
+    if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add
+    celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.
+
+    "When I am animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my book,
+    however defective, and deliver it to the world with the spirit of
+    a man that has endeavoured well. That it will immediately become
+    popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders and
+    risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was
+    ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden
+    ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail,
+    and there never can be wanting some, who distinguish desert, who
+    will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue can ever be
+    perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words
+    are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be
+    spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would
+    not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language
+    can express must often speak of what he does not understand; that
+    a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and
+    sometimes faint with weariness under a task which Scaliger
+    compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that what is
+    obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always
+    present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance,
+    slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of
+    the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in
+    vain trace his memory at the moment of need for that which
+    yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come
+    uncalled into his thoughts to-morrow.
+
+    "In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it
+    not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no
+    book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the
+    world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of
+    that which it condemns, yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it
+    that the _English Dictionary_ was written with little assistance
+    of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the
+    soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic
+    bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and
+    in sorrow; and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism
+    to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I
+    have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto
+    completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed
+    and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of
+    successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated
+    knowledge and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians
+    did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied
+    critics of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their
+    work, were obliged to change its economy, and give their second
+    editions another form, I may surely be contented without the
+    praise of perfection which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of
+    solitude what would it avail me?
+
+    "I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to
+    please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are
+    empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity,
+    having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."
+
+This seems to me to be the noblest passage that Johnson ever wrote.
+
+Almost all the most magnificent utterances of man are tinged with
+sadness. In this they possess a quality that is almost inseparable from
+grandeur wherever displayed. No man of sensibility and taste feels it
+possible to make jokes himself, or to tolerate them from others when in
+the presence of the Falls of Niagara, or a tempest at sea, or when he
+views from a peak in the Andes--as I have done--the sun descent into
+the Pacific. The greatest pictures painted by man touch the heart rather
+than elate it; and genius finds its highest expression not in comedy, but
+in tragedy.
+
+And this need cause us no surprise when we consider how much of the
+great work in letters and in art is directly due to the writer possessing
+in full measure the gift of sympathy.
+
+People with this gift, even if they are without the faculty of expression,
+are beloved by those about them, which must bring them happiness.
+
+Till he was over fifty Dr. Johnson's life was a weary struggle with
+poverty. He wrote _Rasselas_ under the pressure of an urgent need of
+money to send to his dying mother. His wife died some few years
+earlier. I have always thought that the sad reflections he put into the
+mouth of an old philosopher towards the end of the story were indeed
+the true expressions of his own tired heart:--
+
+    "Praise," said the sage with a sigh, "is to an old man an empty
+    sound. I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation
+    of her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband.
+
+    "I have outlived my friends and my rivals. Nothing is now of much
+    importance; for I cannot extend my interest beyond myself. Youth
+    is delighted with applause, because it is considered as the
+    earnest of some future good, and because the prospect of life is
+    far extended; but to me, who am now declining to decrepitude,
+    there is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet
+    less to be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they
+    may take away, but they can give me nothing. Riches would now be
+    useless, and high employment would be pain. My retrospect of life
+    recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time
+    squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I
+    leave many great designs unattempted, and many great attempts
+    unfinished.
+
+    "My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, and therefore I compose
+    myself to tranquillity; endeavour to abstract my thoughts from
+    hopes and cares, which, though reason knows them to be vain, still
+    try to keep their old possession of the heart; expect, with serene
+    humility, that hour which nature cannot long delay; and hope to
+    possess, in a better state, that happiness which here I could not
+    find, and that virtue which here I have not attained."
+
+From the results of _Rasselas_ he sent his mother money, but she had
+expired before it reached her.
+
+Down to the time of Dr. Johnson it was the custom for writers of books
+and poems to seek and enjoy the patronage of some great nobleman,
+to whom they generally dedicated their works.
+
+And in pursuance of that custom Dr. Johnson, when he first issued the
+plan or prospectus of his great _Dictionary_ in 1747, addressed it to
+Lord Chesterfield, who was regarded as the most brilliant and cultivated
+nobleman of his time. Lord Chesterfield, however, took no notice of the
+matter till the _Dictionary_ was on the point of coming out in 1755, and
+then wrote some flippant remarks about it in a publication called _The
+World_.
+
+At this Dr. Johnson wrote a letter to the condescending peer, which
+became celebrated throughout England and practically put an end to
+writers seeking the patronage of the great.
+
+This wonderful letter concludes thus:--
+
+    "Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your
+    outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I
+    have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is
+    useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of
+    publication, without one act of assistance, one word of
+    encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not
+    expect, for I never had a patron before.
+
+    "The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and
+    found him a native of the rocks.
+
+    "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man
+    struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground,
+    encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to
+    take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind, but it has
+    been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am
+    solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want
+    it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess
+    obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be
+    unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a
+    patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.
+
+    "Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to
+    any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I
+    should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have
+    been wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted
+    myself with so much exultation, my lord,--your lordship's most
+    humble, most obedient servant. SAM. JOHNSON."
+
+Boswell's life of Dr. Johnson when you come to read it, as you will be
+sure to do by and by, has left a living picture of this great and good
+man for all future generations to enjoy, extenuating nothing to his
+quaintness, directness, and proneness to contradiction for its own sake,
+yet unveiling everywhere the deep piety and fine magnanimity of his
+character. He suffered much, but never complained, and certainly must
+be numbered among the great men of letters who have found true
+consolation and support in every circumstance of life in an earnest and
+fervent faith.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Edmund Burke was born in 1730, and therefore was twenty-one years
+younger than Dr. Johnson, and he survived him thirteen years. He was
+a great prose writer, and although some of his speeches in Parliament
+that have come down to us possess every quality of solid argument and
+lofty eloquence, there must have been something lacking in his delivery
+and voice, for he so frequently failed to rivet the attention of the
+House, and so often addressed a steadily dwindling audience, that the
+wits christened him "the dinner bell."
+
+All men of letters, however, acknowledge Burke as a true master of a
+very great style.
+
+We see in him the first signs of a breaking away from the universal
+restraint of the older writers, and of the surging up of expressed
+emotion.
+
+His splendid tribute to Marie Antoinette and his panegyric of the lost
+age of chivalry are familiar to all students of English prose.
+
+    "It is now (1791) sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen
+    of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never
+    lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more
+    delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating
+    and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in
+    glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and
+    joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to
+    contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little
+    did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of
+    enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be
+    obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in
+    that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see
+    such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a
+    nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand
+    swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look
+    that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry has gone.
+    That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and
+    the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
+
+    "Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to sex
+    and rank, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that
+    subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude
+    itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of
+    life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
+    and heroic enterprise is gone!
+
+    "It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of
+    honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage
+    while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched,
+    and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its
+    grossness."
+
+This is a splendid and world-famous passage well worth committing to
+memory.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Edward Gibbon, who wrote the _Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire_, belonged to the later half of the eighteenth century, and was
+a contemporary of Dr. Johnson and Burke. He finished his great history
+three years after Dr. Johnson's death. It is a monumental work, and
+will live as long as the English language. It is one of the books which
+every cultivated gentleman should read. The style is stately and
+sonorous, and the industry and erudition involved in its production must
+have been immense.
+
+Although it never sinks below a noble elevation of style, it nevertheless
+displays no uplifting flights of eloquence or declamation, and to me, and
+probably to you, Antony, the most moving passages in Gibbon's
+writings are those that describe with unaffected emotion the moment of
+the first resolve to compose the great history and the night when he
+wrote the last line of it. On page 129 of his memoirs[1] he wrote:--
+
+    "It was at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing
+    amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were
+    singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing
+    the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."
+
+Thus did he resolve to devote himself to the tremendous task, and at
+Lausanne twenty-three years later it was at last fulfilled. He recorded
+the event in a few pregnant sentences that are strangely memorable:--
+
+    "It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787,
+    between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last
+    lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After
+    laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered
+    walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the
+    lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was
+    serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters,
+    and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first
+    emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the
+    establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a
+    sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had
+    taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and
+    that, whatsoever might be the future fate of my History, the life
+    of the historian must be short and precarious."
+
+In June, 1888, just one hundred and one years after that pen had been
+finally laid aside, I searched in Lausanne for the summer-house and
+covered walk, and could find no very authentic record of its site. I
+brought home a flower from the garden where it seemed probable the
+summer-house had once existed, behind the modern hotel built there in
+the intervening time, and laid it between the leaves of my Gibbon.
+
+The pressed flower was still there when I last took the book down from
+my shelves.
+
+I hope my successors will preserve the little token of my reverence.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: First edition, 1794.]
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Some of the most eloquent orators in the world have been Irishmen,
+and among them Henry Grattan was supreme.
+
+The Irish Parliament in the later half of the eighteenth century
+frequently sat spell-bound under the magic of his voice.
+
+In 1782, at the age of thirty-two, he achieved by his amazing
+eloquence a great National Revolution in Ireland. But eighteen years
+later all that he had fought for and achieved was lost in the Act of
+Union. In these days I suppose few will be found to defend the means
+whereby that Act was passed; but the public assertions that the people
+of Ireland were in favour of it wrung from Grattan the following cry of
+indignation and wrath:--
+
+    "To affirm that the judgment of a nation is erroneous may mortify,
+    but to affirm that her judgment _against_ is _for_; to assert that
+    she has said _ay_ when she has pronounced _no_; to affect to refer
+    a great question to the people; finding the sense of the people,
+    like that of the parliament, against the question, to force the
+    question; to affirm the sense of the people to be _for_ the
+    question; to affirm that the question is persisted in, because the
+    sense of the people is for it; to make the falsification of the
+    country's sentiments the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of
+    the Union; to affirm that her parliament, constitution, liberty,
+    honour, property, are taken away by her own authority,--there is,
+    in such artifice, an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility,
+    that can best be answered by sensations of astonishment and
+    disgust, excited on this occasion by the British minister, whether
+    he speaks in gross and total ignorance of the truth, or in
+    shameless and supreme contempt for it.
+
+    "The constitution may be _for a time_ so lost; the character of
+    the country cannot be so lost. The ministers of the Crown will, or
+    may, perhaps, at length find that it is not so easy to put down
+    for ever an ancient and respectable nation, by abilities, however
+    great, and by power and by corruption, however irresistible;
+    liberty may repair her golden beams, and with redoubled heat
+    animate the country; the cry of loyalty will not long continue
+    against the principles of liberty; loyalty is a noble, a
+    judicious, and a capacious principle; but in these countries
+    loyalty, distinct from liberty, is corruption, not loyalty.
+
+    "The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against the
+    principles of liberty. Connexion is a wise and a profound policy;
+    but connexion without an Irish Parliament is connexion without its
+    own principle, without analogy of condition; without the pride of
+    honour that should attend it; is innovation, is peril, is
+    subjugation--not connexion.
+
+    "The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against the
+    principle of liberty.
+
+    "Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, necessary for the
+    preservation of freedom, necessary for that of empire; but,
+    without union of hearts--with a separate government, and without a
+    separate parliament, identification is extinction, is dishonour,
+    is conquest--not identification.
+
+    "Yet I do not give up the country--I see her in a swoon, but she
+    is not dead--though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless,
+    still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheeks a
+    glow of beauty--
+
+      "Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet
+      Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,
+      And death's pale flag is not advanced there."
+
+    "While a plank of the vessel sticks together, I will not leave
+    her. Let the courtier present his flimsy sail, and carry the light
+    bark of his faith, with every new breath of wind--I will remain
+    anchored here--with fidelity to the fortunes of my country,
+    faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall."
+
+Of another character, but not less admirable than his eloquence in the
+Senate, was Grattan's achievement with the pen. His description of the
+great Lord Chatham lives as one of the most noble panegyrics--it not
+the most noble--in the world. No writer, before or since, has offered
+anyone such splendid homage as this--that he never sunk "to the
+vulgar level of the great."
+
+    "The Secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him.
+    Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had
+    the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty, and
+    one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence
+    that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his
+    superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious
+    politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to
+    the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and
+    impracticable, his object was England,--his ambition was fame;
+    without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made
+    a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he
+    smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy
+    of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his schemes
+    were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe
+    and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes
+    were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the
+    suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and
+    enlightened by prophecy.
+
+    "The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent--those
+    sensations which soften, and allure, and vulgarise--were unknown
+    to him; no domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached
+    him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied
+    by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to
+    counsel and decide.
+
+    "A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so
+    authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled
+    at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality.
+    Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this
+    statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and
+    much of the ruin of his victories--but the history of his country,
+    and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.
+
+    "Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence
+    was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly
+    expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom--not like
+    the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of
+    Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music
+    of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct the understanding
+    through the painful subtilty of argumentation; nor was he, like
+    Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion, but rather lightened
+    upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of his
+    mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be
+    followed.
+
+    "Yet he was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he
+    was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he
+    concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon
+    many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence, but even
+    then, like the spinning of a cannon ball, he was still alive with
+    fatal, unapproachable activity.
+
+    "Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could
+    create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
+    eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of
+    slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with
+    unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm
+    empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound
+    through its history."
+
+Grattan died in 1820, and twenty years later, in 1844, another great
+English writer, Lord Macaulay, wrote a world-famous passage upon the
+great Lord Chatham in the _Edinburgh Review_:--
+
+    "Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot
+    which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other
+    end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests
+    there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and
+    Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great
+    citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable
+    graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and, from above,
+    his effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face
+    and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl
+    defiance at her foes.
+
+    "The generation which reared that memorial of him has disappeared.
+    The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate judgments
+    which his contemporaries passed on his character may be calmly
+    revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of
+    vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors,
+    will yet deliberately pronounce that, among the eminent men whose
+    bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless and
+    none a more splendid name."
+
+It is a great race, Antony, that can produce a man of such a character
+as Chatham, and also writers who can dedicate to him such superb
+tributes as these.
+
+Macaulay's prose has been much criticised as being too near to easy
+journalism to be classed among the great classic passages of English;
+but this much must be recognised to his great credit--he never wrote
+an obscure sentence or an ambiguous phrase, and his works may be
+searched in vain for a foreign idiom or even a foreign word. He
+possessed an infallible memory, absolute perspicuity, and a scholarly
+taste. He detested oppression wherever enforced, and never exercised
+his great powers in the defence of mean politics or unworthy practices.
+
+Such a writer to-day would blow a wholesome wind across the tainted
+pools of political intrigue.
+
+We can salute him, Antony, as a fine, manly, clean writer, who was an
+honour to letters.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Born in the same year as was Grattan, namely, in 1750, Lord Erskine
+adorned the profession of the Bar with an eloquence that never
+exhibited the slight tendency to be ponderous which sometimes was
+displayed by his contemporaries.
+
+Grace and refinement shine out in every one of his great speeches.
+
+He was a young scion of the great house of Buchan, being the third son
+of the tenth Earl. After being in the Navy for four years he left it
+for the Army, and six years later he went to Trinity College,
+Cambridge, and took his degree; thence he came to the Bar in 1778, and
+at once displayed the most conspicuous ability as an advocate.
+
+He appeared for Horne Tooke in a six-day trial for high treason, which
+ended in an acquittal.
+
+In 1806 he became Lord Chancellor and a peer.
+
+I quote an indignant warning to the aristocracy of England which flamed
+forth in one of his great speeches:--
+
+    "Let the aristocracy of England, which trembles so much for
+    itself, take heed to its own security; let the nobles of England,
+    if they mean to preserve that pre-eminence which, in some shape or
+    other, must exist in every social community, take care to support
+    it by aiming at that which is creative, and alone creative, of
+    real superiority. Instead of matching themselves to supply wealth,
+    to be again idly squandered in debauching excesses, or to round
+    the quarters of a family shield; instead of continuing their names
+    and honours in cold and alienated embraces, amidst the enervating
+    rounds of shallow dissipation, let them live as their fathers of
+    old lived before them; let them marry as affection and prudence
+    lead the way, and, in the ardours of mutual love, and in the
+    simplicities of rural life, let them lay the foundation of a
+    vigorous race of men, firm in their bodies, and moral from early
+    habits; and, instead of wasting their fortunes and their strength
+    in the tasteless circles of debauchery, let them light up their
+    magnificent and hospital halls to the gentry and peasantry of the
+    country, extending the consolations of wealth and influence to the
+    poor. Let them but do this,--and instead of those dangerous and
+    distracted divisions between the different ranks of life, and
+    those jealousies of the multitude so often blindly painted as big
+    with destruction, we should see our country as one large and
+    harmonious family, which can never be accomplished amidst vice and
+    corruption, by wars and treaties, by informations, _ex officio_
+    for libels, or by any of the tricks and artifices of the State."
+
+Mr. Erskine was entitled, as the son of the tenth Earl of Buchan, to
+speak such words of warning and exhortation to the aristocracy of
+England to which he belonged, and the lapse of a century and a quarter
+has not rendered the exhortation vain, though it may be hoped that the
+condemnatory clauses of the speech would not at the present time be
+so well justified as when they were delivered.
+
+Great names carry great obligations, and, for the most part, those who
+bear them to-day recognise those great obligations and endeavour
+without ostentation to fulfil them.
+
+The silly fribbles who posture before the photographic cameras for
+penny newspapers do not represent the real aristocracy of England.
+
+We must not, Antony, mistake a cockatoo for an eagle.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I shall not expect you in your reading often to penetrate into the
+innumerable dusty octavos that contain sermons. The stoutest heart
+may fail, without blame, before the flat-footed pedestrianism of these
+platitudinous volumes. But there does occasionally arise above the dull
+horizon a star whose brilliance is the more conspicuous for the
+surrounding gloom.
+
+In 1796, Coleridge, in a letter[1] to a Mr. Flower, who was a publisher
+at Cambridge, wrote:--
+
+    "I hope Robert Hall is well. Why is he idle? I mean towards the
+    public. We want such men to rescue this _enlightened age_ from
+    general irreligion."
+
+I suppose Robert Hall is a name known to but few in these days, but at
+the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries
+his fame was great and deserved.
+
+As a divine, dowered with the gift of inspired eloquence, Coleridge
+estimated his powers as second only to those of Jeremy Taylor. When
+Napoleon was at the supreme height of his conquests, and England
+alone of European countries still stood erect, uninvaded and
+undismayed, a company of soldiers attended Robert Hall's place of
+worship on the eve of their departure to Spain. The occasion was
+memorable and moving, and the preacher's splendid periods deserve to
+be preserved from oblivion:--
+
+    "By a series of criminal enterprises, by the successes of guilty
+    ambition, the liberties of Europe have been gradually
+    extinguished; the subjugation of Holland, Switzerland, and the
+    free towns of Germany, has completed that catastrophe; and we are
+    the only people in the Eastern Hemisphere who are in possession of
+    equal laws and a free constitution. Freedom, driven from every
+    spot on the Continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she
+    always chose for her favorite abode; but she is pursued even here,
+    and threatened with destruction. The inundations of lawless power,
+    after covering the whole earth, threaten to follow us here, and
+    we are most exactly, most critically placed in the only aperture
+    where it can be successfully repelled, in the Thermopylæ of the
+    universe.
+
+    "As far as the interests of freedom are concerned, the most
+    important by far of sublunary interests, you, my countrymen, stand
+    in the capacity of the federal representatives of the human race;
+    for with you it is to determine (under God) in what condition the
+    latest posterity shall be born; their fortunes are entrusted to
+    your care, and on your conduct at this moment depends the colour
+    and complexion of their destiny. If liberty, after being
+    extinguished on the Continent, is suffered to expire here, whence
+    is it ever to emerge in the midst of that thick night that will
+    invest it?
+
+    "It remains with you, then, to decide whether that freedom, at
+    whose voice the kingdoms of Europe awoke from the sleep of ages to
+    run a career of virtuous emulation in everything great and good;
+    the freedom which dispelled the mists of superstition and invited
+    the nations to behold their God; whose magic touch kindled the
+    rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, and the flame of
+    eloquence; the freedom which poured into our lap opulence and
+    arts, and embellished life with innumerable institutions and
+    improvements till it became a theatre of wonders; it is for you to
+    decide whether this freedom shall yet survive, or be covered with
+    a funeral pall, and wrapt in eternal gloom.
+
+    "It is not necessary to await your determination. In the
+    solicitude you feel to approve yourselves worthy of such a trust,
+    every thought of what is afflicting in warfare, every apprehension
+    of danger, must vanish, and you are impatient to mingle in the
+    battle of the civilised world.
+
+    "Go then, ye defenders of your country, accompanied with every
+    auspicious omen; advance with alacrity into the field, where God
+    Himself musters the hosts of war. Religion is too much interested
+    in your success not to lend you her aid; she will shed over this
+    enterprise her selectest influences. While you are engaged in the
+    field many will repair to the closet, many to the sanctuary; the
+    faithful of every name will employ that prayer which has power
+    with God; the feeble hands which are unequal to any other weapon
+    will grasp the sword of the Spirit; from myriads of humble,
+    contrite hearts, the voice of intercession, supplication, and
+    weeping, will mingle in its ascent to heaven with the shouts of
+    battle and the shock of arms.
+
+    "While you have everything to fear from the success of the enemy,
+    you have every means of preventing that success, so that it is
+    next to impossible for victory not to crown your exertions. The
+    extent of your resources, under God, is equal to the justice of
+    your cause.
+
+    "But should Providence determine otherwise; should you fall in
+    this struggle, should the nation fall, you will have the
+    satisfaction (the purest allotted to man) of having performed your
+    part; your names will be enrolled with the most illustrious dead,
+    while posterity to the end of time, as often as they revolve the
+    events of this period (and they will incessantly revolve them)
+    will turn to you a reverential eye while they mourn over the
+    freedom which is entombed in your sepulchre.
+
+    "I cannot but imagine the virtuous heroes, legislators, and
+    patriots, of every age and country, are bending from their
+    elevated seats to witness this contest, as if they were incapable,
+    till it be brought to a favourable issue, of enjoying their
+    eternal repose.
+
+    "Enjoy that repose, illustrious immortals! Your mantle fell when
+    you ascended, and thousands inflamed with your spirit, and
+    impatient to tread in your steps, are ready 'to swear by Him that
+    sitteth upon the throne and liveth for ever and ever,' they will
+    protect freedom in her last asylums, and never desert that cause
+    which you sustained by your labours and cemented with your blood.
+
+    "And Thou, Sole Ruler among the children of men, to whom the
+    shields of the earth belong, 'gird on Thy sword, Thou most
+    Mighty'; go forth with our hosts in the day of battle! Impart, in
+    addition to their hereditary valour, that confidence of success
+    which springs from Thy Presence!
+
+    "Pour into their hearts the spirit of departed heroes! Inspire
+    them with Thine own, and, while led by Thine Hand and fighting
+    under Thy banners, open Thou their eyes to behold in every valley
+    and in every plain, what the prophet beheld by the same
+    illuminations--chariots of fire, and horses of fire!
+
+    "Then shall the strong man be as tow, and the maker of it as a
+    spark; and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench
+    them."
+
+We, who have just emerged, shattered indeed and reeling, from
+another and yet more awful combat for freedom, can the better extend
+our sympathy to those forefathers of ours situated in like case, and can
+imagine with what beating hearts they must have listened to so
+magnificent a call to arms as this; commingling prayer, exhortation,
+and benediction.
+
+Napoleon, after all, waged his wars with us according to the laws of
+nations, the rules of civilised peoples, and the dictates of decent
+humanity. But never since Christianity has been established has one
+man committed so dread and awful an accumulation of public iniquities
+as stand for ever against the base and cowardly name of William
+Hohenzollern, Emperor in Germany. He spat upon the ancient chivalries
+of battle; he prostituted the decent amenities of diplomacy; he polluted
+with infamy and murder the splendid comradeship of the sea.
+
+When the captain of one of his submarines placed upon his deck the
+captured crew of an unarmed merchant vessel which he had sunk,
+destroyed their boats, took from them their life-belts, carried them
+miles away from any floating wreckage, and then projected them into
+the sea to drown, this unspeakable monarch approved the awful deed
+and decorated the ruffian for his infamous cruelty.
+
+When gallant Fryatt, fulfilling every duty a captain owes to his unarmed
+crew and helpless passengers, turned the bows of his peaceful
+packet-boat upon the submarine which was being used to murder them
+all in cold blood, he fell into this Kaiser's hands, and the coward
+wreaked his vengeance upon nobility that was beyond his
+comprehension and valour that rendered him insignificant.
+
+Of these horrible acts the proofs stand unchallenged, and for such
+deeds as these the world has cast him out: thrown him down from one
+of the greatest thrones in history; and left him in the place to which,
+white with terror, he ignominiously fled, stripped of all his power and
+splendour, his crowns, his crosses, and his diadems.
+
+Idle is it for this man and his apologists to plead any extenuation or
+excuse.
+
+It was his custom in the plenitude of his power to declare himself
+answerable for his actions only to God and himself. Then let the
+judgment of God be upon him. When we recall the awful and
+unnumbered horrors with which he covered Europe, I doubt whether all
+history can furnish a parallel to him.
+
+By his authority helpless Belgium was invaded, treaties treacherously
+broken, and her people slaughtered. By his authority her priests were
+murdered in cold blood and her nuns violated by his vile soldiery. By his
+authority poison gases were first projected with low cunning upon brave
+and honourable adversaries. By his authority hospital ships at sea were
+sent to the bottom.
+
+But time and the might of free nations have, after fearful sufferings,
+dissipated his invincible armies, and they have shrivelled before the
+wrath of mankind. The whole world rose up in its offended majesty and
+tore from him that shining armour of which it was his custom to boast;
+and, with the brand of Cain upon him, he now lies obscurely in Holland,
+bereft of all the trappings of his sinister power.
+
+There were times in the past when justice would have avenged such
+awful crimes as lie at this man's door with the torture of his living body
+and the desecration of his lifeless remains, but his conquerors disdained
+to debase themselves by imitating his own abominations; and they left
+him to afford a spectacle to posterity as the supreme example of
+human ignominy!
+
+When you are old, Antony, and this greatest of all wars has become
+part of England's history, you will be proud and happy to remember
+that your own father, at the first call for volunteers, laid down the
+pencil and scale of his peaceful profession, went out to fight for his
+country in the trenches in France, was wounded almost to death, and
+was saved only by the skill and devotion of one of the greatest
+surgeons of the day.[2] All the best blood of England, Scotland, and
+Ireland went marching together to defend the freedom of the world,
+and upon their hearts were engraven the glorious words:--
+
+    "Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war
+    and my fingers to fight."
+
+May such a call never come to our beloved country again! But if it does,
+Antony, I know where you will be found without need of exhortations
+from me.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Now in my library.--S.C.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Sir Arbuthnot Lane.]
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Grattan, of whom I have already written, had in the first Lord Plunket
+a successor and a compatriot very little his inferior in the gift of
+oratory.
+
+He was born in 1764, and was therefore some fourteen years younger
+than Grattan, whom he survived by thirty-four years.
+
+Like Grattan, he displayed a burning patriotism and, like him, fiercely
+opposed the Act of Union.
+
+Few orators have displayed greater powers of clear reason and
+convincing logic than Plunket. It may be admitted that he seldom rose
+to great heights of eloquence, but tradition credits his delivery with a
+quality of dignity amounting almost to majesty. The gift of oratory
+consists in how things are said as much as in what things are said, and
+the voice, gesture, and manner of Plunket were commanding and
+magnificent.
+
+When Attorney-General in Ireland, in 1823, in a speech prosecuting the
+leaders of the riot known as "the Bottle Riot," Plunket uttered the
+following fine tribute to the character of William the Third:--
+
+    "Perhaps, my lords, there is not to be found in the annals of
+    history a character more truly great than that of William the
+    Third. Perhaps no person has ever appeared on the theatre of the
+    world who has conferred more essential or more lasting benefits on
+    mankind; on these countries, certainly none. When I look at the
+    abstract merits of his character, I contemplate him with
+    admiration and reverence. Lord of a petty principality--destitute
+    of all resources but those with which nature had endowed
+    him--regarded with jealousy and envy by those whose battles he
+    fought; thwarted in all his counsels; embarrassed in all his
+    movements; deserted in his most critical enterprises--he continued
+    to mould all those discordant materials, to govern all these
+    warring interests, and merely by the force of his genius, the
+    ascendancy of his integrity, and the immovable firmness and
+    constancy of his nature, to combine them into an indissoluble
+    alliance against the schemes of despotism and universal
+    domination of the most powerful monarch in Europe, seconded by the
+    ablest generals, at the head of the bravest and best disciplined
+    armies in the world, and wielding, without check or control, the
+    unlimited resources of his empire. He was not a consummate
+    general; military men will point out his errors; in that respect
+    Fortune did not favour him, save by throwing the lustre of
+    adversity over all his virtues. He sustained defeat after defeat,
+    but always rose _adversa rerum immersabilis unda_. Looking merely
+    at his shining qualities and achievements, I admire him as I do a
+    Scipio, a Regulus, a Fabius; a model of tranquil courage,
+    undeviating probity, and armed with a resoluteness and constancy
+    in the cause of truth and freedom, which rendered him superior to
+    the accidents that control the fate of ordinary men.
+
+    "But this is not all--I feel that to him, under God, I am, at this
+    moment, indebted for the enjoyment of the rights which I possess
+    as a subject of these free countries; to him I owe the blessings
+    of civil and religious liberty, and I venerate his memory with a
+    fervour of devotion suited to his illustrious qualities and to
+    his godlike acts."
+
+This is not so magnificent a panegyric as that of Grattan in his written
+tribute to Chatham, but, enhanced by the gesture and voice of the
+great orator, it was reputed to have left a deep impression upon all who
+heard it.
+
+But few speeches, however eloquent, survive, while the printed work of
+the writer may long endure; but to the orator is given what the writer
+never experiences--the fierce enjoyment, amounting almost to rapture,
+of holding an audience entranced under the spell of the spoken
+cadences; and English, Antony, has a splendour all its own when
+uttered by a master of its august music.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+18
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+To-day I will write about Robert Southey, and, as he and Coleridge
+married sisters, you may claim a distant relationship with him. His
+personal character was beautiful and unselfish, and his dwelling at
+Keswick was the home that for years sheltered Coleridge's children.
+
+With hardly an exception the poets of England have had an easy and
+royal mastery of prose; and in the case of Robert Southey there are
+some, and they are not the worst critics, who anticipate that his prose
+will long outlast his poetry in the Temple of Fame.
+
+We may suppose that to a man whose whole private life was stainlessly
+dedicated to a noble rectitude of conduct, and whose every act was
+sternly subjected to the judgment of an unbending conscience, some
+circumstances of the private life of Nelson must have been distasteful
+and open to censure; but no such reservations dimmed the splendour
+of Southey's tribute to the public hero who gave his life in the act of
+establishing, beyond reach of dispute or cavil, the throne of England as
+Queen of the Sea.
+
+    "The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a
+    public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned pale,
+    as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of
+    our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was
+    suddenly taken from us, and it seemed as if we had never, till
+    then, known how deeply we loved and reverenced him.
+
+    "What the country had lost in its great naval hero--the greatest
+    of our own, and of all former times, was scarcely taken into the
+    account of grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he performed his part,
+    that the maritime war, after the battle of Trafalgar, was
+    considered at an end; the fleets of the enemy were not merely
+    defeated, but destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new race
+    of seamen reared for them, before the possibility of their
+    invading our shores could again be contemplated.
+
+    "It was not, therefore, from any selfish reflection upon the
+    magnitude of our loss that we mourned for him; the general sorrow
+    was of a higher character. The people of England grieved that
+    funeral ceremonies, public monuments and posthumous rewards, were
+    all which they could now bestow upon him whom the king, the
+    legislature, and the nation, would alike have delighted to honour;
+    whom every tongue would have blessed; whose presence in every
+    village through which he might have passed would have wakened the
+    church bells, have given schoolboys a holiday, have drawn children
+    from their sports to gaze upon him, and 'old men from the chimney
+    corner' to look upon Nelson ere they died.
+
+    "The victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, indeed, with the usual
+    forms of rejoicing, but they were without joy; for such already
+    was the glory of the British Navy through Nelson's surpassing
+    genius, that it scarcely seemed to receive any addition from the
+    most signal victory that ever was achieved upon the sea; and the
+    destruction of this mighty fleet, by which all the maritime
+    schemes of France were totally frustrated, hardly appeared to add
+    to our security or strength, for while Nelson was living to watch
+    the combined squadrons of the enemy, we felt ourselves as secure
+    as now, when they were no longer in existence.
+
+    "There was reason to suppose from the appearances upon opening the
+    body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like
+    his father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said to have
+    fallen prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to be
+    lamented, who died so full of honours, and at the height of human
+    fame. The most triumphant death is that of a martyr; the most
+    awful, that of the martyred patriot; the most splendid, that of
+    the hero in the hour of victory; and if the chariot and the horses
+    of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could
+    scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory.
+
+    "He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name
+    and an example which are at this hour inspiring hundreds of the
+    youth of England; a name which is our pride, and an example which
+    will continue to be our shield and our strength."
+
+Nelson left England the Queen of the Sea, and the great war with
+Germany has failed to displace her from that splendid throne. For the
+plain fact of history remains that, after the battle of Jutland, the
+German High Seas Fleet never ventured out of port again till the end of
+the war; and when it did emerge from its ignominious security, it sailed
+to captivity at Scapa Flow, there ultimately to repose on the bottom of
+the sea.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+19
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+There are four very celebrated lines written by Walter Savage Landor
+which you may have heard quoted; they were written towards the close
+of his life, and are certainly distinguished and memorable:--
+
+  "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
+    Nature I loved, and next to Nature Art;
+  I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
+    It sinks, and I am ready to depart."
+
+It does not detract from the merit of the lines that as a fact Landor was
+of a fiery disposition, and strove a great deal with many adversaries,
+often of his own creation, throughout his long life[1]; and although he
+was of a fierce and combative nature he displayed in his writings a
+classical restraint and tender beauty hardly achieved by his
+contemporaries.
+
+In the form of an imaginary conversation between Æsop and Rhodope,
+Landor makes the latter describe how her father, in the famine,
+unbeknown to her, starved that she might have plenty, and, when all
+was gone, took her to the market-place to sell her that she might live.
+There is an exquisite delicacy in this dialogue that places it among the
+wonders of literature:--
+
+    "_Rhodope_. Never shall I forget the morning when my father,
+    sitting in the coolest part of the house, exchanged his last
+    measure of grain for a chlamys of scarlet cloth, fringed with
+    silver. He watched the merchant out of the door, and then looked
+    wistfully into the cornchest. I, who thought there was something
+    worth seeing, looked in also, and finding it empty, expressed my
+    disappointment, not thinking, however, about the corn. A faint and
+    transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of mine. He
+    unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before me,
+    and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the
+    glittering fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; and I
+    know not what flowers he gathered, but he gathered many; and some
+    he placed in my bosom, and some in my hair. But I told him with
+    captious pride, first that I could arrange them better, and again
+    that I would have only the white. However, when he had selected
+    all the white and I had placed a few of them according to my
+    fancy, I told him (rising in my slipper) he might crown me with
+    the remainder.
+
+    "The splendour of my apparel gave me a sensation of authority.
+    Soon as the flowers had taken their station on my head, I
+    expressed a dignified satisfaction at the taste displayed by my
+    father, just as if I could have seen how they appeared! But he
+    knew that there was at least as much pleasure as pride in it, and
+    perhaps we divided the latter (alas! not both) pretty equally.
+
+    "He now took me into the market-place, where a concourse of people
+    were waiting for the purchase of slaves. Merchants came and looked
+    at me; some commending, others disparaging; but all agreeing that
+    I was slender and delicate, that I could not live long, and that I
+    should give much trouble. Many would have bought the chlamys, but
+    there was something less saleable in the child and flowers.
+
+    "_Æsop_. Had thy features been coarse and thy voice rustic, they
+    would all have patted thy cheeks and found no fault in thee.
+
+    "_Rhodope_. As it was, every one had bought exactly such another
+    in time past, and been a loser by it. At these speeches, I
+    perceived the flowers tremble slightly on my bosom, from my
+    father's agitation. Although he scoffed at them, knowing my
+    healthiness, he was troubled internally, and said many short
+    prayers, not very unlike imprecations, turning his head aside.
+    Proud was I, prouder than ever, when at last several talents were
+    offered for me, and by the very man who in the beginning had
+    undervalued me most, and prophesied the worst of me. My father
+    scowled at him and refused the money. I thought he was playing a
+    game, and began to wonder what it could be, since I had never seen
+    it played before. Then I fancied it might be some celebration
+    because plenty had returned to the city, insomuch that my father
+    had bartered the last of the corn he hoarded.
+
+    "I grew more and more delighted at the sport. But soon there
+    advanced an elderly man, who said gravely, 'Thou hast stolen this
+    child; her vesture alone is worth a hundred drachmas. Carry her
+    home again to her parents, and do it directly, or Nemesis and the
+    Eumenides will overtake thee.' Knowing the estimation in which my
+    father had always been holden by his fellow-citizens, I laughed
+    again and pinched his ear. He, although naturally choleric, burst
+    forth into no resentment at these reproaches, but said calmly, 'I
+    think I know thee by name, O guest! Surely thou art Xanthus, the
+    Samian. Deliver this child from famine.'
+
+    "Again I laughed aloud and heartily, and thinking it was now part
+    of the game, I held out both my arms, and protruded my whole body
+    toward the stranger. He would not receive me from my father's
+    neck, but he asked me with benignity and solicitude if I was
+    hungry; at which I laughed again, and more than ever; for it was
+    early in the morning, soon after the first meal, and my father had
+    nourished me most carefully and plentifully in all the days of the
+    famine. But Xanthus, waiting for no answer, took out of a sack,
+    which one of his slaves carried at his side, a cake of wheaten
+    bread and a piece of honeycomb, and gave them to me. I held the
+    honeycomb to my father's mouth, thinking it the most of a dainty.
+    He dashed it to the ground, but seizing the bread he began to
+    devour it ferociously. This also I thought was in the play, and I
+    clapped my hands at his distortions. But Xanthus looked at him
+    like one afraid, and smote the cake from him, crying aloud, 'Name
+    the price,' My father now placed me in his arms, naming a price
+    much below what the other had offered, saying, 'The gods are ever
+    with thee, O Xanthus! therefore to thee do I consign my child.'
+
+    "But while Xanthus was counting out the silver my father seized
+    the cake again, which the slave had taken up and was about to
+    replace in the wallet. His hunger was exasperated by the taste,
+    and the delay. Suddenly there arose much tumult. Turning round in
+    the old woman's bosom who had received me from Xanthus, I saw my
+    beloved father struggling on the ground, livid and speechless. The
+    more violent my cries, the more rapidly they hurried me away; and
+    many were soon between us.
+
+    "Little was I suspicious that he had suffered the pangs of famine
+    long before: alas! and he had suffered them for me. Do I weep
+    while I am telling you they ended? I could not have closed his
+    eyes; I was too young; but I might have received his last breath,
+    the only comfort of an orphan's bosom. Do you now think him
+    blameable, O Æsop?"
+
+    "_Æsop_. It was sublime humanity; it was forbearance and
+    self-denial which even the immortal gods have never shown us."
+
+The _Dream of Petrarca_ is, I think, more famous but not more
+beautiful than this narrative of Rhodope; it lacks the deep human
+tragedy and infinite charity of the winsome child, and the
+self-contained father silently perishing of hunger for her; but if the
+_Æsop and Rhodope_ had never been written, the _Dream of Petrarca_
+would secure its author a place among the immortals:--
+
+    "... Wearied with the length of my walk over the mountains, and
+    finding a soft molehill, covered with grey moss, by the wayside, I
+    laid my head upon it and slept. I cannot tell how long it was
+    before a species of dream or vision came over me.
+
+    "Two beautiful youths appeared beside me; each was winged; but the
+    wings were hanging down and seemed ill-adapted to flight. One of
+    them, whose voice was the softest I ever heard, looking at me
+    frequently, said to the other, 'He is under my guardianship for
+    the present; do not awaken him with that feather.' Methought, on
+    hearing the whisper, I saw something like the feather on an arrow;
+    and then the arrow itself; the whole of it, even to the point,
+    although he carried it in such a manner that it was difficult at
+    first to discover more than a palm's length of it; the rest of the
+    shaft (and the whole of the barb) was behind his ankles.
+
+    "'This feather never awakens anyone,' replied he, rather
+    petulantly, 'but it brings more of confident security, and more of
+    cherished dreams, than you, without me, are capable of imparting.'
+
+    "'Be it so!' answered the gentler; 'none is less inclined to
+    quarrel or dispute than am I. Many whom you have wounded
+    grievously call upon me for succour; but so little am I disposed
+    to thwart you, it is seldom I venture to do more for them than to
+    whisper a few words of comfort in passing. How many reproaches on
+    these occasions have been cast upon me for indifference and
+    infidelity! Nearly as many, and nearly in the same terms as upon
+    you.'
+
+    "'Odd enough that we, O Sleep! should be thought so alike!' said
+    Love contemptuously. 'Yonder is he who bears a nearer resemblance
+    to you; the dullest have observed it.' I fancied I turned my eyes
+    to where he was pointing, and saw at a distance the figure he
+    designated. Meanwhile the contention went on uninterruptedly.
+    Sleep was slow in asserting his power or his benefits. Love
+    recapitulated them; but only that he might assert his own above
+    them.
+
+    "Suddenly he called upon me to decide, and to choose my patron.
+    Under the influence, first of the one, then of the other, I sprang
+    from repose to rapture, I alighted from rapture on repose, and
+    knew not which was sweetest. Love was very angry with me, and
+    declared he would cross me through the whole of my existence.
+    Whatever I might on other occasions have thought of his veracity,
+    I now felt too surely that he would keep his word.
+
+    "At last, before the close of the altercation, the third Genius
+    had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell you how I knew him,
+    but I knew him to be the Genius of Death. Breathless as I was at
+    beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First
+    they seemed only calm; presently they grew contemplative; and
+    lastly beautiful; those of the Graces themselves are less regular,
+    less harmonious, less composed.
+
+    "Love glanced at him unsteadily, with a countenance in which there
+    was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat of disdain; and cried, 'Go away!
+    go away! nothing that thou touchest, lives!' 'Say rather, child!'
+    replied the advancing form, and advancing grew loftier and
+    statelier, 'say rather that nothing of beautiful or of glorious
+    lives its own true life until my wing hath passed over it.'
+
+    "Love pouted, and rumpled and bent down with his forefinger the
+    stiff short feathers on his arrow-head, but replied not. Although
+    he frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded him less and
+    less, and scarcely looked towards him. The milder and calmer
+    Genius, the third, in proportion as I took courage to contemplate
+    him, regarded me with more and more complacency. He held neither
+    flower nor arrow as the others did, but throwing back the clusters
+    of dark curls that overshadowed his countenance, he presented to
+    me his hand, openly and benignly. I shrank on looking at him so
+    near, and yet I sighed to love him. He smiled, not without an
+    expression of pity, at perceiving my diffidence, my timidity; for
+    I remembered how soft was the hand of Sleep, how warm and
+    entrancing was Love's.
+
+    "By degrees I became ashamed of my ingratitude, and turning my
+    face away, I held out my arms, and I felt my neck within his; the
+    coolness of freshest morning breathed around; the heavens seemed to
+    open above me, while the beautiful cheek of my deliverer rested on
+    my head. I would now have looked for those others, but knowing my
+    intention by my gesture, he said consolatorily, 'Sleep is on his
+    way to the Earth, where many are calling him; but it is not to
+    these he hastens, for every call only makes him fly further off.
+    Sedately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as capricious and
+    volatile as the more arrogant and ferocious one.'
+
+    "'And Love!' said I, 'whither is he departed? If not too late, I
+    would propitiate and appease him.'
+
+    "'He who cannot follow me; he who cannot overtake and pass me,'
+    said the Genius, 'is unworthy of the name, the most glorious in
+    earth or heaven. Look up! Love is yonder, and ready to receive
+    thee.'
+
+    "I looked: the earth was under me: I saw only the clear blue sky,
+    and something brighter above it."
+
+There is something most rare and refined and precious in this vision,
+told as it is with a sweet serenity. But it does not touch the heart like
+the _Æsop and Rhodope_.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Born 1775, died 1864.]
+
+
+
+20
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I now come to speak of one whose fame was familiar to me as a
+boy--the great Lord Brougham.--for he lived till 1868. I remember that
+he was vehemently praised and blamed as a politician, but with such
+matters others have dealt; in this letter, Antony, we will concern
+ourselves with the glory of English prose as it poured from Lord
+Brougham in two of his greatest speeches.
+
+He was an orator whose voice was uplifted throughout a long and
+strenuous life in condemnation of all the brutalities and oppression of
+his time, and to whose eloquence the triumphant cause of freedom
+stands for ever in deep obligation.
+
+His great speech on Law Reform in the House of Commons, in 1828,
+took six hours to deliver, and the concluding passage, which mounted
+to a plane of lofty declamation, displayed no sign of exhaustion, and
+was listened to with strained attention by an absorbed and crowded
+audience:--
+
+    "The course is clear before us; the race is glorious to run. You
+    have the power of sending your name down through all times,
+    illustrated by deeds of higher fame, and more useful import, than
+    ever were done within these walls.
+
+    "You saw the greatest warrior of the age--conqueror of
+    Italy--humbler of Germany--terror of the North--saw him account
+    all his matchless victories poor, compared with the triumph you
+    are now in a condition to win--saw him contemn the fickleness of
+    fortune, while, in despite of her, he could pronounce his
+    memorable boast, 'I shall go down to posterity with the Code in my
+    hand!'
+
+    "You have vanquished him in the field; strive now to rival him in
+    the sacred arts of peace! Outstrip him as a lawgiver, whom in arms
+    you overcame! The lustre of the Regency will be eclipsed by the
+    more solid and enduring splendour of the Reign. The praise which
+    false courtiers feigned for our Edwards and Harrys, the Justinians
+    of their day, will be the just tribute of the wise and the good to
+    that monarch under whose sway so mighty an undertaking shall be
+    accomplished. Of a truth, the holders of sceptres are most chiefly
+    to be envied for that they bestow the power of thus conquering,
+    and ruling thus.
+
+    "It was the boast of Augustus--it formed part of the glare in
+    which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost,--that he found
+    Rome of brick, and left it of marble; a praise not unworthy a
+    great prince, and to which the present reign also has its claims.
+    But how much nobler will be the sovereign's boast when he shall
+    have it to say, that he found law dear, and left it cheap; found
+    it a sealed book--left it a living letter; found it the patrimony
+    of the rich--left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the
+    two-edged sword of craft and oppression--left it the staff of
+    honesty and the shield of innocence!
+
+    "To me, much reflecting on these things, it has always seemed a
+    worthier honour to be the instrument of making you bestir
+    yourselves in this high matter, than to enjoy all that office can
+    bestow--office, of which the patronage would be an irksome
+    encumbrance, the emoluments superfluous to one content with the
+    rest of his industrious fellow-citizens that his own hands
+    minister to his wants; and as for the power supposed to follow
+    it--I have lived near half a century, and I have learned that
+    power and place may be severed.
+
+    "But one power I do prize; that of being the advocate of my
+    countrymen here, and their fellow-labourers elsewhere, in those
+    things which concern the best interests of mankind. That power, I
+    know full well, no government can give--no change take away!"
+
+His speech on negro slavery made a deep impression upon the country,
+and rose towards its termination, gradually, but with ever-ascending
+periods, to a close of absolute majesty:--
+
+    "I regard the freedom of the negro as accomplished and sure. Why?
+    Because it is his right--because he has shown himself fit for it;
+    because a pretext, or a shadow of a pretext, can no longer be
+    devised for withholding that right from its possessor. I know that
+    all men at this day take a part in the question, and they will no
+    longer bear to be imposed upon, now they are well informed. My
+    reliance is firm and unflinching upon the great change which I
+    have witnessed--the education of the people, unfettered by party
+    or by sect--witnessed from the beginning of its progress, I may
+    say from the hour of its birth! Yes! It was not for a humble man
+    like me to assist at royal births with the illustrious Prince who
+    condescended to grace the pageant of this opening session, or the
+    great captain and statesman in whose presence I am now proud to
+    speak. But with that illustrious Prince, and with the father of
+    the Queen, I assisted at that other birth, more conspicuous still.
+    With them, and with the head of the House of Russell, incomparably
+    more illustrious in my eyes, I watched over its cradle--I marked
+    its growth--I rejoiced in its strength--I witnessed its maturity;
+    I have been spared to see it ascend the very height of supreme
+    power; directing the councils of state; accelerating every great
+    improvement; uniting itself with every good work; propping all
+    useful institutions; extirpating abuses in all our institutions;
+    passing the bounds of our European dominion, and in the New World,
+    as in the Old, proclaiming that freedom is the birthright of
+    man--that distinction of colour gives no title to oppression--that
+    the chains now loosened must be struck off, and even the marks
+    they have left effaced--proclaiming this by the same eternal law
+    of our nature which makes nations the masters of their own
+    destiny, and which in Europe has caused every tyrant's throne to
+    quake!
+
+    "But they need feel no alarm at the progress of light who defend a
+    limited monarchy and support popular institutions--who place their
+    chiefest pride not in ruling over slaves, be they white or be
+    they black, not in protecting the oppressor, but in wearing a
+    constitutional crown, in holding the sword of justice with the
+    hand of mercy, in being the first citizen of a country whose air
+    is too pure for slavery to breathe, and on whose shores, if the
+    captive's foot but touch, his fetters of themselves fall off. To
+    the resistless progress of this great principle I look with a
+    confidence which nothing can shake; it makes all improvement
+    certain; it makes all change safe which it produces; for none can
+    be brought about unless it has been prepared in a cautious and
+    salutary spirit.
+
+    "So now the fulness of time is come for at length discharging our
+    duty to the African captive. I have demonstrated to you that
+    everything is ordered--every previous step taken--all safe, by
+    experience shown to be safe, for the long-desired consummation.
+    The time has come, the trial has been made, the hour is striking;
+    you have no longer a pretext for hesitation, or faltering, or
+    delay. The slave has shown, by four years' blameless behaviour,
+    and devotion to the pursuits of peaceful industry, that he is as
+    fit for his freedom as any English peasant, ay, or any lord whom
+    I now address.
+
+    "I demand his rights; I demand his liberty without stint. In the
+    name of justice and of law--in the name of reason--in the name of
+    God, who has given you no right to work injustice; I demand that
+    your brother be no longer trampled upon as your slave! I make my
+    appeal to the Commons, who represent the free people of England;
+    and I require at their hands the performance of that condition for
+    which they paid so enormous a price--that condition which all
+    their constituents are in breathless anxiety to see fulfilled! I
+    appeal to this House. Hereditary judges of the first tribunal in
+    the world--to you I appeal for justice. Patrons of all the arts
+    that humanise mankind--under your protection I place humanity
+    herself! To the merciful Sovereign of a free people I call aloud
+    for mercy to the hundreds of thousands for whom half a million of
+    her Christian sisters have cried aloud--I ask that their cry may
+    not have risen in vain. But first I turn my eye to the throne of
+    all justice, and devoutly humbling myself before Him who is of
+    purer eyes than to behold such vast iniquities, I implore that the
+    curse hovering over the head of the unjust and the oppressor be
+    averted from us--that your hearts may be turned to mercy--and that
+    over all the earth His will may at length be done!"
+
+This is nobly to use noble gifts; it is difficult to think ill of a
+man who can carry oratory for a glorious object to such heights of
+splendour. It may seem a duty to some to darken his character with
+detraction, but his inspiring words remain supreme and unsullied and
+will still live when such faults as may be truly laid to his charge
+are long forgotten. To fight for a great cause, Antony, is rightly to
+use great powers, and this is what Lord Brougham did with all his
+might.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+21
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+In the great emprise of war it must often happen that the most awful
+scenes of manifested human power, and the most godlike deeds of
+human glory, are lost to the contemporary world, and utterly unknown
+to succeeding generations, because they were witnessed by no man
+with the gift of expression who could record for after time, in adequate
+language, the majestic spectacle.
+
+In the great war against Germany no great writer has yet appeared
+who was personally in touch as a living witness of the countless deeds
+of glorious valour and acts of heroic endurance that were everywhere
+displayed upon that immense far-stretched front.
+
+But in the wars of former times, a whole battle could be witnessed from
+its beginning to its end by a single commander, and no scenes in
+human life could be more terrible and soul-stirring than the awful ebb
+and flow of a great combat in which the victory of armies and the fate
+of nations hung in the balance.
+
+The battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War might easily at this date
+have long been forgotten had not the pen of Sir William Napier been as
+puissant as his sword. The battle had raged for hours, and the British
+were well-nigh overwhelmed; the Colonel, twenty officers, and over
+four hundred men out of five hundred and seventy had fallen in the
+57th alone; not a third were left standing in the other regiments that
+had been closely engaged throughout the day. Then Cole was ordered
+up with his fourth division as a last hope, and this is how Sir William
+Napier records their advance:--
+
+    "Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke and
+    rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude,
+    startled the enemy's masses, then augmenting and pressing onwards
+    as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and vomiting
+    forth a storm of fire hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front,
+    while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery
+    whistled through the British ranks ... the English battalions,
+    struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking
+    ships; but suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their
+    terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and
+    majesty the British soldier fights.
+
+    "In vain did Soult with voice and gesture animate his Frenchmen;
+    in vain did the hardiest veterans, breaking from the crowded
+    columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open
+    out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up,
+    and, fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and
+    foes, while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to
+    charge the advancing line.
+
+    "Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry.
+
+    "No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm
+    weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were
+    bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread
+    shook the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of
+    every formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant
+    cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as slowly,
+    and with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour
+    of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French
+    reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to
+    restore the fight, but only augmented the irremediable disorder,
+    and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff, went
+    headlong down the steep; the rain flowed after in streams
+    discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the
+    remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood
+    triumphant on the fatal hill!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted victor reels as he
+    places it on his bleeding front.
+
+    "All that night the rain poured down, and the river and the hills
+    and the woods resounded with the dismal clamour and groans of
+    dying men."
+
+Sir William Napier seems intimately to have known the transience of
+the gratitude of nations to those who fight their battles for them. At the
+end of his noble history of the Peninsular War he lets the curtain fall
+upon the scene with solemn brevity in a single sentence, thus:--
+
+    "The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America, some
+    for England: the cavalry, marching through France, took shipping
+    at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all remembrance
+    of the Veterans' services.
+
+    "Yet those Veterans had won nineteen pitched battles, and
+    innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken
+    four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from
+    Portugal, once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed,
+    wounded, or captured two hundred thousand enemies--leaving of
+    their own number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, whiten the
+    plains and mountains of the Peninsula."
+
+Science and the base malignity of our latest adversaries have debased
+modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity and
+honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult to believe
+that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and the petty officer
+at sea that nation can produce a single gentleman.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+22
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+This letter, like the last one, is concerned with war. War brings to every
+man not incapacitated by age or physical defects the call of his country
+to fight, and if need be to die, for it. It also exposes to view the few
+pusillanimous young men who are satisfied to enjoy protection from the
+horrors of invasion and the priceless boon of personal freedom, secured
+to them by the self-sacrifice and valour of others, while they
+themselves remain snugly at home and talk of their consciences.
+
+Patriotism such as that which in 1914 led the flower of our race to flock
+in countless thousands to the standards and be enrolled for battle in
+defence of
+
+  "This precious stone set in the silver sea,"
+  "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,"
+
+being without doubt or cavil one of the noblest emotions of the human
+heart, has often been the begetter of inspired prose. Our own great war
+has not yet produced many fine utterances, and I go back to-day to a
+contemporary of Sir William Napier for one of the noblest outbursts of
+eloquence expressive of a burning patriotism that has ever been poured
+forth.
+
+Someone in the days when Wellington was alive had alluded in the
+House of Lords to the Irish as "aliens," and Richard Sheil, rising in the
+House of Commons, lifted up his voice for his country in an impassioned
+flight of generous eloquence.
+
+Sir Henry Hardinge, who had been at the battle of Waterloo, happened
+to be seated opposite to Sheil in the House, and to him Sheil appealed
+with the deepest emotion to support him in his vindication of his
+country's valour. None will in these days deny that our fellow-citizens of
+Ireland who went to the war displayed a courage as firm and invincible
+as our own:--
+
+    "The Duke of Wellington is not, I am inclined to believe, a man of
+    excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be
+    easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I
+    cannot help thinking, that when he heard his countrymen (for we
+    are his countrymen) designated by a phrase so offensive he ought
+    to have recalled the many fields of fight in which we have been
+    contributors to his renown. Yes, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
+    that he has passed ought to have brought back upon him, that from
+    the earliest achievement in which he displayed that military
+    genius which has placed him foremost in the annals of modern
+    warfare, down to that last and surpassing combat which has made
+    his name imperishable, the Irish soldiers, with whom our armies
+    are filled, were the inseparable auxiliaries to his glory.
+
+    "Whose were the athletic arms that drove their bayonets at Vimiera
+    through those phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of war
+    before? What desperate valour climbed the steeps and filled the
+    moats at Badajos! All! all his victories should have rushed and
+    crowded back upon his memory--Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca,
+    Albuera, Toulouse, and last of all the greatest! (and here Sheil
+    pointed to Sir Henry Hardinge across the House). Tell me, for you
+    were there. I appeal to the gallant soldier before me, from whose
+    opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an
+    intrepid breast; tell me, for you must needs remember, on that day
+    when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while
+    death fell in showers upon them, when the artillery of France,
+    levelled with a precision of the most deadly science, played upon
+    them, when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the
+    example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the
+    onset--tell me if for one instant, when to hesitate for one
+    instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' blenched!
+
+    "And when at length the moment for the last and decisive movement
+    had arrived, and the valour which had so long been wisely cheeked
+    was at length let loose, tell me if Ireland with less heroic
+    valour than the natives of your own glorious isle, precipitated
+    herself upon the foe?
+
+    "The blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in the
+    same stream, on the same field. When the still morning dawned,
+    their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep earth
+    their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now
+    breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven
+    upon their union in the grave.
+
+    "Partners in every peril--in the glory shall we not be permitted
+    to participate, and shall we be told as a requital that we are
+    aliens, and estranged from the noble country for whose salvation
+    our life-blood was poured out?"
+
+A hundred years of strife, misunderstanding, anger, estrangement,
+outrages, bloodshed, and murder separate us from this appealing cry
+wrung from the beating heart of this inspired Irishman. Is the great
+tragedy of England and Ireland that has sullied their annals for seven
+hundred years never to be brought to an end? Is there never to be for
+us a Lethe through which we may pass to the farther shore of
+forgetfulness and forgiveness of the past and reconciliation in the
+future?
+
+That you may live to see it, Antony, is my hope and prayer.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+23
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous passage on the fate of
+Marie Antoinette--in some ways the most splendid of his
+utterances,--and I now am going to quote to you a very great passage
+from Thomas Carlyle on the same tragic subject.
+
+Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must certainly have been familiar
+with Burke's noble ejaculation, to challenge it with emulation; but in the
+result we must admit that he amply justifies his temerity.
+
+The tragic figure of the queen drawn to execution through the roaring
+mob inspired Carlyle with what is surely his most overwhelming
+product.
+
+The august shadow of the Bible is dimly apprehended as the words
+ascend upwards and upwards with simple sublimity to the awful close.
+
+Nothing he wrote in all his multitudinous volumes surpasses this
+astonishing outburst:--
+
+    "Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!
+
+    "For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties,
+    came it not also out of Heaven? _Sunt lachrymæ rerum, et mentem
+    mortalia tangunt_. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks without
+    pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy;--of
+    thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face
+    too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour;
+    and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine
+    and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the merciful end?
+
+    "Look _there_, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is
+    wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes
+    is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale as
+    of one living in death.
+
+    "Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of the
+    World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless,
+    which only curses environ, has to stop--a people drunk with
+    vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee
+    there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac
+    heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell!
+
+    "The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her startled
+    blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face,
+    which she hides with her hands.
+
+    "There is, then, _no_ heart to say, 'God pity thee'?
+
+    "O think not of these: think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the
+    Crucified--Who also treading the winepress alone, fronted sorrow
+    still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and built
+    of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for thee and all the wretched!
+
+    "Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the
+    Tuileries, where thy step was once so light--where thy children
+    shall not dwell.
+
+    "Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes--dumb lies the world;
+    that wild-yelling world, and all its madness, is behind thee."
+
+There is a passage in Carlyle's tempestuous narrative of the taking of
+the Bastille which has always seemed to me to give it the last
+consummate touch of greatness.
+
+Suddenly he pauses in the turmoil and dust and wrath and madness of
+that tremendous conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over
+peaceful France, and he exclaims:--
+
+    "O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant on
+    reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
+    cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the
+    Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are
+    even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:--and also
+    on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hôtel de Ville."
+
+And a few sentences further on a heart of stone must be moved by
+what the archives of that grim prison-house revealed:--
+
+    "Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice.
+    Read this portion of an old letter.
+
+    "'If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake
+    of God and the Most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my
+    dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to show that she is
+    alive! It were the greatest consolation I could receive; and I
+    should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur.'
+
+    "Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret-Demery, and hast no
+    other history,--she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou art
+    dead! Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this question;
+    to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of men."
+
+In the reign of Louis XV. alone, there were no less than fifteen
+thousand _lettres de cachet_ issued, by which anyone could be
+suddenly arrested, and, without trial, and, heedless of protest,
+imprisoned perhaps for life in the Bastille.
+
+In the excesses of the Reign of Terror three or four thousand persons
+perished. Their deaths were spectacular, and have covered with
+execrations their dreadful executioners.
+
+But it is right that we should remember, Antony, the life-long agony
+and the unutterable despair of the victims of that remorselessly cruel
+system which the Revolution overthrew.
+
+The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in _Sartor Resartus_, seems to
+me to come nearer to the above excerpts than anything else in Carlyle,
+though at a perceptible distance:--
+
+    "O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest
+    bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,
+    know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee,
+    'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!
+
+    "But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of
+    Creation is--Light. Till the eye have vision the whole members are
+    in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tossed Soul, as
+    once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: 'Let there be
+    Light!' Even to the greatest that has felt such moment is it not
+    miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to
+    the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the
+    rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate
+    Firmaments: deep, silent rock-foundations are built beneath, and
+    the skyey vault, with its everlasting Luminaries, above; instead
+    of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile,
+    heaven-encompassed World.
+
+    "I, too, could now say to myself: 'Be no longer a Chaos, but a
+    World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the
+    pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in
+    God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then.
+    Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole
+    might. Work while it is called to-day; for the night cometh
+    wherein no man can work.'"
+
+There is another passage in _Sartor Resartus_ which I have always
+held in veneration, though the field labourer is not now so
+"hardly-entreated" as when Carlyle wrote of him:--
+
+    "Two men I honour, and no third. First the toilworn Craftsman that
+    with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth, and
+    makes her man's.
+
+    "Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein
+    notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue indefeasibly royal, as of
+    the sceptre of this planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all
+    weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is
+    the face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for
+    thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee!
+    Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were
+    thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our
+    conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
+    marred. For in thee too lay a god-created form, but it was not to
+    be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and
+    defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to
+    know freedom. Yet toil on, toil on; _thou_ art in thy duty, be
+    out of it who may: thou toilest for the altogether indispensable,
+    for daily bread.
+
+    "A second man I honour, and still more highly: him who is seen
+    toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but
+    the bread of life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards
+    inward harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his
+    outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his
+    outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him
+    artist; not earthly craftsman only, but inspired thinker, who with
+    heaven-made implement conquers heaven for us! If the poor and
+    humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil
+    for him in return, that he have light, have guidance, freedom,
+    immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else
+    is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.
+
+    "Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities
+    united; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's
+    wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this
+    world know I nothing than a peasant saint, could such now anywhere
+    be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself;
+    thou wilt see the splendour of heaven spring forth from the
+    humblest depths of earth, like a light shining in great darkness."
+
+_Sartor Resartus_ has long taken its place among the greatest prose
+works of the nineteenth century, and it is a strange commentary on this
+mandate to us all to "produce, produce!" to find that for eleven years
+Carlyle could find no publisher who would give it in book form to the
+world!
+
+It is a solemn reflection to think that there may be many books of
+eloquence and splendour that have never seen the light of publicity.
+Publishers concern themselves less with what is finely written than with
+what will best sell; and in their defence it may be acceded that some of
+the masterpieces of literature have at their first appearance before the
+world fallen dead from the press.
+
+The first edition of FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyám_, issued at one
+shilling, was totally unrecognised, and copies of it might have been
+bought for twopence in the trays and boxes of trash on the pavement
+outside old bookshops!
+
+But if once a work is published, time will with almost irresistible force
+place it ultimately in the station it deserves in the literature of the
+world.
+
+Instant acceptance not seldom preludes final rejection. In the middle of
+the last century Martin Tupper's _Proverbial Philosophy_ garnished
+every drawing-room table; and now, where is it?
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+_P.S._--Do not look for the passage on Marie Antoinette in the _French
+Revolution_, for you will not find it there, but in the "Essay of the
+Diamond Necklace."
+
+
+
+24
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+You and I once had a cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, had he
+lived, would very certainly have left a brilliant addition to the
+lustre of the name he bore. He was born in 1798, and only lived
+forty-five years, dying when his powers were leading him to high
+fortune in that legal profession which so many of the family have
+pursued.
+
+He was a scholar of Eton; a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; he
+won the Greek and Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again in 1821.
+To him, therefore, the classic spirit was inborn, and a training that
+omitted the study of Latin and Greek the very negation of education.
+He would have had something very trenchant to say of what is now known
+as "the modern side." He wrote a very rich and splendid prose, and it
+is no fond family partiality that leads me to quote to you his
+eloquent and precious defence of the classical languages:--
+
+    "I am not one whose lot it has been to grow old in literary
+    retirement, devoted to classical studies with an exclusiveness
+    which might lead to an overweening estimate of these two noble
+    languages. Few, I will not say evil, were the days allowed to me
+    for such pursuits; and I was constrained, still young and an
+    unripe scholar to forego them for the duties of an active and
+    laborious profession. They are now amusements only, however
+    delightful and improving. For I am far from assuming to understand
+    all their riches, all their beauty, or all their power; yet I can
+    profoundly feel their immeasurable superiority in many important
+    respects to all we call modern; and I would fain think that there
+    are many even among my younger readers who can now, or will
+    hereafter, sympathise with the expression of my ardent admiration.
+
+    "Greek--the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as
+    our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, or
+    indefatigable strength, with the complication and the distinctness
+    of Nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing
+    was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the
+    mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the
+    gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety and
+    picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of Æschylus;
+    not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor fathomed to the
+    bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up
+    with all its ardours even under the Promethean touch of
+    Demosthenes!
+
+    "And Latin--the voice of empire and of war, of law and of the
+    state, inferior to its half-parent and rival in the embodying of
+    passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in
+    sustaining the measured march of history; and superior to it in
+    the indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark
+    of an imperial and despotising republic; rigid in its
+    construction, parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding
+    to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of
+    Greek-like splendour in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius;
+    proved indeed, to the uttermost, by Cicero, and by him found
+    wanting; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its
+    conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the
+    spirit of nations and not with the passions of individuals;
+    breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the
+    schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by
+    the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by
+    the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.
+
+    "These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly
+    counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not
+    failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink
+    deep at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful
+    in human language.
+
+    "The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and of
+    Rome, are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their
+    marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate
+    polish, has sunk for ever in his heart, and thence throws out
+    light and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyance of his
+    maturer years. No avocations of professional labour will make him
+    abandon their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he
+    will find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons--to reperuse
+    them in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations, and in
+    the clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and
+    to the world with superior profit.
+
+    "The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of
+    modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he
+    reverence that of classical antiquity; and in declining age, when
+    the appetite for magazines and reviews, and the ten-times repeated
+    trash of the day, has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a
+    circle of school-fellow friends, and end his secular studies as he
+    began them, with his Homer, his Horace, and his Shakespeare."
+
+Ah, what an echo, Antony, every word of this beautiful passage finds in
+my own heart, only saddened with the poignant regret that the
+necessary business and occupation of the passing years have dulled for
+me such unpolished facility, as I may once have possessed, for
+perusing my Homer and my Horace!
+
+It is, indeed, rare in these days to find gentlemen as familiar as were
+their forebears with Latin and Greek. You, Antony, will probably find
+yourself as you grow up in like case with myself, but there will remain
+for your unending instruction and delight all the glories of English
+literature, to give you a taste for which these few letters of mine are
+written, plucking only a single flower here and there from the most
+wonderful garden in the world.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+25
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Cardinal Newman, of whom I shall write to-day, was the first of the
+great writers born in the nineteenth century, and he lived from 1801 to
+1890. Besides being a master of English prose he was no mean poet;
+but above all else he was a man of immense personal power, which was
+strangely associated with a manifest saintliness which compelled
+diffidence from those admitted to his intimacy.
+
+I have described him as I knew him in my _Memories_;[1] and now will
+quote to you his utterance on music and its effect upon the heart of
+man, which has always seemed to me too precious to leave buried in a
+sermon:--
+
+    "Let us take an instance, of an outward and earthly form, or
+    economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified; I
+    mean musical sounds as they are exhibited most perfectly in
+    instrumental harmony.
+
+    "There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen; yet what
+    a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What Science brings so
+    much out of so little? out of what poor elements does some great
+    master in it create his new world!
+
+    "Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere
+    ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day,
+    without reality, without meaning? We may do so; and then, perhaps,
+    we shall also account theology to be a matter of words; yet, as
+    there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who
+    feel cannot communicate, so is there also in the wonderful
+    creation of sublimity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many
+    men the very names which the Science employs are utterly
+    incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be
+    fanciful or trifling, to speak of the views which it opens upon us
+    to be childish extravagance; yet is it possible that that
+    inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so
+    simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic,
+    should be a mere sound, which is gone and perishes?
+
+    "Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen
+    emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful
+    impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by
+    what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in
+    itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from
+    some higher sphere, they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in
+    the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our home; they
+    are the voice of angels or the magnificat of Saints, or the living
+    laws of Divine Governance, or the Divinic attributes; something
+    are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we
+    cannot utter,--though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise
+    distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them."
+
+Of quite another order is the Cardinal's description of a gentleman.
+Here there is no flight of poetical imagination, but a manifestation of
+felicitous intuition and penetrating insight as rare as it is convincing,
+and the generous wide vision of a man of the world, undimmed by the
+faintest trace of prejudice:--
+
+    "Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say
+    he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both
+    refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in
+    merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and
+    unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their
+    movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits
+    may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or
+    conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy
+    chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and
+    fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat
+    without them.
+
+    "The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may
+    cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast;
+    all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint,
+    or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to
+    make everyone at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all
+    his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the
+    distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom
+    he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or
+    topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation
+    and never wearisome.
+
+    "He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be
+    receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except
+    when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort; he has no
+    ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to
+    those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the
+    best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes
+    unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings
+    for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From
+    a long-sighted prudence he observes the maxim of the ancient sage,
+    that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he
+    were one day to be our friend. He has too much sense to be
+    affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember
+    injuries, and too indolent to bear malice.
+
+    "He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical
+    principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to
+    bereavement because it is irreparable, and to death because it is
+    his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind his
+    disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering
+    discourtesy of better, perhaps, but less educated minds, who, like
+    blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake
+    the point in argument, waste their strength in trifles,
+    misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved
+    than they find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he
+    is too clear-headed to be unjust, he is as simple as he is
+    forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.
+
+    "Nowhere shall we find greater candour, consideration, indulgence;
+    he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for
+    their mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason as well as
+    its strength, its province, and its limits. If he be an unbeliever
+    he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or
+    to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in
+    his infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he even supports
+    institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which he does
+    not assent; he honours the ministers of religion, and it contents
+    him to decline its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them.
+    He is a friend of religious toleration, and that, not only because
+    his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith with
+    an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of
+    feeling which is the attendant on civilisation.
+
+    "Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even
+    when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of
+    imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of
+    the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be
+    no large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the Being of God,
+    sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the
+    attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or
+    creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent
+    thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a
+    teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity
+    itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical
+    powers, he is able to see what sentiments are consistent in those
+    who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others
+    to feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which
+    exist in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions.
+
+    "Such are the lineaments of the ethical character which the
+    cultivated intellect will form apart from religious principle."
+
+Surely this is a wonderful utterance from a Cardinal of the Church of
+Rome, full of urbanity and the wisdom of the world.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Pp. 52-57.]
+
+
+
+26
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have in a former letter quoted a short but noble passage from Lord
+Macaulay on the great Lord Chatham.
+
+But I feel that the writer who was perhaps the greatest essayist that
+England has ever produced must not in these letters be fobbed off with
+so slight a notice and quotation.
+
+What has always seemed to me the supremest passage that flowed
+from his wonderful pen is to be found in his paper on Warren Hastings
+which appeared originally in the _Edinburgh Review_.
+
+His description in that essay of the opening of the great impeachment,
+has given all succeeding generations a vision of one of the most
+majestic scenes in the whole history of man.
+
+    "There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more
+    gorgeous with jewellery and cloth of gold, more attractive to
+    grown-up children, than that which was then exhibited at
+    Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well
+    calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an
+    imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong
+    to the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past,
+    were collected on one spot and in one hour. All the talents and
+    all the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and
+    civilisation were now displayed, with every advantage that could
+    be derived both from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in
+    the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many
+    troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of our
+    constitution were laid; or far away, over boundless seas and
+    deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshipping
+    strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left.
+    The High Court of Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed
+    down from the days of the Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused
+    of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Benares,
+    and over the ladies of the princely house of Oude.
+
+    "The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of
+    William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at
+    the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the
+    just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall
+    where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted
+    a victorious party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where
+    Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid
+    courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor
+    civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers.
+    The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold
+    and ermine, were marshalled by the heralds under Garter
+    King-at-Arms. The judges in their vestments of state attended to
+    give advice on points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords,
+    three-fourths of the Upper House as the Upper House then was,
+    walked in solemn order from their usual place of assembling to the
+    tribunal. The junior Baron present led the way, George Eliot, Lord
+    Heathfield, recently ennobled for his memorable defence of
+    Gibraltar against the fleets and armies of France and Spain. The
+    long procession was closed by the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of
+    the realm, by the great dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons
+    of the King. Last of all came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by
+    his fine person and noble bearing. The grey old walls were hung
+    with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such
+    as has rarely excited the fears or the emulation of an orator.
+    There were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free,
+    enlightened, and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness,
+    wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of
+    every art. There were seated round the Queen the fair-haired young
+    daughters of the House of Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of
+    great Kings and Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle
+    which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons,
+    in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a
+    scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the
+    historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero
+    pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a
+    senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus
+    thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side
+    by side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age.
+    The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has
+    preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and
+    statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had
+    induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark and profound mine
+    from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition, a
+    treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with
+    injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious,
+    massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her
+    to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith.
+    There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the
+    Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by love and
+    music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the
+    members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticised, and
+    exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs.
+    Montague. And there the ladies whose lips, more persuasive than
+    those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against
+    palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
+
+    "The Serjeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar,
+    and bent his knee. The culprit was indeed not unworthy of that
+    great presence. He had ruled an extensive and populous country,
+    had made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and
+    pulled down princes. And in his high place he had so borne
+    himself, that all had feared him, that most had loved him, and
+    that hatred itself could deny him no title to glory, except
+    virtue. He looked like a great man, and not like a bad man. A
+    person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage
+    which, while it indicated deference to the court, indicated also
+    habitual self-possession and self-respect, a high and intellectual
+    forehead, a brow pensive, but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible
+    decision, a face pale and worn, but serene, on which was written,
+    as legibly as under the picture in the council-chamber at
+    Calcutta, _Mens æqua in arduis_; such was the aspect with which
+    the great Proconsul presented himself to his judges."
+
+Such a scene can only find its appropriate enactment at the centre of a
+great empire and amid a people with an august history behind them,
+conscious of present magnificence and confident of future glory.
+
+We are now far into the second century since that memorable spectacle
+filled to the walls the great Hall of Westminster.
+
+What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine spirit of liberty and adorned
+by the sacred principle of personal freedom, has been superseded by a
+socialistic democracy under which personal freedom suffers frequent
+curtailments, and liberty is severely abridged by the mandates of trade
+unions, the prohibitions of urban potentates, and the usurpations of
+medicine men.
+
+Under these cramping and crippling deprivations we have lost the
+collective sense of greatness as a race that infused every participator in
+the splendid pageant of such an event as the Impeachment of Warren
+Hastings. One has but to imagine an impeachment to-day with the
+dominant personages in it chosen from the strike leaders and labour
+delegates of the proletariat, assisted by promoted railway porters and
+ennobled grocers, to perceive what a distance, and down what a
+declivity we have travelled since those days when it was impossible for
+any great public function to take place without its becoming naturally
+and without conscious effort the occasion for a manifestation of the
+pomp, circumstance, and splendour inseparable from the solemn acts
+of a great people performed by their greatest men.
+
+But I am one, Antony, who look forward with steadfast hope and belief
+to a reaction from our present vulgarity, and to a reascension of
+England to a greater dignity, honour, and nobleness both in its public
+and private life than is observable to-day.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+27
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have not in my letters to you travelled beyond our own islands in
+search of great English prose, but I propose now to make one
+divergence from this rule and quote a very great and deservedly
+far-famed speech, uttered on a memorable occasion, of Abraham
+Lincoln, President of the United States.
+
+At the present time, I think, the name of Lincoln lies closer to the
+hearts of the American people than that of any other, not even
+excepting Washington and Hamilton. The latter, though they
+established American independence, remained in a personal sense
+English gentlemen till their death. Lincoln was born in the backwoods in
+rude poverty, received no education but what he acquired by his own
+unaided efforts, and lived and died a man of the people, the ideal type
+of native-born American.
+
+He rose from the lowest to the highest position in the State, borne
+upwards by the simple nobility of his character, by the stainless purity
+of his actions, and the splendid motive of all his endeavours. His
+speeches and writings derive their power and distinction from no tricks
+of oratory, felicity of diction, or nimbleness of mind. They are the vocal
+results of the beatings of his great heart.
+
+He led his people to war in the manner of a prophet of Israel; with an
+awful austerity, majestic, invincible, and with hand uplifted in sure
+appeal to the God of battles. On the field of Gettysburg, where was
+waged the most tremendous of all combats of the war, he came to
+dedicate a cemetery to the innumerable dead, and these were his few
+and noble words:--
+
+    "Fourscore-and-seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this
+    continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
+    proposition that all men are created equal.
+
+    "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
+    nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
+    endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have
+    come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place
+    for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
+    It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
+
+    "But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
+    we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
+    struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add of
+    detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say
+    here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us,
+    the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
+    which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is
+    rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
+    before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased
+    devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure
+    of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not
+    have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new
+    birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the
+    people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
+
+Few are the opportunities in the history of the world when the time, the
+place, the occasion, and the words spoken, have combined so
+poignantly to move the hearts of men.
+
+One can imagine the vast concourse standing awestruck and uncovered
+before the solemn splendour of this noble dedication, every phrase of
+which will remain for generations a treasured and sacred memory in
+countless thousands of homes of the great continent in the West.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+28
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an entirely new style of
+English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away,
+the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and
+there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were
+the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all
+the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us,
+in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative
+alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds.
+
+This flamboyant style seems to have synchronised with the general
+decline of reserve and ceremony in English life, and with the rise of the
+modern familiar intimacy that leaves no privacy even to our thoughts.
+Our grandfathers would have hesitated to have discussed at the
+dinner-table, even after the ladies had withdrawn, what is now set
+down for free debate at ladies' clubs, and canvassed in the correct
+columns of the _Guardian_.
+
+This new habit of mind and speech has affected our literature deeply
+and diversely. In the hands of the really great masters such as Carlyle,
+Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate revelations of the throbbings of their
+hearts, and the direct and untrammelled appeal of their inmost souls
+crying in the market-place, take forcible possession of our affections,
+and bring them into closer touch with each one of us than was ever
+possible with the older restrained writers.
+
+But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the licence of
+intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, and a
+contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative, and redundancy;
+and although the disappearance of reserve in modern writing may tend
+to reduce all but the production of the great to a depressing state of
+vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's hand, has unlocked for us the
+doors of an Aladdin's palace! But even if the restraint of the ancient
+writers has disappeared from the prose of our own times, all great
+writing of necessity must now and always possess the quality of
+simplicity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of nature about him
+with the eyes of a visionary, and wrote of what he saw as one so
+inspired as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed his glorious
+outpourings in a raiment of perfect simplicity.
+
+    "This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance of the firmament;
+    and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of
+    these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate
+    Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 'The earth shook,
+    the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God,' 'He doth set
+    His bow in the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of every
+    drooping swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love. 'In them
+    hath He set a _tabernacle_ for the sun,' whose burning ball,
+    which, without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable
+    and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that
+    firmament surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by
+    mediatorial ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden
+    pavement is spread for his chariot wheels at morning; by the
+    firmament of clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill
+    with light at noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is
+    closed at evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of
+    the firmament his implacable light is divided and its separated
+    fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of
+    distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains
+    burn as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this
+    tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows
+    of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of His
+    own majesty to men, upon the _throne_ of the firmament.
+
+    "As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity,
+    we cannot behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the
+    Preserver of men those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place.
+    'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by
+    earth, for it is His footstool.'
+
+    "And all those passings to and fro of fruitful showers and
+    grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built
+    about the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening
+    thunders, and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to
+    deepen in our hearts the acceptance and distinctness and dearness
+    of the simple words, 'Our Father, Which art in heaven!'"
+
+The description of the first approach to Venice before the days of
+railways will always be cherished by those who admire Ruskin's work as
+one of his most characteristic and memorable utterances:--
+
+    "In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
+    distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
+    toil was rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate survey of
+    the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the
+    happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last
+    hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village,
+    where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its
+    valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty
+    perspective of the causeway, see, for the first time, the towers
+    of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of peaceful
+    and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the
+    railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
+    equivalent--in those days, I say, when there was something more to
+    be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
+    successive halting place than a new arrangement of glass roofing
+    and iron girder--there were few moments of which the recollection
+    was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that which, as I
+    endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought
+    him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open
+    lagoon from the canal of Mestre.
+
+    "Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
+    source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this
+    direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of
+    the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly
+    disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange
+    rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of
+    the deep sea; for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could
+    at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water
+    which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north
+    and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the
+    east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of
+    black weed separating and disappearing gradually in knots of
+    heaving shoal under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed
+    it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so
+    calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the
+    Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of
+    Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of northern waves, yet
+    subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry
+    pallor into a field of burnished gold as the sun declined behind
+    the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named 'St
+    George of the Sea-weed.'
+
+    "As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the
+    traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low,
+    sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows;
+    but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Argua
+    rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright
+    mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill
+    extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning
+    with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded
+    the whole horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here and
+    there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
+    fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
+    breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its
+    snow into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the
+    barred clouds of evening one after another, countless, the crown
+    of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them,
+    to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and
+    on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as
+    the quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.
+
+    "And at last when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its
+    untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded
+    rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the
+    Indian Sea; when first upon the traveller's sight opened the long
+    ranges of columned palaces--each with its black boat moored at the
+    portal, each with its image cast down beneath its feet upon that
+    green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich
+    tessellation when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the
+    shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind
+    the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so
+    adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just
+    bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen,
+    the gondolier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!" struck sharp upon the ear, and
+    the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over
+    the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and
+    loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and when at
+    last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across
+    which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine
+    veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was
+    no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the
+    visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to
+    forget the darker truths of its history and its being, "Well
+    might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to
+    the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the
+    waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her
+    state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all
+    which in Nature was wild or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as
+    the waves and tempests--had been won to adorn her instead of to
+    destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty
+    which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the
+    hour-glass as well as of the sea."
+
+It is now many years since I first saw Venice rising from the sea on a
+September morning as I sailed towards it across the Adriatic from
+Trieste; and as we glided closer and closer its loveliness was slowly and
+exquisitely unveiled under the slanting beams of the early sun.
+
+In all my wanderings over two hemispheres I remember no vision so
+enchanting and unsurpassable! May you live to see it, Antony, before
+the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its beauty.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+29
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Born in Devon at the same time--within a year--as Ruskin, James
+Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same sanguine and
+poetical characteristics. His historical writings have, I believe, been
+somewhat discredited of late years owing to the permission he is
+alleged to have given himself to warp his account of events in order to
+buttress some prejudice or contention of his own.
+
+But if we set him aside as an accurate authority, we can at once restore
+him to our regard as a lord of visionary language:--
+
+    "Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow-dropping, mellow
+    autumn of a rich, glorious summer. In the old man Nature has
+    fulfilled her work; she leads him with her blessings; she fills
+    him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
+    children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to
+    the grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we
+    should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most
+    beautiful.
+
+    "There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with
+    bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the
+    symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side of the grave;
+    which the grave gapes to finish before the victory is won;
+    and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of
+    man.
+
+    "Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose
+    life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to
+    do the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or
+    Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers,
+    priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has been
+    the same--the same bitter cup has been given them to drink."
+
+Another passage of deep and melancholy beauty cannot be omitted
+from this volume. It records in language of haunting loveliness the
+passing away of feudalism and chivalry and of a thousand years of the
+pageantry of faith:--
+
+    "The great trading companies were not instituted for selfish
+    purposes, but to ensure the consumer of manufactured articles that
+    what he purchased was properly made and of a reasonable price.
+    They determined prices, fixed wages, and arranged the rules of
+    apprenticeship. But in time the companies lost their healthy
+    vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were in the reign
+    of Elizabeth hastening away. There were no longer tradesmen to be
+    found in sufficient number who were possessed of the necessary
+    probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon
+    with the deep melancholy which, in those days, settled down on
+    Elizabeth herself.
+
+    "For indeed a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and
+    direction of which even is still hidden from us--a change from era
+    to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up;
+    old things were passing away, and the faith and life of ten
+    centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the
+    abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and
+    all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were
+    passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond
+    the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk
+    back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm
+    earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a
+    small atom in the awful vastness of the Universe.
+
+    "In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for
+    themselves, mankind was to remain no longer. And now it is all
+    gone--like an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between us and the
+    old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the
+    historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us,
+    and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among
+    the aisles of the cathedrals, only as we gaze upon their silent
+    figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float
+    before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps
+    in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediæval
+    age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."
+
+The sound of church bells, being entirely the creation of man, forms
+perhaps a more touching link with the past for us than the eternal
+sounds of nature. Yet the everlasting wash of the waves of the sea
+forms a bond between us and the unplumbed depths of time, as they
+
+  "Begin and cease, and then again begin
+  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring,
+  The eternal note of sadness in.
+  Sophocles long ago
+  Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
+  Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
+  Of human misery."
+
+So wrote Matthew Arnold. Then there is the sound of wind in the trees,
+and the voice of falling waters and rippling streams which must have
+fallen upon the ears of our remotest fore-runners as they do upon our
+own. These eternal sounds about us take no note of our brief coming
+and going, and will be the same when you and I, Antony, and all the
+millions that come after us in the world have returned to dust.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+30
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Though I do not myself rank Matthew Arnold among the great prose
+writers of England, yet, like all true poets--and he indeed was one of
+them,--he wrote excellent English prose.
+
+It is true that he turned to poetry to express his finest emotions and
+thoughts, and he himself alludes to his prose writings thus: "I am a
+mere solitary wanderer in search of the light, and I talk an artless,
+unstudied, everyday familiar language. But, after all, this is the
+language of the mass of the world."
+
+The chief note of all his teaching was urbanity. "The pursuit of
+perfection," he said, "is the pursuit of sweetness and light." "Culture
+hates hatred: culture has one great passion--the passion for sweetness
+and light."
+
+This teaching, no doubt, leads to fields of pleasantness and charm,
+and not at all to the high places of self-sacrifice, or the austere
+peaks of martyrdom. Burning indignation against intolerable things,
+fierce denunciation of the cruelties and abominations of the world
+find no encouragement or sympathy from this serene, detached, and
+therefore somewhat ineffectual, teaching.
+
+Sweetness and light would never have interfered with the slave trade,
+or fiercely fought beside Plimsoll for the load-line on the sides of
+ships.
+
+We did not fight the Germans under the doctrine of sweetness and
+light.
+
+It was a beautiful and edifying adornment for the drawing-room in
+times of Victorian self-satisfied peace, but was a tinsel armour for the
+battle of life, and entirely futile as a sword for combating wrong.
+
+I am not sure that Matthew Arnold would not have called those who
+wrathfully slash about them at abominable evils, Philistines.
+
+After all, the great men of action and the great writers of the world
+have been capable of harbouring great enthusiasms and deep
+indignations in their hearts; and these emotions do not emerge from a
+"passion for sweetness and light."
+
+A better doctrine, Antony, is, I think, to try to push things along
+cheerfully but strenuously in the right direction wherever and whenever
+you can.
+
+As a writer I think Matthew Arnold's best passage is to be found in the
+Preface to his _Essays in Criticism_:--
+
+    "Oxford. Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by
+    the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!
+
+    "There are our young barbarians, all at play!
+
+    "And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens
+    to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last
+    enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her
+    ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of
+    us, to the ideal, to perfection,--to beauty, in a word, which is
+    only truth seen from another side?--nearer perhaps than all the
+    science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so
+    romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to
+    sides and heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of
+    lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and
+    impossible loyalties!... Apparitions of a day, what is our puny
+    warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which
+    this Queen of Romance has been waging against them for centuries,
+    and will wage after we are gone?"
+
+As a man and a companion,[1] if you expected nothing but delightful
+humour, brilliant discourse, and urbane outlook upon everything, few
+could rival his personal charm; but he would never really join you in a
+last ditch to defend the right, or actually charge with you against the
+wrong, although in his poem "The Last Word," while not participating
+himself in such strenuous doings, he seems to yield a reluctant
+admiration to him who does so charge, and who leaves his "body by the
+wall."
+
+Much has happened since Matthew Arnold poured his scorn upon the
+unregenerate Philistines; but let us remember, Antony, that thousands
+and thousands of these contemned neglecters of sweetness and light
+stood unflinchingly and died upon the plains of France that our country
+and its freedom should survive.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: See my _Memories_, pp. 46-52 and 55.]
+
+
+
+31
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Like the author of the _Peninsular War_, Sir William Butler was great
+both as a soldier and as a writer. His autobiography sparkles with
+humour, irony, and felicitous diction; but it was in his _Life of
+Gordon of Khartoum_ that he rose to his full stature as a contributor
+to the glory of English prose.
+
+The spell of Gordon seems to have, as it were, transfigured all who
+approached him, and raised them out of themselves. One man alone, of
+all those whose lives touched his, has shown that his own pinched and
+narrow mediocrity was proof against the radiance of Gordon's spirit,
+and has feebly attempted to belittle the soldier saint for his own
+justification. But he has failed even to project a spot upon the sun of
+Gordon's fame, and he is already forgotten, while the great soldier's
+name will endure in the hearts of his countrymen till England and its
+people fail.
+
+If Sir William Butler's final noble periods, which I here reproduce, do
+not deeply move him who reads them, then must that reader have a
+heart of stone:--
+
+    "Thus fell in dark hour of defeat a man as unselfish as Sidney, of
+    courage dauntless as Wolfe, of honour stainless as Outram, of
+    sympathy wide-reaching as Drummond, of honesty straightforward as
+    Napier, of faith as steadfast as More. Doubtful indeed is it if
+    anywhere in the past we shall find figure of knight or soldier to
+    equal him, for sometimes it is the sword of death that gives to
+    life its real knighthood, and too often the soldier's end is
+    unworthy of his knightly life; but with Gordon the harmony of life
+    and death was complete, and the closing scenes seem to move to
+    their fulfilment in solemn hush, as though an unseen power watched
+    over the sequence of their sorrow.
+
+    "Not by the blind hazard of chance was this great tragedy
+    consummated; not by the discord of men or from the vague
+    opposition of physical obstacle, by fault of route or length of
+    delay, was help denied to him. The picture of a wonderful life had
+    to be made perfect by heroic death. The moral had to be cut deep,
+    and written red, and hung high, so that its lesson could be seen
+    by all men above strife and doubt and discord. Nay, the very
+    setting of the final scenes has to be wrought out in such contrast
+    of colour that the dullest eye shall be able to read the meaning
+    of it all. For many a year back this soldier's life has been a
+    protest against our most cherished teaching. Faith is weakness,
+    we have said. He will show us it is strength. Reward is the right
+    of service. Publicity is true fame. Let us go into action with a
+    newspaper correspondent riding at our elbow, or sitting in the
+    cabin of the ship, has been our practice. He has told us that the
+    race should be for honour, not for 'honours,' that we should 'give
+    away our medal,' and that courage and humility, mercy and
+    strength, should march hand in hand together. For many a year we
+    have had no room for him in our councils. Our armies knew him not;
+    and it was only in semi-savage lands and in the service of remote
+    empires he could find scope for his genius. Now our councils will
+    be shamed in his service, and our armies will find no footing in
+    our efforts to reach him. We have said that the Providence of God
+    was only a calculation of chances; now for eleven months the
+    amazing spectacle will be presented to the world of this solitary
+    soldier standing at bay, within thirty days' travel of the centre
+    of Empire, while the most powerful kingdom on the earth--the
+    nation whose wealth is as the sands of the sea, whose boast is
+    that the sun never sets upon its dominions--is unable to reach
+    him--saving _he_ does not want--but is unable to reach him even
+    with one message of regret for past forgetfulness.
+
+    "No; there is something more in all this than mistake of
+    Executive, or strife of party, or error of Cabinet, or fault of
+    men can explain. The purpose of this life that has been, the
+    lesson of this death that must be, is vaster and deeper than these
+    things. The decrees of God are as fixed to-day as they were two
+    thousand years ago, but they can be worked to their conclusion by
+    the weakness of men as well as by the strength of angels.
+
+    "There is a grey frontlet of rock far away in Strathspey--once the
+    Gordons' home--whose name in bygone times gave a rallying-call to
+    a kindred clan. The scattered firs and wind-swept heather on the
+    lone summit of Craig Ellachie once whispered in Highland
+    clansmen's ear the warcry, 'Stand fast! Craig Ellachie.' Many a
+    year has gone by since kith of Charles Gordon last heard from
+    Highland hilltop the signal of battle, but never in Celtic hero's
+    long record of honour has such answer been sent back to Highland
+    or to Lowland as when this great heart stopped its beating, and
+    lay 'steadfast unto death' in the dawn at Khartoum. The winds that
+    moan through the pine trees on Craig Ellachie have far-off
+    meanings in their voices. Perhaps on that dark January night there
+    came a breath from heaven to whisper to the old Highland rock, 'He
+    stood fast! Craig Ellachie.'
+
+    "The dust of Gordon is not laid in English earth, nor does even
+    the ocean, which has been named Britannia's realm, hold in 'its
+    vast and wandering grave' the bones of her latest hero. Somewhere,
+    far out in the immense desert whose sands so often gave him rest
+    in life, or by the shores of that river which was the scene of so
+    much of his labour, his ashes now add their wind-swept atoms to
+    the mighty waste of the Soudan. But if England, still true to the
+    long line of her martyrs to duty, keep his memory precious in her
+    heart--making of him no false idol or brazen image of glory, but
+    holding him as he was, the mirror and measure of true
+    knighthood--then better than in effigy or epitaph will his life be
+    written, and his nameless tomb become a citadel to his nation."
+
+The statue of Gordon stands in noble reverie in Trafalgar Square, at the
+centre of the Empire for whose honour he died.
+
+In St. Paul's Cathedral he lies in effigy, and engraven upon the
+cenotaph can be seen the most splendid epitaph in the world.
+
+His true greatness has been recorded by Sir William Butler in
+resounding and glorious English; and his last great act of stainless
+nobility has received a deathless tribute.
+
+Your loving old,
+G.P.
+
+
+
+32
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have now come down, at last, to a great writer of English prose who is
+still with us.
+
+Lord Morley at the present day is, I think, universally recognised as the
+greatest living man of letters in the British Empire; he has crowned a
+long record of distinguished literary achievement with his _Life of
+Gladstone_, which has taken its place among the noblest biographies of
+the world, where it is destined to remain into the far future acclaimed
+as a masterpiece. In his description of the veteran statesman launching
+in the House of Commons his great project of Home Rule for Ireland, he
+has surprised himself out of his own reserve, and painted the scene for
+succeeding generations in colours that can never die:--
+
+    "No such scene has ever been beheld in the House of Commons.
+    Members came down at break of day to secure their places; before
+    noon every seat was marked, and crowded benches were even arrayed
+    on the floor of the House from the Mace to the Bar. Princes,
+    ambassadors, great peers, high prelates, thronged the lobbies. The
+    fame of the orator, the boldness of his exploit, curiosity as to
+    the plan, poignant anxiety as to the party result, wonder whether
+    a wizard had at last actually arisen with a spell for casting out
+    the baleful spirits that had for so many ages made Ireland our
+    torment and our dishonour--all these things brought together such
+    an assemblage as no minister before had ever addressed within
+    those world-renowned walls.
+
+    "The Parliament was new. Many of its members had fought a hard
+    battle for their seats, and trusted they were safe in the haven
+    for half a dozen good years to come. Those who were moved by
+    professional ambition, those whose object was social advancement,
+    those who thought only of upright public service, the keen party
+    of men, the men who aspire to office, the men with a past and the
+    men who looked for a future, all alike found themselves adrift on
+    dark and troubled waters. The secrets of the Bill had been well
+    kept. To-day the disquieted host were first to learn what was the
+    great project to which they would have to say that Aye or No on
+    which for them and for the State so much would hang.
+
+    "Of the chief comrades or rivals of the minister's own generation,
+    the strong administrators, the eager and accomplished debaters,
+    the sagacious leaders, the only survivor now comparable to him, in
+    eloquence or in influence, was Mr. Bright. That illustrious man
+    seldom came into the House in those distracted days; and on this
+    memorable occasion his stern and noble head was to be seen in dim
+    obscurity.
+
+    "Various as were the emotions in other regions of the House, in
+    one quarter rejoicing was unmixed. There, at least, was no doubt
+    and no misgiving. There, pallid and tranquil, sat the Irish
+    leader, whose hard insight, whose patience, energy, and spirit of
+    command, had achieved this astounding result, and done that which
+    he had vowed to his countrymen that he would assuredly be able to
+    do. On the benches round him genial excitement rose almost to
+    tumult. Well it might. For the first time since the Union the
+    Irish case was at last to be pressed in all its force and
+    strength, in every aspect of policy and of conscience by the most
+    powerful Englishman then alive.
+
+    "More striking than the audience was the man; more striking than
+    the multitude of eager onlookers from the shore was the rescuer,
+    with deliberate valour facing the floods ready to wash him down;
+    the veteran Ulysses, who, after more than half a century of
+    combat, service, toil, thought it not too late to try a further
+    'work of noble note,' In the hands of such a master of the
+    instrument the theme might easily have lent itself to one of those
+    displays of exalted passion which the House had marvelled at in
+    more than one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches on the Turkish question,
+    or heard with religious reverence in his speech on the Affirmation
+    Bill in 1883.
+
+    "What the occasion now required was that passion should burn low,
+    and reasoned persuasion hold up the guiding lamp. An elaborate
+    scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy to be explained
+    and vindicated. Of that best kind of eloquence which dispenses
+    with declamation this was a fine and sustained example. There was
+    a deep, rapid, steady, onflowing volume of arguments, exposition,
+    exhortation. Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided. Now and
+    again a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted all hearts. But
+    political oratory is action, not words--action, character, will,
+    conviction, purpose, personality. As this eager muster of men
+    underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite in their balance
+    and modulation, the compulsion of his flashing glance and animated
+    gesture, what stirred and commanded them was the recollection of
+    national service, the thought of the speaker's mastering purpose,
+    his unflagging resolution and strenuous will, his strength of thew
+    and sinew well tried in long years of resounding war, his
+    unquenched conviction that the just cause can never fail. Few are
+    the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics, but this was
+    one."
+
+I will not trench upon politics in these letters; but I may hazard the
+belief that could those who rejected this noble effort, by the greatest
+statesman of the age, to assuage the everlasting Irish conflict, have
+looked into the future, few of them but would have supported it with
+relief and thanksgiving.
+
+It is generally perhaps a blessing that the curtain that covers the future
+is impenetrable; but in this case, had it been lifted for us to gaze upon
+the appalling future, Gladstone's last effort for the peace of his country
+would surely not have been permitted to miscarry.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+33
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Two other living writers I will now commend to you, and then I shall
+have done.
+
+The parents of Mr. Belloc, with a happy prevision, anticipated by some
+decades the _entente cordiale_, and their brilliant son felicitously
+manifests in his own person many of the admirable qualities of both
+races. In England he is reported to be forcefully French, and it may be
+surmised that when in France he is engagingly British. Fortunately for
+our literature, it is in the language of his mother that he has found his
+expression. Many are the beautiful utterances scattered through his
+charming works: two of the most picturesque deal with the greatness of
+France; the subject of one is the Ancient Monarchy, and of the other
+the Great Napoleon:--
+
+    "So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out
+    and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and
+    recognised its own nature when the vaults of the Thermæ echoed
+    heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings.
+
+    "Look up the vast valley of dead men crowned, and you may see the
+    gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white
+    beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand the
+    globe, and in his right the hilt of an unconquerable sword. There
+    also are the short strong horsemen of the Robertian House, half
+    hidden by their leather shields, and their sons before them
+    growing in vestment and majesty and taking on the pomp of the
+    Middle Ages; Louis VII., all covered with iron; Philip, the
+    Conqueror; Louis IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they
+    stand in a widening, interminable procession, this great crowd of
+    kings; they loose their armour, they take their ermine on, they
+    are accompanied by their captains and their marshals; at last, in
+    their attitude and in their magnificence they sum up in themselves
+    the pride and the achievement of the French nation.
+
+    "But Time has dissipated what it could not tarnish, and the
+    process of a thousand years has turned these mighty figures into
+    unsubstantial things. You may see them in the grey end of
+    darkness, like a pageant, all standing still. You look again, but
+    with the growing light, and with the wind that rises before
+    morning, they have disappeared."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain
+    sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that
+    passed away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him
+    move along their snows, through the long mysterious twilights of
+    the northern autumn, in silence, with the head bent and the reins
+    in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching
+    towards an ancient solitude and repose. They say it was Napoleon.
+
+    "After him there trailed for days the shadows of the soldiery,
+    vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It was
+    as though the cannon smoke at Waterloo, borne on the light west
+    wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years
+    of combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of
+    the year over the endless plains.
+
+    "But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the
+    Guard, and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French
+    drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the
+    army was of ghosts and was defeated. They passed in the silence
+    which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they
+    sleep in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords."
+
+Time and circumstances have changed our ancient enemies into our
+honoured friends, and the race that fought against us at Waterloo has
+cemented its friendship towards us with its blood; and as we look back
+over the century that divides us from Waterloo we can now with Mr.
+Belloc salute the sombre figure of the defeated conqueror.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+34
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I will now quote to you one other master of splendid English.
+
+Not every temporal sovereign of these realms has deserved a throne
+among the kings of literature. James the First was a poet of some
+merit; Charles the First wrote and spoke with a fine distinction; Queen
+Victoria's letters to her subjects were models of dignified and kindly
+simplicity; but to King George the Fifth by the grace of God it has been
+reserved to give utterance to what I believe to be the most noble and
+uplifting address ever delivered by a king to his people.
+
+From the day of his accession King George has been confronted with
+trials and troubles enough to daunt the stoutest heart, and none of us
+can plumb the depth of anguish that must have been his through the
+awful years of the Great War. He has been tried and proved in the
+fierce fires of adversity, and has emerged ennobled by pain, and
+dowered by sorrow with a gift of expression that has placed him among
+the masters of the glory of English prose.
+
+On the 13th day of May 1922 he concluded a tour of the cemeteries in
+France at Terlinchthun, where there stands on the cliffs over-looking
+the Channel a monument to Napoleon and his Grand Army, and around
+it now lie the innumerable English dead.
+
+Earlier in his pilgrimage Marshal Foch and Lord Haig had in his presence
+clasped hands, and the King with a fine gesture had placed his own
+right hand upon their clasped ones and said, "Amis toujours!" We are
+told that, "going up to the Cross of Sacrifice, the King looked out over
+the closely marshalled graves to the sea, and back towards the woods
+and fields of the Canche Valley where Montreuil stands, and seemed
+reluctant to leave."
+
+At last he turned, and, standing before the great Cross of Sacrifice, he
+spoke from his heart words that those of us, Antony, who love our
+country and the glory of its language will cherish while we live:--
+
+    "For the past few days I have been on a solemn pilgrimage in
+    honour of a people who died for all free men.
+
+    "At the close of that pilgrimage, on which I followed ways already
+    marked by many footsteps of love and pride and grief, I should
+    like to send a message to all who have lost those dear to them in
+    the Great War, and in this the Queen joins me to-day, amidst these
+    surroundings so wonderfully typical of that single-hearted
+    assembly of nations and of races which form our Empire. For here,
+    in their last quarters, lie sons of every portion of that Empire,
+    across, as it were, the threshold of the Mother Island which they
+    guarded, that Freedom might be saved in the uttermost ends of the
+    earth.
+
+    "For this, a generation of our manhood offered itself without
+    question, and almost without the need of a summons. Those proofs
+    of virtue, which we honour here to-day, are to be found throughout
+    the world and its waters--since we can truly say that the whole
+    circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead.
+    Beyond the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, through
+    Eastern Europe in well-nigh unbroken chain they stretch, passing
+    over the holy Mount of Olives itself to the furthest shores of the
+    Indian and Pacific Oceans--from Zeebrugge to Coronel, from Dunkirk
+    to the hidden wildernesses of East Africa.
+
+    "But in this fair land of France, which sustained the utmost fury
+    of the long strife, our brothers are numbered, alas! by hundreds
+    of thousands.
+
+    "They lie in the keeping of a tried and generous friend, a
+    resolute and chivalrous comrade-in-arms, who with ready and quick
+    sympathy has set aside for ever the soil in which they sleep, so
+    that we ourselves and our descendants may for all time reverently
+    tend and preserve their resting-places.
+
+    "And here, at Terlinchthun, the shadow of his monument falling
+    almost across their graves, the greatest of French soldiers--of
+    all soldiers--stands guard over them. And this is just, for side
+    by side with the descendants of his incomparable armies they
+    defended his land in defending their own.
+
+    "Never before in history have a people thus dedicated and
+    maintained individual memorials to their fallen, and, in the
+    course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether
+    there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the
+    years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to
+    the desolation of war. And I feel that, so long as we have faith
+    in God's purposes, we cannot but believe that the existence of
+    these visible memorials will eventually serve to draw all peoples
+    together in sanity and self-control, even as it has already set
+    the relations between our Empire and our Allies on the deep-rooted
+    bases of a common heroism and a common agony.
+
+    "Standing beneath this Cross of Sacrifice, facing the great Stone
+    of Remembrance, and compassed by these sternly simple headstones,
+    we remember, and must charge our children to remember, that as our
+    dead were equal in sacrifice, so are they equal in honour, for the
+    greatest and the least of them have proved that sacrifice and
+    honour are no vain things, but truths by which the world lives.
+
+    "Many of the cemeteries I have visited in the remoter and still
+    desolate districts of this sorely stricken land, where it has not
+    yet been possible to replace the wooden crosses by headstones,
+    have been made into beautiful gardens which are lovingly cared for
+    by comrades of the war.
+
+    "I rejoice I was fortunate enough to see these in the spring, when
+    the returning pulse of the year tells of unbroken life that goes
+    forward in the face of apparent loss and wreckage; and I
+    fervently pray that, both as nations and individuals, we may so
+    order our lives after the ideals for which our brethren died that
+    we may be able to meet their gallant souls once more, humbly but
+    unashamed."
+
+Hard indeed must it be for any Englishman whose heart is quick within
+his bosom not to feel it beat faster with thanksgiving and pride as he
+reads the flawless periods of this glorious speech.
+
+As the final word of consolation, sanctification, and benediction, closing
+the awful agony of the greatest of all wars, preserve, Antony, this
+magnificent threnody in your memory imperishable.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+35
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have come now to the end of my citations for the present. My object,
+Antony, has been to rouse in your heart, if I can, a love, admiration,
+and reverence for the wonders to be found in the treasure-house of
+English prose literature.
+
+I have only opened a little door here and there, so that you can peep in
+and see the visions of splendour within.
+
+Some day perhaps, when you have explored for yourself, you may feel
+surprised that in these letters I have quoted nothing from Sir John Eliot,
+or Addison, or Scott, or Thackeray, or Charles Lamb, or De Quincey, or
+Hazlitt, or other kings and princes of style innumerable. Many, many
+writers whom I have not quoted in these letters have adorned
+everything they touched, but do not seem to me to reach the snow-line
+or rise into great and moving eloquence. Charles Lamb, for example,
+never descends from his equable and altogether pleasing level, far
+above the plain of the commonplace, but neither does he reach up to
+the lofty altitudes of the lonely peaks; and if I began to quote from him,
+I see no obstacle to my quoting his entire works! And of Addison,
+Johnson wrote, "His page is always luminous, but never blazes in
+unexpected splendour"; and he adds, "Whoever wishes to attain an
+English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious,
+must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison."
+
+In selecting such passages as I have in these letters I have necessarily
+followed my own taste, and taste--as I said when I first began writing
+to you--is illusive. I could do no more than cite that which makes my
+own heart beat faster from a compelling sense of its nobility and
+beauty.
+
+When I was young, Antony, I lived long in my father's house among his
+twelve thousand books, with his scholarly mind as my companion, and
+his exact memory as my guide; for more than a quarter of a century
+since those days I have lived in the more modest library of my own
+collecting, and have long learnt how much fine literature there is that I
+have never read, and now can never read. But, Antony, you may not
+find, in these crowded days, even so much time for reading, or so much
+repose for study as I have found, and therefore it is that I have offered
+you in these letters the preferences of my lifetime, even though it has
+been the lifetime of one who makes no claim to be a literary authority.
+
+As you look back at those from whom you have sprung, you will see
+that for five generations they have been men of letters--many
+distinguished, and one world-famous; and though I myself am but a
+puny link in the chain, yet I may perhaps afford you the opportunity
+of hitching your wagon by and by to the star that has for so long ruled
+the destinies of our house.
+
+Farewell, then, dear Antony; and if "the dear God who loveth us" listens
+to the benedictions of the old upon their children's children, may He
+guide and bless you to your life's end.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Glory of English Prose, by Stephen Coleridge
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13785 ***
diff --git a/13785-h/13785-h.htm b/13785-h/13785-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1a34cc7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/13785-h/13785-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,5046 @@
+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy, see www.w3.org">
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content=
+"text/html; charset=UTF-8">
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Glory Of English Prose,
+by The Hon. Stephen Coleridge.</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    P {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         }
+    HR { width: 33%;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+       }
+    BODY{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+
+             font :1.05em serif
+       }
+
+    .smallcaps { font-variant: small-caps }
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .note     {margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em; font-size: smaller;} /* footnote */
+    .blkquot  {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */
+    .pagenum  {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right;} /* page numbers */
+    .sidenote {width: 20%; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-left: 1em; font-size: smaller; float: right; clear: right;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span        {display: block; margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em;}
+    .poem .caesura    {vertical-align: -200%;}
+
+    .caption          {font-size: .70em; }
+
+    a:link {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+    link {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+    a:visited {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+    a:hover {color:red}
+
+
+
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+
+</style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13785 ***</div>
+
+<center><img src="images/image1.jpg" width="324" height="421" alt=
+"Stephen Coleridge" border="0">
+
+<div class="caption">STEPHEN COLERIDGE<br>
+FROM THE PORTRAIT BY BERNARD PARTRIDGE IN THE POSSESSION<br>
+OF THE MESS OF THE SOUTH WALES CIRCUIT</div>
+</center>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>The Glory of English Prose</h1>
+
+<h2>Letters to my Grandson</h2>
+
+<h3>By</h3>
+
+<h2>The Hon. Stephen Coleridge</h2>
+
+<center>
+<div class="caption">"The chief glory of every people arises from
+its authors" <i>Dr. Johnson</i></div>
+</center>
+
+<h4>G.P. Putnam's Sons<br>
+New York and London<br>
+The Knickerbocker Press 1922</h4>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+
+
+<h4>1922<br>
+by<br>
+Stephen Coleridge<br>
+Made in the United States of America</h4>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name='PREFACE'></a>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<p>If you have read, gentle reader, the earlier series of
+<i>Letters to my Grandson on the World about Him</i>, you are to
+understand that in the interval between those letters and these,
+Antony has grown to be a boy in the sixth form of his public
+school.</p>
+
+<p>It has not been any longer necessary therefore to study an
+extreme simplicity of diction in these letters.</p>
+
+<p>My desire has been to lead him into the most glorious company in
+the world, in the hope that, having early made friends with the
+noblest of human aristocracy, he will never afterwards admit to his
+affection and intimacy anything mean or vulgar.</p>
+
+<p>Many young people who, like Antony, are not at all averse from
+the study of English writers, stand aghast at the vastness of the
+what seems so gigantic an enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>In these letters I have acted as pilot for a first voyage
+through what is to a boy an uncharted sea, after which I hope and
+believe he will have learned happily to steer for himself among the
+islands of the blest.</p>
+
+<p>S.C.</p>
+
+<p>THE FORD, CHOBHAM.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<br>
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<br>
+<div class="smallcaps">
+<a href="#letter1">1. On Good And Bad Style In Prose</a><br>
+<a href="#letter2">2. On The Glory Of The Bible</a><br>
+<a href="#letter3">3. Sir Walter Raleigh</a><br>
+<a href="#letter4">4. Act Of Parliament, 1532</a><br>
+<a href="#letter5">5. The Judicious Hooker And Shakespeare</a><br>
+<a href="#letter6">6. Lord Chief Justice Crewe</a><br>
+<a href="#letter7">7. Sir Thomas Browne And Milton</a><br>
+<a href="#letter8">8. Jeremy Taylor</a><br>
+<a href="#letter9">9. Evelyn's Diary</a><br>
+<a href="#letter10">10. John Bunyan</a><br>
+<a href="#letter11">11. Dr. Johnson</a><br>
+<a href="#letter12">12. Edmund Burke</a><br>
+<a href="#letter13">13. Gibbon</a><br>
+<a href="#letter14">14. Henry Grattan And Macaulay</a><br>
+<a href="#letter15">15. Lord Erskine</a><br>
+<a href="#letter16">16. Robert Hall</a><br>
+<a href="#letter17">17. Lord Plunket</a><br>
+<a href="#letter18">18. Robert Southey</a><br>
+<a href="#letter19">19. Walter Savage Landor</a><br>
+<a href="#letter20">20. Lord Brougham</a><br>
+<a href="#letter21">21. Sir William Napier</a><br>
+<a href="#letter22">22. Richard Sheil</a><br>
+<a href="#letter23">23. Thomas Carlyle</a><br>
+<a href="#letter24">24. Henry Nelson Coleridge</a><br>
+<a href="#letter25">25. Cardinal Newman</a><br>
+<a href="#letter26">26. Lord Macaulay Again</a><br>
+<a href="#letter27">27. President Lincoln</a><br>
+<a href="#letter28">28. John Ruskin</a><br>
+<a href="#letter29">29. James Anthony Froude</a><br>
+<a href="#letter30">30. Matthew Arnold</a><br>
+<a href="#letter31">31. Sir William Butler</a><br>
+<a href="#letter32">32. Lord Morley</a><br>
+<a href="#letter33">33. Hilaire Belloc</a><br>
+<a href="#letter34">34. King George The Fifth</a><br>
+<a href="#letter35">35. Conclusion</a><br>
+</div>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<h2>LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON</h2>
+
+<br>
+ <a name="letter1"></a>
+<h2>1</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>The letters which I wrote "On the world about you" having shown
+you that throughout all the universe, from the blazing orbs in
+infinite space to the tiny muscles of an insect's wing, perfect
+design is everywhere manifest, I hope and trust that you will never
+believe that so magnificent a process and order can be without a
+Mind of which it is the visible expression.</p>
+
+<p>The chief object of those letters was to endorse your natural
+feeling of reverence for the Great First Cause of all things, with
+the testimony of your reason; and to save you from ever allowing
+knowledge of how the sap rises in its stalk to lessen your wonder
+at and admiration of the loveliness of a flower.</p>
+
+<p>I am now going to write to you about the literature of England
+and show you, if I can, the immense gulf that divides distinguished
+writing and speech from vulgar writing and speech.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing so vulgar as an ignorant use of your own
+language. Every Englishman should show that he respects and honours
+the glorious language of his country, and will not willingly
+degrade it with his own pen or tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"We have long preserved our constitution," said Dr. Johnson;
+"let us make some struggles for our language."</p>
+
+<p>There is no need to be priggish or fantastic in our choice of
+words or phrases.</p>
+
+<p>Simple old words are just as good as any that can be selected,
+if you use them in their proper sense and place.</p>
+
+<p>By reading good prose constantly your ear will come to know the
+harmony of language, and you will find that your taste will
+unerringly tell you what is good and what is bad in style, without
+your being able to explain even to yourself the precise quality
+that distinguishes the good from the bad.</p>
+
+<p>Any Englishman with a love of his country and a reverence for
+its language can say things in a few words that will find their way
+straight into our hearts, Antony, and make us all better men. I
+will tell you a few of such simple sayings that are better than any
+more laboured writings.</p>
+
+<p>On the 30th of June, 1921, in the <i>Times</i> In Memoriam
+column there was an entry:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"To the undying memory of officers, non-commissioned officers
+and men of the 9th and 10th battalions of the K.O.Y.L.I.<a name=
+'FNanchor_1_1'></a><a href='#Footnote_1_1'><sup>[1]</sup></a> who
+were killed in the attack on Fricourt in the first battle of the
+Somme"; and below it there were placed these splendid
+words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In February of 1913 news reached England of the death, after
+reaching the South Pole, of four explorers, Captain Scott, their
+leader, among them.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly before the end, Captain Oates, a man of fortune who
+joined the expedition from pure love of adventure, knowing that his
+helplessness with frozen feet was retarding the desperate march of
+the others towards their ship, rose up and stumbled out of the tent
+into a raging blizzard, saying, "I dare say I shall be away some
+time."</p>
+
+<p>This was greatly said. His body was never found; but the rescue
+party who afterwards discovered the tent with the others dead in
+it, put up a cairn in the desolate waste of snow with this
+inscription:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L.E.G. Gates,
+Inniskilling Dragoons, who, on their return from the Pole in March,
+1912, willingly walked to his death in a blizzard to try and save
+his comrades beset with hardship."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>All this was done, said, and written, very nobly by all
+concerned.</p>
+
+<p>In St. Paul's Cathedral there lies a recumbent effigy of General
+Gordon, who gave his life for the honour of England at Khartoum,
+and upon it are engraven these words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"He gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor,
+his sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Even the concentrated terseness of Latin cannot surpass these
+examples of the power of the simplest and shortest English
+sentences to penetrate to the heart.</p>
+
+<p>English can be used, by those who master it as an organ of
+expression, to convey deep emotion under perfect control, than
+which nothing is more moving, nothing better calculated to refine
+the mind, nothing more certain to elevate the character.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever a man has something fine to communicate to his
+fellow-men he has but to use English without affectation, honestly
+and simply, and he is in possession of the most splendid vehicle of
+human thought in the world.</p>
+
+<p>All the truly great writers of English speak with simplicity
+from their hearts, they all evince a spirit of unaffected
+reverence, they all teach us to look up and not down, and by the
+nobility of their works which have penetrated into every home where
+letters are cultivated, they have done an incalculable service in
+forming and sustaining the high character of our race.</p>
+
+<p>Clever flippant writers may do a trifling service here and there
+by ridiculing the pompous and deflating the prigs, but there is no
+permanence in such work, unless&mdash;which is seldom the
+case&mdash;it is totally devoid of personal vanity.</p>
+
+<p>Very little such service is rendered when it emanates from a
+writer who announces himself as equal if not superior to
+Shakespeare, and embellishes his lucubrations with parodies of the
+creeds.</p>
+
+<p>"A Gentleman with a Duster," has in his "Glass of Fashion" shown
+us that the Society depicted in the books of Colonel Repington and
+Mrs. Asquith is not the true and great Society that sustains
+England in its noble station among civilised peoples, and we may be
+sure that neither do these books in the faintest degree represent
+the true and living literature of the times. They will pass away
+and be forgotten as utterly as are the fashion plates and
+missing-word competitions of ten years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, Antony, be sure that the famous and living literature
+of England, that has survived all the shocks of time and changes of
+modern life, is the best and properest study for a man to fit him
+for life, to refine his taste, to aggravate his wisdom, and
+consolidate his character.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_1'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_1'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter2"></a>
+
+<h2>2</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I alluded, in my first letter to you about English literature,
+to the necessity of your learning from the beginning the wide
+distinction between what is good and what is bad style.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know a better instance of a display of the difference
+between what is fine style and what is not, than may be made by
+putting side by side almost any sentence from the old authorised
+translation of the Bible and the same sentence from <i>The Bible in
+Modern Speech</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I will just put two quotations side by side:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not,
+neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in
+all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."</p>
+
+<p>"Learn a lesson from the wild lilies. Watch their growth. They
+neither toil nor spin, and yet I tell you that not even Solomon in
+all his magnificence could array himself like one of these."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here you can feel the perfect harmony and balance of the old
+version and the miserable commonplaceness of the effort of these
+misguided modern men.</p>
+
+<p>Again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is mauled into:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Repent, he said, for the kingdom of the heavens is now close at
+hand."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These examples are perfectly suited to illustrate the immense
+difference that separates what is noble and fine in style and what
+is poor and third rate.</p>
+
+<p>If you recite the old version aloud you cannot escape the
+harmony and balance of the sentences, and nothing dignified or
+distinguished can be made of the wretched paraphrases of the two
+desecrators of the splendid old text.</p>
+
+<p>And, Antony, I would have you know that I, who have spent a long
+life in precious libraries, loving fine literature with all my
+heart, have long ago reverenced the old version of the Bible as the
+granite corner-stone upon which has been built all the noblest
+English in the world. No narrative in literature has yet surpassed
+in majesty, simplicity, and passion the story of Joseph and his
+brethren, beginning at the thirty-seventh and ending with the
+forty-fifth chapter of Genesis. There is surely nothing more moving
+and lovely in all the books in the British Museum than the picture
+of Joseph when he sees his little brother among his
+brethren:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"And he lifted up his eyes, and saw his brother Benjamin, his
+mother's son, and said, Is this your younger brother, of whom ye
+spake to me? And he said, God be gracious unto thee, my son.</p>
+
+<p>"And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his
+brother: and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his
+chamber, and wept there."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The whole of the forty-fifth chapter is touching and beautiful
+beyond all criticism, transcending all art. To read it is to
+believe every word of it to be true, and to recognise the sublimity
+of such a relation.</p>
+
+<p>No narrative of the great Greek writers reaches the heart so
+directly and poignantly as does this astonishing story. It moves
+swiftly and surely along from incident to incident till Joseph's
+loving soul can contain itself no more:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all of them that
+stood by him; and he cried, Cause every man to go out from me.</p>
+
+<p>"And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself
+known unto his brethren.</p>
+
+<p>"And he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh
+heard.</p>
+
+<p>"And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph; doth my father
+yet live? And he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck, and wept;
+and Benjamin wept upon his neck. Moreover he kissed all his
+brethren and wept upon them.</p>
+
+<p>"And after that his brethren talked with him."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And this wonderful chapter ends thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"And they went up out of Egypt, and came unto the land of Canaan
+unto Jacob their father, and told him, saying, Joseph is yet alive,
+and is governor over all the land of Egypt.</p>
+
+<p>"And Jacob's heart fainted, for he believed them not.</p>
+
+<p>"And they told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said
+unto them: and when he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to
+carry him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived:</p>
+
+<p>"And Israel said, It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive: I
+will go and see him before I die."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If you read the story of Joseph through from start to finish,
+you will see that it is a perfect narrative of the life of a man
+without fault, who suffered much but without resentment, was great
+of heart in evil days, and, when Fortune placed him in a position
+of glory and greatness, showed a stainless magnanimity and a
+brotherly love that nothing could abate. It is the first and most
+perfect story in literature of the nobility of man's soul, and as
+such it must remain a treasured and priceless possession to the
+world's end.</p>
+
+<p>In the short Book of Ruth there lies embalmed in the finest
+English a very tender love story, set in all the sweet surroundings
+of the ripening corn, the gathered harvest, and the humble
+gleaners. Nothing can be more delightful than the direction of
+Boaz, the great land-owner, to his men, after he had espied Ruth in
+her beauty gleaning in his fields:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"And when she was risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young
+men, saying, Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her
+not:</p>
+
+<p>"And let fall also some of the handfuls on purpose for her, and
+leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This little gem in the books of the Bible inspired Hood to write
+one of his most perfect lyrics:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><span style='margin-left: 1em;'>"She stood breast
+high amid the corn</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Clasped by the golden light of
+morn,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Like the sweetheart of the
+sun,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Who many a glowing kiss had
+won.</span><br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 35%;'>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Thus she stood amid the
+stocks,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Praising God with sweetest
+looks.</span><br>
+ <span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Sure, I said, Heaven did not
+mean</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Where I reap thou should'st but
+glean;</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Lay thy sheaf adown and
+come,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Share my harvest and my
+home."</span><br>
+</div>
+
+<p>That the Bible was translated into English at the time when the
+language was spoken and written in its most noble form, by men
+whose style has never been surpassed in strength combined with
+simplicity, has been a priceless blessing to the English-speaking
+race. The land of its birth, once flowing with milk and honey, has
+been for long centuries a place of barren rocks and arid deserts:
+Persians and Greeks and Romans and Turks have successively swept
+over it; the descendants of those who at different times produced
+its different books are scattered to the ends of the earth; but the
+English translation has for long years been the head corner-stone
+in homes innumerable as the sands of the sea in number.</p>
+
+<p>No upheavals of the earth, no fire, pestilence, famine, or
+slaughter, can ever now blot it out from the ken of men.</p>
+
+<p>When all else is lost we may be sure that the old English
+version of the Bible will survive. "Heaven and earth shall pass
+away, but my words shall not pass away."</p>
+
+<p>Do not think it enough therefore, Antony, to hear it read badly
+and without intelligence or emotion, in little detached snippets,
+in church once a week.</p>
+
+<p>Read it for yourself, and learn to rejoice in the perfect
+balance, harmony, and strength of its noble style.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter3"></a>
+
+<h2>3</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I could write you many letters like my last one about the Bible,
+and perhaps some day I will go back to that wonderful Book and
+write you some more letters about it; but now I will go on and tell
+you about some of the great writers of English prose that came
+after the translation of the Bible.</p>
+
+<p>Those translators were the great founders of the English
+language, which is probably on the whole the most glorious organ of
+human expression that the world has yet known.</p>
+
+<p>It blends the classic purity of Greek and the stately severity
+of Latin with the sanguine passions and noble emotions of our
+race.</p>
+
+<p>A whole life devoted to its study will not make you or me
+perfectly familiar with all the splendid passages that have been
+spoken and written in it. But I shall show in my letters, at least
+some of the glorious utterances scattered around me here in my
+library, so that you may recognise, as you ought, the pomp and
+majesty of the speech of England.</p>
+
+<p>One of the great qualities that was always present in the
+writings of Englishmen from the time of Elizabeth down to the
+beginning of the nineteenth century was its restraint.</p>
+
+<p>Those men never became hysterical or lost their perfect
+self-control.</p>
+
+<p>The deeper the emotion of the writer the more manifest became
+the noble mastery of himself.</p>
+
+<p>When Sir Walter Ralegh, that glorious son of Devon, from which
+county you and I, Antony, are proud to have sprung, lay in the
+Tower of London awaiting his cowardly and shameful execution the
+next day at the hands of that miserable James I., writing to his
+beloved wife, with a piece of coal, because they even denied him
+pen and ink, face to face with death, he yet observed a calm and
+noble language that is truly magnifical&mdash;to use the old Bible
+word.</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"For the rest," he wrote, "when you have travailed and wearied
+your thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit
+down by sorrow in the end. Teach your son also to serve and fear
+God while he is young, that the fear of God may grow up in him.
+Then will God be a Husband unto you and a Father unto him; a
+Husband and a Father which can never be taken from you.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time
+when all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>"Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay
+it at Sherburne, if the land continue, or in Exeter Church by my
+father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me
+away.</p>
+
+<p>"The Everlasting, Infinite, Powerful and Inscrutable God, that
+Almighty God that is goodness itself, mercy itself, the true life
+and light, keep you and yours, and have mercy on me and teach me to
+forgive my persecutors and false accusers, and send us to meet in
+His Glorious Kingdom. My true wife, farewell. Bless my poor boy,
+pray for me. My true God hold you both in His Arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Written with the dying hand of, sometime thy husband, but now
+alas! overthrown, yours that was, but now not my own.</p>
+
+<p>"WALTER RALEGH."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sir Walter Ralegh, long before he came to his untimely end, had
+written in his great <i>History of the World</i> a wonderful
+passage about death; it is justly celebrated, and is familiar to
+all men of letters throughout the world, so I will quote a portion
+of it for you:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The Kings and Princes of the world have always laid before them
+the actions, but not the ends, of those great ones which preceded
+them. They are always transported with the glory of the one, but
+they never mind the misery of the other, till they find the
+experience in themselves.</p>
+
+<p>"They neglect the advice of God, while they enjoy life, or the
+hope of it; but they follow the counsel of Death upon the first
+approach. It is he that puts into man all the wisdom of the world,
+without speaking a word; which God, with all the Words of His Law,
+promises and threats, doth not infuse.</p>
+
+<p>"Death which hateth and destroyeth man is believed; God which
+hath made him and loves him is always deferred. It is, therefore,
+Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. He tells
+the proud and insolent that they are but abjects, and humbles them
+at the instant; makes them cry, complain and repent; yea, even to
+hate their fore-passed happiness.</p>
+
+<p>"He takes account of the rich, and proves him a beggar; a naked
+beggar which hath interest in nothing but in the gravel that fills
+his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful
+and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and they
+acknowledge it.</p>
+
+<p>"O eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou
+hast persuaded; what none have dared thou hast done; and whom all
+the world have flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and
+despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness,
+all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over
+with these two narrow words&mdash;HIC JACET."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sir Walter Ralegh was born only a few miles down below Ottery
+St. Mary, in the same beautiful valley from which you and I,
+Antony, and the poet have come. The peal of bells in the old church
+tower at Otterton was given by him to the parish; and when "the lin
+lan lone of evening-bells" floats across between the hills that
+guard the river Otter, it should fall upon our ears as an echo of
+the melody that strikes upon our hearts in Ralegh's words.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter4"></a>
+
+<h2>4</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>In looking through some very old Acts of Parliament not long ago
+I was rather surprised to find that in those old times our
+forefathers drew up their statutes in very stately English.</p>
+
+<p>In our own times Acts of Parliament frequently violate the
+simplest rules of grammar, and are sometimes so unintelligible as
+to need the labours of learned judges to find out what they
+mean!</p>
+
+<p>But it seems that in the great days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth
+Acts of Parliament were often written in resounding periods of
+solemn splendour of which the meaning is perfectly clear.</p>
+
+<p>In the twenty-fourth year of the great Henry, the Act denying
+and forbidding any jurisdiction of the Pope of Rome in England was
+passed.</p>
+
+<p>This Act, depriving the Pope of all power in England, marked a
+turning-point in history.</p>
+
+<p>It is headed with these words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>THE PRE-EMINENCE, POWER, AND AUTHORITY OF THE KING OF ENGLAND.
+1532.</p>
+
+<p>"Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles
+it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England
+is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by
+one supreme head and King having the dignity and royal estate of
+the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of
+all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms and by names of
+spiritualty and temporalty being bounden and owen to bear next to
+God a natural and humble obedience; he being also institute and
+furnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with
+plenary whole and entire power pre-eminence authority prerogative
+and jurisdiction to render and yield justice and final
+determination to all manner of folk residents or subjects within
+this his realm, in all causes matters debates contentions happening
+to occur insurge or begin within the limits thereof without
+restraint or provocation to any foreign princes or potentates of
+the world ... all causes testamentary, causes of matrimony and
+divorces, rights of tithes, oblations and obventions ... shall be
+from hence-forth heard examined licenced clearly finally and
+definitely adjudged and determined within the King's jurisdiction
+and authority and not elsewhere."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The words "Empire" and "Imperial" are in the present day
+degraded from their ancient high estate by an appropriation of them
+to advertise soap or cigarettes or what not; and we even are
+confronted with the "Imperial" Cancer Research Fund, the money of
+which has been employed in artificially inflicting cancer on
+hundreds of thousands of living animals&mdash;a performance utterly
+repugnant to a great many of the inhabitants in the "Empire"!</p>
+
+<p>But people indifferent to the dictates of mercy are not likely
+to have much reverence for words, however august.</p>
+
+<p>Henry VIII., we may be sure, would never have allowed these
+solemn words to be used by people with something to sell, or by
+scientific disease-mongers.</p>
+
+<p>They were great people who could draw up their statutes in
+splendid passages of sustained nobility.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, Antony, salute them across the centuries.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter5"></a>
+
+<h2>5</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>One of the great creators of English prose who lived at the same
+time as Ralegh and Shakespeare was Richard Hooker, who is generally
+known as "the Judicious Hooker."</p>
+
+<p>He was born in Devon, two years after Ralegh, in 1554.</p>
+
+<p>He must very early in life have made his mark as a man of
+learning and piety, for when he was only thirty-one he was made
+Master of the Temple. The controversies in which he there found
+himself involved induced him to retire when he was only
+thirty-seven into the country, for the purpose of writing his
+famous books, <i>The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is the first great book on the English Church, and it is full
+of magnificent prose. It was divided into eight parts; and in the
+first one, before he had got far into it, he penned the exclamatory
+description of law which will live as long as the
+language:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the
+world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least
+as feeling her care, the greatest as not exempted from her power.
+"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And in the same first part will be found a passage on the Deity
+which portrays faithfully for us the humble wisdom of both the man
+and his age:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into
+the doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and joy
+to make mention of His name; yet our soundest knowledge is to know
+that we know Him not as indeed He is, neither can know Him; and our
+safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we confess
+without confession that His glory is inexplicable, His greatness
+above our capacity to reach. He is above and we upon earth;
+therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Shakespeare was born ten years later than Hooker, in 1564, and
+his share in founding English prose as we know it is, of course,
+not comparable with that of Hooker, for of Shakespeare's prose
+there remains for us but little. Whenever he rose to eloquence he
+clothed himself in verse as with an inevitable attribute, but on
+the rare occasions when he condescended to step down from the great
+line to "the other harmony of prose" he is as splendid as in all
+else. In <i>Hamlet</i> we have this sudden passage:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I have of late, (but wherefore I know not), lost all my mirth,
+foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
+with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me
+a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you,
+this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with
+golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and
+pestilent congregation of vapours.</p>
+
+<p>"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite
+in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in
+action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the
+beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is
+this quintessence of dust? "</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And the most beautiful letter in the world is that written by
+Antonio to Bassanio in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>. When it is
+remembered that it was out of his friendship for Bassanio that
+Antonio entered into his bond with Shylock, the supreme
+exquisiteness of the few words from friend to friend render this
+letter unsurpassable:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow
+cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit, and
+since, in paying it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are
+cleared between you and me if I might see you at my death;
+notwithstanding, use your pleasure; if your love do not persuade
+you to come, let not my letter."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Well did Shakespeare know that such a letter must make an
+instant appeal to the sweet heart of Portia: "O love!" she cries,
+"despatch all business, and be gone!"</p>
+
+<p>All great poets are masters of a splendid prose, and had
+Shakespeare written some notable work of prose we may be sure it
+would even have surpassed the noble utterances of all his wonderful
+contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that no language in the world has yet ever
+lasted in its integrity for over a thousand years. Perhaps printing
+may confer a greater stability on present languages; but whenever
+English is displaced, the sun of the most glorious of all days will
+have set.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter6"></a>
+
+<h2>6</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I do not think that men of letters often search through the old
+law reports for specimens of fine prose, but I believe that here
+and there, in that generally barren field, a nugget of pure gold
+may be discovered by an industrious student.</p>
+
+<p>Much noble prose delivered from the bench down the centuries has
+been lost for ever, for the judges of England have often been
+gentlemen of taste, scholarship, and eloquence. I have found one
+very splendid passage that has somehow survived the wrecks of
+nearly four hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Chief Justice Crewe, who became Chief Justice of England in
+1624, delivered in the case of the Earl of Oxford the following
+noble tribute to the great house of De Vere:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I heard a great peer of this realm, and learned, say, when he
+lived, there was no king in Christendom had such a subject as
+Oxford. He came in with the Conqueror, Earl of Guienne; shortly
+after the Conquest made Great Chamberlain, above 400 years ago, by
+Henry I., the Conqueror's son; confirmed by Henry II. This great
+honour&mdash;this high and noble dignity&mdash;hath continued ever
+since, in the remarkable surname De Vere, by so many ages,
+descents, and generations, as no other kingdom can produce such a
+peer in one and the selfsame name and title. I find in all this
+time but two attainders of this noble family, and those in stormy
+and tempestuous time, when the government was unsettled, and the
+kingdom in competition. I have laboured to make a covenant with
+myself, that affection may not press upon judgment, for I suppose
+that there is no man that hath any apprehension of gentry or
+nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of so noble
+a name and fame, and would take hold of a twig or twine-thread to
+uphold it. And yet Time hath his revolutions: there must be an end
+to all temporal things, <i>finis rerum</i>,&mdash;and end of names
+and dignities, and whatsoever is <i>terrene</i>; and why not of De
+Vere? For where is De Bohun?&mdash;where is Mowbray?&mdash;where is
+Mortimer? Nay, what is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet?
+They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality. And yet,
+let the name and dignity of De Vere stand so long as it pleases
+God."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And alas! we can now ask, Where is De Vere? This great Earldom
+of Oxford was created in 1142, and has disappeared long ago in the
+limbo of peerages said to be in abeyance.</p>
+
+<p>In these days, Antony, when peerages are bought by men
+successful in trade and sold by men successful in intrigue, such
+elevations in rank have ceased to be regarded as the necessary
+concomitants of "great honour" and "high and noble dignity"; so
+that it has long been more reputable in the House of Lords to be a
+descendant than an ancestor. But among the older great families
+there still remains a pride that has descended unsullied through
+many generations, which serves as a fine deterrent from evil deeds,
+and a constant incentive to honour&mdash;and in England the history
+of great names can never be totally ignored, even though the
+country may be ruled by persons who do not know who were their own
+grandfathers.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is more ridiculous and cheap than to sneer at honourable
+descent from famous ancestors; it divertingly illustrates the fable
+of the sour grapes.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter7"></a>
+
+<h2>7</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>You will have seen from the extracts I have already quoted to
+you of the writers of the Elizabethan age that the style of all of
+them possesses something large and resonant, something that may be
+said to constitute the "grand style" in prose; and this quite
+naturally without effort, and without the slightest touch of
+affectation.</p>
+
+<p>A great writer who came immediately after the
+Elizabethans&mdash;namely, Sir Thomas Browne, who lived from 1605
+to 1682&mdash;displays the development in his style of something
+less simple and more precious than ruled in the former
+generation.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to select any passage from his works where all
+is so good. He was curious and exact in his choice of words and
+commanded a wide vocabulary. There is deliberate ingenuity in the
+framing of his sentences, which arrests attention and markedly
+distinguishes his style. His <i>Urn Burial</i>, in spite of its
+elaboration, reaches a grave and solemn splendour.</p>
+
+<p>The fifth chapter, which begins by speaking of the dead who have
+"quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests,"
+rises to a very noble elevation as English prose.</p>
+
+<p>Here I quote one paragraph of it, characteristic of the
+whole:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion
+shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we
+slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of
+affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no
+extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into
+stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are
+slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no
+unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful
+of evils past, is a merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest
+the mixture of our few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not
+relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw
+by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented
+their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their
+souls,&mdash;a good way to continue their memories, while having
+the advantage of plural successions they could not but act
+something remarkable in such variety of beings, and, enjoying the
+fame of their passed selves, make accumulation of glory unto their
+last durations. Others, rather than be lost in the uncomfortable
+night of nothing, were content to recede into the common being, and
+make one particle of the public soul of all things, which was no
+more than to return into their unknown and divine original again.
+Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in
+sweet consistencies, to attend the return of their souls. But all
+was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies,
+which Cambyses or Time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is
+become merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for
+balsams."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Milton was a contemporary of Sir Thomas Browne, and, like all
+great poets, was a master of resounding prose. All that he wrote,
+both in verse and prose, is severely classic in its form. His
+<i>Samson Agonistes</i> is perhaps the finest example of a play
+written in English after the manner of the Greek dramas.</p>
+
+<p>Milton wrote <i>The Areopagitica</i> in defence of the liberty
+of publishers and printers of books. And it stands for all time as
+the first and greatest argument against interference with the
+freedom of the press.</p>
+
+<p>The Areopagit&aelig; were judges at Athens in its more
+flourishing time, who sat on Mars Hill and made decrees and passed
+sentences which were delivered in public and commanded universal
+respect.</p>
+
+<p>I will quote one of the finest passages in this great and
+splendid utterance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church
+and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves
+as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do
+sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not
+absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to
+be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do
+preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that
+living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as
+vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons' teeth; and being
+sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good
+almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a
+reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book
+kills reason itself; kills the Image of God as it were in the eye.
+Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the
+precious life-blood of a master-spirit; embalmed and treasured up
+on purpose to a life beyond life.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof, perhaps, there
+is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the
+loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare
+the worse.</p>
+
+<p>"We should be wary, therefore, what persecutions we raise
+against the living labours of public men; how we spill that
+seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see
+a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom,
+and, if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre,
+whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life,
+but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of
+reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is a fine defence of the inviolability of a good and proper
+book.</p>
+
+<p>A bad book will generally die of itself, but there is something
+horribly malignant about a wicked book, as it must always be worse
+than a wicked man, for a man can repent, but a book cannot.</p>
+
+<p>It is the men of letters who keep alive the books of the great
+from generation to generation, and they are never likely to
+preserve a wicked book from oblivion. Ultimately such go to light
+fires and encompass groceries.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter8"></a>
+
+<h2>8</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Milton, of whom I wrote in my last letter, was five years older
+than Jeremy Taylor, of whom I am going to write to-day. The
+latter's writings differ very much from Milton's, although they
+were contemporaries for the whole of the former's life.</p>
+
+<p>From the grave and august periods of Milton to the sweet beauty
+of Jeremy Taylor is as the passing from out the austere halls of
+Justice to lovely fields full of flowers.</p>
+
+<p>Your and my great kinsman, Coleridge, pronounced Jeremy Taylor
+to be the most eloquent of all divines; and Coleridge was a great
+critic.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, there seems to dwell permanently in Jeremy Taylor's mind
+a compelling sweetness and serenity.</p>
+
+<p>His parables, though sometimes perhaps almost of set purpose
+fanciful, are always full of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>How can anyone withhold sympathy and affection from the writer
+of such a passage as this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"But as, when the sun approaches towards the gates of the
+morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the
+spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the
+lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and
+peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like
+those which decked the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a
+veil because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a
+man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair
+face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a
+cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and
+sets quickly, so is a man's reason and his life."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many
+delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty
+conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their
+stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their
+imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of
+joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society;
+but he that loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness at
+home, and broods a nest of sorrows; and blessing itself cannot make
+him happy; so that all the commandments of God enjoining a man to
+'love his wife' are nothing but so many necessities and capacities
+of joy. 'She that is loved, is safe; and he that loves, is joyful,'
+Love is a union of all things excellent; it contains in it
+proportion and satisfaction, and rest and confidence."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"So have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring
+upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb
+above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud
+sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and
+inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest, than it
+could recover by the liberation and frequent weighing of his wings;
+till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay
+till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and
+did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an
+angel, as he passed sometimes through the air, about his ministries
+here below; so is the prayer of a good man."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I am fallen into the hands of publicans and sequestrators, and
+they have taken all from me; what now? Let me look about me. They
+have left me the sun and moon, fire and water, a loving wife, and
+many friends to pity me, and some to relieve me, and I can still
+discourse; and unless I list, they have not taken away my merry
+countenance and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they
+still have left me the Providence of God, and all the promises of
+the Gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my charity
+to them too; and still I sleep and digest, I eat and drink, I read
+and meditate; I can walk in my neighbor's pleasant fields, and see
+the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which
+God delights, that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation,
+and in God Himself."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here, Antony, is true wisdom. True, indeed, is it that no one
+can take away from you your merry countenance, your cheerful
+spirit, and your good conscience unless you choose; keep all three,
+Antony, throughout your life, and you will be happy yourself and
+make everyone about you happy, and that is to make a little heaven
+of your earthly home.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter9"></a>
+
+<h2>9</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Some day, no doubt, you will read some of the celebrated diaries
+that have come down to us. The best known of such books is
+<i>Pepys's Diary</i> which was written in a kind of shorthand, and
+so lay undeciphered from his death in 1703 for more than a century.
+One of its merits is its absolute self-revelation; for Pepys
+exposes to us his character without a shadow of reserve in all its
+vanity; and the other is the faithful picture it gives us of the
+time of the Restoration.</p>
+
+<p>But, though less popular, <i>Evelyn's Diary</i> is, I think, in
+many ways superior to that of Pepys.<a name='FNanchor_1_2'></a><a
+href='#Footnote_1_2'><sup>[1]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>There is a quiet, unostentatious dignity about Evelyn which is
+altogether absent in the garrulous Pepys, and, indeed I find
+something very beautiful and touching in the grief Evelyn pours
+forth upon the death of his little son of five years
+old:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The day before he died," writes Evelyn, "he call'd to me and in
+a more serious manner than usual, told me that for all I loved him
+so dearly I should give my house, land, and all my fine things, to
+his Brother Jack, he should have none of them; and next morning
+when he found himself ill, and that I persuaded him to keepe his
+hands in bed, he demanded whether he might pray to God with his
+hands un-joyn'd; and a little after, whilst in great agonie,
+whether he should not offend God by using His holy name so often
+calling for ease. What shall I say of his frequent pathetical
+ejaculations utter'd of himselfe: Sweete Jesus save me, deliver me,
+pardon my sinns, let Thine angels receive me!</p>
+
+<p>"So early knowledge, so much piety and perfection! But thus God
+having dress'd up a Saint for himselfe, would not longer permit him
+with us, unworthy of ye future fruites of this incomparable
+hopefull blossome. Such a child I never saw: for such a child I
+blesse God in whose bosome he is! May I and mine become as this
+little child, who now follows the child Jesus that Lamb of God in a
+white robe whithersoever he goes; even so, Lord Jesus, <i>fiat
+voluntas tua!</i> Thou gavest him to us, Thou hast taken him from
+us, blessed be ye name of ye Lord! That I had anything acceptable
+to Thee was from Thy grace alone, since from me he had nothing but
+sin, but that Thou hast pardon'd! Blessed be my God for ever, Amen!
+I caused his body to be coffin'd in lead, and reposited on the 30th
+at 8 o'clock that night in the church at Deptford, accompanied with
+divers of my relations and neighbours among whom I distributed
+rings with this motto: <i>Dominus abstulit</i>; intending, God
+willing, to have him transported with my owne body to be interr'd
+in our dormitory in Wotton Church, in my dear native county of
+Surrey, and to lay my bones and mingle my dust with my fathers, if
+God be gracious to me and make me fit for Him as this blessed child
+was. The Lord Jesus sanctify this and all my other afflictions,
+Amen! Here ends the joy of my life, and for which I go even
+mourning to my grave."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This great love and reverence for little children is peculiarly
+in accord with Christianity, for we should remember that it was the
+WISE men, who, when they had journeyed far across the world to
+salute the King of kings, laid their offerings down at the feet of
+a little child.</p>
+
+<p>Is there not something to reverence in faith and resignation
+such as are here expressed by Evelyn? Were not these men of old
+with their unshakable faith and simple piety better and happier
+than those who in these days know so much more and believe so much
+less?</p>
+
+<p>We, no doubt, have the knowledge, but perhaps they had the
+wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>I think, Antony, that in the history of England we shall have
+difficulty in finding any of our greatest men whose hearts and
+minds were not filled with a reverence for God and a faith in
+something beyond the blind forces which are all that Science has to
+offer mankind as a guide of life.</p>
+
+<p>All who have acted most nobly from the days of Ralegh and Sir
+Thomas More, down to the days of Gordon of Khartoum, and down again
+to our own days when the youth of England upheld the invincible
+valour, self-sacrifice, and glory of their race in the greatest of
+all wars,&mdash;all have been filled with the love of God and have
+found therein a perfect serenity in the face of death, and that
+peace which passeth all understanding.</p>
+
+<p>The character of our race rests indubitably upon that faith, and
+he who lifts his voice, or directs his pen, to tear it down, had
+better never have been born.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_2'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_2'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>Another diary that you should read by and by is that of Henry
+Grabb Robinson.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter10"></a>
+
+<h2>10</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>In these letters I am never going to quote to you anything that
+does not seem to me to rise to a level of merit well above ordinary
+proper prose. There are many writers whose general correctness and
+excellence is not to be questioned or denied whom I shall not
+select in these letters for your particular admiration.</p>
+
+<p>By and by, when your own love of literature impels you to
+excursions in all directions, you may perhaps come to differ from
+my judgment, for everyone's taste must vary a little from that of
+others.</p>
+
+<p>English prose in its excellence follows the proportions
+manifested by the contours of the elevation of the world's
+land.</p>
+
+<p>Vast tracts lie very near the sea-level, of such are the
+interminable outpourings of newspapers and novels and school books.
+And, as each ascent from the sea-level is reached, less and less
+land attains to it, and when the snow-line is approached only a
+very small proportion indeed of the land aspires so high.</p>
+
+<p>So among writers, those who climb to the snow-line are a slender
+band compared to all the inhabitants of the lower slopes and
+plains.</p>
+
+<p>In these letters I do not intend to mistake a pedlar for a
+mountaineer, nor a hearthstone for a granite peak. Time slowly
+buries deep in oblivion the writings of the industrious and the
+dull.</p>
+
+<p>Born fifteen years later than Jeremy Taylor, of whom I wrote in
+a former letter, John Bunyan in 1660, being a Baptist, suffered the
+persecution then the lot of all dissenters, and was cast into
+Bedford gaol, where he lay for conscience' sake for twelve years.
+"As I walked through the wilderness of this world," said he, "I
+lighted on a certain place where was a den, and laid me down in
+that place to sleep; and as I slept I dreamed a dream"; and the
+dream which he dreamed has passed into all lands, and has been
+translated into all languages, and has taken its place with the
+Bible and with the <i>Imitation of Christ</i> as a guide of
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The force of simplicity finds here its most complete expression;
+the story wells from the man's heart, whence come all great
+things:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Then said the Interpreter to Christian, 'Hast thou considered
+all these things?'</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Christian.</i> 'Yes, and they put me in hope and fear.'</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Interpreter.</i> 'Well, keep all things so in thy mind that
+they may be as a goad in thy sides, to prick thee forward in the
+way thou must go.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then Christian began to gird up his loins, and to address
+himself to his journey.</p>
+
+<p>"Then said the Interpreter, 'The Comforter be always with thee,
+good Christian, to guide thee in the way that leads to the
+city.'</p>
+
+<p>"So Christian went on his way.</p>
+
+<p>"Now I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian had
+to go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was
+called Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian
+run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his
+back. He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending, and
+upon that place stood a cross, and a little below in the bottom a
+sepulchre.</p>
+
+<p>"So I saw in my dream that just as Christian came up with the
+cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off
+his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came
+to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no
+more.</p>
+
+<p>"Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry
+heart, 'He hath given me rest by His sorrow, and life by His
+death.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then he stood awhile to look and wonder, for it was very
+surprising to him that the sight of the cross should thus ease him
+of his burden.</p>
+
+<p>"He looked, therefore, and looked again, even till the springs
+that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Bunyan died in 1688, and Dr. Johnson was born in 1709. Many
+years, therefore, elapsed between the time when they each displayed
+their greatest powers.</p>
+
+<p>The interval was occupied by many reputable worldly-wise
+writers, but I do not myself find, between these two masters of
+English prose, anyone who wrote passages of such great lustre that
+I can quote them for your admiration.</p>
+
+<p>You will have noticed, Antony, that all the writers whom I have
+quoted, and who reached the true nobility of speech necessary to
+command our tribute of unstinted praise, have been men of manifest
+piety and reverence.</p>
+
+<p>And you will find it difficult to discover really great and
+eloquent prose from the pen of any man whose heart is not filled
+with a simple faith in the goodness of God.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter11"></a>
+
+<h2>11</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I have come now to Dr. Johnson, and it is almost a test of a
+true man of letters that he should love him.</p>
+
+<p>He was rugged and prejudiced, but magnanimous; impatient with
+the presumptuous, tender to modest ignorance, proudly independent
+of the patronage of the great, and was often doing deeds of noble
+self-sacrifice by stealth.</p>
+
+<p>Through long years of hard, unremitting toil for his daily bread
+he lived bravely and sturdily, with no extraneous help but his
+stout oak stick&mdash;an unconquerable man.</p>
+
+<p>His prose rises on occasion to a measured and stately grandeur
+above the reach of any of his contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>It was not often that he unveiled to the public gaze the
+beatings of his own noble heart, or invited the world to
+contemplate the depression and suffering amid which his unending
+labours were accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>The concluding page of the preface to the first edition of the
+great <i>Dictionary</i> is, therefore, the more precious and
+moving. I know not why this majestic utterance came to be deleted
+in later editions; certainly it sanctifies, and as it were crowns
+with a crown of sorrow, the greatest work of his life; and with
+reverent sympathy and unstinted admiration I reproduce it
+here:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot ultimately
+be defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to
+degeneration: we have long preserved our constitution, let us make
+some struggles for our language.</p>
+
+<p>"In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature
+forbids to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of
+years, to the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield the
+palm of philology to the nations of the continent. The chief glory
+of every people arises from its authors; whether I shall add
+anything by my own writings to the reputation of English
+literature, must be left to time: much of my life has been lost
+under the pressure of disease; much has been trifled away; and much
+has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing
+over me; but I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if
+by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to
+the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth;
+if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add
+celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.</p>
+
+<p>"When I am animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my
+book, however defective, and deliver it to the world with the
+spirit of a man that has endeavoured well. That it will immediately
+become popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders
+and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity
+was ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and
+harden ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last
+prevail, and there never can be wanting some, who distinguish
+desert, who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue can
+ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some
+words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot
+be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life
+would not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever
+language can express must often speak of what he does not
+understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to
+the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a task which
+Scaliger compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that
+what is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not
+always present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise
+vigilance, slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual
+eclipses of the mind will darken learning; and that the writer
+shall often in vain trace his memory at the moment of need for that
+which yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will
+come uncalled into his thoughts to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>"In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let
+it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no
+book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the world
+is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that
+which it condemns, yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it that
+the <i>English Dictionary</i> was written with little assistance of
+the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the
+soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic
+bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and
+in sorrow; and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to
+observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have
+only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto
+completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed
+and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of
+successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated
+knowledge and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians
+did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied
+critics of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their work,
+were obliged to change its economy, and give their second editions
+another form, I may surely be contented without the praise of
+perfection which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude what
+would it avail me?</p>
+
+<p>"I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to
+please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are
+empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity,
+having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This seems to me to be the noblest passage that Johnson ever
+wrote.</p>
+
+<p>Almost all the most magnificent utterances of man are tinged
+with sadness. In this they possess a quality that is almost
+inseparable from grandeur wherever displayed. No man of sensibility
+and taste feels it possible to make jokes himself, or to tolerate
+them from others when in the presence of the Falls of Niagara, or a
+tempest at sea, or when he views from a peak in the Andes&mdash;as
+I have done&mdash;the sun descent into the Pacific. The greatest
+pictures painted by man touch the heart rather than elate it; and
+genius finds its highest expression not in comedy, but in
+tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>And this need cause us no surprise when we consider how much of
+the great work in letters and in art is directly due to the writer
+possessing in full measure the gift of sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>People with this gift, even if they are without the faculty of
+expression, are beloved by those about them, which must bring them
+happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Till he was over fifty Dr. Johnson's life was a weary struggle
+with poverty. He wrote <i>Rasselas</i> under the pressure of an
+urgent need of money to send to his dying mother. His wife died
+some few years earlier. I have always thought that the sad
+reflections he put into the mouth of an old philosopher towards the
+end of the story were indeed the true expressions of his own tired
+heart:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Praise," said the sage with a sigh, "is to an old man an empty
+sound. I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of
+her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband.</p>
+
+<p>"I have outlived my friends and my rivals. Nothing is now of
+much importance; for I cannot extend my interest beyond myself.
+Youth is delighted with applause, because it is considered as the
+earnest of some future good, and because the prospect of life is
+far extended; but to me, who am now declining to decrepitude, there
+is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet less to
+be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they may take
+away, but they can give me nothing. Riches would now be useless,
+and high employment would be pain. My retrospect of life recalls to
+my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered
+upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I leave many
+great designs unattempted, and many great attempts unfinished.</p>
+
+<p>"My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, and therefore I
+compose myself to tranquillity; endeavour to abstract my thoughts
+from hopes and cares, which, though reason knows them to be vain,
+still try to keep their old possession of the heart; expect, with
+serene humility, that hour which nature cannot long delay; and hope
+to possess, in a better state, that happiness which here I could
+not find, and that virtue which here I have not attained."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>From the results of <i>Rasselas</i> he sent his mother money,
+but she had expired before it reached her.</p>
+
+<p>Down to the time of Dr. Johnson it was the custom for writers of
+books and poems to seek and enjoy the patronage of some great
+nobleman, to whom they generally dedicated their works.</p>
+
+<p>And in pursuance of that custom Dr. Johnson, when he first
+issued the plan or prospectus of his great <i>Dictionary</i> in
+1747, addressed it to Lord Chesterfield, who was regarded as the
+most brilliant and cultivated nobleman of his time. Lord
+Chesterfield, however, took no notice of the matter till the
+<i>Dictionary</i> was on the point of coming out in 1755, and then
+wrote some flippant remarks about it in a publication called <i>The
+World</i>.</p>
+
+<p>At this Dr. Johnson wrote a letter to the condescending peer,
+which became celebrated throughout England and practically put an
+end to writers seeking the patronage of the great.</p>
+
+<p>This wonderful letter concludes thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your
+outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I
+have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is
+useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of
+publication, without one act of assistance, one word of
+encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not
+expect, for I never had a patron before.</p>
+
+<p>"The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and
+found him a native of the rocks.</p>
+
+<p>"Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man
+struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground,
+encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to
+take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind, but it has
+been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am
+solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want
+it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess
+obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling
+that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which
+Providence has enabled me to do for myself.</p>
+
+<p>"Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to
+any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I
+should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been
+wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself
+with so much exultation, my lord,&mdash;your lordship's most
+humble, most obedient servant. SAM. JOHNSON."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Boswell's life of Dr. Johnson when you come to read it, as you
+will be sure to do by and by, has left a living picture of this
+great and good man for all future generations to enjoy, extenuating
+nothing to his quaintness, directness, and proneness to
+contradiction for its own sake, yet unveiling everywhere the deep
+piety and fine magnanimity of his character. He suffered much, but
+never complained, and certainly must be numbered among the great
+men of letters who have found true consolation and support in every
+circumstance of life in an earnest and fervent faith.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter12"></a>
+
+<h2>12</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Edmund Burke was born in 1730, and therefore was twenty-one
+years younger than Dr. Johnson, and he survived him thirteen years.
+He was a great prose writer, and although some of his speeches in
+Parliament that have come down to us possess every quality of solid
+argument and lofty eloquence, there must have been something
+lacking in his delivery and voice, for he so frequently failed to
+rivet the attention of the House, and so often addressed a steadily
+dwindling audience, that the wits christened him "the dinner
+bell."</p>
+
+<p>All men of letters, however, acknowledge Burke as a true master
+of a very great style.</p>
+
+<p>We see in him the first signs of a breaking away from the
+universal restraint of the older writers, and of the surging up of
+expressed emotion.</p>
+
+<p>His splendid tribute to Marie Antoinette and his panegyric of
+the lost age of chivalry are familiar to all students of English
+prose.</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"It is now (1791) sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the
+Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely
+never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more
+delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and
+cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in glittering
+like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh!
+what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate
+without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream
+when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic,
+distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry
+the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little
+did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen
+upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour
+and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped
+from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with
+insult. But the age of chivalry has gone. That of sophisters,
+economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe
+is extinguished for ever.</p>
+
+<p>"Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to sex
+and rank, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that
+subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude
+itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of
+life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
+and heroic enterprise is gone!</p>
+
+<p>"It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of
+honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage
+while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched,
+and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its
+grossness."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is a splendid and world-famous passage well worth
+committing to memory.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter13"></a>
+
+<h2>13</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Edward Gibbon, who wrote the <i>Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire</i>, belonged to the later half of the eighteenth century,
+and was a contemporary of Dr. Johnson and Burke. He finished his
+great history three years after Dr. Johnson's death. It is a
+monumental work, and will live as long as the English language. It
+is one of the books which every cultivated gentleman should read.
+The style is stately and sonorous, and the industry and erudition
+involved in its production must have been immense.</p>
+
+<p>Although it never sinks below a noble elevation of style, it
+nevertheless displays no uplifting flights of eloquence or
+declamation, and to me, and probably to you, Antony, the most
+moving passages in Gibbon's writings are those that describe with
+unaffected emotion the moment of the first resolve to compose the
+great history and the night when he wrote the last line of it. On
+page 129 of his memoirs<a name='FNanchor_1_3'></a><a href=
+'#Footnote_1_3'><sup>[1]</sup></a> he wrote:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"It was at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing
+amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were
+singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing
+the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Thus did he resolve to devote himself to the tremendous task,
+and at Lausanne twenty-three years later it was at last fulfilled.
+He recorded the event in a few pregnant sentences that are
+strangely memorable:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787,
+between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines
+of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down
+my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of
+acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and
+the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the
+silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all
+nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy
+on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the establishment of my
+fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was
+spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting
+leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might
+be the future fate of my History, the life of the historian must be
+short and precarious."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In June, 1888, just one hundred and one years after that pen had
+been finally laid aside, I searched in Lausanne for the
+summer-house and covered walk, and could find no very authentic
+record of its site. I brought home a flower from the garden where
+it seemed probable the summer-house had once existed, behind the
+modern hotel built there in the intervening time, and laid it
+between the leaves of my Gibbon.</p>
+
+<p>The pressed flower was still there when I last took the book
+down from my shelves.</p>
+
+<p>I hope my successors will preserve the little token of my
+reverence.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_3'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_3'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>First edition, 1794.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter14"></a>
+
+<h2>14</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Some of the most eloquent orators in the world have been
+Irishmen, and among them Henry Grattan was supreme.</p>
+
+<p>The Irish Parliament in the later half of the eighteenth century
+frequently sat spell-bound under the magic of his voice.</p>
+
+<p>In 1782, at the age of thirty-two, he achieved by his amazing
+eloquence a great National Revolution in Ireland. But eighteen
+years later all that he had fought for and achieved was lost in the
+Act of Union. In these days I suppose few will be found to defend
+the means whereby that Act was passed; but the public assertions
+that the people of Ireland were in favour of it wrung from Grattan
+the following cry of indignation and wrath:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"To affirm that the judgment of a nation is erroneous may
+mortify, but to affirm that her judgment <i>against</i> is
+<i>for</i>; to assert that she has said <i>ay</i> when she has
+pronounced <i>no</i>; to affect to refer a great question to the
+people; finding the sense of the people, like that of the
+parliament, against the question, to force the question; to affirm
+the sense of the people to be <i>for</i> the question; to affirm
+that the question is persisted in, because the sense of the people
+is for it; to make the falsification of the country's sentiments
+the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of the Union; to affirm
+that her parliament, constitution, liberty, honour, property, are
+taken away by her own authority,&mdash;there is, in such artifice,
+an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility, that can best be
+answered by sensations of astonishment and disgust, excited on this
+occasion by the British minister, whether he speaks in gross and
+total ignorance of the truth, or in shameless and supreme contempt
+for it.</p>
+
+<p>"The constitution may be <i>for a time</i> so lost; the
+character of the country cannot be so lost. The ministers of the
+Crown will, or may, perhaps, at length find that it is not so easy
+to put down for ever an ancient and respectable nation, by
+abilities, however great, and by power and by corruption, however
+irresistible; liberty may repair her golden beams, and with
+redoubled heat animate the country; the cry of loyalty will not
+long continue against the principles of liberty; loyalty is a
+noble, a judicious, and a capacious principle; but in these
+countries loyalty, distinct from liberty, is corruption, not
+loyalty.</p>
+
+<p>"The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against
+the principles of liberty. Connexion is a wise and a profound
+policy; but connexion without an Irish Parliament is connexion
+without its own principle, without analogy of condition; without
+the pride of honour that should attend it; is innovation, is peril,
+is subjugation&mdash;not connexion.</p>
+
+<p>"The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against
+the principle of liberty.</p>
+
+<p>"Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, necessary for the
+preservation of freedom, necessary for that of empire; but, without
+union of hearts&mdash;with a separate government, and without a
+separate parliament, identification is extinction, is dishonour, is
+conquest&mdash;not identification.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet I do not give up the country&mdash;I see her in a swoon,
+but she is not dead&mdash;though in her tomb she lies helpless and
+motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her
+cheeks a glow of beauty&mdash;</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="poem"><span style='margin-left: 3em;'>"Thou art not
+conquered; beauty's ensign yet</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 3em;'>Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy
+cheeks,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 3em;'>And death's pale flag is not
+advanced there."</span><br>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"While a plank of the vessel sticks together, I will not leave
+her. Let the courtier present his flimsy sail, and carry the light
+bark of his faith, with every new breath of wind&mdash;I will
+remain anchored here&mdash;with fidelity to the fortunes of my
+country, faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of another character, but not less admirable than his eloquence
+in the Senate, was Grattan's achievement with the pen. His
+description of the great Lord Chatham lives as one of the most
+noble panegyrics&mdash;it not the most noble&mdash;in the world. No
+writer, before or since, has offered anyone such splendid homage as
+this&mdash;that he never sunk "to the vulgar level of the
+great."</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The Secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached
+him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character
+had the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty,
+and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his
+presence that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved
+from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of
+vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk
+him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive,
+and impracticable, his object was England,&mdash;his ambition was
+fame; without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he
+made a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand
+he smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the
+democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his
+schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but
+Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these
+schemes were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the
+suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and enlightened
+by prophecy.</p>
+
+<p>"The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and
+indolent&mdash;those sensations which soften, and allure, and
+vulgarise&mdash;were unknown to him; no domestic difficulties, no
+domestic weakness reached him; but, aloof from the sordid
+occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came
+occasionally into our system to counsel and decide.</p>
+
+<p>"A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so
+authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled
+at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality. Corruption
+imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and
+talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and much of the ruin
+of his victories&mdash;but the history of his country, and the
+calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.</p>
+
+<p>"Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his
+eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous,
+familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive
+wisdom&mdash;not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid
+conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and
+sometimes the music of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct
+the understanding through the painful subtilty of argumentation;
+nor was he, like Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion, but
+rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the
+flashings of his mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but
+could not be followed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet he was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he
+was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he
+concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon
+many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence, but even
+then, like the spinning of a cannon ball, he was still alive with
+fatal, unapproachable activity.</p>
+
+<p>"Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could
+create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
+eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of
+slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with unbounded
+authority; something that could establish or overwhelm empire, and
+strike a blow in the world that should resound through its
+history."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Grattan died in 1820, and twenty years later, in 1844, another
+great English writer, Lord Macaulay, wrote a world-famous passage
+upon the great Lord Chatham in the <i>Edinburgh
+Review</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot
+which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other
+end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests
+there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and
+Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great
+citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable
+graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and, from above, his
+effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face and
+outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl
+defiance at her foes.</p>
+
+<p>"The generation which reared that memorial of him has
+disappeared. The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate
+judgments which his contemporaries passed on his character may be
+calmly revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of
+vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors, will
+yet deliberately pronounce that, among the eminent men whose bones
+lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless and none a
+more splendid name."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is a great race, Antony, that can produce a man of such a
+character as Chatham, and also writers who can dedicate to him such
+superb tributes as these.</p>
+
+<p>Macaulay's prose has been much criticised as being too near to
+easy journalism to be classed among the great classic passages of
+English; but this much must be recognised to his great
+credit&mdash;he never wrote an obscure sentence or an ambiguous
+phrase, and his works may be searched in vain for a foreign idiom
+or even a foreign word. He possessed an infallible memory, absolute
+perspicuity, and a scholarly taste. He detested oppression wherever
+enforced, and never exercised his great powers in the defence of
+mean politics or unworthy practices.</p>
+
+<p>Such a writer to-day would blow a wholesome wind across the
+tainted pools of political intrigue.</p>
+
+<p>We can salute him, Antony, as a fine, manly, clean writer, who
+was an honour to letters.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter15"></a>
+
+<h2>15</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Born in the same year as was Grattan, namely, in 1750, Lord
+Erskine adorned the profession of the Bar with an eloquence that
+never exhibited the slight tendency to be ponderous which sometimes
+was displayed by his contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>Grace and refinement shine out in every one of his great
+speeches.</p>
+
+<p>He was a young scion of the great house of Buchan, being the
+third son of the tenth Earl. After being in the Navy for four years
+he left it for the Army, and six years later he went to Trinity
+College, Cambridge, and took his degree; thence he came to the Bar
+in 1778, and at once displayed the most conspicuous ability as an
+advocate.</p>
+
+<p>He appeared for Horne Tooke in a six-day trial for high treason,
+which ended in an acquittal.</p>
+
+<p>In 1806 he became Lord Chancellor and a peer.</p>
+
+<p>I quote an indignant warning to the aristocracy of England which
+flamed forth in one of his great speeches:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Let the aristocracy of England, which trembles so much for
+itself, take heed to its own security; let the nobles of England,
+if they mean to preserve that pre-eminence which, in some shape or
+other, must exist in every social community, take care to support
+it by aiming at that which is creative, and alone creative, of real
+superiority. Instead of matching themselves to supply wealth, to be
+again idly squandered in debauching excesses, or to round the
+quarters of a family shield; instead of continuing their names and
+honours in cold and alienated embraces, amidst the enervating
+rounds of shallow dissipation, let them live as their fathers of
+old lived before them; let them marry as affection and prudence
+lead the way, and, in the ardours of mutual love, and in the
+simplicities of rural life, let them lay the foundation of a
+vigorous race of men, firm in their bodies, and moral from early
+habits; and, instead of wasting their fortunes and their strength
+in the tasteless circles of debauchery, let them light up their
+magnificent and hospital halls to the gentry and peasantry of the
+country, extending the consolations of wealth and influence to the
+poor. Let them but do this,&mdash;and instead of those dangerous
+and distracted divisions between the different ranks of life, and
+those jealousies of the multitude so often blindly painted as big
+with destruction, we should see our country as one large and
+harmonious family, which can never be accomplished amidst vice and
+corruption, by wars and treaties, by informations, <i>ex
+officio</i> for libels, or by any of the tricks and artifices of
+the State."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mr. Erskine was entitled, as the son of the tenth Earl of
+Buchan, to speak such words of warning and exhortation to the
+aristocracy of England to which he belonged, and the lapse of a
+century and a quarter has not rendered the exhortation vain, though
+it may be hoped that the condemnatory clauses of the speech would
+not at the present time be so well justified as when they were
+delivered.</p>
+
+<p>Great names carry great obligations, and, for the most part,
+those who bear them to-day recognise those great obligations and
+endeavour without ostentation to fulfil them.</p>
+
+<p>The silly fribbles who posture before the photographic cameras
+for penny newspapers do not represent the real aristocracy of
+England.</p>
+
+<p>We must not, Antony, mistake a cockatoo for an eagle.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter16"></a>
+
+<h2>16</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I shall not expect you in your reading often to penetrate into
+the innumerable dusty octavos that contain sermons. The stoutest
+heart may fail, without blame, before the flat-footed pedestrianism
+of these platitudinous volumes. But there does occasionally arise
+above the dull horizon a star whose brilliance is the more
+conspicuous for the surrounding gloom.</p>
+
+<p>In 1796, Coleridge, in a letter<a name='FNanchor_1_4'></a><a
+href='#Footnote_1_4'><sup>[1]</sup></a> to a Mr. Flower, who was a
+publisher at Cambridge, wrote:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I hope Robert Hall is well. Why is he idle? I mean towards the
+public. We want such men to rescue this <i>enlightened age</i> from
+general irreligion."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I suppose Robert Hall is a name known to but few in these days,
+but at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
+nineteenth centuries his fame was great and deserved.</p>
+
+<p>As a divine, dowered with the gift of inspired eloquence,
+Coleridge estimated his powers as second only to those of Jeremy
+Taylor. When Napoleon was at the supreme height of his conquests,
+and England alone of European countries still stood erect,
+uninvaded and undismayed, a company of soldiers attended Robert
+Hall's place of worship on the eve of their departure to Spain. The
+occasion was memorable and moving, and the preacher's splendid
+periods deserve to be preserved from oblivion:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"By a series of criminal enterprises, by the successes of guilty
+ambition, the liberties of Europe have been gradually extinguished;
+the subjugation of Holland, Switzerland, and the free towns of
+Germany, has completed that catastrophe; and we are the only people
+in the Eastern Hemisphere who are in possession of equal laws and a
+free constitution. Freedom, driven from every spot on the
+Continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she always chose
+for her favorite abode; but she is pursued even here, and
+threatened with destruction. The inundations of lawless power,
+after covering the whole earth, threaten to follow us here, and we
+are most exactly, most critically placed in the only aperture where
+it can be successfully repelled, in the Thermopyl&aelig; of the
+universe.</p>
+
+<p>"As far as the interests of freedom are concerned, the most
+important by far of sublunary interests, you, my countrymen, stand
+in the capacity of the federal representatives of the human race;
+for with you it is to determine (under God) in what condition the
+latest posterity shall be born; their fortunes are entrusted to
+your care, and on your conduct at this moment depends the colour
+and complexion of their destiny. If liberty, after being
+extinguished on the Continent, is suffered to expire here, whence
+is it ever to emerge in the midst of that thick night that will
+invest it?</p>
+
+<p>"It remains with you, then, to decide whether that freedom, at
+whose voice the kingdoms of Europe awoke from the sleep of ages to
+run a career of virtuous emulation in everything great and good;
+the freedom which dispelled the mists of superstition and invited
+the nations to behold their God; whose magic touch kindled the rays
+of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, and the flame of eloquence;
+the freedom which poured into our lap opulence and arts, and
+embellished life with innumerable institutions and improvements
+till it became a theatre of wonders; it is for you to decide
+whether this freedom shall yet survive, or be covered with a
+funeral pall, and wrapt in eternal gloom.</p>
+
+<p>"It is not necessary to await your determination. In the
+solicitude you feel to approve yourselves worthy of such a trust,
+every thought of what is afflicting in warfare, every apprehension
+of danger, must vanish, and you are impatient to mingle in the
+battle of the civilised world.</p>
+
+<p>"Go then, ye defenders of your country, accompanied with every
+auspicious omen; advance with alacrity into the field, where God
+Himself musters the hosts of war. Religion is too much interested
+in your success not to lend you her aid; she will shed over this
+enterprise her selectest influences. While you are engaged in the
+field many will repair to the closet, many to the sanctuary; the
+faithful of every name will employ that prayer which has power with
+God; the feeble hands which are unequal to any other weapon will
+grasp the sword of the Spirit; from myriads of humble, contrite
+hearts, the voice of intercession, supplication, and weeping, will
+mingle in its ascent to heaven with the shouts of battle and the
+shock of arms.</p>
+
+<p>"While you have everything to fear from the success of the
+enemy, you have every means of preventing that success, so that it
+is next to impossible for victory not to crown your exertions. The
+extent of your resources, under God, is equal to the justice of
+your cause.</p>
+
+<p>"But should Providence determine otherwise; should you fall in
+this struggle, should the nation fall, you will have the
+satisfaction (the purest allotted to man) of having performed your
+part; your names will be enrolled with the most illustrious dead,
+while posterity to the end of time, as often as they revolve the
+events of this period (and they will incessantly revolve them) will
+turn to you a reverential eye while they mourn over the freedom
+which is entombed in your sepulchre.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot but imagine the virtuous heroes, legislators, and
+patriots, of every age and country, are bending from their elevated
+seats to witness this contest, as if they were incapable, till it
+be brought to a favourable issue, of enjoying their eternal
+repose.</p>
+
+<p>"Enjoy that repose, illustrious immortals! Your mantle fell when
+you ascended, and thousands inflamed with your spirit, and
+impatient to tread in your steps, are ready 'to swear by Him that
+sitteth upon the throne and liveth for ever and ever,' they will
+protect freedom in her last asylums, and never desert that cause
+which you sustained by your labours and cemented with your
+blood.</p>
+
+<p>"And Thou, Sole Ruler among the children of men, to whom the
+shields of the earth belong, 'gird on Thy sword, Thou most Mighty';
+go forth with our hosts in the day of battle! Impart, in addition
+to their hereditary valour, that confidence of success which
+springs from Thy Presence!</p>
+
+<p>"Pour into their hearts the spirit of departed heroes! Inspire
+them with Thine own, and, while led by Thine Hand and fighting
+under Thy banners, open Thou their eyes to behold in every valley
+and in every plain, what the prophet beheld by the same
+illuminations&mdash;chariots of fire, and horses of fire!</p>
+
+<p>"Then shall the strong man be as tow, and the maker of it as a
+spark; and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench
+them."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We, who have just emerged, shattered indeed and reeling, from
+another and yet more awful combat for freedom, can the better
+extend our sympathy to those forefathers of ours situated in like
+case, and can imagine with what beating hearts they must have
+listened to so magnificent a call to arms as this; commingling
+prayer, exhortation, and benediction.</p>
+
+<p>Napoleon, after all, waged his wars with us according to the
+laws of nations, the rules of civilised peoples, and the dictates
+of decent humanity. But never since Christianity has been
+established has one man committed so dread and awful an
+accumulation of public iniquities as stand for ever against the
+base and cowardly name of William Hohenzollern, Emperor in Germany.
+He spat upon the ancient chivalries of battle; he prostituted the
+decent amenities of diplomacy; he polluted with infamy and murder
+the splendid comradeship of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>When the captain of one of his submarines placed upon his deck
+the captured crew of an unarmed merchant vessel which he had sunk,
+destroyed their boats, took from them their life-belts, carried
+them miles away from any floating wreckage, and then projected them
+into the sea to drown, this unspeakable monarch approved the awful
+deed and decorated the ruffian for his infamous cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>When gallant Fryatt, fulfilling every duty a captain owes to his
+unarmed crew and helpless passengers, turned the bows of his
+peaceful packet-boat upon the submarine which was being used to
+murder them all in cold blood, he fell into this Kaiser's hands,
+and the coward wreaked his vengeance upon nobility that was beyond
+his comprehension and valour that rendered him insignificant.</p>
+
+<p>Of these horrible acts the proofs stand unchallenged, and for
+such deeds as these the world has cast him out: thrown him down
+from one of the greatest thrones in history; and left him in the
+place to which, white with terror, he ignominiously fled, stripped
+of all his power and splendour, his crowns, his crosses, and his
+diadems.</p>
+
+<p>Idle is it for this man and his apologists to plead any
+extenuation or excuse.</p>
+
+<p>It was his custom in the plenitude of his power to declare
+himself answerable for his actions only to God and himself. Then
+let the judgment of God be upon him. When we recall the awful and
+unnumbered horrors with which he covered Europe, I doubt whether
+all history can furnish a parallel to him.</p>
+
+<p>By his authority helpless Belgium was invaded, treaties
+treacherously broken, and her people slaughtered. By his authority
+her priests were murdered in cold blood and her nuns violated by
+his vile soldiery. By his authority poison gases were first
+projected with low cunning upon brave and honourable adversaries.
+By his authority hospital ships at sea were sent to the bottom.</p>
+
+<p>But time and the might of free nations have, after fearful
+sufferings, dissipated his invincible armies, and they have
+shrivelled before the wrath of mankind. The whole world rose up in
+its offended majesty and tore from him that shining armour of which
+it was his custom to boast; and, with the brand of Cain upon him,
+he now lies obscurely in Holland, bereft of all the trappings of
+his sinister power.</p>
+
+<p>There were times in the past when justice would have avenged
+such awful crimes as lie at this man's door with the torture of his
+living body and the desecration of his lifeless remains, but his
+conquerors disdained to debase themselves by imitating his own
+abominations; and they left him to afford a spectacle to posterity
+as the supreme example of human ignominy!</p>
+
+<p>When you are old, Antony, and this greatest of all wars has
+become part of England's history, you will be proud and happy to
+remember that your own father, at the first call for volunteers,
+laid down the pencil and scale of his peaceful profession, went out
+to fight for his country in the trenches in France, was wounded
+almost to death, and was saved only by the skill and devotion of
+one of the greatest surgeons of the day.<a name=
+'FNanchor_2_5'></a><a href='#Footnote_2_5'><sup>[2]</sup></a> All
+the best blood of England, Scotland, and Ireland went marching
+together to defend the freedom of the world, and upon their hearts
+were engraven the glorious words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war
+and my fingers to fight."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>May such a call never come to our beloved country again! But if
+it does, Antony, I know where you will be found without need of
+exhortations from me.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_4'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_4'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>Now in my library.&mdash;S.C.</p>
+</div>
+
+<a name='Footnote_2_5'></a><a href='#FNanchor_2_5'>[2]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>Sir Arbuthnot Lane.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter17"></a>
+
+<h2>17</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Grattan, of whom I have already written, had in the first Lord
+Plunket a successor and a compatriot very little his inferior in
+the gift of oratory.</p>
+
+<p>He was born in 1764, and was therefore some fourteen years
+younger than Grattan, whom he survived by thirty-four years.</p>
+
+<p>Like Grattan, he displayed a burning patriotism and, like him,
+fiercely opposed the Act of Union.</p>
+
+<p>Few orators have displayed greater powers of clear reason and
+convincing logic than Plunket. It may be admitted that he seldom
+rose to great heights of eloquence, but tradition credits his
+delivery with a quality of dignity amounting almost to majesty. The
+gift of oratory consists in how things are said as much as in what
+things are said, and the voice, gesture, and manner of Plunket were
+commanding and magnificent.</p>
+
+<p>When Attorney-General in Ireland, in 1823, in a speech
+prosecuting the leaders of the riot known as "the Bottle Riot,"
+Plunket uttered the following fine tribute to the character of
+William the Third:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Perhaps, my lords, there is not to be found in the annals of
+history a character more truly great than that of William the
+Third. Perhaps no person has ever appeared on the theatre of the
+world who has conferred more essential or more lasting benefits on
+mankind; on these countries, certainly none. When I look at the
+abstract merits of his character, I contemplate him with admiration
+and reverence. Lord of a petty principality&mdash;destitute of all
+resources but those with which nature had endowed
+him&mdash;regarded with jealousy and envy by those whose battles he
+fought; thwarted in all his counsels; embarrassed in all his
+movements; deserted in his most critical enterprises&mdash;he
+continued to mould all those discordant materials, to govern all
+these warring interests, and merely by the force of his genius, the
+ascendancy of his integrity, and the immovable firmness and
+constancy of his nature, to combine them into an indissoluble
+alliance against the schemes of despotism and universal domination
+of the most powerful monarch in Europe, seconded by the ablest
+generals, at the head of the bravest and best disciplined armies in
+the world, and wielding, without check or control, the unlimited
+resources of his empire. He was not a consummate general; military
+men will point out his errors; in that respect Fortune did not
+favour him, save by throwing the lustre of adversity over all his
+virtues. He sustained defeat after defeat, but always rose
+<i>adversa rerum immersabilis unda</i>. Looking merely at his
+shining qualities and achievements, I admire him as I do a Scipio,
+a Regulus, a Fabius; a model of tranquil courage, undeviating
+probity, and armed with a resoluteness and constancy in the cause
+of truth and freedom, which rendered him superior to the accidents
+that control the fate of ordinary men.</p>
+
+<p>"But this is not all&mdash;I feel that to him, under God, I am,
+at this moment, indebted for the enjoyment of the rights which I
+possess as a subject of these free countries; to him I owe the
+blessings of civil and religious liberty, and I venerate his memory
+with a fervour of devotion suited to his illustrious qualities and
+to his godlike acts."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is not so magnificent a panegyric as that of Grattan in his
+written tribute to Chatham, but, enhanced by the gesture and voice
+of the great orator, it was reputed to have left a deep impression
+upon all who heard it.</p>
+
+<p>But few speeches, however eloquent, survive, while the printed
+work of the writer may long endure; but to the orator is given what
+the writer never experiences&mdash;the fierce enjoyment, amounting
+almost to rapture, of holding an audience entranced under the spell
+of the spoken cadences; and English, Antony, has a splendour all
+its own when uttered by a master of its august music.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter18"></a>
+
+<h2>18</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>To-day I will write about Robert Southey, and, as he and
+Coleridge married sisters, you may claim a distant relationship
+with him. His personal character was beautiful and unselfish, and
+his dwelling at Keswick was the home that for years sheltered
+Coleridge's children.</p>
+
+<p>With hardly an exception the poets of England have had an easy
+and royal mastery of prose; and in the case of Robert Southey there
+are some, and they are not the worst critics, who anticipate that
+his prose will long outlast his poetry in the Temple of Fame.</p>
+
+<p>We may suppose that to a man whose whole private life was
+stainlessly dedicated to a noble rectitude of conduct, and whose
+every act was sternly subjected to the judgment of an unbending
+conscience, some circumstances of the private life of Nelson must
+have been distasteful and open to censure; but no such reservations
+dimmed the splendour of Southey's tribute to the public hero who
+gave his life in the act of establishing, beyond reach of dispute
+or cavil, the throne of England as Queen of the Sea.</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than
+a public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned
+pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object
+of our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was
+suddenly taken from us, and it seemed as if we had never, till
+then, known how deeply we loved and reverenced him.</p>
+
+<p>"What the country had lost in its great naval hero&mdash;the
+greatest of our own, and of all former times, was scarcely taken
+into the account of grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he performed
+his part, that the maritime war, after the battle of Trafalgar, was
+considered at an end; the fleets of the enemy were not merely
+defeated, but destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new race
+of seamen reared for them, before the possibility of their invading
+our shores could again be contemplated.</p>
+
+<p>"It was not, therefore, from any selfish reflection upon the
+magnitude of our loss that we mourned for him; the general sorrow
+was of a higher character. The people of England grieved that
+funeral ceremonies, public monuments and posthumous rewards, were
+all which they could now bestow upon him whom the king, the
+legislature, and the nation, would alike have delighted to honour;
+whom every tongue would have blessed; whose presence in every
+village through which he might have passed would have wakened the
+church bells, have given schoolboys a holiday, have drawn children
+from their sports to gaze upon him, and 'old men from the chimney
+corner' to look upon Nelson ere they died.</p>
+
+<p>"The victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, indeed, with the usual
+forms of rejoicing, but they were without joy; for such already was
+the glory of the British Navy through Nelson's surpassing genius,
+that it scarcely seemed to receive any addition from the most
+signal victory that ever was achieved upon the sea; and the
+destruction of this mighty fleet, by which all the maritime schemes
+of France were totally frustrated, hardly appeared to add to our
+security or strength, for while Nelson was living to watch the
+combined squadrons of the enemy, we felt ourselves as secure as
+now, when they were no longer in existence.</p>
+
+<p>"There was reason to suppose from the appearances upon opening
+the body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like
+his father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said to have fallen
+prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to be lamented, who
+died so full of honours, and at the height of human fame. The most
+triumphant death is that of a martyr; the most awful, that of the
+martyred patriot; the most splendid, that of the hero in the hour
+of victory; and if the chariot and the horses of fire had been
+vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could scarcely have
+departed in a brighter blaze of glory.</p>
+
+<p>"He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a
+name and an example which are at this hour inspiring hundreds of
+the youth of England; a name which is our pride, and an example
+which will continue to be our shield and our strength."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nelson left England the Queen of the Sea, and the great war with
+Germany has failed to displace her from that splendid throne. For
+the plain fact of history remains that, after the battle of
+Jutland, the German High Seas Fleet never ventured out of port
+again till the end of the war; and when it did emerge from its
+ignominious security, it sailed to captivity at Scapa Flow, there
+ultimately to repose on the bottom of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter19"></a>
+
+<h2>19</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>There are four very celebrated lines written by Walter Savage
+Landor which you may have heard quoted; they were written towards
+the close of his life, and are certainly distinguished and
+memorable:&mdash;</p>
+
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>"I strove with none, for none was
+worth my strife;</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 2em;'>Nature I loved, and next to Nature
+Art;</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>I warmed both hands before the fire
+of life;</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 2em;'>It sinks, and I am ready to
+depart."</span><br>
+
+
+<p>It does not detract from the merit of the lines that as a fact
+Landor was of a fiery disposition, and strove a great deal with
+many adversaries, often of his own creation, throughout his long
+life<a name='FNanchor_1_6'></a><a href=
+'#Footnote_1_6'><sup>[1]</sup></a>; and although he was of a fierce
+and combative nature he displayed in his writings a classical
+restraint and tender beauty hardly achieved by his
+contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>In the form of an imaginary conversation between &AElig;sop and
+Rhodope, Landor makes the latter describe how her father, in the
+famine, unbeknown to her, starved that she might have plenty, and,
+when all was gone, took her to the market-place to sell her that
+she might live. There is an exquisite delicacy in this dialogue
+that places it among the wonders of literature:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"<i>Rhodope</i>. Never shall I forget the morning when my
+father, sitting in the coolest part of the house, exchanged his
+last measure of grain for a chlamys of scarlet cloth, fringed with
+silver. He watched the merchant out of the door, and then looked
+wistfully into the cornchest. I, who thought there was something
+worth seeing, looked in also, and finding it empty, expressed my
+disappointment, not thinking, however, about the corn. A faint and
+transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of mine. He
+unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before me,
+and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the glittering
+fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; and I know not what
+flowers he gathered, but he gathered many; and some he placed in my
+bosom, and some in my hair. But I told him with captious pride,
+first that I could arrange them better, and again that I would have
+only the white. However, when he had selected all the white and I
+had placed a few of them according to my fancy, I told him (rising
+in my slipper) he might crown me with the remainder.</p>
+
+<p>"The splendour of my apparel gave me a sensation of authority.
+Soon as the flowers had taken their station on my head, I expressed
+a dignified satisfaction at the taste displayed by my father, just
+as if I could have seen how they appeared! But he knew that there
+was at least as much pleasure as pride in it, and perhaps we
+divided the latter (alas! not both) pretty equally.</p>
+
+<p>"He now took me into the market-place, where a concourse of
+people were waiting for the purchase of slaves. Merchants came and
+looked at me; some commending, others disparaging; but all agreeing
+that I was slender and delicate, that I could not live long, and
+that I should give much trouble. Many would have bought the
+chlamys, but there was something less saleable in the child and
+flowers.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>&AElig;sop</i>. Had thy features been coarse and thy voice
+rustic, they would all have patted thy cheeks and found no fault in
+thee.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Rhodope</i>. As it was, every one had bought exactly such
+another in time past, and been a loser by it. At these speeches, I
+perceived the flowers tremble slightly on my bosom, from my
+father's agitation. Although he scoffed at them, knowing my
+healthiness, he was troubled internally, and said many short
+prayers, not very unlike imprecations, turning his head aside.
+Proud was I, prouder than ever, when at last several talents were
+offered for me, and by the very man who in the beginning had
+undervalued me most, and prophesied the worst of me. My father
+scowled at him and refused the money. I thought he was playing a
+game, and began to wonder what it could be, since I had never seen
+it played before. Then I fancied it might be some celebration
+because plenty had returned to the city, insomuch that my father
+had bartered the last of the corn he hoarded.</p>
+
+<p>"I grew more and more delighted at the sport. But soon there
+advanced an elderly man, who said gravely, 'Thou hast stolen this
+child; her vesture alone is worth a hundred drachmas. Carry her
+home again to her parents, and do it directly, or Nemesis and the
+Eumenides will overtake thee.' Knowing the estimation in which my
+father had always been holden by his fellow-citizens, I laughed
+again and pinched his ear. He, although naturally choleric, burst
+forth into no resentment at these reproaches, but said calmly, 'I
+think I know thee by name, O guest! Surely thou art Xanthus, the
+Samian. Deliver this child from famine.'</p>
+
+<p>"Again I laughed aloud and heartily, and thinking it was now
+part of the game, I held out both my arms, and protruded my whole
+body toward the stranger. He would not receive me from my father's
+neck, but he asked me with benignity and solicitude if I was
+hungry; at which I laughed again, and more than ever; for it was
+early in the morning, soon after the first meal, and my father had
+nourished me most carefully and plentifully in all the days of the
+famine. But Xanthus, waiting for no answer, took out of a sack,
+which one of his slaves carried at his side, a cake of wheaten
+bread and a piece of honeycomb, and gave them to me. I held the
+honeycomb to my father's mouth, thinking it the most of a dainty.
+He dashed it to the ground, but seizing the bread he began to
+devour it ferociously. This also I thought was in the play, and I
+clapped my hands at his distortions. But Xanthus looked at him like
+one afraid, and smote the cake from him, crying aloud, 'Name the
+price,' My father now placed me in his arms, naming a price much
+below what the other had offered, saying, 'The gods are ever with
+thee, O Xanthus! therefore to thee do I consign my child.'</p>
+
+<p>"But while Xanthus was counting out the silver my father seized
+the cake again, which the slave had taken up and was about to
+replace in the wallet. His hunger was exasperated by the taste, and
+the delay. Suddenly there arose much tumult. Turning round in the
+old woman's bosom who had received me from Xanthus, I saw my
+beloved father struggling on the ground, livid and speechless. The
+more violent my cries, the more rapidly they hurried me away; and
+many were soon between us.</p>
+
+<p>"Little was I suspicious that he had suffered the pangs of
+famine long before: alas! and he had suffered them for me. Do I
+weep while I am telling you they ended? I could not have closed his
+eyes; I was too young; but I might have received his last breath,
+the only comfort of an orphan's bosom. Do you now think him
+blameable, O &AElig;sop?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>&AElig;sop</i>. It was sublime humanity; it was forbearance
+and self-denial which even the immortal gods have never shown
+us."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The <i>Dream of Petrarca</i> is, I think, more famous but not
+more beautiful than this narrative of Rhodope; it lacks the deep
+human tragedy and infinite charity of the winsome child, and the
+self-contained father silently perishing of hunger for her; but if
+the <i>&AElig;sop and Rhodope</i> had never been written, the
+<i>Dream of Petrarca</i> would secure its author a place among the
+immortals:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"... Wearied with the length of my walk over the mountains, and
+finding a soft molehill, covered with grey moss, by the wayside, I
+laid my head upon it and slept. I cannot tell how long it was
+before a species of dream or vision came over me.</p>
+
+<p>"Two beautiful youths appeared beside me; each was winged; but
+the wings were hanging down and seemed ill-adapted to flight. One
+of them, whose voice was the softest I ever heard, looking at me
+frequently, said to the other, 'He is under my guardianship for the
+present; do not awaken him with that feather.' Methought, on
+hearing the whisper, I saw something like the feather on an arrow;
+and then the arrow itself; the whole of it, even to the point,
+although he carried it in such a manner that it was difficult at
+first to discover more than a palm's length of it; the rest of the
+shaft (and the whole of the barb) was behind his ankles.</p>
+
+<p>"'This feather never awakens anyone,' replied he, rather
+petulantly, 'but it brings more of confident security, and more of
+cherished dreams, than you, without me, are capable of
+imparting.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Be it so!' answered the gentler; 'none is less inclined to
+quarrel or dispute than am I. Many whom you have wounded grievously
+call upon me for succour; but so little am I disposed to thwart
+you, it is seldom I venture to do more for them than to whisper a
+few words of comfort in passing. How many reproaches on these
+occasions have been cast upon me for indifference and infidelity!
+Nearly as many, and nearly in the same terms as upon you.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Odd enough that we, O Sleep! should be thought so alike!' said
+Love contemptuously. 'Yonder is he who bears a nearer resemblance
+to you; the dullest have observed it.' I fancied I turned my eyes
+to where he was pointing, and saw at a distance the figure he
+designated. Meanwhile the contention went on uninterruptedly. Sleep
+was slow in asserting his power or his benefits. Love recapitulated
+them; but only that he might assert his own above them.</p>
+
+<p>"Suddenly he called upon me to decide, and to choose my patron.
+Under the influence, first of the one, then of the other, I sprang
+from repose to rapture, I alighted from rapture on repose, and knew
+not which was sweetest. Love was very angry with me, and declared
+he would cross me through the whole of my existence. Whatever I
+might on other occasions have thought of his veracity, I now felt
+too surely that he would keep his word.</p>
+
+<p>"At last, before the close of the altercation, the third Genius
+had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell you how I knew him,
+but I knew him to be the Genius of Death. Breathless as I was at
+beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First they
+seemed only calm; presently they grew contemplative; and lastly
+beautiful; those of the Graces themselves are less regular, less
+harmonious, less composed.</p>
+
+<p>"Love glanced at him unsteadily, with a countenance in which
+there was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat of disdain; and cried, 'Go
+away! go away! nothing that thou touchest, lives!' 'Say rather,
+child!' replied the advancing form, and advancing grew loftier and
+statelier, 'say rather that nothing of beautiful or of glorious
+lives its own true life until my wing hath passed over it.'</p>
+
+<p>"Love pouted, and rumpled and bent down with his forefinger the
+stiff short feathers on his arrow-head, but replied not. Although
+he frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded him less and less,
+and scarcely looked towards him. The milder and calmer Genius, the
+third, in proportion as I took courage to contemplate him, regarded
+me with more and more complacency. He held neither flower nor arrow
+as the others did, but throwing back the clusters of dark curls
+that overshadowed his countenance, he presented to me his hand,
+openly and benignly. I shrank on looking at him so near, and yet I
+sighed to love him. He smiled, not without an expression of pity,
+at perceiving my diffidence, my timidity; for I remembered how soft
+was the hand of Sleep, how warm and entrancing was Love's.</p>
+
+<p>"By degrees I became ashamed of my ingratitude, and turning my
+face away, I held out my arms, and I felt my neck within his; the
+coolness of freshest morning breathed around; the heavens seemed to
+open above me, while the beautiful cheek of my deliverer rested on
+my head. I would now have looked for those others, but knowing my
+intention by my gesture, he said consolatorily, 'Sleep is on his
+way to the Earth, where many are calling him; but it is not to
+these he hastens, for every call only makes him fly further off.
+Sedately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as capricious and
+volatile as the more arrogant and ferocious one.'</p>
+
+<p>"'And Love!' said I, 'whither is he departed? If not too late, I
+would propitiate and appease him.'</p>
+
+<p>"'He who cannot follow me; he who cannot overtake and pass me,'
+said the Genius, 'is unworthy of the name, the most glorious in
+earth or heaven. Look up! Love is yonder, and ready to receive
+thee.'</p>
+
+<p>"I looked: the earth was under me: I saw only the clear blue
+sky, and something brighter above it."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is something most rare and refined and precious in this
+vision, told as it is with a sweet serenity. But it does not touch
+the heart like the <i>&AElig;sop and Rhodope</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_6'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_6'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>Born 1775, died 1864.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter20"></a>
+
+<h2>20</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I now come to speak of one whose fame was familiar to me as a
+boy&mdash;the great Lord Brougham.&mdash;for he lived till 1868. I
+remember that he was vehemently praised and blamed as a politician,
+but with such matters others have dealt; in this letter, Antony, we
+will concern ourselves with the glory of English prose as it poured
+from Lord Brougham in two of his greatest speeches.</p>
+
+<p>He was an orator whose voice was uplifted throughout a long and
+strenuous life in condemnation of all the brutalities and
+oppression of his time, and to whose eloquence the triumphant cause
+of freedom stands for ever in deep obligation.</p>
+
+<p>His great speech on Law Reform in the House of Commons, in 1828,
+took six hours to deliver, and the concluding passage, which
+mounted to a plane of lofty declamation, displayed no sign of
+exhaustion, and was listened to with strained attention by an
+absorbed and crowded audience:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The course is clear before us; the race is glorious to run. You
+have the power of sending your name down through all times,
+illustrated by deeds of higher fame, and more useful import, than
+ever were done within these walls.</p>
+
+<p>"You saw the greatest warrior of the age&mdash;conqueror of
+Italy&mdash;humbler of Germany&mdash;terror of the North&mdash;saw
+him account all his matchless victories poor, compared with the
+triumph you are now in a condition to win&mdash;saw him contemn the
+fickleness of fortune, while, in despite of her, he could pronounce
+his memorable boast, 'I shall go down to posterity with the Code in
+my hand!'</p>
+
+<p>"You have vanquished him in the field; strive now to rival him
+in the sacred arts of peace! Outstrip him as a lawgiver, whom in
+arms you overcame! The lustre of the Regency will be eclipsed by
+the more solid and enduring splendour of the Reign. The praise
+which false courtiers feigned for our Edwards and Harrys, the
+Justinians of their day, will be the just tribute of the wise and
+the good to that monarch under whose sway so mighty an undertaking
+shall be accomplished. Of a truth, the holders of sceptres are most
+chiefly to be envied for that they bestow the power of thus
+conquering, and ruling thus.</p>
+
+<p>"It was the boast of Augustus&mdash;it formed part of the glare
+in which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost,&mdash;that
+he found Rome of brick, and left it of marble; a praise not
+unworthy a great prince, and to which the present reign also has
+its claims. But how much nobler will be the sovereign's boast when
+he shall have it to say, that he found law dear, and left it cheap;
+found it a sealed book&mdash;left it a living letter; found it the
+patrimony of the rich&mdash;left it the inheritance of the poor;
+found it the two-edged sword of craft and oppression&mdash;left it
+the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence!</p>
+
+<p>"To me, much reflecting on these things, it has always seemed a
+worthier honour to be the instrument of making you bestir
+yourselves in this high matter, than to enjoy all that office can
+bestow&mdash;office, of which the patronage would be an irksome
+encumbrance, the emoluments superfluous to one content with the
+rest of his industrious fellow-citizens that his own hands minister
+to his wants; and as for the power supposed to follow it&mdash;I
+have lived near half a century, and I have learned that power and
+place may be severed.</p>
+
+<p>"But one power I do prize; that of being the advocate of my
+countrymen here, and their fellow-labourers elsewhere, in those
+things which concern the best interests of mankind. That power, I
+know full well, no government can give&mdash;no change take
+away!"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>His speech on negro slavery made a deep impression upon the
+country, and rose towards its termination, gradually, but with
+ever-ascending periods, to a close of absolute majesty:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I regard the freedom of the negro as accomplished and sure.
+Why? Because it is his right&mdash;because he has shown himself fit
+for it; because a pretext, or a shadow of a pretext, can no longer
+be devised for withholding that right from its possessor. I know
+that all men at this day take a part in the question, and they will
+no longer bear to be imposed upon, now they are well informed. My
+reliance is firm and unflinching upon the great change which I have
+witnessed&mdash;the education of the people, unfettered by party or
+by sect&mdash;witnessed from the beginning of its progress, I may
+say from the hour of its birth! Yes! It was not for a humble man
+like me to assist at royal births with the illustrious Prince who
+condescended to grace the pageant of this opening session, or the
+great captain and statesman in whose presence I am now proud to
+speak. But with that illustrious Prince, and with the father of the
+Queen, I assisted at that other birth, more conspicuous still. With
+them, and with the head of the House of Russell, incomparably more
+illustrious in my eyes, I watched over its cradle&mdash;I marked
+its growth&mdash;I rejoiced in its strength&mdash;I witnessed its
+maturity; I have been spared to see it ascend the very height of
+supreme power; directing the councils of state; accelerating every
+great improvement; uniting itself with every good work; propping
+all useful institutions; extirpating abuses in all our
+institutions; passing the bounds of our European dominion, and in
+the New World, as in the Old, proclaiming that freedom is the
+birthright of man&mdash;that distinction of colour gives no title
+to oppression&mdash;that the chains now loosened must be struck
+off, and even the marks they have left effaced&mdash;proclaiming
+this by the same eternal law of our nature which makes nations the
+masters of their own destiny, and which in Europe has caused every
+tyrant's throne to quake!</p>
+
+<p>"But they need feel no alarm at the progress of light who defend
+a limited monarchy and support popular institutions&mdash;who place
+their chiefest pride not in ruling over slaves, be they white or be
+they black, not in protecting the oppressor, but in wearing a
+constitutional crown, in holding the sword of justice with the hand
+of mercy, in being the first citizen of a country whose air is too
+pure for slavery to breathe, and on whose shores, if the captive's
+foot but touch, his fetters of themselves fall off. To the
+resistless progress of this great principle I look with a
+confidence which nothing can shake; it makes all improvement
+certain; it makes all change safe which it produces; for none can
+be brought about unless it has been prepared in a cautious and
+salutary spirit.</p>
+
+<p>"So now the fulness of time is come for at length discharging
+our duty to the African captive. I have demonstrated to you that
+everything is ordered&mdash;every previous step taken&mdash;all
+safe, by experience shown to be safe, for the long-desired
+consummation. The time has come, the trial has been made, the hour
+is striking; you have no longer a pretext for hesitation, or
+faltering, or delay. The slave has shown, by four years' blameless
+behaviour, and devotion to the pursuits of peaceful industry, that
+he is as fit for his freedom as any English peasant, ay, or any
+lord whom I now address.</p>
+
+<p>"I demand his rights; I demand his liberty without stint. In the
+name of justice and of law&mdash;in the name of reason&mdash;in the
+name of God, who has given you no right to work injustice; I demand
+that your brother be no longer trampled upon as your slave! I make
+my appeal to the Commons, who represent the free people of England;
+and I require at their hands the performance of that condition for
+which they paid so enormous a price&mdash;that condition which all
+their constituents are in breathless anxiety to see fulfilled! I
+appeal to this House. Hereditary judges of the first tribunal in
+the world&mdash;to you I appeal for justice. Patrons of all the
+arts that humanise mankind&mdash;under your protection I place
+humanity herself! To the merciful Sovereign of a free people I call
+aloud for mercy to the hundreds of thousands for whom half a
+million of her Christian sisters have cried aloud&mdash;I ask that
+their cry may not have risen in vain. But first I turn my eye to
+the throne of all justice, and devoutly humbling myself before Him
+who is of purer eyes than to behold such vast iniquities, I implore
+that the curse hovering over the head of the unjust and the
+oppressor be averted from us&mdash;that your hearts may be turned
+to mercy&mdash;and that over all the earth His will may at length
+be done!"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is nobly to use noble gifts; it is difficult to think ill
+of a man who can carry oratory for a glorious object to such
+heights of splendour. It may seem a duty to some to darken his
+character with detraction, but his inspiring words remain supreme
+and unsullied and will still live when such faults as may be truly
+laid to his charge are long forgotten. To fight for a great cause,
+Antony, is rightly to use great powers, and this is what Lord
+Brougham did with all his might.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter21"></a>
+
+<h2>21</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>In the great emprise of war it must often happen that the most
+awful scenes of manifested human power, and the most godlike deeds
+of human glory, are lost to the contemporary world, and utterly
+unknown to succeeding generations, because they were witnessed by
+no man with the gift of expression who could record for after time,
+in adequate language, the majestic spectacle.</p>
+
+<p>In the great war against Germany no great writer has yet
+appeared who was personally in touch as a living witness of the
+countless deeds of glorious valour and acts of heroic endurance
+that were everywhere displayed upon that immense far-stretched
+front.</p>
+
+<p>But in the wars of former times, a whole battle could be
+witnessed from its beginning to its end by a single commander, and
+no scenes in human life could be more terrible and soul-stirring
+than the awful ebb and flow of a great combat in which the victory
+of armies and the fate of nations hung in the balance.</p>
+
+<p>The battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War might easily at this
+date have long been forgotten had not the pen of Sir William Napier
+been as puissant as his sword. The battle had raged for hours, and
+the British were well-nigh overwhelmed; the Colonel, twenty
+officers, and over four hundred men out of five hundred and seventy
+had fallen in the 57th alone; not a third were left standing in the
+other regiments that had been closely engaged throughout the day.
+Then Cole was ordered up with his fourth division as a last hope,
+and this is how Sir William Napier records their
+advance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke and
+rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude,
+startled the enemy's masses, then augmenting and pressing onwards
+as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and vomiting
+forth a storm of fire hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front,
+while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery
+whistled through the British ranks ... the English battalions,
+struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking
+ships; but suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their
+terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and
+majesty the British soldier fights.</p>
+
+<p>"In vain did Soult with voice and gesture animate his Frenchmen;
+in vain did the hardiest veterans, breaking from the crowded
+columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open
+out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and,
+fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and foes,
+while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to charge the
+advancing line.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry.</p>
+
+<p>"No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm
+weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were
+bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread shook
+the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every
+formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries
+that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as slowly, and
+with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour of the
+attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French
+reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to
+restore the fight, but only augmented the irremediable disorder,
+and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff, went
+headlong down the steep; the rain flowed after in streams
+discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the
+remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood
+triumphant on the fatal hill!</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;'>
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted victor reels as he
+places it on his bleeding front.</p>
+
+<p>"All that night the rain poured down, and the river and the
+hills and the woods resounded with the dismal clamour and groans of
+dying men."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sir William Napier seems intimately to have known the transience
+of the gratitude of nations to those who fight their battles for
+them. At the end of his noble history of the Peninsular War he lets
+the curtain fall upon the scene with solemn brevity in a single
+sentence, thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America,
+some for England: the cavalry, marching through France, took
+shipping at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all
+remembrance of the Veterans' services.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet those Veterans had won nineteen pitched battles, and
+innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken
+four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from Portugal,
+once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed, wounded, or
+captured two hundred thousand enemies&mdash;leaving of their own
+number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, whiten the plains and
+mountains of the Peninsula."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Science and the base malignity of our latest adversaries have
+debased modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity
+and honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult
+to believe that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and
+the petty officer at sea that nation can produce a single
+gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter22"></a>
+
+<h2>22</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>This letter, like the last one, is concerned with war. War
+brings to every man not incapacitated by age or physical defects
+the call of his country to fight, and if need be to die, for it. It
+also exposes to view the few pusillanimous young men who are
+satisfied to enjoy protection from the horrors of invasion and the
+priceless boon of personal freedom, secured to them by the
+self-sacrifice and valour of others, while they themselves remain
+snugly at home and talk of their consciences.</p>
+
+<p>Patriotism such as that which in 1914 led the flower of our race
+to flock in countless thousands to the standards and be enrolled
+for battle in defence of</p>
+
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>"This precious stone set in the
+silver sea,"</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>"This blessed plot, this earth,
+this realm, this England,"</span><br>
+
+
+<p>being without doubt or cavil one of the noblest emotions of the
+human heart, has often been the begetter of inspired prose. Our own
+great war has not yet produced many fine utterances, and I go back
+to-day to a contemporary of Sir William Napier for one of the
+noblest outbursts of eloquence expressive of a burning patriotism
+that has ever been poured forth.</p>
+
+<p>Someone in the days when Wellington was alive had alluded in the
+House of Lords to the Irish as "aliens," and Richard Sheil, rising
+in the House of Commons, lifted up his voice for his country in an
+impassioned flight of generous eloquence.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Henry Hardinge, who had been at the battle of Waterloo,
+happened to be seated opposite to Sheil in the House, and to him
+Sheil appealed with the deepest emotion to support him in his
+vindication of his country's valour. None will in these days deny
+that our fellow-citizens of Ireland who went to the war displayed a
+courage as firm and invincible as our own:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The Duke of Wellington is not, I am inclined to believe, a man
+of excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be
+easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I
+cannot help thinking, that when he heard his countrymen (for we are
+his countrymen) designated by a phrase so offensive he ought to
+have recalled the many fields of fight in which we have been
+contributors to his renown. Yes, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
+that he has passed ought to have brought back upon him, that from
+the earliest achievement in which he displayed that military genius
+which has placed him foremost in the annals of modern warfare, down
+to that last and surpassing combat which has made his name
+imperishable, the Irish soldiers, with whom our armies are filled,
+were the inseparable auxiliaries to his glory.</p>
+
+<p>"Whose were the athletic arms that drove their bayonets at
+Vimiera through those phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of
+war before? What desperate valour climbed the steeps and filled the
+moats at Badajos! All! all his victories should have rushed and
+crowded back upon his memory&mdash;Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca,
+Albuera, Toulouse, and last of all the greatest! (and here Sheil
+pointed to Sir Henry Hardinge across the House). Tell me, for you
+were there. I appeal to the gallant soldier before me, from whose
+opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an
+intrepid breast; tell me, for you must needs remember, on that day
+when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while
+death fell in showers upon them, when the artillery of France,
+levelled with a precision of the most deadly science, played upon
+them, when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the
+example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the
+onset&mdash;tell me if for one instant, when to hesitate for one
+instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' blenched!</p>
+
+<p>"And when at length the moment for the last and decisive
+movement had arrived, and the valour which had so long been wisely
+cheeked was at length let loose, tell me if Ireland with less
+heroic valour than the natives of your own glorious isle,
+precipitated herself upon the foe?</p>
+
+<p>"The blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in
+the same stream, on the same field. When the still morning dawned,
+their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep earth
+their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now
+breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven upon
+their union in the grave.</p>
+
+<p>"Partners in every peril&mdash;in the glory shall we not be
+permitted to participate, and shall we be told as a requital that
+we are aliens, and estranged from the noble country for whose
+salvation our life-blood was poured out?"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A hundred years of strife, misunderstanding, anger,
+estrangement, outrages, bloodshed, and murder separate us from this
+appealing cry wrung from the beating heart of this inspired
+Irishman. Is the great tragedy of England and Ireland that has
+sullied their annals for seven hundred years never to be brought to
+an end? Is there never to be for us a Lethe through which we may
+pass to the farther shore of forgetfulness and forgiveness of the
+past and reconciliation in the future?</p>
+
+<p>That you may live to see it, Antony, is my hope and prayer.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter23"></a>
+
+<h2>23</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous passage on the fate
+of Marie Antoinette&mdash;in some ways the most splendid of his
+utterances,&mdash;and I now am going to quote to you a very great
+passage from Thomas Carlyle on the same tragic subject.</p>
+
+<p>Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must certainly have been
+familiar with Burke's noble ejaculation, to challenge it with
+emulation; but in the result we must admit that he amply justifies
+his temerity.</p>
+
+<p>The tragic figure of the queen drawn to execution through the
+roaring mob inspired Carlyle with what is surely his most
+overwhelming product.</p>
+
+<p>The august shadow of the Bible is dimly apprehended as the words
+ascend upwards and upwards with simple sublimity to the awful
+close.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing he wrote in all his multitudinous volumes surpasses this
+astonishing outburst:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!</p>
+
+<p>"For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties,
+came it not also out of Heaven? <i>Sunt lachrym&aelig; rerum, et
+mentem mortalia tangunt</i>. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks
+without pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting
+ignominy;&mdash;of thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not
+to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy
+eye on splendour; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to
+which the guillotine and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the
+merciful end?</p>
+
+<p>"Look <i>there</i>, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair
+face is wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those
+eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale
+as of one living in death.</p>
+
+<p>"Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of
+the World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless,
+which only curses environ, has to stop&mdash;a people drunk with
+vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee
+there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads,
+the air deaf with their triumph-yell!</p>
+
+<p>"The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her
+startled blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale
+face, which she hides with her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"There is, then, <i>no</i> heart to say, 'God pity thee'?</p>
+
+<p>"O think not of these: think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the
+Crucified&mdash;Who also treading the winepress alone, fronted
+sorrow still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and
+built of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for thee and all the
+wretched!</p>
+
+<p>"Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the
+Tuileries, where thy step was once so light&mdash;where thy
+children shall not dwell.</p>
+
+<p>"Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes&mdash;dumb lies the
+world; that wild-yelling world, and all its madness, is behind
+thee."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is a passage in Carlyle's tempestuous narrative of the
+taking of the Bastille which has always seemed to me to give it the
+last consummate touch of greatness.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he pauses in the turmoil and dust and wrath and madness
+of that tremendous conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over
+peaceful France, and he exclaims:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant
+on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
+cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the
+Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are
+even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:&mdash;and
+also on this roaring Hell-porch of a H&ocirc;tel de Ville."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And a few sentences further on a heart of stone must be moved by
+what the archives of that grim prison-house revealed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice.
+Read this portion of an old letter.</p>
+
+<p>"'If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake
+of God and the Most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my
+dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to show that she is
+alive! It were the greatest consolation I could receive; and I
+should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur.'</p>
+
+<p>"Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret-Demery, and hast no
+other history,&mdash;she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou
+art dead! Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this
+question; to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of
+men. "</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the reign of Louis XV. alone, there were no less than fifteen
+thousand <i>lettres de cachet</i> issued, by which anyone could be
+suddenly arrested, and, without trial, and, heedless of protest,
+imprisoned perhaps for life in the Bastille.</p>
+
+<p>In the excesses of the Reign of Terror three or four thousand
+persons perished. Their deaths were spectacular, and have covered
+with execrations their dreadful executioners.</p>
+
+<p>But it is right that we should remember, Antony, the life-long
+agony and the unutterable despair of the victims of that
+remorselessly cruel system which the Revolution overthrew.</p>
+
+<p>The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in <i>Sartor Resartus</i>,
+seems to me to come nearer to the above excerpts than anything else
+in Carlyle, though at a perceptible distance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and
+criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and
+create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already
+with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!</p>
+
+<p>"But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning
+of Creation is&mdash;Light. Till the eye have vision the whole
+members are in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tossed
+Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: 'Let
+there be Light!' Even to the greatest that has felt such moment is
+it not miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler
+figures, to the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is
+hushed; the rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves
+into separate Firmaments: deep, silent rock-foundations are built
+beneath, and the skyey vault, with its everlasting Luminaries,
+above; instead of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming,
+fertile, heaven-encompassed World.</p>
+
+<p>"I, too, could now say to myself: 'Be no longer a Chaos, but a
+World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the
+pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in
+God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then.
+Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole
+might. Work while it is called to-day; for the night cometh wherein
+no man can work.'"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is another passage in <i>Sartor Resartus</i> which I have
+always held in veneration, though the field labourer is not now so
+"hardly-entreated" as when Carlyle wrote of him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Two men I honour, and no third. First the toilworn Craftsman
+that with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth, and
+makes her man's.</p>
+
+<p>"Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein
+notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue indefeasibly royal, as of the
+sceptre of this planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all
+weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the
+face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for thy
+rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee!
+Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were
+thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our
+conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
+marred. For in thee too lay a god-created form, but it was not to
+be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and
+defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know
+freedom. Yet toil on, toil on; <i>thou</i> art in thy duty, be out
+of it who may: thou toilest for the altogether indispensable, for
+daily bread.</p>
+
+<p>"A second man I honour, and still more highly: him who is seen
+toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the
+bread of life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards
+inward harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his
+outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his
+outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him
+artist; not earthly craftsman only, but inspired thinker, who with
+heaven-made implement conquers heaven for us! If the poor and
+humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil
+for him in return, that he have light, have guidance, freedom,
+immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else is
+chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.</p>
+
+<p>"Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities
+united; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's
+wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this
+world know I nothing than a peasant saint, could such now anywhere
+be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself;
+thou wilt see the splendour of heaven spring forth from the
+humblest depths of earth, like a light shining in great
+darkness."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Sartor Resartus</i> has long taken its place among the
+greatest prose works of the nineteenth century, and it is a strange
+commentary on this mandate to us all to "produce, produce!" to find
+that for eleven years Carlyle could find no publisher who would
+give it in book form to the world!</p>
+
+<p>It is a solemn reflection to think that there may be many books
+of eloquence and splendour that have never seen the light of
+publicity. Publishers concern themselves less with what is finely
+written than with what will best sell; and in their defence it may
+be acceded that some of the masterpieces of literature have at
+their first appearance before the world fallen dead from the
+press.</p>
+
+<p>The first edition of FitzGerald's <i>Omar Khayy&aacute;m</i>,
+issued at one shilling, was totally unrecognised, and copies of it
+might have been bought for twopence in the trays and boxes of trash
+on the pavement outside old bookshops!</p>
+
+<p>But if once a work is published, time will with almost
+irresistible force place it ultimately in the station it deserves
+in the literature of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Instant acceptance not seldom preludes final rejection. In the
+middle of the last century Martin Tupper's <i>Proverbial
+Philosophy</i> garnished every drawing-room table; and now, where
+is it?</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<p><i>P.S.</i>&mdash;Do not look for the passage on Marie
+Antoinette in the <i>French Revolution</i>, for you will not find
+it there, but in the "Essay of the Diamond Necklace."</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter24"></a>
+
+<h2>24</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>You and I once had a cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, had he
+lived, would very certainly have left a brilliant addition to the
+lustre of the name he bore. He was born in 1798, and only lived
+forty-five years, dying when his powers were leading him to high
+fortune in that legal profession which so many of the family have
+pursued.</p>
+
+<p>He was a scholar of Eton; a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge;
+he won the Greek and Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again in
+1821. To him, therefore, the classic spirit was inborn, and a
+training that omitted the study of Latin and Greek the very
+negation of education. He would have had something very trenchant
+to say of what is now known as "the modern side." He wrote a very
+rich and splendid prose, and it is no fond family partiality that
+leads me to quote to you his eloquent and precious defence of the
+classical languages:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I am not one whose lot it has been to grow old in literary
+retirement, devoted to classical studies with an exclusiveness
+which might lead to an overweening estimate of these two noble
+languages. Few, I will not say evil, were the days allowed to me
+for such pursuits; and I was constrained, still young and an unripe
+scholar to forego them for the duties of an active and laborious
+profession. They are now amusements only, however delightful and
+improving. For I am far from assuming to understand all their
+riches, all their beauty, or all their power; yet I can profoundly
+feel their immeasurable superiority in many important respects to
+all we call modern; and I would fain think that there are many even
+among my younger readers who can now, or will hereafter, sympathise
+with the expression of my ardent admiration.</p>
+
+<p>"Greek&mdash;the shrine of the genius of the old world; as
+universal as our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite
+flexibility, or indefatigable strength, with the complication and
+the distinctness of Nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar,
+from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian,
+speaking to the mind like English; with words like pictures, with
+words like the gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety
+and picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of
+&AElig;schylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor
+fathomed to the bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its
+thunders, nor lit up with all its ardours even under the Promethean
+touch of Demosthenes!</p>
+
+<p>"And Latin&mdash;the voice of empire and of war, of law and of
+the state, inferior to its half-parent and rival in the embodying
+of passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in
+sustaining the measured march of history; and superior to it in the
+indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark of an
+imperial and despotising republic; rigid in its construction,
+parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding to the flowery
+yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of Greek-like splendour
+in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius; proved indeed, to the
+uttermost, by Cicero, and by him found wanting; yet majestic in its
+bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of
+history, instinct with the spirit of nations and not with the
+passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not
+the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit,
+whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and
+discursive Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.</p>
+
+<p>"These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly
+counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not
+failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink deep
+at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful in
+human language.</p>
+
+<p>"The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and
+of Rome, are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their
+marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate
+polish, has sunk for ever in his heart, and thence throws out light
+and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyance of his maturer
+years. No avocations of professional labour will make him abandon
+their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he will
+find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons&mdash;to reperuse them
+in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations, and in the
+clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and to
+the world with superior profit.</p>
+
+<p>"The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of
+modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he
+reverence that of classical antiquity; and in declining age, when
+the appetite for magazines and reviews, and the ten-times repeated
+trash of the day, has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a
+circle of school-fellow friends, and end his secular studies as he
+began them, with his Homer, his Horace, and his Shakespeare."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Ah, what an echo, Antony, every word of this beautiful passage
+finds in my own heart, only saddened with the poignant regret that
+the necessary business and occupation of the passing years have
+dulled for me such unpolished facility, as I may once have
+possessed, for perusing my Homer and my Horace!</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, rare in these days to find gentlemen as familiar
+as were their forebears with Latin and Greek. You, Antony, will
+probably find yourself as you grow up in like case with myself, but
+there will remain for your unending instruction and delight all the
+glories of English literature, to give you a taste for which these
+few letters of mine are written, plucking only a single flower here
+and there from the most wonderful garden in the world.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter25"></a>
+
+<h2>25</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Cardinal Newman, of whom I shall write to-day, was the first of
+the great writers born in the nineteenth century, and he lived from
+1801 to 1890. Besides being a master of English prose he was no
+mean poet; but above all else he was a man of immense personal
+power, which was strangely associated with a manifest saintliness
+which compelled diffidence from those admitted to his intimacy.</p>
+
+<p>I have described him as I knew him in my <i>Memories</i>;<a
+name='FNanchor_1_7'></a><a href='#Footnote_1_7'><sup>[1]</sup></a>
+and now will quote to you his utterance on music and its effect
+upon the heart of man, which has always seemed to me too precious
+to leave buried in a sermon:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Let us take an instance, of an outward and earthly form, or
+economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified; I
+mean musical sounds as they are exhibited most perfectly in
+instrumental harmony.</p>
+
+<p>"There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen; yet
+what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What Science
+brings so much out of so little? out of what poor elements does
+some great master in it create his new world!</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere
+ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day,
+without reality, without meaning? We may do so; and then, perhaps,
+we shall also account theology to be a matter of words; yet, as
+there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who
+feel cannot communicate, so is there also in the wonderful creation
+of sublimity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many men the
+very names which the Science employs are utterly incomprehensible.
+To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be fanciful or trifling,
+to speak of the views which it opens upon us to be childish
+extravagance; yet is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution
+and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet
+so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound,
+which is gone and perishes?</p>
+
+<p>"Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen
+emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful
+impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by
+what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in
+itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from some
+higher sphere, they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the
+medium of created sound; they are echoes from our home; they are
+the voice of angels or the magnificat of Saints, or the living laws
+of Divine Governance, or the Divinic attributes; something are they
+besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot
+utter,&mdash;though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise
+distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting
+them."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of quite another order is the Cardinal's description of a
+gentleman. Here there is no flight of poetical imagination, but a
+manifestation of felicitous intuition and penetrating insight as
+rare as it is convincing, and the generous wide vision of a man of
+the world, undimmed by the faintest trace of prejudice:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to
+say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both
+refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in
+merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and
+unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their
+movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits
+may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or
+conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy
+chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and
+fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat
+without them.</p>
+
+<p>"The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may
+cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast;
+all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or
+suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make
+everyone at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his
+company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the
+distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom
+he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics
+which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation and
+never wearisome.</p>
+
+<p>"He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be
+receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except
+when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort; he has no
+ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to
+those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the
+best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes
+unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for
+arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a
+long-sighted prudence he observes the maxim of the ancient sage,
+that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he
+were one day to be our friend. He has too much sense to be
+affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries,
+and too indolent to bear malice.</p>
+
+<p>"He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical
+principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to
+bereavement because it is irreparable, and to death because it is
+his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind his
+disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy
+of better, perhaps, but less educated minds, who, like blunt
+weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the
+point in argument, waste their strength in trifles, misconceive
+their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they
+find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too
+clear-headed to be unjust, he is as simple as he is forcible, and
+as brief as he is decisive.</p>
+
+<p>"Nowhere shall we find greater candour, consideration,
+indulgence; he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he
+accounts for their mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason
+as well as its strength, its province, and its limits. If he be an
+unbeliever he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule
+religion or to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or
+fanatic in his infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he even
+supports institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which
+he does not assent; he honours the ministers of religion, and it
+contents him to decline its mysteries without assailing or
+denouncing them. He is a friend of religious toleration, and that,
+not only because his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms
+of faith with an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and
+effeminacy of feeling which is the attendant on civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>"Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even
+when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of
+imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of
+the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be no
+large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the Being of God,
+sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the
+attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or
+creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent
+thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a
+teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity
+itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical
+powers, he is able to see what sentiments are consistent in those
+who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others to
+feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which exist
+in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions.</p>
+
+<p>"Such are the lineaments of the ethical character which the
+cultivated intellect will form apart from religious principle."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Surely this is a wonderful utterance from a Cardinal of the
+Church of Rome, full of urbanity and the wisdom of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_7'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_7'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>Pp. 52-57.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter26"></a>
+
+<h2>26</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I have in a former letter quoted a short but noble passage from
+Lord Macaulay on the great Lord Chatham.</p>
+
+<p>But I feel that the writer who was perhaps the greatest essayist
+that England has ever produced must not in these letters be fobbed
+off with so slight a notice and quotation.</p>
+
+<p>What has always seemed to me the supremest passage that flowed
+from his wonderful pen is to be found in his paper on Warren
+Hastings which appeared originally in the <i>Edinburgh
+Review</i>.</p>
+
+<p>His description in that essay of the opening of the great
+impeachment, has given all succeeding generations a vision of one
+of the most majestic scenes in the whole history of man.</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more
+gorgeous with jewellery and cloth of gold, more attractive to
+grown-up children, than that which was then exhibited at
+Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well
+calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an
+imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong to
+the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past, were
+collected on one spot and in one hour. All the talents and all the
+accomplishments which are developed by liberty and civilisation
+were now displayed, with every advantage that could be derived both
+from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in the proceedings
+carried the mind either backward, through many troubled centuries,
+to the days when the foundations of our constitution were laid; or
+far away, over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living
+under strange stars, worshipping strange gods, and writing strange
+characters from right to left. The High Court of Parliament was to
+sit, according to forms handed down from the days of the
+Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused of exercising tyranny over
+the lord of the holy city of Benares, and over the ladies of the
+princely house of Oude.</p>
+
+<p>"The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of
+William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at
+the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the
+just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall
+where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a
+victorious party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where
+Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid
+courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor
+civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers. The
+streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold and
+ermine, were marshalled by the heralds under Garter King-at-Arms.
+The judges in their vestments of state attended to give advice on
+points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords, three-fourths of
+the Upper House as the Upper House then was, walked in solemn order
+from their usual place of assembling to the tribunal. The junior
+Baron present led the way, George Eliot, Lord Heathfield, recently
+ennobled for his memorable defence of Gibraltar against the fleets
+and armies of France and Spain. The long procession was closed by
+the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of the realm, by the great
+dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons of the King. Last of all
+came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by his fine person and noble
+bearing. The grey old walls were hung with scarlet. The long
+galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited
+the fears or the emulation of an orator. There were gathered
+together, from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and
+prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning,
+the representatives of every science and of every art. There were
+seated round the Queen the fair-haired young daughters of the House
+of Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of great Kings and
+Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other
+country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of
+her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all
+the imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman
+Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily
+against Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some
+show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa.
+There were seen, side by side, the greatest painter and the
+greatest scholar of the age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds
+from that easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads
+of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many
+noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labours in that
+dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure
+of erudition, a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often
+paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still
+precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous
+charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted
+his faith. There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful
+race, the Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by
+love and music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were
+the members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticised, and
+exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs.
+Montague. And there the ladies whose lips, more persuasive than
+those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against
+palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana, Duchess of
+Devonshire.</p>
+
+<p>"The Serjeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar,
+and bent his knee. The culprit was indeed not unworthy of that
+great presence. He had ruled an extensive and populous country, had
+made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and
+pulled down princes. And in his high place he had so borne himself,
+that all had feared him, that most had loved him, and that hatred
+itself could deny him no title to glory, except virtue. He looked
+like a great man, and not like a bad man. A person small and
+emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage which, while it
+indicated deference to the court, indicated also habitual
+self-possession and self-respect, a high and intellectual forehead,
+a brow pensive, but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible decision, a
+face pale and worn, but serene, on which was written, as legibly as
+under the picture in the council-chamber at Calcutta, <i>Mens
+&aelig;qua in arduis</i>; such was the aspect with which the great
+Proconsul presented himself to his judges. "</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Such a scene can only find its appropriate enactment at the
+centre of a great empire and amid a people with an august history
+behind them, conscious of present magnificence and confident of
+future glory.</p>
+
+<p>We are now far into the second century since that memorable
+spectacle filled to the walls the great Hall of Westminster.</p>
+
+<p>What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine spirit of liberty and
+adorned by the sacred principle of personal freedom, has been
+superseded by a socialistic democracy under which personal freedom
+suffers frequent curtailments, and liberty is severely abridged by
+the mandates of trade unions, the prohibitions of urban potentates,
+and the usurpations of medicine men.</p>
+
+<p>Under these cramping and crippling deprivations we have lost the
+collective sense of greatness as a race that infused every
+participator in the splendid pageant of such an event as the
+Impeachment of Warren Hastings. One has but to imagine an
+impeachment to-day with the dominant personages in it chosen from
+the strike leaders and labour delegates of the proletariat,
+assisted by promoted railway porters and ennobled grocers, to
+perceive what a distance, and down what a declivity we have
+travelled since those days when it was impossible for any great
+public function to take place without its becoming naturally and
+without conscious effort the occasion for a manifestation of the
+pomp, circumstance, and splendour inseparable from the solemn acts
+of a great people performed by their greatest men.</p>
+
+<p>But I am one, Antony, who look forward with steadfast hope and
+belief to a reaction from our present vulgarity, and to a
+reascension of England to a greater dignity, honour, and nobleness
+both in its public and private life than is observable to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter27"></a>
+
+<h2>27</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I have not in my letters to you travelled beyond our own islands
+in search of great English prose, but I propose now to make one
+divergence from this rule and quote a very great and deservedly
+far-famed speech, uttered on a memorable occasion, of Abraham
+Lincoln, President of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>At the present time, I think, the name of Lincoln lies closer to
+the hearts of the American people than that of any other, not even
+excepting Washington and Hamilton. The latter, though they
+established American independence, remained in a personal sense
+English gentlemen till their death. Lincoln was born in the
+backwoods in rude poverty, received no education but what he
+acquired by his own unaided efforts, and lived and died a man of
+the people, the ideal type of native-born American.</p>
+
+<p>He rose from the lowest to the highest position in the State,
+borne upwards by the simple nobility of his character, by the
+stainless purity of his actions, and the splendid motive of all his
+endeavours. His speeches and writings derive their power and
+distinction from no tricks of oratory, felicity of diction, or
+nimbleness of mind. They are the vocal results of the beatings of
+his great heart.</p>
+
+<p>He led his people to war in the manner of a prophet of Israel;
+with an awful austerity, majestic, invincible, and with hand
+uplifted in sure appeal to the God of battles. On the field of
+Gettysburg, where was waged the most tremendous of all combats of
+the war, he came to dedicate a cemetery to the innumerable dead,
+and these were his few and noble words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Fourscore-and-seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon
+this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to
+the proposition that all men are created equal.</p>
+
+<p>"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
+nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
+endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come
+to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for
+those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is
+altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.</p>
+
+<p>"But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
+we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
+struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add of
+detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say
+here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the
+living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which
+they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather
+for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us;
+that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that
+cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that
+we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain;
+that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and
+that government of the people, by the people, and for the people,
+shall not perish from the earth."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Few are the opportunities in the history of the world when the
+time, the place, the occasion, and the words spoken, have combined
+so poignantly to move the hearts of men.</p>
+
+<p>One can imagine the vast concourse standing awestruck and
+uncovered before the solemn splendour of this noble dedication,
+every phrase of which will remain for generations a treasured and
+sacred memory in countless thousands of homes of the great
+continent in the West.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter28"></a>
+
+<h2>28</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an entirely new
+style of English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were
+swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries
+was abandoned, and there arose a band of writers, to whom De
+Quincey and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all veils from
+their emotions, threw away all the shackles of reserve, and poured
+their sobs and ecstasies upon us, in soaring periods of impassioned
+prose, glittering with decorative alliterations, and adorned with
+euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds.</p>
+
+<p>This flamboyant style seems to have synchronised with the
+general decline of reserve and ceremony in English life, and with
+the rise of the modern familiar intimacy that leaves no privacy
+even to our thoughts. Our grandfathers would have hesitated to have
+discussed at the dinner-table, even after the ladies had withdrawn,
+what is now set down for free debate at ladies' clubs, and
+canvassed in the correct columns of the <i>Guardian</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This new habit of mind and speech has affected our literature
+deeply and diversely. In the hands of the really great masters such
+as Carlyle, Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate revelations of the
+throbbings of their hearts, and the direct and untrammelled appeal
+of their inmost souls crying in the market-place, take forcible
+possession of our affections, and bring them into closer touch with
+each one of us than was ever possible with the older restrained
+writers.</p>
+
+<p>But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the
+licence of intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread
+vulgarity, and a contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative,
+and redundancy; and although the disappearance of reserve in modern
+writing may tend to reduce all but the production of the great to a
+depressing state of vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's
+hand, has unlocked for us the doors of an Aladdin's palace! But
+even if the restraint of the ancient writers has disappeared from
+the prose of our own times, all great writing of necessity must now
+and always possess the quality of simplicity; and even Ruskin, who
+saw the world of nature about him with the eyes of a visionary, and
+wrote of what he saw as one so inspired as to be already half in
+Paradise, yet clothed his glorious outpourings in a raiment of
+perfect simplicity.</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance of the firmament;
+and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of
+these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate
+Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 'The earth shook,
+the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God,' 'He doth set His
+bow in the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of every drooping
+swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love. 'In them hath He
+set a <i>tabernacle</i> for the sun,' whose burning ball, which,
+without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable and
+scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that firmament
+surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by mediatorial
+ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden pavement is
+spread for his chariot wheels at morning; by the firmament of
+clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill with light at
+noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is closed at
+evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of the
+firmament his implacable light is divided and its separated
+fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of
+distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains
+burn as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this
+tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows
+of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of His
+own majesty to men, upon the <i>throne</i> of the firmament.</p>
+
+<p>"As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of
+eternity, we cannot behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and
+the Preserver of men those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place.
+'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by
+earth, for it is His footstool.'</p>
+
+<p>"And all those passings to and fro of fruitful showers and
+grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built about
+the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening thunders,
+and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in
+our hearts the acceptance and distinctness and dearness of the
+simple words, 'Our Father, Which art in heaven!'"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The description of the first approach to Venice before the days
+of railways will always be cherished by those who admire Ruskin's
+work as one of his most characteristic and memorable
+utterances:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in
+which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which
+that toil was rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate
+survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly
+by the happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the
+last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet
+village, where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside
+its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty
+perspective of the causeway, see, for the first time, the towers of
+some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset&mdash;hours of
+peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival
+in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
+equivalent&mdash;in those days, I say, when there was something
+more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
+successive halting place than a new arrangement of glass roofing
+and iron girder&mdash;there were few moments of which the
+recollection was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that
+which, as I endeavoured to describe in the close of the last
+chapter, brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot
+into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre.</p>
+
+<p>"Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
+source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction,
+its buildings are far less characteristic than those of the other
+great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by
+distance, and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its
+walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea;
+for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once
+comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water which
+stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north and
+south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east.
+The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black
+weed separating and disappearing gradually in knots of heaving
+shoal under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be
+indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly;
+not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan
+promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a
+sea with the bleak power of northern waves, yet subdued into a
+strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a
+field of burnished gold as the sun declined behind the belfry tower
+of the lonely island church, fitly named 'St George of the
+Sea-weed.'</p>
+
+<p>"As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the
+traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low,
+sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows;
+but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Argua rose
+in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage
+of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended
+themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the
+craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole
+horizon to the north&mdash;a wall of jagged blue, here and there
+showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading
+far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
+breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow
+into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the
+barred clouds of evening one after another, countless, the crown of
+the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to
+rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on
+the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the
+quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.</p>
+
+<p>"And at last when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its
+untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded
+rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the
+Indian Sea; when first upon the traveller's sight opened the long
+ranges of columned palaces&mdash;each with its black boat moored at
+the portal, each with its image cast down beneath its feet upon
+that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of
+rich tessellation when first, at the extremity of the bright vista,
+the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from
+behind the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so
+delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a
+bow just bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was
+all risen, the gondolier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!" struck sharp upon the
+ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half
+met over the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed
+close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and
+when at last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea,
+across which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its
+sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation,
+it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the
+visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to forget
+the darker truths of its history and its being, "Well might it seem
+that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the
+enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters which
+encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state, rather
+than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in Nature was
+wild or merciless&mdash;Time and Decay, as well as the waves and
+tempests&mdash;had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and
+might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to
+have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of
+the sea."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is now many years since I first saw Venice rising from the
+sea on a September morning as I sailed towards it across the
+Adriatic from Trieste; and as we glided closer and closer its
+loveliness was slowly and exquisitely unveiled under the slanting
+beams of the early sun.</p>
+
+<p>In all my wanderings over two hemispheres I remember no vision
+so enchanting and unsurpassable! May you live to see it, Antony,
+before the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter29"></a>
+
+<h2>29</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Born in Devon at the same time&mdash;within a year&mdash;as
+Ruskin, James Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same
+sanguine and poetical characteristics. His historical writings
+have, I believe, been somewhat discredited of late years owing to
+the permission he is alleged to have given himself to warp his
+account of events in order to buttress some prejudice or contention
+of his own.</p>
+
+<p>But if we set him aside as an accurate authority, we can at once
+restore him to our regard as a lord of visionary
+language:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow-dropping, mellow
+autumn of a rich, glorious summer. In the old man Nature has
+fulfilled her work; she leads him with her blessings; she fills him
+with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
+children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to
+the grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we
+should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most
+beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>"There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with
+bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the
+symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side of the grave;
+which the grave gapes to finish before the victory is won;
+and&mdash;strange that it should be so&mdash;this is the highest
+life of man.</p>
+
+<p>"Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose
+life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do
+the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or
+Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers,
+priests, poets, kings, slaves&mdash;one and all, their fate has
+been the same&mdash;the same bitter cup has been given them to
+drink."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Another passage of deep and melancholy beauty cannot be omitted
+from this volume. It records in language of haunting loveliness the
+passing away of feudalism and chivalry and of a thousand years of
+the pageantry of faith:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The great trading companies were not instituted for selfish
+purposes, but to ensure the consumer of manufactured articles that
+what he purchased was properly made and of a reasonable price. They
+determined prices, fixed wages, and arranged the rules of
+apprenticeship. But in time the companies lost their healthy
+vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were in the reign of
+Elizabeth hastening away. There were no longer tradesmen to be
+found in sufficient number who were possessed of the necessary
+probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon with
+the deep melancholy which, in those days, settled down on Elizabeth
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>"For indeed a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and
+direction of which even is still hidden from us&mdash;a change from
+era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken
+up; old things were passing away, and the faith and life of ten
+centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the
+abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and
+all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were
+passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond
+the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk
+back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm
+earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a
+small atom in the awful vastness of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>"In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for
+themselves, mankind was to remain no longer. And now it is all
+gone&mdash;like an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between us and
+the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the
+historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and
+our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the
+aisles of the cathedrals, only as we gaze upon their silent figures
+sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of
+what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound
+of church bells, that peculiar creation of medi&aelig;val age,
+which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The sound of church bells, being entirely the creation of man,
+forms perhaps a more touching link with the past for us than the
+eternal sounds of nature. Yet the everlasting wash of the waves of
+the sea forms a bond between us and the unplumbed depths of time,
+as they</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><span style='margin-left: 1em;'>"Begin and cease,
+and then again begin</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>With tremulous cadence slow, and
+bring,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>The eternal note of sadness
+in.</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Sophocles long ago</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Heard it on the &AElig;gean, and it
+brought</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Into his mind the turbid ebb and
+flow</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Of human misery."</span><br>
+</div>
+
+<p>So wrote Matthew Arnold. Then there is the sound of wind in the
+trees, and the voice of falling waters and rippling streams which
+must have fallen upon the ears of our remotest fore-runners as they
+do upon our own. These eternal sounds about us take no note of our
+brief coming and going, and will be the same when you and I,
+Antony, and all the millions that come after us in the world have
+returned to dust.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter30"></a>
+
+<h2>30</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Though I do not myself rank Matthew Arnold among the great prose
+writers of England, yet, like all true poets&mdash;and he indeed
+was one of them,&mdash;he wrote excellent English prose.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that he turned to poetry to express his finest
+emotions and thoughts, and he himself alludes to his prose writings
+thus: "I am a mere solitary wanderer in search of the light, and I
+talk an artless, unstudied, everyday familiar language. But, after
+all, this is the language of the mass of the world."</p>
+
+<p>The chief note of all his teaching was urbanity. "The pursuit of
+perfection," he said, "is the pursuit of sweetness and light."
+"Culture hates hatred: culture has one great passion&mdash;the
+passion for sweetness and light."</p>
+
+<p>This teaching, no doubt, leads to fields of pleasantness and
+charm, and not at all to the high places of self-sacrifice, or the
+austere peaks of martyrdom. Burning indignation against intolerable
+things, fierce denunciation of the cruelties and abominations of
+the world find no encouragement or sympathy from this serene,
+detached, and therefore somewhat ineffectual, teaching.</p>
+
+<p>Sweetness and light would never have interfered with the slave
+trade, or fiercely fought beside Plimsoll for the load-line on the
+sides of ships.</p>
+
+<p>We did not fight the Germans under the doctrine of sweetness and
+light.</p>
+
+<p>It was a beautiful and edifying adornment for the drawing-room
+in times of Victorian self-satisfied peace, but was a tinsel armour
+for the battle of life, and entirely futile as a sword for
+combating wrong.</p>
+
+<p>I am not sure that Matthew Arnold would not have called those
+who wrathfully slash about them at abominable evils,
+Philistines.</p>
+
+<p>After all, the great men of action and the great writers of the
+world have been capable of harbouring great enthusiasms and deep
+indignations in their hearts; and these emotions do not emerge from
+a "passion for sweetness and light."</p>
+
+<p>A better doctrine, Antony, is, I think, to try to push things
+along cheerfully but strenuously in the right direction wherever
+and whenever you can.</p>
+
+<p>As a writer I think Matthew Arnold's best passage is to be found
+in the Preface to his <i>Essays in Criticism</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Oxford. Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged
+by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!</p>
+
+<p>"There are our young barbarians, all at play!</p>
+
+<p>"And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens
+to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last
+enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her
+ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of
+us, to the ideal, to perfection,&mdash;to beauty, in a word, which
+is only truth seen from another side?&mdash;nearer perhaps than all
+the science of T&uuml;bingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has
+been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given
+thyself to sides and heroes not mine, only never to the
+Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and
+unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!... Apparitions of a day,
+what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the
+warfare which this Queen of Romance has been waging against them
+for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As a man and a companion,<a name='FNanchor_1_8'></a><a href=
+'#Footnote_1_8'><sup>[1]</sup></a> if you expected nothing but
+delightful humour, brilliant discourse, and urbane outlook upon
+everything, few could rival his personal charm; but he would never
+really join you in a last ditch to defend the right, or actually
+charge with you against the wrong, although in his poem "The Last
+Word," while not participating himself in such strenuous doings, he
+seems to yield a reluctant admiration to him who does so charge,
+and who leaves his "body by the wall."</p>
+
+<p>Much has happened since Matthew Arnold poured his scorn upon the
+unregenerate Philistines; but let us remember, Antony, that
+thousands and thousands of these contemned neglecters of sweetness
+and light stood unflinchingly and died upon the plains of France
+that our country and its freedom should survive.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_8'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_8'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>See my <i>Memories</i>, pp. 46-52 and 55.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter31"></a>
+
+<h2>31</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Like the author of the <i>Peninsular War</i>, Sir William Butler
+was great both as a soldier and as a writer. His autobiography
+sparkles with humour, irony, and felicitous diction; but it was in
+his <i>Life of Gordon of Khartoum</i> that he rose to his full
+stature as a contributor to the glory of English prose.</p>
+
+<p>The spell of Gordon seems to have, as it were, transfigured all
+who approached him, and raised them out of themselves. One man
+alone, of all those whose lives touched his, has shown that his own
+pinched and narrow mediocrity was proof against the radiance of
+Gordon's spirit, and has feebly attempted to belittle the soldier
+saint for his own justification. But he has failed even to project
+a spot upon the sun of Gordon's fame, and he is already forgotten,
+while the great soldier's name will endure in the hearts of his
+countrymen till England and its people fail.</p>
+
+<p>If Sir William Butler's final noble periods, which I here
+reproduce, do not deeply move him who reads them, then must that
+reader have a heart of stone:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Thus fell in dark hour of defeat a man as unselfish as Sidney,
+of courage dauntless as Wolfe, of honour stainless as Outram, of
+sympathy wide-reaching as Drummond, of honesty straightforward as
+Napier, of faith as steadfast as More. Doubtful indeed is it if
+anywhere in the past we shall find figure of knight or soldier to
+equal him, for sometimes it is the sword of death that gives to
+life its real knighthood, and too often the soldier's end is
+unworthy of his knightly life; but with Gordon the harmony of life
+and death was complete, and the closing scenes seem to move to
+their fulfilment in solemn hush, as though an unseen power watched
+over the sequence of their sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>"Not by the blind hazard of chance was this great tragedy
+consummated; not by the discord of men or from the vague opposition
+of physical obstacle, by fault of route or length of delay, was
+help denied to him. The picture of a wonderful life had to be made
+perfect by heroic death. The moral had to be cut deep, and written
+red, and hung high, so that its lesson could be seen by all men
+above strife and doubt and discord. Nay, the very setting of the
+final scenes has to be wrought out in such contrast of colour that
+the dullest eye shall be able to read the meaning of it all. For
+many a year back this soldier's life has been a protest against our
+most cherished teaching. Faith is weakness, we have said. He will
+show us it is strength. Reward is the right of service. Publicity
+is true fame. Let us go into action with a newspaper correspondent
+riding at our elbow, or sitting in the cabin of the ship, has been
+our practice. He has told us that the race should be for honour,
+not for 'honours,' that we should 'give away our medal,' and that
+courage and humility, mercy and strength, should march hand in hand
+together. For many a year we have had no room for him in our
+councils. Our armies knew him not; and it was only in semi-savage
+lands and in the service of remote empires he could find scope for
+his genius. Now our councils will be shamed in his service, and our
+armies will find no footing in our efforts to reach him. We have
+said that the Providence of God was only a calculation of chances;
+now for eleven months the amazing spectacle will be presented to
+the world of this solitary soldier standing at bay, within thirty
+days' travel of the centre of Empire, while the most powerful
+kingdom on the earth&mdash;the nation whose wealth is as the sands
+of the sea, whose boast is that the sun never sets upon its
+dominions&mdash;is unable to reach him&mdash;saving <i>he</i> does
+not want&mdash;but is unable to reach him even with one message of
+regret for past forgetfulness.</p>
+
+<p>"No; there is something more in all this than mistake of
+Executive, or strife of party, or error of Cabinet, or fault of men
+can explain. The purpose of this life that has been, the lesson of
+this death that must be, is vaster and deeper than these things.
+The decrees of God are as fixed to-day as they were two thousand
+years ago, but they can be worked to their conclusion by the
+weakness of men as well as by the strength of angels.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a grey frontlet of rock far away in
+Strathspey&mdash;once the Gordons' home&mdash;whose name in bygone
+times gave a rallying-call to a kindred clan. The scattered firs
+and wind-swept heather on the lone summit of Craig Ellachie once
+whispered in Highland clansmen's ear the warcry, 'Stand fast! Craig
+Ellachie.' Many a year has gone by since kith of Charles Gordon
+last heard from Highland hilltop the signal of battle, but never in
+Celtic hero's long record of honour has such answer been sent back
+to Highland or to Lowland as when this great heart stopped its
+beating, and lay 'steadfast unto death' in the dawn at Khartoum.
+The winds that moan through the pine trees on Craig Ellachie have
+far-off meanings in their voices. Perhaps on that dark January
+night there came a breath from heaven to whisper to the old
+Highland rock, 'He stood fast! Craig Ellachie.'</p>
+
+<p>"The dust of Gordon is not laid in English earth, nor does even
+the ocean, which has been named Britannia's realm, hold in 'its
+vast and wandering grave' the bones of her latest hero. Somewhere,
+far out in the immense desert whose sands so often gave him rest in
+life, or by the shores of that river which was the scene of so much
+of his labour, his ashes now add their wind-swept atoms to the
+mighty waste of the Soudan. But if England, still true to the long
+line of her martyrs to duty, keep his memory precious in her
+heart&mdash;making of him no false idol or brazen image of glory,
+but holding him as he was, the mirror and measure of true
+knighthood&mdash;then better than in effigy or epitaph will his
+life be written, and his nameless tomb become a citadel to his
+nation. "</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The statue of Gordon stands in noble reverie in Trafalgar
+Square, at the centre of the Empire for whose honour he died.</p>
+
+<p>In St. Paul's Cathedral he lies in effigy, and engraven upon the
+cenotaph can be seen the most splendid epitaph in the world.</p>
+
+<p>His true greatness has been recorded by Sir William Butler in
+resounding and glorious English; and his last great act of
+stainless nobility has received a deathless tribute.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+, G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter32"></a>
+
+<h2>32</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I have now come down, at last, to a great writer of English
+prose who is still with us.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Morley at the present day is, I think, universally
+recognised as the greatest living man of letters in the British
+Empire; he has crowned a long record of distinguished literary
+achievement with his <i>Life of Gladstone</i>, which has taken its
+place among the noblest biographies of the world, where it is
+destined to remain into the far future acclaimed as a masterpiece.
+In his description of the veteran statesman launching in the House
+of Commons his great project of Home Rule for Ireland, he has
+surprised himself out of his own reserve, and painted the scene for
+succeeding generations in colours that can never die:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"No such scene has ever been beheld in the House of Commons.
+Members came down at break of day to secure their places; before
+noon every seat was marked, and crowded benches were even arrayed
+on the floor of the House from the Mace to the Bar. Princes,
+ambassadors, great peers, high prelates, thronged the lobbies. The
+fame of the orator, the boldness of his exploit, curiosity as to
+the plan, poignant anxiety as to the party result, wonder whether a
+wizard had at last actually arisen with a spell for casting out the
+baleful spirits that had for so many ages made Ireland our torment
+and our dishonour&mdash;all these things brought together such an
+assemblage as no minister before had ever addressed within those
+world-renowned walls.</p>
+
+<p>"The Parliament was new. Many of its members had fought a hard
+battle for their seats, and trusted they were safe in the haven for
+half a dozen good years to come. Those who were moved by
+professional ambition, those whose object was social advancement,
+those who thought only of upright public service, the keen party of
+men, the men who aspire to office, the men with a past and the men
+who looked for a future, all alike found themselves adrift on dark
+and troubled waters. The secrets of the Bill had been well kept.
+To-day the disquieted host were first to learn what was the great
+project to which they would have to say that Aye or No on which for
+them and for the State so much would hang.</p>
+
+<p>"Of the chief comrades or rivals of the minister's own
+generation, the strong administrators, the eager and accomplished
+debaters, the sagacious leaders, the only survivor now comparable
+to him, in eloquence or in influence, was Mr. Bright. That
+illustrious man seldom came into the House in those distracted
+days; and on this memorable occasion his stern and noble head was
+to be seen in dim obscurity.</p>
+
+<p>"Various as were the emotions in other regions of the House, in
+one quarter rejoicing was unmixed. There, at least, was no doubt
+and no misgiving. There, pallid and tranquil, sat the Irish leader,
+whose hard insight, whose patience, energy, and spirit of command,
+had achieved this astounding result, and done that which he had
+vowed to his countrymen that he would assuredly be able to do. On
+the benches round him genial excitement rose almost to tumult. Well
+it might. For the first time since the Union the Irish case was at
+last to be pressed in all its force and strength, in every aspect
+of policy and of conscience by the most powerful Englishman then
+alive.</p>
+
+<p>"More striking than the audience was the man; more striking than
+the multitude of eager onlookers from the shore was the rescuer,
+with deliberate valour facing the floods ready to wash him down;
+the veteran Ulysses, who, after more than half a century of combat,
+service, toil, thought it not too late to try a further 'work of
+noble note,' In the hands of such a master of the instrument the
+theme might easily have lent itself to one of those displays of
+exalted passion which the House had marvelled at in more than one
+of Mr. Gladstone's speeches on the Turkish question, or heard with
+religious reverence in his speech on the Affirmation Bill in
+1883.</p>
+
+<p>"What the occasion now required was that passion should burn
+low, and reasoned persuasion hold up the guiding lamp. An elaborate
+scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy to be explained and
+vindicated. Of that best kind of eloquence which dispenses with
+declamation this was a fine and sustained example. There was a
+deep, rapid, steady, onflowing volume of arguments, exposition,
+exhortation. Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided. Now and again
+a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted all hearts. But political
+oratory is action, not words&mdash;action, character, will,
+conviction, purpose, personality. As this eager muster of men
+underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite in their balance and
+modulation, the compulsion of his flashing glance and animated
+gesture, what stirred and commanded them was the recollection of
+national service, the thought of the speaker's mastering purpose,
+his unflagging resolution and strenuous will, his strength of thew
+and sinew well tried in long years of resounding war, his
+unquenched conviction that the just cause can never fail. Few are
+the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics, but this was
+one."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I will not trench upon politics in these letters; but I may
+hazard the belief that could those who rejected this noble effort,
+by the greatest statesman of the age, to assuage the everlasting
+Irish conflict, have looked into the future, few of them but would
+have supported it with relief and thanksgiving.</p>
+
+<p>It is generally perhaps a blessing that the curtain that covers
+the future is impenetrable; but in this case, had it been lifted
+for us to gaze upon the appalling future, Gladstone's last effort
+for the peace of his country would surely not have been permitted
+to miscarry.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter33"></a>
+
+<h2>33</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Two other living writers I will now commend to you, and then I
+shall have done.</p>
+
+<p>The parents of Mr. Belloc, with a happy prevision, anticipated
+by some decades the <i>entente cordiale</i>, and their brilliant
+son felicitously manifests in his own person many of the admirable
+qualities of both races. In England he is reported to be forcefully
+French, and it may be surmised that when in France he is engagingly
+British. Fortunately for our literature, it is in the language of
+his mother that he has found his expression. Many are the beautiful
+utterances scattered through his charming works: two of the most
+picturesque deal with the greatness of France; the subject of one
+is the Ancient Monarchy, and of the other the Great
+Napoleon:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out
+and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and
+recognised its own nature when the vaults of the Therm&aelig;
+echoed heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings.</p>
+
+<p>"Look up the vast valley of dead men crowned, and you may see
+the gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long
+white beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand
+the globe, and in his right the hilt of an unconquerable sword.
+There also are the short strong horsemen of the Robertian House,
+half hidden by their leather shields, and their sons before them
+growing in vestment and majesty and taking on the pomp of the
+Middle Ages; Louis VII., all covered with iron; Philip, the
+Conqueror; Louis IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they
+stand in a widening, interminable procession, this great crowd of
+kings; they loose their armour, they take their ermine on, they are
+accompanied by their captains and their marshals; at last, in their
+attitude and in their magnificence they sum up in themselves the
+pride and the achievement of the French nation.</p>
+
+<p>"But Time has dissipated what it could not tarnish, and the
+process of a thousand years has turned these mighty figures into
+unsubstantial things. You may see them in the grey end of darkness,
+like a pageant, all standing still. You look again, but with the
+growing light, and with the wind that rises before morning, they
+have disappeared."</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;'>
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain
+sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that
+passed away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him
+move along their snows, through the long mysterious twilights of
+the northern autumn, in silence, with the head bent and the reins
+in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching
+towards an ancient solitude and repose. They say it was
+Napoleon.</p>
+
+<p>"After him there trailed for days the shadows of the soldiery,
+vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It was
+as though the cannon smoke at Waterloo, borne on the light west
+wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years of
+combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of the
+year over the endless plains.</p>
+
+<p>"But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the
+Guard, and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French
+drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the
+army was of ghosts and was defeated. They passed in the silence
+which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they sleep
+in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Time and circumstances have changed our ancient enemies into our
+honoured friends, and the race that fought against us at Waterloo
+has cemented its friendship towards us with its blood; and as we
+look back over the century that divides us from Waterloo we can now
+with Mr. Belloc salute the sombre figure of the defeated
+conqueror.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter34"></a>
+
+<h2>34</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I will now quote to you one other master of splendid
+English.</p>
+
+<p>Not every temporal sovereign of these realms has deserved a
+throne among the kings of literature. James the First was a poet of
+some merit; Charles the First wrote and spoke with a fine
+distinction; Queen Victoria's letters to her subjects were models
+of dignified and kindly simplicity; but to King George the Fifth by
+the grace of God it has been reserved to give utterance to what I
+believe to be the most noble and uplifting address ever delivered
+by a king to his people.</p>
+
+<p>From the day of his accession King George has been confronted
+with trials and troubles enough to daunt the stoutest heart, and
+none of us can plumb the depth of anguish that must have been his
+through the awful years of the Great War. He has been tried and
+proved in the fierce fires of adversity, and has emerged ennobled
+by pain, and dowered by sorrow with a gift of expression that has
+placed him among the masters of the glory of English prose.</p>
+
+<p>On the 13th day of May 1922 he concluded a tour of the
+cemeteries in France at Terlinchthun, where there stands on the
+cliffs over-looking the Channel a monument to Napoleon and his
+Grand Army, and around it now lie the innumerable English dead.</p>
+
+<p>Earlier in his pilgrimage Marshal Foch and Lord Haig had in his
+presence clasped hands, and the King with a fine gesture had placed
+his own right hand upon their clasped ones and said, "Amis
+toujours!" We are told that, "going up to the Cross of Sacrifice,
+the King looked out over the closely marshalled graves to the sea,
+and back towards the woods and fields of the Canche Valley where
+Montreuil stands, and seemed reluctant to leave."</p>
+
+<p>At last he turned, and, standing before the great Cross of
+Sacrifice, he spoke from his heart words that those of us, Antony,
+who love our country and the glory of its language will cherish
+while we live:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"For the past few days I have been on a solemn pilgrimage in
+honour of a people who died for all free men.</p>
+
+<p>"At the close of that pilgrimage, on which I followed ways
+already marked by many footsteps of love and pride and grief, I
+should like to send a message to all who have lost those dear to
+them in the Great War, and in this the Queen joins me to-day,
+amidst these surroundings so wonderfully typical of that
+single-hearted assembly of nations and of races which form our
+Empire. For here, in their last quarters, lie sons of every portion
+of that Empire, across, as it were, the threshold of the Mother
+Island which they guarded, that Freedom might be saved in the
+uttermost ends of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>"For this, a generation of our manhood offered itself without
+question, and almost without the need of a summons. Those proofs of
+virtue, which we honour here to-day, are to be found throughout the
+world and its waters&mdash;since we can truly say that the whole
+circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. Beyond
+the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, through Eastern
+Europe in well-nigh unbroken chain they stretch, passing over the
+holy Mount of Olives itself to the furthest shores of the Indian
+and Pacific Oceans&mdash;from Zeebrugge to Coronel, from Dunkirk to
+the hidden wildernesses of East Africa.</p>
+
+<p>"But in this fair land of France, which sustained the utmost
+fury of the long strife, our brothers are numbered, alas! by
+hundreds of thousands.</p>
+
+<p>"They lie in the keeping of a tried and generous friend, a
+resolute and chivalrous comrade-in-arms, who with ready and quick
+sympathy has set aside for ever the soil in which they sleep, so
+that we ourselves and our descendants may for all time reverently
+tend and preserve their resting-places.</p>
+
+<p>"And here, at Terlinchthun, the shadow of his monument falling
+almost across their graves, the greatest of French
+soldiers&mdash;of all soldiers&mdash;stands guard over them. And
+this is just, for side by side with the descendants of his
+incomparable armies they defended his land in defending their
+own.</p>
+
+<p>"Never before in history have a people thus dedicated and
+maintained individual memorials to their fallen, and, in the course
+of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can
+be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to
+come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the
+desolation of war. And I feel that, so long as we have faith in
+God's purposes, we cannot but believe that the existence of these
+visible memorials will eventually serve to draw all peoples
+together in sanity and self-control, even as it has already set the
+relations between our Empire and our Allies on the deep-rooted
+bases of a common heroism and a common agony.</p>
+
+<p>"Standing beneath this Cross of Sacrifice, facing the great
+Stone of Remembrance, and compassed by these sternly simple
+headstones, we remember, and must charge our children to remember,
+that as our dead were equal in sacrifice, so are they equal in
+honour, for the greatest and the least of them have proved that
+sacrifice and honour are no vain things, but truths by which the
+world lives.</p>
+
+<p>"Many of the cemeteries I have visited in the remoter and still
+desolate districts of this sorely stricken land, where it has not
+yet been possible to replace the wooden crosses by headstones, have
+been made into beautiful gardens which are lovingly cared for by
+comrades of the war.</p>
+
+<p>"I rejoice I was fortunate enough to see these in the spring,
+when the returning pulse of the year tells of unbroken life that
+goes forward in the face of apparent loss and wreckage; and I
+fervently pray that, both as nations and individuals, we may so
+order our lives after the ideals for which our brethren died that
+we may be able to meet their gallant souls once more, humbly but
+unashamed."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Hard indeed must it be for any Englishman whose heart is quick
+within his bosom not to feel it beat faster with thanksgiving and
+pride as he reads the flawless periods of this glorious speech.</p>
+
+<p>As the final word of consolation, sanctification, and
+benediction, closing the awful agony of the greatest of all wars,
+preserve, Antony, this magnificent threnody in your memory
+imperishable.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter35"></a>
+
+<h2>35</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I have come now to the end of my citations for the present. My
+object, Antony, has been to rouse in your heart, if I can, a love,
+admiration, and reverence for the wonders to be found in the
+treasure-house of English prose literature.</p>
+
+<p>I have only opened a little door here and there, so that you can
+peep in and see the visions of splendour within.</p>
+
+<p>Some day perhaps, when you have explored for yourself, you may
+feel surprised that in these letters I have quoted nothing from Sir
+John Eliot, or Addison, or Scott, or Thackeray, or Charles Lamb, or
+De Quincey, or Hazlitt, or other kings and princes of style
+innumerable. Many, many writers whom I have not quoted in these
+letters have adorned everything they touched, but do not seem to me
+to reach the snow-line or rise into great and moving eloquence.
+Charles Lamb, for example, never descends from his equable and
+altogether pleasing level, far above the plain of the commonplace,
+but neither does he reach up to the lofty altitudes of the lonely
+peaks; and if I began to quote from him, I see no obstacle to my
+quoting his entire works! And of Addison, Johnson wrote, "His page
+is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour"; and
+he adds, "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but
+not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days
+and nights to the volumes of Addison."</p>
+
+<p>In selecting such passages as I have in these letters I have
+necessarily followed my own taste, and taste&mdash;as I said when I
+first began writing to you&mdash;is illusive. I could do no more
+than cite that which makes my own heart beat faster from a
+compelling sense of its nobility and beauty.</p>
+
+<p>When I was young, Antony, I lived long in my father's house
+among his twelve thousand books, with his scholarly mind as my
+companion, and his exact memory as my guide; for more than a
+quarter of a century since those days I have lived in the more
+modest library of my own collecting, and have long learnt how much
+fine literature there is that I have never read, and now can never
+read. But, Antony, you may not find, in these crowded days, even so
+much time for reading, or so much repose for study as I have found,
+and therefore it is that I have offered you in these letters the
+preferences of my lifetime, even though it has been the lifetime of
+one who makes no claim to be a literary authority.</p>
+
+<p>As you look back at those from whom you have sprung, you will
+see that for five generations they have been men of
+letters&mdash;many distinguished, and one world-famous; and though
+I myself am but a puny link in the chain, yet I may perhaps afford
+you the opportunity of hitching your wagon by and by to the star
+that has for so long ruled the destinies of our house.</p>
+
+<p>Farewell, then, dear Antony; and if "the dear God who loveth us"
+listens to the benedictions of the old upon their children's
+children, may He guide and bless you to your life's end.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13785 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/13785-h/images/image1.jpg b/13785-h/images/image1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a37e8a6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/13785-h/images/image1.jpg
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1896891
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #13785 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13785)
diff --git a/old/13785-8.txt b/old/13785-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ddc435f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/13785-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4849 @@
+Project Gutenberg's The Glory of English Prose, by Stephen Coleridge
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Glory of English Prose
+       Letters to My Grandson
+
+Author: Stephen Coleridge
+
+Release Date: October 18, 2004 [EBook #13785]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF ENGLISH PROSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet, Spooty, Reda and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Glory of English Prose
+
+Letters to my Grandson
+
+[Illustration: STEPHEN COLERIDGE
+FROM THE PORTRAIT BY BERNARD PARTRIDGE IN THE POSSESSION
+OF THE MESS OF THE SOUTH WALES CIRCUIT]
+
+The Glory of English Prose
+Letters to My Grandson
+
+By
+The Hon. Stephen Coleridge
+
+"The chief glory of every people arises from its authors"
+_Dr. Johnson_
+
+G.P. Putnam's Sons
+New York and London
+The Knickerbocker Press
+1922
+
+1922
+by
+Stephen Coleridge
+Made in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+If you have read, gentle reader, the earlier series of _Letters to my
+Grandson on the World about Him_, you are to understand that in the
+interval between those letters and these, Antony has grown to be a boy
+in the sixth form of his public school.
+
+It has not been any longer necessary therefore to study an extreme
+simplicity of diction in these letters.
+
+My desire has been to lead him into the most glorious company in the
+world, in the hope that, having early made friends with the noblest of
+human aristocracy, he will never afterwards admit to his affection and
+intimacy anything mean or vulgar.
+
+Many young people who, like Antony, are not at all averse from the
+study of English writers, stand aghast at the vastness of the what
+seems so gigantic an enterprise.
+
+In these letters I have acted as pilot for a first voyage through what is
+to a boy an uncharted sea, after which I hope and believe he will have
+learned happily to steer for himself among the islands of the blest.
+
+S.C.
+
+THE FORD,
+CHOBHAM.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+1. ON GOOD AND BAD STYLE IN PROSE
+2. ON THE GLORY OF THE BIBLE
+3. SIR WALTER RALEIGH
+4. ACT OF PARLIAMENT, 1532
+5. THE JUDICIOUS HOOKER AND SHAKESPEARE
+6. LORD CHIEF JUSTICE CREWE
+7. SIR THOMAS BROWNE AND MILTON
+8. JEREMY TAYLOR
+9. EVELYN'S DIARY
+10. JOHN BUNYAN
+11. DR. JOHNSON
+12. EDMUND BURKE
+13. GIBBON
+14. HENRY GRATTAN AND MACAULAY
+15. LORD ERSKINE
+16. ROBERT HALL
+17. LORD PLUNKET
+18. ROBERT SOUTHEY
+19. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
+20. LORD BROUGHAM
+21. SIR WILLIAM NAPIER
+22. RICHARD SHEIL
+23. THOMAS CARLYLE
+24. HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE
+25. CARDINAL NEWMAN
+26. LORD MACAULAY AGAIN
+27. PRESIDENT LINCOLN
+28. JOHN RUSKIN
+29. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
+30. MATTHEW ARNOLD
+31. SIR WILLIAM BUTLER
+32. LORD MORLEY
+33. HILAIRE BELLOC
+34. KING GEORGE THE FIFTH
+35. CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+The letters which I wrote "On the world about you" having shown you
+that throughout all the universe, from the blazing orbs in infinite space
+to the tiny muscles of an insect's wing, perfect design is everywhere
+manifest, I hope and trust that you will never believe that so
+magnificent a process and order can be without a Mind of which it is the
+visible expression.
+
+The chief object of those letters was to endorse your natural feeling of
+reverence for the Great First Cause of all things, with the
+testimony of your reason; and to save you from ever allowing
+knowledge of how the sap rises in its stalk to lessen your wonder at
+and admiration of the loveliness of a flower.
+
+I am now going to write to you about the literature of England and
+show you, if I can, the immense gulf that divides distinguished writing
+and speech from vulgar writing and speech.
+
+There is nothing so vulgar as an ignorant use of your own language.
+Every Englishman should show that he respects and honours the
+glorious language of his country, and will not willingly degrade it with
+his own pen or tongue.
+
+"We have long preserved our constitution," said Dr. Johnson; "let us
+make some struggles for our language."
+
+There is no need to be priggish or fantastic in our choice of words or
+phrases.
+
+Simple old words are just as good as any that can be selected, if you
+use them in their proper sense and place.
+
+By reading good prose constantly your ear will come to know the
+harmony of language, and you will find that your taste will unerringly
+tell you what is good and what is bad in style, without your being able
+to explain even to yourself the precise quality that distinguishes the
+good from the bad.
+
+Any Englishman with a love of his country and a reverence for its
+language can say things in a few words that will find their way straight
+into our hearts, Antony, and make us all better men. I will tell you a
+few of such simple sayings that are better than any more
+laboured writings.
+
+On the 30th of June, 1921, in the _Times_ In Memoriam column there
+was an entry:--
+
+"To the undying memory of officers, non-commissioned officers and
+men of the 9th and 10th battalions of the K.O.Y.L.I.[1] who were killed
+in the attack on Fricourt in the first battle of the Somme"; and below it
+there were placed these splendid words:--
+
+    "Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts."
+
+In February of 1913 news reached England of the death, after reaching
+the South Pole, of four explorers, Captain Scott, their leader,
+among them.
+
+Shortly before the end, Captain Oates, a man of fortune who joined the
+expedition from pure love of adventure, knowing that his helplessness
+with frozen feet was retarding the desperate march of the others
+towards their ship, rose up and stumbled out of the tent into a
+raging blizzard, saying, "I dare say I shall be away some time."
+
+This was greatly said. His body was never found; but the rescue party
+who afterwards discovered the tent with the others dead in it, put up a
+cairn in the desolate waste of snow with this inscription:--
+
+    "Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L.E.G. Gates,
+    Inniskilling Dragoons, who, on their return from the Pole in
+    March, 1912, willingly walked to his death in a blizzard to try
+    and save his comrades beset with hardship."
+
+All this was done, said, and written, very nobly by all concerned.
+
+In St. Paul's Cathedral there lies a recumbent effigy of General Gordon,
+who gave his life for the honour of England at Khartoum, and upon it
+are engraven these words:--
+
+    "He gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his
+    sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God."
+
+Even the concentrated terseness of Latin cannot surpass these
+examples of the power of the simplest and shortest English sentences
+to penetrate to the heart.
+
+English can be used, by those who master it as an organ of expression,
+to convey deep emotion under perfect control, than which nothing is
+more moving, nothing better calculated to refine the mind, nothing
+more certain to elevate the character.
+
+Whenever a man has something fine to communicate to his fellow-men
+he has but to use English without affectation, honestly and simply, and
+he is in possession of the most splendid vehicle of human thought in
+the world.
+
+All the truly great writers of English speak with simplicity from
+their hearts, they all evince a spirit of unaffected reverence, they
+all teach us to look up and not down, and by the nobility of their
+works which have penetrated into every home where letters are
+cultivated, they have done an incalculable service in forming and
+sustaining the high character of our race.
+
+Clever flippant writers may do a trifling service here and there by
+ridiculing the pompous and deflating the prigs, but there is no
+permanence in such work, unless--which is seldom the case--it is totally
+devoid of personal vanity.
+
+Very little such service is rendered when it emanates from a writer who
+announces himself as equal if not superior to Shakespeare, and
+embellishes his lucubrations with parodies of the creeds.
+
+"A Gentleman with a Duster," has in his "Glass of Fashion" shown us
+that the Society depicted in the books of Colonel Repington and Mrs.
+Asquith is not the true and great Society that sustains England in its
+noble station among civilised peoples, and we may be sure that neither
+do these books in the faintest degree represent the true and living
+literature of the times. They will pass away and be forgotten as utterly
+as are the fashion plates and missing-word competitions of ten years
+ago.
+
+Therefore, Antony, be sure that the famous and living literature of
+England, that has survived all the shocks of time and changes of
+modern life, is the best and properest study for a man to fit him for
+life, to refine his taste, to aggravate his wisdom, and consolidate
+his character.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.]
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I alluded, in my first letter to you about English literature, to the
+necessity of your learning from the beginning the wide distinction
+between what is good and what is bad style.
+
+I do not know a better instance of a display of the difference between
+what is fine style and what is not, than may be made by putting side by
+side almost any sentence from the old authorised translation of the
+Bible and the same sentence from _The Bible in Modern Speech_.
+
+I will just put two quotations side by side:--
+
+    "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not,
+    neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in
+    all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."
+
+    "Learn a lesson from the wild lilies. Watch their growth. They
+    neither toil nor spin, and yet I tell you that not even Solomon
+    in all his magnificence could array himself like one of these."
+
+Here you can feel the perfect harmony and balance of the old version
+and the miserable commonplaceness of the effort of these misguided
+modern men.
+
+Again:--
+
+    "Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."
+
+This is mauled into:--
+
+    "Repent, he said, for the kingdom of the heavens is now close at
+    hand."
+
+These examples are perfectly suited to illustrate the immense
+difference that separates what is noble and fine in style and what is
+poor and third rate.
+
+If you recite the old version aloud you cannot escape the harmony and
+balance of the sentences, and nothing dignified or distinguished can be
+made of the wretched paraphrases of the two desecrators of the
+splendid old text.
+
+And, Antony, I would have you know that I, who have spent a long life
+in precious libraries, loving fine literature with all my heart, have long
+ago reverenced the old version of the Bible as the granite corner-stone
+upon which has been built all the noblest English in the world. No
+narrative in literature has yet surpassed in majesty, simplicity, and
+passion the story of Joseph and his brethren, beginning at the
+thirty-seventh and ending with the forty-fifth chapter of Genesis. There
+is surely nothing more moving and lovely in all the books in the British
+Museum than the picture of Joseph when he sees his little brother
+among his brethren:--
+
+    "And he lifted up his eyes, and saw his brother Benjamin, his
+    mother's son, and said, Is this your younger brother, of whom ye
+    spake to me? And he said, God be gracious unto thee, my son.
+
+    "And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his brother:
+    and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber, and
+    wept there."
+
+The whole of the forty-fifth chapter is touching and beautiful beyond
+all criticism, transcending all art. To read it is to believe every
+word of it to be true, and to recognise the sublimity of such a
+relation.
+
+No narrative of the great Greek writers reaches the heart so directly
+and poignantly as does this astonishing story. It moves swiftly and
+surely along from incident to incident till Joseph's loving soul can
+contain itself no more:--
+
+    "Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all of them that
+    stood by him; and he cried, Cause every man to go out from me.
+
+    "And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known
+    unto his brethren.
+
+    "And he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh
+    heard.
+
+    "And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph; doth my father
+    yet live? And he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck, and wept;
+    and Benjamin wept upon his neck. Moreover he kissed all his
+    brethren and wept upon them.
+
+    "And after that his brethren talked with him."
+
+And this wonderful chapter ends thus:--
+
+    "And they went up out of Egypt, and came unto the land of Canaan
+    unto Jacob their father, and told him, saying, Joseph is yet
+    alive, and is governor over all the land of Egypt.
+
+    "And Jacob's heart fainted, for he believed them not.
+
+    "And they told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said unto
+    them: and when he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry
+    him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived:
+
+    "And Israel said, It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive: I will
+    go and see him before I die."
+
+If you read the story of Joseph through from start to finish, you will
+see that it is a perfect narrative of the life of a man without
+fault, who suffered much but without resentment, was great of heart in
+evil days, and, when Fortune placed him in a position of glory and
+greatness, showed a stainless magnanimity and a brotherly love that
+nothing could abate. It is the first and most perfect story in
+literature of the nobility of man's soul, and as such it must remain a
+treasured and priceless possession to the world's end.
+
+In the short Book of Ruth there lies embalmed in the finest English a
+very tender love story, set in all the sweet surroundings of the ripening
+corn, the gathered harvest, and the humble gleaners. Nothing can be
+more delightful than the direction of Boaz, the great land-owner, to his
+men, after he had espied Ruth in her beauty gleaning in his fields:--
+
+    "And when she was risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men,
+    saying, Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her
+    not:
+
+    "And let fall also some of the handfuls on purpose for her, and
+    leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not."
+
+This little gem in the books of the Bible inspired Hood to write one of
+his most perfect lyrics:--
+
+  "She stood breast high amid the corn
+  Clasped by the golden light of morn,
+  Like the sweetheart of the sun,
+  Who many a glowing kiss had won.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Thus she stood amid the stocks,
+  Praising God with sweetest looks.
+
+  Sure, I said, Heaven did not mean
+  Where I reap thou should'st but glean;
+  Lay thy sheaf adown and come,
+  Share my harvest and my home."
+
+That the Bible was translated into English at the time when the
+language was spoken and written in its most noble form, by men whose
+style has never been surpassed in strength combined with simplicity,
+has been a priceless blessing to the English-speaking race. The land of
+its birth, once flowing with milk and honey, has been for long centuries
+a place of barren rocks and arid deserts: Persians and Greeks and
+Romans and Turks have successively swept over it; the descendants
+of those who at different times produced its different books are
+scattered to the ends of the earth; but the English translation has for
+long years been the head corner-stone in homes innumerable as the
+sands of the sea in number.
+
+No upheavals of the earth, no fire, pestilence, famine, or slaughter, can
+ever now blot it out from the ken of men.
+
+When all else is lost we may be sure that the old English version of the
+Bible will survive. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words
+shall not pass away."
+
+Do not think it enough therefore, Antony, to hear it read badly and
+without intelligence or emotion, in little detached snippets, in church
+once a week.
+
+Read it for yourself, and learn to rejoice in the perfect balance,
+harmony, and strength of its noble style.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I could write you many letters like my last one about the Bible, and
+perhaps some day I will go back to that wonderful Book and write
+you some more letters about it; but now I will go on and tell you about
+some of the great writers of English prose that came after the
+translation of the Bible.
+
+Those translators were the great founders of the English language,
+which is probably on the whole the most glorious organ of human
+expression that the world has yet known.
+
+It blends the classic purity of Greek and the stately severity of Latin
+with the sanguine passions and noble emotions of our race.
+
+A whole life devoted to its study will not make you or me perfectly
+familiar with all the splendid passages that have been spoken and
+written in it. But I shall show in my letters, at least some of the
+glorious utterances scattered around me here in my library, so that
+you may recognise, as you ought, the pomp and majesty of the speech of
+England.
+
+One of the great qualities that was always present in the writings of
+Englishmen from the time of Elizabeth down to the beginning of the
+nineteenth century was its restraint.
+
+Those men never became hysterical or lost their perfect self-control.
+
+The deeper the emotion of the writer the more manifest became the
+noble mastery of himself.
+
+When Sir Walter Ralegh, that glorious son of Devon, from which county
+you and I, Antony, are proud to have sprung, lay in the Tower of
+London awaiting his cowardly and shameful execution the next day at
+the hands of that miserable James I., writing to his beloved wife, with a
+piece of coal, because they even denied him pen and ink, face to face
+with death, he yet observed a calm and noble language that is truly
+magnifical--to use the old Bible word.
+
+    "For the rest," he wrote, "when you have travailed and wearied
+    your thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit
+    down by sorrow in the end. Teach your son also to serve and fear
+    God while he is young, that the fear of God may grow up in him.
+    Then will God be a Husband unto you and a Father unto him; a
+    Husband and a Father which can never be taken from you.
+
+    "I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time when
+    all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world.
+
+    "Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it
+    at Sherburne, if the land continue, or in Exeter Church by my
+    father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me
+    away.
+
+    "The Everlasting, Infinite, Powerful and Inscrutable God, that
+    Almighty God that is goodness itself, mercy itself, the true life
+    and light, keep you and yours, and have mercy on me and teach me
+    to forgive my persecutors and false accusers, and send us to meet
+    in His Glorious Kingdom. My true wife, farewell. Bless my poor
+    boy, pray for me. My true God hold you both in His Arms.
+
+    "Written with the dying hand of, sometime thy husband, but now
+    alas! overthrown, yours that was, but now not my own.
+
+    "WALTER RALEGH."
+
+Sir Walter Ralegh, long before he came to his untimely end, had written
+in his great _History of the World_ a wonderful passage about death; it
+is justly celebrated, and is familiar to all men of letters throughout the
+world, so I will quote a portion of it for you:--
+
+    "The Kings and Princes of the world have always laid before them
+    the actions, but not the ends, of those great ones which preceded
+    them. They are always transported with the glory of the one, but
+    they never mind the misery of the other, till they find the
+    experience in themselves.
+
+    "They neglect the advice of God, while they enjoy life, or the
+    hope of it; but they follow the counsel of Death upon the first
+    approach. It is he that puts into man all the wisdom of the world,
+    without speaking a word; which God, with all the Words of His Law,
+    promises and threats, doth not infuse.
+
+    "Death which hateth and destroyeth man is believed; God which hath
+    made him and loves him is always deferred. It is, therefore, Death
+    alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. He tells the
+    proud and insolent that they are but abjects, and humbles them at
+    the instant; makes them cry, complain and repent; yea, even to
+    hate their fore-passed happiness.
+
+    "He takes account of the rich, and proves him a beggar; a naked
+    beggar which hath interest in nothing but in the gravel that fills
+    his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful
+    and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and
+    they acknowledge it.
+
+    "O eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou
+    hast persuaded; what none have dared thou hast done; and whom all
+    the world have flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and
+    despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched
+    greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered
+    it all over with these two narrow words--HIC JACET."
+
+Sir Walter Ralegh was born only a few miles down below Ottery St.
+Mary, in the same beautiful valley from which you and I, Antony, and
+the poet have come. The peal of bells in the old church tower at
+Otterton was given by him to the parish; and when "the lin lan lone of
+evening-bells" floats across between the hills that guard the river Otter,
+it should fall upon our ears as an echo of the melody that strikes upon
+our hearts in Ralegh's words.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+In looking through some very old Acts of Parliament not long ago I was
+rather surprised to find that in those old times our forefathers drew up
+their statutes in very stately English.
+
+In our own times Acts of Parliament frequently violate the simplest
+rules of grammar, and are sometimes so unintelligible as to need the
+labours of learned judges to find out what they mean!
+
+But it seems that in the great days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth Acts of
+Parliament were often written in resounding periods of solemn
+splendour of which the meaning is perfectly clear.
+
+In the twenty-fourth year of the great Henry, the Act denying and
+forbidding any jurisdiction of the Pope of Rome in England was passed.
+
+This Act, depriving the Pope of all power in England, marked a
+turning-point in history.
+
+It is headed with these words:--
+
+    THE PRE-EMINENCE, POWER, AND AUTHORITY OF THE KING OF ENGLAND.
+    1532.
+
+    "Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it
+    is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is
+    an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one
+    supreme head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the
+    imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of
+    all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms and by names of
+    spiritualty and temporalty being bounden and owen to bear next to
+    God a natural and humble obedience; he being also institute and
+    furnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with
+    plenary whole and entire power pre-eminence authority prerogative
+    and jurisdiction to render and yield justice and final
+    determination to all manner of folk residents or subjects within
+    this his realm, in all causes matters debates contentions
+    happening to occur insurge or begin within the limits thereof
+    without restraint or provocation to any foreign princes or
+    potentates of the world ... all causes testamentary, causes of
+    matrimony and divorces, rights of tithes, oblations and obventions
+    ... shall be from hence-forth heard examined licenced clearly
+    finally and definitely adjudged and determined within the King's
+    jurisdiction and authority and not elsewhere."
+
+The words "Empire" and "Imperial" are in the present day degraded
+from their ancient high estate by an appropriation of them to advertise
+soap or cigarettes or what not; and we even are confronted with the
+"Imperial" Cancer Research Fund, the money of which has been
+employed in artificially inflicting cancer on hundreds of thousands of
+living animals--a performance utterly repugnant to a great many of the
+inhabitants in the "Empire"!
+
+But people indifferent to the dictates of mercy are not likely to have
+much reverence for words, however august.
+
+Henry VIII., we may be sure, would never have allowed these solemn
+words to be used by people with something to sell, or by scientific
+disease-mongers.
+
+They were great people who could draw up their statutes in splendid
+passages of sustained nobility.
+
+Let us, Antony, salute them across the centuries.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+One of the great creators of English prose who lived at the same time
+as Ralegh and Shakespeare was Richard Hooker, who is generally
+known as "the Judicious Hooker."
+
+He was born in Devon, two years after Ralegh, in 1554.
+
+He must very early in life have made his mark as a man of learning and
+piety, for when he was only thirty-one he was made Master of the
+Temple. The controversies in which he there found himself involved
+induced him to retire when he was only thirty-seven into the country,
+for the purpose of writing his famous books, _The Laws of Ecclesiastical
+Polity_.
+
+It is the first great book on the English Church, and it is full of
+magnificent prose. It was divided into eight parts; and in the first one,
+before he had got far into it, he penned the exclamatory description of
+law which will live as long as the language:--
+
+    "Her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world;
+    all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as
+    feeling her care, the greatest as not exempted from her power."
+
+And in the same first part will be found a passage on the Deity which
+portrays faithfully for us the humble wisdom of both the man and his
+age:--
+
+    "Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into
+    the doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and
+    joy to make mention of His name; yet our soundest knowledge is to
+    know that we know Him not as indeed He is, neither can know Him;
+    and our safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we
+    confess without confession that His glory is inexplicable, His
+    greatness above our capacity to reach. He is above and we upon
+    earth; therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few."
+
+Shakespeare was born ten years later than Hooker, in 1564, and his
+share in founding English prose as we know it is, of course, not
+comparable with that of Hooker, for of Shakespeare's prose there
+remains for us but little. Whenever he rose to eloquence he clothed
+himself in verse as with an inevitable attribute, but on the rare
+occasions when he condescended to step down from the great line to
+"the other harmony of prose" he is as splendid as in all else. In
+_Hamlet_ we have this sudden passage:--
+
+    "I have of late, (but wherefore I know not), lost all my mirth,
+    foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
+    with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to
+    me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look
+    you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
+    fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me,
+    than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
+
+    "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in
+    faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action,
+    how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of
+    the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this
+    quintessence of dust?"
+
+And the most beautiful letter in the world is that written by Antonio to
+Bassanio in _The Merchant of Venice_. When it is remembered that it
+was out of his friendship for Bassanio that Antonio entered into his
+bond with Shylock, the supreme exquisiteness of the few words from
+friend to friend render this letter unsurpassable:--
+
+    "Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow
+    cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit, and
+    since, in paying it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are
+    cleared between you and me if I might see you at my death;
+    notwithstanding, use your pleasure; if your love do not persuade
+    you to come, let not my letter."
+
+Well did Shakespeare know that such a letter must make an instant
+appeal to the sweet heart of Portia: "O love!" she cries, "despatch all
+business, and be gone!"
+
+All great poets are masters of a splendid prose, and had Shakespeare
+written some notable work of prose we may be sure it would even have
+surpassed the noble utterances of all his wonderful contemporaries.
+
+It has been said that no language in the world has yet ever lasted in its
+integrity for over a thousand years. Perhaps printing may confer a
+greater stability on present languages; but whenever English is
+displaced, the sun of the most glorious of all days will have set.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I do not think that men of letters often search through the old law
+reports for specimens of fine prose, but I believe that here and there,
+in that generally barren field, a nugget of pure gold may be discovered
+by an industrious student.
+
+Much noble prose delivered from the bench down the centuries has
+been lost for ever, for the judges of England have often been
+gentlemen of taste, scholarship, and eloquence. I have found one very
+splendid passage that has somehow survived the wrecks of nearly four
+hundred years.
+
+Lord Chief Justice Crewe, who became Chief Justice of England in 1624,
+delivered in the case of the Earl of Oxford the following noble tribute to
+the great house of De Vere:--
+
+    "I heard a great peer of this realm, and learned, say, when he
+    lived, there was no king in Christendom had such a subject as
+    Oxford. He came in with the Conqueror, Earl of Guienne; shortly
+    after the Conquest made Great Chamberlain, above 400 years ago, by
+    Henry I., the Conqueror's son; confirmed by Henry II. This great
+    honour--this high and noble dignity--hath continued ever since, in
+    the remarkable surname De Vere, by so many ages, descents, and
+    generations, as no other kingdom can produce such a peer in one
+    and the selfsame name and title. I find in all this time but two
+    attainders of this noble family, and those in stormy and
+    tempestuous time, when the government was unsettled, and the
+    kingdom in competition. I have laboured to make a covenant with
+    myself, that affection may not press upon judgment, for I suppose
+    that there is no man that hath any apprehension of gentry or
+    nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of so noble
+    a name and fame, and would take hold of a twig or twine-thread to
+    uphold it. And yet Time hath his revolutions: there must be an end
+    to all temporal things, _finis rerum_,--and end of names and
+    dignities, and whatsoever is _terrene_; and why not of De Vere?
+    For where is De Bohun?--where is Mowbray?--where is Mortimer? Nay,
+    what is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are
+    entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality. And yet, let
+    the name and dignity of De Vere stand so long as it pleases God."
+
+And alas! we can now ask, Where is De Vere? This great Earldom of
+Oxford was created in 1142, and has disappeared long ago in the limbo
+of peerages said to be in abeyance.
+
+In these days, Antony, when peerages are bought by men successful in
+trade and sold by men successful in intrigue, such elevations in rank
+have ceased to be regarded as the necessary concomitants of "great
+honour" and "high and noble dignity"; so that it has long been more
+reputable in the House of Lords to be a descendant than an ancestor.
+But among the older great families there still remains a pride that has
+descended unsullied through many generations, which serves as a fine
+deterrent from evil deeds, and a constant incentive to honour--and in
+England the history of great names can never be totally ignored, even
+though the country may be ruled by persons who do not know who
+were their own grandfathers.
+
+Nothing is more ridiculous and cheap than to sneer at honourable
+descent from famous ancestors; it divertingly illustrates the fable of the
+sour grapes.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+You will have seen from the extracts I have already quoted to you of
+the writers of the Elizabethan age that the style of all of them
+possesses something large and resonant, something that may be said
+to constitute the "grand style" in prose; and this quite naturally without
+effort, and without the slightest touch of affectation.
+
+A great writer who came immediately after the Elizabethans--namely,
+Sir Thomas Browne, who lived from 1605 to 1682--displays the
+development in his style of something less simple and more precious
+than ruled in the former generation.
+
+It is difficult to select any passage from his works where all is so good.
+He was curious and exact in his choice of words and commanded a wide
+vocabulary. There is deliberate ingenuity in the framing of his
+sentences, which arrests attention and markedly distinguishes his style.
+His _Urn Burial_, in spite of its elaboration, reaches a grave and solemn
+splendour.
+
+The fifth chapter, which begins by speaking of the dead who have
+"quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests,"
+rises to a very noble elevation as English prose.
+
+Here I quote one paragraph of it, characteristic of the whole:--
+
+    "Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares
+    with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly
+    remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction
+    leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and
+    sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.
+    Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are slippery, or fall
+    like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity.
+    To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a
+    merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our
+    few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into
+    cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of
+    repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of
+    subsistency with a transmigration of their souls,--a good way to
+    continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural
+    successions they could not but act something remarkable in such
+    variety of beings, and, enjoying the fame of their passed selves,
+    make accumulation of glory unto their last durations. Others,
+    rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were
+    content to recede into the common being, and make one particle of
+    the public soul of all things, which was no more than to return
+    into their unknown and divine original again. Egyptian ingenuity
+    was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in sweet
+    consistencies, to attend the return of their souls. But all was
+    vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which
+    Cambyses or Time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is
+    become merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for
+    balsams."
+
+Milton was a contemporary of Sir Thomas Browne, and, like all great
+poets, was a master of resounding prose. All that he wrote, both in
+verse and prose, is severely classic in its form. His _Samson Agonistes_
+is perhaps the finest example of a play written in English after the
+manner of the Greek dramas.
+
+Milton wrote _The Areopagitica_ in defence of the liberty of
+publishers and printers of books. And it stands for all time as the
+first and greatest argument against interference with the freedom of
+the press.
+
+The Areopagitæ were judges at Athens in its more flourishing time, who
+sat on Mars Hill and made decrees and passed sentences which were
+delivered in public and commanded universal respect.
+
+I will quote one of the finest passages in this great and splendid
+utterance:--
+
+    "I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church
+    and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean
+    themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison,
+    and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not
+    absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them
+    to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they
+    do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of
+    that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively,
+    and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons' teeth;
+    and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
+
+    "And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good
+    almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a
+    reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book
+    kills reason itself; kills the Image of God as it were in the eye.
+    Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the
+    precious life-blood of a master-spirit; embalmed and treasured up
+    on purpose to a life beyond life.
+
+    "'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof, perhaps, there is
+    no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss
+    of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the
+    worse.
+
+    "We should be wary, therefore, what persecutions we raise against
+    the living labours of public men; how we spill that seasoned life
+    of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of
+    homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and, if it
+    extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the
+    execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but
+    strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason
+    itself; slays an immortality rather than a life."
+
+This is a fine defence of the inviolability of a good and proper book.
+
+A bad book will generally die of itself, but there is something horribly
+malignant about a wicked book, as it must always be worse than a
+wicked man, for a man can repent, but a book cannot.
+
+It is the men of letters who keep alive the books of the great from
+generation to generation, and they are never likely to preserve a
+wicked book from oblivion. Ultimately such go to light fires and
+encompass groceries.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Milton, of whom I wrote in my last letter, was five years older than
+Jeremy Taylor, of whom I am going to write to-day. The latter's
+writings differ very much from Milton's, although they were
+contemporaries for the whole of the former's life.
+
+From the grave and august periods of Milton to the sweet beauty of
+Jeremy Taylor is as the passing from out the austere halls of Justice to
+lovely fields full of flowers.
+
+Your and my great kinsman, Coleridge, pronounced Jeremy Taylor to be
+the most eloquent of all divines; and Coleridge was a great critic.
+
+Indeed, there seems to dwell permanently in Jeremy Taylor's mind a
+compelling sweetness and serenity.
+
+His parables, though sometimes perhaps almost of set purpose fanciful,
+are always full of beauty.
+
+How can anyone withhold sympathy and affection from the writer of
+such a passage as this:--
+
+    "But as, when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning,
+    he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits
+    of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to
+    matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over
+    the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those
+    which decked the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a veil
+    because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man
+    tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face
+    and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud
+    often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets
+    quickly, so is a man's reason and his life."
+
+Again:--
+
+    "No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many
+    delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty
+    conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their
+    stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their
+    imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of
+    joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society;
+    but he that loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness at
+    home, and broods a nest of sorrows; and blessing itself cannot
+    make him happy; so that all the commandments of God enjoining a
+    man to 'love his wife' are nothing but so many necessities and
+    capacities of joy. 'She that is loved, is safe; and he that loves,
+    is joyful,' Love is a union of all things excellent; it contains
+    in it proportion and satisfaction, and rest and confidence."
+
+Again:--
+
+    "So have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring
+    upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and
+    climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the
+    loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular
+    and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest,
+    than it could recover by the liberation and frequent weighing of
+    his wings; till the little creature was forced to sit down and
+    pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a
+    prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned
+    music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes through the
+    air, about his ministries here below; so is the prayer of a good
+    man."
+
+Again:--
+
+    "I am fallen into the hands of publicans and sequestrators, and
+    they have taken all from me; what now? Let me look about me. They
+    have left me the sun and moon, fire and water, a loving wife, and
+    many friends to pity me, and some to relieve me, and I can still
+    discourse; and unless I list, they have not taken away my merry
+    countenance and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they
+    still have left me the Providence of God, and all the promises of
+    the Gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my
+    charity to them too; and still I sleep and digest, I eat and
+    drink, I read and meditate; I can walk in my neighbor's pleasant
+    fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in
+    all that in which God delights, that is, in virtue and wisdom, in
+    the whole creation, and in God Himself."
+
+Here, Antony, is true wisdom. True, indeed, is it that no one can take
+away from you your merry countenance, your cheerful spirit, and your
+good conscience unless you choose; keep all three, Antony, throughout
+your life, and you will be happy yourself and make everyone about you
+happy, and that is to make a little heaven of your earthly home.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Some day, no doubt, you will read some of the celebrated diaries that
+have come down to us. The best known of such books is _Pepys's
+Diary_ which was written in a kind of shorthand, and so lay
+undeciphered from his death in 1703 for more than a century. One of
+its merits is its absolute self-revelation; for Pepys exposes to us his
+character without a shadow of reserve in all its vanity; and the other is
+the faithful picture it gives us of the time of the Restoration.
+
+But, though less popular, _Evelyn's Diary_ is, I think, in many ways
+superior to that of Pepys.[1]
+
+There is a quiet, unostentatious dignity about Evelyn which is
+altogether absent in the garrulous Pepys, and, indeed I find something
+very beautiful and touching in the grief Evelyn pours forth upon the
+death of his little son of five years old:--
+
+    "The day before he died," writes Evelyn, "he call'd to me and in a
+    more serious manner than usual, told me that for all I loved him
+    so dearly I should give my house, land, and all my fine things, to
+    his Brother Jack, he should have none of them; and next morning
+    when he found himself ill, and that I persuaded him to keepe his
+    hands in bed, he demanded whether he might pray to God with his
+    hands un-joyn'd; and a little after, whilst in great agonie,
+    whether he should not offend God by using His holy name so often
+    calling for ease. What shall I say of his frequent pathetical
+    ejaculations utter'd of himselfe: Sweete Jesus save me, deliver
+    me, pardon my sinns, let Thine angels receive me!
+
+    "So early knowledge, so much piety and perfection! But thus God
+    having dress'd up a Saint for himselfe, would not longer permit
+    him with us, unworthy of ye future fruites of this incomparable
+    hopefull blossome. Such a child I never saw: for such a child I
+    blesse God in whose bosome he is! May I and mine become as this
+    little child, who now follows the child Jesus that Lamb of God in
+    a white robe whithersoever he goes; even so, Lord Jesus, _fiat
+    voluntas tua!_ Thou gavest him to us, Thou hast taken him from us,
+    blessed be ye name of ye Lord! That I had anything acceptable to
+    Thee was from Thy grace alone, since from me he had nothing but
+    sin, but that Thou hast pardon'd! Blessed be my God for ever,
+    Amen! I caused his body to be coffin'd in lead, and reposited on
+    the 30th at 8 o'clock that night in the church at Deptford,
+    accompanied with divers of my relations and neighbours among whom
+    I distributed rings with this motto: _Dominus abstulit_;
+    intending, God willing, to have him transported with my owne body
+    to be interr'd in our dormitory in Wotton Church, in my dear
+    native county of Surrey, and to lay my bones and mingle my dust
+    with my fathers, if God be gracious to me and make me fit for Him
+    as this blessed child was. The Lord Jesus sanctify this and all my
+    other afflictions, Amen! Here ends the joy of my life, and for
+    which I go even mourning to my grave."
+
+This great love and reverence for little children is peculiarly in accord
+with Christianity, for we should remember that it was the WISE men,
+who, when they had journeyed far across the world to salute the King
+of kings, laid their offerings down at the feet of a little child.
+
+Is there not something to reverence in faith and resignation such as are
+here expressed by Evelyn? Were not these men of old with their
+unshakable faith and simple piety better and happier than those who in
+these days know so much more and believe so much less?
+
+We, no doubt, have the knowledge, but perhaps they had the wisdom.
+
+I think, Antony, that in the history of England we shall have
+difficulty in finding any of our greatest men whose hearts and minds
+were not filled with a reverence for God and a faith in something
+beyond the blind forces which are all that Science has to offer
+mankind as a guide of life.
+
+All who have acted most nobly from the days of Ralegh and Sir Thomas
+More, down to the days of Gordon of Khartoum, and down again to our
+own days when the youth of England upheld the invincible valour,
+self-sacrifice, and glory of their race in the greatest of all wars,--all
+have been filled with the love of God and have found therein a perfect
+serenity in the face of death, and that peace which passeth all
+understanding.
+
+The character of our race rests indubitably upon that faith, and he
+who lifts his voice, or directs his pen, to tear it down, had better
+never have been born.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Another diary that you should read by and by is that of
+Henry Grabb Robinson.]
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+In these letters I am never going to quote to you anything that does
+not seem to me to rise to a level of merit well above ordinary proper
+prose. There are many writers whose general correctness and
+excellence is not to be questioned or denied whom I shall not select in
+these letters for your particular admiration.
+
+By and by, when your own love of literature impels you to excursions in
+all directions, you may perhaps come to differ from my judgment, for
+everyone's taste must vary a little from that of others.
+
+English prose in its excellence follows the proportions manifested by the
+contours of the elevation of the world's land.
+
+Vast tracts lie very near the sea-level, of such are the interminable
+outpourings of newspapers and novels and school books. And, as each
+ascent from the sea-level is reached, less and less land attains to it,
+and when the snow-line is approached only a very small proportion
+indeed of the land aspires so high.
+
+So among writers, those who climb to the snow-line are a slender band
+compared to all the inhabitants of the lower slopes and plains.
+
+In these letters I do not intend to mistake a pedlar for a mountaineer,
+nor a hearthstone for a granite peak. Time slowly buries deep in
+oblivion the writings of the industrious and the dull.
+
+Born fifteen years later than Jeremy Taylor, of whom I wrote in a
+former letter, John Bunyan in 1660, being a Baptist, suffered the
+persecution then the lot of all dissenters, and was cast into Bedford
+gaol, where he lay for conscience' sake for twelve years. "As I walked
+through the wilderness of this world," said he, "I lighted on a certain
+place where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as
+I slept I dreamed a dream"; and the dream which he dreamed has
+passed into all lands, and has been translated into all languages, and
+has taken its place with the Bible and with the _Imitation of Christ_ as
+a guide of life.
+
+The force of simplicity finds here its most complete expression; the
+story wells from the man's heart, whence come all great things:--
+
+    "Then said the Interpreter to Christian, 'Hast thou considered
+    all these things?'
+
+    "_Christian._ 'Yes, and they put me in hope and fear.'
+
+    "_Interpreter._ 'Well, keep all things so in thy mind that they
+    may be as a goad in thy sides, to prick thee forward in the way
+    thou must go.'
+
+    "Then Christian began to gird up his loins, and to address himself
+    to his journey.
+
+    "Then said the Interpreter, 'The Comforter be always with thee,
+    good Christian, to guide thee in the way that leads to the city.'
+
+    "So Christian went on his way.
+
+    "Now I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian had to
+    go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was called
+    Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run,
+    but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back.
+    He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending, and upon
+    that place stood a cross, and a little below in the bottom a
+    sepulchre.
+
+    "So I saw in my dream that just as Christian came up with the
+    cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off
+    his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came
+    to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no
+    more.
+
+    "Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry
+    heart, 'He hath given me rest by His sorrow, and life by His
+    death.'
+
+    "Then he stood awhile to look and wonder, for it was very
+    surprising to him that the sight of the cross should thus ease him
+    of his burden.
+
+    "He looked, therefore, and looked again, even till the springs
+    that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks."
+
+Bunyan died in 1688, and Dr. Johnson was born in 1709. Many years,
+therefore, elapsed between the time when they each displayed their
+greatest powers.
+
+The interval was occupied by many reputable worldly-wise writers, but I
+do not myself find, between these two masters of English prose,
+anyone who wrote passages of such great lustre that I can quote them
+for your admiration.
+
+You will have noticed, Antony, that all the writers whom I have quoted,
+and who reached the true nobility of speech necessary to command our
+tribute of unstinted praise, have been men of manifest piety and
+reverence.
+
+And you will find it difficult to discover really great and eloquent prose
+from the pen of any man whose heart is not filled with a simple faith in
+the goodness of God.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have come now to Dr. Johnson, and it is almost a test of a true man
+of letters that he should love him.
+
+He was rugged and prejudiced, but magnanimous; impatient with the
+presumptuous, tender to modest ignorance, proudly independent of the
+patronage of the great, and was often doing deeds of noble
+self-sacrifice by stealth.
+
+Through long years of hard, unremitting toil for his daily bread he lived
+bravely and sturdily, with no extraneous help but his stout oak stick--an
+unconquerable man.
+
+His prose rises on occasion to a measured and stately grandeur above
+the reach of any of his contemporaries.
+
+It was not often that he unveiled to the public gaze the beatings of his
+own noble heart, or invited the world to contemplate the depression
+and suffering amid which his unending labours were accomplished.
+
+The concluding page of the preface to the first edition of the great
+_Dictionary_ is, therefore, the more precious and moving. I know not
+why this majestic utterance came to be deleted in later editions;
+certainly it sanctifies, and as it were crowns with a crown of sorrow, the
+greatest work of his life; and with reverent sympathy and unstinted
+admiration I reproduce it here:--
+
+    "Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot ultimately be
+    defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to
+    degeneration: we have long preserved our constitution, let us make
+    some struggles for our language.
+
+    "In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature forbids
+    to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of years, to
+    the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield the palm of
+    philology to the nations of the continent. The chief glory of
+    every people arises from its authors; whether I shall add anything
+    by my own writings to the reputation of English literature, must
+    be left to time: much of my life has been lost under the pressure
+    of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been
+    spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I
+    shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my
+    assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the
+    propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth;
+    if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add
+    celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.
+
+    "When I am animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my book,
+    however defective, and deliver it to the world with the spirit of
+    a man that has endeavoured well. That it will immediately become
+    popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders and
+    risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was
+    ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden
+    ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail,
+    and there never can be wanting some, who distinguish desert, who
+    will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue can ever be
+    perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words
+    are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be
+    spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would
+    not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language
+    can express must often speak of what he does not understand; that
+    a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and
+    sometimes faint with weariness under a task which Scaliger
+    compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that what is
+    obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always
+    present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance,
+    slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of
+    the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in
+    vain trace his memory at the moment of need for that which
+    yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come
+    uncalled into his thoughts to-morrow.
+
+    "In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it
+    not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no
+    book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the
+    world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of
+    that which it condemns, yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it
+    that the _English Dictionary_ was written with little assistance
+    of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the
+    soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic
+    bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and
+    in sorrow; and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism
+    to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I
+    have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto
+    completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed
+    and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of
+    successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated
+    knowledge and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians
+    did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied
+    critics of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their
+    work, were obliged to change its economy, and give their second
+    editions another form, I may surely be contented without the
+    praise of perfection which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of
+    solitude what would it avail me?
+
+    "I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to
+    please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are
+    empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity,
+    having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."
+
+This seems to me to be the noblest passage that Johnson ever wrote.
+
+Almost all the most magnificent utterances of man are tinged with
+sadness. In this they possess a quality that is almost inseparable from
+grandeur wherever displayed. No man of sensibility and taste feels it
+possible to make jokes himself, or to tolerate them from others when in
+the presence of the Falls of Niagara, or a tempest at sea, or when he
+views from a peak in the Andes--as I have done--the sun descent into
+the Pacific. The greatest pictures painted by man touch the heart rather
+than elate it; and genius finds its highest expression not in comedy, but
+in tragedy.
+
+And this need cause us no surprise when we consider how much of the
+great work in letters and in art is directly due to the writer possessing
+in full measure the gift of sympathy.
+
+People with this gift, even if they are without the faculty of expression,
+are beloved by those about them, which must bring them happiness.
+
+Till he was over fifty Dr. Johnson's life was a weary struggle with
+poverty. He wrote _Rasselas_ under the pressure of an urgent need of
+money to send to his dying mother. His wife died some few years
+earlier. I have always thought that the sad reflections he put into the
+mouth of an old philosopher towards the end of the story were indeed
+the true expressions of his own tired heart:--
+
+    "Praise," said the sage with a sigh, "is to an old man an empty
+    sound. I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation
+    of her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband.
+
+    "I have outlived my friends and my rivals. Nothing is now of much
+    importance; for I cannot extend my interest beyond myself. Youth
+    is delighted with applause, because it is considered as the
+    earnest of some future good, and because the prospect of life is
+    far extended; but to me, who am now declining to decrepitude,
+    there is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet
+    less to be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they
+    may take away, but they can give me nothing. Riches would now be
+    useless, and high employment would be pain. My retrospect of life
+    recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time
+    squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I
+    leave many great designs unattempted, and many great attempts
+    unfinished.
+
+    "My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, and therefore I compose
+    myself to tranquillity; endeavour to abstract my thoughts from
+    hopes and cares, which, though reason knows them to be vain, still
+    try to keep their old possession of the heart; expect, with serene
+    humility, that hour which nature cannot long delay; and hope to
+    possess, in a better state, that happiness which here I could not
+    find, and that virtue which here I have not attained."
+
+From the results of _Rasselas_ he sent his mother money, but she had
+expired before it reached her.
+
+Down to the time of Dr. Johnson it was the custom for writers of books
+and poems to seek and enjoy the patronage of some great nobleman,
+to whom they generally dedicated their works.
+
+And in pursuance of that custom Dr. Johnson, when he first issued the
+plan or prospectus of his great _Dictionary_ in 1747, addressed it to
+Lord Chesterfield, who was regarded as the most brilliant and cultivated
+nobleman of his time. Lord Chesterfield, however, took no notice of the
+matter till the _Dictionary_ was on the point of coming out in 1755, and
+then wrote some flippant remarks about it in a publication called _The
+World_.
+
+At this Dr. Johnson wrote a letter to the condescending peer, which
+became celebrated throughout England and practically put an end to
+writers seeking the patronage of the great.
+
+This wonderful letter concludes thus:--
+
+    "Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your
+    outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I
+    have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is
+    useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of
+    publication, without one act of assistance, one word of
+    encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not
+    expect, for I never had a patron before.
+
+    "The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and
+    found him a native of the rocks.
+
+    "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man
+    struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground,
+    encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to
+    take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind, but it has
+    been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am
+    solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want
+    it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess
+    obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be
+    unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a
+    patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.
+
+    "Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to
+    any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I
+    should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have
+    been wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted
+    myself with so much exultation, my lord,--your lordship's most
+    humble, most obedient servant. SAM. JOHNSON."
+
+Boswell's life of Dr. Johnson when you come to read it, as you will be
+sure to do by and by, has left a living picture of this great and good
+man for all future generations to enjoy, extenuating nothing to his
+quaintness, directness, and proneness to contradiction for its own sake,
+yet unveiling everywhere the deep piety and fine magnanimity of his
+character. He suffered much, but never complained, and certainly must
+be numbered among the great men of letters who have found true
+consolation and support in every circumstance of life in an earnest and
+fervent faith.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Edmund Burke was born in 1730, and therefore was twenty-one years
+younger than Dr. Johnson, and he survived him thirteen years. He was
+a great prose writer, and although some of his speeches in Parliament
+that have come down to us possess every quality of solid argument and
+lofty eloquence, there must have been something lacking in his delivery
+and voice, for he so frequently failed to rivet the attention of the
+House, and so often addressed a steadily dwindling audience, that the
+wits christened him "the dinner bell."
+
+All men of letters, however, acknowledge Burke as a true master of a
+very great style.
+
+We see in him the first signs of a breaking away from the universal
+restraint of the older writers, and of the surging up of expressed
+emotion.
+
+His splendid tribute to Marie Antoinette and his panegyric of the lost
+age of chivalry are familiar to all students of English prose.
+
+    "It is now (1791) sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen
+    of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never
+    lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more
+    delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating
+    and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in
+    glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and
+    joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to
+    contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little
+    did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of
+    enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be
+    obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in
+    that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see
+    such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a
+    nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand
+    swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look
+    that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry has gone.
+    That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and
+    the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
+
+    "Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to sex
+    and rank, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that
+    subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude
+    itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of
+    life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
+    and heroic enterprise is gone!
+
+    "It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of
+    honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage
+    while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched,
+    and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its
+    grossness."
+
+This is a splendid and world-famous passage well worth committing to
+memory.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Edward Gibbon, who wrote the _Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire_, belonged to the later half of the eighteenth century, and was
+a contemporary of Dr. Johnson and Burke. He finished his great history
+three years after Dr. Johnson's death. It is a monumental work, and
+will live as long as the English language. It is one of the books which
+every cultivated gentleman should read. The style is stately and
+sonorous, and the industry and erudition involved in its production must
+have been immense.
+
+Although it never sinks below a noble elevation of style, it nevertheless
+displays no uplifting flights of eloquence or declamation, and to me, and
+probably to you, Antony, the most moving passages in Gibbon's
+writings are those that describe with unaffected emotion the moment of
+the first resolve to compose the great history and the night when he
+wrote the last line of it. On page 129 of his memoirs[1] he wrote:--
+
+    "It was at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing
+    amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were
+    singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing
+    the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."
+
+Thus did he resolve to devote himself to the tremendous task, and at
+Lausanne twenty-three years later it was at last fulfilled. He recorded
+the event in a few pregnant sentences that are strangely memorable:--
+
+    "It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787,
+    between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last
+    lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After
+    laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered
+    walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the
+    lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was
+    serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters,
+    and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first
+    emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the
+    establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a
+    sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had
+    taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and
+    that, whatsoever might be the future fate of my History, the life
+    of the historian must be short and precarious."
+
+In June, 1888, just one hundred and one years after that pen had been
+finally laid aside, I searched in Lausanne for the summer-house and
+covered walk, and could find no very authentic record of its site. I
+brought home a flower from the garden where it seemed probable the
+summer-house had once existed, behind the modern hotel built there in
+the intervening time, and laid it between the leaves of my Gibbon.
+
+The pressed flower was still there when I last took the book down from
+my shelves.
+
+I hope my successors will preserve the little token of my reverence.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: First edition, 1794.]
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Some of the most eloquent orators in the world have been Irishmen,
+and among them Henry Grattan was supreme.
+
+The Irish Parliament in the later half of the eighteenth century
+frequently sat spell-bound under the magic of his voice.
+
+In 1782, at the age of thirty-two, he achieved by his amazing
+eloquence a great National Revolution in Ireland. But eighteen years
+later all that he had fought for and achieved was lost in the Act of
+Union. In these days I suppose few will be found to defend the means
+whereby that Act was passed; but the public assertions that the people
+of Ireland were in favour of it wrung from Grattan the following cry of
+indignation and wrath:--
+
+    "To affirm that the judgment of a nation is erroneous may mortify,
+    but to affirm that her judgment _against_ is _for_; to assert that
+    she has said _ay_ when she has pronounced _no_; to affect to refer
+    a great question to the people; finding the sense of the people,
+    like that of the parliament, against the question, to force the
+    question; to affirm the sense of the people to be _for_ the
+    question; to affirm that the question is persisted in, because the
+    sense of the people is for it; to make the falsification of the
+    country's sentiments the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of
+    the Union; to affirm that her parliament, constitution, liberty,
+    honour, property, are taken away by her own authority,--there is,
+    in such artifice, an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility,
+    that can best be answered by sensations of astonishment and
+    disgust, excited on this occasion by the British minister, whether
+    he speaks in gross and total ignorance of the truth, or in
+    shameless and supreme contempt for it.
+
+    "The constitution may be _for a time_ so lost; the character of
+    the country cannot be so lost. The ministers of the Crown will, or
+    may, perhaps, at length find that it is not so easy to put down
+    for ever an ancient and respectable nation, by abilities, however
+    great, and by power and by corruption, however irresistible;
+    liberty may repair her golden beams, and with redoubled heat
+    animate the country; the cry of loyalty will not long continue
+    against the principles of liberty; loyalty is a noble, a
+    judicious, and a capacious principle; but in these countries
+    loyalty, distinct from liberty, is corruption, not loyalty.
+
+    "The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against the
+    principles of liberty. Connexion is a wise and a profound policy;
+    but connexion without an Irish Parliament is connexion without its
+    own principle, without analogy of condition; without the pride of
+    honour that should attend it; is innovation, is peril, is
+    subjugation--not connexion.
+
+    "The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against the
+    principle of liberty.
+
+    "Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, necessary for the
+    preservation of freedom, necessary for that of empire; but,
+    without union of hearts--with a separate government, and without a
+    separate parliament, identification is extinction, is dishonour,
+    is conquest--not identification.
+
+    "Yet I do not give up the country--I see her in a swoon, but she
+    is not dead--though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless,
+    still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheeks a
+    glow of beauty--
+
+      "Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet
+      Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,
+      And death's pale flag is not advanced there."
+
+    "While a plank of the vessel sticks together, I will not leave
+    her. Let the courtier present his flimsy sail, and carry the light
+    bark of his faith, with every new breath of wind--I will remain
+    anchored here--with fidelity to the fortunes of my country,
+    faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall."
+
+Of another character, but not less admirable than his eloquence in the
+Senate, was Grattan's achievement with the pen. His description of the
+great Lord Chatham lives as one of the most noble panegyrics--it not
+the most noble--in the world. No writer, before or since, has offered
+anyone such splendid homage as this--that he never sunk "to the
+vulgar level of the great."
+
+    "The Secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him.
+    Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had
+    the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty, and
+    one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence
+    that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his
+    superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious
+    politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to
+    the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and
+    impracticable, his object was England,--his ambition was fame;
+    without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made
+    a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he
+    smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy
+    of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his schemes
+    were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe
+    and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes
+    were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the
+    suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and
+    enlightened by prophecy.
+
+    "The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent--those
+    sensations which soften, and allure, and vulgarise--were unknown
+    to him; no domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached
+    him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied
+    by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to
+    counsel and decide.
+
+    "A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so
+    authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled
+    at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality.
+    Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this
+    statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and
+    much of the ruin of his victories--but the history of his country,
+    and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.
+
+    "Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence
+    was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly
+    expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom--not like
+    the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of
+    Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music
+    of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct the understanding
+    through the painful subtilty of argumentation; nor was he, like
+    Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion, but rather lightened
+    upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of his
+    mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be
+    followed.
+
+    "Yet he was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he
+    was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he
+    concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon
+    many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence, but even
+    then, like the spinning of a cannon ball, he was still alive with
+    fatal, unapproachable activity.
+
+    "Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could
+    create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
+    eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of
+    slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with
+    unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm
+    empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound
+    through its history."
+
+Grattan died in 1820, and twenty years later, in 1844, another great
+English writer, Lord Macaulay, wrote a world-famous passage upon the
+great Lord Chatham in the _Edinburgh Review_:--
+
+    "Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot
+    which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other
+    end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests
+    there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and
+    Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great
+    citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable
+    graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and, from above,
+    his effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face
+    and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl
+    defiance at her foes.
+
+    "The generation which reared that memorial of him has disappeared.
+    The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate judgments
+    which his contemporaries passed on his character may be calmly
+    revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of
+    vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors,
+    will yet deliberately pronounce that, among the eminent men whose
+    bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless and
+    none a more splendid name."
+
+It is a great race, Antony, that can produce a man of such a character
+as Chatham, and also writers who can dedicate to him such superb
+tributes as these.
+
+Macaulay's prose has been much criticised as being too near to easy
+journalism to be classed among the great classic passages of English;
+but this much must be recognised to his great credit--he never wrote
+an obscure sentence or an ambiguous phrase, and his works may be
+searched in vain for a foreign idiom or even a foreign word. He
+possessed an infallible memory, absolute perspicuity, and a scholarly
+taste. He detested oppression wherever enforced, and never exercised
+his great powers in the defence of mean politics or unworthy practices.
+
+Such a writer to-day would blow a wholesome wind across the tainted
+pools of political intrigue.
+
+We can salute him, Antony, as a fine, manly, clean writer, who was an
+honour to letters.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Born in the same year as was Grattan, namely, in 1750, Lord Erskine
+adorned the profession of the Bar with an eloquence that never
+exhibited the slight tendency to be ponderous which sometimes was
+displayed by his contemporaries.
+
+Grace and refinement shine out in every one of his great speeches.
+
+He was a young scion of the great house of Buchan, being the third son
+of the tenth Earl. After being in the Navy for four years he left it
+for the Army, and six years later he went to Trinity College,
+Cambridge, and took his degree; thence he came to the Bar in 1778, and
+at once displayed the most conspicuous ability as an advocate.
+
+He appeared for Horne Tooke in a six-day trial for high treason, which
+ended in an acquittal.
+
+In 1806 he became Lord Chancellor and a peer.
+
+I quote an indignant warning to the aristocracy of England which flamed
+forth in one of his great speeches:--
+
+    "Let the aristocracy of England, which trembles so much for
+    itself, take heed to its own security; let the nobles of England,
+    if they mean to preserve that pre-eminence which, in some shape or
+    other, must exist in every social community, take care to support
+    it by aiming at that which is creative, and alone creative, of
+    real superiority. Instead of matching themselves to supply wealth,
+    to be again idly squandered in debauching excesses, or to round
+    the quarters of a family shield; instead of continuing their names
+    and honours in cold and alienated embraces, amidst the enervating
+    rounds of shallow dissipation, let them live as their fathers of
+    old lived before them; let them marry as affection and prudence
+    lead the way, and, in the ardours of mutual love, and in the
+    simplicities of rural life, let them lay the foundation of a
+    vigorous race of men, firm in their bodies, and moral from early
+    habits; and, instead of wasting their fortunes and their strength
+    in the tasteless circles of debauchery, let them light up their
+    magnificent and hospital halls to the gentry and peasantry of the
+    country, extending the consolations of wealth and influence to the
+    poor. Let them but do this,--and instead of those dangerous and
+    distracted divisions between the different ranks of life, and
+    those jealousies of the multitude so often blindly painted as big
+    with destruction, we should see our country as one large and
+    harmonious family, which can never be accomplished amidst vice and
+    corruption, by wars and treaties, by informations, _ex officio_
+    for libels, or by any of the tricks and artifices of the State."
+
+Mr. Erskine was entitled, as the son of the tenth Earl of Buchan, to
+speak such words of warning and exhortation to the aristocracy of
+England to which he belonged, and the lapse of a century and a quarter
+has not rendered the exhortation vain, though it may be hoped that the
+condemnatory clauses of the speech would not at the present time be
+so well justified as when they were delivered.
+
+Great names carry great obligations, and, for the most part, those who
+bear them to-day recognise those great obligations and endeavour
+without ostentation to fulfil them.
+
+The silly fribbles who posture before the photographic cameras for
+penny newspapers do not represent the real aristocracy of England.
+
+We must not, Antony, mistake a cockatoo for an eagle.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I shall not expect you in your reading often to penetrate into the
+innumerable dusty octavos that contain sermons. The stoutest heart
+may fail, without blame, before the flat-footed pedestrianism of these
+platitudinous volumes. But there does occasionally arise above the dull
+horizon a star whose brilliance is the more conspicuous for the
+surrounding gloom.
+
+In 1796, Coleridge, in a letter[1] to a Mr. Flower, who was a publisher
+at Cambridge, wrote:--
+
+    "I hope Robert Hall is well. Why is he idle? I mean towards the
+    public. We want such men to rescue this _enlightened age_ from
+    general irreligion."
+
+I suppose Robert Hall is a name known to but few in these days, but at
+the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries
+his fame was great and deserved.
+
+As a divine, dowered with the gift of inspired eloquence, Coleridge
+estimated his powers as second only to those of Jeremy Taylor. When
+Napoleon was at the supreme height of his conquests, and England
+alone of European countries still stood erect, uninvaded and
+undismayed, a company of soldiers attended Robert Hall's place of
+worship on the eve of their departure to Spain. The occasion was
+memorable and moving, and the preacher's splendid periods deserve to
+be preserved from oblivion:--
+
+    "By a series of criminal enterprises, by the successes of guilty
+    ambition, the liberties of Europe have been gradually
+    extinguished; the subjugation of Holland, Switzerland, and the
+    free towns of Germany, has completed that catastrophe; and we are
+    the only people in the Eastern Hemisphere who are in possession of
+    equal laws and a free constitution. Freedom, driven from every
+    spot on the Continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she
+    always chose for her favorite abode; but she is pursued even here,
+    and threatened with destruction. The inundations of lawless power,
+    after covering the whole earth, threaten to follow us here, and
+    we are most exactly, most critically placed in the only aperture
+    where it can be successfully repelled, in the Thermopylæ of the
+    universe.
+
+    "As far as the interests of freedom are concerned, the most
+    important by far of sublunary interests, you, my countrymen, stand
+    in the capacity of the federal representatives of the human race;
+    for with you it is to determine (under God) in what condition the
+    latest posterity shall be born; their fortunes are entrusted to
+    your care, and on your conduct at this moment depends the colour
+    and complexion of their destiny. If liberty, after being
+    extinguished on the Continent, is suffered to expire here, whence
+    is it ever to emerge in the midst of that thick night that will
+    invest it?
+
+    "It remains with you, then, to decide whether that freedom, at
+    whose voice the kingdoms of Europe awoke from the sleep of ages to
+    run a career of virtuous emulation in everything great and good;
+    the freedom which dispelled the mists of superstition and invited
+    the nations to behold their God; whose magic touch kindled the
+    rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, and the flame of
+    eloquence; the freedom which poured into our lap opulence and
+    arts, and embellished life with innumerable institutions and
+    improvements till it became a theatre of wonders; it is for you to
+    decide whether this freedom shall yet survive, or be covered with
+    a funeral pall, and wrapt in eternal gloom.
+
+    "It is not necessary to await your determination. In the
+    solicitude you feel to approve yourselves worthy of such a trust,
+    every thought of what is afflicting in warfare, every apprehension
+    of danger, must vanish, and you are impatient to mingle in the
+    battle of the civilised world.
+
+    "Go then, ye defenders of your country, accompanied with every
+    auspicious omen; advance with alacrity into the field, where God
+    Himself musters the hosts of war. Religion is too much interested
+    in your success not to lend you her aid; she will shed over this
+    enterprise her selectest influences. While you are engaged in the
+    field many will repair to the closet, many to the sanctuary; the
+    faithful of every name will employ that prayer which has power
+    with God; the feeble hands which are unequal to any other weapon
+    will grasp the sword of the Spirit; from myriads of humble,
+    contrite hearts, the voice of intercession, supplication, and
+    weeping, will mingle in its ascent to heaven with the shouts of
+    battle and the shock of arms.
+
+    "While you have everything to fear from the success of the enemy,
+    you have every means of preventing that success, so that it is
+    next to impossible for victory not to crown your exertions. The
+    extent of your resources, under God, is equal to the justice of
+    your cause.
+
+    "But should Providence determine otherwise; should you fall in
+    this struggle, should the nation fall, you will have the
+    satisfaction (the purest allotted to man) of having performed your
+    part; your names will be enrolled with the most illustrious dead,
+    while posterity to the end of time, as often as they revolve the
+    events of this period (and they will incessantly revolve them)
+    will turn to you a reverential eye while they mourn over the
+    freedom which is entombed in your sepulchre.
+
+    "I cannot but imagine the virtuous heroes, legislators, and
+    patriots, of every age and country, are bending from their
+    elevated seats to witness this contest, as if they were incapable,
+    till it be brought to a favourable issue, of enjoying their
+    eternal repose.
+
+    "Enjoy that repose, illustrious immortals! Your mantle fell when
+    you ascended, and thousands inflamed with your spirit, and
+    impatient to tread in your steps, are ready 'to swear by Him that
+    sitteth upon the throne and liveth for ever and ever,' they will
+    protect freedom in her last asylums, and never desert that cause
+    which you sustained by your labours and cemented with your blood.
+
+    "And Thou, Sole Ruler among the children of men, to whom the
+    shields of the earth belong, 'gird on Thy sword, Thou most
+    Mighty'; go forth with our hosts in the day of battle! Impart, in
+    addition to their hereditary valour, that confidence of success
+    which springs from Thy Presence!
+
+    "Pour into their hearts the spirit of departed heroes! Inspire
+    them with Thine own, and, while led by Thine Hand and fighting
+    under Thy banners, open Thou their eyes to behold in every valley
+    and in every plain, what the prophet beheld by the same
+    illuminations--chariots of fire, and horses of fire!
+
+    "Then shall the strong man be as tow, and the maker of it as a
+    spark; and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench
+    them."
+
+We, who have just emerged, shattered indeed and reeling, from
+another and yet more awful combat for freedom, can the better extend
+our sympathy to those forefathers of ours situated in like case, and can
+imagine with what beating hearts they must have listened to so
+magnificent a call to arms as this; commingling prayer, exhortation,
+and benediction.
+
+Napoleon, after all, waged his wars with us according to the laws of
+nations, the rules of civilised peoples, and the dictates of decent
+humanity. But never since Christianity has been established has one
+man committed so dread and awful an accumulation of public iniquities
+as stand for ever against the base and cowardly name of William
+Hohenzollern, Emperor in Germany. He spat upon the ancient chivalries
+of battle; he prostituted the decent amenities of diplomacy; he polluted
+with infamy and murder the splendid comradeship of the sea.
+
+When the captain of one of his submarines placed upon his deck the
+captured crew of an unarmed merchant vessel which he had sunk,
+destroyed their boats, took from them their life-belts, carried them
+miles away from any floating wreckage, and then projected them into
+the sea to drown, this unspeakable monarch approved the awful deed
+and decorated the ruffian for his infamous cruelty.
+
+When gallant Fryatt, fulfilling every duty a captain owes to his unarmed
+crew and helpless passengers, turned the bows of his peaceful
+packet-boat upon the submarine which was being used to murder them
+all in cold blood, he fell into this Kaiser's hands, and the coward
+wreaked his vengeance upon nobility that was beyond his
+comprehension and valour that rendered him insignificant.
+
+Of these horrible acts the proofs stand unchallenged, and for such
+deeds as these the world has cast him out: thrown him down from one
+of the greatest thrones in history; and left him in the place to which,
+white with terror, he ignominiously fled, stripped of all his power and
+splendour, his crowns, his crosses, and his diadems.
+
+Idle is it for this man and his apologists to plead any extenuation or
+excuse.
+
+It was his custom in the plenitude of his power to declare himself
+answerable for his actions only to God and himself. Then let the
+judgment of God be upon him. When we recall the awful and
+unnumbered horrors with which he covered Europe, I doubt whether all
+history can furnish a parallel to him.
+
+By his authority helpless Belgium was invaded, treaties treacherously
+broken, and her people slaughtered. By his authority her priests were
+murdered in cold blood and her nuns violated by his vile soldiery. By his
+authority poison gases were first projected with low cunning upon brave
+and honourable adversaries. By his authority hospital ships at sea were
+sent to the bottom.
+
+But time and the might of free nations have, after fearful sufferings,
+dissipated his invincible armies, and they have shrivelled before the
+wrath of mankind. The whole world rose up in its offended majesty and
+tore from him that shining armour of which it was his custom to boast;
+and, with the brand of Cain upon him, he now lies obscurely in Holland,
+bereft of all the trappings of his sinister power.
+
+There were times in the past when justice would have avenged such
+awful crimes as lie at this man's door with the torture of his living body
+and the desecration of his lifeless remains, but his conquerors disdained
+to debase themselves by imitating his own abominations; and they left
+him to afford a spectacle to posterity as the supreme example of
+human ignominy!
+
+When you are old, Antony, and this greatest of all wars has become
+part of England's history, you will be proud and happy to remember
+that your own father, at the first call for volunteers, laid down the
+pencil and scale of his peaceful profession, went out to fight for his
+country in the trenches in France, was wounded almost to death, and
+was saved only by the skill and devotion of one of the greatest
+surgeons of the day.[2] All the best blood of England, Scotland, and
+Ireland went marching together to defend the freedom of the world,
+and upon their hearts were engraven the glorious words:--
+
+    "Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war
+    and my fingers to fight."
+
+May such a call never come to our beloved country again! But if it does,
+Antony, I know where you will be found without need of exhortations
+from me.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Now in my library.--S.C.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Sir Arbuthnot Lane.]
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Grattan, of whom I have already written, had in the first Lord Plunket
+a successor and a compatriot very little his inferior in the gift of
+oratory.
+
+He was born in 1764, and was therefore some fourteen years younger
+than Grattan, whom he survived by thirty-four years.
+
+Like Grattan, he displayed a burning patriotism and, like him, fiercely
+opposed the Act of Union.
+
+Few orators have displayed greater powers of clear reason and
+convincing logic than Plunket. It may be admitted that he seldom rose
+to great heights of eloquence, but tradition credits his delivery with a
+quality of dignity amounting almost to majesty. The gift of oratory
+consists in how things are said as much as in what things are said, and
+the voice, gesture, and manner of Plunket were commanding and
+magnificent.
+
+When Attorney-General in Ireland, in 1823, in a speech prosecuting the
+leaders of the riot known as "the Bottle Riot," Plunket uttered the
+following fine tribute to the character of William the Third:--
+
+    "Perhaps, my lords, there is not to be found in the annals of
+    history a character more truly great than that of William the
+    Third. Perhaps no person has ever appeared on the theatre of the
+    world who has conferred more essential or more lasting benefits on
+    mankind; on these countries, certainly none. When I look at the
+    abstract merits of his character, I contemplate him with
+    admiration and reverence. Lord of a petty principality--destitute
+    of all resources but those with which nature had endowed
+    him--regarded with jealousy and envy by those whose battles he
+    fought; thwarted in all his counsels; embarrassed in all his
+    movements; deserted in his most critical enterprises--he continued
+    to mould all those discordant materials, to govern all these
+    warring interests, and merely by the force of his genius, the
+    ascendancy of his integrity, and the immovable firmness and
+    constancy of his nature, to combine them into an indissoluble
+    alliance against the schemes of despotism and universal
+    domination of the most powerful monarch in Europe, seconded by the
+    ablest generals, at the head of the bravest and best disciplined
+    armies in the world, and wielding, without check or control, the
+    unlimited resources of his empire. He was not a consummate
+    general; military men will point out his errors; in that respect
+    Fortune did not favour him, save by throwing the lustre of
+    adversity over all his virtues. He sustained defeat after defeat,
+    but always rose _adversa rerum immersabilis unda_. Looking merely
+    at his shining qualities and achievements, I admire him as I do a
+    Scipio, a Regulus, a Fabius; a model of tranquil courage,
+    undeviating probity, and armed with a resoluteness and constancy
+    in the cause of truth and freedom, which rendered him superior to
+    the accidents that control the fate of ordinary men.
+
+    "But this is not all--I feel that to him, under God, I am, at this
+    moment, indebted for the enjoyment of the rights which I possess
+    as a subject of these free countries; to him I owe the blessings
+    of civil and religious liberty, and I venerate his memory with a
+    fervour of devotion suited to his illustrious qualities and to
+    his godlike acts."
+
+This is not so magnificent a panegyric as that of Grattan in his written
+tribute to Chatham, but, enhanced by the gesture and voice of the
+great orator, it was reputed to have left a deep impression upon all who
+heard it.
+
+But few speeches, however eloquent, survive, while the printed work of
+the writer may long endure; but to the orator is given what the writer
+never experiences--the fierce enjoyment, amounting almost to rapture,
+of holding an audience entranced under the spell of the spoken
+cadences; and English, Antony, has a splendour all its own when
+uttered by a master of its august music.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+18
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+To-day I will write about Robert Southey, and, as he and Coleridge
+married sisters, you may claim a distant relationship with him. His
+personal character was beautiful and unselfish, and his dwelling at
+Keswick was the home that for years sheltered Coleridge's children.
+
+With hardly an exception the poets of England have had an easy and
+royal mastery of prose; and in the case of Robert Southey there are
+some, and they are not the worst critics, who anticipate that his prose
+will long outlast his poetry in the Temple of Fame.
+
+We may suppose that to a man whose whole private life was stainlessly
+dedicated to a noble rectitude of conduct, and whose every act was
+sternly subjected to the judgment of an unbending conscience, some
+circumstances of the private life of Nelson must have been distasteful
+and open to censure; but no such reservations dimmed the splendour
+of Southey's tribute to the public hero who gave his life in the act of
+establishing, beyond reach of dispute or cavil, the throne of England as
+Queen of the Sea.
+
+    "The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a
+    public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned pale,
+    as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of
+    our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was
+    suddenly taken from us, and it seemed as if we had never, till
+    then, known how deeply we loved and reverenced him.
+
+    "What the country had lost in its great naval hero--the greatest
+    of our own, and of all former times, was scarcely taken into the
+    account of grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he performed his part,
+    that the maritime war, after the battle of Trafalgar, was
+    considered at an end; the fleets of the enemy were not merely
+    defeated, but destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new race
+    of seamen reared for them, before the possibility of their
+    invading our shores could again be contemplated.
+
+    "It was not, therefore, from any selfish reflection upon the
+    magnitude of our loss that we mourned for him; the general sorrow
+    was of a higher character. The people of England grieved that
+    funeral ceremonies, public monuments and posthumous rewards, were
+    all which they could now bestow upon him whom the king, the
+    legislature, and the nation, would alike have delighted to honour;
+    whom every tongue would have blessed; whose presence in every
+    village through which he might have passed would have wakened the
+    church bells, have given schoolboys a holiday, have drawn children
+    from their sports to gaze upon him, and 'old men from the chimney
+    corner' to look upon Nelson ere they died.
+
+    "The victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, indeed, with the usual
+    forms of rejoicing, but they were without joy; for such already
+    was the glory of the British Navy through Nelson's surpassing
+    genius, that it scarcely seemed to receive any addition from the
+    most signal victory that ever was achieved upon the sea; and the
+    destruction of this mighty fleet, by which all the maritime
+    schemes of France were totally frustrated, hardly appeared to add
+    to our security or strength, for while Nelson was living to watch
+    the combined squadrons of the enemy, we felt ourselves as secure
+    as now, when they were no longer in existence.
+
+    "There was reason to suppose from the appearances upon opening the
+    body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like
+    his father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said to have
+    fallen prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to be
+    lamented, who died so full of honours, and at the height of human
+    fame. The most triumphant death is that of a martyr; the most
+    awful, that of the martyred patriot; the most splendid, that of
+    the hero in the hour of victory; and if the chariot and the horses
+    of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could
+    scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory.
+
+    "He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name
+    and an example which are at this hour inspiring hundreds of the
+    youth of England; a name which is our pride, and an example which
+    will continue to be our shield and our strength."
+
+Nelson left England the Queen of the Sea, and the great war with
+Germany has failed to displace her from that splendid throne. For the
+plain fact of history remains that, after the battle of Jutland, the
+German High Seas Fleet never ventured out of port again till the end of
+the war; and when it did emerge from its ignominious security, it sailed
+to captivity at Scapa Flow, there ultimately to repose on the bottom of
+the sea.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+19
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+There are four very celebrated lines written by Walter Savage Landor
+which you may have heard quoted; they were written towards the close
+of his life, and are certainly distinguished and memorable:--
+
+  "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
+    Nature I loved, and next to Nature Art;
+  I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
+    It sinks, and I am ready to depart."
+
+It does not detract from the merit of the lines that as a fact Landor was
+of a fiery disposition, and strove a great deal with many adversaries,
+often of his own creation, throughout his long life[1]; and although he
+was of a fierce and combative nature he displayed in his writings a
+classical restraint and tender beauty hardly achieved by his
+contemporaries.
+
+In the form of an imaginary conversation between Æsop and Rhodope,
+Landor makes the latter describe how her father, in the famine,
+unbeknown to her, starved that she might have plenty, and, when all
+was gone, took her to the market-place to sell her that she might live.
+There is an exquisite delicacy in this dialogue that places it among the
+wonders of literature:--
+
+    "_Rhodope_. Never shall I forget the morning when my father,
+    sitting in the coolest part of the house, exchanged his last
+    measure of grain for a chlamys of scarlet cloth, fringed with
+    silver. He watched the merchant out of the door, and then looked
+    wistfully into the cornchest. I, who thought there was something
+    worth seeing, looked in also, and finding it empty, expressed my
+    disappointment, not thinking, however, about the corn. A faint and
+    transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of mine. He
+    unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before me,
+    and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the
+    glittering fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; and I
+    know not what flowers he gathered, but he gathered many; and some
+    he placed in my bosom, and some in my hair. But I told him with
+    captious pride, first that I could arrange them better, and again
+    that I would have only the white. However, when he had selected
+    all the white and I had placed a few of them according to my
+    fancy, I told him (rising in my slipper) he might crown me with
+    the remainder.
+
+    "The splendour of my apparel gave me a sensation of authority.
+    Soon as the flowers had taken their station on my head, I
+    expressed a dignified satisfaction at the taste displayed by my
+    father, just as if I could have seen how they appeared! But he
+    knew that there was at least as much pleasure as pride in it, and
+    perhaps we divided the latter (alas! not both) pretty equally.
+
+    "He now took me into the market-place, where a concourse of people
+    were waiting for the purchase of slaves. Merchants came and looked
+    at me; some commending, others disparaging; but all agreeing that
+    I was slender and delicate, that I could not live long, and that I
+    should give much trouble. Many would have bought the chlamys, but
+    there was something less saleable in the child and flowers.
+
+    "_Æsop_. Had thy features been coarse and thy voice rustic, they
+    would all have patted thy cheeks and found no fault in thee.
+
+    "_Rhodope_. As it was, every one had bought exactly such another
+    in time past, and been a loser by it. At these speeches, I
+    perceived the flowers tremble slightly on my bosom, from my
+    father's agitation. Although he scoffed at them, knowing my
+    healthiness, he was troubled internally, and said many short
+    prayers, not very unlike imprecations, turning his head aside.
+    Proud was I, prouder than ever, when at last several talents were
+    offered for me, and by the very man who in the beginning had
+    undervalued me most, and prophesied the worst of me. My father
+    scowled at him and refused the money. I thought he was playing a
+    game, and began to wonder what it could be, since I had never seen
+    it played before. Then I fancied it might be some celebration
+    because plenty had returned to the city, insomuch that my father
+    had bartered the last of the corn he hoarded.
+
+    "I grew more and more delighted at the sport. But soon there
+    advanced an elderly man, who said gravely, 'Thou hast stolen this
+    child; her vesture alone is worth a hundred drachmas. Carry her
+    home again to her parents, and do it directly, or Nemesis and the
+    Eumenides will overtake thee.' Knowing the estimation in which my
+    father had always been holden by his fellow-citizens, I laughed
+    again and pinched his ear. He, although naturally choleric, burst
+    forth into no resentment at these reproaches, but said calmly, 'I
+    think I know thee by name, O guest! Surely thou art Xanthus, the
+    Samian. Deliver this child from famine.'
+
+    "Again I laughed aloud and heartily, and thinking it was now part
+    of the game, I held out both my arms, and protruded my whole body
+    toward the stranger. He would not receive me from my father's
+    neck, but he asked me with benignity and solicitude if I was
+    hungry; at which I laughed again, and more than ever; for it was
+    early in the morning, soon after the first meal, and my father had
+    nourished me most carefully and plentifully in all the days of the
+    famine. But Xanthus, waiting for no answer, took out of a sack,
+    which one of his slaves carried at his side, a cake of wheaten
+    bread and a piece of honeycomb, and gave them to me. I held the
+    honeycomb to my father's mouth, thinking it the most of a dainty.
+    He dashed it to the ground, but seizing the bread he began to
+    devour it ferociously. This also I thought was in the play, and I
+    clapped my hands at his distortions. But Xanthus looked at him
+    like one afraid, and smote the cake from him, crying aloud, 'Name
+    the price,' My father now placed me in his arms, naming a price
+    much below what the other had offered, saying, 'The gods are ever
+    with thee, O Xanthus! therefore to thee do I consign my child.'
+
+    "But while Xanthus was counting out the silver my father seized
+    the cake again, which the slave had taken up and was about to
+    replace in the wallet. His hunger was exasperated by the taste,
+    and the delay. Suddenly there arose much tumult. Turning round in
+    the old woman's bosom who had received me from Xanthus, I saw my
+    beloved father struggling on the ground, livid and speechless. The
+    more violent my cries, the more rapidly they hurried me away; and
+    many were soon between us.
+
+    "Little was I suspicious that he had suffered the pangs of famine
+    long before: alas! and he had suffered them for me. Do I weep
+    while I am telling you they ended? I could not have closed his
+    eyes; I was too young; but I might have received his last breath,
+    the only comfort of an orphan's bosom. Do you now think him
+    blameable, O Æsop?"
+
+    "_Æsop_. It was sublime humanity; it was forbearance and
+    self-denial which even the immortal gods have never shown us."
+
+The _Dream of Petrarca_ is, I think, more famous but not more
+beautiful than this narrative of Rhodope; it lacks the deep human
+tragedy and infinite charity of the winsome child, and the
+self-contained father silently perishing of hunger for her; but if the
+_Æsop and Rhodope_ had never been written, the _Dream of Petrarca_
+would secure its author a place among the immortals:--
+
+    "... Wearied with the length of my walk over the mountains, and
+    finding a soft molehill, covered with grey moss, by the wayside, I
+    laid my head upon it and slept. I cannot tell how long it was
+    before a species of dream or vision came over me.
+
+    "Two beautiful youths appeared beside me; each was winged; but the
+    wings were hanging down and seemed ill-adapted to flight. One of
+    them, whose voice was the softest I ever heard, looking at me
+    frequently, said to the other, 'He is under my guardianship for
+    the present; do not awaken him with that feather.' Methought, on
+    hearing the whisper, I saw something like the feather on an arrow;
+    and then the arrow itself; the whole of it, even to the point,
+    although he carried it in such a manner that it was difficult at
+    first to discover more than a palm's length of it; the rest of the
+    shaft (and the whole of the barb) was behind his ankles.
+
+    "'This feather never awakens anyone,' replied he, rather
+    petulantly, 'but it brings more of confident security, and more of
+    cherished dreams, than you, without me, are capable of imparting.'
+
+    "'Be it so!' answered the gentler; 'none is less inclined to
+    quarrel or dispute than am I. Many whom you have wounded
+    grievously call upon me for succour; but so little am I disposed
+    to thwart you, it is seldom I venture to do more for them than to
+    whisper a few words of comfort in passing. How many reproaches on
+    these occasions have been cast upon me for indifference and
+    infidelity! Nearly as many, and nearly in the same terms as upon
+    you.'
+
+    "'Odd enough that we, O Sleep! should be thought so alike!' said
+    Love contemptuously. 'Yonder is he who bears a nearer resemblance
+    to you; the dullest have observed it.' I fancied I turned my eyes
+    to where he was pointing, and saw at a distance the figure he
+    designated. Meanwhile the contention went on uninterruptedly.
+    Sleep was slow in asserting his power or his benefits. Love
+    recapitulated them; but only that he might assert his own above
+    them.
+
+    "Suddenly he called upon me to decide, and to choose my patron.
+    Under the influence, first of the one, then of the other, I sprang
+    from repose to rapture, I alighted from rapture on repose, and
+    knew not which was sweetest. Love was very angry with me, and
+    declared he would cross me through the whole of my existence.
+    Whatever I might on other occasions have thought of his veracity,
+    I now felt too surely that he would keep his word.
+
+    "At last, before the close of the altercation, the third Genius
+    had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell you how I knew him,
+    but I knew him to be the Genius of Death. Breathless as I was at
+    beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First
+    they seemed only calm; presently they grew contemplative; and
+    lastly beautiful; those of the Graces themselves are less regular,
+    less harmonious, less composed.
+
+    "Love glanced at him unsteadily, with a countenance in which there
+    was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat of disdain; and cried, 'Go away!
+    go away! nothing that thou touchest, lives!' 'Say rather, child!'
+    replied the advancing form, and advancing grew loftier and
+    statelier, 'say rather that nothing of beautiful or of glorious
+    lives its own true life until my wing hath passed over it.'
+
+    "Love pouted, and rumpled and bent down with his forefinger the
+    stiff short feathers on his arrow-head, but replied not. Although
+    he frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded him less and
+    less, and scarcely looked towards him. The milder and calmer
+    Genius, the third, in proportion as I took courage to contemplate
+    him, regarded me with more and more complacency. He held neither
+    flower nor arrow as the others did, but throwing back the clusters
+    of dark curls that overshadowed his countenance, he presented to
+    me his hand, openly and benignly. I shrank on looking at him so
+    near, and yet I sighed to love him. He smiled, not without an
+    expression of pity, at perceiving my diffidence, my timidity; for
+    I remembered how soft was the hand of Sleep, how warm and
+    entrancing was Love's.
+
+    "By degrees I became ashamed of my ingratitude, and turning my
+    face away, I held out my arms, and I felt my neck within his; the
+    coolness of freshest morning breathed around; the heavens seemed to
+    open above me, while the beautiful cheek of my deliverer rested on
+    my head. I would now have looked for those others, but knowing my
+    intention by my gesture, he said consolatorily, 'Sleep is on his
+    way to the Earth, where many are calling him; but it is not to
+    these he hastens, for every call only makes him fly further off.
+    Sedately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as capricious and
+    volatile as the more arrogant and ferocious one.'
+
+    "'And Love!' said I, 'whither is he departed? If not too late, I
+    would propitiate and appease him.'
+
+    "'He who cannot follow me; he who cannot overtake and pass me,'
+    said the Genius, 'is unworthy of the name, the most glorious in
+    earth or heaven. Look up! Love is yonder, and ready to receive
+    thee.'
+
+    "I looked: the earth was under me: I saw only the clear blue sky,
+    and something brighter above it."
+
+There is something most rare and refined and precious in this vision,
+told as it is with a sweet serenity. But it does not touch the heart like
+the _Æsop and Rhodope_.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Born 1775, died 1864.]
+
+
+
+20
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I now come to speak of one whose fame was familiar to me as a
+boy--the great Lord Brougham.--for he lived till 1868. I remember that
+he was vehemently praised and blamed as a politician, but with such
+matters others have dealt; in this letter, Antony, we will concern
+ourselves with the glory of English prose as it poured from Lord
+Brougham in two of his greatest speeches.
+
+He was an orator whose voice was uplifted throughout a long and
+strenuous life in condemnation of all the brutalities and oppression of
+his time, and to whose eloquence the triumphant cause of freedom
+stands for ever in deep obligation.
+
+His great speech on Law Reform in the House of Commons, in 1828,
+took six hours to deliver, and the concluding passage, which mounted
+to a plane of lofty declamation, displayed no sign of exhaustion, and
+was listened to with strained attention by an absorbed and crowded
+audience:--
+
+    "The course is clear before us; the race is glorious to run. You
+    have the power of sending your name down through all times,
+    illustrated by deeds of higher fame, and more useful import, than
+    ever were done within these walls.
+
+    "You saw the greatest warrior of the age--conqueror of
+    Italy--humbler of Germany--terror of the North--saw him account
+    all his matchless victories poor, compared with the triumph you
+    are now in a condition to win--saw him contemn the fickleness of
+    fortune, while, in despite of her, he could pronounce his
+    memorable boast, 'I shall go down to posterity with the Code in my
+    hand!'
+
+    "You have vanquished him in the field; strive now to rival him in
+    the sacred arts of peace! Outstrip him as a lawgiver, whom in arms
+    you overcame! The lustre of the Regency will be eclipsed by the
+    more solid and enduring splendour of the Reign. The praise which
+    false courtiers feigned for our Edwards and Harrys, the Justinians
+    of their day, will be the just tribute of the wise and the good to
+    that monarch under whose sway so mighty an undertaking shall be
+    accomplished. Of a truth, the holders of sceptres are most chiefly
+    to be envied for that they bestow the power of thus conquering,
+    and ruling thus.
+
+    "It was the boast of Augustus--it formed part of the glare in
+    which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost,--that he found
+    Rome of brick, and left it of marble; a praise not unworthy a
+    great prince, and to which the present reign also has its claims.
+    But how much nobler will be the sovereign's boast when he shall
+    have it to say, that he found law dear, and left it cheap; found
+    it a sealed book--left it a living letter; found it the patrimony
+    of the rich--left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the
+    two-edged sword of craft and oppression--left it the staff of
+    honesty and the shield of innocence!
+
+    "To me, much reflecting on these things, it has always seemed a
+    worthier honour to be the instrument of making you bestir
+    yourselves in this high matter, than to enjoy all that office can
+    bestow--office, of which the patronage would be an irksome
+    encumbrance, the emoluments superfluous to one content with the
+    rest of his industrious fellow-citizens that his own hands
+    minister to his wants; and as for the power supposed to follow
+    it--I have lived near half a century, and I have learned that
+    power and place may be severed.
+
+    "But one power I do prize; that of being the advocate of my
+    countrymen here, and their fellow-labourers elsewhere, in those
+    things which concern the best interests of mankind. That power, I
+    know full well, no government can give--no change take away!"
+
+His speech on negro slavery made a deep impression upon the country,
+and rose towards its termination, gradually, but with ever-ascending
+periods, to a close of absolute majesty:--
+
+    "I regard the freedom of the negro as accomplished and sure. Why?
+    Because it is his right--because he has shown himself fit for it;
+    because a pretext, or a shadow of a pretext, can no longer be
+    devised for withholding that right from its possessor. I know that
+    all men at this day take a part in the question, and they will no
+    longer bear to be imposed upon, now they are well informed. My
+    reliance is firm and unflinching upon the great change which I
+    have witnessed--the education of the people, unfettered by party
+    or by sect--witnessed from the beginning of its progress, I may
+    say from the hour of its birth! Yes! It was not for a humble man
+    like me to assist at royal births with the illustrious Prince who
+    condescended to grace the pageant of this opening session, or the
+    great captain and statesman in whose presence I am now proud to
+    speak. But with that illustrious Prince, and with the father of
+    the Queen, I assisted at that other birth, more conspicuous still.
+    With them, and with the head of the House of Russell, incomparably
+    more illustrious in my eyes, I watched over its cradle--I marked
+    its growth--I rejoiced in its strength--I witnessed its maturity;
+    I have been spared to see it ascend the very height of supreme
+    power; directing the councils of state; accelerating every great
+    improvement; uniting itself with every good work; propping all
+    useful institutions; extirpating abuses in all our institutions;
+    passing the bounds of our European dominion, and in the New World,
+    as in the Old, proclaiming that freedom is the birthright of
+    man--that distinction of colour gives no title to oppression--that
+    the chains now loosened must be struck off, and even the marks
+    they have left effaced--proclaiming this by the same eternal law
+    of our nature which makes nations the masters of their own
+    destiny, and which in Europe has caused every tyrant's throne to
+    quake!
+
+    "But they need feel no alarm at the progress of light who defend a
+    limited monarchy and support popular institutions--who place their
+    chiefest pride not in ruling over slaves, be they white or be
+    they black, not in protecting the oppressor, but in wearing a
+    constitutional crown, in holding the sword of justice with the
+    hand of mercy, in being the first citizen of a country whose air
+    is too pure for slavery to breathe, and on whose shores, if the
+    captive's foot but touch, his fetters of themselves fall off. To
+    the resistless progress of this great principle I look with a
+    confidence which nothing can shake; it makes all improvement
+    certain; it makes all change safe which it produces; for none can
+    be brought about unless it has been prepared in a cautious and
+    salutary spirit.
+
+    "So now the fulness of time is come for at length discharging our
+    duty to the African captive. I have demonstrated to you that
+    everything is ordered--every previous step taken--all safe, by
+    experience shown to be safe, for the long-desired consummation.
+    The time has come, the trial has been made, the hour is striking;
+    you have no longer a pretext for hesitation, or faltering, or
+    delay. The slave has shown, by four years' blameless behaviour,
+    and devotion to the pursuits of peaceful industry, that he is as
+    fit for his freedom as any English peasant, ay, or any lord whom
+    I now address.
+
+    "I demand his rights; I demand his liberty without stint. In the
+    name of justice and of law--in the name of reason--in the name of
+    God, who has given you no right to work injustice; I demand that
+    your brother be no longer trampled upon as your slave! I make my
+    appeal to the Commons, who represent the free people of England;
+    and I require at their hands the performance of that condition for
+    which they paid so enormous a price--that condition which all
+    their constituents are in breathless anxiety to see fulfilled! I
+    appeal to this House. Hereditary judges of the first tribunal in
+    the world--to you I appeal for justice. Patrons of all the arts
+    that humanise mankind--under your protection I place humanity
+    herself! To the merciful Sovereign of a free people I call aloud
+    for mercy to the hundreds of thousands for whom half a million of
+    her Christian sisters have cried aloud--I ask that their cry may
+    not have risen in vain. But first I turn my eye to the throne of
+    all justice, and devoutly humbling myself before Him who is of
+    purer eyes than to behold such vast iniquities, I implore that the
+    curse hovering over the head of the unjust and the oppressor be
+    averted from us--that your hearts may be turned to mercy--and that
+    over all the earth His will may at length be done!"
+
+This is nobly to use noble gifts; it is difficult to think ill of a
+man who can carry oratory for a glorious object to such heights of
+splendour. It may seem a duty to some to darken his character with
+detraction, but his inspiring words remain supreme and unsullied and
+will still live when such faults as may be truly laid to his charge
+are long forgotten. To fight for a great cause, Antony, is rightly to
+use great powers, and this is what Lord Brougham did with all his
+might.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+21
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+In the great emprise of war it must often happen that the most awful
+scenes of manifested human power, and the most godlike deeds of
+human glory, are lost to the contemporary world, and utterly unknown
+to succeeding generations, because they were witnessed by no man
+with the gift of expression who could record for after time, in adequate
+language, the majestic spectacle.
+
+In the great war against Germany no great writer has yet appeared
+who was personally in touch as a living witness of the countless deeds
+of glorious valour and acts of heroic endurance that were everywhere
+displayed upon that immense far-stretched front.
+
+But in the wars of former times, a whole battle could be witnessed from
+its beginning to its end by a single commander, and no scenes in
+human life could be more terrible and soul-stirring than the awful ebb
+and flow of a great combat in which the victory of armies and the fate
+of nations hung in the balance.
+
+The battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War might easily at this date
+have long been forgotten had not the pen of Sir William Napier been as
+puissant as his sword. The battle had raged for hours, and the British
+were well-nigh overwhelmed; the Colonel, twenty officers, and over
+four hundred men out of five hundred and seventy had fallen in the
+57th alone; not a third were left standing in the other regiments that
+had been closely engaged throughout the day. Then Cole was ordered
+up with his fourth division as a last hope, and this is how Sir William
+Napier records their advance:--
+
+    "Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke and
+    rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude,
+    startled the enemy's masses, then augmenting and pressing onwards
+    as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and vomiting
+    forth a storm of fire hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front,
+    while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery
+    whistled through the British ranks ... the English battalions,
+    struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking
+    ships; but suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their
+    terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and
+    majesty the British soldier fights.
+
+    "In vain did Soult with voice and gesture animate his Frenchmen;
+    in vain did the hardiest veterans, breaking from the crowded
+    columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open
+    out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up,
+    and, fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and
+    foes, while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to
+    charge the advancing line.
+
+    "Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry.
+
+    "No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm
+    weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were
+    bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread
+    shook the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of
+    every formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant
+    cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as slowly,
+    and with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour
+    of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French
+    reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to
+    restore the fight, but only augmented the irremediable disorder,
+    and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff, went
+    headlong down the steep; the rain flowed after in streams
+    discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the
+    remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood
+    triumphant on the fatal hill!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted victor reels as he
+    places it on his bleeding front.
+
+    "All that night the rain poured down, and the river and the hills
+    and the woods resounded with the dismal clamour and groans of
+    dying men."
+
+Sir William Napier seems intimately to have known the transience of
+the gratitude of nations to those who fight their battles for them. At the
+end of his noble history of the Peninsular War he lets the curtain fall
+upon the scene with solemn brevity in a single sentence, thus:--
+
+    "The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America, some
+    for England: the cavalry, marching through France, took shipping
+    at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all remembrance
+    of the Veterans' services.
+
+    "Yet those Veterans had won nineteen pitched battles, and
+    innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken
+    four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from
+    Portugal, once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed,
+    wounded, or captured two hundred thousand enemies--leaving of
+    their own number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, whiten the
+    plains and mountains of the Peninsula."
+
+Science and the base malignity of our latest adversaries have debased
+modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity and
+honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult to believe
+that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and the petty officer
+at sea that nation can produce a single gentleman.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+22
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+This letter, like the last one, is concerned with war. War brings to every
+man not incapacitated by age or physical defects the call of his country
+to fight, and if need be to die, for it. It also exposes to view the few
+pusillanimous young men who are satisfied to enjoy protection from the
+horrors of invasion and the priceless boon of personal freedom, secured
+to them by the self-sacrifice and valour of others, while they
+themselves remain snugly at home and talk of their consciences.
+
+Patriotism such as that which in 1914 led the flower of our race to flock
+in countless thousands to the standards and be enrolled for battle in
+defence of
+
+  "This precious stone set in the silver sea,"
+  "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,"
+
+being without doubt or cavil one of the noblest emotions of the human
+heart, has often been the begetter of inspired prose. Our own great war
+has not yet produced many fine utterances, and I go back to-day to a
+contemporary of Sir William Napier for one of the noblest outbursts of
+eloquence expressive of a burning patriotism that has ever been poured
+forth.
+
+Someone in the days when Wellington was alive had alluded in the
+House of Lords to the Irish as "aliens," and Richard Sheil, rising in the
+House of Commons, lifted up his voice for his country in an impassioned
+flight of generous eloquence.
+
+Sir Henry Hardinge, who had been at the battle of Waterloo, happened
+to be seated opposite to Sheil in the House, and to him Sheil appealed
+with the deepest emotion to support him in his vindication of his
+country's valour. None will in these days deny that our fellow-citizens of
+Ireland who went to the war displayed a courage as firm and invincible
+as our own:--
+
+    "The Duke of Wellington is not, I am inclined to believe, a man of
+    excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be
+    easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I
+    cannot help thinking, that when he heard his countrymen (for we
+    are his countrymen) designated by a phrase so offensive he ought
+    to have recalled the many fields of fight in which we have been
+    contributors to his renown. Yes, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
+    that he has passed ought to have brought back upon him, that from
+    the earliest achievement in which he displayed that military
+    genius which has placed him foremost in the annals of modern
+    warfare, down to that last and surpassing combat which has made
+    his name imperishable, the Irish soldiers, with whom our armies
+    are filled, were the inseparable auxiliaries to his glory.
+
+    "Whose were the athletic arms that drove their bayonets at Vimiera
+    through those phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of war
+    before? What desperate valour climbed the steeps and filled the
+    moats at Badajos! All! all his victories should have rushed and
+    crowded back upon his memory--Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca,
+    Albuera, Toulouse, and last of all the greatest! (and here Sheil
+    pointed to Sir Henry Hardinge across the House). Tell me, for you
+    were there. I appeal to the gallant soldier before me, from whose
+    opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an
+    intrepid breast; tell me, for you must needs remember, on that day
+    when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while
+    death fell in showers upon them, when the artillery of France,
+    levelled with a precision of the most deadly science, played upon
+    them, when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the
+    example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the
+    onset--tell me if for one instant, when to hesitate for one
+    instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' blenched!
+
+    "And when at length the moment for the last and decisive movement
+    had arrived, and the valour which had so long been wisely cheeked
+    was at length let loose, tell me if Ireland with less heroic
+    valour than the natives of your own glorious isle, precipitated
+    herself upon the foe?
+
+    "The blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in the
+    same stream, on the same field. When the still morning dawned,
+    their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep earth
+    their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now
+    breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven
+    upon their union in the grave.
+
+    "Partners in every peril--in the glory shall we not be permitted
+    to participate, and shall we be told as a requital that we are
+    aliens, and estranged from the noble country for whose salvation
+    our life-blood was poured out?"
+
+A hundred years of strife, misunderstanding, anger, estrangement,
+outrages, bloodshed, and murder separate us from this appealing cry
+wrung from the beating heart of this inspired Irishman. Is the great
+tragedy of England and Ireland that has sullied their annals for seven
+hundred years never to be brought to an end? Is there never to be for
+us a Lethe through which we may pass to the farther shore of
+forgetfulness and forgiveness of the past and reconciliation in the
+future?
+
+That you may live to see it, Antony, is my hope and prayer.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+23
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous passage on the fate of
+Marie Antoinette--in some ways the most splendid of his
+utterances,--and I now am going to quote to you a very great passage
+from Thomas Carlyle on the same tragic subject.
+
+Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must certainly have been familiar
+with Burke's noble ejaculation, to challenge it with emulation; but in the
+result we must admit that he amply justifies his temerity.
+
+The tragic figure of the queen drawn to execution through the roaring
+mob inspired Carlyle with what is surely his most overwhelming
+product.
+
+The august shadow of the Bible is dimly apprehended as the words
+ascend upwards and upwards with simple sublimity to the awful close.
+
+Nothing he wrote in all his multitudinous volumes surpasses this
+astonishing outburst:--
+
+    "Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!
+
+    "For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties,
+    came it not also out of Heaven? _Sunt lachrymæ rerum, et mentem
+    mortalia tangunt_. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks without
+    pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy;--of
+    thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face
+    too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour;
+    and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine
+    and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the merciful end?
+
+    "Look _there_, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is
+    wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes
+    is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale as
+    of one living in death.
+
+    "Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of the
+    World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless,
+    which only curses environ, has to stop--a people drunk with
+    vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee
+    there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac
+    heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell!
+
+    "The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her startled
+    blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face,
+    which she hides with her hands.
+
+    "There is, then, _no_ heart to say, 'God pity thee'?
+
+    "O think not of these: think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the
+    Crucified--Who also treading the winepress alone, fronted sorrow
+    still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and built
+    of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for thee and all the wretched!
+
+    "Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the
+    Tuileries, where thy step was once so light--where thy children
+    shall not dwell.
+
+    "Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes--dumb lies the world;
+    that wild-yelling world, and all its madness, is behind thee."
+
+There is a passage in Carlyle's tempestuous narrative of the taking of
+the Bastille which has always seemed to me to give it the last
+consummate touch of greatness.
+
+Suddenly he pauses in the turmoil and dust and wrath and madness of
+that tremendous conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over
+peaceful France, and he exclaims:--
+
+    "O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant on
+    reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
+    cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the
+    Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are
+    even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:--and also
+    on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hôtel de Ville."
+
+And a few sentences further on a heart of stone must be moved by
+what the archives of that grim prison-house revealed:--
+
+    "Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice.
+    Read this portion of an old letter.
+
+    "'If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake
+    of God and the Most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my
+    dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to show that she is
+    alive! It were the greatest consolation I could receive; and I
+    should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur.'
+
+    "Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret-Demery, and hast no
+    other history,--she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou art
+    dead! Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this question;
+    to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of men."
+
+In the reign of Louis XV. alone, there were no less than fifteen
+thousand _lettres de cachet_ issued, by which anyone could be
+suddenly arrested, and, without trial, and, heedless of protest,
+imprisoned perhaps for life in the Bastille.
+
+In the excesses of the Reign of Terror three or four thousand persons
+perished. Their deaths were spectacular, and have covered with
+execrations their dreadful executioners.
+
+But it is right that we should remember, Antony, the life-long agony
+and the unutterable despair of the victims of that remorselessly cruel
+system which the Revolution overthrew.
+
+The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in _Sartor Resartus_, seems to
+me to come nearer to the above excerpts than anything else in Carlyle,
+though at a perceptible distance:--
+
+    "O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest
+    bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,
+    know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee,
+    'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!
+
+    "But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of
+    Creation is--Light. Till the eye have vision the whole members are
+    in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tossed Soul, as
+    once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: 'Let there be
+    Light!' Even to the greatest that has felt such moment is it not
+    miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to
+    the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the
+    rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate
+    Firmaments: deep, silent rock-foundations are built beneath, and
+    the skyey vault, with its everlasting Luminaries, above; instead
+    of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile,
+    heaven-encompassed World.
+
+    "I, too, could now say to myself: 'Be no longer a Chaos, but a
+    World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the
+    pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in
+    God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then.
+    Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole
+    might. Work while it is called to-day; for the night cometh
+    wherein no man can work.'"
+
+There is another passage in _Sartor Resartus_ which I have always
+held in veneration, though the field labourer is not now so
+"hardly-entreated" as when Carlyle wrote of him:--
+
+    "Two men I honour, and no third. First the toilworn Craftsman that
+    with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth, and
+    makes her man's.
+
+    "Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein
+    notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue indefeasibly royal, as of
+    the sceptre of this planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all
+    weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is
+    the face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for
+    thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee!
+    Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were
+    thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our
+    conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
+    marred. For in thee too lay a god-created form, but it was not to
+    be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and
+    defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to
+    know freedom. Yet toil on, toil on; _thou_ art in thy duty, be
+    out of it who may: thou toilest for the altogether indispensable,
+    for daily bread.
+
+    "A second man I honour, and still more highly: him who is seen
+    toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but
+    the bread of life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards
+    inward harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his
+    outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his
+    outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him
+    artist; not earthly craftsman only, but inspired thinker, who with
+    heaven-made implement conquers heaven for us! If the poor and
+    humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil
+    for him in return, that he have light, have guidance, freedom,
+    immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else
+    is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.
+
+    "Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities
+    united; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's
+    wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this
+    world know I nothing than a peasant saint, could such now anywhere
+    be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself;
+    thou wilt see the splendour of heaven spring forth from the
+    humblest depths of earth, like a light shining in great darkness."
+
+_Sartor Resartus_ has long taken its place among the greatest prose
+works of the nineteenth century, and it is a strange commentary on this
+mandate to us all to "produce, produce!" to find that for eleven years
+Carlyle could find no publisher who would give it in book form to the
+world!
+
+It is a solemn reflection to think that there may be many books of
+eloquence and splendour that have never seen the light of publicity.
+Publishers concern themselves less with what is finely written than with
+what will best sell; and in their defence it may be acceded that some of
+the masterpieces of literature have at their first appearance before the
+world fallen dead from the press.
+
+The first edition of FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyám_, issued at one
+shilling, was totally unrecognised, and copies of it might have been
+bought for twopence in the trays and boxes of trash on the pavement
+outside old bookshops!
+
+But if once a work is published, time will with almost irresistible force
+place it ultimately in the station it deserves in the literature of the
+world.
+
+Instant acceptance not seldom preludes final rejection. In the middle of
+the last century Martin Tupper's _Proverbial Philosophy_ garnished
+every drawing-room table; and now, where is it?
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+_P.S._--Do not look for the passage on Marie Antoinette in the _French
+Revolution_, for you will not find it there, but in the "Essay of the
+Diamond Necklace."
+
+
+
+24
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+You and I once had a cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, had he
+lived, would very certainly have left a brilliant addition to the
+lustre of the name he bore. He was born in 1798, and only lived
+forty-five years, dying when his powers were leading him to high
+fortune in that legal profession which so many of the family have
+pursued.
+
+He was a scholar of Eton; a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; he
+won the Greek and Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again in 1821.
+To him, therefore, the classic spirit was inborn, and a training that
+omitted the study of Latin and Greek the very negation of education.
+He would have had something very trenchant to say of what is now known
+as "the modern side." He wrote a very rich and splendid prose, and it
+is no fond family partiality that leads me to quote to you his
+eloquent and precious defence of the classical languages:--
+
+    "I am not one whose lot it has been to grow old in literary
+    retirement, devoted to classical studies with an exclusiveness
+    which might lead to an overweening estimate of these two noble
+    languages. Few, I will not say evil, were the days allowed to me
+    for such pursuits; and I was constrained, still young and an
+    unripe scholar to forego them for the duties of an active and
+    laborious profession. They are now amusements only, however
+    delightful and improving. For I am far from assuming to understand
+    all their riches, all their beauty, or all their power; yet I can
+    profoundly feel their immeasurable superiority in many important
+    respects to all we call modern; and I would fain think that there
+    are many even among my younger readers who can now, or will
+    hereafter, sympathise with the expression of my ardent admiration.
+
+    "Greek--the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as
+    our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, or
+    indefatigable strength, with the complication and the distinctness
+    of Nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing
+    was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the
+    mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the
+    gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety and
+    picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of Æschylus;
+    not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor fathomed to the
+    bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up
+    with all its ardours even under the Promethean touch of
+    Demosthenes!
+
+    "And Latin--the voice of empire and of war, of law and of the
+    state, inferior to its half-parent and rival in the embodying of
+    passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in
+    sustaining the measured march of history; and superior to it in
+    the indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark
+    of an imperial and despotising republic; rigid in its
+    construction, parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding
+    to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of
+    Greek-like splendour in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius;
+    proved indeed, to the uttermost, by Cicero, and by him found
+    wanting; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its
+    conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the
+    spirit of nations and not with the passions of individuals;
+    breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the
+    schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by
+    the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by
+    the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.
+
+    "These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly
+    counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not
+    failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink
+    deep at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful
+    in human language.
+
+    "The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and of
+    Rome, are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their
+    marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate
+    polish, has sunk for ever in his heart, and thence throws out
+    light and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyance of his
+    maturer years. No avocations of professional labour will make him
+    abandon their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he
+    will find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons--to reperuse
+    them in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations, and in
+    the clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and
+    to the world with superior profit.
+
+    "The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of
+    modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he
+    reverence that of classical antiquity; and in declining age, when
+    the appetite for magazines and reviews, and the ten-times repeated
+    trash of the day, has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a
+    circle of school-fellow friends, and end his secular studies as he
+    began them, with his Homer, his Horace, and his Shakespeare."
+
+Ah, what an echo, Antony, every word of this beautiful passage finds in
+my own heart, only saddened with the poignant regret that the
+necessary business and occupation of the passing years have dulled for
+me such unpolished facility, as I may once have possessed, for
+perusing my Homer and my Horace!
+
+It is, indeed, rare in these days to find gentlemen as familiar as were
+their forebears with Latin and Greek. You, Antony, will probably find
+yourself as you grow up in like case with myself, but there will remain
+for your unending instruction and delight all the glories of English
+literature, to give you a taste for which these few letters of mine are
+written, plucking only a single flower here and there from the most
+wonderful garden in the world.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+25
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Cardinal Newman, of whom I shall write to-day, was the first of the
+great writers born in the nineteenth century, and he lived from 1801 to
+1890. Besides being a master of English prose he was no mean poet;
+but above all else he was a man of immense personal power, which was
+strangely associated with a manifest saintliness which compelled
+diffidence from those admitted to his intimacy.
+
+I have described him as I knew him in my _Memories_;[1] and now will
+quote to you his utterance on music and its effect upon the heart of
+man, which has always seemed to me too precious to leave buried in a
+sermon:--
+
+    "Let us take an instance, of an outward and earthly form, or
+    economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified; I
+    mean musical sounds as they are exhibited most perfectly in
+    instrumental harmony.
+
+    "There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen; yet what
+    a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What Science brings so
+    much out of so little? out of what poor elements does some great
+    master in it create his new world!
+
+    "Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere
+    ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day,
+    without reality, without meaning? We may do so; and then, perhaps,
+    we shall also account theology to be a matter of words; yet, as
+    there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who
+    feel cannot communicate, so is there also in the wonderful
+    creation of sublimity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many
+    men the very names which the Science employs are utterly
+    incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be
+    fanciful or trifling, to speak of the views which it opens upon us
+    to be childish extravagance; yet is it possible that that
+    inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so
+    simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic,
+    should be a mere sound, which is gone and perishes?
+
+    "Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen
+    emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful
+    impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by
+    what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in
+    itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from
+    some higher sphere, they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in
+    the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our home; they
+    are the voice of angels or the magnificat of Saints, or the living
+    laws of Divine Governance, or the Divinic attributes; something
+    are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we
+    cannot utter,--though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise
+    distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them."
+
+Of quite another order is the Cardinal's description of a gentleman.
+Here there is no flight of poetical imagination, but a manifestation of
+felicitous intuition and penetrating insight as rare as it is convincing,
+and the generous wide vision of a man of the world, undimmed by the
+faintest trace of prejudice:--
+
+    "Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say
+    he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both
+    refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in
+    merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and
+    unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their
+    movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits
+    may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or
+    conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy
+    chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and
+    fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat
+    without them.
+
+    "The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may
+    cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast;
+    all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint,
+    or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to
+    make everyone at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all
+    his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the
+    distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom
+    he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or
+    topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation
+    and never wearisome.
+
+    "He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be
+    receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except
+    when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort; he has no
+    ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to
+    those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the
+    best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes
+    unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings
+    for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From
+    a long-sighted prudence he observes the maxim of the ancient sage,
+    that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he
+    were one day to be our friend. He has too much sense to be
+    affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember
+    injuries, and too indolent to bear malice.
+
+    "He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical
+    principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to
+    bereavement because it is irreparable, and to death because it is
+    his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind his
+    disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering
+    discourtesy of better, perhaps, but less educated minds, who, like
+    blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake
+    the point in argument, waste their strength in trifles,
+    misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved
+    than they find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he
+    is too clear-headed to be unjust, he is as simple as he is
+    forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.
+
+    "Nowhere shall we find greater candour, consideration, indulgence;
+    he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for
+    their mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason as well as
+    its strength, its province, and its limits. If he be an unbeliever
+    he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or
+    to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in
+    his infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he even supports
+    institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which he does
+    not assent; he honours the ministers of religion, and it contents
+    him to decline its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them.
+    He is a friend of religious toleration, and that, not only because
+    his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith with
+    an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of
+    feeling which is the attendant on civilisation.
+
+    "Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even
+    when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of
+    imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of
+    the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be
+    no large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the Being of God,
+    sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the
+    attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or
+    creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent
+    thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a
+    teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity
+    itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical
+    powers, he is able to see what sentiments are consistent in those
+    who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others
+    to feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which
+    exist in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions.
+
+    "Such are the lineaments of the ethical character which the
+    cultivated intellect will form apart from religious principle."
+
+Surely this is a wonderful utterance from a Cardinal of the Church of
+Rome, full of urbanity and the wisdom of the world.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Pp. 52-57.]
+
+
+
+26
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have in a former letter quoted a short but noble passage from Lord
+Macaulay on the great Lord Chatham.
+
+But I feel that the writer who was perhaps the greatest essayist that
+England has ever produced must not in these letters be fobbed off with
+so slight a notice and quotation.
+
+What has always seemed to me the supremest passage that flowed
+from his wonderful pen is to be found in his paper on Warren Hastings
+which appeared originally in the _Edinburgh Review_.
+
+His description in that essay of the opening of the great impeachment,
+has given all succeeding generations a vision of one of the most
+majestic scenes in the whole history of man.
+
+    "There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more
+    gorgeous with jewellery and cloth of gold, more attractive to
+    grown-up children, than that which was then exhibited at
+    Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well
+    calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an
+    imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong
+    to the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past,
+    were collected on one spot and in one hour. All the talents and
+    all the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and
+    civilisation were now displayed, with every advantage that could
+    be derived both from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in
+    the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many
+    troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of our
+    constitution were laid; or far away, over boundless seas and
+    deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshipping
+    strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left.
+    The High Court of Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed
+    down from the days of the Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused
+    of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Benares,
+    and over the ladies of the princely house of Oude.
+
+    "The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of
+    William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at
+    the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the
+    just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall
+    where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted
+    a victorious party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where
+    Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid
+    courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor
+    civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers.
+    The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold
+    and ermine, were marshalled by the heralds under Garter
+    King-at-Arms. The judges in their vestments of state attended to
+    give advice on points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords,
+    three-fourths of the Upper House as the Upper House then was,
+    walked in solemn order from their usual place of assembling to the
+    tribunal. The junior Baron present led the way, George Eliot, Lord
+    Heathfield, recently ennobled for his memorable defence of
+    Gibraltar against the fleets and armies of France and Spain. The
+    long procession was closed by the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of
+    the realm, by the great dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons
+    of the King. Last of all came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by
+    his fine person and noble bearing. The grey old walls were hung
+    with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such
+    as has rarely excited the fears or the emulation of an orator.
+    There were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free,
+    enlightened, and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness,
+    wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of
+    every art. There were seated round the Queen the fair-haired young
+    daughters of the House of Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of
+    great Kings and Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle
+    which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons,
+    in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a
+    scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the
+    historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero
+    pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a
+    senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus
+    thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side
+    by side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age.
+    The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has
+    preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and
+    statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had
+    induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark and profound mine
+    from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition, a
+    treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with
+    injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious,
+    massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her
+    to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith.
+    There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the
+    Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by love and
+    music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the
+    members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticised, and
+    exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs.
+    Montague. And there the ladies whose lips, more persuasive than
+    those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against
+    palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
+
+    "The Serjeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar,
+    and bent his knee. The culprit was indeed not unworthy of that
+    great presence. He had ruled an extensive and populous country,
+    had made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and
+    pulled down princes. And in his high place he had so borne
+    himself, that all had feared him, that most had loved him, and
+    that hatred itself could deny him no title to glory, except
+    virtue. He looked like a great man, and not like a bad man. A
+    person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage
+    which, while it indicated deference to the court, indicated also
+    habitual self-possession and self-respect, a high and intellectual
+    forehead, a brow pensive, but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible
+    decision, a face pale and worn, but serene, on which was written,
+    as legibly as under the picture in the council-chamber at
+    Calcutta, _Mens æqua in arduis_; such was the aspect with which
+    the great Proconsul presented himself to his judges."
+
+Such a scene can only find its appropriate enactment at the centre of a
+great empire and amid a people with an august history behind them,
+conscious of present magnificence and confident of future glory.
+
+We are now far into the second century since that memorable spectacle
+filled to the walls the great Hall of Westminster.
+
+What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine spirit of liberty and adorned
+by the sacred principle of personal freedom, has been superseded by a
+socialistic democracy under which personal freedom suffers frequent
+curtailments, and liberty is severely abridged by the mandates of trade
+unions, the prohibitions of urban potentates, and the usurpations of
+medicine men.
+
+Under these cramping and crippling deprivations we have lost the
+collective sense of greatness as a race that infused every participator in
+the splendid pageant of such an event as the Impeachment of Warren
+Hastings. One has but to imagine an impeachment to-day with the
+dominant personages in it chosen from the strike leaders and labour
+delegates of the proletariat, assisted by promoted railway porters and
+ennobled grocers, to perceive what a distance, and down what a
+declivity we have travelled since those days when it was impossible for
+any great public function to take place without its becoming naturally
+and without conscious effort the occasion for a manifestation of the
+pomp, circumstance, and splendour inseparable from the solemn acts
+of a great people performed by their greatest men.
+
+But I am one, Antony, who look forward with steadfast hope and belief
+to a reaction from our present vulgarity, and to a reascension of
+England to a greater dignity, honour, and nobleness both in its public
+and private life than is observable to-day.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+27
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have not in my letters to you travelled beyond our own islands in
+search of great English prose, but I propose now to make one
+divergence from this rule and quote a very great and deservedly
+far-famed speech, uttered on a memorable occasion, of Abraham
+Lincoln, President of the United States.
+
+At the present time, I think, the name of Lincoln lies closer to the
+hearts of the American people than that of any other, not even
+excepting Washington and Hamilton. The latter, though they
+established American independence, remained in a personal sense
+English gentlemen till their death. Lincoln was born in the backwoods in
+rude poverty, received no education but what he acquired by his own
+unaided efforts, and lived and died a man of the people, the ideal type
+of native-born American.
+
+He rose from the lowest to the highest position in the State, borne
+upwards by the simple nobility of his character, by the stainless purity
+of his actions, and the splendid motive of all his endeavours. His
+speeches and writings derive their power and distinction from no tricks
+of oratory, felicity of diction, or nimbleness of mind. They are the vocal
+results of the beatings of his great heart.
+
+He led his people to war in the manner of a prophet of Israel; with an
+awful austerity, majestic, invincible, and with hand uplifted in sure
+appeal to the God of battles. On the field of Gettysburg, where was
+waged the most tremendous of all combats of the war, he came to
+dedicate a cemetery to the innumerable dead, and these were his few
+and noble words:--
+
+    "Fourscore-and-seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this
+    continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
+    proposition that all men are created equal.
+
+    "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
+    nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
+    endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have
+    come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place
+    for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
+    It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
+
+    "But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
+    we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
+    struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add of
+    detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say
+    here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us,
+    the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
+    which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is
+    rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
+    before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased
+    devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure
+    of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not
+    have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new
+    birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the
+    people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
+
+Few are the opportunities in the history of the world when the time, the
+place, the occasion, and the words spoken, have combined so
+poignantly to move the hearts of men.
+
+One can imagine the vast concourse standing awestruck and uncovered
+before the solemn splendour of this noble dedication, every phrase of
+which will remain for generations a treasured and sacred memory in
+countless thousands of homes of the great continent in the West.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+28
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an entirely new style of
+English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away,
+the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and
+there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were
+the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all
+the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us,
+in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative
+alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds.
+
+This flamboyant style seems to have synchronised with the general
+decline of reserve and ceremony in English life, and with the rise of the
+modern familiar intimacy that leaves no privacy even to our thoughts.
+Our grandfathers would have hesitated to have discussed at the
+dinner-table, even after the ladies had withdrawn, what is now set
+down for free debate at ladies' clubs, and canvassed in the correct
+columns of the _Guardian_.
+
+This new habit of mind and speech has affected our literature deeply
+and diversely. In the hands of the really great masters such as Carlyle,
+Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate revelations of the throbbings of their
+hearts, and the direct and untrammelled appeal of their inmost souls
+crying in the market-place, take forcible possession of our affections,
+and bring them into closer touch with each one of us than was ever
+possible with the older restrained writers.
+
+But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the licence of
+intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, and a
+contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative, and redundancy;
+and although the disappearance of reserve in modern writing may tend
+to reduce all but the production of the great to a depressing state of
+vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's hand, has unlocked for us the
+doors of an Aladdin's palace! But even if the restraint of the ancient
+writers has disappeared from the prose of our own times, all great
+writing of necessity must now and always possess the quality of
+simplicity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of nature about him
+with the eyes of a visionary, and wrote of what he saw as one so
+inspired as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed his glorious
+outpourings in a raiment of perfect simplicity.
+
+    "This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance of the firmament;
+    and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of
+    these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate
+    Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 'The earth shook,
+    the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God,' 'He doth set
+    His bow in the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of every
+    drooping swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love. 'In them
+    hath He set a _tabernacle_ for the sun,' whose burning ball,
+    which, without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable
+    and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that
+    firmament surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by
+    mediatorial ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden
+    pavement is spread for his chariot wheels at morning; by the
+    firmament of clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill
+    with light at noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is
+    closed at evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of
+    the firmament his implacable light is divided and its separated
+    fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of
+    distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains
+    burn as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this
+    tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows
+    of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of His
+    own majesty to men, upon the _throne_ of the firmament.
+
+    "As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity,
+    we cannot behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the
+    Preserver of men those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place.
+    'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by
+    earth, for it is His footstool.'
+
+    "And all those passings to and fro of fruitful showers and
+    grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built
+    about the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening
+    thunders, and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to
+    deepen in our hearts the acceptance and distinctness and dearness
+    of the simple words, 'Our Father, Which art in heaven!'"
+
+The description of the first approach to Venice before the days of
+railways will always be cherished by those who admire Ruskin's work as
+one of his most characteristic and memorable utterances:--
+
+    "In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
+    distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
+    toil was rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate survey of
+    the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the
+    happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last
+    hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village,
+    where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its
+    valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty
+    perspective of the causeway, see, for the first time, the towers
+    of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of peaceful
+    and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the
+    railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
+    equivalent--in those days, I say, when there was something more to
+    be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
+    successive halting place than a new arrangement of glass roofing
+    and iron girder--there were few moments of which the recollection
+    was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that which, as I
+    endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought
+    him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open
+    lagoon from the canal of Mestre.
+
+    "Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
+    source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this
+    direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of
+    the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly
+    disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange
+    rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of
+    the deep sea; for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could
+    at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water
+    which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north
+    and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the
+    east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of
+    black weed separating and disappearing gradually in knots of
+    heaving shoal under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed
+    it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so
+    calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the
+    Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of
+    Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of northern waves, yet
+    subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry
+    pallor into a field of burnished gold as the sun declined behind
+    the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named 'St
+    George of the Sea-weed.'
+
+    "As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the
+    traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low,
+    sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows;
+    but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Argua
+    rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright
+    mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill
+    extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning
+    with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded
+    the whole horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here and
+    there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
+    fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
+    breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its
+    snow into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the
+    barred clouds of evening one after another, countless, the crown
+    of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them,
+    to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and
+    on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as
+    the quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.
+
+    "And at last when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its
+    untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded
+    rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the
+    Indian Sea; when first upon the traveller's sight opened the long
+    ranges of columned palaces--each with its black boat moored at the
+    portal, each with its image cast down beneath its feet upon that
+    green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich
+    tessellation when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the
+    shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind
+    the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so
+    adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just
+    bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen,
+    the gondolier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!" struck sharp upon the ear, and
+    the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over
+    the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and
+    loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and when at
+    last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across
+    which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine
+    veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was
+    no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the
+    visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to
+    forget the darker truths of its history and its being, "Well
+    might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to
+    the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the
+    waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her
+    state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all
+    which in Nature was wild or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as
+    the waves and tempests--had been won to adorn her instead of to
+    destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty
+    which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the
+    hour-glass as well as of the sea."
+
+It is now many years since I first saw Venice rising from the sea on a
+September morning as I sailed towards it across the Adriatic from
+Trieste; and as we glided closer and closer its loveliness was slowly and
+exquisitely unveiled under the slanting beams of the early sun.
+
+In all my wanderings over two hemispheres I remember no vision so
+enchanting and unsurpassable! May you live to see it, Antony, before
+the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its beauty.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+29
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Born in Devon at the same time--within a year--as Ruskin, James
+Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same sanguine and
+poetical characteristics. His historical writings have, I believe, been
+somewhat discredited of late years owing to the permission he is
+alleged to have given himself to warp his account of events in order to
+buttress some prejudice or contention of his own.
+
+But if we set him aside as an accurate authority, we can at once restore
+him to our regard as a lord of visionary language:--
+
+    "Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow-dropping, mellow
+    autumn of a rich, glorious summer. In the old man Nature has
+    fulfilled her work; she leads him with her blessings; she fills
+    him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
+    children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to
+    the grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we
+    should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most
+    beautiful.
+
+    "There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with
+    bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the
+    symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side of the grave;
+    which the grave gapes to finish before the victory is won;
+    and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of
+    man.
+
+    "Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose
+    life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to
+    do the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or
+    Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers,
+    priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has been
+    the same--the same bitter cup has been given them to drink."
+
+Another passage of deep and melancholy beauty cannot be omitted
+from this volume. It records in language of haunting loveliness the
+passing away of feudalism and chivalry and of a thousand years of the
+pageantry of faith:--
+
+    "The great trading companies were not instituted for selfish
+    purposes, but to ensure the consumer of manufactured articles that
+    what he purchased was properly made and of a reasonable price.
+    They determined prices, fixed wages, and arranged the rules of
+    apprenticeship. But in time the companies lost their healthy
+    vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were in the reign
+    of Elizabeth hastening away. There were no longer tradesmen to be
+    found in sufficient number who were possessed of the necessary
+    probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon
+    with the deep melancholy which, in those days, settled down on
+    Elizabeth herself.
+
+    "For indeed a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and
+    direction of which even is still hidden from us--a change from era
+    to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up;
+    old things were passing away, and the faith and life of ten
+    centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the
+    abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and
+    all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were
+    passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond
+    the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk
+    back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm
+    earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a
+    small atom in the awful vastness of the Universe.
+
+    "In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for
+    themselves, mankind was to remain no longer. And now it is all
+    gone--like an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between us and the
+    old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the
+    historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us,
+    and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among
+    the aisles of the cathedrals, only as we gaze upon their silent
+    figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float
+    before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps
+    in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediæval
+    age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."
+
+The sound of church bells, being entirely the creation of man, forms
+perhaps a more touching link with the past for us than the eternal
+sounds of nature. Yet the everlasting wash of the waves of the sea
+forms a bond between us and the unplumbed depths of time, as they
+
+  "Begin and cease, and then again begin
+  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring,
+  The eternal note of sadness in.
+  Sophocles long ago
+  Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
+  Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
+  Of human misery."
+
+So wrote Matthew Arnold. Then there is the sound of wind in the trees,
+and the voice of falling waters and rippling streams which must have
+fallen upon the ears of our remotest fore-runners as they do upon our
+own. These eternal sounds about us take no note of our brief coming
+and going, and will be the same when you and I, Antony, and all the
+millions that come after us in the world have returned to dust.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+30
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Though I do not myself rank Matthew Arnold among the great prose
+writers of England, yet, like all true poets--and he indeed was one of
+them,--he wrote excellent English prose.
+
+It is true that he turned to poetry to express his finest emotions and
+thoughts, and he himself alludes to his prose writings thus: "I am a
+mere solitary wanderer in search of the light, and I talk an artless,
+unstudied, everyday familiar language. But, after all, this is the
+language of the mass of the world."
+
+The chief note of all his teaching was urbanity. "The pursuit of
+perfection," he said, "is the pursuit of sweetness and light." "Culture
+hates hatred: culture has one great passion--the passion for sweetness
+and light."
+
+This teaching, no doubt, leads to fields of pleasantness and charm,
+and not at all to the high places of self-sacrifice, or the austere
+peaks of martyrdom. Burning indignation against intolerable things,
+fierce denunciation of the cruelties and abominations of the world
+find no encouragement or sympathy from this serene, detached, and
+therefore somewhat ineffectual, teaching.
+
+Sweetness and light would never have interfered with the slave trade,
+or fiercely fought beside Plimsoll for the load-line on the sides of
+ships.
+
+We did not fight the Germans under the doctrine of sweetness and
+light.
+
+It was a beautiful and edifying adornment for the drawing-room in
+times of Victorian self-satisfied peace, but was a tinsel armour for the
+battle of life, and entirely futile as a sword for combating wrong.
+
+I am not sure that Matthew Arnold would not have called those who
+wrathfully slash about them at abominable evils, Philistines.
+
+After all, the great men of action and the great writers of the world
+have been capable of harbouring great enthusiasms and deep
+indignations in their hearts; and these emotions do not emerge from a
+"passion for sweetness and light."
+
+A better doctrine, Antony, is, I think, to try to push things along
+cheerfully but strenuously in the right direction wherever and whenever
+you can.
+
+As a writer I think Matthew Arnold's best passage is to be found in the
+Preface to his _Essays in Criticism_:--
+
+    "Oxford. Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by
+    the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!
+
+    "There are our young barbarians, all at play!
+
+    "And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens
+    to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last
+    enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her
+    ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of
+    us, to the ideal, to perfection,--to beauty, in a word, which is
+    only truth seen from another side?--nearer perhaps than all the
+    science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so
+    romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to
+    sides and heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of
+    lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and
+    impossible loyalties!... Apparitions of a day, what is our puny
+    warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which
+    this Queen of Romance has been waging against them for centuries,
+    and will wage after we are gone?"
+
+As a man and a companion,[1] if you expected nothing but delightful
+humour, brilliant discourse, and urbane outlook upon everything, few
+could rival his personal charm; but he would never really join you in a
+last ditch to defend the right, or actually charge with you against the
+wrong, although in his poem "The Last Word," while not participating
+himself in such strenuous doings, he seems to yield a reluctant
+admiration to him who does so charge, and who leaves his "body by the
+wall."
+
+Much has happened since Matthew Arnold poured his scorn upon the
+unregenerate Philistines; but let us remember, Antony, that thousands
+and thousands of these contemned neglecters of sweetness and light
+stood unflinchingly and died upon the plains of France that our country
+and its freedom should survive.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: See my _Memories_, pp. 46-52 and 55.]
+
+
+
+31
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Like the author of the _Peninsular War_, Sir William Butler was great
+both as a soldier and as a writer. His autobiography sparkles with
+humour, irony, and felicitous diction; but it was in his _Life of
+Gordon of Khartoum_ that he rose to his full stature as a contributor
+to the glory of English prose.
+
+The spell of Gordon seems to have, as it were, transfigured all who
+approached him, and raised them out of themselves. One man alone, of
+all those whose lives touched his, has shown that his own pinched and
+narrow mediocrity was proof against the radiance of Gordon's spirit,
+and has feebly attempted to belittle the soldier saint for his own
+justification. But he has failed even to project a spot upon the sun of
+Gordon's fame, and he is already forgotten, while the great soldier's
+name will endure in the hearts of his countrymen till England and its
+people fail.
+
+If Sir William Butler's final noble periods, which I here reproduce, do
+not deeply move him who reads them, then must that reader have a
+heart of stone:--
+
+    "Thus fell in dark hour of defeat a man as unselfish as Sidney, of
+    courage dauntless as Wolfe, of honour stainless as Outram, of
+    sympathy wide-reaching as Drummond, of honesty straightforward as
+    Napier, of faith as steadfast as More. Doubtful indeed is it if
+    anywhere in the past we shall find figure of knight or soldier to
+    equal him, for sometimes it is the sword of death that gives to
+    life its real knighthood, and too often the soldier's end is
+    unworthy of his knightly life; but with Gordon the harmony of life
+    and death was complete, and the closing scenes seem to move to
+    their fulfilment in solemn hush, as though an unseen power watched
+    over the sequence of their sorrow.
+
+    "Not by the blind hazard of chance was this great tragedy
+    consummated; not by the discord of men or from the vague
+    opposition of physical obstacle, by fault of route or length of
+    delay, was help denied to him. The picture of a wonderful life had
+    to be made perfect by heroic death. The moral had to be cut deep,
+    and written red, and hung high, so that its lesson could be seen
+    by all men above strife and doubt and discord. Nay, the very
+    setting of the final scenes has to be wrought out in such contrast
+    of colour that the dullest eye shall be able to read the meaning
+    of it all. For many a year back this soldier's life has been a
+    protest against our most cherished teaching. Faith is weakness,
+    we have said. He will show us it is strength. Reward is the right
+    of service. Publicity is true fame. Let us go into action with a
+    newspaper correspondent riding at our elbow, or sitting in the
+    cabin of the ship, has been our practice. He has told us that the
+    race should be for honour, not for 'honours,' that we should 'give
+    away our medal,' and that courage and humility, mercy and
+    strength, should march hand in hand together. For many a year we
+    have had no room for him in our councils. Our armies knew him not;
+    and it was only in semi-savage lands and in the service of remote
+    empires he could find scope for his genius. Now our councils will
+    be shamed in his service, and our armies will find no footing in
+    our efforts to reach him. We have said that the Providence of God
+    was only a calculation of chances; now for eleven months the
+    amazing spectacle will be presented to the world of this solitary
+    soldier standing at bay, within thirty days' travel of the centre
+    of Empire, while the most powerful kingdom on the earth--the
+    nation whose wealth is as the sands of the sea, whose boast is
+    that the sun never sets upon its dominions--is unable to reach
+    him--saving _he_ does not want--but is unable to reach him even
+    with one message of regret for past forgetfulness.
+
+    "No; there is something more in all this than mistake of
+    Executive, or strife of party, or error of Cabinet, or fault of
+    men can explain. The purpose of this life that has been, the
+    lesson of this death that must be, is vaster and deeper than these
+    things. The decrees of God are as fixed to-day as they were two
+    thousand years ago, but they can be worked to their conclusion by
+    the weakness of men as well as by the strength of angels.
+
+    "There is a grey frontlet of rock far away in Strathspey--once the
+    Gordons' home--whose name in bygone times gave a rallying-call to
+    a kindred clan. The scattered firs and wind-swept heather on the
+    lone summit of Craig Ellachie once whispered in Highland
+    clansmen's ear the warcry, 'Stand fast! Craig Ellachie.' Many a
+    year has gone by since kith of Charles Gordon last heard from
+    Highland hilltop the signal of battle, but never in Celtic hero's
+    long record of honour has such answer been sent back to Highland
+    or to Lowland as when this great heart stopped its beating, and
+    lay 'steadfast unto death' in the dawn at Khartoum. The winds that
+    moan through the pine trees on Craig Ellachie have far-off
+    meanings in their voices. Perhaps on that dark January night there
+    came a breath from heaven to whisper to the old Highland rock, 'He
+    stood fast! Craig Ellachie.'
+
+    "The dust of Gordon is not laid in English earth, nor does even
+    the ocean, which has been named Britannia's realm, hold in 'its
+    vast and wandering grave' the bones of her latest hero. Somewhere,
+    far out in the immense desert whose sands so often gave him rest
+    in life, or by the shores of that river which was the scene of so
+    much of his labour, his ashes now add their wind-swept atoms to
+    the mighty waste of the Soudan. But if England, still true to the
+    long line of her martyrs to duty, keep his memory precious in her
+    heart--making of him no false idol or brazen image of glory, but
+    holding him as he was, the mirror and measure of true
+    knighthood--then better than in effigy or epitaph will his life be
+    written, and his nameless tomb become a citadel to his nation."
+
+The statue of Gordon stands in noble reverie in Trafalgar Square, at the
+centre of the Empire for whose honour he died.
+
+In St. Paul's Cathedral he lies in effigy, and engraven upon the
+cenotaph can be seen the most splendid epitaph in the world.
+
+His true greatness has been recorded by Sir William Butler in
+resounding and glorious English; and his last great act of stainless
+nobility has received a deathless tribute.
+
+Your loving old,
+G.P.
+
+
+
+32
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have now come down, at last, to a great writer of English prose who is
+still with us.
+
+Lord Morley at the present day is, I think, universally recognised as the
+greatest living man of letters in the British Empire; he has crowned a
+long record of distinguished literary achievement with his _Life of
+Gladstone_, which has taken its place among the noblest biographies of
+the world, where it is destined to remain into the far future acclaimed
+as a masterpiece. In his description of the veteran statesman launching
+in the House of Commons his great project of Home Rule for Ireland, he
+has surprised himself out of his own reserve, and painted the scene for
+succeeding generations in colours that can never die:--
+
+    "No such scene has ever been beheld in the House of Commons.
+    Members came down at break of day to secure their places; before
+    noon every seat was marked, and crowded benches were even arrayed
+    on the floor of the House from the Mace to the Bar. Princes,
+    ambassadors, great peers, high prelates, thronged the lobbies. The
+    fame of the orator, the boldness of his exploit, curiosity as to
+    the plan, poignant anxiety as to the party result, wonder whether
+    a wizard had at last actually arisen with a spell for casting out
+    the baleful spirits that had for so many ages made Ireland our
+    torment and our dishonour--all these things brought together such
+    an assemblage as no minister before had ever addressed within
+    those world-renowned walls.
+
+    "The Parliament was new. Many of its members had fought a hard
+    battle for their seats, and trusted they were safe in the haven
+    for half a dozen good years to come. Those who were moved by
+    professional ambition, those whose object was social advancement,
+    those who thought only of upright public service, the keen party
+    of men, the men who aspire to office, the men with a past and the
+    men who looked for a future, all alike found themselves adrift on
+    dark and troubled waters. The secrets of the Bill had been well
+    kept. To-day the disquieted host were first to learn what was the
+    great project to which they would have to say that Aye or No on
+    which for them and for the State so much would hang.
+
+    "Of the chief comrades or rivals of the minister's own generation,
+    the strong administrators, the eager and accomplished debaters,
+    the sagacious leaders, the only survivor now comparable to him, in
+    eloquence or in influence, was Mr. Bright. That illustrious man
+    seldom came into the House in those distracted days; and on this
+    memorable occasion his stern and noble head was to be seen in dim
+    obscurity.
+
+    "Various as were the emotions in other regions of the House, in
+    one quarter rejoicing was unmixed. There, at least, was no doubt
+    and no misgiving. There, pallid and tranquil, sat the Irish
+    leader, whose hard insight, whose patience, energy, and spirit of
+    command, had achieved this astounding result, and done that which
+    he had vowed to his countrymen that he would assuredly be able to
+    do. On the benches round him genial excitement rose almost to
+    tumult. Well it might. For the first time since the Union the
+    Irish case was at last to be pressed in all its force and
+    strength, in every aspect of policy and of conscience by the most
+    powerful Englishman then alive.
+
+    "More striking than the audience was the man; more striking than
+    the multitude of eager onlookers from the shore was the rescuer,
+    with deliberate valour facing the floods ready to wash him down;
+    the veteran Ulysses, who, after more than half a century of
+    combat, service, toil, thought it not too late to try a further
+    'work of noble note,' In the hands of such a master of the
+    instrument the theme might easily have lent itself to one of those
+    displays of exalted passion which the House had marvelled at in
+    more than one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches on the Turkish question,
+    or heard with religious reverence in his speech on the Affirmation
+    Bill in 1883.
+
+    "What the occasion now required was that passion should burn low,
+    and reasoned persuasion hold up the guiding lamp. An elaborate
+    scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy to be explained
+    and vindicated. Of that best kind of eloquence which dispenses
+    with declamation this was a fine and sustained example. There was
+    a deep, rapid, steady, onflowing volume of arguments, exposition,
+    exhortation. Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided. Now and
+    again a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted all hearts. But
+    political oratory is action, not words--action, character, will,
+    conviction, purpose, personality. As this eager muster of men
+    underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite in their balance
+    and modulation, the compulsion of his flashing glance and animated
+    gesture, what stirred and commanded them was the recollection of
+    national service, the thought of the speaker's mastering purpose,
+    his unflagging resolution and strenuous will, his strength of thew
+    and sinew well tried in long years of resounding war, his
+    unquenched conviction that the just cause can never fail. Few are
+    the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics, but this was
+    one."
+
+I will not trench upon politics in these letters; but I may hazard the
+belief that could those who rejected this noble effort, by the greatest
+statesman of the age, to assuage the everlasting Irish conflict, have
+looked into the future, few of them but would have supported it with
+relief and thanksgiving.
+
+It is generally perhaps a blessing that the curtain that covers the future
+is impenetrable; but in this case, had it been lifted for us to gaze upon
+the appalling future, Gladstone's last effort for the peace of his country
+would surely not have been permitted to miscarry.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+33
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Two other living writers I will now commend to you, and then I shall
+have done.
+
+The parents of Mr. Belloc, with a happy prevision, anticipated by some
+decades the _entente cordiale_, and their brilliant son felicitously
+manifests in his own person many of the admirable qualities of both
+races. In England he is reported to be forcefully French, and it may be
+surmised that when in France he is engagingly British. Fortunately for
+our literature, it is in the language of his mother that he has found his
+expression. Many are the beautiful utterances scattered through his
+charming works: two of the most picturesque deal with the greatness of
+France; the subject of one is the Ancient Monarchy, and of the other
+the Great Napoleon:--
+
+    "So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out
+    and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and
+    recognised its own nature when the vaults of the Thermæ echoed
+    heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings.
+
+    "Look up the vast valley of dead men crowned, and you may see the
+    gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white
+    beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand the
+    globe, and in his right the hilt of an unconquerable sword. There
+    also are the short strong horsemen of the Robertian House, half
+    hidden by their leather shields, and their sons before them
+    growing in vestment and majesty and taking on the pomp of the
+    Middle Ages; Louis VII., all covered with iron; Philip, the
+    Conqueror; Louis IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they
+    stand in a widening, interminable procession, this great crowd of
+    kings; they loose their armour, they take their ermine on, they
+    are accompanied by their captains and their marshals; at last, in
+    their attitude and in their magnificence they sum up in themselves
+    the pride and the achievement of the French nation.
+
+    "But Time has dissipated what it could not tarnish, and the
+    process of a thousand years has turned these mighty figures into
+    unsubstantial things. You may see them in the grey end of
+    darkness, like a pageant, all standing still. You look again, but
+    with the growing light, and with the wind that rises before
+    morning, they have disappeared."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain
+    sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that
+    passed away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him
+    move along their snows, through the long mysterious twilights of
+    the northern autumn, in silence, with the head bent and the reins
+    in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching
+    towards an ancient solitude and repose. They say it was Napoleon.
+
+    "After him there trailed for days the shadows of the soldiery,
+    vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It was
+    as though the cannon smoke at Waterloo, borne on the light west
+    wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years
+    of combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of
+    the year over the endless plains.
+
+    "But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the
+    Guard, and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French
+    drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the
+    army was of ghosts and was defeated. They passed in the silence
+    which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they
+    sleep in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords."
+
+Time and circumstances have changed our ancient enemies into our
+honoured friends, and the race that fought against us at Waterloo has
+cemented its friendship towards us with its blood; and as we look back
+over the century that divides us from Waterloo we can now with Mr.
+Belloc salute the sombre figure of the defeated conqueror.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+34
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I will now quote to you one other master of splendid English.
+
+Not every temporal sovereign of these realms has deserved a throne
+among the kings of literature. James the First was a poet of some
+merit; Charles the First wrote and spoke with a fine distinction; Queen
+Victoria's letters to her subjects were models of dignified and kindly
+simplicity; but to King George the Fifth by the grace of God it has been
+reserved to give utterance to what I believe to be the most noble and
+uplifting address ever delivered by a king to his people.
+
+From the day of his accession King George has been confronted with
+trials and troubles enough to daunt the stoutest heart, and none of us
+can plumb the depth of anguish that must have been his through the
+awful years of the Great War. He has been tried and proved in the
+fierce fires of adversity, and has emerged ennobled by pain, and
+dowered by sorrow with a gift of expression that has placed him among
+the masters of the glory of English prose.
+
+On the 13th day of May 1922 he concluded a tour of the cemeteries in
+France at Terlinchthun, where there stands on the cliffs over-looking
+the Channel a monument to Napoleon and his Grand Army, and around
+it now lie the innumerable English dead.
+
+Earlier in his pilgrimage Marshal Foch and Lord Haig had in his presence
+clasped hands, and the King with a fine gesture had placed his own
+right hand upon their clasped ones and said, "Amis toujours!" We are
+told that, "going up to the Cross of Sacrifice, the King looked out over
+the closely marshalled graves to the sea, and back towards the woods
+and fields of the Canche Valley where Montreuil stands, and seemed
+reluctant to leave."
+
+At last he turned, and, standing before the great Cross of Sacrifice, he
+spoke from his heart words that those of us, Antony, who love our
+country and the glory of its language will cherish while we live:--
+
+    "For the past few days I have been on a solemn pilgrimage in
+    honour of a people who died for all free men.
+
+    "At the close of that pilgrimage, on which I followed ways already
+    marked by many footsteps of love and pride and grief, I should
+    like to send a message to all who have lost those dear to them in
+    the Great War, and in this the Queen joins me to-day, amidst these
+    surroundings so wonderfully typical of that single-hearted
+    assembly of nations and of races which form our Empire. For here,
+    in their last quarters, lie sons of every portion of that Empire,
+    across, as it were, the threshold of the Mother Island which they
+    guarded, that Freedom might be saved in the uttermost ends of the
+    earth.
+
+    "For this, a generation of our manhood offered itself without
+    question, and almost without the need of a summons. Those proofs
+    of virtue, which we honour here to-day, are to be found throughout
+    the world and its waters--since we can truly say that the whole
+    circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead.
+    Beyond the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, through
+    Eastern Europe in well-nigh unbroken chain they stretch, passing
+    over the holy Mount of Olives itself to the furthest shores of the
+    Indian and Pacific Oceans--from Zeebrugge to Coronel, from Dunkirk
+    to the hidden wildernesses of East Africa.
+
+    "But in this fair land of France, which sustained the utmost fury
+    of the long strife, our brothers are numbered, alas! by hundreds
+    of thousands.
+
+    "They lie in the keeping of a tried and generous friend, a
+    resolute and chivalrous comrade-in-arms, who with ready and quick
+    sympathy has set aside for ever the soil in which they sleep, so
+    that we ourselves and our descendants may for all time reverently
+    tend and preserve their resting-places.
+
+    "And here, at Terlinchthun, the shadow of his monument falling
+    almost across their graves, the greatest of French soldiers--of
+    all soldiers--stands guard over them. And this is just, for side
+    by side with the descendants of his incomparable armies they
+    defended his land in defending their own.
+
+    "Never before in history have a people thus dedicated and
+    maintained individual memorials to their fallen, and, in the
+    course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether
+    there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the
+    years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to
+    the desolation of war. And I feel that, so long as we have faith
+    in God's purposes, we cannot but believe that the existence of
+    these visible memorials will eventually serve to draw all peoples
+    together in sanity and self-control, even as it has already set
+    the relations between our Empire and our Allies on the deep-rooted
+    bases of a common heroism and a common agony.
+
+    "Standing beneath this Cross of Sacrifice, facing the great Stone
+    of Remembrance, and compassed by these sternly simple headstones,
+    we remember, and must charge our children to remember, that as our
+    dead were equal in sacrifice, so are they equal in honour, for the
+    greatest and the least of them have proved that sacrifice and
+    honour are no vain things, but truths by which the world lives.
+
+    "Many of the cemeteries I have visited in the remoter and still
+    desolate districts of this sorely stricken land, where it has not
+    yet been possible to replace the wooden crosses by headstones,
+    have been made into beautiful gardens which are lovingly cared for
+    by comrades of the war.
+
+    "I rejoice I was fortunate enough to see these in the spring, when
+    the returning pulse of the year tells of unbroken life that goes
+    forward in the face of apparent loss and wreckage; and I
+    fervently pray that, both as nations and individuals, we may so
+    order our lives after the ideals for which our brethren died that
+    we may be able to meet their gallant souls once more, humbly but
+    unashamed."
+
+Hard indeed must it be for any Englishman whose heart is quick within
+his bosom not to feel it beat faster with thanksgiving and pride as he
+reads the flawless periods of this glorious speech.
+
+As the final word of consolation, sanctification, and benediction, closing
+the awful agony of the greatest of all wars, preserve, Antony, this
+magnificent threnody in your memory imperishable.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+35
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have come now to the end of my citations for the present. My object,
+Antony, has been to rouse in your heart, if I can, a love, admiration,
+and reverence for the wonders to be found in the treasure-house of
+English prose literature.
+
+I have only opened a little door here and there, so that you can peep in
+and see the visions of splendour within.
+
+Some day perhaps, when you have explored for yourself, you may feel
+surprised that in these letters I have quoted nothing from Sir John Eliot,
+or Addison, or Scott, or Thackeray, or Charles Lamb, or De Quincey, or
+Hazlitt, or other kings and princes of style innumerable. Many, many
+writers whom I have not quoted in these letters have adorned
+everything they touched, but do not seem to me to reach the snow-line
+or rise into great and moving eloquence. Charles Lamb, for example,
+never descends from his equable and altogether pleasing level, far
+above the plain of the commonplace, but neither does he reach up to
+the lofty altitudes of the lonely peaks; and if I began to quote from him,
+I see no obstacle to my quoting his entire works! And of Addison,
+Johnson wrote, "His page is always luminous, but never blazes in
+unexpected splendour"; and he adds, "Whoever wishes to attain an
+English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious,
+must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison."
+
+In selecting such passages as I have in these letters I have necessarily
+followed my own taste, and taste--as I said when I first began writing
+to you--is illusive. I could do no more than cite that which makes my
+own heart beat faster from a compelling sense of its nobility and
+beauty.
+
+When I was young, Antony, I lived long in my father's house among his
+twelve thousand books, with his scholarly mind as my companion, and
+his exact memory as my guide; for more than a quarter of a century
+since those days I have lived in the more modest library of my own
+collecting, and have long learnt how much fine literature there is that I
+have never read, and now can never read. But, Antony, you may not
+find, in these crowded days, even so much time for reading, or so much
+repose for study as I have found, and therefore it is that I have offered
+you in these letters the preferences of my lifetime, even though it has
+been the lifetime of one who makes no claim to be a literary authority.
+
+As you look back at those from whom you have sprung, you will see
+that for five generations they have been men of letters--many
+distinguished, and one world-famous; and though I myself am but a
+puny link in the chain, yet I may perhaps afford you the opportunity
+of hitching your wagon by and by to the star that has for so long ruled
+the destinies of our house.
+
+Farewell, then, dear Antony; and if "the dear God who loveth us" listens
+to the benedictions of the old upon their children's children, may He
+guide and bless you to your life's end.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Glory of English Prose, by Stephen Coleridge
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF ENGLISH PROSE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 13785-8.txt or 13785-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/3/7/8/13785/
+
+Produced by Juliet, Spooty, Reda and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/13785-8.zip b/old/13785-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..28417ab
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/13785-8.zip
diff --git a/old/13785-h.zip b/old/13785-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..683e7c6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/13785-h.zip
diff --git a/old/13785-h/13785-h.htm b/old/13785-h/13785-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6a3ee8e
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/13785-h/13785-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,5460 @@
+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
+<html>
+<head>
+<meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy, see www.w3.org">
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content=
+"text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Glory Of English Prose,
+by The Hon. Stephen Coleridge.</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    P {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         }
+    HR { width: 33%;
+    margin-top: 1em;
+    margin-bottom: 1em;
+       }
+    BODY{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+
+             font :1.05em serif
+       }
+
+    .smallcaps { font-variant: small-caps }
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .note     {margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em; font-size: smaller;} /* footnote */
+    .blkquot  {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */
+    .pagenum  {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right;} /* page numbers */
+    .sidenote {width: 20%; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em; padding-left: 1em; font-size: smaller; float: right; clear: right;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span        {display: block; margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em;}
+    .poem .caesura    {vertical-align: -200%;}
+
+    .caption          {font-size: .70em; }
+
+    a:link {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+    link {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+    a:visited {color:blue; text-decoration:none}
+    a:hover {color:red}
+
+
+
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+
+</style>
+</head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's The Glory of English Prose, by Stephen Coleridge
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Glory of English Prose
+       Letters to My Grandson
+
+Author: Stephen Coleridge
+
+Release Date: October 18, 2004 [EBook #13785]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF ENGLISH PROSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet, Spooty, Reda and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<center><img src="images/image1.jpg" width="324" height="421" alt=
+"Stephen Coleridge" border="0">
+
+<div class="caption">STEPHEN COLERIDGE<br>
+FROM THE PORTRAIT BY BERNARD PARTRIDGE IN THE POSSESSION<br>
+OF THE MESS OF THE SOUTH WALES CIRCUIT</div>
+</center>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1>The Glory of English Prose</h1>
+
+<h2>Letters to my Grandson</h2>
+
+<h3>By</h3>
+
+<h2>The Hon. Stephen Coleridge</h2>
+
+<center>
+<div class="caption">"The chief glory of every people arises from
+its authors" <i>Dr. Johnson</i></div>
+</center>
+
+<h4>G.P. Putnam's Sons<br>
+New York and London<br>
+The Knickerbocker Press 1922</h4>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+
+
+<h4>1922<br>
+by<br>
+Stephen Coleridge<br>
+Made in the United States of America</h4>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name='PREFACE'></a>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<p>If you have read, gentle reader, the earlier series of
+<i>Letters to my Grandson on the World about Him</i>, you are to
+understand that in the interval between those letters and these,
+Antony has grown to be a boy in the sixth form of his public
+school.</p>
+
+<p>It has not been any longer necessary therefore to study an
+extreme simplicity of diction in these letters.</p>
+
+<p>My desire has been to lead him into the most glorious company in
+the world, in the hope that, having early made friends with the
+noblest of human aristocracy, he will never afterwards admit to his
+affection and intimacy anything mean or vulgar.</p>
+
+<p>Many young people who, like Antony, are not at all averse from
+the study of English writers, stand aghast at the vastness of the
+what seems so gigantic an enterprise.</p>
+
+<p>In these letters I have acted as pilot for a first voyage
+through what is to a boy an uncharted sea, after which I hope and
+believe he will have learned happily to steer for himself among the
+islands of the blest.</p>
+
+<p>S.C.</p>
+
+<p>THE FORD, CHOBHAM.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<br>
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<br>
+<div class="smallcaps">
+<a href="#letter1">1. On Good And Bad Style In Prose</a><br>
+<a href="#letter2">2. On The Glory Of The Bible</a><br>
+<a href="#letter3">3. Sir Walter Raleigh</a><br>
+<a href="#letter4">4. Act Of Parliament, 1532</a><br>
+<a href="#letter5">5. The Judicious Hooker And Shakespeare</a><br>
+<a href="#letter6">6. Lord Chief Justice Crewe</a><br>
+<a href="#letter7">7. Sir Thomas Browne And Milton</a><br>
+<a href="#letter8">8. Jeremy Taylor</a><br>
+<a href="#letter9">9. Evelyn's Diary</a><br>
+<a href="#letter10">10. John Bunyan</a><br>
+<a href="#letter11">11. Dr. Johnson</a><br>
+<a href="#letter12">12. Edmund Burke</a><br>
+<a href="#letter13">13. Gibbon</a><br>
+<a href="#letter14">14. Henry Grattan And Macaulay</a><br>
+<a href="#letter15">15. Lord Erskine</a><br>
+<a href="#letter16">16. Robert Hall</a><br>
+<a href="#letter17">17. Lord Plunket</a><br>
+<a href="#letter18">18. Robert Southey</a><br>
+<a href="#letter19">19. Walter Savage Landor</a><br>
+<a href="#letter20">20. Lord Brougham</a><br>
+<a href="#letter21">21. Sir William Napier</a><br>
+<a href="#letter22">22. Richard Sheil</a><br>
+<a href="#letter23">23. Thomas Carlyle</a><br>
+<a href="#letter24">24. Henry Nelson Coleridge</a><br>
+<a href="#letter25">25. Cardinal Newman</a><br>
+<a href="#letter26">26. Lord Macaulay Again</a><br>
+<a href="#letter27">27. President Lincoln</a><br>
+<a href="#letter28">28. John Ruskin</a><br>
+<a href="#letter29">29. James Anthony Froude</a><br>
+<a href="#letter30">30. Matthew Arnold</a><br>
+<a href="#letter31">31. Sir William Butler</a><br>
+<a href="#letter32">32. Lord Morley</a><br>
+<a href="#letter33">33. Hilaire Belloc</a><br>
+<a href="#letter34">34. King George The Fifth</a><br>
+<a href="#letter35">35. Conclusion</a><br>
+</div>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<h2>LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON</h2>
+
+<br>
+ <a name="letter1"></a>
+<h2>1</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>The letters which I wrote "On the world about you" having shown
+you that throughout all the universe, from the blazing orbs in
+infinite space to the tiny muscles of an insect's wing, perfect
+design is everywhere manifest, I hope and trust that you will never
+believe that so magnificent a process and order can be without a
+Mind of which it is the visible expression.</p>
+
+<p>The chief object of those letters was to endorse your natural
+feeling of reverence for the Great First Cause of all things, with
+the testimony of your reason; and to save you from ever allowing
+knowledge of how the sap rises in its stalk to lessen your wonder
+at and admiration of the loveliness of a flower.</p>
+
+<p>I am now going to write to you about the literature of England
+and show you, if I can, the immense gulf that divides distinguished
+writing and speech from vulgar writing and speech.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing so vulgar as an ignorant use of your own
+language. Every Englishman should show that he respects and honours
+the glorious language of his country, and will not willingly
+degrade it with his own pen or tongue.</p>
+
+<p>"We have long preserved our constitution," said Dr. Johnson;
+"let us make some struggles for our language."</p>
+
+<p>There is no need to be priggish or fantastic in our choice of
+words or phrases.</p>
+
+<p>Simple old words are just as good as any that can be selected,
+if you use them in their proper sense and place.</p>
+
+<p>By reading good prose constantly your ear will come to know the
+harmony of language, and you will find that your taste will
+unerringly tell you what is good and what is bad in style, without
+your being able to explain even to yourself the precise quality
+that distinguishes the good from the bad.</p>
+
+<p>Any Englishman with a love of his country and a reverence for
+its language can say things in a few words that will find their way
+straight into our hearts, Antony, and make us all better men. I
+will tell you a few of such simple sayings that are better than any
+more laboured writings.</p>
+
+<p>On the 30th of June, 1921, in the <i>Times</i> In Memoriam
+column there was an entry:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"To the undying memory of officers, non-commissioned officers
+and men of the 9th and 10th battalions of the K.O.Y.L.I.<a name=
+'FNanchor_1_1'></a><a href='#Footnote_1_1'><sup>[1]</sup></a> who
+were killed in the attack on Fricourt in the first battle of the
+Somme"; and below it there were placed these splendid
+words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In February of 1913 news reached England of the death, after
+reaching the South Pole, of four explorers, Captain Scott, their
+leader, among them.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly before the end, Captain Oates, a man of fortune who
+joined the expedition from pure love of adventure, knowing that his
+helplessness with frozen feet was retarding the desperate march of
+the others towards their ship, rose up and stumbled out of the tent
+into a raging blizzard, saying, "I dare say I shall be away some
+time."</p>
+
+<p>This was greatly said. His body was never found; but the rescue
+party who afterwards discovered the tent with the others dead in
+it, put up a cairn in the desolate waste of snow with this
+inscription:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L.E.G. Gates,
+Inniskilling Dragoons, who, on their return from the Pole in March,
+1912, willingly walked to his death in a blizzard to try and save
+his comrades beset with hardship."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>All this was done, said, and written, very nobly by all
+concerned.</p>
+
+<p>In St. Paul's Cathedral there lies a recumbent effigy of General
+Gordon, who gave his life for the honour of England at Khartoum,
+and upon it are engraven these words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"He gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor,
+his sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Even the concentrated terseness of Latin cannot surpass these
+examples of the power of the simplest and shortest English
+sentences to penetrate to the heart.</p>
+
+<p>English can be used, by those who master it as an organ of
+expression, to convey deep emotion under perfect control, than
+which nothing is more moving, nothing better calculated to refine
+the mind, nothing more certain to elevate the character.</p>
+
+<p>Whenever a man has something fine to communicate to his
+fellow-men he has but to use English without affectation, honestly
+and simply, and he is in possession of the most splendid vehicle of
+human thought in the world.</p>
+
+<p>All the truly great writers of English speak with simplicity
+from their hearts, they all evince a spirit of unaffected
+reverence, they all teach us to look up and not down, and by the
+nobility of their works which have penetrated into every home where
+letters are cultivated, they have done an incalculable service in
+forming and sustaining the high character of our race.</p>
+
+<p>Clever flippant writers may do a trifling service here and there
+by ridiculing the pompous and deflating the prigs, but there is no
+permanence in such work, unless&mdash;which is seldom the
+case&mdash;it is totally devoid of personal vanity.</p>
+
+<p>Very little such service is rendered when it emanates from a
+writer who announces himself as equal if not superior to
+Shakespeare, and embellishes his lucubrations with parodies of the
+creeds.</p>
+
+<p>"A Gentleman with a Duster," has in his "Glass of Fashion" shown
+us that the Society depicted in the books of Colonel Repington and
+Mrs. Asquith is not the true and great Society that sustains
+England in its noble station among civilised peoples, and we may be
+sure that neither do these books in the faintest degree represent
+the true and living literature of the times. They will pass away
+and be forgotten as utterly as are the fashion plates and
+missing-word competitions of ten years ago.</p>
+
+<p>Therefore, Antony, be sure that the famous and living literature
+of England, that has survived all the shocks of time and changes of
+modern life, is the best and properest study for a man to fit him
+for life, to refine his taste, to aggravate his wisdom, and
+consolidate his character.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_1'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_1'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter2"></a>
+
+<h2>2</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I alluded, in my first letter to you about English literature,
+to the necessity of your learning from the beginning the wide
+distinction between what is good and what is bad style.</p>
+
+<p>I do not know a better instance of a display of the difference
+between what is fine style and what is not, than may be made by
+putting side by side almost any sentence from the old authorised
+translation of the Bible and the same sentence from <i>The Bible in
+Modern Speech</i>.</p>
+
+<p>I will just put two quotations side by side:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not,
+neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in
+all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."</p>
+
+<p>"Learn a lesson from the wild lilies. Watch their growth. They
+neither toil nor spin, and yet I tell you that not even Solomon in
+all his magnificence could array himself like one of these."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here you can feel the perfect harmony and balance of the old
+version and the miserable commonplaceness of the effort of these
+misguided modern men.</p>
+
+<p>Again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is mauled into:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Repent, he said, for the kingdom of the heavens is now close at
+hand."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These examples are perfectly suited to illustrate the immense
+difference that separates what is noble and fine in style and what
+is poor and third rate.</p>
+
+<p>If you recite the old version aloud you cannot escape the
+harmony and balance of the sentences, and nothing dignified or
+distinguished can be made of the wretched paraphrases of the two
+desecrators of the splendid old text.</p>
+
+<p>And, Antony, I would have you know that I, who have spent a long
+life in precious libraries, loving fine literature with all my
+heart, have long ago reverenced the old version of the Bible as the
+granite corner-stone upon which has been built all the noblest
+English in the world. No narrative in literature has yet surpassed
+in majesty, simplicity, and passion the story of Joseph and his
+brethren, beginning at the thirty-seventh and ending with the
+forty-fifth chapter of Genesis. There is surely nothing more moving
+and lovely in all the books in the British Museum than the picture
+of Joseph when he sees his little brother among his
+brethren:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"And he lifted up his eyes, and saw his brother Benjamin, his
+mother's son, and said, Is this your younger brother, of whom ye
+spake to me? And he said, God be gracious unto thee, my son.</p>
+
+<p>"And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his
+brother: and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his
+chamber, and wept there."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The whole of the forty-fifth chapter is touching and beautiful
+beyond all criticism, transcending all art. To read it is to
+believe every word of it to be true, and to recognise the sublimity
+of such a relation.</p>
+
+<p>No narrative of the great Greek writers reaches the heart so
+directly and poignantly as does this astonishing story. It moves
+swiftly and surely along from incident to incident till Joseph's
+loving soul can contain itself no more:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all of them that
+stood by him; and he cried, Cause every man to go out from me.</p>
+
+<p>"And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself
+known unto his brethren.</p>
+
+<p>"And he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh
+heard.</p>
+
+<p>"And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph; doth my father
+yet live? And he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck, and wept;
+and Benjamin wept upon his neck. Moreover he kissed all his
+brethren and wept upon them.</p>
+
+<p>"And after that his brethren talked with him."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And this wonderful chapter ends thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"And they went up out of Egypt, and came unto the land of Canaan
+unto Jacob their father, and told him, saying, Joseph is yet alive,
+and is governor over all the land of Egypt.</p>
+
+<p>"And Jacob's heart fainted, for he believed them not.</p>
+
+<p>"And they told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said
+unto them: and when he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to
+carry him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived:</p>
+
+<p>"And Israel said, It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive: I
+will go and see him before I die."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If you read the story of Joseph through from start to finish,
+you will see that it is a perfect narrative of the life of a man
+without fault, who suffered much but without resentment, was great
+of heart in evil days, and, when Fortune placed him in a position
+of glory and greatness, showed a stainless magnanimity and a
+brotherly love that nothing could abate. It is the first and most
+perfect story in literature of the nobility of man's soul, and as
+such it must remain a treasured and priceless possession to the
+world's end.</p>
+
+<p>In the short Book of Ruth there lies embalmed in the finest
+English a very tender love story, set in all the sweet surroundings
+of the ripening corn, the gathered harvest, and the humble
+gleaners. Nothing can be more delightful than the direction of
+Boaz, the great land-owner, to his men, after he had espied Ruth in
+her beauty gleaning in his fields:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"And when she was risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young
+men, saying, Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her
+not:</p>
+
+<p>"And let fall also some of the handfuls on purpose for her, and
+leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This little gem in the books of the Bible inspired Hood to write
+one of his most perfect lyrics:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><span style='margin-left: 1em;'>"She stood breast
+high amid the corn</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Clasped by the golden light of
+morn,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Like the sweetheart of the
+sun,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Who many a glowing kiss had
+won.</span><br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 35%;'>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Thus she stood amid the
+stocks,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Praising God with sweetest
+looks.</span><br>
+ <span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Sure, I said, Heaven did not
+mean</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Where I reap thou should'st but
+glean;</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Lay thy sheaf adown and
+come,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Share my harvest and my
+home."</span><br>
+</div>
+
+<p>That the Bible was translated into English at the time when the
+language was spoken and written in its most noble form, by men
+whose style has never been surpassed in strength combined with
+simplicity, has been a priceless blessing to the English-speaking
+race. The land of its birth, once flowing with milk and honey, has
+been for long centuries a place of barren rocks and arid deserts:
+Persians and Greeks and Romans and Turks have successively swept
+over it; the descendants of those who at different times produced
+its different books are scattered to the ends of the earth; but the
+English translation has for long years been the head corner-stone
+in homes innumerable as the sands of the sea in number.</p>
+
+<p>No upheavals of the earth, no fire, pestilence, famine, or
+slaughter, can ever now blot it out from the ken of men.</p>
+
+<p>When all else is lost we may be sure that the old English
+version of the Bible will survive. "Heaven and earth shall pass
+away, but my words shall not pass away."</p>
+
+<p>Do not think it enough therefore, Antony, to hear it read badly
+and without intelligence or emotion, in little detached snippets,
+in church once a week.</p>
+
+<p>Read it for yourself, and learn to rejoice in the perfect
+balance, harmony, and strength of its noble style.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter3"></a>
+
+<h2>3</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I could write you many letters like my last one about the Bible,
+and perhaps some day I will go back to that wonderful Book and
+write you some more letters about it; but now I will go on and tell
+you about some of the great writers of English prose that came
+after the translation of the Bible.</p>
+
+<p>Those translators were the great founders of the English
+language, which is probably on the whole the most glorious organ of
+human expression that the world has yet known.</p>
+
+<p>It blends the classic purity of Greek and the stately severity
+of Latin with the sanguine passions and noble emotions of our
+race.</p>
+
+<p>A whole life devoted to its study will not make you or me
+perfectly familiar with all the splendid passages that have been
+spoken and written in it. But I shall show in my letters, at least
+some of the glorious utterances scattered around me here in my
+library, so that you may recognise, as you ought, the pomp and
+majesty of the speech of England.</p>
+
+<p>One of the great qualities that was always present in the
+writings of Englishmen from the time of Elizabeth down to the
+beginning of the nineteenth century was its restraint.</p>
+
+<p>Those men never became hysterical or lost their perfect
+self-control.</p>
+
+<p>The deeper the emotion of the writer the more manifest became
+the noble mastery of himself.</p>
+
+<p>When Sir Walter Ralegh, that glorious son of Devon, from which
+county you and I, Antony, are proud to have sprung, lay in the
+Tower of London awaiting his cowardly and shameful execution the
+next day at the hands of that miserable James I., writing to his
+beloved wife, with a piece of coal, because they even denied him
+pen and ink, face to face with death, he yet observed a calm and
+noble language that is truly magnifical&mdash;to use the old Bible
+word.</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"For the rest," he wrote, "when you have travailed and wearied
+your thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit
+down by sorrow in the end. Teach your son also to serve and fear
+God while he is young, that the fear of God may grow up in him.
+Then will God be a Husband unto you and a Father unto him; a
+Husband and a Father which can never be taken from you.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time
+when all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the
+world.</p>
+
+<p>"Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay
+it at Sherburne, if the land continue, or in Exeter Church by my
+father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me
+away.</p>
+
+<p>"The Everlasting, Infinite, Powerful and Inscrutable God, that
+Almighty God that is goodness itself, mercy itself, the true life
+and light, keep you and yours, and have mercy on me and teach me to
+forgive my persecutors and false accusers, and send us to meet in
+His Glorious Kingdom. My true wife, farewell. Bless my poor boy,
+pray for me. My true God hold you both in His Arms.</p>
+
+<p>"Written with the dying hand of, sometime thy husband, but now
+alas! overthrown, yours that was, but now not my own.</p>
+
+<p>"WALTER RALEGH."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sir Walter Ralegh, long before he came to his untimely end, had
+written in his great <i>History of the World</i> a wonderful
+passage about death; it is justly celebrated, and is familiar to
+all men of letters throughout the world, so I will quote a portion
+of it for you:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The Kings and Princes of the world have always laid before them
+the actions, but not the ends, of those great ones which preceded
+them. They are always transported with the glory of the one, but
+they never mind the misery of the other, till they find the
+experience in themselves.</p>
+
+<p>"They neglect the advice of God, while they enjoy life, or the
+hope of it; but they follow the counsel of Death upon the first
+approach. It is he that puts into man all the wisdom of the world,
+without speaking a word; which God, with all the Words of His Law,
+promises and threats, doth not infuse.</p>
+
+<p>"Death which hateth and destroyeth man is believed; God which
+hath made him and loves him is always deferred. It is, therefore,
+Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. He tells
+the proud and insolent that they are but abjects, and humbles them
+at the instant; makes them cry, complain and repent; yea, even to
+hate their fore-passed happiness.</p>
+
+<p>"He takes account of the rich, and proves him a beggar; a naked
+beggar which hath interest in nothing but in the gravel that fills
+his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful
+and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and they
+acknowledge it.</p>
+
+<p>"O eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou
+hast persuaded; what none have dared thou hast done; and whom all
+the world have flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and
+despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness,
+all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over
+with these two narrow words&mdash;HIC JACET."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sir Walter Ralegh was born only a few miles down below Ottery
+St. Mary, in the same beautiful valley from which you and I,
+Antony, and the poet have come. The peal of bells in the old church
+tower at Otterton was given by him to the parish; and when "the lin
+lan lone of evening-bells" floats across between the hills that
+guard the river Otter, it should fall upon our ears as an echo of
+the melody that strikes upon our hearts in Ralegh's words.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter4"></a>
+
+<h2>4</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>In looking through some very old Acts of Parliament not long ago
+I was rather surprised to find that in those old times our
+forefathers drew up their statutes in very stately English.</p>
+
+<p>In our own times Acts of Parliament frequently violate the
+simplest rules of grammar, and are sometimes so unintelligible as
+to need the labours of learned judges to find out what they
+mean!</p>
+
+<p>But it seems that in the great days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth
+Acts of Parliament were often written in resounding periods of
+solemn splendour of which the meaning is perfectly clear.</p>
+
+<p>In the twenty-fourth year of the great Henry, the Act denying
+and forbidding any jurisdiction of the Pope of Rome in England was
+passed.</p>
+
+<p>This Act, depriving the Pope of all power in England, marked a
+turning-point in history.</p>
+
+<p>It is headed with these words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>THE PRE-EMINENCE, POWER, AND AUTHORITY OF THE KING OF ENGLAND.
+1532.</p>
+
+<p>"Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles
+it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England
+is an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by
+one supreme head and King having the dignity and royal estate of
+the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of
+all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms and by names of
+spiritualty and temporalty being bounden and owen to bear next to
+God a natural and humble obedience; he being also institute and
+furnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with
+plenary whole and entire power pre-eminence authority prerogative
+and jurisdiction to render and yield justice and final
+determination to all manner of folk residents or subjects within
+this his realm, in all causes matters debates contentions happening
+to occur insurge or begin within the limits thereof without
+restraint or provocation to any foreign princes or potentates of
+the world ... all causes testamentary, causes of matrimony and
+divorces, rights of tithes, oblations and obventions ... shall be
+from hence-forth heard examined licenced clearly finally and
+definitely adjudged and determined within the King's jurisdiction
+and authority and not elsewhere."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The words "Empire" and "Imperial" are in the present day
+degraded from their ancient high estate by an appropriation of them
+to advertise soap or cigarettes or what not; and we even are
+confronted with the "Imperial" Cancer Research Fund, the money of
+which has been employed in artificially inflicting cancer on
+hundreds of thousands of living animals&mdash;a performance utterly
+repugnant to a great many of the inhabitants in the "Empire"!</p>
+
+<p>But people indifferent to the dictates of mercy are not likely
+to have much reverence for words, however august.</p>
+
+<p>Henry VIII., we may be sure, would never have allowed these
+solemn words to be used by people with something to sell, or by
+scientific disease-mongers.</p>
+
+<p>They were great people who could draw up their statutes in
+splendid passages of sustained nobility.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, Antony, salute them across the centuries.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter5"></a>
+
+<h2>5</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>One of the great creators of English prose who lived at the same
+time as Ralegh and Shakespeare was Richard Hooker, who is generally
+known as "the Judicious Hooker."</p>
+
+<p>He was born in Devon, two years after Ralegh, in 1554.</p>
+
+<p>He must very early in life have made his mark as a man of
+learning and piety, for when he was only thirty-one he was made
+Master of the Temple. The controversies in which he there found
+himself involved induced him to retire when he was only
+thirty-seven into the country, for the purpose of writing his
+famous books, <i>The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It is the first great book on the English Church, and it is full
+of magnificent prose. It was divided into eight parts; and in the
+first one, before he had got far into it, he penned the exclamatory
+description of law which will live as long as the
+language:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the
+world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least
+as feeling her care, the greatest as not exempted from her power.
+"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And in the same first part will be found a passage on the Deity
+which portrays faithfully for us the humble wisdom of both the man
+and his age:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into
+the doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and joy
+to make mention of His name; yet our soundest knowledge is to know
+that we know Him not as indeed He is, neither can know Him; and our
+safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we confess
+without confession that His glory is inexplicable, His greatness
+above our capacity to reach. He is above and we upon earth;
+therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Shakespeare was born ten years later than Hooker, in 1564, and
+his share in founding English prose as we know it is, of course,
+not comparable with that of Hooker, for of Shakespeare's prose
+there remains for us but little. Whenever he rose to eloquence he
+clothed himself in verse as with an inevitable attribute, but on
+the rare occasions when he condescended to step down from the great
+line to "the other harmony of prose" he is as splendid as in all
+else. In <i>Hamlet</i> we have this sudden passage:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I have of late, (but wherefore I know not), lost all my mirth,
+foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
+with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me
+a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you,
+this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with
+golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and
+pestilent congregation of vapours.</p>
+
+<p>"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite
+in faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in
+action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the
+beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is
+this quintessence of dust? "</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And the most beautiful letter in the world is that written by
+Antonio to Bassanio in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>. When it is
+remembered that it was out of his friendship for Bassanio that
+Antonio entered into his bond with Shylock, the supreme
+exquisiteness of the few words from friend to friend render this
+letter unsurpassable:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow
+cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit, and
+since, in paying it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are
+cleared between you and me if I might see you at my death;
+notwithstanding, use your pleasure; if your love do not persuade
+you to come, let not my letter."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Well did Shakespeare know that such a letter must make an
+instant appeal to the sweet heart of Portia: "O love!" she cries,
+"despatch all business, and be gone!"</p>
+
+<p>All great poets are masters of a splendid prose, and had
+Shakespeare written some notable work of prose we may be sure it
+would even have surpassed the noble utterances of all his wonderful
+contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>It has been said that no language in the world has yet ever
+lasted in its integrity for over a thousand years. Perhaps printing
+may confer a greater stability on present languages; but whenever
+English is displaced, the sun of the most glorious of all days will
+have set.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter6"></a>
+
+<h2>6</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I do not think that men of letters often search through the old
+law reports for specimens of fine prose, but I believe that here
+and there, in that generally barren field, a nugget of pure gold
+may be discovered by an industrious student.</p>
+
+<p>Much noble prose delivered from the bench down the centuries has
+been lost for ever, for the judges of England have often been
+gentlemen of taste, scholarship, and eloquence. I have found one
+very splendid passage that has somehow survived the wrecks of
+nearly four hundred years.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Chief Justice Crewe, who became Chief Justice of England in
+1624, delivered in the case of the Earl of Oxford the following
+noble tribute to the great house of De Vere:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I heard a great peer of this realm, and learned, say, when he
+lived, there was no king in Christendom had such a subject as
+Oxford. He came in with the Conqueror, Earl of Guienne; shortly
+after the Conquest made Great Chamberlain, above 400 years ago, by
+Henry I., the Conqueror's son; confirmed by Henry II. This great
+honour&mdash;this high and noble dignity&mdash;hath continued ever
+since, in the remarkable surname De Vere, by so many ages,
+descents, and generations, as no other kingdom can produce such a
+peer in one and the selfsame name and title. I find in all this
+time but two attainders of this noble family, and those in stormy
+and tempestuous time, when the government was unsettled, and the
+kingdom in competition. I have laboured to make a covenant with
+myself, that affection may not press upon judgment, for I suppose
+that there is no man that hath any apprehension of gentry or
+nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of so noble
+a name and fame, and would take hold of a twig or twine-thread to
+uphold it. And yet Time hath his revolutions: there must be an end
+to all temporal things, <i>finis rerum</i>,&mdash;and end of names
+and dignities, and whatsoever is <i>terrene</i>; and why not of De
+Vere? For where is De Bohun?&mdash;where is Mowbray?&mdash;where is
+Mortimer? Nay, what is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet?
+They are entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality. And yet,
+let the name and dignity of De Vere stand so long as it pleases
+God."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And alas! we can now ask, Where is De Vere? This great Earldom
+of Oxford was created in 1142, and has disappeared long ago in the
+limbo of peerages said to be in abeyance.</p>
+
+<p>In these days, Antony, when peerages are bought by men
+successful in trade and sold by men successful in intrigue, such
+elevations in rank have ceased to be regarded as the necessary
+concomitants of "great honour" and "high and noble dignity"; so
+that it has long been more reputable in the House of Lords to be a
+descendant than an ancestor. But among the older great families
+there still remains a pride that has descended unsullied through
+many generations, which serves as a fine deterrent from evil deeds,
+and a constant incentive to honour&mdash;and in England the history
+of great names can never be totally ignored, even though the
+country may be ruled by persons who do not know who were their own
+grandfathers.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is more ridiculous and cheap than to sneer at honourable
+descent from famous ancestors; it divertingly illustrates the fable
+of the sour grapes.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter7"></a>
+
+<h2>7</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>You will have seen from the extracts I have already quoted to
+you of the writers of the Elizabethan age that the style of all of
+them possesses something large and resonant, something that may be
+said to constitute the "grand style" in prose; and this quite
+naturally without effort, and without the slightest touch of
+affectation.</p>
+
+<p>A great writer who came immediately after the
+Elizabethans&mdash;namely, Sir Thomas Browne, who lived from 1605
+to 1682&mdash;displays the development in his style of something
+less simple and more precious than ruled in the former
+generation.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to select any passage from his works where all
+is so good. He was curious and exact in his choice of words and
+commanded a wide vocabulary. There is deliberate ingenuity in the
+framing of his sentences, which arrests attention and markedly
+distinguishes his style. His <i>Urn Burial</i>, in spite of its
+elaboration, reaches a grave and solemn splendour.</p>
+
+<p>The fifth chapter, which begins by speaking of the dead who have
+"quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests,"
+rises to a very noble elevation as English prose.</p>
+
+<p>Here I quote one paragraph of it, characteristic of the
+whole:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion
+shares with memory a great part even of our living beings; we
+slightly remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of
+affliction leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no
+extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into
+stones are fables. Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are
+slippery, or fall like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no
+unhappy stupidity. To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful
+of evils past, is a merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest
+the mixture of our few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not
+relapsing into cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw
+by the edge of repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented
+their hopes of subsistency with a transmigration of their
+souls,&mdash;a good way to continue their memories, while having
+the advantage of plural successions they could not but act
+something remarkable in such variety of beings, and, enjoying the
+fame of their passed selves, make accumulation of glory unto their
+last durations. Others, rather than be lost in the uncomfortable
+night of nothing, were content to recede into the common being, and
+make one particle of the public soul of all things, which was no
+more than to return into their unknown and divine original again.
+Egyptian ingenuity was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in
+sweet consistencies, to attend the return of their souls. But all
+was vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies,
+which Cambyses or Time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is
+become merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for
+balsams."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Milton was a contemporary of Sir Thomas Browne, and, like all
+great poets, was a master of resounding prose. All that he wrote,
+both in verse and prose, is severely classic in its form. His
+<i>Samson Agonistes</i> is perhaps the finest example of a play
+written in English after the manner of the Greek dramas.</p>
+
+<p>Milton wrote <i>The Areopagitica</i> in defence of the liberty
+of publishers and printers of books. And it stands for all time as
+the first and greatest argument against interference with the
+freedom of the press.</p>
+
+<p>The Areopagit&aelig; were judges at Athens in its more
+flourishing time, who sat on Mars Hill and made decrees and passed
+sentences which were delivered in public and commanded universal
+respect.</p>
+
+<p>I will quote one of the finest passages in this great and
+splendid utterance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church
+and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves
+as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do
+sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not
+absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to
+be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do
+preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that
+living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as
+vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons' teeth; and being
+sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good
+almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a
+reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book
+kills reason itself; kills the Image of God as it were in the eye.
+Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the
+precious life-blood of a master-spirit; embalmed and treasured up
+on purpose to a life beyond life.</p>
+
+<p>"'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof, perhaps, there
+is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the
+loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare
+the worse.</p>
+
+<p>"We should be wary, therefore, what persecutions we raise
+against the living labours of public men; how we spill that
+seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see
+a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom,
+and, if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre,
+whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life,
+but strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of
+reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is a fine defence of the inviolability of a good and proper
+book.</p>
+
+<p>A bad book will generally die of itself, but there is something
+horribly malignant about a wicked book, as it must always be worse
+than a wicked man, for a man can repent, but a book cannot.</p>
+
+<p>It is the men of letters who keep alive the books of the great
+from generation to generation, and they are never likely to
+preserve a wicked book from oblivion. Ultimately such go to light
+fires and encompass groceries.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter8"></a>
+
+<h2>8</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Milton, of whom I wrote in my last letter, was five years older
+than Jeremy Taylor, of whom I am going to write to-day. The
+latter's writings differ very much from Milton's, although they
+were contemporaries for the whole of the former's life.</p>
+
+<p>From the grave and august periods of Milton to the sweet beauty
+of Jeremy Taylor is as the passing from out the austere halls of
+Justice to lovely fields full of flowers.</p>
+
+<p>Your and my great kinsman, Coleridge, pronounced Jeremy Taylor
+to be the most eloquent of all divines; and Coleridge was a great
+critic.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed, there seems to dwell permanently in Jeremy Taylor's mind
+a compelling sweetness and serenity.</p>
+
+<p>His parables, though sometimes perhaps almost of set purpose
+fanciful, are always full of beauty.</p>
+
+<p>How can anyone withhold sympathy and affection from the writer
+of such a passage as this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"But as, when the sun approaches towards the gates of the
+morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the
+spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the
+lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and
+peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like
+those which decked the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a
+veil because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a
+man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair
+face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a
+cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and
+sets quickly, so is a man's reason and his life."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many
+delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty
+conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their
+stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their
+imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of
+joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society;
+but he that loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness at
+home, and broods a nest of sorrows; and blessing itself cannot make
+him happy; so that all the commandments of God enjoining a man to
+'love his wife' are nothing but so many necessities and capacities
+of joy. 'She that is loved, is safe; and he that loves, is joyful,'
+Love is a union of all things excellent; it contains in it
+proportion and satisfaction, and rest and confidence."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"So have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring
+upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb
+above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud
+sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and
+inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest, than it
+could recover by the liberation and frequent weighing of his wings;
+till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay
+till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and
+did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an
+angel, as he passed sometimes through the air, about his ministries
+here below; so is the prayer of a good man."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Again:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I am fallen into the hands of publicans and sequestrators, and
+they have taken all from me; what now? Let me look about me. They
+have left me the sun and moon, fire and water, a loving wife, and
+many friends to pity me, and some to relieve me, and I can still
+discourse; and unless I list, they have not taken away my merry
+countenance and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they
+still have left me the Providence of God, and all the promises of
+the Gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my charity
+to them too; and still I sleep and digest, I eat and drink, I read
+and meditate; I can walk in my neighbor's pleasant fields, and see
+the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which
+God delights, that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation,
+and in God Himself."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here, Antony, is true wisdom. True, indeed, is it that no one
+can take away from you your merry countenance, your cheerful
+spirit, and your good conscience unless you choose; keep all three,
+Antony, throughout your life, and you will be happy yourself and
+make everyone about you happy, and that is to make a little heaven
+of your earthly home.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter9"></a>
+
+<h2>9</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Some day, no doubt, you will read some of the celebrated diaries
+that have come down to us. The best known of such books is
+<i>Pepys's Diary</i> which was written in a kind of shorthand, and
+so lay undeciphered from his death in 1703 for more than a century.
+One of its merits is its absolute self-revelation; for Pepys
+exposes to us his character without a shadow of reserve in all its
+vanity; and the other is the faithful picture it gives us of the
+time of the Restoration.</p>
+
+<p>But, though less popular, <i>Evelyn's Diary</i> is, I think, in
+many ways superior to that of Pepys.<a name='FNanchor_1_2'></a><a
+href='#Footnote_1_2'><sup>[1]</sup></a></p>
+
+<p>There is a quiet, unostentatious dignity about Evelyn which is
+altogether absent in the garrulous Pepys, and, indeed I find
+something very beautiful and touching in the grief Evelyn pours
+forth upon the death of his little son of five years
+old:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The day before he died," writes Evelyn, "he call'd to me and in
+a more serious manner than usual, told me that for all I loved him
+so dearly I should give my house, land, and all my fine things, to
+his Brother Jack, he should have none of them; and next morning
+when he found himself ill, and that I persuaded him to keepe his
+hands in bed, he demanded whether he might pray to God with his
+hands un-joyn'd; and a little after, whilst in great agonie,
+whether he should not offend God by using His holy name so often
+calling for ease. What shall I say of his frequent pathetical
+ejaculations utter'd of himselfe: Sweete Jesus save me, deliver me,
+pardon my sinns, let Thine angels receive me!</p>
+
+<p>"So early knowledge, so much piety and perfection! But thus God
+having dress'd up a Saint for himselfe, would not longer permit him
+with us, unworthy of ye future fruites of this incomparable
+hopefull blossome. Such a child I never saw: for such a child I
+blesse God in whose bosome he is! May I and mine become as this
+little child, who now follows the child Jesus that Lamb of God in a
+white robe whithersoever he goes; even so, Lord Jesus, <i>fiat
+voluntas tua!</i> Thou gavest him to us, Thou hast taken him from
+us, blessed be ye name of ye Lord! That I had anything acceptable
+to Thee was from Thy grace alone, since from me he had nothing but
+sin, but that Thou hast pardon'd! Blessed be my God for ever, Amen!
+I caused his body to be coffin'd in lead, and reposited on the 30th
+at 8 o'clock that night in the church at Deptford, accompanied with
+divers of my relations and neighbours among whom I distributed
+rings with this motto: <i>Dominus abstulit</i>; intending, God
+willing, to have him transported with my owne body to be interr'd
+in our dormitory in Wotton Church, in my dear native county of
+Surrey, and to lay my bones and mingle my dust with my fathers, if
+God be gracious to me and make me fit for Him as this blessed child
+was. The Lord Jesus sanctify this and all my other afflictions,
+Amen! Here ends the joy of my life, and for which I go even
+mourning to my grave."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This great love and reverence for little children is peculiarly
+in accord with Christianity, for we should remember that it was the
+WISE men, who, when they had journeyed far across the world to
+salute the King of kings, laid their offerings down at the feet of
+a little child.</p>
+
+<p>Is there not something to reverence in faith and resignation
+such as are here expressed by Evelyn? Were not these men of old
+with their unshakable faith and simple piety better and happier
+than those who in these days know so much more and believe so much
+less?</p>
+
+<p>We, no doubt, have the knowledge, but perhaps they had the
+wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>I think, Antony, that in the history of England we shall have
+difficulty in finding any of our greatest men whose hearts and
+minds were not filled with a reverence for God and a faith in
+something beyond the blind forces which are all that Science has to
+offer mankind as a guide of life.</p>
+
+<p>All who have acted most nobly from the days of Ralegh and Sir
+Thomas More, down to the days of Gordon of Khartoum, and down again
+to our own days when the youth of England upheld the invincible
+valour, self-sacrifice, and glory of their race in the greatest of
+all wars,&mdash;all have been filled with the love of God and have
+found therein a perfect serenity in the face of death, and that
+peace which passeth all understanding.</p>
+
+<p>The character of our race rests indubitably upon that faith, and
+he who lifts his voice, or directs his pen, to tear it down, had
+better never have been born.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_2'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_2'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>Another diary that you should read by and by is that of Henry
+Grabb Robinson.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter10"></a>
+
+<h2>10</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>In these letters I am never going to quote to you anything that
+does not seem to me to rise to a level of merit well above ordinary
+proper prose. There are many writers whose general correctness and
+excellence is not to be questioned or denied whom I shall not
+select in these letters for your particular admiration.</p>
+
+<p>By and by, when your own love of literature impels you to
+excursions in all directions, you may perhaps come to differ from
+my judgment, for everyone's taste must vary a little from that of
+others.</p>
+
+<p>English prose in its excellence follows the proportions
+manifested by the contours of the elevation of the world's
+land.</p>
+
+<p>Vast tracts lie very near the sea-level, of such are the
+interminable outpourings of newspapers and novels and school books.
+And, as each ascent from the sea-level is reached, less and less
+land attains to it, and when the snow-line is approached only a
+very small proportion indeed of the land aspires so high.</p>
+
+<p>So among writers, those who climb to the snow-line are a slender
+band compared to all the inhabitants of the lower slopes and
+plains.</p>
+
+<p>In these letters I do not intend to mistake a pedlar for a
+mountaineer, nor a hearthstone for a granite peak. Time slowly
+buries deep in oblivion the writings of the industrious and the
+dull.</p>
+
+<p>Born fifteen years later than Jeremy Taylor, of whom I wrote in
+a former letter, John Bunyan in 1660, being a Baptist, suffered the
+persecution then the lot of all dissenters, and was cast into
+Bedford gaol, where he lay for conscience' sake for twelve years.
+"As I walked through the wilderness of this world," said he, "I
+lighted on a certain place where was a den, and laid me down in
+that place to sleep; and as I slept I dreamed a dream"; and the
+dream which he dreamed has passed into all lands, and has been
+translated into all languages, and has taken its place with the
+Bible and with the <i>Imitation of Christ</i> as a guide of
+life.</p>
+
+<p>The force of simplicity finds here its most complete expression;
+the story wells from the man's heart, whence come all great
+things:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Then said the Interpreter to Christian, 'Hast thou considered
+all these things?'</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Christian.</i> 'Yes, and they put me in hope and fear.'</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Interpreter.</i> 'Well, keep all things so in thy mind that
+they may be as a goad in thy sides, to prick thee forward in the
+way thou must go.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then Christian began to gird up his loins, and to address
+himself to his journey.</p>
+
+<p>"Then said the Interpreter, 'The Comforter be always with thee,
+good Christian, to guide thee in the way that leads to the
+city.'</p>
+
+<p>"So Christian went on his way.</p>
+
+<p>"Now I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian had
+to go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was
+called Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian
+run, but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his
+back. He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending, and
+upon that place stood a cross, and a little below in the bottom a
+sepulchre.</p>
+
+<p>"So I saw in my dream that just as Christian came up with the
+cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off
+his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came
+to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no
+more.</p>
+
+<p>"Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry
+heart, 'He hath given me rest by His sorrow, and life by His
+death.'</p>
+
+<p>"Then he stood awhile to look and wonder, for it was very
+surprising to him that the sight of the cross should thus ease him
+of his burden.</p>
+
+<p>"He looked, therefore, and looked again, even till the springs
+that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Bunyan died in 1688, and Dr. Johnson was born in 1709. Many
+years, therefore, elapsed between the time when they each displayed
+their greatest powers.</p>
+
+<p>The interval was occupied by many reputable worldly-wise
+writers, but I do not myself find, between these two masters of
+English prose, anyone who wrote passages of such great lustre that
+I can quote them for your admiration.</p>
+
+<p>You will have noticed, Antony, that all the writers whom I have
+quoted, and who reached the true nobility of speech necessary to
+command our tribute of unstinted praise, have been men of manifest
+piety and reverence.</p>
+
+<p>And you will find it difficult to discover really great and
+eloquent prose from the pen of any man whose heart is not filled
+with a simple faith in the goodness of God.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter11"></a>
+
+<h2>11</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I have come now to Dr. Johnson, and it is almost a test of a
+true man of letters that he should love him.</p>
+
+<p>He was rugged and prejudiced, but magnanimous; impatient with
+the presumptuous, tender to modest ignorance, proudly independent
+of the patronage of the great, and was often doing deeds of noble
+self-sacrifice by stealth.</p>
+
+<p>Through long years of hard, unremitting toil for his daily bread
+he lived bravely and sturdily, with no extraneous help but his
+stout oak stick&mdash;an unconquerable man.</p>
+
+<p>His prose rises on occasion to a measured and stately grandeur
+above the reach of any of his contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>It was not often that he unveiled to the public gaze the
+beatings of his own noble heart, or invited the world to
+contemplate the depression and suffering amid which his unending
+labours were accomplished.</p>
+
+<p>The concluding page of the preface to the first edition of the
+great <i>Dictionary</i> is, therefore, the more precious and
+moving. I know not why this majestic utterance came to be deleted
+in later editions; certainly it sanctifies, and as it were crowns
+with a crown of sorrow, the greatest work of his life; and with
+reverent sympathy and unstinted admiration I reproduce it
+here:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot ultimately
+be defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to
+degeneration: we have long preserved our constitution, let us make
+some struggles for our language.</p>
+
+<p>"In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature
+forbids to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of
+years, to the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield the
+palm of philology to the nations of the continent. The chief glory
+of every people arises from its authors; whether I shall add
+anything by my own writings to the reputation of English
+literature, must be left to time: much of my life has been lost
+under the pressure of disease; much has been trifled away; and much
+has always been spent in provision for the day that was passing
+over me; but I shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if
+by my assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to
+the propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth;
+if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add
+celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.</p>
+
+<p>"When I am animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my
+book, however defective, and deliver it to the world with the
+spirit of a man that has endeavoured well. That it will immediately
+become popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders
+and risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity
+was ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and
+harden ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last
+prevail, and there never can be wanting some, who distinguish
+desert, who will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue can
+ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some
+words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot
+be spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life
+would not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever
+language can express must often speak of what he does not
+understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to
+the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a task which
+Scaliger compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that
+what is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not
+always present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise
+vigilance, slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual
+eclipses of the mind will darken learning; and that the writer
+shall often in vain trace his memory at the moment of need for that
+which yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will
+come uncalled into his thoughts to-morrow.</p>
+
+<p>"In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let
+it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no
+book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the world
+is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that
+which it condemns, yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it that
+the <i>English Dictionary</i> was written with little assistance of
+the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the
+soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic
+bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and
+in sorrow; and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to
+observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have
+only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto
+completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed
+and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of
+successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated
+knowledge and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians
+did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied
+critics of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their work,
+were obliged to change its economy, and give their second editions
+another form, I may surely be contented without the praise of
+perfection which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of solitude what
+would it avail me?</p>
+
+<p>"I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to
+please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are
+empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity,
+having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This seems to me to be the noblest passage that Johnson ever
+wrote.</p>
+
+<p>Almost all the most magnificent utterances of man are tinged
+with sadness. In this they possess a quality that is almost
+inseparable from grandeur wherever displayed. No man of sensibility
+and taste feels it possible to make jokes himself, or to tolerate
+them from others when in the presence of the Falls of Niagara, or a
+tempest at sea, or when he views from a peak in the Andes&mdash;as
+I have done&mdash;the sun descent into the Pacific. The greatest
+pictures painted by man touch the heart rather than elate it; and
+genius finds its highest expression not in comedy, but in
+tragedy.</p>
+
+<p>And this need cause us no surprise when we consider how much of
+the great work in letters and in art is directly due to the writer
+possessing in full measure the gift of sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>People with this gift, even if they are without the faculty of
+expression, are beloved by those about them, which must bring them
+happiness.</p>
+
+<p>Till he was over fifty Dr. Johnson's life was a weary struggle
+with poverty. He wrote <i>Rasselas</i> under the pressure of an
+urgent need of money to send to his dying mother. His wife died
+some few years earlier. I have always thought that the sad
+reflections he put into the mouth of an old philosopher towards the
+end of the story were indeed the true expressions of his own tired
+heart:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Praise," said the sage with a sigh, "is to an old man an empty
+sound. I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation of
+her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband.</p>
+
+<p>"I have outlived my friends and my rivals. Nothing is now of
+much importance; for I cannot extend my interest beyond myself.
+Youth is delighted with applause, because it is considered as the
+earnest of some future good, and because the prospect of life is
+far extended; but to me, who am now declining to decrepitude, there
+is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet less to
+be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they may take
+away, but they can give me nothing. Riches would now be useless,
+and high employment would be pain. My retrospect of life recalls to
+my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered
+upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I leave many
+great designs unattempted, and many great attempts unfinished.</p>
+
+<p>"My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, and therefore I
+compose myself to tranquillity; endeavour to abstract my thoughts
+from hopes and cares, which, though reason knows them to be vain,
+still try to keep their old possession of the heart; expect, with
+serene humility, that hour which nature cannot long delay; and hope
+to possess, in a better state, that happiness which here I could
+not find, and that virtue which here I have not attained."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>From the results of <i>Rasselas</i> he sent his mother money,
+but she had expired before it reached her.</p>
+
+<p>Down to the time of Dr. Johnson it was the custom for writers of
+books and poems to seek and enjoy the patronage of some great
+nobleman, to whom they generally dedicated their works.</p>
+
+<p>And in pursuance of that custom Dr. Johnson, when he first
+issued the plan or prospectus of his great <i>Dictionary</i> in
+1747, addressed it to Lord Chesterfield, who was regarded as the
+most brilliant and cultivated nobleman of his time. Lord
+Chesterfield, however, took no notice of the matter till the
+<i>Dictionary</i> was on the point of coming out in 1755, and then
+wrote some flippant remarks about it in a publication called <i>The
+World</i>.</p>
+
+<p>At this Dr. Johnson wrote a letter to the condescending peer,
+which became celebrated throughout England and practically put an
+end to writers seeking the patronage of the great.</p>
+
+<p>This wonderful letter concludes thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your
+outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I
+have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is
+useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of
+publication, without one act of assistance, one word of
+encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not
+expect, for I never had a patron before.</p>
+
+<p>"The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and
+found him a native of the rocks.</p>
+
+<p>"Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man
+struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground,
+encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to
+take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind, but it has
+been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am
+solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want
+it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess
+obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling
+that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which
+Providence has enabled me to do for myself.</p>
+
+<p>"Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to
+any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I
+should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been
+wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself
+with so much exultation, my lord,&mdash;your lordship's most
+humble, most obedient servant. SAM. JOHNSON."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Boswell's life of Dr. Johnson when you come to read it, as you
+will be sure to do by and by, has left a living picture of this
+great and good man for all future generations to enjoy, extenuating
+nothing to his quaintness, directness, and proneness to
+contradiction for its own sake, yet unveiling everywhere the deep
+piety and fine magnanimity of his character. He suffered much, but
+never complained, and certainly must be numbered among the great
+men of letters who have found true consolation and support in every
+circumstance of life in an earnest and fervent faith.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter12"></a>
+
+<h2>12</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Edmund Burke was born in 1730, and therefore was twenty-one
+years younger than Dr. Johnson, and he survived him thirteen years.
+He was a great prose writer, and although some of his speeches in
+Parliament that have come down to us possess every quality of solid
+argument and lofty eloquence, there must have been something
+lacking in his delivery and voice, for he so frequently failed to
+rivet the attention of the House, and so often addressed a steadily
+dwindling audience, that the wits christened him "the dinner
+bell."</p>
+
+<p>All men of letters, however, acknowledge Burke as a true master
+of a very great style.</p>
+
+<p>We see in him the first signs of a breaking away from the
+universal restraint of the older writers, and of the surging up of
+expressed emotion.</p>
+
+<p>His splendid tribute to Marie Antoinette and his panegyric of
+the lost age of chivalry are familiar to all students of English
+prose.</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"It is now (1791) sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the
+Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely
+never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more
+delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and
+cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in glittering
+like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh!
+what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate
+without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream
+when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic,
+distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry
+the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little
+did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen
+upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour
+and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped
+from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with
+insult. But the age of chivalry has gone. That of sophisters,
+economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe
+is extinguished for ever.</p>
+
+<p>"Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to sex
+and rank, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that
+subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude
+itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of
+life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
+and heroic enterprise is gone!</p>
+
+<p>"It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of
+honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage
+while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched,
+and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its
+grossness."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is a splendid and world-famous passage well worth
+committing to memory.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter13"></a>
+
+<h2>13</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Edward Gibbon, who wrote the <i>Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire</i>, belonged to the later half of the eighteenth century,
+and was a contemporary of Dr. Johnson and Burke. He finished his
+great history three years after Dr. Johnson's death. It is a
+monumental work, and will live as long as the English language. It
+is one of the books which every cultivated gentleman should read.
+The style is stately and sonorous, and the industry and erudition
+involved in its production must have been immense.</p>
+
+<p>Although it never sinks below a noble elevation of style, it
+nevertheless displays no uplifting flights of eloquence or
+declamation, and to me, and probably to you, Antony, the most
+moving passages in Gibbon's writings are those that describe with
+unaffected emotion the moment of the first resolve to compose the
+great history and the night when he wrote the last line of it. On
+page 129 of his memoirs<a name='FNanchor_1_3'></a><a href=
+'#Footnote_1_3'><sup>[1]</sup></a> he wrote:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"It was at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing
+amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were
+singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing
+the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Thus did he resolve to devote himself to the tremendous task,
+and at Lausanne twenty-three years later it was at last fulfilled.
+He recorded the event in a few pregnant sentences that are
+strangely memorable:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787,
+between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines
+of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down
+my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of
+acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and
+the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the
+silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all
+nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy
+on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the establishment of my
+fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was
+spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting
+leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might
+be the future fate of my History, the life of the historian must be
+short and precarious."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In June, 1888, just one hundred and one years after that pen had
+been finally laid aside, I searched in Lausanne for the
+summer-house and covered walk, and could find no very authentic
+record of its site. I brought home a flower from the garden where
+it seemed probable the summer-house had once existed, behind the
+modern hotel built there in the intervening time, and laid it
+between the leaves of my Gibbon.</p>
+
+<p>The pressed flower was still there when I last took the book
+down from my shelves.</p>
+
+<p>I hope my successors will preserve the little token of my
+reverence.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_3'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_3'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>First edition, 1794.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter14"></a>
+
+<h2>14</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Some of the most eloquent orators in the world have been
+Irishmen, and among them Henry Grattan was supreme.</p>
+
+<p>The Irish Parliament in the later half of the eighteenth century
+frequently sat spell-bound under the magic of his voice.</p>
+
+<p>In 1782, at the age of thirty-two, he achieved by his amazing
+eloquence a great National Revolution in Ireland. But eighteen
+years later all that he had fought for and achieved was lost in the
+Act of Union. In these days I suppose few will be found to defend
+the means whereby that Act was passed; but the public assertions
+that the people of Ireland were in favour of it wrung from Grattan
+the following cry of indignation and wrath:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"To affirm that the judgment of a nation is erroneous may
+mortify, but to affirm that her judgment <i>against</i> is
+<i>for</i>; to assert that she has said <i>ay</i> when she has
+pronounced <i>no</i>; to affect to refer a great question to the
+people; finding the sense of the people, like that of the
+parliament, against the question, to force the question; to affirm
+the sense of the people to be <i>for</i> the question; to affirm
+that the question is persisted in, because the sense of the people
+is for it; to make the falsification of the country's sentiments
+the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of the Union; to affirm
+that her parliament, constitution, liberty, honour, property, are
+taken away by her own authority,&mdash;there is, in such artifice,
+an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility, that can best be
+answered by sensations of astonishment and disgust, excited on this
+occasion by the British minister, whether he speaks in gross and
+total ignorance of the truth, or in shameless and supreme contempt
+for it.</p>
+
+<p>"The constitution may be <i>for a time</i> so lost; the
+character of the country cannot be so lost. The ministers of the
+Crown will, or may, perhaps, at length find that it is not so easy
+to put down for ever an ancient and respectable nation, by
+abilities, however great, and by power and by corruption, however
+irresistible; liberty may repair her golden beams, and with
+redoubled heat animate the country; the cry of loyalty will not
+long continue against the principles of liberty; loyalty is a
+noble, a judicious, and a capacious principle; but in these
+countries loyalty, distinct from liberty, is corruption, not
+loyalty.</p>
+
+<p>"The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against
+the principles of liberty. Connexion is a wise and a profound
+policy; but connexion without an Irish Parliament is connexion
+without its own principle, without analogy of condition; without
+the pride of honour that should attend it; is innovation, is peril,
+is subjugation&mdash;not connexion.</p>
+
+<p>"The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against
+the principle of liberty.</p>
+
+<p>"Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, necessary for the
+preservation of freedom, necessary for that of empire; but, without
+union of hearts&mdash;with a separate government, and without a
+separate parliament, identification is extinction, is dishonour, is
+conquest&mdash;not identification.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet I do not give up the country&mdash;I see her in a swoon,
+but she is not dead&mdash;though in her tomb she lies helpless and
+motionless, still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her
+cheeks a glow of beauty&mdash;</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="poem"><span style='margin-left: 3em;'>"Thou art not
+conquered; beauty's ensign yet</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 3em;'>Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy
+cheeks,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 3em;'>And death's pale flag is not
+advanced there."</span><br>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"While a plank of the vessel sticks together, I will not leave
+her. Let the courtier present his flimsy sail, and carry the light
+bark of his faith, with every new breath of wind&mdash;I will
+remain anchored here&mdash;with fidelity to the fortunes of my
+country, faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of another character, but not less admirable than his eloquence
+in the Senate, was Grattan's achievement with the pen. His
+description of the great Lord Chatham lives as one of the most
+noble panegyrics&mdash;it not the most noble&mdash;in the world. No
+writer, before or since, has offered anyone such splendid homage as
+this&mdash;that he never sunk "to the vulgar level of the
+great."</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The Secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached
+him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character
+had the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty,
+and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his
+presence that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved
+from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of
+vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk
+him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive,
+and impracticable, his object was England,&mdash;his ambition was
+fame; without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he
+made a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand
+he smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the
+democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his
+schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but
+Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these
+schemes were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the
+suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and enlightened
+by prophecy.</p>
+
+<p>"The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and
+indolent&mdash;those sensations which soften, and allure, and
+vulgarise&mdash;were unknown to him; no domestic difficulties, no
+domestic weakness reached him; but, aloof from the sordid
+occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came
+occasionally into our system to counsel and decide.</p>
+
+<p>"A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so
+authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled
+at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality. Corruption
+imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and
+talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and much of the ruin
+of his victories&mdash;but the history of his country, and the
+calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.</p>
+
+<p>"Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his
+eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous,
+familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive
+wisdom&mdash;not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid
+conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and
+sometimes the music of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct
+the understanding through the painful subtilty of argumentation;
+nor was he, like Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion, but
+rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the
+flashings of his mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but
+could not be followed.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet he was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he
+was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he
+concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon
+many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence, but even
+then, like the spinning of a cannon ball, he was still alive with
+fatal, unapproachable activity.</p>
+
+<p>"Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could
+create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
+eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of
+slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with unbounded
+authority; something that could establish or overwhelm empire, and
+strike a blow in the world that should resound through its
+history."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Grattan died in 1820, and twenty years later, in 1844, another
+great English writer, Lord Macaulay, wrote a world-famous passage
+upon the great Lord Chatham in the <i>Edinburgh
+Review</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot
+which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other
+end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests
+there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and
+Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great
+citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable
+graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and, from above, his
+effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face and
+outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl
+defiance at her foes.</p>
+
+<p>"The generation which reared that memorial of him has
+disappeared. The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate
+judgments which his contemporaries passed on his character may be
+calmly revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of
+vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors, will
+yet deliberately pronounce that, among the eminent men whose bones
+lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless and none a
+more splendid name."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is a great race, Antony, that can produce a man of such a
+character as Chatham, and also writers who can dedicate to him such
+superb tributes as these.</p>
+
+<p>Macaulay's prose has been much criticised as being too near to
+easy journalism to be classed among the great classic passages of
+English; but this much must be recognised to his great
+credit&mdash;he never wrote an obscure sentence or an ambiguous
+phrase, and his works may be searched in vain for a foreign idiom
+or even a foreign word. He possessed an infallible memory, absolute
+perspicuity, and a scholarly taste. He detested oppression wherever
+enforced, and never exercised his great powers in the defence of
+mean politics or unworthy practices.</p>
+
+<p>Such a writer to-day would blow a wholesome wind across the
+tainted pools of political intrigue.</p>
+
+<p>We can salute him, Antony, as a fine, manly, clean writer, who
+was an honour to letters.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter15"></a>
+
+<h2>15</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Born in the same year as was Grattan, namely, in 1750, Lord
+Erskine adorned the profession of the Bar with an eloquence that
+never exhibited the slight tendency to be ponderous which sometimes
+was displayed by his contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>Grace and refinement shine out in every one of his great
+speeches.</p>
+
+<p>He was a young scion of the great house of Buchan, being the
+third son of the tenth Earl. After being in the Navy for four years
+he left it for the Army, and six years later he went to Trinity
+College, Cambridge, and took his degree; thence he came to the Bar
+in 1778, and at once displayed the most conspicuous ability as an
+advocate.</p>
+
+<p>He appeared for Horne Tooke in a six-day trial for high treason,
+which ended in an acquittal.</p>
+
+<p>In 1806 he became Lord Chancellor and a peer.</p>
+
+<p>I quote an indignant warning to the aristocracy of England which
+flamed forth in one of his great speeches:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Let the aristocracy of England, which trembles so much for
+itself, take heed to its own security; let the nobles of England,
+if they mean to preserve that pre-eminence which, in some shape or
+other, must exist in every social community, take care to support
+it by aiming at that which is creative, and alone creative, of real
+superiority. Instead of matching themselves to supply wealth, to be
+again idly squandered in debauching excesses, or to round the
+quarters of a family shield; instead of continuing their names and
+honours in cold and alienated embraces, amidst the enervating
+rounds of shallow dissipation, let them live as their fathers of
+old lived before them; let them marry as affection and prudence
+lead the way, and, in the ardours of mutual love, and in the
+simplicities of rural life, let them lay the foundation of a
+vigorous race of men, firm in their bodies, and moral from early
+habits; and, instead of wasting their fortunes and their strength
+in the tasteless circles of debauchery, let them light up their
+magnificent and hospital halls to the gentry and peasantry of the
+country, extending the consolations of wealth and influence to the
+poor. Let them but do this,&mdash;and instead of those dangerous
+and distracted divisions between the different ranks of life, and
+those jealousies of the multitude so often blindly painted as big
+with destruction, we should see our country as one large and
+harmonious family, which can never be accomplished amidst vice and
+corruption, by wars and treaties, by informations, <i>ex
+officio</i> for libels, or by any of the tricks and artifices of
+the State."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mr. Erskine was entitled, as the son of the tenth Earl of
+Buchan, to speak such words of warning and exhortation to the
+aristocracy of England to which he belonged, and the lapse of a
+century and a quarter has not rendered the exhortation vain, though
+it may be hoped that the condemnatory clauses of the speech would
+not at the present time be so well justified as when they were
+delivered.</p>
+
+<p>Great names carry great obligations, and, for the most part,
+those who bear them to-day recognise those great obligations and
+endeavour without ostentation to fulfil them.</p>
+
+<p>The silly fribbles who posture before the photographic cameras
+for penny newspapers do not represent the real aristocracy of
+England.</p>
+
+<p>We must not, Antony, mistake a cockatoo for an eagle.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter16"></a>
+
+<h2>16</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I shall not expect you in your reading often to penetrate into
+the innumerable dusty octavos that contain sermons. The stoutest
+heart may fail, without blame, before the flat-footed pedestrianism
+of these platitudinous volumes. But there does occasionally arise
+above the dull horizon a star whose brilliance is the more
+conspicuous for the surrounding gloom.</p>
+
+<p>In 1796, Coleridge, in a letter<a name='FNanchor_1_4'></a><a
+href='#Footnote_1_4'><sup>[1]</sup></a> to a Mr. Flower, who was a
+publisher at Cambridge, wrote:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I hope Robert Hall is well. Why is he idle? I mean towards the
+public. We want such men to rescue this <i>enlightened age</i> from
+general irreligion."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I suppose Robert Hall is a name known to but few in these days,
+but at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the
+nineteenth centuries his fame was great and deserved.</p>
+
+<p>As a divine, dowered with the gift of inspired eloquence,
+Coleridge estimated his powers as second only to those of Jeremy
+Taylor. When Napoleon was at the supreme height of his conquests,
+and England alone of European countries still stood erect,
+uninvaded and undismayed, a company of soldiers attended Robert
+Hall's place of worship on the eve of their departure to Spain. The
+occasion was memorable and moving, and the preacher's splendid
+periods deserve to be preserved from oblivion:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"By a series of criminal enterprises, by the successes of guilty
+ambition, the liberties of Europe have been gradually extinguished;
+the subjugation of Holland, Switzerland, and the free towns of
+Germany, has completed that catastrophe; and we are the only people
+in the Eastern Hemisphere who are in possession of equal laws and a
+free constitution. Freedom, driven from every spot on the
+Continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she always chose
+for her favorite abode; but she is pursued even here, and
+threatened with destruction. The inundations of lawless power,
+after covering the whole earth, threaten to follow us here, and we
+are most exactly, most critically placed in the only aperture where
+it can be successfully repelled, in the Thermopyl&aelig; of the
+universe.</p>
+
+<p>"As far as the interests of freedom are concerned, the most
+important by far of sublunary interests, you, my countrymen, stand
+in the capacity of the federal representatives of the human race;
+for with you it is to determine (under God) in what condition the
+latest posterity shall be born; their fortunes are entrusted to
+your care, and on your conduct at this moment depends the colour
+and complexion of their destiny. If liberty, after being
+extinguished on the Continent, is suffered to expire here, whence
+is it ever to emerge in the midst of that thick night that will
+invest it?</p>
+
+<p>"It remains with you, then, to decide whether that freedom, at
+whose voice the kingdoms of Europe awoke from the sleep of ages to
+run a career of virtuous emulation in everything great and good;
+the freedom which dispelled the mists of superstition and invited
+the nations to behold their God; whose magic touch kindled the rays
+of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, and the flame of eloquence;
+the freedom which poured into our lap opulence and arts, and
+embellished life with innumerable institutions and improvements
+till it became a theatre of wonders; it is for you to decide
+whether this freedom shall yet survive, or be covered with a
+funeral pall, and wrapt in eternal gloom.</p>
+
+<p>"It is not necessary to await your determination. In the
+solicitude you feel to approve yourselves worthy of such a trust,
+every thought of what is afflicting in warfare, every apprehension
+of danger, must vanish, and you are impatient to mingle in the
+battle of the civilised world.</p>
+
+<p>"Go then, ye defenders of your country, accompanied with every
+auspicious omen; advance with alacrity into the field, where God
+Himself musters the hosts of war. Religion is too much interested
+in your success not to lend you her aid; she will shed over this
+enterprise her selectest influences. While you are engaged in the
+field many will repair to the closet, many to the sanctuary; the
+faithful of every name will employ that prayer which has power with
+God; the feeble hands which are unequal to any other weapon will
+grasp the sword of the Spirit; from myriads of humble, contrite
+hearts, the voice of intercession, supplication, and weeping, will
+mingle in its ascent to heaven with the shouts of battle and the
+shock of arms.</p>
+
+<p>"While you have everything to fear from the success of the
+enemy, you have every means of preventing that success, so that it
+is next to impossible for victory not to crown your exertions. The
+extent of your resources, under God, is equal to the justice of
+your cause.</p>
+
+<p>"But should Providence determine otherwise; should you fall in
+this struggle, should the nation fall, you will have the
+satisfaction (the purest allotted to man) of having performed your
+part; your names will be enrolled with the most illustrious dead,
+while posterity to the end of time, as often as they revolve the
+events of this period (and they will incessantly revolve them) will
+turn to you a reverential eye while they mourn over the freedom
+which is entombed in your sepulchre.</p>
+
+<p>"I cannot but imagine the virtuous heroes, legislators, and
+patriots, of every age and country, are bending from their elevated
+seats to witness this contest, as if they were incapable, till it
+be brought to a favourable issue, of enjoying their eternal
+repose.</p>
+
+<p>"Enjoy that repose, illustrious immortals! Your mantle fell when
+you ascended, and thousands inflamed with your spirit, and
+impatient to tread in your steps, are ready 'to swear by Him that
+sitteth upon the throne and liveth for ever and ever,' they will
+protect freedom in her last asylums, and never desert that cause
+which you sustained by your labours and cemented with your
+blood.</p>
+
+<p>"And Thou, Sole Ruler among the children of men, to whom the
+shields of the earth belong, 'gird on Thy sword, Thou most Mighty';
+go forth with our hosts in the day of battle! Impart, in addition
+to their hereditary valour, that confidence of success which
+springs from Thy Presence!</p>
+
+<p>"Pour into their hearts the spirit of departed heroes! Inspire
+them with Thine own, and, while led by Thine Hand and fighting
+under Thy banners, open Thou their eyes to behold in every valley
+and in every plain, what the prophet beheld by the same
+illuminations&mdash;chariots of fire, and horses of fire!</p>
+
+<p>"Then shall the strong man be as tow, and the maker of it as a
+spark; and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench
+them."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We, who have just emerged, shattered indeed and reeling, from
+another and yet more awful combat for freedom, can the better
+extend our sympathy to those forefathers of ours situated in like
+case, and can imagine with what beating hearts they must have
+listened to so magnificent a call to arms as this; commingling
+prayer, exhortation, and benediction.</p>
+
+<p>Napoleon, after all, waged his wars with us according to the
+laws of nations, the rules of civilised peoples, and the dictates
+of decent humanity. But never since Christianity has been
+established has one man committed so dread and awful an
+accumulation of public iniquities as stand for ever against the
+base and cowardly name of William Hohenzollern, Emperor in Germany.
+He spat upon the ancient chivalries of battle; he prostituted the
+decent amenities of diplomacy; he polluted with infamy and murder
+the splendid comradeship of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>When the captain of one of his submarines placed upon his deck
+the captured crew of an unarmed merchant vessel which he had sunk,
+destroyed their boats, took from them their life-belts, carried
+them miles away from any floating wreckage, and then projected them
+into the sea to drown, this unspeakable monarch approved the awful
+deed and decorated the ruffian for his infamous cruelty.</p>
+
+<p>When gallant Fryatt, fulfilling every duty a captain owes to his
+unarmed crew and helpless passengers, turned the bows of his
+peaceful packet-boat upon the submarine which was being used to
+murder them all in cold blood, he fell into this Kaiser's hands,
+and the coward wreaked his vengeance upon nobility that was beyond
+his comprehension and valour that rendered him insignificant.</p>
+
+<p>Of these horrible acts the proofs stand unchallenged, and for
+such deeds as these the world has cast him out: thrown him down
+from one of the greatest thrones in history; and left him in the
+place to which, white with terror, he ignominiously fled, stripped
+of all his power and splendour, his crowns, his crosses, and his
+diadems.</p>
+
+<p>Idle is it for this man and his apologists to plead any
+extenuation or excuse.</p>
+
+<p>It was his custom in the plenitude of his power to declare
+himself answerable for his actions only to God and himself. Then
+let the judgment of God be upon him. When we recall the awful and
+unnumbered horrors with which he covered Europe, I doubt whether
+all history can furnish a parallel to him.</p>
+
+<p>By his authority helpless Belgium was invaded, treaties
+treacherously broken, and her people slaughtered. By his authority
+her priests were murdered in cold blood and her nuns violated by
+his vile soldiery. By his authority poison gases were first
+projected with low cunning upon brave and honourable adversaries.
+By his authority hospital ships at sea were sent to the bottom.</p>
+
+<p>But time and the might of free nations have, after fearful
+sufferings, dissipated his invincible armies, and they have
+shrivelled before the wrath of mankind. The whole world rose up in
+its offended majesty and tore from him that shining armour of which
+it was his custom to boast; and, with the brand of Cain upon him,
+he now lies obscurely in Holland, bereft of all the trappings of
+his sinister power.</p>
+
+<p>There were times in the past when justice would have avenged
+such awful crimes as lie at this man's door with the torture of his
+living body and the desecration of his lifeless remains, but his
+conquerors disdained to debase themselves by imitating his own
+abominations; and they left him to afford a spectacle to posterity
+as the supreme example of human ignominy!</p>
+
+<p>When you are old, Antony, and this greatest of all wars has
+become part of England's history, you will be proud and happy to
+remember that your own father, at the first call for volunteers,
+laid down the pencil and scale of his peaceful profession, went out
+to fight for his country in the trenches in France, was wounded
+almost to death, and was saved only by the skill and devotion of
+one of the greatest surgeons of the day.<a name=
+'FNanchor_2_5'></a><a href='#Footnote_2_5'><sup>[2]</sup></a> All
+the best blood of England, Scotland, and Ireland went marching
+together to defend the freedom of the world, and upon their hearts
+were engraven the glorious words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war
+and my fingers to fight."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>May such a call never come to our beloved country again! But if
+it does, Antony, I know where you will be found without need of
+exhortations from me.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_4'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_4'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>Now in my library.&mdash;S.C.</p>
+</div>
+
+<a name='Footnote_2_5'></a><a href='#FNanchor_2_5'>[2]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>Sir Arbuthnot Lane.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter17"></a>
+
+<h2>17</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Grattan, of whom I have already written, had in the first Lord
+Plunket a successor and a compatriot very little his inferior in
+the gift of oratory.</p>
+
+<p>He was born in 1764, and was therefore some fourteen years
+younger than Grattan, whom he survived by thirty-four years.</p>
+
+<p>Like Grattan, he displayed a burning patriotism and, like him,
+fiercely opposed the Act of Union.</p>
+
+<p>Few orators have displayed greater powers of clear reason and
+convincing logic than Plunket. It may be admitted that he seldom
+rose to great heights of eloquence, but tradition credits his
+delivery with a quality of dignity amounting almost to majesty. The
+gift of oratory consists in how things are said as much as in what
+things are said, and the voice, gesture, and manner of Plunket were
+commanding and magnificent.</p>
+
+<p>When Attorney-General in Ireland, in 1823, in a speech
+prosecuting the leaders of the riot known as "the Bottle Riot,"
+Plunket uttered the following fine tribute to the character of
+William the Third:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Perhaps, my lords, there is not to be found in the annals of
+history a character more truly great than that of William the
+Third. Perhaps no person has ever appeared on the theatre of the
+world who has conferred more essential or more lasting benefits on
+mankind; on these countries, certainly none. When I look at the
+abstract merits of his character, I contemplate him with admiration
+and reverence. Lord of a petty principality&mdash;destitute of all
+resources but those with which nature had endowed
+him&mdash;regarded with jealousy and envy by those whose battles he
+fought; thwarted in all his counsels; embarrassed in all his
+movements; deserted in his most critical enterprises&mdash;he
+continued to mould all those discordant materials, to govern all
+these warring interests, and merely by the force of his genius, the
+ascendancy of his integrity, and the immovable firmness and
+constancy of his nature, to combine them into an indissoluble
+alliance against the schemes of despotism and universal domination
+of the most powerful monarch in Europe, seconded by the ablest
+generals, at the head of the bravest and best disciplined armies in
+the world, and wielding, without check or control, the unlimited
+resources of his empire. He was not a consummate general; military
+men will point out his errors; in that respect Fortune did not
+favour him, save by throwing the lustre of adversity over all his
+virtues. He sustained defeat after defeat, but always rose
+<i>adversa rerum immersabilis unda</i>. Looking merely at his
+shining qualities and achievements, I admire him as I do a Scipio,
+a Regulus, a Fabius; a model of tranquil courage, undeviating
+probity, and armed with a resoluteness and constancy in the cause
+of truth and freedom, which rendered him superior to the accidents
+that control the fate of ordinary men.</p>
+
+<p>"But this is not all&mdash;I feel that to him, under God, I am,
+at this moment, indebted for the enjoyment of the rights which I
+possess as a subject of these free countries; to him I owe the
+blessings of civil and religious liberty, and I venerate his memory
+with a fervour of devotion suited to his illustrious qualities and
+to his godlike acts."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is not so magnificent a panegyric as that of Grattan in his
+written tribute to Chatham, but, enhanced by the gesture and voice
+of the great orator, it was reputed to have left a deep impression
+upon all who heard it.</p>
+
+<p>But few speeches, however eloquent, survive, while the printed
+work of the writer may long endure; but to the orator is given what
+the writer never experiences&mdash;the fierce enjoyment, amounting
+almost to rapture, of holding an audience entranced under the spell
+of the spoken cadences; and English, Antony, has a splendour all
+its own when uttered by a master of its august music.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter18"></a>
+
+<h2>18</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>To-day I will write about Robert Southey, and, as he and
+Coleridge married sisters, you may claim a distant relationship
+with him. His personal character was beautiful and unselfish, and
+his dwelling at Keswick was the home that for years sheltered
+Coleridge's children.</p>
+
+<p>With hardly an exception the poets of England have had an easy
+and royal mastery of prose; and in the case of Robert Southey there
+are some, and they are not the worst critics, who anticipate that
+his prose will long outlast his poetry in the Temple of Fame.</p>
+
+<p>We may suppose that to a man whose whole private life was
+stainlessly dedicated to a noble rectitude of conduct, and whose
+every act was sternly subjected to the judgment of an unbending
+conscience, some circumstances of the private life of Nelson must
+have been distasteful and open to censure; but no such reservations
+dimmed the splendour of Southey's tribute to the public hero who
+gave his life in the act of establishing, beyond reach of dispute
+or cavil, the throne of England as Queen of the Sea.</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than
+a public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned
+pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object
+of our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was
+suddenly taken from us, and it seemed as if we had never, till
+then, known how deeply we loved and reverenced him.</p>
+
+<p>"What the country had lost in its great naval hero&mdash;the
+greatest of our own, and of all former times, was scarcely taken
+into the account of grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he performed
+his part, that the maritime war, after the battle of Trafalgar, was
+considered at an end; the fleets of the enemy were not merely
+defeated, but destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new race
+of seamen reared for them, before the possibility of their invading
+our shores could again be contemplated.</p>
+
+<p>"It was not, therefore, from any selfish reflection upon the
+magnitude of our loss that we mourned for him; the general sorrow
+was of a higher character. The people of England grieved that
+funeral ceremonies, public monuments and posthumous rewards, were
+all which they could now bestow upon him whom the king, the
+legislature, and the nation, would alike have delighted to honour;
+whom every tongue would have blessed; whose presence in every
+village through which he might have passed would have wakened the
+church bells, have given schoolboys a holiday, have drawn children
+from their sports to gaze upon him, and 'old men from the chimney
+corner' to look upon Nelson ere they died.</p>
+
+<p>"The victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, indeed, with the usual
+forms of rejoicing, but they were without joy; for such already was
+the glory of the British Navy through Nelson's surpassing genius,
+that it scarcely seemed to receive any addition from the most
+signal victory that ever was achieved upon the sea; and the
+destruction of this mighty fleet, by which all the maritime schemes
+of France were totally frustrated, hardly appeared to add to our
+security or strength, for while Nelson was living to watch the
+combined squadrons of the enemy, we felt ourselves as secure as
+now, when they were no longer in existence.</p>
+
+<p>"There was reason to suppose from the appearances upon opening
+the body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like
+his father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said to have fallen
+prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to be lamented, who
+died so full of honours, and at the height of human fame. The most
+triumphant death is that of a martyr; the most awful, that of the
+martyred patriot; the most splendid, that of the hero in the hour
+of victory; and if the chariot and the horses of fire had been
+vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could scarcely have
+departed in a brighter blaze of glory.</p>
+
+<p>"He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a
+name and an example which are at this hour inspiring hundreds of
+the youth of England; a name which is our pride, and an example
+which will continue to be our shield and our strength."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nelson left England the Queen of the Sea, and the great war with
+Germany has failed to displace her from that splendid throne. For
+the plain fact of history remains that, after the battle of
+Jutland, the German High Seas Fleet never ventured out of port
+again till the end of the war; and when it did emerge from its
+ignominious security, it sailed to captivity at Scapa Flow, there
+ultimately to repose on the bottom of the sea.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter19"></a>
+
+<h2>19</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>There are four very celebrated lines written by Walter Savage
+Landor which you may have heard quoted; they were written towards
+the close of his life, and are certainly distinguished and
+memorable:&mdash;</p>
+
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>"I strove with none, for none was
+worth my strife;</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 2em;'>Nature I loved, and next to Nature
+Art;</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>I warmed both hands before the fire
+of life;</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 2em;'>It sinks, and I am ready to
+depart."</span><br>
+
+
+<p>It does not detract from the merit of the lines that as a fact
+Landor was of a fiery disposition, and strove a great deal with
+many adversaries, often of his own creation, throughout his long
+life<a name='FNanchor_1_6'></a><a href=
+'#Footnote_1_6'><sup>[1]</sup></a>; and although he was of a fierce
+and combative nature he displayed in his writings a classical
+restraint and tender beauty hardly achieved by his
+contemporaries.</p>
+
+<p>In the form of an imaginary conversation between &AElig;sop and
+Rhodope, Landor makes the latter describe how her father, in the
+famine, unbeknown to her, starved that she might have plenty, and,
+when all was gone, took her to the market-place to sell her that
+she might live. There is an exquisite delicacy in this dialogue
+that places it among the wonders of literature:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"<i>Rhodope</i>. Never shall I forget the morning when my
+father, sitting in the coolest part of the house, exchanged his
+last measure of grain for a chlamys of scarlet cloth, fringed with
+silver. He watched the merchant out of the door, and then looked
+wistfully into the cornchest. I, who thought there was something
+worth seeing, looked in also, and finding it empty, expressed my
+disappointment, not thinking, however, about the corn. A faint and
+transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of mine. He
+unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before me,
+and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the glittering
+fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; and I know not what
+flowers he gathered, but he gathered many; and some he placed in my
+bosom, and some in my hair. But I told him with captious pride,
+first that I could arrange them better, and again that I would have
+only the white. However, when he had selected all the white and I
+had placed a few of them according to my fancy, I told him (rising
+in my slipper) he might crown me with the remainder.</p>
+
+<p>"The splendour of my apparel gave me a sensation of authority.
+Soon as the flowers had taken their station on my head, I expressed
+a dignified satisfaction at the taste displayed by my father, just
+as if I could have seen how they appeared! But he knew that there
+was at least as much pleasure as pride in it, and perhaps we
+divided the latter (alas! not both) pretty equally.</p>
+
+<p>"He now took me into the market-place, where a concourse of
+people were waiting for the purchase of slaves. Merchants came and
+looked at me; some commending, others disparaging; but all agreeing
+that I was slender and delicate, that I could not live long, and
+that I should give much trouble. Many would have bought the
+chlamys, but there was something less saleable in the child and
+flowers.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>&AElig;sop</i>. Had thy features been coarse and thy voice
+rustic, they would all have patted thy cheeks and found no fault in
+thee.</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Rhodope</i>. As it was, every one had bought exactly such
+another in time past, and been a loser by it. At these speeches, I
+perceived the flowers tremble slightly on my bosom, from my
+father's agitation. Although he scoffed at them, knowing my
+healthiness, he was troubled internally, and said many short
+prayers, not very unlike imprecations, turning his head aside.
+Proud was I, prouder than ever, when at last several talents were
+offered for me, and by the very man who in the beginning had
+undervalued me most, and prophesied the worst of me. My father
+scowled at him and refused the money. I thought he was playing a
+game, and began to wonder what it could be, since I had never seen
+it played before. Then I fancied it might be some celebration
+because plenty had returned to the city, insomuch that my father
+had bartered the last of the corn he hoarded.</p>
+
+<p>"I grew more and more delighted at the sport. But soon there
+advanced an elderly man, who said gravely, 'Thou hast stolen this
+child; her vesture alone is worth a hundred drachmas. Carry her
+home again to her parents, and do it directly, or Nemesis and the
+Eumenides will overtake thee.' Knowing the estimation in which my
+father had always been holden by his fellow-citizens, I laughed
+again and pinched his ear. He, although naturally choleric, burst
+forth into no resentment at these reproaches, but said calmly, 'I
+think I know thee by name, O guest! Surely thou art Xanthus, the
+Samian. Deliver this child from famine.'</p>
+
+<p>"Again I laughed aloud and heartily, and thinking it was now
+part of the game, I held out both my arms, and protruded my whole
+body toward the stranger. He would not receive me from my father's
+neck, but he asked me with benignity and solicitude if I was
+hungry; at which I laughed again, and more than ever; for it was
+early in the morning, soon after the first meal, and my father had
+nourished me most carefully and plentifully in all the days of the
+famine. But Xanthus, waiting for no answer, took out of a sack,
+which one of his slaves carried at his side, a cake of wheaten
+bread and a piece of honeycomb, and gave them to me. I held the
+honeycomb to my father's mouth, thinking it the most of a dainty.
+He dashed it to the ground, but seizing the bread he began to
+devour it ferociously. This also I thought was in the play, and I
+clapped my hands at his distortions. But Xanthus looked at him like
+one afraid, and smote the cake from him, crying aloud, 'Name the
+price,' My father now placed me in his arms, naming a price much
+below what the other had offered, saying, 'The gods are ever with
+thee, O Xanthus! therefore to thee do I consign my child.'</p>
+
+<p>"But while Xanthus was counting out the silver my father seized
+the cake again, which the slave had taken up and was about to
+replace in the wallet. His hunger was exasperated by the taste, and
+the delay. Suddenly there arose much tumult. Turning round in the
+old woman's bosom who had received me from Xanthus, I saw my
+beloved father struggling on the ground, livid and speechless. The
+more violent my cries, the more rapidly they hurried me away; and
+many were soon between us.</p>
+
+<p>"Little was I suspicious that he had suffered the pangs of
+famine long before: alas! and he had suffered them for me. Do I
+weep while I am telling you they ended? I could not have closed his
+eyes; I was too young; but I might have received his last breath,
+the only comfort of an orphan's bosom. Do you now think him
+blameable, O &AElig;sop?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>&AElig;sop</i>. It was sublime humanity; it was forbearance
+and self-denial which even the immortal gods have never shown
+us."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The <i>Dream of Petrarca</i> is, I think, more famous but not
+more beautiful than this narrative of Rhodope; it lacks the deep
+human tragedy and infinite charity of the winsome child, and the
+self-contained father silently perishing of hunger for her; but if
+the <i>&AElig;sop and Rhodope</i> had never been written, the
+<i>Dream of Petrarca</i> would secure its author a place among the
+immortals:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"... Wearied with the length of my walk over the mountains, and
+finding a soft molehill, covered with grey moss, by the wayside, I
+laid my head upon it and slept. I cannot tell how long it was
+before a species of dream or vision came over me.</p>
+
+<p>"Two beautiful youths appeared beside me; each was winged; but
+the wings were hanging down and seemed ill-adapted to flight. One
+of them, whose voice was the softest I ever heard, looking at me
+frequently, said to the other, 'He is under my guardianship for the
+present; do not awaken him with that feather.' Methought, on
+hearing the whisper, I saw something like the feather on an arrow;
+and then the arrow itself; the whole of it, even to the point,
+although he carried it in such a manner that it was difficult at
+first to discover more than a palm's length of it; the rest of the
+shaft (and the whole of the barb) was behind his ankles.</p>
+
+<p>"'This feather never awakens anyone,' replied he, rather
+petulantly, 'but it brings more of confident security, and more of
+cherished dreams, than you, without me, are capable of
+imparting.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Be it so!' answered the gentler; 'none is less inclined to
+quarrel or dispute than am I. Many whom you have wounded grievously
+call upon me for succour; but so little am I disposed to thwart
+you, it is seldom I venture to do more for them than to whisper a
+few words of comfort in passing. How many reproaches on these
+occasions have been cast upon me for indifference and infidelity!
+Nearly as many, and nearly in the same terms as upon you.'</p>
+
+<p>"'Odd enough that we, O Sleep! should be thought so alike!' said
+Love contemptuously. 'Yonder is he who bears a nearer resemblance
+to you; the dullest have observed it.' I fancied I turned my eyes
+to where he was pointing, and saw at a distance the figure he
+designated. Meanwhile the contention went on uninterruptedly. Sleep
+was slow in asserting his power or his benefits. Love recapitulated
+them; but only that he might assert his own above them.</p>
+
+<p>"Suddenly he called upon me to decide, and to choose my patron.
+Under the influence, first of the one, then of the other, I sprang
+from repose to rapture, I alighted from rapture on repose, and knew
+not which was sweetest. Love was very angry with me, and declared
+he would cross me through the whole of my existence. Whatever I
+might on other occasions have thought of his veracity, I now felt
+too surely that he would keep his word.</p>
+
+<p>"At last, before the close of the altercation, the third Genius
+had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell you how I knew him,
+but I knew him to be the Genius of Death. Breathless as I was at
+beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First they
+seemed only calm; presently they grew contemplative; and lastly
+beautiful; those of the Graces themselves are less regular, less
+harmonious, less composed.</p>
+
+<p>"Love glanced at him unsteadily, with a countenance in which
+there was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat of disdain; and cried, 'Go
+away! go away! nothing that thou touchest, lives!' 'Say rather,
+child!' replied the advancing form, and advancing grew loftier and
+statelier, 'say rather that nothing of beautiful or of glorious
+lives its own true life until my wing hath passed over it.'</p>
+
+<p>"Love pouted, and rumpled and bent down with his forefinger the
+stiff short feathers on his arrow-head, but replied not. Although
+he frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded him less and less,
+and scarcely looked towards him. The milder and calmer Genius, the
+third, in proportion as I took courage to contemplate him, regarded
+me with more and more complacency. He held neither flower nor arrow
+as the others did, but throwing back the clusters of dark curls
+that overshadowed his countenance, he presented to me his hand,
+openly and benignly. I shrank on looking at him so near, and yet I
+sighed to love him. He smiled, not without an expression of pity,
+at perceiving my diffidence, my timidity; for I remembered how soft
+was the hand of Sleep, how warm and entrancing was Love's.</p>
+
+<p>"By degrees I became ashamed of my ingratitude, and turning my
+face away, I held out my arms, and I felt my neck within his; the
+coolness of freshest morning breathed around; the heavens seemed to
+open above me, while the beautiful cheek of my deliverer rested on
+my head. I would now have looked for those others, but knowing my
+intention by my gesture, he said consolatorily, 'Sleep is on his
+way to the Earth, where many are calling him; but it is not to
+these he hastens, for every call only makes him fly further off.
+Sedately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as capricious and
+volatile as the more arrogant and ferocious one.'</p>
+
+<p>"'And Love!' said I, 'whither is he departed? If not too late, I
+would propitiate and appease him.'</p>
+
+<p>"'He who cannot follow me; he who cannot overtake and pass me,'
+said the Genius, 'is unworthy of the name, the most glorious in
+earth or heaven. Look up! Love is yonder, and ready to receive
+thee.'</p>
+
+<p>"I looked: the earth was under me: I saw only the clear blue
+sky, and something brighter above it."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is something most rare and refined and precious in this
+vision, told as it is with a sweet serenity. But it does not touch
+the heart like the <i>&AElig;sop and Rhodope</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_6'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_6'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>Born 1775, died 1864.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter20"></a>
+
+<h2>20</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I now come to speak of one whose fame was familiar to me as a
+boy&mdash;the great Lord Brougham.&mdash;for he lived till 1868. I
+remember that he was vehemently praised and blamed as a politician,
+but with such matters others have dealt; in this letter, Antony, we
+will concern ourselves with the glory of English prose as it poured
+from Lord Brougham in two of his greatest speeches.</p>
+
+<p>He was an orator whose voice was uplifted throughout a long and
+strenuous life in condemnation of all the brutalities and
+oppression of his time, and to whose eloquence the triumphant cause
+of freedom stands for ever in deep obligation.</p>
+
+<p>His great speech on Law Reform in the House of Commons, in 1828,
+took six hours to deliver, and the concluding passage, which
+mounted to a plane of lofty declamation, displayed no sign of
+exhaustion, and was listened to with strained attention by an
+absorbed and crowded audience:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The course is clear before us; the race is glorious to run. You
+have the power of sending your name down through all times,
+illustrated by deeds of higher fame, and more useful import, than
+ever were done within these walls.</p>
+
+<p>"You saw the greatest warrior of the age&mdash;conqueror of
+Italy&mdash;humbler of Germany&mdash;terror of the North&mdash;saw
+him account all his matchless victories poor, compared with the
+triumph you are now in a condition to win&mdash;saw him contemn the
+fickleness of fortune, while, in despite of her, he could pronounce
+his memorable boast, 'I shall go down to posterity with the Code in
+my hand!'</p>
+
+<p>"You have vanquished him in the field; strive now to rival him
+in the sacred arts of peace! Outstrip him as a lawgiver, whom in
+arms you overcame! The lustre of the Regency will be eclipsed by
+the more solid and enduring splendour of the Reign. The praise
+which false courtiers feigned for our Edwards and Harrys, the
+Justinians of their day, will be the just tribute of the wise and
+the good to that monarch under whose sway so mighty an undertaking
+shall be accomplished. Of a truth, the holders of sceptres are most
+chiefly to be envied for that they bestow the power of thus
+conquering, and ruling thus.</p>
+
+<p>"It was the boast of Augustus&mdash;it formed part of the glare
+in which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost,&mdash;that
+he found Rome of brick, and left it of marble; a praise not
+unworthy a great prince, and to which the present reign also has
+its claims. But how much nobler will be the sovereign's boast when
+he shall have it to say, that he found law dear, and left it cheap;
+found it a sealed book&mdash;left it a living letter; found it the
+patrimony of the rich&mdash;left it the inheritance of the poor;
+found it the two-edged sword of craft and oppression&mdash;left it
+the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence!</p>
+
+<p>"To me, much reflecting on these things, it has always seemed a
+worthier honour to be the instrument of making you bestir
+yourselves in this high matter, than to enjoy all that office can
+bestow&mdash;office, of which the patronage would be an irksome
+encumbrance, the emoluments superfluous to one content with the
+rest of his industrious fellow-citizens that his own hands minister
+to his wants; and as for the power supposed to follow it&mdash;I
+have lived near half a century, and I have learned that power and
+place may be severed.</p>
+
+<p>"But one power I do prize; that of being the advocate of my
+countrymen here, and their fellow-labourers elsewhere, in those
+things which concern the best interests of mankind. That power, I
+know full well, no government can give&mdash;no change take
+away!"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>His speech on negro slavery made a deep impression upon the
+country, and rose towards its termination, gradually, but with
+ever-ascending periods, to a close of absolute majesty:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I regard the freedom of the negro as accomplished and sure.
+Why? Because it is his right&mdash;because he has shown himself fit
+for it; because a pretext, or a shadow of a pretext, can no longer
+be devised for withholding that right from its possessor. I know
+that all men at this day take a part in the question, and they will
+no longer bear to be imposed upon, now they are well informed. My
+reliance is firm and unflinching upon the great change which I have
+witnessed&mdash;the education of the people, unfettered by party or
+by sect&mdash;witnessed from the beginning of its progress, I may
+say from the hour of its birth! Yes! It was not for a humble man
+like me to assist at royal births with the illustrious Prince who
+condescended to grace the pageant of this opening session, or the
+great captain and statesman in whose presence I am now proud to
+speak. But with that illustrious Prince, and with the father of the
+Queen, I assisted at that other birth, more conspicuous still. With
+them, and with the head of the House of Russell, incomparably more
+illustrious in my eyes, I watched over its cradle&mdash;I marked
+its growth&mdash;I rejoiced in its strength&mdash;I witnessed its
+maturity; I have been spared to see it ascend the very height of
+supreme power; directing the councils of state; accelerating every
+great improvement; uniting itself with every good work; propping
+all useful institutions; extirpating abuses in all our
+institutions; passing the bounds of our European dominion, and in
+the New World, as in the Old, proclaiming that freedom is the
+birthright of man&mdash;that distinction of colour gives no title
+to oppression&mdash;that the chains now loosened must be struck
+off, and even the marks they have left effaced&mdash;proclaiming
+this by the same eternal law of our nature which makes nations the
+masters of their own destiny, and which in Europe has caused every
+tyrant's throne to quake!</p>
+
+<p>"But they need feel no alarm at the progress of light who defend
+a limited monarchy and support popular institutions&mdash;who place
+their chiefest pride not in ruling over slaves, be they white or be
+they black, not in protecting the oppressor, but in wearing a
+constitutional crown, in holding the sword of justice with the hand
+of mercy, in being the first citizen of a country whose air is too
+pure for slavery to breathe, and on whose shores, if the captive's
+foot but touch, his fetters of themselves fall off. To the
+resistless progress of this great principle I look with a
+confidence which nothing can shake; it makes all improvement
+certain; it makes all change safe which it produces; for none can
+be brought about unless it has been prepared in a cautious and
+salutary spirit.</p>
+
+<p>"So now the fulness of time is come for at length discharging
+our duty to the African captive. I have demonstrated to you that
+everything is ordered&mdash;every previous step taken&mdash;all
+safe, by experience shown to be safe, for the long-desired
+consummation. The time has come, the trial has been made, the hour
+is striking; you have no longer a pretext for hesitation, or
+faltering, or delay. The slave has shown, by four years' blameless
+behaviour, and devotion to the pursuits of peaceful industry, that
+he is as fit for his freedom as any English peasant, ay, or any
+lord whom I now address.</p>
+
+<p>"I demand his rights; I demand his liberty without stint. In the
+name of justice and of law&mdash;in the name of reason&mdash;in the
+name of God, who has given you no right to work injustice; I demand
+that your brother be no longer trampled upon as your slave! I make
+my appeal to the Commons, who represent the free people of England;
+and I require at their hands the performance of that condition for
+which they paid so enormous a price&mdash;that condition which all
+their constituents are in breathless anxiety to see fulfilled! I
+appeal to this House. Hereditary judges of the first tribunal in
+the world&mdash;to you I appeal for justice. Patrons of all the
+arts that humanise mankind&mdash;under your protection I place
+humanity herself! To the merciful Sovereign of a free people I call
+aloud for mercy to the hundreds of thousands for whom half a
+million of her Christian sisters have cried aloud&mdash;I ask that
+their cry may not have risen in vain. But first I turn my eye to
+the throne of all justice, and devoutly humbling myself before Him
+who is of purer eyes than to behold such vast iniquities, I implore
+that the curse hovering over the head of the unjust and the
+oppressor be averted from us&mdash;that your hearts may be turned
+to mercy&mdash;and that over all the earth His will may at length
+be done!"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is nobly to use noble gifts; it is difficult to think ill
+of a man who can carry oratory for a glorious object to such
+heights of splendour. It may seem a duty to some to darken his
+character with detraction, but his inspiring words remain supreme
+and unsullied and will still live when such faults as may be truly
+laid to his charge are long forgotten. To fight for a great cause,
+Antony, is rightly to use great powers, and this is what Lord
+Brougham did with all his might.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter21"></a>
+
+<h2>21</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>In the great emprise of war it must often happen that the most
+awful scenes of manifested human power, and the most godlike deeds
+of human glory, are lost to the contemporary world, and utterly
+unknown to succeeding generations, because they were witnessed by
+no man with the gift of expression who could record for after time,
+in adequate language, the majestic spectacle.</p>
+
+<p>In the great war against Germany no great writer has yet
+appeared who was personally in touch as a living witness of the
+countless deeds of glorious valour and acts of heroic endurance
+that were everywhere displayed upon that immense far-stretched
+front.</p>
+
+<p>But in the wars of former times, a whole battle could be
+witnessed from its beginning to its end by a single commander, and
+no scenes in human life could be more terrible and soul-stirring
+than the awful ebb and flow of a great combat in which the victory
+of armies and the fate of nations hung in the balance.</p>
+
+<p>The battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War might easily at this
+date have long been forgotten had not the pen of Sir William Napier
+been as puissant as his sword. The battle had raged for hours, and
+the British were well-nigh overwhelmed; the Colonel, twenty
+officers, and over four hundred men out of five hundred and seventy
+had fallen in the 57th alone; not a third were left standing in the
+other regiments that had been closely engaged throughout the day.
+Then Cole was ordered up with his fourth division as a last hope,
+and this is how Sir William Napier records their
+advance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke and
+rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude,
+startled the enemy's masses, then augmenting and pressing onwards
+as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and vomiting
+forth a storm of fire hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front,
+while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery
+whistled through the British ranks ... the English battalions,
+struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking
+ships; but suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their
+terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and
+majesty the British soldier fights.</p>
+
+<p>"In vain did Soult with voice and gesture animate his Frenchmen;
+in vain did the hardiest veterans, breaking from the crowded
+columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open
+out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up, and,
+fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and foes,
+while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to charge the
+advancing line.</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry.</p>
+
+<p>"No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm
+weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were
+bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread shook
+the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of every
+formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant cries
+that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as slowly, and
+with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour of the
+attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French
+reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to
+restore the fight, but only augmented the irremediable disorder,
+and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff, went
+headlong down the steep; the rain flowed after in streams
+discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the
+remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood
+triumphant on the fatal hill!</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;'>
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted victor reels as he
+places it on his bleeding front.</p>
+
+<p>"All that night the rain poured down, and the river and the
+hills and the woods resounded with the dismal clamour and groans of
+dying men."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Sir William Napier seems intimately to have known the transience
+of the gratitude of nations to those who fight their battles for
+them. At the end of his noble history of the Peninsular War he lets
+the curtain fall upon the scene with solemn brevity in a single
+sentence, thus:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America,
+some for England: the cavalry, marching through France, took
+shipping at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all
+remembrance of the Veterans' services.</p>
+
+<p>"Yet those Veterans had won nineteen pitched battles, and
+innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken
+four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from Portugal,
+once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed, wounded, or
+captured two hundred thousand enemies&mdash;leaving of their own
+number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, whiten the plains and
+mountains of the Peninsula."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Science and the base malignity of our latest adversaries have
+debased modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity
+and honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult
+to believe that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and
+the petty officer at sea that nation can produce a single
+gentleman.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter22"></a>
+
+<h2>22</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>This letter, like the last one, is concerned with war. War
+brings to every man not incapacitated by age or physical defects
+the call of his country to fight, and if need be to die, for it. It
+also exposes to view the few pusillanimous young men who are
+satisfied to enjoy protection from the horrors of invasion and the
+priceless boon of personal freedom, secured to them by the
+self-sacrifice and valour of others, while they themselves remain
+snugly at home and talk of their consciences.</p>
+
+<p>Patriotism such as that which in 1914 led the flower of our race
+to flock in countless thousands to the standards and be enrolled
+for battle in defence of</p>
+
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>"This precious stone set in the
+silver sea,"</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>"This blessed plot, this earth,
+this realm, this England,"</span><br>
+
+
+<p>being without doubt or cavil one of the noblest emotions of the
+human heart, has often been the begetter of inspired prose. Our own
+great war has not yet produced many fine utterances, and I go back
+to-day to a contemporary of Sir William Napier for one of the
+noblest outbursts of eloquence expressive of a burning patriotism
+that has ever been poured forth.</p>
+
+<p>Someone in the days when Wellington was alive had alluded in the
+House of Lords to the Irish as "aliens," and Richard Sheil, rising
+in the House of Commons, lifted up his voice for his country in an
+impassioned flight of generous eloquence.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Henry Hardinge, who had been at the battle of Waterloo,
+happened to be seated opposite to Sheil in the House, and to him
+Sheil appealed with the deepest emotion to support him in his
+vindication of his country's valour. None will in these days deny
+that our fellow-citizens of Ireland who went to the war displayed a
+courage as firm and invincible as our own:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The Duke of Wellington is not, I am inclined to believe, a man
+of excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be
+easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I
+cannot help thinking, that when he heard his countrymen (for we are
+his countrymen) designated by a phrase so offensive he ought to
+have recalled the many fields of fight in which we have been
+contributors to his renown. Yes, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
+that he has passed ought to have brought back upon him, that from
+the earliest achievement in which he displayed that military genius
+which has placed him foremost in the annals of modern warfare, down
+to that last and surpassing combat which has made his name
+imperishable, the Irish soldiers, with whom our armies are filled,
+were the inseparable auxiliaries to his glory.</p>
+
+<p>"Whose were the athletic arms that drove their bayonets at
+Vimiera through those phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of
+war before? What desperate valour climbed the steeps and filled the
+moats at Badajos! All! all his victories should have rushed and
+crowded back upon his memory&mdash;Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca,
+Albuera, Toulouse, and last of all the greatest! (and here Sheil
+pointed to Sir Henry Hardinge across the House). Tell me, for you
+were there. I appeal to the gallant soldier before me, from whose
+opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an
+intrepid breast; tell me, for you must needs remember, on that day
+when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while
+death fell in showers upon them, when the artillery of France,
+levelled with a precision of the most deadly science, played upon
+them, when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the
+example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the
+onset&mdash;tell me if for one instant, when to hesitate for one
+instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' blenched!</p>
+
+<p>"And when at length the moment for the last and decisive
+movement had arrived, and the valour which had so long been wisely
+cheeked was at length let loose, tell me if Ireland with less
+heroic valour than the natives of your own glorious isle,
+precipitated herself upon the foe?</p>
+
+<p>"The blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in
+the same stream, on the same field. When the still morning dawned,
+their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep earth
+their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now
+breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven upon
+their union in the grave.</p>
+
+<p>"Partners in every peril&mdash;in the glory shall we not be
+permitted to participate, and shall we be told as a requital that
+we are aliens, and estranged from the noble country for whose
+salvation our life-blood was poured out?"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A hundred years of strife, misunderstanding, anger,
+estrangement, outrages, bloodshed, and murder separate us from this
+appealing cry wrung from the beating heart of this inspired
+Irishman. Is the great tragedy of England and Ireland that has
+sullied their annals for seven hundred years never to be brought to
+an end? Is there never to be for us a Lethe through which we may
+pass to the farther shore of forgetfulness and forgiveness of the
+past and reconciliation in the future?</p>
+
+<p>That you may live to see it, Antony, is my hope and prayer.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter23"></a>
+
+<h2>23</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous passage on the fate
+of Marie Antoinette&mdash;in some ways the most splendid of his
+utterances,&mdash;and I now am going to quote to you a very great
+passage from Thomas Carlyle on the same tragic subject.</p>
+
+<p>Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must certainly have been
+familiar with Burke's noble ejaculation, to challenge it with
+emulation; but in the result we must admit that he amply justifies
+his temerity.</p>
+
+<p>The tragic figure of the queen drawn to execution through the
+roaring mob inspired Carlyle with what is surely his most
+overwhelming product.</p>
+
+<p>The august shadow of the Bible is dimly apprehended as the words
+ascend upwards and upwards with simple sublimity to the awful
+close.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing he wrote in all his multitudinous volumes surpasses this
+astonishing outburst:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!</p>
+
+<p>"For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties,
+came it not also out of Heaven? <i>Sunt lachrym&aelig; rerum, et
+mentem mortalia tangunt</i>. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks
+without pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting
+ignominy;&mdash;of thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not
+to visit thy face too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy
+eye on splendour; and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to
+which the guillotine and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the
+merciful end?</p>
+
+<p>"Look <i>there</i>, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair
+face is wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those
+eyes is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale
+as of one living in death.</p>
+
+<p>"Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of
+the World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless,
+which only curses environ, has to stop&mdash;a people drunk with
+vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee
+there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac heads,
+the air deaf with their triumph-yell!</p>
+
+<p>"The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her
+startled blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale
+face, which she hides with her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"There is, then, <i>no</i> heart to say, 'God pity thee'?</p>
+
+<p>"O think not of these: think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the
+Crucified&mdash;Who also treading the winepress alone, fronted
+sorrow still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and
+built of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for thee and all the
+wretched!</p>
+
+<p>"Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the
+Tuileries, where thy step was once so light&mdash;where thy
+children shall not dwell.</p>
+
+<p>"Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes&mdash;dumb lies the
+world; that wild-yelling world, and all its madness, is behind
+thee."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is a passage in Carlyle's tempestuous narrative of the
+taking of the Bastille which has always seemed to me to give it the
+last consummate touch of greatness.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly he pauses in the turmoil and dust and wrath and madness
+of that tremendous conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over
+peaceful France, and he exclaims:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant
+on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
+cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the
+Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are
+even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:&mdash;and
+also on this roaring Hell-porch of a H&ocirc;tel de Ville."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>And a few sentences further on a heart of stone must be moved by
+what the archives of that grim prison-house revealed:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice.
+Read this portion of an old letter.</p>
+
+<p>"'If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake
+of God and the Most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my
+dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to show that she is
+alive! It were the greatest consolation I could receive; and I
+should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur.'</p>
+
+<p>"Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret-Demery, and hast no
+other history,&mdash;she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou
+art dead! Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this
+question; to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of
+men. "</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In the reign of Louis XV. alone, there were no less than fifteen
+thousand <i>lettres de cachet</i> issued, by which anyone could be
+suddenly arrested, and, without trial, and, heedless of protest,
+imprisoned perhaps for life in the Bastille.</p>
+
+<p>In the excesses of the Reign of Terror three or four thousand
+persons perished. Their deaths were spectacular, and have covered
+with execrations their dreadful executioners.</p>
+
+<p>But it is right that we should remember, Antony, the life-long
+agony and the unutterable despair of the victims of that
+remorselessly cruel system which the Revolution overthrew.</p>
+
+<p>The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in <i>Sartor Resartus</i>,
+seems to me to come nearer to the above excerpts than anything else
+in Carlyle, though at a perceptible distance:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and
+criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and
+create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already
+with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!</p>
+
+<p>"But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning
+of Creation is&mdash;Light. Till the eye have vision the whole
+members are in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tossed
+Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: 'Let
+there be Light!' Even to the greatest that has felt such moment is
+it not miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler
+figures, to the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is
+hushed; the rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves
+into separate Firmaments: deep, silent rock-foundations are built
+beneath, and the skyey vault, with its everlasting Luminaries,
+above; instead of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming,
+fertile, heaven-encompassed World.</p>
+
+<p>"I, too, could now say to myself: 'Be no longer a Chaos, but a
+World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the
+pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in
+God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then.
+Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole
+might. Work while it is called to-day; for the night cometh wherein
+no man can work.'"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>There is another passage in <i>Sartor Resartus</i> which I have
+always held in veneration, though the field labourer is not now so
+"hardly-entreated" as when Carlyle wrote of him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Two men I honour, and no third. First the toilworn Craftsman
+that with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth, and
+makes her man's.</p>
+
+<p>"Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein
+notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue indefeasibly royal, as of the
+sceptre of this planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all
+weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the
+face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for thy
+rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee!
+Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were
+thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our
+conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
+marred. For in thee too lay a god-created form, but it was not to
+be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and
+defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know
+freedom. Yet toil on, toil on; <i>thou</i> art in thy duty, be out
+of it who may: thou toilest for the altogether indispensable, for
+daily bread.</p>
+
+<p>"A second man I honour, and still more highly: him who is seen
+toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but the
+bread of life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards
+inward harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his
+outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his
+outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him
+artist; not earthly craftsman only, but inspired thinker, who with
+heaven-made implement conquers heaven for us! If the poor and
+humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil
+for him in return, that he have light, have guidance, freedom,
+immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else is
+chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.</p>
+
+<p>"Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities
+united; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's
+wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this
+world know I nothing than a peasant saint, could such now anywhere
+be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself;
+thou wilt see the splendour of heaven spring forth from the
+humblest depths of earth, like a light shining in great
+darkness."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>Sartor Resartus</i> has long taken its place among the
+greatest prose works of the nineteenth century, and it is a strange
+commentary on this mandate to us all to "produce, produce!" to find
+that for eleven years Carlyle could find no publisher who would
+give it in book form to the world!</p>
+
+<p>It is a solemn reflection to think that there may be many books
+of eloquence and splendour that have never seen the light of
+publicity. Publishers concern themselves less with what is finely
+written than with what will best sell; and in their defence it may
+be acceded that some of the masterpieces of literature have at
+their first appearance before the world fallen dead from the
+press.</p>
+
+<p>The first edition of FitzGerald's <i>Omar Khayy&aacute;m</i>,
+issued at one shilling, was totally unrecognised, and copies of it
+might have been bought for twopence in the trays and boxes of trash
+on the pavement outside old bookshops!</p>
+
+<p>But if once a work is published, time will with almost
+irresistible force place it ultimately in the station it deserves
+in the literature of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Instant acceptance not seldom preludes final rejection. In the
+middle of the last century Martin Tupper's <i>Proverbial
+Philosophy</i> garnished every drawing-room table; and now, where
+is it?</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<p><i>P.S.</i>&mdash;Do not look for the passage on Marie
+Antoinette in the <i>French Revolution</i>, for you will not find
+it there, but in the "Essay of the Diamond Necklace."</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter24"></a>
+
+<h2>24</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>You and I once had a cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, had he
+lived, would very certainly have left a brilliant addition to the
+lustre of the name he bore. He was born in 1798, and only lived
+forty-five years, dying when his powers were leading him to high
+fortune in that legal profession which so many of the family have
+pursued.</p>
+
+<p>He was a scholar of Eton; a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge;
+he won the Greek and Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again in
+1821. To him, therefore, the classic spirit was inborn, and a
+training that omitted the study of Latin and Greek the very
+negation of education. He would have had something very trenchant
+to say of what is now known as "the modern side." He wrote a very
+rich and splendid prose, and it is no fond family partiality that
+leads me to quote to you his eloquent and precious defence of the
+classical languages:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"I am not one whose lot it has been to grow old in literary
+retirement, devoted to classical studies with an exclusiveness
+which might lead to an overweening estimate of these two noble
+languages. Few, I will not say evil, were the days allowed to me
+for such pursuits; and I was constrained, still young and an unripe
+scholar to forego them for the duties of an active and laborious
+profession. They are now amusements only, however delightful and
+improving. For I am far from assuming to understand all their
+riches, all their beauty, or all their power; yet I can profoundly
+feel their immeasurable superiority in many important respects to
+all we call modern; and I would fain think that there are many even
+among my younger readers who can now, or will hereafter, sympathise
+with the expression of my ardent admiration.</p>
+
+<p>"Greek&mdash;the shrine of the genius of the old world; as
+universal as our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite
+flexibility, or indefatigable strength, with the complication and
+the distinctness of Nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar,
+from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian,
+speaking to the mind like English; with words like pictures, with
+words like the gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety
+and picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of
+&AElig;schylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor
+fathomed to the bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its
+thunders, nor lit up with all its ardours even under the Promethean
+touch of Demosthenes!</p>
+
+<p>"And Latin&mdash;the voice of empire and of war, of law and of
+the state, inferior to its half-parent and rival in the embodying
+of passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in
+sustaining the measured march of history; and superior to it in the
+indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark of an
+imperial and despotising republic; rigid in its construction,
+parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding to the flowery
+yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of Greek-like splendour
+in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius; proved indeed, to the
+uttermost, by Cicero, and by him found wanting; yet majestic in its
+bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of
+history, instinct with the spirit of nations and not with the
+passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not
+the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit,
+whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and
+discursive Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.</p>
+
+<p>"These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly
+counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not
+failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink deep
+at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful in
+human language.</p>
+
+<p>"The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and
+of Rome, are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their
+marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate
+polish, has sunk for ever in his heart, and thence throws out light
+and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyance of his maturer
+years. No avocations of professional labour will make him abandon
+their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he will
+find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons&mdash;to reperuse them
+in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations, and in the
+clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and to
+the world with superior profit.</p>
+
+<p>"The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of
+modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he
+reverence that of classical antiquity; and in declining age, when
+the appetite for magazines and reviews, and the ten-times repeated
+trash of the day, has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a
+circle of school-fellow friends, and end his secular studies as he
+began them, with his Homer, his Horace, and his Shakespeare."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Ah, what an echo, Antony, every word of this beautiful passage
+finds in my own heart, only saddened with the poignant regret that
+the necessary business and occupation of the passing years have
+dulled for me such unpolished facility, as I may once have
+possessed, for perusing my Homer and my Horace!</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, rare in these days to find gentlemen as familiar
+as were their forebears with Latin and Greek. You, Antony, will
+probably find yourself as you grow up in like case with myself, but
+there will remain for your unending instruction and delight all the
+glories of English literature, to give you a taste for which these
+few letters of mine are written, plucking only a single flower here
+and there from the most wonderful garden in the world.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter25"></a>
+
+<h2>25</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Cardinal Newman, of whom I shall write to-day, was the first of
+the great writers born in the nineteenth century, and he lived from
+1801 to 1890. Besides being a master of English prose he was no
+mean poet; but above all else he was a man of immense personal
+power, which was strangely associated with a manifest saintliness
+which compelled diffidence from those admitted to his intimacy.</p>
+
+<p>I have described him as I knew him in my <i>Memories</i>;<a
+name='FNanchor_1_7'></a><a href='#Footnote_1_7'><sup>[1]</sup></a>
+and now will quote to you his utterance on music and its effect
+upon the heart of man, which has always seemed to me too precious
+to leave buried in a sermon:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Let us take an instance, of an outward and earthly form, or
+economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified; I
+mean musical sounds as they are exhibited most perfectly in
+instrumental harmony.</p>
+
+<p>"There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen; yet
+what a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What Science
+brings so much out of so little? out of what poor elements does
+some great master in it create his new world!</p>
+
+<p>"Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere
+ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day,
+without reality, without meaning? We may do so; and then, perhaps,
+we shall also account theology to be a matter of words; yet, as
+there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who
+feel cannot communicate, so is there also in the wonderful creation
+of sublimity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many men the
+very names which the Science employs are utterly incomprehensible.
+To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be fanciful or trifling,
+to speak of the views which it opens upon us to be childish
+extravagance; yet is it possible that that inexhaustible evolution
+and disposition of notes, so rich yet so simple, so intricate yet
+so regulated, so various yet so majestic, should be a mere sound,
+which is gone and perishes?</p>
+
+<p>"Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen
+emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful
+impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by
+what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in
+itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from some
+higher sphere, they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in the
+medium of created sound; they are echoes from our home; they are
+the voice of angels or the magnificat of Saints, or the living laws
+of Divine Governance, or the Divinic attributes; something are they
+besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we cannot
+utter,&mdash;though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise
+distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting
+them."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Of quite another order is the Cardinal's description of a
+gentleman. Here there is no flight of poetical imagination, but a
+manifestation of felicitous intuition and penetrating insight as
+rare as it is convincing, and the generous wide vision of a man of
+the world, undimmed by the faintest trace of prejudice:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to
+say he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both
+refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in
+merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and
+unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their
+movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits
+may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or
+conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy
+chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and
+fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat
+without them.</p>
+
+<p>"The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may
+cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast;
+all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or
+suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make
+everyone at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his
+company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the
+distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom
+he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics
+which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation and
+never wearisome.</p>
+
+<p>"He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be
+receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except
+when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort; he has no
+ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to
+those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the
+best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes
+unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings for
+arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From a
+long-sighted prudence he observes the maxim of the ancient sage,
+that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he
+were one day to be our friend. He has too much sense to be
+affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember injuries,
+and too indolent to bear malice.</p>
+
+<p>"He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical
+principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to
+bereavement because it is irreparable, and to death because it is
+his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind his
+disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering discourtesy
+of better, perhaps, but less educated minds, who, like blunt
+weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake the
+point in argument, waste their strength in trifles, misconceive
+their adversary, and leave the question more involved than they
+find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he is too
+clear-headed to be unjust, he is as simple as he is forcible, and
+as brief as he is decisive.</p>
+
+<p>"Nowhere shall we find greater candour, consideration,
+indulgence; he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he
+accounts for their mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason
+as well as its strength, its province, and its limits. If he be an
+unbeliever he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule
+religion or to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or
+fanatic in his infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he even
+supports institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which
+he does not assent; he honours the ministers of religion, and it
+contents him to decline its mysteries without assailing or
+denouncing them. He is a friend of religious toleration, and that,
+not only because his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms
+of faith with an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and
+effeminacy of feeling which is the attendant on civilisation.</p>
+
+<p>"Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even
+when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of
+imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of
+the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be no
+large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the Being of God,
+sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the
+attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or
+creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent
+thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a
+teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity
+itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical
+powers, he is able to see what sentiments are consistent in those
+who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others to
+feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which exist
+in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions.</p>
+
+<p>"Such are the lineaments of the ethical character which the
+cultivated intellect will form apart from religious principle."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Surely this is a wonderful utterance from a Cardinal of the
+Church of Rome, full of urbanity and the wisdom of the world.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_7'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_7'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>Pp. 52-57.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter26"></a>
+
+<h2>26</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I have in a former letter quoted a short but noble passage from
+Lord Macaulay on the great Lord Chatham.</p>
+
+<p>But I feel that the writer who was perhaps the greatest essayist
+that England has ever produced must not in these letters be fobbed
+off with so slight a notice and quotation.</p>
+
+<p>What has always seemed to me the supremest passage that flowed
+from his wonderful pen is to be found in his paper on Warren
+Hastings which appeared originally in the <i>Edinburgh
+Review</i>.</p>
+
+<p>His description in that essay of the opening of the great
+impeachment, has given all succeeding generations a vision of one
+of the most majestic scenes in the whole history of man.</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more
+gorgeous with jewellery and cloth of gold, more attractive to
+grown-up children, than that which was then exhibited at
+Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well
+calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an
+imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong to
+the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past, were
+collected on one spot and in one hour. All the talents and all the
+accomplishments which are developed by liberty and civilisation
+were now displayed, with every advantage that could be derived both
+from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in the proceedings
+carried the mind either backward, through many troubled centuries,
+to the days when the foundations of our constitution were laid; or
+far away, over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations living
+under strange stars, worshipping strange gods, and writing strange
+characters from right to left. The High Court of Parliament was to
+sit, according to forms handed down from the days of the
+Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused of exercising tyranny over
+the lord of the holy city of Benares, and over the ladies of the
+princely house of Oude.</p>
+
+<p>"The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of
+William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at
+the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the
+just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall
+where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted a
+victorious party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where
+Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid
+courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor
+civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers. The
+streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold and
+ermine, were marshalled by the heralds under Garter King-at-Arms.
+The judges in their vestments of state attended to give advice on
+points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords, three-fourths of
+the Upper House as the Upper House then was, walked in solemn order
+from their usual place of assembling to the tribunal. The junior
+Baron present led the way, George Eliot, Lord Heathfield, recently
+ennobled for his memorable defence of Gibraltar against the fleets
+and armies of France and Spain. The long procession was closed by
+the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of the realm, by the great
+dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons of the King. Last of all
+came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by his fine person and noble
+bearing. The grey old walls were hung with scarlet. The long
+galleries were crowded by an audience such as has rarely excited
+the fears or the emulation of an orator. There were gathered
+together, from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and
+prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning,
+the representatives of every science and of every art. There were
+seated round the Queen the fair-haired young daughters of the House
+of Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of great Kings and
+Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other
+country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of
+her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all
+the imitations of the stage. There the historian of the Roman
+Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily
+against Verres, and when, before a senate which still retained some
+show of freedom, Tacitus thundered against the oppressor of Africa.
+There were seen, side by side, the greatest painter and the
+greatest scholar of the age. The spectacle had allured Reynolds
+from that easel which has preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads
+of so many writers and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many
+noble matrons. It had induced Parr to suspend his labours in that
+dark and profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure
+of erudition, a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often
+paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still
+precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous
+charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted
+his faith. There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful
+race, the Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by
+love and music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were
+the members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticised, and
+exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs.
+Montague. And there the ladies whose lips, more persuasive than
+those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against
+palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana, Duchess of
+Devonshire.</p>
+
+<p>"The Serjeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar,
+and bent his knee. The culprit was indeed not unworthy of that
+great presence. He had ruled an extensive and populous country, had
+made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and
+pulled down princes. And in his high place he had so borne himself,
+that all had feared him, that most had loved him, and that hatred
+itself could deny him no title to glory, except virtue. He looked
+like a great man, and not like a bad man. A person small and
+emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage which, while it
+indicated deference to the court, indicated also habitual
+self-possession and self-respect, a high and intellectual forehead,
+a brow pensive, but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible decision, a
+face pale and worn, but serene, on which was written, as legibly as
+under the picture in the council-chamber at Calcutta, <i>Mens
+&aelig;qua in arduis</i>; such was the aspect with which the great
+Proconsul presented himself to his judges. "</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Such a scene can only find its appropriate enactment at the
+centre of a great empire and amid a people with an august history
+behind them, conscious of present magnificence and confident of
+future glory.</p>
+
+<p>We are now far into the second century since that memorable
+spectacle filled to the walls the great Hall of Westminster.</p>
+
+<p>What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine spirit of liberty and
+adorned by the sacred principle of personal freedom, has been
+superseded by a socialistic democracy under which personal freedom
+suffers frequent curtailments, and liberty is severely abridged by
+the mandates of trade unions, the prohibitions of urban potentates,
+and the usurpations of medicine men.</p>
+
+<p>Under these cramping and crippling deprivations we have lost the
+collective sense of greatness as a race that infused every
+participator in the splendid pageant of such an event as the
+Impeachment of Warren Hastings. One has but to imagine an
+impeachment to-day with the dominant personages in it chosen from
+the strike leaders and labour delegates of the proletariat,
+assisted by promoted railway porters and ennobled grocers, to
+perceive what a distance, and down what a declivity we have
+travelled since those days when it was impossible for any great
+public function to take place without its becoming naturally and
+without conscious effort the occasion for a manifestation of the
+pomp, circumstance, and splendour inseparable from the solemn acts
+of a great people performed by their greatest men.</p>
+
+<p>But I am one, Antony, who look forward with steadfast hope and
+belief to a reaction from our present vulgarity, and to a
+reascension of England to a greater dignity, honour, and nobleness
+both in its public and private life than is observable to-day.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter27"></a>
+
+<h2>27</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I have not in my letters to you travelled beyond our own islands
+in search of great English prose, but I propose now to make one
+divergence from this rule and quote a very great and deservedly
+far-famed speech, uttered on a memorable occasion, of Abraham
+Lincoln, President of the United States.</p>
+
+<p>At the present time, I think, the name of Lincoln lies closer to
+the hearts of the American people than that of any other, not even
+excepting Washington and Hamilton. The latter, though they
+established American independence, remained in a personal sense
+English gentlemen till their death. Lincoln was born in the
+backwoods in rude poverty, received no education but what he
+acquired by his own unaided efforts, and lived and died a man of
+the people, the ideal type of native-born American.</p>
+
+<p>He rose from the lowest to the highest position in the State,
+borne upwards by the simple nobility of his character, by the
+stainless purity of his actions, and the splendid motive of all his
+endeavours. His speeches and writings derive their power and
+distinction from no tricks of oratory, felicity of diction, or
+nimbleness of mind. They are the vocal results of the beatings of
+his great heart.</p>
+
+<p>He led his people to war in the manner of a prophet of Israel;
+with an awful austerity, majestic, invincible, and with hand
+uplifted in sure appeal to the God of battles. On the field of
+Gettysburg, where was waged the most tremendous of all combats of
+the war, he came to dedicate a cemetery to the innumerable dead,
+and these were his few and noble words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Fourscore-and-seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon
+this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to
+the proposition that all men are created equal.</p>
+
+<p>"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
+nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
+endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come
+to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for
+those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is
+altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.</p>
+
+<p>"But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
+we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
+struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add of
+detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say
+here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the
+living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which
+they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather
+for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us;
+that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that
+cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that
+we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain;
+that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and
+that government of the people, by the people, and for the people,
+shall not perish from the earth."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Few are the opportunities in the history of the world when the
+time, the place, the occasion, and the words spoken, have combined
+so poignantly to move the hearts of men.</p>
+
+<p>One can imagine the vast concourse standing awestruck and
+uncovered before the solemn splendour of this noble dedication,
+every phrase of which will remain for generations a treasured and
+sacred memory in countless thousands of homes of the great
+continent in the West.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter28"></a>
+
+<h2>28</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an entirely new
+style of English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were
+swept away, the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries
+was abandoned, and there arose a band of writers, to whom De
+Quincey and Ruskin were the leaders, who withdrew all veils from
+their emotions, threw away all the shackles of reserve, and poured
+their sobs and ecstasies upon us, in soaring periods of impassioned
+prose, glittering with decorative alliterations, and adorned with
+euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds.</p>
+
+<p>This flamboyant style seems to have synchronised with the
+general decline of reserve and ceremony in English life, and with
+the rise of the modern familiar intimacy that leaves no privacy
+even to our thoughts. Our grandfathers would have hesitated to have
+discussed at the dinner-table, even after the ladies had withdrawn,
+what is now set down for free debate at ladies' clubs, and
+canvassed in the correct columns of the <i>Guardian</i>.</p>
+
+<p>This new habit of mind and speech has affected our literature
+deeply and diversely. In the hands of the really great masters such
+as Carlyle, Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate revelations of the
+throbbings of their hearts, and the direct and untrammelled appeal
+of their inmost souls crying in the market-place, take forcible
+possession of our affections, and bring them into closer touch with
+each one of us than was ever possible with the older restrained
+writers.</p>
+
+<p>But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the
+licence of intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread
+vulgarity, and a contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative,
+and redundancy; and although the disappearance of reserve in modern
+writing may tend to reduce all but the production of the great to a
+depressing state of vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's
+hand, has unlocked for us the doors of an Aladdin's palace! But
+even if the restraint of the ancient writers has disappeared from
+the prose of our own times, all great writing of necessity must now
+and always possess the quality of simplicity; and even Ruskin, who
+saw the world of nature about him with the eyes of a visionary, and
+wrote of what he saw as one so inspired as to be already half in
+Paradise, yet clothed his glorious outpourings in a raiment of
+perfect simplicity.</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance of the firmament;
+and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of
+these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate
+Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 'The earth shook,
+the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God,' 'He doth set His
+bow in the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of every drooping
+swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love. 'In them hath He
+set a <i>tabernacle</i> for the sun,' whose burning ball, which,
+without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable and
+scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that firmament
+surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by mediatorial
+ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden pavement is
+spread for his chariot wheels at morning; by the firmament of
+clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill with light at
+noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is closed at
+evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of the
+firmament his implacable light is divided and its separated
+fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of
+distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains
+burn as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this
+tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows
+of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of His
+own majesty to men, upon the <i>throne</i> of the firmament.</p>
+
+<p>"As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of
+eternity, we cannot behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and
+the Preserver of men those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place.
+'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by
+earth, for it is His footstool.'</p>
+
+<p>"And all those passings to and fro of fruitful showers and
+grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built about
+the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening thunders,
+and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in
+our hearts the acceptance and distinctness and dearness of the
+simple words, 'Our Father, Which art in heaven!'"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The description of the first approach to Venice before the days
+of railways will always be cherished by those who admire Ruskin's
+work as one of his most characteristic and memorable
+utterances:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in
+which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which
+that toil was rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate
+survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly
+by the happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the
+last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet
+village, where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside
+its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty
+perspective of the causeway, see, for the first time, the towers of
+some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset&mdash;hours of
+peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival
+in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
+equivalent&mdash;in those days, I say, when there was something
+more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
+successive halting place than a new arrangement of glass roofing
+and iron girder&mdash;there were few moments of which the
+recollection was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that
+which, as I endeavoured to describe in the close of the last
+chapter, brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot
+into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre.</p>
+
+<p>"Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
+source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this direction,
+its buildings are far less characteristic than those of the other
+great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by
+distance, and more than atoned for by the strange rising of its
+walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea;
+for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could at once
+comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water which
+stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north and
+south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east.
+The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black
+weed separating and disappearing gradually in knots of heaving
+shoal under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be
+indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so calmly;
+not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan
+promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a
+sea with the bleak power of northern waves, yet subdued into a
+strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a
+field of burnished gold as the sun declined behind the belfry tower
+of the lonely island church, fitly named 'St George of the
+Sea-weed.'</p>
+
+<p>"As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the
+traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low,
+sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows;
+but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Argua rose
+in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage
+of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended
+themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with the
+craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole
+horizon to the north&mdash;a wall of jagged blue, here and there
+showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices, fading
+far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
+breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its snow
+into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the
+barred clouds of evening one after another, countless, the crown of
+the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them, to
+rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and on
+the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as the
+quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.</p>
+
+<p>"And at last when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its
+untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded
+rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the
+Indian Sea; when first upon the traveller's sight opened the long
+ranges of columned palaces&mdash;each with its black boat moored at
+the portal, each with its image cast down beneath its feet upon
+that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of
+rich tessellation when first, at the extremity of the bright vista,
+the shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from
+behind the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so
+delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a
+bow just bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was
+all risen, the gondolier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!" struck sharp upon the
+ear, and the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half
+met over the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed
+close and loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and
+when at last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea,
+across which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its
+sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation,
+it was no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the
+visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to forget
+the darker truths of its history and its being, "Well might it seem
+that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of the
+enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters which
+encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state, rather
+than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in Nature was
+wild or merciless&mdash;Time and Decay, as well as the waves and
+tempests&mdash;had been won to adorn her instead of to destroy, and
+might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty which seemed to
+have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-glass as well as of
+the sea."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is now many years since I first saw Venice rising from the
+sea on a September morning as I sailed towards it across the
+Adriatic from Trieste; and as we glided closer and closer its
+loveliness was slowly and exquisitely unveiled under the slanting
+beams of the early sun.</p>
+
+<p>In all my wanderings over two hemispheres I remember no vision
+so enchanting and unsurpassable! May you live to see it, Antony,
+before the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its
+beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter29"></a>
+
+<h2>29</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Born in Devon at the same time&mdash;within a year&mdash;as
+Ruskin, James Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same
+sanguine and poetical characteristics. His historical writings
+have, I believe, been somewhat discredited of late years owing to
+the permission he is alleged to have given himself to warp his
+account of events in order to buttress some prejudice or contention
+of his own.</p>
+
+<p>But if we set him aside as an accurate authority, we can at once
+restore him to our regard as a lord of visionary
+language:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow-dropping, mellow
+autumn of a rich, glorious summer. In the old man Nature has
+fulfilled her work; she leads him with her blessings; she fills him
+with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
+children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to
+the grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we
+should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most
+beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>"There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with
+bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the
+symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side of the grave;
+which the grave gapes to finish before the victory is won;
+and&mdash;strange that it should be so&mdash;this is the highest
+life of man.</p>
+
+<p>"Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose
+life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to do
+the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or
+Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers,
+priests, poets, kings, slaves&mdash;one and all, their fate has
+been the same&mdash;the same bitter cup has been given them to
+drink."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Another passage of deep and melancholy beauty cannot be omitted
+from this volume. It records in language of haunting loveliness the
+passing away of feudalism and chivalry and of a thousand years of
+the pageantry of faith:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"The great trading companies were not instituted for selfish
+purposes, but to ensure the consumer of manufactured articles that
+what he purchased was properly made and of a reasonable price. They
+determined prices, fixed wages, and arranged the rules of
+apprenticeship. But in time the companies lost their healthy
+vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were in the reign of
+Elizabeth hastening away. There were no longer tradesmen to be
+found in sufficient number who were possessed of the necessary
+probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon with
+the deep melancholy which, in those days, settled down on Elizabeth
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>"For indeed a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and
+direction of which even is still hidden from us&mdash;a change from
+era to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken
+up; old things were passing away, and the faith and life of ten
+centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the
+abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and
+all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were
+passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond
+the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk
+back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm
+earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a
+small atom in the awful vastness of the Universe.</p>
+
+<p>"In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for
+themselves, mankind was to remain no longer. And now it is all
+gone&mdash;like an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between us and
+the old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the
+historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and
+our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the
+aisles of the cathedrals, only as we gaze upon their silent figures
+sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of
+what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound
+of church bells, that peculiar creation of medi&aelig;val age,
+which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The sound of church bells, being entirely the creation of man,
+forms perhaps a more touching link with the past for us than the
+eternal sounds of nature. Yet the everlasting wash of the waves of
+the sea forms a bond between us and the unplumbed depths of time,
+as they</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><span style='margin-left: 1em;'>"Begin and cease,
+and then again begin</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>With tremulous cadence slow, and
+bring,</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>The eternal note of sadness
+in.</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Sophocles long ago</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Heard it on the &AElig;gean, and it
+brought</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Into his mind the turbid ebb and
+flow</span><br>
+<span style='margin-left: 1em;'>Of human misery."</span><br>
+</div>
+
+<p>So wrote Matthew Arnold. Then there is the sound of wind in the
+trees, and the voice of falling waters and rippling streams which
+must have fallen upon the ears of our remotest fore-runners as they
+do upon our own. These eternal sounds about us take no note of our
+brief coming and going, and will be the same when you and I,
+Antony, and all the millions that come after us in the world have
+returned to dust.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter30"></a>
+
+<h2>30</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Though I do not myself rank Matthew Arnold among the great prose
+writers of England, yet, like all true poets&mdash;and he indeed
+was one of them,&mdash;he wrote excellent English prose.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that he turned to poetry to express his finest
+emotions and thoughts, and he himself alludes to his prose writings
+thus: "I am a mere solitary wanderer in search of the light, and I
+talk an artless, unstudied, everyday familiar language. But, after
+all, this is the language of the mass of the world."</p>
+
+<p>The chief note of all his teaching was urbanity. "The pursuit of
+perfection," he said, "is the pursuit of sweetness and light."
+"Culture hates hatred: culture has one great passion&mdash;the
+passion for sweetness and light."</p>
+
+<p>This teaching, no doubt, leads to fields of pleasantness and
+charm, and not at all to the high places of self-sacrifice, or the
+austere peaks of martyrdom. Burning indignation against intolerable
+things, fierce denunciation of the cruelties and abominations of
+the world find no encouragement or sympathy from this serene,
+detached, and therefore somewhat ineffectual, teaching.</p>
+
+<p>Sweetness and light would never have interfered with the slave
+trade, or fiercely fought beside Plimsoll for the load-line on the
+sides of ships.</p>
+
+<p>We did not fight the Germans under the doctrine of sweetness and
+light.</p>
+
+<p>It was a beautiful and edifying adornment for the drawing-room
+in times of Victorian self-satisfied peace, but was a tinsel armour
+for the battle of life, and entirely futile as a sword for
+combating wrong.</p>
+
+<p>I am not sure that Matthew Arnold would not have called those
+who wrathfully slash about them at abominable evils,
+Philistines.</p>
+
+<p>After all, the great men of action and the great writers of the
+world have been capable of harbouring great enthusiasms and deep
+indignations in their hearts; and these emotions do not emerge from
+a "passion for sweetness and light."</p>
+
+<p>A better doctrine, Antony, is, I think, to try to push things
+along cheerfully but strenuously in the right direction wherever
+and whenever you can.</p>
+
+<p>As a writer I think Matthew Arnold's best passage is to be found
+in the Preface to his <i>Essays in Criticism</i>:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Oxford. Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged
+by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!</p>
+
+<p>"There are our young barbarians, all at play!</p>
+
+<p>"And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens
+to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last
+enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her
+ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of
+us, to the ideal, to perfection,&mdash;to beauty, in a word, which
+is only truth seen from another side?&mdash;nearer perhaps than all
+the science of T&uuml;bingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has
+been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given
+thyself to sides and heroes not mine, only never to the
+Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and
+unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!... Apparitions of a day,
+what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the
+warfare which this Queen of Romance has been waging against them
+for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?"</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As a man and a companion,<a name='FNanchor_1_8'></a><a href=
+'#Footnote_1_8'><sup>[1]</sup></a> if you expected nothing but
+delightful humour, brilliant discourse, and urbane outlook upon
+everything, few could rival his personal charm; but he would never
+really join you in a last ditch to defend the right, or actually
+charge with you against the wrong, although in his poem "The Last
+Word," while not participating himself in such strenuous doings, he
+seems to yield a reluctant admiration to him who does so charge,
+and who leaves his "body by the wall."</p>
+
+<p>Much has happened since Matthew Arnold poured his scorn upon the
+unregenerate Philistines; but let us remember, Antony, that
+thousands and thousands of these contemned neglecters of sweetness
+and light stood unflinchingly and died upon the plains of France
+that our country and its freedom should survive.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<a name='Footnote_1_8'></a><a href='#FNanchor_1_8'>[1]</a>
+<div class='note'>
+<p>See my <i>Memories</i>, pp. 46-52 and 55.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter31"></a>
+
+<h2>31</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Like the author of the <i>Peninsular War</i>, Sir William Butler
+was great both as a soldier and as a writer. His autobiography
+sparkles with humour, irony, and felicitous diction; but it was in
+his <i>Life of Gordon of Khartoum</i> that he rose to his full
+stature as a contributor to the glory of English prose.</p>
+
+<p>The spell of Gordon seems to have, as it were, transfigured all
+who approached him, and raised them out of themselves. One man
+alone, of all those whose lives touched his, has shown that his own
+pinched and narrow mediocrity was proof against the radiance of
+Gordon's spirit, and has feebly attempted to belittle the soldier
+saint for his own justification. But he has failed even to project
+a spot upon the sun of Gordon's fame, and he is already forgotten,
+while the great soldier's name will endure in the hearts of his
+countrymen till England and its people fail.</p>
+
+<p>If Sir William Butler's final noble periods, which I here
+reproduce, do not deeply move him who reads them, then must that
+reader have a heart of stone:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"Thus fell in dark hour of defeat a man as unselfish as Sidney,
+of courage dauntless as Wolfe, of honour stainless as Outram, of
+sympathy wide-reaching as Drummond, of honesty straightforward as
+Napier, of faith as steadfast as More. Doubtful indeed is it if
+anywhere in the past we shall find figure of knight or soldier to
+equal him, for sometimes it is the sword of death that gives to
+life its real knighthood, and too often the soldier's end is
+unworthy of his knightly life; but with Gordon the harmony of life
+and death was complete, and the closing scenes seem to move to
+their fulfilment in solemn hush, as though an unseen power watched
+over the sequence of their sorrow.</p>
+
+<p>"Not by the blind hazard of chance was this great tragedy
+consummated; not by the discord of men or from the vague opposition
+of physical obstacle, by fault of route or length of delay, was
+help denied to him. The picture of a wonderful life had to be made
+perfect by heroic death. The moral had to be cut deep, and written
+red, and hung high, so that its lesson could be seen by all men
+above strife and doubt and discord. Nay, the very setting of the
+final scenes has to be wrought out in such contrast of colour that
+the dullest eye shall be able to read the meaning of it all. For
+many a year back this soldier's life has been a protest against our
+most cherished teaching. Faith is weakness, we have said. He will
+show us it is strength. Reward is the right of service. Publicity
+is true fame. Let us go into action with a newspaper correspondent
+riding at our elbow, or sitting in the cabin of the ship, has been
+our practice. He has told us that the race should be for honour,
+not for 'honours,' that we should 'give away our medal,' and that
+courage and humility, mercy and strength, should march hand in hand
+together. For many a year we have had no room for him in our
+councils. Our armies knew him not; and it was only in semi-savage
+lands and in the service of remote empires he could find scope for
+his genius. Now our councils will be shamed in his service, and our
+armies will find no footing in our efforts to reach him. We have
+said that the Providence of God was only a calculation of chances;
+now for eleven months the amazing spectacle will be presented to
+the world of this solitary soldier standing at bay, within thirty
+days' travel of the centre of Empire, while the most powerful
+kingdom on the earth&mdash;the nation whose wealth is as the sands
+of the sea, whose boast is that the sun never sets upon its
+dominions&mdash;is unable to reach him&mdash;saving <i>he</i> does
+not want&mdash;but is unable to reach him even with one message of
+regret for past forgetfulness.</p>
+
+<p>"No; there is something more in all this than mistake of
+Executive, or strife of party, or error of Cabinet, or fault of men
+can explain. The purpose of this life that has been, the lesson of
+this death that must be, is vaster and deeper than these things.
+The decrees of God are as fixed to-day as they were two thousand
+years ago, but they can be worked to their conclusion by the
+weakness of men as well as by the strength of angels.</p>
+
+<p>"There is a grey frontlet of rock far away in
+Strathspey&mdash;once the Gordons' home&mdash;whose name in bygone
+times gave a rallying-call to a kindred clan. The scattered firs
+and wind-swept heather on the lone summit of Craig Ellachie once
+whispered in Highland clansmen's ear the warcry, 'Stand fast! Craig
+Ellachie.' Many a year has gone by since kith of Charles Gordon
+last heard from Highland hilltop the signal of battle, but never in
+Celtic hero's long record of honour has such answer been sent back
+to Highland or to Lowland as when this great heart stopped its
+beating, and lay 'steadfast unto death' in the dawn at Khartoum.
+The winds that moan through the pine trees on Craig Ellachie have
+far-off meanings in their voices. Perhaps on that dark January
+night there came a breath from heaven to whisper to the old
+Highland rock, 'He stood fast! Craig Ellachie.'</p>
+
+<p>"The dust of Gordon is not laid in English earth, nor does even
+the ocean, which has been named Britannia's realm, hold in 'its
+vast and wandering grave' the bones of her latest hero. Somewhere,
+far out in the immense desert whose sands so often gave him rest in
+life, or by the shores of that river which was the scene of so much
+of his labour, his ashes now add their wind-swept atoms to the
+mighty waste of the Soudan. But if England, still true to the long
+line of her martyrs to duty, keep his memory precious in her
+heart&mdash;making of him no false idol or brazen image of glory,
+but holding him as he was, the mirror and measure of true
+knighthood&mdash;then better than in effigy or epitaph will his
+life be written, and his nameless tomb become a citadel to his
+nation. "</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The statue of Gordon stands in noble reverie in Trafalgar
+Square, at the centre of the Empire for whose honour he died.</p>
+
+<p>In St. Paul's Cathedral he lies in effigy, and engraven upon the
+cenotaph can be seen the most splendid epitaph in the world.</p>
+
+<p>His true greatness has been recorded by Sir William Butler in
+resounding and glorious English; and his last great act of
+stainless nobility has received a deathless tribute.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+, G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter32"></a>
+
+<h2>32</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I have now come down, at last, to a great writer of English
+prose who is still with us.</p>
+
+<p>Lord Morley at the present day is, I think, universally
+recognised as the greatest living man of letters in the British
+Empire; he has crowned a long record of distinguished literary
+achievement with his <i>Life of Gladstone</i>, which has taken its
+place among the noblest biographies of the world, where it is
+destined to remain into the far future acclaimed as a masterpiece.
+In his description of the veteran statesman launching in the House
+of Commons his great project of Home Rule for Ireland, he has
+surprised himself out of his own reserve, and painted the scene for
+succeeding generations in colours that can never die:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"No such scene has ever been beheld in the House of Commons.
+Members came down at break of day to secure their places; before
+noon every seat was marked, and crowded benches were even arrayed
+on the floor of the House from the Mace to the Bar. Princes,
+ambassadors, great peers, high prelates, thronged the lobbies. The
+fame of the orator, the boldness of his exploit, curiosity as to
+the plan, poignant anxiety as to the party result, wonder whether a
+wizard had at last actually arisen with a spell for casting out the
+baleful spirits that had for so many ages made Ireland our torment
+and our dishonour&mdash;all these things brought together such an
+assemblage as no minister before had ever addressed within those
+world-renowned walls.</p>
+
+<p>"The Parliament was new. Many of its members had fought a hard
+battle for their seats, and trusted they were safe in the haven for
+half a dozen good years to come. Those who were moved by
+professional ambition, those whose object was social advancement,
+those who thought only of upright public service, the keen party of
+men, the men who aspire to office, the men with a past and the men
+who looked for a future, all alike found themselves adrift on dark
+and troubled waters. The secrets of the Bill had been well kept.
+To-day the disquieted host were first to learn what was the great
+project to which they would have to say that Aye or No on which for
+them and for the State so much would hang.</p>
+
+<p>"Of the chief comrades or rivals of the minister's own
+generation, the strong administrators, the eager and accomplished
+debaters, the sagacious leaders, the only survivor now comparable
+to him, in eloquence or in influence, was Mr. Bright. That
+illustrious man seldom came into the House in those distracted
+days; and on this memorable occasion his stern and noble head was
+to be seen in dim obscurity.</p>
+
+<p>"Various as were the emotions in other regions of the House, in
+one quarter rejoicing was unmixed. There, at least, was no doubt
+and no misgiving. There, pallid and tranquil, sat the Irish leader,
+whose hard insight, whose patience, energy, and spirit of command,
+had achieved this astounding result, and done that which he had
+vowed to his countrymen that he would assuredly be able to do. On
+the benches round him genial excitement rose almost to tumult. Well
+it might. For the first time since the Union the Irish case was at
+last to be pressed in all its force and strength, in every aspect
+of policy and of conscience by the most powerful Englishman then
+alive.</p>
+
+<p>"More striking than the audience was the man; more striking than
+the multitude of eager onlookers from the shore was the rescuer,
+with deliberate valour facing the floods ready to wash him down;
+the veteran Ulysses, who, after more than half a century of combat,
+service, toil, thought it not too late to try a further 'work of
+noble note,' In the hands of such a master of the instrument the
+theme might easily have lent itself to one of those displays of
+exalted passion which the House had marvelled at in more than one
+of Mr. Gladstone's speeches on the Turkish question, or heard with
+religious reverence in his speech on the Affirmation Bill in
+1883.</p>
+
+<p>"What the occasion now required was that passion should burn
+low, and reasoned persuasion hold up the guiding lamp. An elaborate
+scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy to be explained and
+vindicated. Of that best kind of eloquence which dispenses with
+declamation this was a fine and sustained example. There was a
+deep, rapid, steady, onflowing volume of arguments, exposition,
+exhortation. Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided. Now and again
+a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted all hearts. But political
+oratory is action, not words&mdash;action, character, will,
+conviction, purpose, personality. As this eager muster of men
+underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite in their balance and
+modulation, the compulsion of his flashing glance and animated
+gesture, what stirred and commanded them was the recollection of
+national service, the thought of the speaker's mastering purpose,
+his unflagging resolution and strenuous will, his strength of thew
+and sinew well tried in long years of resounding war, his
+unquenched conviction that the just cause can never fail. Few are
+the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics, but this was
+one."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I will not trench upon politics in these letters; but I may
+hazard the belief that could those who rejected this noble effort,
+by the greatest statesman of the age, to assuage the everlasting
+Irish conflict, have looked into the future, few of them but would
+have supported it with relief and thanksgiving.</p>
+
+<p>It is generally perhaps a blessing that the curtain that covers
+the future is impenetrable; but in this case, had it been lifted
+for us to gaze upon the appalling future, Gladstone's last effort
+for the peace of his country would surely not have been permitted
+to miscarry.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter33"></a>
+
+<h2>33</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>Two other living writers I will now commend to you, and then I
+shall have done.</p>
+
+<p>The parents of Mr. Belloc, with a happy prevision, anticipated
+by some decades the <i>entente cordiale</i>, and their brilliant
+son felicitously manifests in his own person many of the admirable
+qualities of both races. In England he is reported to be forcefully
+French, and it may be surmised that when in France he is engagingly
+British. Fortunately for our literature, it is in the language of
+his mother that he has found his expression. Many are the beautiful
+utterances scattered through his charming works: two of the most
+picturesque deal with the greatness of France; the subject of one
+is the Ancient Monarchy, and of the other the Great
+Napoleon:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out
+and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and
+recognised its own nature when the vaults of the Therm&aelig;
+echoed heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings.</p>
+
+<p>"Look up the vast valley of dead men crowned, and you may see
+the gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long
+white beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand
+the globe, and in his right the hilt of an unconquerable sword.
+There also are the short strong horsemen of the Robertian House,
+half hidden by their leather shields, and their sons before them
+growing in vestment and majesty and taking on the pomp of the
+Middle Ages; Louis VII., all covered with iron; Philip, the
+Conqueror; Louis IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they
+stand in a widening, interminable procession, this great crowd of
+kings; they loose their armour, they take their ermine on, they are
+accompanied by their captains and their marshals; at last, in their
+attitude and in their magnificence they sum up in themselves the
+pride and the achievement of the French nation.</p>
+
+<p>"But Time has dissipated what it could not tarnish, and the
+process of a thousand years has turned these mighty figures into
+unsubstantial things. You may see them in the grey end of darkness,
+like a pageant, all standing still. You look again, but with the
+growing light, and with the wind that rises before morning, they
+have disappeared."</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;'>
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain
+sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that
+passed away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him
+move along their snows, through the long mysterious twilights of
+the northern autumn, in silence, with the head bent and the reins
+in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching
+towards an ancient solitude and repose. They say it was
+Napoleon.</p>
+
+<p>"After him there trailed for days the shadows of the soldiery,
+vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It was
+as though the cannon smoke at Waterloo, borne on the light west
+wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years of
+combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of the
+year over the endless plains.</p>
+
+<p>"But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the
+Guard, and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French
+drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the
+army was of ghosts and was defeated. They passed in the silence
+which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they sleep
+in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Time and circumstances have changed our ancient enemies into our
+honoured friends, and the race that fought against us at Waterloo
+has cemented its friendship towards us with its blood; and as we
+look back over the century that divides us from Waterloo we can now
+with Mr. Belloc salute the sombre figure of the defeated
+conqueror.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter34"></a>
+
+<h2>34</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I will now quote to you one other master of splendid
+English.</p>
+
+<p>Not every temporal sovereign of these realms has deserved a
+throne among the kings of literature. James the First was a poet of
+some merit; Charles the First wrote and spoke with a fine
+distinction; Queen Victoria's letters to her subjects were models
+of dignified and kindly simplicity; but to King George the Fifth by
+the grace of God it has been reserved to give utterance to what I
+believe to be the most noble and uplifting address ever delivered
+by a king to his people.</p>
+
+<p>From the day of his accession King George has been confronted
+with trials and troubles enough to daunt the stoutest heart, and
+none of us can plumb the depth of anguish that must have been his
+through the awful years of the Great War. He has been tried and
+proved in the fierce fires of adversity, and has emerged ennobled
+by pain, and dowered by sorrow with a gift of expression that has
+placed him among the masters of the glory of English prose.</p>
+
+<p>On the 13th day of May 1922 he concluded a tour of the
+cemeteries in France at Terlinchthun, where there stands on the
+cliffs over-looking the Channel a monument to Napoleon and his
+Grand Army, and around it now lie the innumerable English dead.</p>
+
+<p>Earlier in his pilgrimage Marshal Foch and Lord Haig had in his
+presence clasped hands, and the King with a fine gesture had placed
+his own right hand upon their clasped ones and said, "Amis
+toujours!" We are told that, "going up to the Cross of Sacrifice,
+the King looked out over the closely marshalled graves to the sea,
+and back towards the woods and fields of the Canche Valley where
+Montreuil stands, and seemed reluctant to leave."</p>
+
+<p>At last he turned, and, standing before the great Cross of
+Sacrifice, he spoke from his heart words that those of us, Antony,
+who love our country and the glory of its language will cherish
+while we live:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blkquot">
+<p>"For the past few days I have been on a solemn pilgrimage in
+honour of a people who died for all free men.</p>
+
+<p>"At the close of that pilgrimage, on which I followed ways
+already marked by many footsteps of love and pride and grief, I
+should like to send a message to all who have lost those dear to
+them in the Great War, and in this the Queen joins me to-day,
+amidst these surroundings so wonderfully typical of that
+single-hearted assembly of nations and of races which form our
+Empire. For here, in their last quarters, lie sons of every portion
+of that Empire, across, as it were, the threshold of the Mother
+Island which they guarded, that Freedom might be saved in the
+uttermost ends of the earth.</p>
+
+<p>"For this, a generation of our manhood offered itself without
+question, and almost without the need of a summons. Those proofs of
+virtue, which we honour here to-day, are to be found throughout the
+world and its waters&mdash;since we can truly say that the whole
+circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. Beyond
+the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, through Eastern
+Europe in well-nigh unbroken chain they stretch, passing over the
+holy Mount of Olives itself to the furthest shores of the Indian
+and Pacific Oceans&mdash;from Zeebrugge to Coronel, from Dunkirk to
+the hidden wildernesses of East Africa.</p>
+
+<p>"But in this fair land of France, which sustained the utmost
+fury of the long strife, our brothers are numbered, alas! by
+hundreds of thousands.</p>
+
+<p>"They lie in the keeping of a tried and generous friend, a
+resolute and chivalrous comrade-in-arms, who with ready and quick
+sympathy has set aside for ever the soil in which they sleep, so
+that we ourselves and our descendants may for all time reverently
+tend and preserve their resting-places.</p>
+
+<p>"And here, at Terlinchthun, the shadow of his monument falling
+almost across their graves, the greatest of French
+soldiers&mdash;of all soldiers&mdash;stands guard over them. And
+this is just, for side by side with the descendants of his
+incomparable armies they defended his land in defending their
+own.</p>
+
+<p>"Never before in history have a people thus dedicated and
+maintained individual memorials to their fallen, and, in the course
+of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can
+be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to
+come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the
+desolation of war. And I feel that, so long as we have faith in
+God's purposes, we cannot but believe that the existence of these
+visible memorials will eventually serve to draw all peoples
+together in sanity and self-control, even as it has already set the
+relations between our Empire and our Allies on the deep-rooted
+bases of a common heroism and a common agony.</p>
+
+<p>"Standing beneath this Cross of Sacrifice, facing the great
+Stone of Remembrance, and compassed by these sternly simple
+headstones, we remember, and must charge our children to remember,
+that as our dead were equal in sacrifice, so are they equal in
+honour, for the greatest and the least of them have proved that
+sacrifice and honour are no vain things, but truths by which the
+world lives.</p>
+
+<p>"Many of the cemeteries I have visited in the remoter and still
+desolate districts of this sorely stricken land, where it has not
+yet been possible to replace the wooden crosses by headstones, have
+been made into beautiful gardens which are lovingly cared for by
+comrades of the war.</p>
+
+<p>"I rejoice I was fortunate enough to see these in the spring,
+when the returning pulse of the year tells of unbroken life that
+goes forward in the face of apparent loss and wreckage; and I
+fervently pray that, both as nations and individuals, we may so
+order our lives after the ideals for which our brethren died that
+we may be able to meet their gallant souls once more, humbly but
+unashamed."</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Hard indeed must it be for any Englishman whose heart is quick
+within his bosom not to feel it beat faster with thanksgiving and
+pride as he reads the flawless periods of this glorious speech.</p>
+
+<p>As the final word of consolation, sanctification, and
+benediction, closing the awful agony of the greatest of all wars,
+preserve, Antony, this magnificent threnody in your memory
+imperishable.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;'>
+<a name="letter35"></a>
+
+<h2>35</h2>
+
+<br>
+
+
+<div class="smallcaps">My Dear Antony,</div>
+
+<p>I have come now to the end of my citations for the present. My
+object, Antony, has been to rouse in your heart, if I can, a love,
+admiration, and reverence for the wonders to be found in the
+treasure-house of English prose literature.</p>
+
+<p>I have only opened a little door here and there, so that you can
+peep in and see the visions of splendour within.</p>
+
+<p>Some day perhaps, when you have explored for yourself, you may
+feel surprised that in these letters I have quoted nothing from Sir
+John Eliot, or Addison, or Scott, or Thackeray, or Charles Lamb, or
+De Quincey, or Hazlitt, or other kings and princes of style
+innumerable. Many, many writers whom I have not quoted in these
+letters have adorned everything they touched, but do not seem to me
+to reach the snow-line or rise into great and moving eloquence.
+Charles Lamb, for example, never descends from his equable and
+altogether pleasing level, far above the plain of the commonplace,
+but neither does he reach up to the lofty altitudes of the lonely
+peaks; and if I began to quote from him, I see no obstacle to my
+quoting his entire works! And of Addison, Johnson wrote, "His page
+is always luminous, but never blazes in unexpected splendour"; and
+he adds, "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but
+not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days
+and nights to the volumes of Addison."</p>
+
+<p>In selecting such passages as I have in these letters I have
+necessarily followed my own taste, and taste&mdash;as I said when I
+first began writing to you&mdash;is illusive. I could do no more
+than cite that which makes my own heart beat faster from a
+compelling sense of its nobility and beauty.</p>
+
+<p>When I was young, Antony, I lived long in my father's house
+among his twelve thousand books, with his scholarly mind as my
+companion, and his exact memory as my guide; for more than a
+quarter of a century since those days I have lived in the more
+modest library of my own collecting, and have long learnt how much
+fine literature there is that I have never read, and now can never
+read. But, Antony, you may not find, in these crowded days, even so
+much time for reading, or so much repose for study as I have found,
+and therefore it is that I have offered you in these letters the
+preferences of my lifetime, even though it has been the lifetime of
+one who makes no claim to be a literary authority.</p>
+
+<p>As you look back at those from whom you have sprung, you will
+see that for five generations they have been men of
+letters&mdash;many distinguished, and one world-famous; and though
+I myself am but a puny link in the chain, yet I may perhaps afford
+you the opportunity of hitching your wagon by and by to the star
+that has for so long ruled the destinies of our house.</p>
+
+<p>Farewell, then, dear Antony; and if "the dear God who loveth us"
+listens to the benedictions of the old upon their children's
+children, may He guide and bless you to your life's end.</p>
+
+<p>Your loving old<br>
+G.P.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Glory of English Prose, by Stephen Coleridge
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF ENGLISH PROSE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 13785-h.htm or 13785-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/3/7/8/13785/
+
+Produced by Juliet, Spooty, Reda and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/old/13785-h/images/image1.jpg b/old/13785-h/images/image1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a37e8a6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/13785-h/images/image1.jpg
diff --git a/old/13785.txt b/old/13785.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2f3c6e8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/13785.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4849 @@
+Project Gutenberg's The Glory of English Prose, by Stephen Coleridge
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Glory of English Prose
+       Letters to My Grandson
+
+Author: Stephen Coleridge
+
+Release Date: October 18, 2004 [EBook #13785]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF ENGLISH PROSE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet, Spooty, Reda and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Glory of English Prose
+
+Letters to my Grandson
+
+[Illustration: STEPHEN COLERIDGE
+FROM THE PORTRAIT BY BERNARD PARTRIDGE IN THE POSSESSION
+OF THE MESS OF THE SOUTH WALES CIRCUIT]
+
+The Glory of English Prose
+Letters to My Grandson
+
+By
+The Hon. Stephen Coleridge
+
+"The chief glory of every people arises from its authors"
+_Dr. Johnson_
+
+G.P. Putnam's Sons
+New York and London
+The Knickerbocker Press
+1922
+
+1922
+by
+Stephen Coleridge
+Made in the United States of America
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+If you have read, gentle reader, the earlier series of _Letters to my
+Grandson on the World about Him_, you are to understand that in the
+interval between those letters and these, Antony has grown to be a boy
+in the sixth form of his public school.
+
+It has not been any longer necessary therefore to study an extreme
+simplicity of diction in these letters.
+
+My desire has been to lead him into the most glorious company in the
+world, in the hope that, having early made friends with the noblest of
+human aristocracy, he will never afterwards admit to his affection and
+intimacy anything mean or vulgar.
+
+Many young people who, like Antony, are not at all averse from the
+study of English writers, stand aghast at the vastness of the what
+seems so gigantic an enterprise.
+
+In these letters I have acted as pilot for a first voyage through what is
+to a boy an uncharted sea, after which I hope and believe he will have
+learned happily to steer for himself among the islands of the blest.
+
+S.C.
+
+THE FORD,
+CHOBHAM.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+1. ON GOOD AND BAD STYLE IN PROSE
+2. ON THE GLORY OF THE BIBLE
+3. SIR WALTER RALEIGH
+4. ACT OF PARLIAMENT, 1532
+5. THE JUDICIOUS HOOKER AND SHAKESPEARE
+6. LORD CHIEF JUSTICE CREWE
+7. SIR THOMAS BROWNE AND MILTON
+8. JEREMY TAYLOR
+9. EVELYN'S DIARY
+10. JOHN BUNYAN
+11. DR. JOHNSON
+12. EDMUND BURKE
+13. GIBBON
+14. HENRY GRATTAN AND MACAULAY
+15. LORD ERSKINE
+16. ROBERT HALL
+17. LORD PLUNKET
+18. ROBERT SOUTHEY
+19. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
+20. LORD BROUGHAM
+21. SIR WILLIAM NAPIER
+22. RICHARD SHEIL
+23. THOMAS CARLYLE
+24. HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE
+25. CARDINAL NEWMAN
+26. LORD MACAULAY AGAIN
+27. PRESIDENT LINCOLN
+28. JOHN RUSKIN
+29. JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
+30. MATTHEW ARNOLD
+31. SIR WILLIAM BUTLER
+32. LORD MORLEY
+33. HILAIRE BELLOC
+34. KING GEORGE THE FIFTH
+35. CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+
+LETTERS TO MY GRANDSON
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+The letters which I wrote "On the world about you" having shown you
+that throughout all the universe, from the blazing orbs in infinite space
+to the tiny muscles of an insect's wing, perfect design is everywhere
+manifest, I hope and trust that you will never believe that so
+magnificent a process and order can be without a Mind of which it is the
+visible expression.
+
+The chief object of those letters was to endorse your natural feeling of
+reverence for the Great First Cause of all things, with the
+testimony of your reason; and to save you from ever allowing
+knowledge of how the sap rises in its stalk to lessen your wonder at
+and admiration of the loveliness of a flower.
+
+I am now going to write to you about the literature of England and
+show you, if I can, the immense gulf that divides distinguished writing
+and speech from vulgar writing and speech.
+
+There is nothing so vulgar as an ignorant use of your own language.
+Every Englishman should show that he respects and honours the
+glorious language of his country, and will not willingly degrade it with
+his own pen or tongue.
+
+"We have long preserved our constitution," said Dr. Johnson; "let us
+make some struggles for our language."
+
+There is no need to be priggish or fantastic in our choice of words or
+phrases.
+
+Simple old words are just as good as any that can be selected, if you
+use them in their proper sense and place.
+
+By reading good prose constantly your ear will come to know the
+harmony of language, and you will find that your taste will unerringly
+tell you what is good and what is bad in style, without your being able
+to explain even to yourself the precise quality that distinguishes the
+good from the bad.
+
+Any Englishman with a love of his country and a reverence for its
+language can say things in a few words that will find their way straight
+into our hearts, Antony, and make us all better men. I will tell you a
+few of such simple sayings that are better than any more
+laboured writings.
+
+On the 30th of June, 1921, in the _Times_ In Memoriam column there
+was an entry:--
+
+"To the undying memory of officers, non-commissioned officers and
+men of the 9th and 10th battalions of the K.O.Y.L.I.[1] who were killed
+in the attack on Fricourt in the first battle of the Somme"; and below it
+there were placed these splendid words:--
+
+    "Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts."
+
+In February of 1913 news reached England of the death, after reaching
+the South Pole, of four explorers, Captain Scott, their leader,
+among them.
+
+Shortly before the end, Captain Oates, a man of fortune who joined the
+expedition from pure love of adventure, knowing that his helplessness
+with frozen feet was retarding the desperate march of the others
+towards their ship, rose up and stumbled out of the tent into a
+raging blizzard, saying, "I dare say I shall be away some time."
+
+This was greatly said. His body was never found; but the rescue party
+who afterwards discovered the tent with the others dead in it, put up a
+cairn in the desolate waste of snow with this inscription:--
+
+    "Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L.E.G. Gates,
+    Inniskilling Dragoons, who, on their return from the Pole in
+    March, 1912, willingly walked to his death in a blizzard to try
+    and save his comrades beset with hardship."
+
+All this was done, said, and written, very nobly by all concerned.
+
+In St. Paul's Cathedral there lies a recumbent effigy of General Gordon,
+who gave his life for the honour of England at Khartoum, and upon it
+are engraven these words:--
+
+    "He gave his strength to the weak, his substance to the poor, his
+    sympathy to the suffering, his heart to God."
+
+Even the concentrated terseness of Latin cannot surpass these
+examples of the power of the simplest and shortest English sentences
+to penetrate to the heart.
+
+English can be used, by those who master it as an organ of expression,
+to convey deep emotion under perfect control, than which nothing is
+more moving, nothing better calculated to refine the mind, nothing
+more certain to elevate the character.
+
+Whenever a man has something fine to communicate to his fellow-men
+he has but to use English without affectation, honestly and simply, and
+he is in possession of the most splendid vehicle of human thought in
+the world.
+
+All the truly great writers of English speak with simplicity from
+their hearts, they all evince a spirit of unaffected reverence, they
+all teach us to look up and not down, and by the nobility of their
+works which have penetrated into every home where letters are
+cultivated, they have done an incalculable service in forming and
+sustaining the high character of our race.
+
+Clever flippant writers may do a trifling service here and there by
+ridiculing the pompous and deflating the prigs, but there is no
+permanence in such work, unless--which is seldom the case--it is totally
+devoid of personal vanity.
+
+Very little such service is rendered when it emanates from a writer who
+announces himself as equal if not superior to Shakespeare, and
+embellishes his lucubrations with parodies of the creeds.
+
+"A Gentleman with a Duster," has in his "Glass of Fashion" shown us
+that the Society depicted in the books of Colonel Repington and Mrs.
+Asquith is not the true and great Society that sustains England in its
+noble station among civilised peoples, and we may be sure that neither
+do these books in the faintest degree represent the true and living
+literature of the times. They will pass away and be forgotten as utterly
+as are the fashion plates and missing-word competitions of ten years
+ago.
+
+Therefore, Antony, be sure that the famous and living literature of
+England, that has survived all the shocks of time and changes of
+modern life, is the best and properest study for a man to fit him for
+life, to refine his taste, to aggravate his wisdom, and consolidate
+his character.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry.]
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I alluded, in my first letter to you about English literature, to the
+necessity of your learning from the beginning the wide distinction
+between what is good and what is bad style.
+
+I do not know a better instance of a display of the difference between
+what is fine style and what is not, than may be made by putting side by
+side almost any sentence from the old authorised translation of the
+Bible and the same sentence from _The Bible in Modern Speech_.
+
+I will just put two quotations side by side:--
+
+    "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not,
+    neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in
+    all his glory was not arrayed like one of these."
+
+    "Learn a lesson from the wild lilies. Watch their growth. They
+    neither toil nor spin, and yet I tell you that not even Solomon
+    in all his magnificence could array himself like one of these."
+
+Here you can feel the perfect harmony and balance of the old version
+and the miserable commonplaceness of the effort of these misguided
+modern men.
+
+Again:--
+
+    "Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."
+
+This is mauled into:--
+
+    "Repent, he said, for the kingdom of the heavens is now close at
+    hand."
+
+These examples are perfectly suited to illustrate the immense
+difference that separates what is noble and fine in style and what is
+poor and third rate.
+
+If you recite the old version aloud you cannot escape the harmony and
+balance of the sentences, and nothing dignified or distinguished can be
+made of the wretched paraphrases of the two desecrators of the
+splendid old text.
+
+And, Antony, I would have you know that I, who have spent a long life
+in precious libraries, loving fine literature with all my heart, have long
+ago reverenced the old version of the Bible as the granite corner-stone
+upon which has been built all the noblest English in the world. No
+narrative in literature has yet surpassed in majesty, simplicity, and
+passion the story of Joseph and his brethren, beginning at the
+thirty-seventh and ending with the forty-fifth chapter of Genesis. There
+is surely nothing more moving and lovely in all the books in the British
+Museum than the picture of Joseph when he sees his little brother
+among his brethren:--
+
+    "And he lifted up his eyes, and saw his brother Benjamin, his
+    mother's son, and said, Is this your younger brother, of whom ye
+    spake to me? And he said, God be gracious unto thee, my son.
+
+    "And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his brother:
+    and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber, and
+    wept there."
+
+The whole of the forty-fifth chapter is touching and beautiful beyond
+all criticism, transcending all art. To read it is to believe every
+word of it to be true, and to recognise the sublimity of such a
+relation.
+
+No narrative of the great Greek writers reaches the heart so directly
+and poignantly as does this astonishing story. It moves swiftly and
+surely along from incident to incident till Joseph's loving soul can
+contain itself no more:--
+
+    "Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all of them that
+    stood by him; and he cried, Cause every man to go out from me.
+
+    "And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known
+    unto his brethren.
+
+    "And he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh
+    heard.
+
+    "And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph; doth my father
+    yet live? And he fell upon his brother Benjamin's neck, and wept;
+    and Benjamin wept upon his neck. Moreover he kissed all his
+    brethren and wept upon them.
+
+    "And after that his brethren talked with him."
+
+And this wonderful chapter ends thus:--
+
+    "And they went up out of Egypt, and came unto the land of Canaan
+    unto Jacob their father, and told him, saying, Joseph is yet
+    alive, and is governor over all the land of Egypt.
+
+    "And Jacob's heart fainted, for he believed them not.
+
+    "And they told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said unto
+    them: and when he saw the wagons which Joseph had sent to carry
+    him, the spirit of Jacob their father revived:
+
+    "And Israel said, It is enough; Joseph my son is yet alive: I will
+    go and see him before I die."
+
+If you read the story of Joseph through from start to finish, you will
+see that it is a perfect narrative of the life of a man without
+fault, who suffered much but without resentment, was great of heart in
+evil days, and, when Fortune placed him in a position of glory and
+greatness, showed a stainless magnanimity and a brotherly love that
+nothing could abate. It is the first and most perfect story in
+literature of the nobility of man's soul, and as such it must remain a
+treasured and priceless possession to the world's end.
+
+In the short Book of Ruth there lies embalmed in the finest English a
+very tender love story, set in all the sweet surroundings of the ripening
+corn, the gathered harvest, and the humble gleaners. Nothing can be
+more delightful than the direction of Boaz, the great land-owner, to his
+men, after he had espied Ruth in her beauty gleaning in his fields:--
+
+    "And when she was risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men,
+    saying, Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her
+    not:
+
+    "And let fall also some of the handfuls on purpose for her, and
+    leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not."
+
+This little gem in the books of the Bible inspired Hood to write one of
+his most perfect lyrics:--
+
+  "She stood breast high amid the corn
+  Clasped by the golden light of morn,
+  Like the sweetheart of the sun,
+  Who many a glowing kiss had won.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+  Thus she stood amid the stocks,
+  Praising God with sweetest looks.
+
+  Sure, I said, Heaven did not mean
+  Where I reap thou should'st but glean;
+  Lay thy sheaf adown and come,
+  Share my harvest and my home."
+
+That the Bible was translated into English at the time when the
+language was spoken and written in its most noble form, by men whose
+style has never been surpassed in strength combined with simplicity,
+has been a priceless blessing to the English-speaking race. The land of
+its birth, once flowing with milk and honey, has been for long centuries
+a place of barren rocks and arid deserts: Persians and Greeks and
+Romans and Turks have successively swept over it; the descendants
+of those who at different times produced its different books are
+scattered to the ends of the earth; but the English translation has for
+long years been the head corner-stone in homes innumerable as the
+sands of the sea in number.
+
+No upheavals of the earth, no fire, pestilence, famine, or slaughter, can
+ever now blot it out from the ken of men.
+
+When all else is lost we may be sure that the old English version of the
+Bible will survive. "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words
+shall not pass away."
+
+Do not think it enough therefore, Antony, to hear it read badly and
+without intelligence or emotion, in little detached snippets, in church
+once a week.
+
+Read it for yourself, and learn to rejoice in the perfect balance,
+harmony, and strength of its noble style.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I could write you many letters like my last one about the Bible, and
+perhaps some day I will go back to that wonderful Book and write
+you some more letters about it; but now I will go on and tell you about
+some of the great writers of English prose that came after the
+translation of the Bible.
+
+Those translators were the great founders of the English language,
+which is probably on the whole the most glorious organ of human
+expression that the world has yet known.
+
+It blends the classic purity of Greek and the stately severity of Latin
+with the sanguine passions and noble emotions of our race.
+
+A whole life devoted to its study will not make you or me perfectly
+familiar with all the splendid passages that have been spoken and
+written in it. But I shall show in my letters, at least some of the
+glorious utterances scattered around me here in my library, so that
+you may recognise, as you ought, the pomp and majesty of the speech of
+England.
+
+One of the great qualities that was always present in the writings of
+Englishmen from the time of Elizabeth down to the beginning of the
+nineteenth century was its restraint.
+
+Those men never became hysterical or lost their perfect self-control.
+
+The deeper the emotion of the writer the more manifest became the
+noble mastery of himself.
+
+When Sir Walter Ralegh, that glorious son of Devon, from which county
+you and I, Antony, are proud to have sprung, lay in the Tower of
+London awaiting his cowardly and shameful execution the next day at
+the hands of that miserable James I., writing to his beloved wife, with a
+piece of coal, because they even denied him pen and ink, face to face
+with death, he yet observed a calm and noble language that is truly
+magnifical--to use the old Bible word.
+
+    "For the rest," he wrote, "when you have travailed and wearied
+    your thoughts on all sorts of worldly cogitations, you shall sit
+    down by sorrow in the end. Teach your son also to serve and fear
+    God while he is young, that the fear of God may grow up in him.
+    Then will God be a Husband unto you and a Father unto him; a
+    Husband and a Father which can never be taken from you.
+
+    "I cannot write much. God knows how hardly I stole this time when
+    all sleep; and it is time to separate my thoughts from the world.
+
+    "Beg my dead body, which living was denied you; and either lay it
+    at Sherburne, if the land continue, or in Exeter Church by my
+    father and mother. I can write no more. Time and Death call me
+    away.
+
+    "The Everlasting, Infinite, Powerful and Inscrutable God, that
+    Almighty God that is goodness itself, mercy itself, the true life
+    and light, keep you and yours, and have mercy on me and teach me
+    to forgive my persecutors and false accusers, and send us to meet
+    in His Glorious Kingdom. My true wife, farewell. Bless my poor
+    boy, pray for me. My true God hold you both in His Arms.
+
+    "Written with the dying hand of, sometime thy husband, but now
+    alas! overthrown, yours that was, but now not my own.
+
+    "WALTER RALEGH."
+
+Sir Walter Ralegh, long before he came to his untimely end, had written
+in his great _History of the World_ a wonderful passage about death; it
+is justly celebrated, and is familiar to all men of letters throughout the
+world, so I will quote a portion of it for you:--
+
+    "The Kings and Princes of the world have always laid before them
+    the actions, but not the ends, of those great ones which preceded
+    them. They are always transported with the glory of the one, but
+    they never mind the misery of the other, till they find the
+    experience in themselves.
+
+    "They neglect the advice of God, while they enjoy life, or the
+    hope of it; but they follow the counsel of Death upon the first
+    approach. It is he that puts into man all the wisdom of the world,
+    without speaking a word; which God, with all the Words of His Law,
+    promises and threats, doth not infuse.
+
+    "Death which hateth and destroyeth man is believed; God which hath
+    made him and loves him is always deferred. It is, therefore, Death
+    alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. He tells the
+    proud and insolent that they are but abjects, and humbles them at
+    the instant; makes them cry, complain and repent; yea, even to
+    hate their fore-passed happiness.
+
+    "He takes account of the rich, and proves him a beggar; a naked
+    beggar which hath interest in nothing but in the gravel that fills
+    his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful
+    and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and
+    they acknowledge it.
+
+    "O eloquent, just and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou
+    hast persuaded; what none have dared thou hast done; and whom all
+    the world have flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and
+    despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched
+    greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered
+    it all over with these two narrow words--HIC JACET."
+
+Sir Walter Ralegh was born only a few miles down below Ottery St.
+Mary, in the same beautiful valley from which you and I, Antony, and
+the poet have come. The peal of bells in the old church tower at
+Otterton was given by him to the parish; and when "the lin lan lone of
+evening-bells" floats across between the hills that guard the river Otter,
+it should fall upon our ears as an echo of the melody that strikes upon
+our hearts in Ralegh's words.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+In looking through some very old Acts of Parliament not long ago I was
+rather surprised to find that in those old times our forefathers drew up
+their statutes in very stately English.
+
+In our own times Acts of Parliament frequently violate the simplest
+rules of grammar, and are sometimes so unintelligible as to need the
+labours of learned judges to find out what they mean!
+
+But it seems that in the great days of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth Acts of
+Parliament were often written in resounding periods of solemn
+splendour of which the meaning is perfectly clear.
+
+In the twenty-fourth year of the great Henry, the Act denying and
+forbidding any jurisdiction of the Pope of Rome in England was passed.
+
+This Act, depriving the Pope of all power in England, marked a
+turning-point in history.
+
+It is headed with these words:--
+
+    THE PRE-EMINENCE, POWER, AND AUTHORITY OF THE KING OF ENGLAND.
+    1532.
+
+    "Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it
+    is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is
+    an Empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one
+    supreme head and King having the dignity and royal estate of the
+    imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic compact of
+    all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms and by names of
+    spiritualty and temporalty being bounden and owen to bear next to
+    God a natural and humble obedience; he being also institute and
+    furnished by the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with
+    plenary whole and entire power pre-eminence authority prerogative
+    and jurisdiction to render and yield justice and final
+    determination to all manner of folk residents or subjects within
+    this his realm, in all causes matters debates contentions
+    happening to occur insurge or begin within the limits thereof
+    without restraint or provocation to any foreign princes or
+    potentates of the world ... all causes testamentary, causes of
+    matrimony and divorces, rights of tithes, oblations and obventions
+    ... shall be from hence-forth heard examined licenced clearly
+    finally and definitely adjudged and determined within the King's
+    jurisdiction and authority and not elsewhere."
+
+The words "Empire" and "Imperial" are in the present day degraded
+from their ancient high estate by an appropriation of them to advertise
+soap or cigarettes or what not; and we even are confronted with the
+"Imperial" Cancer Research Fund, the money of which has been
+employed in artificially inflicting cancer on hundreds of thousands of
+living animals--a performance utterly repugnant to a great many of the
+inhabitants in the "Empire"!
+
+But people indifferent to the dictates of mercy are not likely to have
+much reverence for words, however august.
+
+Henry VIII., we may be sure, would never have allowed these solemn
+words to be used by people with something to sell, or by scientific
+disease-mongers.
+
+They were great people who could draw up their statutes in splendid
+passages of sustained nobility.
+
+Let us, Antony, salute them across the centuries.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+One of the great creators of English prose who lived at the same time
+as Ralegh and Shakespeare was Richard Hooker, who is generally
+known as "the Judicious Hooker."
+
+He was born in Devon, two years after Ralegh, in 1554.
+
+He must very early in life have made his mark as a man of learning and
+piety, for when he was only thirty-one he was made Master of the
+Temple. The controversies in which he there found himself involved
+induced him to retire when he was only thirty-seven into the country,
+for the purpose of writing his famous books, _The Laws of Ecclesiastical
+Polity_.
+
+It is the first great book on the English Church, and it is full of
+magnificent prose. It was divided into eight parts; and in the first one,
+before he had got far into it, he penned the exclamatory description of
+law which will live as long as the language:--
+
+    "Her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world;
+    all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as
+    feeling her care, the greatest as not exempted from her power."
+
+And in the same first part will be found a passage on the Deity which
+portrays faithfully for us the humble wisdom of both the man and his
+age:--
+
+    "Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into
+    the doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and
+    joy to make mention of His name; yet our soundest knowledge is to
+    know that we know Him not as indeed He is, neither can know Him;
+    and our safest eloquence concerning Him is our silence, when we
+    confess without confession that His glory is inexplicable, His
+    greatness above our capacity to reach. He is above and we upon
+    earth; therefore it behoveth our words to be wary and few."
+
+Shakespeare was born ten years later than Hooker, in 1564, and his
+share in founding English prose as we know it is, of course, not
+comparable with that of Hooker, for of Shakespeare's prose there
+remains for us but little. Whenever he rose to eloquence he clothed
+himself in verse as with an inevitable attribute, but on the rare
+occasions when he condescended to step down from the great line to
+"the other harmony of prose" he is as splendid as in all else. In
+_Hamlet_ we have this sudden passage:--
+
+    "I have of late, (but wherefore I know not), lost all my mirth,
+    foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
+    with my disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to
+    me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look
+    you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
+    fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me,
+    than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
+
+    "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in
+    faculty! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action,
+    how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of
+    the world! the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this
+    quintessence of dust?"
+
+And the most beautiful letter in the world is that written by Antonio to
+Bassanio in _The Merchant of Venice_. When it is remembered that it
+was out of his friendship for Bassanio that Antonio entered into his
+bond with Shylock, the supreme exquisiteness of the few words from
+friend to friend render this letter unsurpassable:--
+
+    "Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow
+    cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit, and
+    since, in paying it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are
+    cleared between you and me if I might see you at my death;
+    notwithstanding, use your pleasure; if your love do not persuade
+    you to come, let not my letter."
+
+Well did Shakespeare know that such a letter must make an instant
+appeal to the sweet heart of Portia: "O love!" she cries, "despatch all
+business, and be gone!"
+
+All great poets are masters of a splendid prose, and had Shakespeare
+written some notable work of prose we may be sure it would even have
+surpassed the noble utterances of all his wonderful contemporaries.
+
+It has been said that no language in the world has yet ever lasted in its
+integrity for over a thousand years. Perhaps printing may confer a
+greater stability on present languages; but whenever English is
+displaced, the sun of the most glorious of all days will have set.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I do not think that men of letters often search through the old law
+reports for specimens of fine prose, but I believe that here and there,
+in that generally barren field, a nugget of pure gold may be discovered
+by an industrious student.
+
+Much noble prose delivered from the bench down the centuries has
+been lost for ever, for the judges of England have often been
+gentlemen of taste, scholarship, and eloquence. I have found one very
+splendid passage that has somehow survived the wrecks of nearly four
+hundred years.
+
+Lord Chief Justice Crewe, who became Chief Justice of England in 1624,
+delivered in the case of the Earl of Oxford the following noble tribute to
+the great house of De Vere:--
+
+    "I heard a great peer of this realm, and learned, say, when he
+    lived, there was no king in Christendom had such a subject as
+    Oxford. He came in with the Conqueror, Earl of Guienne; shortly
+    after the Conquest made Great Chamberlain, above 400 years ago, by
+    Henry I., the Conqueror's son; confirmed by Henry II. This great
+    honour--this high and noble dignity--hath continued ever since, in
+    the remarkable surname De Vere, by so many ages, descents, and
+    generations, as no other kingdom can produce such a peer in one
+    and the selfsame name and title. I find in all this time but two
+    attainders of this noble family, and those in stormy and
+    tempestuous time, when the government was unsettled, and the
+    kingdom in competition. I have laboured to make a covenant with
+    myself, that affection may not press upon judgment, for I suppose
+    that there is no man that hath any apprehension of gentry or
+    nobleness, but his affection stands to the continuance of so noble
+    a name and fame, and would take hold of a twig or twine-thread to
+    uphold it. And yet Time hath his revolutions: there must be an end
+    to all temporal things, _finis rerum_,--and end of names and
+    dignities, and whatsoever is _terrene_; and why not of De Vere?
+    For where is De Bohun?--where is Mowbray?--where is Mortimer? Nay,
+    what is more and most of all, where is Plantagenet? They are
+    entombed in the urns and sepulchres of mortality. And yet, let
+    the name and dignity of De Vere stand so long as it pleases God."
+
+And alas! we can now ask, Where is De Vere? This great Earldom of
+Oxford was created in 1142, and has disappeared long ago in the limbo
+of peerages said to be in abeyance.
+
+In these days, Antony, when peerages are bought by men successful in
+trade and sold by men successful in intrigue, such elevations in rank
+have ceased to be regarded as the necessary concomitants of "great
+honour" and "high and noble dignity"; so that it has long been more
+reputable in the House of Lords to be a descendant than an ancestor.
+But among the older great families there still remains a pride that has
+descended unsullied through many generations, which serves as a fine
+deterrent from evil deeds, and a constant incentive to honour--and in
+England the history of great names can never be totally ignored, even
+though the country may be ruled by persons who do not know who
+were their own grandfathers.
+
+Nothing is more ridiculous and cheap than to sneer at honourable
+descent from famous ancestors; it divertingly illustrates the fable of the
+sour grapes.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+You will have seen from the extracts I have already quoted to you of
+the writers of the Elizabethan age that the style of all of them
+possesses something large and resonant, something that may be said
+to constitute the "grand style" in prose; and this quite naturally without
+effort, and without the slightest touch of affectation.
+
+A great writer who came immediately after the Elizabethans--namely,
+Sir Thomas Browne, who lived from 1605 to 1682--displays the
+development in his style of something less simple and more precious
+than ruled in the former generation.
+
+It is difficult to select any passage from his works where all is so good.
+He was curious and exact in his choice of words and commanded a wide
+vocabulary. There is deliberate ingenuity in the framing of his
+sentences, which arrests attention and markedly distinguishes his style.
+His _Urn Burial_, in spite of its elaboration, reaches a grave and solemn
+splendour.
+
+The fifth chapter, which begins by speaking of the dead who have
+"quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three conquests,"
+rises to a very noble elevation as English prose.
+
+Here I quote one paragraph of it, characteristic of the whole:--
+
+    "Darkness and light divide the course of time, and oblivion shares
+    with memory a great part even of our living beings; we slightly
+    remember our felicities, and the smartest strokes of affliction
+    leave but short smart upon us. Sense endureth no extremities, and
+    sorrows destroy us or themselves. To weep into stones are fables.
+    Afflictions induce callosities; miseries are slippery, or fall
+    like snow upon us, which notwithstanding is no unhappy stupidity.
+    To be ignorant of evils to come, and forgetful of evils past, is a
+    merciful provision in nature, whereby we digest the mixture of our
+    few and evil days, and, our delivered senses not relapsing into
+    cutting remembrances, our sorrows are not kept raw by the edge of
+    repetitions. A great part of antiquity contented their hopes of
+    subsistency with a transmigration of their souls,--a good way to
+    continue their memories, while having the advantage of plural
+    successions they could not but act something remarkable in such
+    variety of beings, and, enjoying the fame of their passed selves,
+    make accumulation of glory unto their last durations. Others,
+    rather than be lost in the uncomfortable night of nothing, were
+    content to recede into the common being, and make one particle of
+    the public soul of all things, which was no more than to return
+    into their unknown and divine original again. Egyptian ingenuity
+    was more unsatisfied, contriving their bodies in sweet
+    consistencies, to attend the return of their souls. But all was
+    vanity, feeding the wind, and folly. The Egyptian mummies, which
+    Cambyses or Time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is
+    become merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for
+    balsams."
+
+Milton was a contemporary of Sir Thomas Browne, and, like all great
+poets, was a master of resounding prose. All that he wrote, both in
+verse and prose, is severely classic in its form. His _Samson Agonistes_
+is perhaps the finest example of a play written in English after the
+manner of the Greek dramas.
+
+Milton wrote _The Areopagitica_ in defence of the liberty of
+publishers and printers of books. And it stands for all time as the
+first and greatest argument against interference with the freedom of
+the press.
+
+The Areopagitae were judges at Athens in its more flourishing time, who
+sat on Mars Hill and made decrees and passed sentences which were
+delivered in public and commanded universal respect.
+
+I will quote one of the finest passages in this great and splendid
+utterance:--
+
+    "I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church
+    and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean
+    themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison,
+    and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: for books are not
+    absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them
+    to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they
+    do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of
+    that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively,
+    and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragons' teeth;
+    and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
+
+    "And yet on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good
+    almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a
+    reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book
+    kills reason itself; kills the Image of God as it were in the eye.
+    Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the
+    precious life-blood of a master-spirit; embalmed and treasured up
+    on purpose to a life beyond life.
+
+    "'Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof, perhaps, there is
+    no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss
+    of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the
+    worse.
+
+    "We should be wary, therefore, what persecutions we raise against
+    the living labours of public men; how we spill that seasoned life
+    of man preserved and stored up in books; since we see a kind of
+    homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom, and, if it
+    extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the
+    execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but
+    strikes at that ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason
+    itself; slays an immortality rather than a life."
+
+This is a fine defence of the inviolability of a good and proper book.
+
+A bad book will generally die of itself, but there is something horribly
+malignant about a wicked book, as it must always be worse than a
+wicked man, for a man can repent, but a book cannot.
+
+It is the men of letters who keep alive the books of the great from
+generation to generation, and they are never likely to preserve a
+wicked book from oblivion. Ultimately such go to light fires and
+encompass groceries.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Milton, of whom I wrote in my last letter, was five years older than
+Jeremy Taylor, of whom I am going to write to-day. The latter's
+writings differ very much from Milton's, although they were
+contemporaries for the whole of the former's life.
+
+From the grave and august periods of Milton to the sweet beauty of
+Jeremy Taylor is as the passing from out the austere halls of Justice to
+lovely fields full of flowers.
+
+Your and my great kinsman, Coleridge, pronounced Jeremy Taylor to be
+the most eloquent of all divines; and Coleridge was a great critic.
+
+Indeed, there seems to dwell permanently in Jeremy Taylor's mind a
+compelling sweetness and serenity.
+
+His parables, though sometimes perhaps almost of set purpose fanciful,
+are always full of beauty.
+
+How can anyone withhold sympathy and affection from the writer of
+such a passage as this:--
+
+    "But as, when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning,
+    he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits
+    of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to
+    matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over
+    the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns, like those
+    which decked the brows of Moses when he was forced to wear a veil
+    because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man
+    tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shows a fair face
+    and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud
+    often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets
+    quickly, so is a man's reason and his life."
+
+Again:--
+
+    "No man can tell but he that loves his children, how many
+    delicious accents make a man's heart dance in the pretty
+    conversation of those dear pledges; their childishness, their
+    stammering, their little angers, their innocence, their
+    imperfections, their necessities, are so many little emanations of
+    joy and comfort to him that delights in their persons and society;
+    but he that loves not his wife and children, feeds a lioness at
+    home, and broods a nest of sorrows; and blessing itself cannot
+    make him happy; so that all the commandments of God enjoining a
+    man to 'love his wife' are nothing but so many necessities and
+    capacities of joy. 'She that is loved, is safe; and he that loves,
+    is joyful,' Love is a union of all things excellent; it contains
+    in it proportion and satisfaction, and rest and confidence."
+
+Again:--
+
+    "So have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring
+    upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and
+    climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the
+    loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular
+    and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest,
+    than it could recover by the liberation and frequent weighing of
+    his wings; till the little creature was forced to sit down and
+    pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a
+    prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned
+    music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes through the
+    air, about his ministries here below; so is the prayer of a good
+    man."
+
+Again:--
+
+    "I am fallen into the hands of publicans and sequestrators, and
+    they have taken all from me; what now? Let me look about me. They
+    have left me the sun and moon, fire and water, a loving wife, and
+    many friends to pity me, and some to relieve me, and I can still
+    discourse; and unless I list, they have not taken away my merry
+    countenance and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience; they
+    still have left me the Providence of God, and all the promises of
+    the Gospel, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my
+    charity to them too; and still I sleep and digest, I eat and
+    drink, I read and meditate; I can walk in my neighbor's pleasant
+    fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in
+    all that in which God delights, that is, in virtue and wisdom, in
+    the whole creation, and in God Himself."
+
+Here, Antony, is true wisdom. True, indeed, is it that no one can take
+away from you your merry countenance, your cheerful spirit, and your
+good conscience unless you choose; keep all three, Antony, throughout
+your life, and you will be happy yourself and make everyone about you
+happy, and that is to make a little heaven of your earthly home.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Some day, no doubt, you will read some of the celebrated diaries that
+have come down to us. The best known of such books is _Pepys's
+Diary_ which was written in a kind of shorthand, and so lay
+undeciphered from his death in 1703 for more than a century. One of
+its merits is its absolute self-revelation; for Pepys exposes to us his
+character without a shadow of reserve in all its vanity; and the other is
+the faithful picture it gives us of the time of the Restoration.
+
+But, though less popular, _Evelyn's Diary_ is, I think, in many ways
+superior to that of Pepys.[1]
+
+There is a quiet, unostentatious dignity about Evelyn which is
+altogether absent in the garrulous Pepys, and, indeed I find something
+very beautiful and touching in the grief Evelyn pours forth upon the
+death of his little son of five years old:--
+
+    "The day before he died," writes Evelyn, "he call'd to me and in a
+    more serious manner than usual, told me that for all I loved him
+    so dearly I should give my house, land, and all my fine things, to
+    his Brother Jack, he should have none of them; and next morning
+    when he found himself ill, and that I persuaded him to keepe his
+    hands in bed, he demanded whether he might pray to God with his
+    hands un-joyn'd; and a little after, whilst in great agonie,
+    whether he should not offend God by using His holy name so often
+    calling for ease. What shall I say of his frequent pathetical
+    ejaculations utter'd of himselfe: Sweete Jesus save me, deliver
+    me, pardon my sinns, let Thine angels receive me!
+
+    "So early knowledge, so much piety and perfection! But thus God
+    having dress'd up a Saint for himselfe, would not longer permit
+    him with us, unworthy of ye future fruites of this incomparable
+    hopefull blossome. Such a child I never saw: for such a child I
+    blesse God in whose bosome he is! May I and mine become as this
+    little child, who now follows the child Jesus that Lamb of God in
+    a white robe whithersoever he goes; even so, Lord Jesus, _fiat
+    voluntas tua!_ Thou gavest him to us, Thou hast taken him from us,
+    blessed be ye name of ye Lord! That I had anything acceptable to
+    Thee was from Thy grace alone, since from me he had nothing but
+    sin, but that Thou hast pardon'd! Blessed be my God for ever,
+    Amen! I caused his body to be coffin'd in lead, and reposited on
+    the 30th at 8 o'clock that night in the church at Deptford,
+    accompanied with divers of my relations and neighbours among whom
+    I distributed rings with this motto: _Dominus abstulit_;
+    intending, God willing, to have him transported with my owne body
+    to be interr'd in our dormitory in Wotton Church, in my dear
+    native county of Surrey, and to lay my bones and mingle my dust
+    with my fathers, if God be gracious to me and make me fit for Him
+    as this blessed child was. The Lord Jesus sanctify this and all my
+    other afflictions, Amen! Here ends the joy of my life, and for
+    which I go even mourning to my grave."
+
+This great love and reverence for little children is peculiarly in accord
+with Christianity, for we should remember that it was the WISE men,
+who, when they had journeyed far across the world to salute the King
+of kings, laid their offerings down at the feet of a little child.
+
+Is there not something to reverence in faith and resignation such as are
+here expressed by Evelyn? Were not these men of old with their
+unshakable faith and simple piety better and happier than those who in
+these days know so much more and believe so much less?
+
+We, no doubt, have the knowledge, but perhaps they had the wisdom.
+
+I think, Antony, that in the history of England we shall have
+difficulty in finding any of our greatest men whose hearts and minds
+were not filled with a reverence for God and a faith in something
+beyond the blind forces which are all that Science has to offer
+mankind as a guide of life.
+
+All who have acted most nobly from the days of Ralegh and Sir Thomas
+More, down to the days of Gordon of Khartoum, and down again to our
+own days when the youth of England upheld the invincible valour,
+self-sacrifice, and glory of their race in the greatest of all wars,--all
+have been filled with the love of God and have found therein a perfect
+serenity in the face of death, and that peace which passeth all
+understanding.
+
+The character of our race rests indubitably upon that faith, and he
+who lifts his voice, or directs his pen, to tear it down, had better
+never have been born.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Another diary that you should read by and by is that of
+Henry Grabb Robinson.]
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+In these letters I am never going to quote to you anything that does
+not seem to me to rise to a level of merit well above ordinary proper
+prose. There are many writers whose general correctness and
+excellence is not to be questioned or denied whom I shall not select in
+these letters for your particular admiration.
+
+By and by, when your own love of literature impels you to excursions in
+all directions, you may perhaps come to differ from my judgment, for
+everyone's taste must vary a little from that of others.
+
+English prose in its excellence follows the proportions manifested by the
+contours of the elevation of the world's land.
+
+Vast tracts lie very near the sea-level, of such are the interminable
+outpourings of newspapers and novels and school books. And, as each
+ascent from the sea-level is reached, less and less land attains to it,
+and when the snow-line is approached only a very small proportion
+indeed of the land aspires so high.
+
+So among writers, those who climb to the snow-line are a slender band
+compared to all the inhabitants of the lower slopes and plains.
+
+In these letters I do not intend to mistake a pedlar for a mountaineer,
+nor a hearthstone for a granite peak. Time slowly buries deep in
+oblivion the writings of the industrious and the dull.
+
+Born fifteen years later than Jeremy Taylor, of whom I wrote in a
+former letter, John Bunyan in 1660, being a Baptist, suffered the
+persecution then the lot of all dissenters, and was cast into Bedford
+gaol, where he lay for conscience' sake for twelve years. "As I walked
+through the wilderness of this world," said he, "I lighted on a certain
+place where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as
+I slept I dreamed a dream"; and the dream which he dreamed has
+passed into all lands, and has been translated into all languages, and
+has taken its place with the Bible and with the _Imitation of Christ_ as
+a guide of life.
+
+The force of simplicity finds here its most complete expression; the
+story wells from the man's heart, whence come all great things:--
+
+    "Then said the Interpreter to Christian, 'Hast thou considered
+    all these things?'
+
+    "_Christian._ 'Yes, and they put me in hope and fear.'
+
+    "_Interpreter._ 'Well, keep all things so in thy mind that they
+    may be as a goad in thy sides, to prick thee forward in the way
+    thou must go.'
+
+    "Then Christian began to gird up his loins, and to address himself
+    to his journey.
+
+    "Then said the Interpreter, 'The Comforter be always with thee,
+    good Christian, to guide thee in the way that leads to the city.'
+
+    "So Christian went on his way.
+
+    "Now I saw in my dream that the highway up which Christian had to
+    go was fenced on either side with a wall, and that wall was called
+    Salvation. Up this way, therefore, did burdened Christian run,
+    but not without great difficulty, because of the load on his back.
+    He ran thus till he came at a place somewhat ascending, and upon
+    that place stood a cross, and a little below in the bottom a
+    sepulchre.
+
+    "So I saw in my dream that just as Christian came up with the
+    cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off
+    his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came
+    to the mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I saw it no
+    more.
+
+    "Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said with a merry
+    heart, 'He hath given me rest by His sorrow, and life by His
+    death.'
+
+    "Then he stood awhile to look and wonder, for it was very
+    surprising to him that the sight of the cross should thus ease him
+    of his burden.
+
+    "He looked, therefore, and looked again, even till the springs
+    that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks."
+
+Bunyan died in 1688, and Dr. Johnson was born in 1709. Many years,
+therefore, elapsed between the time when they each displayed their
+greatest powers.
+
+The interval was occupied by many reputable worldly-wise writers, but I
+do not myself find, between these two masters of English prose,
+anyone who wrote passages of such great lustre that I can quote them
+for your admiration.
+
+You will have noticed, Antony, that all the writers whom I have quoted,
+and who reached the true nobility of speech necessary to command our
+tribute of unstinted praise, have been men of manifest piety and
+reverence.
+
+And you will find it difficult to discover really great and eloquent prose
+from the pen of any man whose heart is not filled with a simple faith in
+the goodness of God.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have come now to Dr. Johnson, and it is almost a test of a true man
+of letters that he should love him.
+
+He was rugged and prejudiced, but magnanimous; impatient with the
+presumptuous, tender to modest ignorance, proudly independent of the
+patronage of the great, and was often doing deeds of noble
+self-sacrifice by stealth.
+
+Through long years of hard, unremitting toil for his daily bread he lived
+bravely and sturdily, with no extraneous help but his stout oak stick--an
+unconquerable man.
+
+His prose rises on occasion to a measured and stately grandeur above
+the reach of any of his contemporaries.
+
+It was not often that he unveiled to the public gaze the beatings of his
+own noble heart, or invited the world to contemplate the depression
+and suffering amid which his unending labours were accomplished.
+
+The concluding page of the preface to the first edition of the great
+_Dictionary_ is, therefore, the more precious and moving. I know not
+why this majestic utterance came to be deleted in later editions;
+certainly it sanctifies, and as it were crowns with a crown of sorrow, the
+greatest work of his life; and with reverent sympathy and unstinted
+admiration I reproduce it here:--
+
+    "Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot ultimately be
+    defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to
+    degeneration: we have long preserved our constitution, let us make
+    some struggles for our language.
+
+    "In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature forbids
+    to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of years, to
+    the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield the palm of
+    philology to the nations of the continent. The chief glory of
+    every people arises from its authors; whether I shall add anything
+    by my own writings to the reputation of English literature, must
+    be left to time: much of my life has been lost under the pressure
+    of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been
+    spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I
+    shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my
+    assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the
+    propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth;
+    if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add
+    celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.
+
+    "When I am animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my book,
+    however defective, and deliver it to the world with the spirit of
+    a man that has endeavoured well. That it will immediately become
+    popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders and
+    risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was
+    ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden
+    ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail,
+    and there never can be wanting some, who distinguish desert, who
+    will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue can ever be
+    perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words
+    are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be
+    spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would
+    not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language
+    can express must often speak of what he does not understand; that
+    a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and
+    sometimes faint with weariness under a task which Scaliger
+    compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that what is
+    obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always
+    present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance,
+    slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of
+    the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in
+    vain trace his memory at the moment of need for that which
+    yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come
+    uncalled into his thoughts to-morrow.
+
+    "In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it
+    not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no
+    book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the
+    world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of
+    that which it condemns, yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it
+    that the _English Dictionary_ was written with little assistance
+    of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the
+    soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic
+    bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and
+    in sorrow; and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism
+    to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I
+    have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto
+    completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed
+    and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of
+    successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated
+    knowledge and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians
+    did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied
+    critics of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their
+    work, were obliged to change its economy, and give their second
+    editions another form, I may surely be contented without the
+    praise of perfection which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of
+    solitude what would it avail me?
+
+    "I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to
+    please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are
+    empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity,
+    having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."
+
+This seems to me to be the noblest passage that Johnson ever wrote.
+
+Almost all the most magnificent utterances of man are tinged with
+sadness. In this they possess a quality that is almost inseparable from
+grandeur wherever displayed. No man of sensibility and taste feels it
+possible to make jokes himself, or to tolerate them from others when in
+the presence of the Falls of Niagara, or a tempest at sea, or when he
+views from a peak in the Andes--as I have done--the sun descent into
+the Pacific. The greatest pictures painted by man touch the heart rather
+than elate it; and genius finds its highest expression not in comedy, but
+in tragedy.
+
+And this need cause us no surprise when we consider how much of the
+great work in letters and in art is directly due to the writer possessing
+in full measure the gift of sympathy.
+
+People with this gift, even if they are without the faculty of expression,
+are beloved by those about them, which must bring them happiness.
+
+Till he was over fifty Dr. Johnson's life was a weary struggle with
+poverty. He wrote _Rasselas_ under the pressure of an urgent need of
+money to send to his dying mother. His wife died some few years
+earlier. I have always thought that the sad reflections he put into the
+mouth of an old philosopher towards the end of the story were indeed
+the true expressions of his own tired heart:--
+
+    "Praise," said the sage with a sigh, "is to an old man an empty
+    sound. I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation
+    of her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband.
+
+    "I have outlived my friends and my rivals. Nothing is now of much
+    importance; for I cannot extend my interest beyond myself. Youth
+    is delighted with applause, because it is considered as the
+    earnest of some future good, and because the prospect of life is
+    far extended; but to me, who am now declining to decrepitude,
+    there is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet
+    less to be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they
+    may take away, but they can give me nothing. Riches would now be
+    useless, and high employment would be pain. My retrospect of life
+    recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time
+    squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I
+    leave many great designs unattempted, and many great attempts
+    unfinished.
+
+    "My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, and therefore I compose
+    myself to tranquillity; endeavour to abstract my thoughts from
+    hopes and cares, which, though reason knows them to be vain, still
+    try to keep their old possession of the heart; expect, with serene
+    humility, that hour which nature cannot long delay; and hope to
+    possess, in a better state, that happiness which here I could not
+    find, and that virtue which here I have not attained."
+
+From the results of _Rasselas_ he sent his mother money, but she had
+expired before it reached her.
+
+Down to the time of Dr. Johnson it was the custom for writers of books
+and poems to seek and enjoy the patronage of some great nobleman,
+to whom they generally dedicated their works.
+
+And in pursuance of that custom Dr. Johnson, when he first issued the
+plan or prospectus of his great _Dictionary_ in 1747, addressed it to
+Lord Chesterfield, who was regarded as the most brilliant and cultivated
+nobleman of his time. Lord Chesterfield, however, took no notice of the
+matter till the _Dictionary_ was on the point of coming out in 1755, and
+then wrote some flippant remarks about it in a publication called _The
+World_.
+
+At this Dr. Johnson wrote a letter to the condescending peer, which
+became celebrated throughout England and practically put an end to
+writers seeking the patronage of the great.
+
+This wonderful letter concludes thus:--
+
+    "Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your
+    outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I
+    have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is
+    useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of
+    publication, without one act of assistance, one word of
+    encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not
+    expect, for I never had a patron before.
+
+    "The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and
+    found him a native of the rocks.
+
+    "Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man
+    struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground,
+    encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to
+    take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind, but it has
+    been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am
+    solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want
+    it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess
+    obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be
+    unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a
+    patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.
+
+    "Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to
+    any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I
+    should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have
+    been wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted
+    myself with so much exultation, my lord,--your lordship's most
+    humble, most obedient servant. SAM. JOHNSON."
+
+Boswell's life of Dr. Johnson when you come to read it, as you will be
+sure to do by and by, has left a living picture of this great and good
+man for all future generations to enjoy, extenuating nothing to his
+quaintness, directness, and proneness to contradiction for its own sake,
+yet unveiling everywhere the deep piety and fine magnanimity of his
+character. He suffered much, but never complained, and certainly must
+be numbered among the great men of letters who have found true
+consolation and support in every circumstance of life in an earnest and
+fervent faith.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Edmund Burke was born in 1730, and therefore was twenty-one years
+younger than Dr. Johnson, and he survived him thirteen years. He was
+a great prose writer, and although some of his speeches in Parliament
+that have come down to us possess every quality of solid argument and
+lofty eloquence, there must have been something lacking in his delivery
+and voice, for he so frequently failed to rivet the attention of the
+House, and so often addressed a steadily dwindling audience, that the
+wits christened him "the dinner bell."
+
+All men of letters, however, acknowledge Burke as a true master of a
+very great style.
+
+We see in him the first signs of a breaking away from the universal
+restraint of the older writers, and of the surging up of expressed
+emotion.
+
+His splendid tribute to Marie Antoinette and his panegyric of the lost
+age of chivalry are familiar to all students of English prose.
+
+    "It is now (1791) sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen
+    of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never
+    lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more
+    delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating
+    and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in
+    glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and
+    joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to
+    contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little
+    did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of
+    enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be
+    obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in
+    that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see
+    such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a
+    nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand
+    swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look
+    that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry has gone.
+    That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and
+    the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
+
+    "Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to sex
+    and rank, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that
+    subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude
+    itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of
+    life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
+    and heroic enterprise is gone!
+
+    "It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of
+    honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage
+    while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched,
+    and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its
+    grossness."
+
+This is a splendid and world-famous passage well worth committing to
+memory.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Edward Gibbon, who wrote the _Decline and Fall of the Roman
+Empire_, belonged to the later half of the eighteenth century, and was
+a contemporary of Dr. Johnson and Burke. He finished his great history
+three years after Dr. Johnson's death. It is a monumental work, and
+will live as long as the English language. It is one of the books which
+every cultivated gentleman should read. The style is stately and
+sonorous, and the industry and erudition involved in its production must
+have been immense.
+
+Although it never sinks below a noble elevation of style, it nevertheless
+displays no uplifting flights of eloquence or declamation, and to me, and
+probably to you, Antony, the most moving passages in Gibbon's
+writings are those that describe with unaffected emotion the moment of
+the first resolve to compose the great history and the night when he
+wrote the last line of it. On page 129 of his memoirs[1] he wrote:--
+
+    "It was at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing
+    amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were
+    singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing
+    the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."
+
+Thus did he resolve to devote himself to the tremendous task, and at
+Lausanne twenty-three years later it was at last fulfilled. He recorded
+the event in a few pregnant sentences that are strangely memorable:--
+
+    "It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787,
+    between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last
+    lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After
+    laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered
+    walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the
+    lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was
+    serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters,
+    and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first
+    emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the
+    establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a
+    sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had
+    taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and
+    that, whatsoever might be the future fate of my History, the life
+    of the historian must be short and precarious."
+
+In June, 1888, just one hundred and one years after that pen had been
+finally laid aside, I searched in Lausanne for the summer-house and
+covered walk, and could find no very authentic record of its site. I
+brought home a flower from the garden where it seemed probable the
+summer-house had once existed, behind the modern hotel built there in
+the intervening time, and laid it between the leaves of my Gibbon.
+
+The pressed flower was still there when I last took the book down from
+my shelves.
+
+I hope my successors will preserve the little token of my reverence.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: First edition, 1794.]
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Some of the most eloquent orators in the world have been Irishmen,
+and among them Henry Grattan was supreme.
+
+The Irish Parliament in the later half of the eighteenth century
+frequently sat spell-bound under the magic of his voice.
+
+In 1782, at the age of thirty-two, he achieved by his amazing
+eloquence a great National Revolution in Ireland. But eighteen years
+later all that he had fought for and achieved was lost in the Act of
+Union. In these days I suppose few will be found to defend the means
+whereby that Act was passed; but the public assertions that the people
+of Ireland were in favour of it wrung from Grattan the following cry of
+indignation and wrath:--
+
+    "To affirm that the judgment of a nation is erroneous may mortify,
+    but to affirm that her judgment _against_ is _for_; to assert that
+    she has said _ay_ when she has pronounced _no_; to affect to refer
+    a great question to the people; finding the sense of the people,
+    like that of the parliament, against the question, to force the
+    question; to affirm the sense of the people to be _for_ the
+    question; to affirm that the question is persisted in, because the
+    sense of the people is for it; to make the falsification of the
+    country's sentiments the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of
+    the Union; to affirm that her parliament, constitution, liberty,
+    honour, property, are taken away by her own authority,--there is,
+    in such artifice, an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility,
+    that can best be answered by sensations of astonishment and
+    disgust, excited on this occasion by the British minister, whether
+    he speaks in gross and total ignorance of the truth, or in
+    shameless and supreme contempt for it.
+
+    "The constitution may be _for a time_ so lost; the character of
+    the country cannot be so lost. The ministers of the Crown will, or
+    may, perhaps, at length find that it is not so easy to put down
+    for ever an ancient and respectable nation, by abilities, however
+    great, and by power and by corruption, however irresistible;
+    liberty may repair her golden beams, and with redoubled heat
+    animate the country; the cry of loyalty will not long continue
+    against the principles of liberty; loyalty is a noble, a
+    judicious, and a capacious principle; but in these countries
+    loyalty, distinct from liberty, is corruption, not loyalty.
+
+    "The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against the
+    principles of liberty. Connexion is a wise and a profound policy;
+    but connexion without an Irish Parliament is connexion without its
+    own principle, without analogy of condition; without the pride of
+    honour that should attend it; is innovation, is peril, is
+    subjugation--not connexion.
+
+    "The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against the
+    principle of liberty.
+
+    "Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, necessary for the
+    preservation of freedom, necessary for that of empire; but,
+    without union of hearts--with a separate government, and without a
+    separate parliament, identification is extinction, is dishonour,
+    is conquest--not identification.
+
+    "Yet I do not give up the country--I see her in a swoon, but she
+    is not dead--though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless,
+    still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheeks a
+    glow of beauty--
+
+      "Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet
+      Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,
+      And death's pale flag is not advanced there."
+
+    "While a plank of the vessel sticks together, I will not leave
+    her. Let the courtier present his flimsy sail, and carry the light
+    bark of his faith, with every new breath of wind--I will remain
+    anchored here--with fidelity to the fortunes of my country,
+    faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall."
+
+Of another character, but not less admirable than his eloquence in the
+Senate, was Grattan's achievement with the pen. His description of the
+great Lord Chatham lives as one of the most noble panegyrics--it not
+the most noble--in the world. No writer, before or since, has offered
+anyone such splendid homage as this--that he never sunk "to the
+vulgar level of the great."
+
+    "The Secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him.
+    Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had
+    the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty, and
+    one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence
+    that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his
+    superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious
+    politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to
+    the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and
+    impracticable, his object was England,--his ambition was fame;
+    without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made
+    a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he
+    smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy
+    of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his schemes
+    were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe
+    and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes
+    were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the
+    suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and
+    enlightened by prophecy.
+
+    "The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent--those
+    sensations which soften, and allure, and vulgarise--were unknown
+    to him; no domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached
+    him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied
+    by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to
+    counsel and decide.
+
+    "A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so
+    authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled
+    at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality.
+    Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this
+    statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and
+    much of the ruin of his victories--but the history of his country,
+    and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.
+
+    "Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence
+    was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly
+    expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom--not like
+    the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of
+    Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music
+    of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct the understanding
+    through the painful subtilty of argumentation; nor was he, like
+    Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion, but rather lightened
+    upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of his
+    mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be
+    followed.
+
+    "Yet he was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he
+    was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he
+    concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon
+    many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence, but even
+    then, like the spinning of a cannon ball, he was still alive with
+    fatal, unapproachable activity.
+
+    "Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could
+    create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
+    eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of
+    slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with
+    unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm
+    empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound
+    through its history."
+
+Grattan died in 1820, and twenty years later, in 1844, another great
+English writer, Lord Macaulay, wrote a world-famous passage upon the
+great Lord Chatham in the _Edinburgh Review_:--
+
+    "Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot
+    which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other
+    end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests
+    there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and
+    Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great
+    citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable
+    graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and, from above,
+    his effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face
+    and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl
+    defiance at her foes.
+
+    "The generation which reared that memorial of him has disappeared.
+    The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate judgments
+    which his contemporaries passed on his character may be calmly
+    revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of
+    vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors,
+    will yet deliberately pronounce that, among the eminent men whose
+    bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless and
+    none a more splendid name."
+
+It is a great race, Antony, that can produce a man of such a character
+as Chatham, and also writers who can dedicate to him such superb
+tributes as these.
+
+Macaulay's prose has been much criticised as being too near to easy
+journalism to be classed among the great classic passages of English;
+but this much must be recognised to his great credit--he never wrote
+an obscure sentence or an ambiguous phrase, and his works may be
+searched in vain for a foreign idiom or even a foreign word. He
+possessed an infallible memory, absolute perspicuity, and a scholarly
+taste. He detested oppression wherever enforced, and never exercised
+his great powers in the defence of mean politics or unworthy practices.
+
+Such a writer to-day would blow a wholesome wind across the tainted
+pools of political intrigue.
+
+We can salute him, Antony, as a fine, manly, clean writer, who was an
+honour to letters.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Born in the same year as was Grattan, namely, in 1750, Lord Erskine
+adorned the profession of the Bar with an eloquence that never
+exhibited the slight tendency to be ponderous which sometimes was
+displayed by his contemporaries.
+
+Grace and refinement shine out in every one of his great speeches.
+
+He was a young scion of the great house of Buchan, being the third son
+of the tenth Earl. After being in the Navy for four years he left it
+for the Army, and six years later he went to Trinity College,
+Cambridge, and took his degree; thence he came to the Bar in 1778, and
+at once displayed the most conspicuous ability as an advocate.
+
+He appeared for Horne Tooke in a six-day trial for high treason, which
+ended in an acquittal.
+
+In 1806 he became Lord Chancellor and a peer.
+
+I quote an indignant warning to the aristocracy of England which flamed
+forth in one of his great speeches:--
+
+    "Let the aristocracy of England, which trembles so much for
+    itself, take heed to its own security; let the nobles of England,
+    if they mean to preserve that pre-eminence which, in some shape or
+    other, must exist in every social community, take care to support
+    it by aiming at that which is creative, and alone creative, of
+    real superiority. Instead of matching themselves to supply wealth,
+    to be again idly squandered in debauching excesses, or to round
+    the quarters of a family shield; instead of continuing their names
+    and honours in cold and alienated embraces, amidst the enervating
+    rounds of shallow dissipation, let them live as their fathers of
+    old lived before them; let them marry as affection and prudence
+    lead the way, and, in the ardours of mutual love, and in the
+    simplicities of rural life, let them lay the foundation of a
+    vigorous race of men, firm in their bodies, and moral from early
+    habits; and, instead of wasting their fortunes and their strength
+    in the tasteless circles of debauchery, let them light up their
+    magnificent and hospital halls to the gentry and peasantry of the
+    country, extending the consolations of wealth and influence to the
+    poor. Let them but do this,--and instead of those dangerous and
+    distracted divisions between the different ranks of life, and
+    those jealousies of the multitude so often blindly painted as big
+    with destruction, we should see our country as one large and
+    harmonious family, which can never be accomplished amidst vice and
+    corruption, by wars and treaties, by informations, _ex officio_
+    for libels, or by any of the tricks and artifices of the State."
+
+Mr. Erskine was entitled, as the son of the tenth Earl of Buchan, to
+speak such words of warning and exhortation to the aristocracy of
+England to which he belonged, and the lapse of a century and a quarter
+has not rendered the exhortation vain, though it may be hoped that the
+condemnatory clauses of the speech would not at the present time be
+so well justified as when they were delivered.
+
+Great names carry great obligations, and, for the most part, those who
+bear them to-day recognise those great obligations and endeavour
+without ostentation to fulfil them.
+
+The silly fribbles who posture before the photographic cameras for
+penny newspapers do not represent the real aristocracy of England.
+
+We must not, Antony, mistake a cockatoo for an eagle.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I shall not expect you in your reading often to penetrate into the
+innumerable dusty octavos that contain sermons. The stoutest heart
+may fail, without blame, before the flat-footed pedestrianism of these
+platitudinous volumes. But there does occasionally arise above the dull
+horizon a star whose brilliance is the more conspicuous for the
+surrounding gloom.
+
+In 1796, Coleridge, in a letter[1] to a Mr. Flower, who was a publisher
+at Cambridge, wrote:--
+
+    "I hope Robert Hall is well. Why is he idle? I mean towards the
+    public. We want such men to rescue this _enlightened age_ from
+    general irreligion."
+
+I suppose Robert Hall is a name known to but few in these days, but at
+the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries
+his fame was great and deserved.
+
+As a divine, dowered with the gift of inspired eloquence, Coleridge
+estimated his powers as second only to those of Jeremy Taylor. When
+Napoleon was at the supreme height of his conquests, and England
+alone of European countries still stood erect, uninvaded and
+undismayed, a company of soldiers attended Robert Hall's place of
+worship on the eve of their departure to Spain. The occasion was
+memorable and moving, and the preacher's splendid periods deserve to
+be preserved from oblivion:--
+
+    "By a series of criminal enterprises, by the successes of guilty
+    ambition, the liberties of Europe have been gradually
+    extinguished; the subjugation of Holland, Switzerland, and the
+    free towns of Germany, has completed that catastrophe; and we are
+    the only people in the Eastern Hemisphere who are in possession of
+    equal laws and a free constitution. Freedom, driven from every
+    spot on the Continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she
+    always chose for her favorite abode; but she is pursued even here,
+    and threatened with destruction. The inundations of lawless power,
+    after covering the whole earth, threaten to follow us here, and
+    we are most exactly, most critically placed in the only aperture
+    where it can be successfully repelled, in the Thermopylae of the
+    universe.
+
+    "As far as the interests of freedom are concerned, the most
+    important by far of sublunary interests, you, my countrymen, stand
+    in the capacity of the federal representatives of the human race;
+    for with you it is to determine (under God) in what condition the
+    latest posterity shall be born; their fortunes are entrusted to
+    your care, and on your conduct at this moment depends the colour
+    and complexion of their destiny. If liberty, after being
+    extinguished on the Continent, is suffered to expire here, whence
+    is it ever to emerge in the midst of that thick night that will
+    invest it?
+
+    "It remains with you, then, to decide whether that freedom, at
+    whose voice the kingdoms of Europe awoke from the sleep of ages to
+    run a career of virtuous emulation in everything great and good;
+    the freedom which dispelled the mists of superstition and invited
+    the nations to behold their God; whose magic touch kindled the
+    rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, and the flame of
+    eloquence; the freedom which poured into our lap opulence and
+    arts, and embellished life with innumerable institutions and
+    improvements till it became a theatre of wonders; it is for you to
+    decide whether this freedom shall yet survive, or be covered with
+    a funeral pall, and wrapt in eternal gloom.
+
+    "It is not necessary to await your determination. In the
+    solicitude you feel to approve yourselves worthy of such a trust,
+    every thought of what is afflicting in warfare, every apprehension
+    of danger, must vanish, and you are impatient to mingle in the
+    battle of the civilised world.
+
+    "Go then, ye defenders of your country, accompanied with every
+    auspicious omen; advance with alacrity into the field, where God
+    Himself musters the hosts of war. Religion is too much interested
+    in your success not to lend you her aid; she will shed over this
+    enterprise her selectest influences. While you are engaged in the
+    field many will repair to the closet, many to the sanctuary; the
+    faithful of every name will employ that prayer which has power
+    with God; the feeble hands which are unequal to any other weapon
+    will grasp the sword of the Spirit; from myriads of humble,
+    contrite hearts, the voice of intercession, supplication, and
+    weeping, will mingle in its ascent to heaven with the shouts of
+    battle and the shock of arms.
+
+    "While you have everything to fear from the success of the enemy,
+    you have every means of preventing that success, so that it is
+    next to impossible for victory not to crown your exertions. The
+    extent of your resources, under God, is equal to the justice of
+    your cause.
+
+    "But should Providence determine otherwise; should you fall in
+    this struggle, should the nation fall, you will have the
+    satisfaction (the purest allotted to man) of having performed your
+    part; your names will be enrolled with the most illustrious dead,
+    while posterity to the end of time, as often as they revolve the
+    events of this period (and they will incessantly revolve them)
+    will turn to you a reverential eye while they mourn over the
+    freedom which is entombed in your sepulchre.
+
+    "I cannot but imagine the virtuous heroes, legislators, and
+    patriots, of every age and country, are bending from their
+    elevated seats to witness this contest, as if they were incapable,
+    till it be brought to a favourable issue, of enjoying their
+    eternal repose.
+
+    "Enjoy that repose, illustrious immortals! Your mantle fell when
+    you ascended, and thousands inflamed with your spirit, and
+    impatient to tread in your steps, are ready 'to swear by Him that
+    sitteth upon the throne and liveth for ever and ever,' they will
+    protect freedom in her last asylums, and never desert that cause
+    which you sustained by your labours and cemented with your blood.
+
+    "And Thou, Sole Ruler among the children of men, to whom the
+    shields of the earth belong, 'gird on Thy sword, Thou most
+    Mighty'; go forth with our hosts in the day of battle! Impart, in
+    addition to their hereditary valour, that confidence of success
+    which springs from Thy Presence!
+
+    "Pour into their hearts the spirit of departed heroes! Inspire
+    them with Thine own, and, while led by Thine Hand and fighting
+    under Thy banners, open Thou their eyes to behold in every valley
+    and in every plain, what the prophet beheld by the same
+    illuminations--chariots of fire, and horses of fire!
+
+    "Then shall the strong man be as tow, and the maker of it as a
+    spark; and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench
+    them."
+
+We, who have just emerged, shattered indeed and reeling, from
+another and yet more awful combat for freedom, can the better extend
+our sympathy to those forefathers of ours situated in like case, and can
+imagine with what beating hearts they must have listened to so
+magnificent a call to arms as this; commingling prayer, exhortation,
+and benediction.
+
+Napoleon, after all, waged his wars with us according to the laws of
+nations, the rules of civilised peoples, and the dictates of decent
+humanity. But never since Christianity has been established has one
+man committed so dread and awful an accumulation of public iniquities
+as stand for ever against the base and cowardly name of William
+Hohenzollern, Emperor in Germany. He spat upon the ancient chivalries
+of battle; he prostituted the decent amenities of diplomacy; he polluted
+with infamy and murder the splendid comradeship of the sea.
+
+When the captain of one of his submarines placed upon his deck the
+captured crew of an unarmed merchant vessel which he had sunk,
+destroyed their boats, took from them their life-belts, carried them
+miles away from any floating wreckage, and then projected them into
+the sea to drown, this unspeakable monarch approved the awful deed
+and decorated the ruffian for his infamous cruelty.
+
+When gallant Fryatt, fulfilling every duty a captain owes to his unarmed
+crew and helpless passengers, turned the bows of his peaceful
+packet-boat upon the submarine which was being used to murder them
+all in cold blood, he fell into this Kaiser's hands, and the coward
+wreaked his vengeance upon nobility that was beyond his
+comprehension and valour that rendered him insignificant.
+
+Of these horrible acts the proofs stand unchallenged, and for such
+deeds as these the world has cast him out: thrown him down from one
+of the greatest thrones in history; and left him in the place to which,
+white with terror, he ignominiously fled, stripped of all his power and
+splendour, his crowns, his crosses, and his diadems.
+
+Idle is it for this man and his apologists to plead any extenuation or
+excuse.
+
+It was his custom in the plenitude of his power to declare himself
+answerable for his actions only to God and himself. Then let the
+judgment of God be upon him. When we recall the awful and
+unnumbered horrors with which he covered Europe, I doubt whether all
+history can furnish a parallel to him.
+
+By his authority helpless Belgium was invaded, treaties treacherously
+broken, and her people slaughtered. By his authority her priests were
+murdered in cold blood and her nuns violated by his vile soldiery. By his
+authority poison gases were first projected with low cunning upon brave
+and honourable adversaries. By his authority hospital ships at sea were
+sent to the bottom.
+
+But time and the might of free nations have, after fearful sufferings,
+dissipated his invincible armies, and they have shrivelled before the
+wrath of mankind. The whole world rose up in its offended majesty and
+tore from him that shining armour of which it was his custom to boast;
+and, with the brand of Cain upon him, he now lies obscurely in Holland,
+bereft of all the trappings of his sinister power.
+
+There were times in the past when justice would have avenged such
+awful crimes as lie at this man's door with the torture of his living body
+and the desecration of his lifeless remains, but his conquerors disdained
+to debase themselves by imitating his own abominations; and they left
+him to afford a spectacle to posterity as the supreme example of
+human ignominy!
+
+When you are old, Antony, and this greatest of all wars has become
+part of England's history, you will be proud and happy to remember
+that your own father, at the first call for volunteers, laid down the
+pencil and scale of his peaceful profession, went out to fight for his
+country in the trenches in France, was wounded almost to death, and
+was saved only by the skill and devotion of one of the greatest
+surgeons of the day.[2] All the best blood of England, Scotland, and
+Ireland went marching together to defend the freedom of the world,
+and upon their hearts were engraven the glorious words:--
+
+    "Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war
+    and my fingers to fight."
+
+May such a call never come to our beloved country again! But if it does,
+Antony, I know where you will be found without need of exhortations
+from me.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Now in my library.--S.C.]
+
+[Footnote 2: Sir Arbuthnot Lane.]
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Grattan, of whom I have already written, had in the first Lord Plunket
+a successor and a compatriot very little his inferior in the gift of
+oratory.
+
+He was born in 1764, and was therefore some fourteen years younger
+than Grattan, whom he survived by thirty-four years.
+
+Like Grattan, he displayed a burning patriotism and, like him, fiercely
+opposed the Act of Union.
+
+Few orators have displayed greater powers of clear reason and
+convincing logic than Plunket. It may be admitted that he seldom rose
+to great heights of eloquence, but tradition credits his delivery with a
+quality of dignity amounting almost to majesty. The gift of oratory
+consists in how things are said as much as in what things are said, and
+the voice, gesture, and manner of Plunket were commanding and
+magnificent.
+
+When Attorney-General in Ireland, in 1823, in a speech prosecuting the
+leaders of the riot known as "the Bottle Riot," Plunket uttered the
+following fine tribute to the character of William the Third:--
+
+    "Perhaps, my lords, there is not to be found in the annals of
+    history a character more truly great than that of William the
+    Third. Perhaps no person has ever appeared on the theatre of the
+    world who has conferred more essential or more lasting benefits on
+    mankind; on these countries, certainly none. When I look at the
+    abstract merits of his character, I contemplate him with
+    admiration and reverence. Lord of a petty principality--destitute
+    of all resources but those with which nature had endowed
+    him--regarded with jealousy and envy by those whose battles he
+    fought; thwarted in all his counsels; embarrassed in all his
+    movements; deserted in his most critical enterprises--he continued
+    to mould all those discordant materials, to govern all these
+    warring interests, and merely by the force of his genius, the
+    ascendancy of his integrity, and the immovable firmness and
+    constancy of his nature, to combine them into an indissoluble
+    alliance against the schemes of despotism and universal
+    domination of the most powerful monarch in Europe, seconded by the
+    ablest generals, at the head of the bravest and best disciplined
+    armies in the world, and wielding, without check or control, the
+    unlimited resources of his empire. He was not a consummate
+    general; military men will point out his errors; in that respect
+    Fortune did not favour him, save by throwing the lustre of
+    adversity over all his virtues. He sustained defeat after defeat,
+    but always rose _adversa rerum immersabilis unda_. Looking merely
+    at his shining qualities and achievements, I admire him as I do a
+    Scipio, a Regulus, a Fabius; a model of tranquil courage,
+    undeviating probity, and armed with a resoluteness and constancy
+    in the cause of truth and freedom, which rendered him superior to
+    the accidents that control the fate of ordinary men.
+
+    "But this is not all--I feel that to him, under God, I am, at this
+    moment, indebted for the enjoyment of the rights which I possess
+    as a subject of these free countries; to him I owe the blessings
+    of civil and religious liberty, and I venerate his memory with a
+    fervour of devotion suited to his illustrious qualities and to
+    his godlike acts."
+
+This is not so magnificent a panegyric as that of Grattan in his written
+tribute to Chatham, but, enhanced by the gesture and voice of the
+great orator, it was reputed to have left a deep impression upon all who
+heard it.
+
+But few speeches, however eloquent, survive, while the printed work of
+the writer may long endure; but to the orator is given what the writer
+never experiences--the fierce enjoyment, amounting almost to rapture,
+of holding an audience entranced under the spell of the spoken
+cadences; and English, Antony, has a splendour all its own when
+uttered by a master of its august music.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+18
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+To-day I will write about Robert Southey, and, as he and Coleridge
+married sisters, you may claim a distant relationship with him. His
+personal character was beautiful and unselfish, and his dwelling at
+Keswick was the home that for years sheltered Coleridge's children.
+
+With hardly an exception the poets of England have had an easy and
+royal mastery of prose; and in the case of Robert Southey there are
+some, and they are not the worst critics, who anticipate that his prose
+will long outlast his poetry in the Temple of Fame.
+
+We may suppose that to a man whose whole private life was stainlessly
+dedicated to a noble rectitude of conduct, and whose every act was
+sternly subjected to the judgment of an unbending conscience, some
+circumstances of the private life of Nelson must have been distasteful
+and open to censure; but no such reservations dimmed the splendour
+of Southey's tribute to the public hero who gave his life in the act of
+establishing, beyond reach of dispute or cavil, the throne of England as
+Queen of the Sea.
+
+    "The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a
+    public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned pale,
+    as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of
+    our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was
+    suddenly taken from us, and it seemed as if we had never, till
+    then, known how deeply we loved and reverenced him.
+
+    "What the country had lost in its great naval hero--the greatest
+    of our own, and of all former times, was scarcely taken into the
+    account of grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he performed his part,
+    that the maritime war, after the battle of Trafalgar, was
+    considered at an end; the fleets of the enemy were not merely
+    defeated, but destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new race
+    of seamen reared for them, before the possibility of their
+    invading our shores could again be contemplated.
+
+    "It was not, therefore, from any selfish reflection upon the
+    magnitude of our loss that we mourned for him; the general sorrow
+    was of a higher character. The people of England grieved that
+    funeral ceremonies, public monuments and posthumous rewards, were
+    all which they could now bestow upon him whom the king, the
+    legislature, and the nation, would alike have delighted to honour;
+    whom every tongue would have blessed; whose presence in every
+    village through which he might have passed would have wakened the
+    church bells, have given schoolboys a holiday, have drawn children
+    from their sports to gaze upon him, and 'old men from the chimney
+    corner' to look upon Nelson ere they died.
+
+    "The victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, indeed, with the usual
+    forms of rejoicing, but they were without joy; for such already
+    was the glory of the British Navy through Nelson's surpassing
+    genius, that it scarcely seemed to receive any addition from the
+    most signal victory that ever was achieved upon the sea; and the
+    destruction of this mighty fleet, by which all the maritime
+    schemes of France were totally frustrated, hardly appeared to add
+    to our security or strength, for while Nelson was living to watch
+    the combined squadrons of the enemy, we felt ourselves as secure
+    as now, when they were no longer in existence.
+
+    "There was reason to suppose from the appearances upon opening the
+    body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like
+    his father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said to have
+    fallen prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to be
+    lamented, who died so full of honours, and at the height of human
+    fame. The most triumphant death is that of a martyr; the most
+    awful, that of the martyred patriot; the most splendid, that of
+    the hero in the hour of victory; and if the chariot and the horses
+    of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could
+    scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory.
+
+    "He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name
+    and an example which are at this hour inspiring hundreds of the
+    youth of England; a name which is our pride, and an example which
+    will continue to be our shield and our strength."
+
+Nelson left England the Queen of the Sea, and the great war with
+Germany has failed to displace her from that splendid throne. For the
+plain fact of history remains that, after the battle of Jutland, the
+German High Seas Fleet never ventured out of port again till the end of
+the war; and when it did emerge from its ignominious security, it sailed
+to captivity at Scapa Flow, there ultimately to repose on the bottom of
+the sea.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+19
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+There are four very celebrated lines written by Walter Savage Landor
+which you may have heard quoted; they were written towards the close
+of his life, and are certainly distinguished and memorable:--
+
+  "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
+    Nature I loved, and next to Nature Art;
+  I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
+    It sinks, and I am ready to depart."
+
+It does not detract from the merit of the lines that as a fact Landor was
+of a fiery disposition, and strove a great deal with many adversaries,
+often of his own creation, throughout his long life[1]; and although he
+was of a fierce and combative nature he displayed in his writings a
+classical restraint and tender beauty hardly achieved by his
+contemporaries.
+
+In the form of an imaginary conversation between AEsop and Rhodope,
+Landor makes the latter describe how her father, in the famine,
+unbeknown to her, starved that she might have plenty, and, when all
+was gone, took her to the market-place to sell her that she might live.
+There is an exquisite delicacy in this dialogue that places it among the
+wonders of literature:--
+
+    "_Rhodope_. Never shall I forget the morning when my father,
+    sitting in the coolest part of the house, exchanged his last
+    measure of grain for a chlamys of scarlet cloth, fringed with
+    silver. He watched the merchant out of the door, and then looked
+    wistfully into the cornchest. I, who thought there was something
+    worth seeing, looked in also, and finding it empty, expressed my
+    disappointment, not thinking, however, about the corn. A faint and
+    transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of mine. He
+    unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before me,
+    and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the
+    glittering fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; and I
+    know not what flowers he gathered, but he gathered many; and some
+    he placed in my bosom, and some in my hair. But I told him with
+    captious pride, first that I could arrange them better, and again
+    that I would have only the white. However, when he had selected
+    all the white and I had placed a few of them according to my
+    fancy, I told him (rising in my slipper) he might crown me with
+    the remainder.
+
+    "The splendour of my apparel gave me a sensation of authority.
+    Soon as the flowers had taken their station on my head, I
+    expressed a dignified satisfaction at the taste displayed by my
+    father, just as if I could have seen how they appeared! But he
+    knew that there was at least as much pleasure as pride in it, and
+    perhaps we divided the latter (alas! not both) pretty equally.
+
+    "He now took me into the market-place, where a concourse of people
+    were waiting for the purchase of slaves. Merchants came and looked
+    at me; some commending, others disparaging; but all agreeing that
+    I was slender and delicate, that I could not live long, and that I
+    should give much trouble. Many would have bought the chlamys, but
+    there was something less saleable in the child and flowers.
+
+    "_AEsop_. Had thy features been coarse and thy voice rustic, they
+    would all have patted thy cheeks and found no fault in thee.
+
+    "_Rhodope_. As it was, every one had bought exactly such another
+    in time past, and been a loser by it. At these speeches, I
+    perceived the flowers tremble slightly on my bosom, from my
+    father's agitation. Although he scoffed at them, knowing my
+    healthiness, he was troubled internally, and said many short
+    prayers, not very unlike imprecations, turning his head aside.
+    Proud was I, prouder than ever, when at last several talents were
+    offered for me, and by the very man who in the beginning had
+    undervalued me most, and prophesied the worst of me. My father
+    scowled at him and refused the money. I thought he was playing a
+    game, and began to wonder what it could be, since I had never seen
+    it played before. Then I fancied it might be some celebration
+    because plenty had returned to the city, insomuch that my father
+    had bartered the last of the corn he hoarded.
+
+    "I grew more and more delighted at the sport. But soon there
+    advanced an elderly man, who said gravely, 'Thou hast stolen this
+    child; her vesture alone is worth a hundred drachmas. Carry her
+    home again to her parents, and do it directly, or Nemesis and the
+    Eumenides will overtake thee.' Knowing the estimation in which my
+    father had always been holden by his fellow-citizens, I laughed
+    again and pinched his ear. He, although naturally choleric, burst
+    forth into no resentment at these reproaches, but said calmly, 'I
+    think I know thee by name, O guest! Surely thou art Xanthus, the
+    Samian. Deliver this child from famine.'
+
+    "Again I laughed aloud and heartily, and thinking it was now part
+    of the game, I held out both my arms, and protruded my whole body
+    toward the stranger. He would not receive me from my father's
+    neck, but he asked me with benignity and solicitude if I was
+    hungry; at which I laughed again, and more than ever; for it was
+    early in the morning, soon after the first meal, and my father had
+    nourished me most carefully and plentifully in all the days of the
+    famine. But Xanthus, waiting for no answer, took out of a sack,
+    which one of his slaves carried at his side, a cake of wheaten
+    bread and a piece of honeycomb, and gave them to me. I held the
+    honeycomb to my father's mouth, thinking it the most of a dainty.
+    He dashed it to the ground, but seizing the bread he began to
+    devour it ferociously. This also I thought was in the play, and I
+    clapped my hands at his distortions. But Xanthus looked at him
+    like one afraid, and smote the cake from him, crying aloud, 'Name
+    the price,' My father now placed me in his arms, naming a price
+    much below what the other had offered, saying, 'The gods are ever
+    with thee, O Xanthus! therefore to thee do I consign my child.'
+
+    "But while Xanthus was counting out the silver my father seized
+    the cake again, which the slave had taken up and was about to
+    replace in the wallet. His hunger was exasperated by the taste,
+    and the delay. Suddenly there arose much tumult. Turning round in
+    the old woman's bosom who had received me from Xanthus, I saw my
+    beloved father struggling on the ground, livid and speechless. The
+    more violent my cries, the more rapidly they hurried me away; and
+    many were soon between us.
+
+    "Little was I suspicious that he had suffered the pangs of famine
+    long before: alas! and he had suffered them for me. Do I weep
+    while I am telling you they ended? I could not have closed his
+    eyes; I was too young; but I might have received his last breath,
+    the only comfort of an orphan's bosom. Do you now think him
+    blameable, O AEsop?"
+
+    "_AEsop_. It was sublime humanity; it was forbearance and
+    self-denial which even the immortal gods have never shown us."
+
+The _Dream of Petrarca_ is, I think, more famous but not more
+beautiful than this narrative of Rhodope; it lacks the deep human
+tragedy and infinite charity of the winsome child, and the
+self-contained father silently perishing of hunger for her; but if the
+_AEsop and Rhodope_ had never been written, the _Dream of Petrarca_
+would secure its author a place among the immortals:--
+
+    "... Wearied with the length of my walk over the mountains, and
+    finding a soft molehill, covered with grey moss, by the wayside, I
+    laid my head upon it and slept. I cannot tell how long it was
+    before a species of dream or vision came over me.
+
+    "Two beautiful youths appeared beside me; each was winged; but the
+    wings were hanging down and seemed ill-adapted to flight. One of
+    them, whose voice was the softest I ever heard, looking at me
+    frequently, said to the other, 'He is under my guardianship for
+    the present; do not awaken him with that feather.' Methought, on
+    hearing the whisper, I saw something like the feather on an arrow;
+    and then the arrow itself; the whole of it, even to the point,
+    although he carried it in such a manner that it was difficult at
+    first to discover more than a palm's length of it; the rest of the
+    shaft (and the whole of the barb) was behind his ankles.
+
+    "'This feather never awakens anyone,' replied he, rather
+    petulantly, 'but it brings more of confident security, and more of
+    cherished dreams, than you, without me, are capable of imparting.'
+
+    "'Be it so!' answered the gentler; 'none is less inclined to
+    quarrel or dispute than am I. Many whom you have wounded
+    grievously call upon me for succour; but so little am I disposed
+    to thwart you, it is seldom I venture to do more for them than to
+    whisper a few words of comfort in passing. How many reproaches on
+    these occasions have been cast upon me for indifference and
+    infidelity! Nearly as many, and nearly in the same terms as upon
+    you.'
+
+    "'Odd enough that we, O Sleep! should be thought so alike!' said
+    Love contemptuously. 'Yonder is he who bears a nearer resemblance
+    to you; the dullest have observed it.' I fancied I turned my eyes
+    to where he was pointing, and saw at a distance the figure he
+    designated. Meanwhile the contention went on uninterruptedly.
+    Sleep was slow in asserting his power or his benefits. Love
+    recapitulated them; but only that he might assert his own above
+    them.
+
+    "Suddenly he called upon me to decide, and to choose my patron.
+    Under the influence, first of the one, then of the other, I sprang
+    from repose to rapture, I alighted from rapture on repose, and
+    knew not which was sweetest. Love was very angry with me, and
+    declared he would cross me through the whole of my existence.
+    Whatever I might on other occasions have thought of his veracity,
+    I now felt too surely that he would keep his word.
+
+    "At last, before the close of the altercation, the third Genius
+    had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell you how I knew him,
+    but I knew him to be the Genius of Death. Breathless as I was at
+    beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First
+    they seemed only calm; presently they grew contemplative; and
+    lastly beautiful; those of the Graces themselves are less regular,
+    less harmonious, less composed.
+
+    "Love glanced at him unsteadily, with a countenance in which there
+    was somewhat of anxiety, somewhat of disdain; and cried, 'Go away!
+    go away! nothing that thou touchest, lives!' 'Say rather, child!'
+    replied the advancing form, and advancing grew loftier and
+    statelier, 'say rather that nothing of beautiful or of glorious
+    lives its own true life until my wing hath passed over it.'
+
+    "Love pouted, and rumpled and bent down with his forefinger the
+    stiff short feathers on his arrow-head, but replied not. Although
+    he frowned worse than ever, and at me, I dreaded him less and
+    less, and scarcely looked towards him. The milder and calmer
+    Genius, the third, in proportion as I took courage to contemplate
+    him, regarded me with more and more complacency. He held neither
+    flower nor arrow as the others did, but throwing back the clusters
+    of dark curls that overshadowed his countenance, he presented to
+    me his hand, openly and benignly. I shrank on looking at him so
+    near, and yet I sighed to love him. He smiled, not without an
+    expression of pity, at perceiving my diffidence, my timidity; for
+    I remembered how soft was the hand of Sleep, how warm and
+    entrancing was Love's.
+
+    "By degrees I became ashamed of my ingratitude, and turning my
+    face away, I held out my arms, and I felt my neck within his; the
+    coolness of freshest morning breathed around; the heavens seemed to
+    open above me, while the beautiful cheek of my deliverer rested on
+    my head. I would now have looked for those others, but knowing my
+    intention by my gesture, he said consolatorily, 'Sleep is on his
+    way to the Earth, where many are calling him; but it is not to
+    these he hastens, for every call only makes him fly further off.
+    Sedately and gravely as he looks, he is nearly as capricious and
+    volatile as the more arrogant and ferocious one.'
+
+    "'And Love!' said I, 'whither is he departed? If not too late, I
+    would propitiate and appease him.'
+
+    "'He who cannot follow me; he who cannot overtake and pass me,'
+    said the Genius, 'is unworthy of the name, the most glorious in
+    earth or heaven. Look up! Love is yonder, and ready to receive
+    thee.'
+
+    "I looked: the earth was under me: I saw only the clear blue sky,
+    and something brighter above it."
+
+There is something most rare and refined and precious in this vision,
+told as it is with a sweet serenity. But it does not touch the heart like
+the _AEsop and Rhodope_.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Born 1775, died 1864.]
+
+
+
+20
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I now come to speak of one whose fame was familiar to me as a
+boy--the great Lord Brougham.--for he lived till 1868. I remember that
+he was vehemently praised and blamed as a politician, but with such
+matters others have dealt; in this letter, Antony, we will concern
+ourselves with the glory of English prose as it poured from Lord
+Brougham in two of his greatest speeches.
+
+He was an orator whose voice was uplifted throughout a long and
+strenuous life in condemnation of all the brutalities and oppression of
+his time, and to whose eloquence the triumphant cause of freedom
+stands for ever in deep obligation.
+
+His great speech on Law Reform in the House of Commons, in 1828,
+took six hours to deliver, and the concluding passage, which mounted
+to a plane of lofty declamation, displayed no sign of exhaustion, and
+was listened to with strained attention by an absorbed and crowded
+audience:--
+
+    "The course is clear before us; the race is glorious to run. You
+    have the power of sending your name down through all times,
+    illustrated by deeds of higher fame, and more useful import, than
+    ever were done within these walls.
+
+    "You saw the greatest warrior of the age--conqueror of
+    Italy--humbler of Germany--terror of the North--saw him account
+    all his matchless victories poor, compared with the triumph you
+    are now in a condition to win--saw him contemn the fickleness of
+    fortune, while, in despite of her, he could pronounce his
+    memorable boast, 'I shall go down to posterity with the Code in my
+    hand!'
+
+    "You have vanquished him in the field; strive now to rival him in
+    the sacred arts of peace! Outstrip him as a lawgiver, whom in arms
+    you overcame! The lustre of the Regency will be eclipsed by the
+    more solid and enduring splendour of the Reign. The praise which
+    false courtiers feigned for our Edwards and Harrys, the Justinians
+    of their day, will be the just tribute of the wise and the good to
+    that monarch under whose sway so mighty an undertaking shall be
+    accomplished. Of a truth, the holders of sceptres are most chiefly
+    to be envied for that they bestow the power of thus conquering,
+    and ruling thus.
+
+    "It was the boast of Augustus--it formed part of the glare in
+    which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost,--that he found
+    Rome of brick, and left it of marble; a praise not unworthy a
+    great prince, and to which the present reign also has its claims.
+    But how much nobler will be the sovereign's boast when he shall
+    have it to say, that he found law dear, and left it cheap; found
+    it a sealed book--left it a living letter; found it the patrimony
+    of the rich--left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the
+    two-edged sword of craft and oppression--left it the staff of
+    honesty and the shield of innocence!
+
+    "To me, much reflecting on these things, it has always seemed a
+    worthier honour to be the instrument of making you bestir
+    yourselves in this high matter, than to enjoy all that office can
+    bestow--office, of which the patronage would be an irksome
+    encumbrance, the emoluments superfluous to one content with the
+    rest of his industrious fellow-citizens that his own hands
+    minister to his wants; and as for the power supposed to follow
+    it--I have lived near half a century, and I have learned that
+    power and place may be severed.
+
+    "But one power I do prize; that of being the advocate of my
+    countrymen here, and their fellow-labourers elsewhere, in those
+    things which concern the best interests of mankind. That power, I
+    know full well, no government can give--no change take away!"
+
+His speech on negro slavery made a deep impression upon the country,
+and rose towards its termination, gradually, but with ever-ascending
+periods, to a close of absolute majesty:--
+
+    "I regard the freedom of the negro as accomplished and sure. Why?
+    Because it is his right--because he has shown himself fit for it;
+    because a pretext, or a shadow of a pretext, can no longer be
+    devised for withholding that right from its possessor. I know that
+    all men at this day take a part in the question, and they will no
+    longer bear to be imposed upon, now they are well informed. My
+    reliance is firm and unflinching upon the great change which I
+    have witnessed--the education of the people, unfettered by party
+    or by sect--witnessed from the beginning of its progress, I may
+    say from the hour of its birth! Yes! It was not for a humble man
+    like me to assist at royal births with the illustrious Prince who
+    condescended to grace the pageant of this opening session, or the
+    great captain and statesman in whose presence I am now proud to
+    speak. But with that illustrious Prince, and with the father of
+    the Queen, I assisted at that other birth, more conspicuous still.
+    With them, and with the head of the House of Russell, incomparably
+    more illustrious in my eyes, I watched over its cradle--I marked
+    its growth--I rejoiced in its strength--I witnessed its maturity;
+    I have been spared to see it ascend the very height of supreme
+    power; directing the councils of state; accelerating every great
+    improvement; uniting itself with every good work; propping all
+    useful institutions; extirpating abuses in all our institutions;
+    passing the bounds of our European dominion, and in the New World,
+    as in the Old, proclaiming that freedom is the birthright of
+    man--that distinction of colour gives no title to oppression--that
+    the chains now loosened must be struck off, and even the marks
+    they have left effaced--proclaiming this by the same eternal law
+    of our nature which makes nations the masters of their own
+    destiny, and which in Europe has caused every tyrant's throne to
+    quake!
+
+    "But they need feel no alarm at the progress of light who defend a
+    limited monarchy and support popular institutions--who place their
+    chiefest pride not in ruling over slaves, be they white or be
+    they black, not in protecting the oppressor, but in wearing a
+    constitutional crown, in holding the sword of justice with the
+    hand of mercy, in being the first citizen of a country whose air
+    is too pure for slavery to breathe, and on whose shores, if the
+    captive's foot but touch, his fetters of themselves fall off. To
+    the resistless progress of this great principle I look with a
+    confidence which nothing can shake; it makes all improvement
+    certain; it makes all change safe which it produces; for none can
+    be brought about unless it has been prepared in a cautious and
+    salutary spirit.
+
+    "So now the fulness of time is come for at length discharging our
+    duty to the African captive. I have demonstrated to you that
+    everything is ordered--every previous step taken--all safe, by
+    experience shown to be safe, for the long-desired consummation.
+    The time has come, the trial has been made, the hour is striking;
+    you have no longer a pretext for hesitation, or faltering, or
+    delay. The slave has shown, by four years' blameless behaviour,
+    and devotion to the pursuits of peaceful industry, that he is as
+    fit for his freedom as any English peasant, ay, or any lord whom
+    I now address.
+
+    "I demand his rights; I demand his liberty without stint. In the
+    name of justice and of law--in the name of reason--in the name of
+    God, who has given you no right to work injustice; I demand that
+    your brother be no longer trampled upon as your slave! I make my
+    appeal to the Commons, who represent the free people of England;
+    and I require at their hands the performance of that condition for
+    which they paid so enormous a price--that condition which all
+    their constituents are in breathless anxiety to see fulfilled! I
+    appeal to this House. Hereditary judges of the first tribunal in
+    the world--to you I appeal for justice. Patrons of all the arts
+    that humanise mankind--under your protection I place humanity
+    herself! To the merciful Sovereign of a free people I call aloud
+    for mercy to the hundreds of thousands for whom half a million of
+    her Christian sisters have cried aloud--I ask that their cry may
+    not have risen in vain. But first I turn my eye to the throne of
+    all justice, and devoutly humbling myself before Him who is of
+    purer eyes than to behold such vast iniquities, I implore that the
+    curse hovering over the head of the unjust and the oppressor be
+    averted from us--that your hearts may be turned to mercy--and that
+    over all the earth His will may at length be done!"
+
+This is nobly to use noble gifts; it is difficult to think ill of a
+man who can carry oratory for a glorious object to such heights of
+splendour. It may seem a duty to some to darken his character with
+detraction, but his inspiring words remain supreme and unsullied and
+will still live when such faults as may be truly laid to his charge
+are long forgotten. To fight for a great cause, Antony, is rightly to
+use great powers, and this is what Lord Brougham did with all his
+might.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+21
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+In the great emprise of war it must often happen that the most awful
+scenes of manifested human power, and the most godlike deeds of
+human glory, are lost to the contemporary world, and utterly unknown
+to succeeding generations, because they were witnessed by no man
+with the gift of expression who could record for after time, in adequate
+language, the majestic spectacle.
+
+In the great war against Germany no great writer has yet appeared
+who was personally in touch as a living witness of the countless deeds
+of glorious valour and acts of heroic endurance that were everywhere
+displayed upon that immense far-stretched front.
+
+But in the wars of former times, a whole battle could be witnessed from
+its beginning to its end by a single commander, and no scenes in
+human life could be more terrible and soul-stirring than the awful ebb
+and flow of a great combat in which the victory of armies and the fate
+of nations hung in the balance.
+
+The battle of Albuera in the Peninsular War might easily at this date
+have long been forgotten had not the pen of Sir William Napier been as
+puissant as his sword. The battle had raged for hours, and the British
+were well-nigh overwhelmed; the Colonel, twenty officers, and over
+four hundred men out of five hundred and seventy had fallen in the
+57th alone; not a third were left standing in the other regiments that
+had been closely engaged throughout the day. Then Cole was ordered
+up with his fourth division as a last hope, and this is how Sir William
+Napier records their advance:--
+
+    "Such a gallant line, issuing from the midst of the smoke and
+    rapidly separating itself from the confused and broken multitude,
+    startled the enemy's masses, then augmenting and pressing onwards
+    as to an assured victory; they wavered, hesitated, and vomiting
+    forth a storm of fire hastily endeavoured to enlarge their front,
+    while a fearful discharge of grape from all their artillery
+    whistled through the British ranks ... the English battalions,
+    struck by the iron tempest, reeled and staggered like sinking
+    ships; but suddenly and sternly recovering, they closed on their
+    terrible enemies, and then was seen with what a strength and
+    majesty the British soldier fights.
+
+    "In vain did Soult with voice and gesture animate his Frenchmen;
+    in vain did the hardiest veterans, breaking from the crowded
+    columns, sacrifice their lives to gain time for the mass to open
+    out on such a fair field; in vain did the mass itself bear up,
+    and, fiercely striving, fire indiscriminately upon friends and
+    foes, while the horsemen hovering on the flank threatened to
+    charge the advancing line.
+
+    "Nothing could stop that astonishing infantry.
+
+    "No sudden burst of undisciplined valour, no nervous enthusiasm
+    weakened the stability of their order; their flashing eyes were
+    bent on the dark columns in their front; their measured tread
+    shook the ground; their dreadful volleys swept away the head of
+    every formation; their deafening shouts overpowered the dissonant
+    cries that broke from all parts of the tumultuous crowd as slowly,
+    and with a horrid carnage, it was pushed by the incessant vigour
+    of the attack to the farthest edge of the height. There the French
+    reserve, mixing with the struggling multitude, endeavoured to
+    restore the fight, but only augmented the irremediable disorder,
+    and the mighty mass, giving way like a loosened cliff, went
+    headlong down the steep; the rain flowed after in streams
+    discoloured with blood, and eighteen hundred unwounded men, the
+    remnant of six thousand unconquerable British soldiers, stood
+    triumphant on the fatal hill!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "The laurel is nobly won when the exhausted victor reels as he
+    places it on his bleeding front.
+
+    "All that night the rain poured down, and the river and the hills
+    and the woods resounded with the dismal clamour and groans of
+    dying men."
+
+Sir William Napier seems intimately to have known the transience of
+the gratitude of nations to those who fight their battles for them. At the
+end of his noble history of the Peninsular War he lets the curtain fall
+upon the scene with solemn brevity in a single sentence, thus:--
+
+    "The British infantry embarked at Bordeaux, some for America, some
+    for England: the cavalry, marching through France, took shipping
+    at Boulogne. Thus the war terminated, and with it all remembrance
+    of the Veterans' services.
+
+    "Yet those Veterans had won nineteen pitched battles, and
+    innumerable combats; had made or sustained ten sieges and taken
+    four great fortresses; had twice expelled the French from
+    Portugal, once from Spain; had penetrated France, and killed,
+    wounded, or captured two hundred thousand enemies--leaving of
+    their own number, forty thousand dead, whose bones, whiten the
+    plains and mountains of the Peninsula."
+
+Science and the base malignity of our latest adversaries have debased
+modern warfare, as waged by them, from its ancient dignity and
+honour; and they have conducted it so as to make it difficult to believe
+that from the Kaiser down to the subaltern on land and the petty officer
+at sea that nation can produce a single gentleman.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+22
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+This letter, like the last one, is concerned with war. War brings to every
+man not incapacitated by age or physical defects the call of his country
+to fight, and if need be to die, for it. It also exposes to view the few
+pusillanimous young men who are satisfied to enjoy protection from the
+horrors of invasion and the priceless boon of personal freedom, secured
+to them by the self-sacrifice and valour of others, while they
+themselves remain snugly at home and talk of their consciences.
+
+Patriotism such as that which in 1914 led the flower of our race to flock
+in countless thousands to the standards and be enrolled for battle in
+defence of
+
+  "This precious stone set in the silver sea,"
+  "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,"
+
+being without doubt or cavil one of the noblest emotions of the human
+heart, has often been the begetter of inspired prose. Our own great war
+has not yet produced many fine utterances, and I go back to-day to a
+contemporary of Sir William Napier for one of the noblest outbursts of
+eloquence expressive of a burning patriotism that has ever been poured
+forth.
+
+Someone in the days when Wellington was alive had alluded in the
+House of Lords to the Irish as "aliens," and Richard Sheil, rising in the
+House of Commons, lifted up his voice for his country in an impassioned
+flight of generous eloquence.
+
+Sir Henry Hardinge, who had been at the battle of Waterloo, happened
+to be seated opposite to Sheil in the House, and to him Sheil appealed
+with the deepest emotion to support him in his vindication of his
+country's valour. None will in these days deny that our fellow-citizens of
+Ireland who went to the war displayed a courage as firm and invincible
+as our own:--
+
+    "The Duke of Wellington is not, I am inclined to believe, a man of
+    excitable temperament. His mind is of a cast too martial to be
+    easily moved; but, notwithstanding his habitual inflexibility, I
+    cannot help thinking, that when he heard his countrymen (for we
+    are his countrymen) designated by a phrase so offensive he ought
+    to have recalled the many fields of fight in which we have been
+    contributors to his renown. Yes, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
+    that he has passed ought to have brought back upon him, that from
+    the earliest achievement in which he displayed that military
+    genius which has placed him foremost in the annals of modern
+    warfare, down to that last and surpassing combat which has made
+    his name imperishable, the Irish soldiers, with whom our armies
+    are filled, were the inseparable auxiliaries to his glory.
+
+    "Whose were the athletic arms that drove their bayonets at Vimiera
+    through those phalanxes that never reeled in the shock of war
+    before? What desperate valour climbed the steeps and filled the
+    moats at Badajos! All! all his victories should have rushed and
+    crowded back upon his memory--Vimiera, Badajos, Salamanca,
+    Albuera, Toulouse, and last of all the greatest! (and here Sheil
+    pointed to Sir Henry Hardinge across the House). Tell me, for you
+    were there. I appeal to the gallant soldier before me, from whose
+    opinions I differ, but who bears, I know, a generous heart in an
+    intrepid breast; tell me, for you must needs remember, on that day
+    when the destinies of mankind were trembling in the balance, while
+    death fell in showers upon them, when the artillery of France,
+    levelled with a precision of the most deadly science, played upon
+    them, when her legions, incited by the voice and inspired by the
+    example of their mighty leader, rushed again and again to the
+    onset--tell me if for one instant, when to hesitate for one
+    instant was to be lost, the 'aliens' blenched!
+
+    "And when at length the moment for the last and decisive movement
+    had arrived, and the valour which had so long been wisely cheeked
+    was at length let loose, tell me if Ireland with less heroic
+    valour than the natives of your own glorious isle, precipitated
+    herself upon the foe?
+
+    "The blood of England, of Scotland, and of Ireland, flowed in the
+    same stream, on the same field. When the still morning dawned,
+    their dead lay cold and stark together; in the same deep earth
+    their bodies were deposited; the green corn of spring is now
+    breaking from their commingled dust; the dew falls from Heaven
+    upon their union in the grave.
+
+    "Partners in every peril--in the glory shall we not be permitted
+    to participate, and shall we be told as a requital that we are
+    aliens, and estranged from the noble country for whose salvation
+    our life-blood was poured out?"
+
+A hundred years of strife, misunderstanding, anger, estrangement,
+outrages, bloodshed, and murder separate us from this appealing cry
+wrung from the beating heart of this inspired Irishman. Is the great
+tragedy of England and Ireland that has sullied their annals for seven
+hundred years never to be brought to an end? Is there never to be for
+us a Lethe through which we may pass to the farther shore of
+forgetfulness and forgiveness of the past and reconciliation in the
+future?
+
+That you may live to see it, Antony, is my hope and prayer.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+23
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I gave you in a former letter Burke's famous passage on the fate of
+Marie Antoinette--in some ways the most splendid of his
+utterances,--and I now am going to quote to you a very great passage
+from Thomas Carlyle on the same tragic subject.
+
+Courageous was it of Carlyle, who must certainly have been familiar
+with Burke's noble ejaculation, to challenge it with emulation; but in the
+result we must admit that he amply justifies his temerity.
+
+The tragic figure of the queen drawn to execution through the roaring
+mob inspired Carlyle with what is surely his most overwhelming
+product.
+
+The august shadow of the Bible is dimly apprehended as the words
+ascend upwards and upwards with simple sublimity to the awful close.
+
+Nothing he wrote in all his multitudinous volumes surpasses this
+astonishing outburst:--
+
+    "Beautiful Highborn that wert so foully hurled low!
+
+    "For, if thy being came to thee out of old Hapsburg Dynasties,
+    came it not also out of Heaven? _Sunt lachrymae rerum, et mentem
+    mortalia tangunt_. Oh! is there a man's heart that thinks without
+    pity of those long months and years of slow-wasting ignominy;--of
+    thy birth soft-cradled, the winds of Heaven not to visit thy face
+    too roughly, thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendour;
+    and then of thy death, or hundred deaths, to which the guillotine
+    and Fouquier Tinville's judgment was but the merciful end?
+
+    "Look _there_, O man born of woman! The bloom of that fair face is
+    wasted, the hair is grey with care; the brightness of those eyes
+    is quenched, their lids hang drooping, the face is stony pale as
+    of one living in death.
+
+    "Mean weeds which her own hand has mended attire the Queen of the
+    World. The death-hurdle, where thou sittest pale, motionless,
+    which only curses environ, has to stop--a people drunk with
+    vengeance will drink it again in full draught, looking at thee
+    there. Far as the eye reaches, a multitudinous sea of maniac
+    heads, the air deaf with their triumph-yell!
+
+    "The living-dead must shudder with yet one more pang; her startled
+    blood yet again suffuses with the hue of agony that pale face,
+    which she hides with her hands.
+
+    "There is, then, _no_ heart to say, 'God pity thee'?
+
+    "O think not of these: think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the
+    Crucified--Who also treading the winepress alone, fronted sorrow
+    still deeper, and triumphed over it, and made it holy, and built
+    of it a Sanctuary of Sorrow for thee and all the wretched!
+
+    "Thy path of thorns is nigh ended. One long last look at the
+    Tuileries, where thy step was once so light--where thy children
+    shall not dwell.
+
+    "Thy head is on the block; the axe rushes--dumb lies the world;
+    that wild-yelling world, and all its madness, is behind thee."
+
+There is a passage in Carlyle's tempestuous narrative of the taking of
+the Bastille which has always seemed to me to give it the last
+consummate touch of greatness.
+
+Suddenly he pauses in the turmoil and dust and wrath and madness of
+that tremendous conflict, and his poetic vision gazes away over
+peaceful France, and he exclaims:--
+
+    "O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant on
+    reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
+    cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the
+    Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are
+    even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:--and also
+    on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hotel de Ville."
+
+And a few sentences further on a heart of stone must be moved by
+what the archives of that grim prison-house revealed:--
+
+    "Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice.
+    Read this portion of an old letter.
+
+    "'If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake
+    of God and the Most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my
+    dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to show that she is
+    alive! It were the greatest consolation I could receive; and I
+    should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur.'
+
+    "Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret-Demery, and hast no
+    other history,--she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou art
+    dead! Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this question;
+    to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of men."
+
+In the reign of Louis XV. alone, there were no less than fifteen
+thousand _lettres de cachet_ issued, by which anyone could be
+suddenly arrested, and, without trial, and, heedless of protest,
+imprisoned perhaps for life in the Bastille.
+
+In the excesses of the Reign of Terror three or four thousand persons
+perished. Their deaths were spectacular, and have covered with
+execrations their dreadful executioners.
+
+But it is right that we should remember, Antony, the life-long agony
+and the unutterable despair of the victims of that remorselessly cruel
+system which the Revolution overthrew.
+
+The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in _Sartor Resartus_, seems to
+me to come nearer to the above excerpts than anything else in Carlyle,
+though at a perceptible distance:--
+
+    "O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest
+    bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create,
+    know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee,
+    'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!
+
+    "But it is with man's Soul as it was with Nature: the beginning of
+    Creation is--Light. Till the eye have vision the whole members are
+    in bonds. Divine moment, when over the tempest-tossed Soul, as
+    once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: 'Let there be
+    Light!' Even to the greatest that has felt such moment is it not
+    miraculous and God-announcing; even as, under simpler figures, to
+    the simplest and least. The mad primeval Discord is hushed; the
+    rudely-jumbled conflicting elements bind themselves into separate
+    Firmaments: deep, silent rock-foundations are built beneath, and
+    the skyey vault, with its everlasting Luminaries, above; instead
+    of a dark, wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile,
+    heaven-encompassed World.
+
+    "I, too, could now say to myself: 'Be no longer a Chaos, but a
+    World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the
+    pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in
+    God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee; out with it then.
+    Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole
+    might. Work while it is called to-day; for the night cometh
+    wherein no man can work.'"
+
+There is another passage in _Sartor Resartus_ which I have always
+held in veneration, though the field labourer is not now so
+"hardly-entreated" as when Carlyle wrote of him:--
+
+    "Two men I honour, and no third. First the toilworn Craftsman that
+    with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth, and
+    makes her man's.
+
+    "Venerable to me is the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein
+    notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue indefeasibly royal, as of
+    the sceptre of this planet. Venerable too is the rugged face, all
+    weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is
+    the face of a man living manlike. Oh, but the more venerable for
+    thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee!
+    Hardly-entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were
+    thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our
+    conscript, on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so
+    marred. For in thee too lay a god-created form, but it was not to
+    be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and
+    defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to
+    know freedom. Yet toil on, toil on; _thou_ art in thy duty, be
+    out of it who may: thou toilest for the altogether indispensable,
+    for daily bread.
+
+    "A second man I honour, and still more highly: him who is seen
+    toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread, but
+    the bread of life. Is not he too in his duty; endeavouring towards
+    inward harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his
+    outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all, when his
+    outward and his inward endeavour are one: when we can name him
+    artist; not earthly craftsman only, but inspired thinker, who with
+    heaven-made implement conquers heaven for us! If the poor and
+    humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil
+    for him in return, that he have light, have guidance, freedom,
+    immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else
+    is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.
+
+    "Unspeakably touching is it, however, when I find both dignities
+    united; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's
+    wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this
+    world know I nothing than a peasant saint, could such now anywhere
+    be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself;
+    thou wilt see the splendour of heaven spring forth from the
+    humblest depths of earth, like a light shining in great darkness."
+
+_Sartor Resartus_ has long taken its place among the greatest prose
+works of the nineteenth century, and it is a strange commentary on this
+mandate to us all to "produce, produce!" to find that for eleven years
+Carlyle could find no publisher who would give it in book form to the
+world!
+
+It is a solemn reflection to think that there may be many books of
+eloquence and splendour that have never seen the light of publicity.
+Publishers concern themselves less with what is finely written than with
+what will best sell; and in their defence it may be acceded that some of
+the masterpieces of literature have at their first appearance before the
+world fallen dead from the press.
+
+The first edition of FitzGerald's _Omar Khayyam_, issued at one
+shilling, was totally unrecognised, and copies of it might have been
+bought for twopence in the trays and boxes of trash on the pavement
+outside old bookshops!
+
+But if once a work is published, time will with almost irresistible force
+place it ultimately in the station it deserves in the literature of the
+world.
+
+Instant acceptance not seldom preludes final rejection. In the middle of
+the last century Martin Tupper's _Proverbial Philosophy_ garnished
+every drawing-room table; and now, where is it?
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+_P.S._--Do not look for the passage on Marie Antoinette in the _French
+Revolution_, for you will not find it there, but in the "Essay of the
+Diamond Necklace."
+
+
+
+24
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+You and I once had a cousin, Henry Nelson Coleridge, who, had he
+lived, would very certainly have left a brilliant addition to the
+lustre of the name he bore. He was born in 1798, and only lived
+forty-five years, dying when his powers were leading him to high
+fortune in that legal profession which so many of the family have
+pursued.
+
+He was a scholar of Eton; a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge; he
+won the Greek and Latin Odes in 1820, and the Greek Ode again in 1821.
+To him, therefore, the classic spirit was inborn, and a training that
+omitted the study of Latin and Greek the very negation of education.
+He would have had something very trenchant to say of what is now known
+as "the modern side." He wrote a very rich and splendid prose, and it
+is no fond family partiality that leads me to quote to you his
+eloquent and precious defence of the classical languages:--
+
+    "I am not one whose lot it has been to grow old in literary
+    retirement, devoted to classical studies with an exclusiveness
+    which might lead to an overweening estimate of these two noble
+    languages. Few, I will not say evil, were the days allowed to me
+    for such pursuits; and I was constrained, still young and an
+    unripe scholar to forego them for the duties of an active and
+    laborious profession. They are now amusements only, however
+    delightful and improving. For I am far from assuming to understand
+    all their riches, all their beauty, or all their power; yet I can
+    profoundly feel their immeasurable superiority in many important
+    respects to all we call modern; and I would fain think that there
+    are many even among my younger readers who can now, or will
+    hereafter, sympathise with the expression of my ardent admiration.
+
+    "Greek--the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as
+    our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, or
+    indefatigable strength, with the complication and the distinctness
+    of Nature herself; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing
+    was excluded; speaking to the ear like Italian, speaking to the
+    mind like English; with words like pictures, with words like the
+    gossamer films of the summer; at once the variety and
+    picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and the intensity of AEschylus;
+    not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor fathomed to the
+    bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up
+    with all its ardours even under the Promethean touch of
+    Demosthenes!
+
+    "And Latin--the voice of empire and of war, of law and of the
+    state, inferior to its half-parent and rival in the embodying of
+    passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in
+    sustaining the measured march of history; and superior to it in
+    the indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark
+    of an imperial and despotising republic; rigid in its
+    construction, parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding
+    to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of
+    Greek-like splendour in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius;
+    proved indeed, to the uttermost, by Cicero, and by him found
+    wanting; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its
+    conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the
+    spirit of nations and not with the passions of individuals;
+    breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the
+    schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by
+    the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by
+    the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus.
+
+    "These inestimable advantages, which no modern skill can wholly
+    counterpoise, are known and felt by the scholar alone. He has not
+    failed, in the sweet and silent studies of his youth, to drink
+    deep at those sacred fountains of all that is just and beautiful
+    in human language.
+
+    "The thoughts and the words of the master-spirits of Greece and of
+    Rome, are inseparably blended in his memory; a sense of their
+    marvellous harmonies, their exquisite fitness, their consummate
+    polish, has sunk for ever in his heart, and thence throws out
+    light and fragrancy upon the gloom and the annoyance of his
+    maturer years. No avocations of professional labour will make him
+    abandon their wholesome study; in the midst of a thousand cares he
+    will find an hour to recur to his boyish lessons--to reperuse
+    them in the pleasurable consciousness of old associations, and in
+    the clearness of manly judgment, and to apply them to himself and
+    to the world with superior profit.
+
+    "The more extended his sphere of learning in the literature of
+    modern Europe, the more deeply, though the more wisely, will he
+    reverence that of classical antiquity; and in declining age, when
+    the appetite for magazines and reviews, and the ten-times repeated
+    trash of the day, has failed, he will retire, as it were, within a
+    circle of school-fellow friends, and end his secular studies as he
+    began them, with his Homer, his Horace, and his Shakespeare."
+
+Ah, what an echo, Antony, every word of this beautiful passage finds in
+my own heart, only saddened with the poignant regret that the
+necessary business and occupation of the passing years have dulled for
+me such unpolished facility, as I may once have possessed, for
+perusing my Homer and my Horace!
+
+It is, indeed, rare in these days to find gentlemen as familiar as were
+their forebears with Latin and Greek. You, Antony, will probably find
+yourself as you grow up in like case with myself, but there will remain
+for your unending instruction and delight all the glories of English
+literature, to give you a taste for which these few letters of mine are
+written, plucking only a single flower here and there from the most
+wonderful garden in the world.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+25
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Cardinal Newman, of whom I shall write to-day, was the first of the
+great writers born in the nineteenth century, and he lived from 1801 to
+1890. Besides being a master of English prose he was no mean poet;
+but above all else he was a man of immense personal power, which was
+strangely associated with a manifest saintliness which compelled
+diffidence from those admitted to his intimacy.
+
+I have described him as I knew him in my _Memories_;[1] and now will
+quote to you his utterance on music and its effect upon the heart of
+man, which has always seemed to me too precious to leave buried in a
+sermon:--
+
+    "Let us take an instance, of an outward and earthly form, or
+    economy, under which great wonders unknown seem to be typified; I
+    mean musical sounds as they are exhibited most perfectly in
+    instrumental harmony.
+
+    "There are seven notes in the scale; make them fourteen; yet what
+    a slender outfit for so vast an enterprise! What Science brings so
+    much out of so little? out of what poor elements does some great
+    master in it create his new world!
+
+    "Shall we say that all this exuberant inventiveness is a mere
+    ingenuity or trick of art, like some game or fashion of the day,
+    without reality, without meaning? We may do so; and then, perhaps,
+    we shall also account theology to be a matter of words; yet, as
+    there is a divinity in the theology of the Church, which those who
+    feel cannot communicate, so is there also in the wonderful
+    creation of sublimity and beauty of which I am speaking. To many
+    men the very names which the Science employs are utterly
+    incomprehensible. To speak of an idea or a subject seems to be
+    fanciful or trifling, to speak of the views which it opens upon us
+    to be childish extravagance; yet is it possible that that
+    inexhaustible evolution and disposition of notes, so rich yet so
+    simple, so intricate yet so regulated, so various yet so majestic,
+    should be a mere sound, which is gone and perishes?
+
+    "Can it be that those mysterious stirrings of heart, and keen
+    emotions, and strange yearnings after we know not what, and awful
+    impressions from we know not whence, should be wrought in us by
+    what is unsubstantial, and comes and goes, and begins and ends in
+    itself? It is not so; it cannot be. No; they have escaped from
+    some higher sphere, they are the outpourings of eternal harmony in
+    the medium of created sound; they are echoes from our home; they
+    are the voice of angels or the magnificat of Saints, or the living
+    laws of Divine Governance, or the Divinic attributes; something
+    are they besides themselves, which we cannot compass, which we
+    cannot utter,--though mortal man, and he perhaps not otherwise
+    distinguished above his fellows, has the gift of eliciting them."
+
+Of quite another order is the Cardinal's description of a gentleman.
+Here there is no flight of poetical imagination, but a manifestation of
+felicitous intuition and penetrating insight as rare as it is convincing,
+and the generous wide vision of a man of the world, undimmed by the
+faintest trace of prejudice:--
+
+    "Hence it is that it is almost a definition of a gentleman to say
+    he is one who never inflicts pain. This description is both
+    refined and, as far as it goes, accurate. He is mainly occupied in
+    merely removing the obstacles which hinder the free and
+    unembarrassed action of those about him; and he concurs with their
+    movements rather than takes the initiative himself. His benefits
+    may be considered as parallel to what are called comforts or
+    conveniences in arrangements of a personal nature: like an easy
+    chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and
+    fatigue, though nature provides both means of rest and animal heat
+    without them.
+
+    "The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may
+    cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast;
+    all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint,
+    or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to
+    make everyone at their ease and at home. He has his eyes on all
+    his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the
+    distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom
+    he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or
+    topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation
+    and never wearisome.
+
+    "He makes light of favours while he does them, and seems to be
+    receiving when he is conferring. He never speaks of himself except
+    when compelled, never defends himself by a mere retort; he has no
+    ears for slander or gossip, is scrupulous in imputing motives to
+    those who interfere with him, and interprets everything for the
+    best. He is never mean or little in his disputes, never takes
+    unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities or sharp sayings
+    for arguments, or insinuates evil which he dare not say out. From
+    a long-sighted prudence he observes the maxim of the ancient sage,
+    that we should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he
+    were one day to be our friend. He has too much sense to be
+    affronted at insults, he is too well employed to remember
+    injuries, and too indolent to bear malice.
+
+    "He is patient, forbearing, and resigned, on philosophical
+    principles; he submits to pain because it is inevitable, to
+    bereavement because it is irreparable, and to death because it is
+    his destiny. If he engages in controversy of any kind his
+    disciplined intellect preserves him from the blundering
+    discourtesy of better, perhaps, but less educated minds, who, like
+    blunt weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who mistake
+    the point in argument, waste their strength in trifles,
+    misconceive their adversary, and leave the question more involved
+    than they find it. He may be right or wrong in his opinion, but he
+    is too clear-headed to be unjust, he is as simple as he is
+    forcible, and as brief as he is decisive.
+
+    "Nowhere shall we find greater candour, consideration, indulgence;
+    he throws himself into the minds of his opponents, he accounts for
+    their mistakes. He knows the weakness of human reason as well as
+    its strength, its province, and its limits. If he be an unbeliever
+    he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or
+    to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic in
+    his infidelity. He respects piety and devotion; he even supports
+    institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which he does
+    not assent; he honours the ministers of religion, and it contents
+    him to decline its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them.
+    He is a friend of religious toleration, and that, not only because
+    his philosophy has taught him to look on all forms of faith with
+    an impartial eye, but also from the gentleness and effeminacy of
+    feeling which is the attendant on civilisation.
+
+    "Not that he may not hold a religion too, in his own way, even
+    when he is not a Christian. In that case his religion is one of
+    imagination and sentiment; it is the embodiment of those ideas of
+    the sublime, majestic, and beautiful, without which there can be
+    no large philosophy. Sometimes he acknowledges the Being of God,
+    sometimes he invests an unknown principle or quality with the
+    attributes of perfection. And this deduction of his reason, or
+    creation of his fancy, he makes the occasion of such excellent
+    thoughts, and the starting-point of so varied and systematic a
+    teaching, that he even seems like a disciple of Christianity
+    itself. From the very accuracy and steadiness of his logical
+    powers, he is able to see what sentiments are consistent in those
+    who hold any religious doctrine at all, and he appears to others
+    to feel and to hold a whole circle of theological truths, which
+    exist in his mind no otherwise than as a number of deductions.
+
+    "Such are the lineaments of the ethical character which the
+    cultivated intellect will form apart from religious principle."
+
+Surely this is a wonderful utterance from a Cardinal of the Church of
+Rome, full of urbanity and the wisdom of the world.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: Pp. 52-57.]
+
+
+
+26
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have in a former letter quoted a short but noble passage from Lord
+Macaulay on the great Lord Chatham.
+
+But I feel that the writer who was perhaps the greatest essayist that
+England has ever produced must not in these letters be fobbed off with
+so slight a notice and quotation.
+
+What has always seemed to me the supremest passage that flowed
+from his wonderful pen is to be found in his paper on Warren Hastings
+which appeared originally in the _Edinburgh Review_.
+
+His description in that essay of the opening of the great impeachment,
+has given all succeeding generations a vision of one of the most
+majestic scenes in the whole history of man.
+
+    "There have been spectacles more dazzling to the eye, more
+    gorgeous with jewellery and cloth of gold, more attractive to
+    grown-up children, than that which was then exhibited at
+    Westminster; but, perhaps, there never was a spectacle so well
+    calculated to strike a highly cultivated, a reflecting, an
+    imaginative mind. All the various kinds of interest which belong
+    to the near and to the distant, to the present and to the past,
+    were collected on one spot and in one hour. All the talents and
+    all the accomplishments which are developed by liberty and
+    civilisation were now displayed, with every advantage that could
+    be derived both from co-operation and from contrast. Every step in
+    the proceedings carried the mind either backward, through many
+    troubled centuries, to the days when the foundations of our
+    constitution were laid; or far away, over boundless seas and
+    deserts, to dusky nations living under strange stars, worshipping
+    strange gods, and writing strange characters from right to left.
+    The High Court of Parliament was to sit, according to forms handed
+    down from the days of the Plantagenets, on an Englishman accused
+    of exercising tyranny over the lord of the holy city of Benares,
+    and over the ladies of the princely house of Oude.
+
+    "The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of
+    William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with acclamations at
+    the inauguration of thirty kings, the hall which had witnessed the
+    just sentence of Bacon and the just absolution of Somers, the hall
+    where the eloquence of Strafford had for a moment awed and melted
+    a victorious party inflamed with just resentment, the hall where
+    Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the placid
+    courage which has half redeemed his fame. Neither military nor
+    civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with grenadiers.
+    The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in gold
+    and ermine, were marshalled by the heralds under Garter
+    King-at-Arms. The judges in their vestments of state attended to
+    give advice on points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords,
+    three-fourths of the Upper House as the Upper House then was,
+    walked in solemn order from their usual place of assembling to the
+    tribunal. The junior Baron present led the way, George Eliot, Lord
+    Heathfield, recently ennobled for his memorable defence of
+    Gibraltar against the fleets and armies of France and Spain. The
+    long procession was closed by the Duke of Norfolk, Earl Marshal of
+    the realm, by the great dignitaries, and by the brothers and sons
+    of the King. Last of all came the Prince of Wales, conspicuous by
+    his fine person and noble bearing. The grey old walls were hung
+    with scarlet. The long galleries were crowded by an audience such
+    as has rarely excited the fears or the emulation of an orator.
+    There were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free,
+    enlightened, and prosperous empire, grace and female loveliness,
+    wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of
+    every art. There were seated round the Queen the fair-haired young
+    daughters of the House of Brunswick. There the Ambassadors of
+    great Kings and Commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle
+    which no other country in the world could present. There Siddons,
+    in the prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a
+    scene surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the
+    historian of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero
+    pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a
+    senate which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus
+    thundered against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side
+    by side, the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age.
+    The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has
+    preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers and
+    statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons. It had
+    induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark and profound mine
+    from which he had extracted a vast treasure of erudition, a
+    treasure too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with
+    injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still precious,
+    massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous charms of her
+    to whom the heir of the throne had in secret plighted his faith.
+    There too was she, the beautiful mother of a beautiful race, the
+    Saint Cecilia, whose delicate features, lighted up by love and
+    music, art has rescued from the common decay. There were the
+    members of that brilliant society which quoted, criticised, and
+    exchanged repartees, under the rich peacock hangings of Mrs.
+    Montague. And there the ladies whose lips, more persuasive than
+    those of Fox himself, had carried the Westminster election against
+    palace and treasury, shone round Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
+
+    "The Serjeants made proclamation. Hastings advanced to the bar,
+    and bent his knee. The culprit was indeed not unworthy of that
+    great presence. He had ruled an extensive and populous country,
+    had made laws and treaties, had sent forth armies, had set up and
+    pulled down princes. And in his high place he had so borne
+    himself, that all had feared him, that most had loved him, and
+    that hatred itself could deny him no title to glory, except
+    virtue. He looked like a great man, and not like a bad man. A
+    person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage
+    which, while it indicated deference to the court, indicated also
+    habitual self-possession and self-respect, a high and intellectual
+    forehead, a brow pensive, but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible
+    decision, a face pale and worn, but serene, on which was written,
+    as legibly as under the picture in the council-chamber at
+    Calcutta, _Mens aequa in arduis_; such was the aspect with which
+    the great Proconsul presented himself to his judges."
+
+Such a scene can only find its appropriate enactment at the centre of a
+great empire and amid a people with an august history behind them,
+conscious of present magnificence and confident of future glory.
+
+We are now far into the second century since that memorable spectacle
+filled to the walls the great Hall of Westminster.
+
+What was an oligarchy permeated by a fine spirit of liberty and adorned
+by the sacred principle of personal freedom, has been superseded by a
+socialistic democracy under which personal freedom suffers frequent
+curtailments, and liberty is severely abridged by the mandates of trade
+unions, the prohibitions of urban potentates, and the usurpations of
+medicine men.
+
+Under these cramping and crippling deprivations we have lost the
+collective sense of greatness as a race that infused every participator in
+the splendid pageant of such an event as the Impeachment of Warren
+Hastings. One has but to imagine an impeachment to-day with the
+dominant personages in it chosen from the strike leaders and labour
+delegates of the proletariat, assisted by promoted railway porters and
+ennobled grocers, to perceive what a distance, and down what a
+declivity we have travelled since those days when it was impossible for
+any great public function to take place without its becoming naturally
+and without conscious effort the occasion for a manifestation of the
+pomp, circumstance, and splendour inseparable from the solemn acts
+of a great people performed by their greatest men.
+
+But I am one, Antony, who look forward with steadfast hope and belief
+to a reaction from our present vulgarity, and to a reascension of
+England to a greater dignity, honour, and nobleness both in its public
+and private life than is observable to-day.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+27
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have not in my letters to you travelled beyond our own islands in
+search of great English prose, but I propose now to make one
+divergence from this rule and quote a very great and deservedly
+far-famed speech, uttered on a memorable occasion, of Abraham
+Lincoln, President of the United States.
+
+At the present time, I think, the name of Lincoln lies closer to the
+hearts of the American people than that of any other, not even
+excepting Washington and Hamilton. The latter, though they
+established American independence, remained in a personal sense
+English gentlemen till their death. Lincoln was born in the backwoods in
+rude poverty, received no education but what he acquired by his own
+unaided efforts, and lived and died a man of the people, the ideal type
+of native-born American.
+
+He rose from the lowest to the highest position in the State, borne
+upwards by the simple nobility of his character, by the stainless purity
+of his actions, and the splendid motive of all his endeavours. His
+speeches and writings derive their power and distinction from no tricks
+of oratory, felicity of diction, or nimbleness of mind. They are the vocal
+results of the beatings of his great heart.
+
+He led his people to war in the manner of a prophet of Israel; with an
+awful austerity, majestic, invincible, and with hand uplifted in sure
+appeal to the God of battles. On the field of Gettysburg, where was
+waged the most tremendous of all combats of the war, he came to
+dedicate a cemetery to the innumerable dead, and these were his few
+and noble words:--
+
+    "Fourscore-and-seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this
+    continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the
+    proposition that all men are created equal.
+
+    "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that
+    nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
+    endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have
+    come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place
+    for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
+    It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
+
+    "But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate,
+    we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
+    struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add of
+    detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say
+    here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us,
+    the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
+    which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is
+    rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
+    before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased
+    devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure
+    of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not
+    have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new
+    birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the
+    people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
+
+Few are the opportunities in the history of the world when the time, the
+place, the occasion, and the words spoken, have combined so
+poignantly to move the hearts of men.
+
+One can imagine the vast concourse standing awestruck and uncovered
+before the solemn splendour of this noble dedication, every phrase of
+which will remain for generations a treasured and sacred memory in
+countless thousands of homes of the great continent in the West.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+28
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of an entirely new style of
+English prose. The ancient and universal restraints were swept away,
+the decorous stateliness of all the buried centuries was abandoned, and
+there arose a band of writers, to whom De Quincey and Ruskin were
+the leaders, who withdrew all veils from their emotions, threw away all
+the shackles of reserve, and poured their sobs and ecstasies upon us,
+in soaring periods of impassioned prose, glittering with decorative
+alliterations, and adorned with euphonious harmonies of vowel sounds.
+
+This flamboyant style seems to have synchronised with the general
+decline of reserve and ceremony in English life, and with the rise of the
+modern familiar intimacy that leaves no privacy even to our thoughts.
+Our grandfathers would have hesitated to have discussed at the
+dinner-table, even after the ladies had withdrawn, what is now set
+down for free debate at ladies' clubs, and canvassed in the correct
+columns of the _Guardian_.
+
+This new habit of mind and speech has affected our literature deeply
+and diversely. In the hands of the really great masters such as Carlyle,
+Froude, and Ruskin, the intimate revelations of the throbbings of their
+hearts, and the direct and untrammelled appeal of their inmost souls
+crying in the market-place, take forcible possession of our affections,
+and bring them into closer touch with each one of us than was ever
+possible with the older restrained writers.
+
+But with lesser men the modern decay of restraint and the licence of
+intimacy and of the emotions have led to widespread vulgarity, and a
+contemptible deluge of hyperbole, and superlative, and redundancy;
+and although the disappearance of reserve in modern writing may tend
+to reduce all but the production of the great to a depressing state of
+vulgarity, it nevertheless, in the master's hand, has unlocked for us the
+doors of an Aladdin's palace! But even if the restraint of the ancient
+writers has disappeared from the prose of our own times, all great
+writing of necessity must now and always possess the quality of
+simplicity; and even Ruskin, who saw the world of nature about him
+with the eyes of a visionary, and wrote of what he saw as one so
+inspired as to be already half in Paradise, yet clothed his glorious
+outpourings in a raiment of perfect simplicity.
+
+    "This, I believe," he wrote, "is the ordinance of the firmament;
+    and it seems to me that in the midst of the material nearness of
+    these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate
+    Presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. 'The earth shook,
+    the heavens also dropped, at the presence of God,' 'He doth set
+    His bow in the clouds,' and thus renews, in the sound of every
+    drooping swathe of rain, His promise of everlasting love. 'In them
+    hath He set a _tabernacle_ for the sun,' whose burning ball,
+    which, without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable
+    and scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that
+    firmament surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by
+    mediatorial ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden
+    pavement is spread for his chariot wheels at morning; by the
+    firmament of clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill
+    with light at noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is
+    closed at evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of
+    the firmament his implacable light is divided and its separated
+    fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of
+    distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains
+    burn as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this
+    tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows
+    of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of His
+    own majesty to men, upon the _throne_ of the firmament.
+
+    "As the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity,
+    we cannot behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the
+    Preserver of men those heavens are indeed His dwelling-place.
+    'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne; nor by
+    earth, for it is His footstool.'
+
+    "And all those passings to and fro of fruitful showers and
+    grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built
+    about the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening
+    thunders, and glories of coloured robe and cloven ray, are but to
+    deepen in our hearts the acceptance and distinctness and dearness
+    of the simple words, 'Our Father, Which art in heaven!'"
+
+The description of the first approach to Venice before the days of
+railways will always be cherished by those who admire Ruskin's work as
+one of his most characteristic and memorable utterances:--
+
+    "In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
+    distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that
+    toil was rewarded partly by the power of that deliberate survey of
+    the countries through which the journey lay, and partly by the
+    happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last
+    hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village,
+    where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows beside its
+    valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty
+    perspective of the causeway, see, for the first time, the towers
+    of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of peaceful
+    and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the
+    railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
+    equivalent--in those days, I say, when there was something more to
+    be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
+    successive halting place than a new arrangement of glass roofing
+    and iron girder--there were few moments of which the recollection
+    was more fondly cherished by the traveller than that which, as I
+    endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, brought
+    him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into the open
+    lagoon from the canal of Mestre.
+
+    "Not but that the aspect of the city itself was generally the
+    source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this
+    direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of
+    the other great towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly
+    disguised by distance, and more than atoned for by the strange
+    rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it seemed, of
+    the deep sea; for it was impossible that the mind or the eye could
+    at once comprehend the shallowness of the vast sheet of water
+    which stretched away in leagues of rippling lustre to the north
+    and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the
+    east. The salt breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of
+    black weed separating and disappearing gradually in knots of
+    heaving shoal under the advance of the steady tide, all proclaimed
+    it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested so
+    calmly; not such blue, soft, lake-like ocean as bathes the
+    Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble rocks of
+    Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of northern waves, yet
+    subdued into a strange spacious rest, and changed from its angry
+    pallor into a field of burnished gold as the sun declined behind
+    the belfry tower of the lonely island church, fitly named 'St
+    George of the Sea-weed.'
+
+    "As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the
+    traveller had just left sank behind him into one long, low,
+    sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows;
+    but, at what seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Argua
+    rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright
+    mirage of the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill
+    extended themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning
+    with the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded
+    the whole horizon to the north--a wall of jagged blue, here and
+    there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
+    fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
+    breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its
+    snow into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind the
+    barred clouds of evening one after another, countless, the crown
+    of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pursuing them,
+    to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles of Murano, and
+    on the great city, where it magnified itself along the waves, as
+    the quick, silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer and nearer.
+
+    "And at last when its walls were reached, and the outmost of its
+    untrodden streets was entered, not through towered gate or guarded
+    rampart, but as a deep inlet between two rocks of coral in the
+    Indian Sea; when first upon the traveller's sight opened the long
+    ranges of columned palaces--each with its black boat moored at the
+    portal, each with its image cast down beneath its feet upon that
+    green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich
+    tessellation when first, at the extremity of the bright vista, the
+    shadowy Rialto threw its colossal curve slowly forth from behind
+    the palace of the Camerlemghi, that strange curve, so delicate, so
+    adamantine, strong as a mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just
+    bent; when first, before its moonlike circumference was all risen,
+    the gondolier's cry, 'Ah! Stali!" struck sharp upon the ear, and
+    the prow turned aside under the mighty cornices that half met over
+    the narrow canal, where the plash of the water followed close and
+    loud, ringing along the marble by the boat's side; and when at
+    last the boat darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across
+    which the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine
+    veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation, it was
+    no marvel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the
+    visionary charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange as to
+    forget the darker truths of its history and its being, "Well
+    might it seem that such a city had owed her existence rather to
+    the rod of the enchanter, than the fear of the fugitive; that the
+    waters which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her
+    state, rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all
+    which in Nature was wild or merciless--Time and Decay, as well as
+    the waves and tempests--had been won to adorn her instead of to
+    destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty
+    which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the
+    hour-glass as well as of the sea."
+
+It is now many years since I first saw Venice rising from the sea on a
+September morning as I sailed towards it across the Adriatic from
+Trieste; and as we glided closer and closer its loveliness was slowly and
+exquisitely unveiled under the slanting beams of the early sun.
+
+In all my wanderings over two hemispheres I remember no vision so
+enchanting and unsurpassable! May you live to see it, Antony, before
+the vulgarities of modern life have totally defaced its beauty.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+29
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Born in Devon at the same time--within a year--as Ruskin, James
+Anthony Froude wrote prose that displays the same sanguine and
+poetical characteristics. His historical writings have, I believe, been
+somewhat discredited of late years owing to the permission he is
+alleged to have given himself to warp his account of events in order to
+buttress some prejudice or contention of his own.
+
+But if we set him aside as an accurate authority, we can at once restore
+him to our regard as a lord of visionary language:--
+
+    "Beautiful is old age, beautiful as the slow-dropping, mellow
+    autumn of a rich, glorious summer. In the old man Nature has
+    fulfilled her work; she leads him with her blessings; she fills
+    him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
+    children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to
+    the grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we
+    should not call it beautiful. It is beautiful, but not the most
+    beautiful.
+
+    "There is another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with
+    bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the cross is the
+    symbol; a battle which no peace follows, this side of the grave;
+    which the grave gapes to finish before the victory is won;
+    and--strange that it should be so--this is the highest life of
+    man.
+
+    "Look back along the great names of history; there is none whose
+    life has been other than this. They to whom it has been given to
+    do the really highest work in this earth, whoever they are, Jew or
+    Gentile, Pagan or Christian, warriors, legislators, philosophers,
+    priests, poets, kings, slaves--one and all, their fate has been
+    the same--the same bitter cup has been given them to drink."
+
+Another passage of deep and melancholy beauty cannot be omitted
+from this volume. It records in language of haunting loveliness the
+passing away of feudalism and chivalry and of a thousand years of the
+pageantry of faith:--
+
+    "The great trading companies were not instituted for selfish
+    purposes, but to ensure the consumer of manufactured articles that
+    what he purchased was properly made and of a reasonable price.
+    They determined prices, fixed wages, and arranged the rules of
+    apprenticeship. But in time the companies lost their healthy
+    vitality, and, with other relics of feudalism, were in the reign
+    of Elizabeth hastening away. There were no longer tradesmen to be
+    found in sufficient number who were possessed of the necessary
+    probity; and it is impossible not to connect such a phenomenon
+    with the deep melancholy which, in those days, settled down on
+    Elizabeth herself.
+
+    "For indeed a change was coming upon the world, the meaning and
+    direction of which even is still hidden from us--a change from era
+    to era. The paths trodden by the footsteps of ages were broken up;
+    old things were passing away, and the faith and life of ten
+    centuries were dissolving like a dream. Chivalry was dying; the
+    abbey and the castle were soon together to crumble into ruins; and
+    all the forms, desires, beliefs, convictions of the old world were
+    passing away, never to return. A new continent had risen up beyond
+    the western sea. The floor of heaven, inlaid with stars, had sunk
+    back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and the firm
+    earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, was seen to be but a
+    small atom in the awful vastness of the Universe.
+
+    "In the fabric of habit which they had so laboriously built for
+    themselves, mankind was to remain no longer. And now it is all
+    gone--like an unsubstantial pageant, faded; and between us and the
+    old English there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the
+    historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us,
+    and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among
+    the aisles of the cathedrals, only as we gaze upon their silent
+    figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float
+    before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps
+    in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediaeval
+    age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."
+
+The sound of church bells, being entirely the creation of man, forms
+perhaps a more touching link with the past for us than the eternal
+sounds of nature. Yet the everlasting wash of the waves of the sea
+forms a bond between us and the unplumbed depths of time, as they
+
+  "Begin and cease, and then again begin
+  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring,
+  The eternal note of sadness in.
+  Sophocles long ago
+  Heard it on the AEgean, and it brought
+  Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
+  Of human misery."
+
+So wrote Matthew Arnold. Then there is the sound of wind in the trees,
+and the voice of falling waters and rippling streams which must have
+fallen upon the ears of our remotest fore-runners as they do upon our
+own. These eternal sounds about us take no note of our brief coming
+and going, and will be the same when you and I, Antony, and all the
+millions that come after us in the world have returned to dust.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+30
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Though I do not myself rank Matthew Arnold among the great prose
+writers of England, yet, like all true poets--and he indeed was one of
+them,--he wrote excellent English prose.
+
+It is true that he turned to poetry to express his finest emotions and
+thoughts, and he himself alludes to his prose writings thus: "I am a
+mere solitary wanderer in search of the light, and I talk an artless,
+unstudied, everyday familiar language. But, after all, this is the
+language of the mass of the world."
+
+The chief note of all his teaching was urbanity. "The pursuit of
+perfection," he said, "is the pursuit of sweetness and light." "Culture
+hates hatred: culture has one great passion--the passion for sweetness
+and light."
+
+This teaching, no doubt, leads to fields of pleasantness and charm,
+and not at all to the high places of self-sacrifice, or the austere
+peaks of martyrdom. Burning indignation against intolerable things,
+fierce denunciation of the cruelties and abominations of the world
+find no encouragement or sympathy from this serene, detached, and
+therefore somewhat ineffectual, teaching.
+
+Sweetness and light would never have interfered with the slave trade,
+or fiercely fought beside Plimsoll for the load-line on the sides of
+ships.
+
+We did not fight the Germans under the doctrine of sweetness and
+light.
+
+It was a beautiful and edifying adornment for the drawing-room in
+times of Victorian self-satisfied peace, but was a tinsel armour for the
+battle of life, and entirely futile as a sword for combating wrong.
+
+I am not sure that Matthew Arnold would not have called those who
+wrathfully slash about them at abominable evils, Philistines.
+
+After all, the great men of action and the great writers of the world
+have been capable of harbouring great enthusiasms and deep
+indignations in their hearts; and these emotions do not emerge from a
+"passion for sweetness and light."
+
+A better doctrine, Antony, is, I think, to try to push things along
+cheerfully but strenuously in the right direction wherever and whenever
+you can.
+
+As a writer I think Matthew Arnold's best passage is to be found in the
+Preface to his _Essays in Criticism_:--
+
+    "Oxford. Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by
+    the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!
+
+    "There are our young barbarians, all at play!
+
+    "And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens
+    to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last
+    enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her
+    ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of
+    us, to the ideal, to perfection,--to beauty, in a word, which is
+    only truth seen from another side?--nearer perhaps than all the
+    science of Tuebingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so
+    romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to
+    sides and heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of
+    lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and
+    impossible loyalties!... Apparitions of a day, what is our puny
+    warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which
+    this Queen of Romance has been waging against them for centuries,
+    and will wage after we are gone?"
+
+As a man and a companion,[1] if you expected nothing but delightful
+humour, brilliant discourse, and urbane outlook upon everything, few
+could rival his personal charm; but he would never really join you in a
+last ditch to defend the right, or actually charge with you against the
+wrong, although in his poem "The Last Word," while not participating
+himself in such strenuous doings, he seems to yield a reluctant
+admiration to him who does so charge, and who leaves his "body by the
+wall."
+
+Much has happened since Matthew Arnold poured his scorn upon the
+unregenerate Philistines; but let us remember, Antony, that thousands
+and thousands of these contemned neglecters of sweetness and light
+stood unflinchingly and died upon the plains of France that our country
+and its freedom should survive.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+[Footnote 1: See my _Memories_, pp. 46-52 and 55.]
+
+
+
+31
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Like the author of the _Peninsular War_, Sir William Butler was great
+both as a soldier and as a writer. His autobiography sparkles with
+humour, irony, and felicitous diction; but it was in his _Life of
+Gordon of Khartoum_ that he rose to his full stature as a contributor
+to the glory of English prose.
+
+The spell of Gordon seems to have, as it were, transfigured all who
+approached him, and raised them out of themselves. One man alone, of
+all those whose lives touched his, has shown that his own pinched and
+narrow mediocrity was proof against the radiance of Gordon's spirit,
+and has feebly attempted to belittle the soldier saint for his own
+justification. But he has failed even to project a spot upon the sun of
+Gordon's fame, and he is already forgotten, while the great soldier's
+name will endure in the hearts of his countrymen till England and its
+people fail.
+
+If Sir William Butler's final noble periods, which I here reproduce, do
+not deeply move him who reads them, then must that reader have a
+heart of stone:--
+
+    "Thus fell in dark hour of defeat a man as unselfish as Sidney, of
+    courage dauntless as Wolfe, of honour stainless as Outram, of
+    sympathy wide-reaching as Drummond, of honesty straightforward as
+    Napier, of faith as steadfast as More. Doubtful indeed is it if
+    anywhere in the past we shall find figure of knight or soldier to
+    equal him, for sometimes it is the sword of death that gives to
+    life its real knighthood, and too often the soldier's end is
+    unworthy of his knightly life; but with Gordon the harmony of life
+    and death was complete, and the closing scenes seem to move to
+    their fulfilment in solemn hush, as though an unseen power watched
+    over the sequence of their sorrow.
+
+    "Not by the blind hazard of chance was this great tragedy
+    consummated; not by the discord of men or from the vague
+    opposition of physical obstacle, by fault of route or length of
+    delay, was help denied to him. The picture of a wonderful life had
+    to be made perfect by heroic death. The moral had to be cut deep,
+    and written red, and hung high, so that its lesson could be seen
+    by all men above strife and doubt and discord. Nay, the very
+    setting of the final scenes has to be wrought out in such contrast
+    of colour that the dullest eye shall be able to read the meaning
+    of it all. For many a year back this soldier's life has been a
+    protest against our most cherished teaching. Faith is weakness,
+    we have said. He will show us it is strength. Reward is the right
+    of service. Publicity is true fame. Let us go into action with a
+    newspaper correspondent riding at our elbow, or sitting in the
+    cabin of the ship, has been our practice. He has told us that the
+    race should be for honour, not for 'honours,' that we should 'give
+    away our medal,' and that courage and humility, mercy and
+    strength, should march hand in hand together. For many a year we
+    have had no room for him in our councils. Our armies knew him not;
+    and it was only in semi-savage lands and in the service of remote
+    empires he could find scope for his genius. Now our councils will
+    be shamed in his service, and our armies will find no footing in
+    our efforts to reach him. We have said that the Providence of God
+    was only a calculation of chances; now for eleven months the
+    amazing spectacle will be presented to the world of this solitary
+    soldier standing at bay, within thirty days' travel of the centre
+    of Empire, while the most powerful kingdom on the earth--the
+    nation whose wealth is as the sands of the sea, whose boast is
+    that the sun never sets upon its dominions--is unable to reach
+    him--saving _he_ does not want--but is unable to reach him even
+    with one message of regret for past forgetfulness.
+
+    "No; there is something more in all this than mistake of
+    Executive, or strife of party, or error of Cabinet, or fault of
+    men can explain. The purpose of this life that has been, the
+    lesson of this death that must be, is vaster and deeper than these
+    things. The decrees of God are as fixed to-day as they were two
+    thousand years ago, but they can be worked to their conclusion by
+    the weakness of men as well as by the strength of angels.
+
+    "There is a grey frontlet of rock far away in Strathspey--once the
+    Gordons' home--whose name in bygone times gave a rallying-call to
+    a kindred clan. The scattered firs and wind-swept heather on the
+    lone summit of Craig Ellachie once whispered in Highland
+    clansmen's ear the warcry, 'Stand fast! Craig Ellachie.' Many a
+    year has gone by since kith of Charles Gordon last heard from
+    Highland hilltop the signal of battle, but never in Celtic hero's
+    long record of honour has such answer been sent back to Highland
+    or to Lowland as when this great heart stopped its beating, and
+    lay 'steadfast unto death' in the dawn at Khartoum. The winds that
+    moan through the pine trees on Craig Ellachie have far-off
+    meanings in their voices. Perhaps on that dark January night there
+    came a breath from heaven to whisper to the old Highland rock, 'He
+    stood fast! Craig Ellachie.'
+
+    "The dust of Gordon is not laid in English earth, nor does even
+    the ocean, which has been named Britannia's realm, hold in 'its
+    vast and wandering grave' the bones of her latest hero. Somewhere,
+    far out in the immense desert whose sands so often gave him rest
+    in life, or by the shores of that river which was the scene of so
+    much of his labour, his ashes now add their wind-swept atoms to
+    the mighty waste of the Soudan. But if England, still true to the
+    long line of her martyrs to duty, keep his memory precious in her
+    heart--making of him no false idol or brazen image of glory, but
+    holding him as he was, the mirror and measure of true
+    knighthood--then better than in effigy or epitaph will his life be
+    written, and his nameless tomb become a citadel to his nation."
+
+The statue of Gordon stands in noble reverie in Trafalgar Square, at the
+centre of the Empire for whose honour he died.
+
+In St. Paul's Cathedral he lies in effigy, and engraven upon the
+cenotaph can be seen the most splendid epitaph in the world.
+
+His true greatness has been recorded by Sir William Butler in
+resounding and glorious English; and his last great act of stainless
+nobility has received a deathless tribute.
+
+Your loving old,
+G.P.
+
+
+
+32
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have now come down, at last, to a great writer of English prose who is
+still with us.
+
+Lord Morley at the present day is, I think, universally recognised as the
+greatest living man of letters in the British Empire; he has crowned a
+long record of distinguished literary achievement with his _Life of
+Gladstone_, which has taken its place among the noblest biographies of
+the world, where it is destined to remain into the far future acclaimed
+as a masterpiece. In his description of the veteran statesman launching
+in the House of Commons his great project of Home Rule for Ireland, he
+has surprised himself out of his own reserve, and painted the scene for
+succeeding generations in colours that can never die:--
+
+    "No such scene has ever been beheld in the House of Commons.
+    Members came down at break of day to secure their places; before
+    noon every seat was marked, and crowded benches were even arrayed
+    on the floor of the House from the Mace to the Bar. Princes,
+    ambassadors, great peers, high prelates, thronged the lobbies. The
+    fame of the orator, the boldness of his exploit, curiosity as to
+    the plan, poignant anxiety as to the party result, wonder whether
+    a wizard had at last actually arisen with a spell for casting out
+    the baleful spirits that had for so many ages made Ireland our
+    torment and our dishonour--all these things brought together such
+    an assemblage as no minister before had ever addressed within
+    those world-renowned walls.
+
+    "The Parliament was new. Many of its members had fought a hard
+    battle for their seats, and trusted they were safe in the haven
+    for half a dozen good years to come. Those who were moved by
+    professional ambition, those whose object was social advancement,
+    those who thought only of upright public service, the keen party
+    of men, the men who aspire to office, the men with a past and the
+    men who looked for a future, all alike found themselves adrift on
+    dark and troubled waters. The secrets of the Bill had been well
+    kept. To-day the disquieted host were first to learn what was the
+    great project to which they would have to say that Aye or No on
+    which for them and for the State so much would hang.
+
+    "Of the chief comrades or rivals of the minister's own generation,
+    the strong administrators, the eager and accomplished debaters,
+    the sagacious leaders, the only survivor now comparable to him, in
+    eloquence or in influence, was Mr. Bright. That illustrious man
+    seldom came into the House in those distracted days; and on this
+    memorable occasion his stern and noble head was to be seen in dim
+    obscurity.
+
+    "Various as were the emotions in other regions of the House, in
+    one quarter rejoicing was unmixed. There, at least, was no doubt
+    and no misgiving. There, pallid and tranquil, sat the Irish
+    leader, whose hard insight, whose patience, energy, and spirit of
+    command, had achieved this astounding result, and done that which
+    he had vowed to his countrymen that he would assuredly be able to
+    do. On the benches round him genial excitement rose almost to
+    tumult. Well it might. For the first time since the Union the
+    Irish case was at last to be pressed in all its force and
+    strength, in every aspect of policy and of conscience by the most
+    powerful Englishman then alive.
+
+    "More striking than the audience was the man; more striking than
+    the multitude of eager onlookers from the shore was the rescuer,
+    with deliberate valour facing the floods ready to wash him down;
+    the veteran Ulysses, who, after more than half a century of
+    combat, service, toil, thought it not too late to try a further
+    'work of noble note,' In the hands of such a master of the
+    instrument the theme might easily have lent itself to one of those
+    displays of exalted passion which the House had marvelled at in
+    more than one of Mr. Gladstone's speeches on the Turkish question,
+    or heard with religious reverence in his speech on the Affirmation
+    Bill in 1883.
+
+    "What the occasion now required was that passion should burn low,
+    and reasoned persuasion hold up the guiding lamp. An elaborate
+    scheme was to be unfolded, an unfamiliar policy to be explained
+    and vindicated. Of that best kind of eloquence which dispenses
+    with declamation this was a fine and sustained example. There was
+    a deep, rapid, steady, onflowing volume of arguments, exposition,
+    exhortation. Every hard or bitter stroke was avoided. Now and
+    again a fervid note thrilled the ear and lifted all hearts. But
+    political oratory is action, not words--action, character, will,
+    conviction, purpose, personality. As this eager muster of men
+    underwent the enchantment of periods exquisite in their balance
+    and modulation, the compulsion of his flashing glance and animated
+    gesture, what stirred and commanded them was the recollection of
+    national service, the thought of the speaker's mastering purpose,
+    his unflagging resolution and strenuous will, his strength of thew
+    and sinew well tried in long years of resounding war, his
+    unquenched conviction that the just cause can never fail. Few are
+    the heroic moments in our parliamentary politics, but this was
+    one."
+
+I will not trench upon politics in these letters; but I may hazard the
+belief that could those who rejected this noble effort, by the greatest
+statesman of the age, to assuage the everlasting Irish conflict, have
+looked into the future, few of them but would have supported it with
+relief and thanksgiving.
+
+It is generally perhaps a blessing that the curtain that covers the future
+is impenetrable; but in this case, had it been lifted for us to gaze upon
+the appalling future, Gladstone's last effort for the peace of his country
+would surely not have been permitted to miscarry.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+33
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+Two other living writers I will now commend to you, and then I shall
+have done.
+
+The parents of Mr. Belloc, with a happy prevision, anticipated by some
+decades the _entente cordiale_, and their brilliant son felicitously
+manifests in his own person many of the admirable qualities of both
+races. In England he is reported to be forcefully French, and it may be
+surmised that when in France he is engagingly British. Fortunately for
+our literature, it is in the language of his mother that he has found his
+expression. Many are the beautiful utterances scattered through his
+charming works: two of the most picturesque deal with the greatness of
+France; the subject of one is the Ancient Monarchy, and of the other
+the Great Napoleon:--
+
+    "So perished the French Monarchy. Its dim origins stretched out
+    and lost themselves in Rome; it had already learnt to speak and
+    recognised its own nature when the vaults of the Thermae echoed
+    heavily to the slow footsteps of the Merovingian kings.
+
+    "Look up the vast valley of dead men crowned, and you may see the
+    gigantic figure of Charlemagne, his brows level and his long white
+    beard tangled like an undergrowth, having in his left hand the
+    globe, and in his right the hilt of an unconquerable sword. There
+    also are the short strong horsemen of the Robertian House, half
+    hidden by their leather shields, and their sons before them
+    growing in vestment and majesty and taking on the pomp of the
+    Middle Ages; Louis VII., all covered with iron; Philip, the
+    Conqueror; Louis IX., who alone is surrounded with light: they
+    stand in a widening, interminable procession, this great crowd of
+    kings; they loose their armour, they take their ermine on, they
+    are accompanied by their captains and their marshals; at last, in
+    their attitude and in their magnificence they sum up in themselves
+    the pride and the achievement of the French nation.
+
+    "But Time has dissipated what it could not tarnish, and the
+    process of a thousand years has turned these mighty figures into
+    unsubstantial things. You may see them in the grey end of
+    darkness, like a pageant, all standing still. You look again, but
+    with the growing light, and with the wind that rises before
+    morning, they have disappeared."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+    "There is a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain
+    sombre, mounted figure, unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that
+    passed away to Asia, to the east and to the north. They saw him
+    move along their snows, through the long mysterious twilights of
+    the northern autumn, in silence, with the head bent and the reins
+    in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching
+    towards an ancient solitude and repose. They say it was Napoleon.
+
+    "After him there trailed for days the shadows of the soldiery,
+    vague mists bearing faintly the forms of companies of men. It was
+    as though the cannon smoke at Waterloo, borne on the light west
+    wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years
+    of combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of
+    the year over the endless plains.
+
+    "But there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the
+    Guard, and the sound that Heine loved, the dance of the French
+    drums, was extinguished; there was no echo of their songs, for the
+    army was of ghosts and was defeated. They passed in the silence
+    which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they
+    sleep in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords."
+
+Time and circumstances have changed our ancient enemies into our
+honoured friends, and the race that fought against us at Waterloo has
+cemented its friendship towards us with its blood; and as we look back
+over the century that divides us from Waterloo we can now with Mr.
+Belloc salute the sombre figure of the defeated conqueror.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+34
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I will now quote to you one other master of splendid English.
+
+Not every temporal sovereign of these realms has deserved a throne
+among the kings of literature. James the First was a poet of some
+merit; Charles the First wrote and spoke with a fine distinction; Queen
+Victoria's letters to her subjects were models of dignified and kindly
+simplicity; but to King George the Fifth by the grace of God it has been
+reserved to give utterance to what I believe to be the most noble and
+uplifting address ever delivered by a king to his people.
+
+From the day of his accession King George has been confronted with
+trials and troubles enough to daunt the stoutest heart, and none of us
+can plumb the depth of anguish that must have been his through the
+awful years of the Great War. He has been tried and proved in the
+fierce fires of adversity, and has emerged ennobled by pain, and
+dowered by sorrow with a gift of expression that has placed him among
+the masters of the glory of English prose.
+
+On the 13th day of May 1922 he concluded a tour of the cemeteries in
+France at Terlinchthun, where there stands on the cliffs over-looking
+the Channel a monument to Napoleon and his Grand Army, and around
+it now lie the innumerable English dead.
+
+Earlier in his pilgrimage Marshal Foch and Lord Haig had in his presence
+clasped hands, and the King with a fine gesture had placed his own
+right hand upon their clasped ones and said, "Amis toujours!" We are
+told that, "going up to the Cross of Sacrifice, the King looked out over
+the closely marshalled graves to the sea, and back towards the woods
+and fields of the Canche Valley where Montreuil stands, and seemed
+reluctant to leave."
+
+At last he turned, and, standing before the great Cross of Sacrifice, he
+spoke from his heart words that those of us, Antony, who love our
+country and the glory of its language will cherish while we live:--
+
+    "For the past few days I have been on a solemn pilgrimage in
+    honour of a people who died for all free men.
+
+    "At the close of that pilgrimage, on which I followed ways already
+    marked by many footsteps of love and pride and grief, I should
+    like to send a message to all who have lost those dear to them in
+    the Great War, and in this the Queen joins me to-day, amidst these
+    surroundings so wonderfully typical of that single-hearted
+    assembly of nations and of races which form our Empire. For here,
+    in their last quarters, lie sons of every portion of that Empire,
+    across, as it were, the threshold of the Mother Island which they
+    guarded, that Freedom might be saved in the uttermost ends of the
+    earth.
+
+    "For this, a generation of our manhood offered itself without
+    question, and almost without the need of a summons. Those proofs
+    of virtue, which we honour here to-day, are to be found throughout
+    the world and its waters--since we can truly say that the whole
+    circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead.
+    Beyond the stately cemeteries of France, across Italy, through
+    Eastern Europe in well-nigh unbroken chain they stretch, passing
+    over the holy Mount of Olives itself to the furthest shores of the
+    Indian and Pacific Oceans--from Zeebrugge to Coronel, from Dunkirk
+    to the hidden wildernesses of East Africa.
+
+    "But in this fair land of France, which sustained the utmost fury
+    of the long strife, our brothers are numbered, alas! by hundreds
+    of thousands.
+
+    "They lie in the keeping of a tried and generous friend, a
+    resolute and chivalrous comrade-in-arms, who with ready and quick
+    sympathy has set aside for ever the soil in which they sleep, so
+    that we ourselves and our descendants may for all time reverently
+    tend and preserve their resting-places.
+
+    "And here, at Terlinchthun, the shadow of his monument falling
+    almost across their graves, the greatest of French soldiers--of
+    all soldiers--stands guard over them. And this is just, for side
+    by side with the descendants of his incomparable armies they
+    defended his land in defending their own.
+
+    "Never before in history have a people thus dedicated and
+    maintained individual memorials to their fallen, and, in the
+    course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether
+    there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the
+    years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to
+    the desolation of war. And I feel that, so long as we have faith
+    in God's purposes, we cannot but believe that the existence of
+    these visible memorials will eventually serve to draw all peoples
+    together in sanity and self-control, even as it has already set
+    the relations between our Empire and our Allies on the deep-rooted
+    bases of a common heroism and a common agony.
+
+    "Standing beneath this Cross of Sacrifice, facing the great Stone
+    of Remembrance, and compassed by these sternly simple headstones,
+    we remember, and must charge our children to remember, that as our
+    dead were equal in sacrifice, so are they equal in honour, for the
+    greatest and the least of them have proved that sacrifice and
+    honour are no vain things, but truths by which the world lives.
+
+    "Many of the cemeteries I have visited in the remoter and still
+    desolate districts of this sorely stricken land, where it has not
+    yet been possible to replace the wooden crosses by headstones,
+    have been made into beautiful gardens which are lovingly cared for
+    by comrades of the war.
+
+    "I rejoice I was fortunate enough to see these in the spring, when
+    the returning pulse of the year tells of unbroken life that goes
+    forward in the face of apparent loss and wreckage; and I
+    fervently pray that, both as nations and individuals, we may so
+    order our lives after the ideals for which our brethren died that
+    we may be able to meet their gallant souls once more, humbly but
+    unashamed."
+
+Hard indeed must it be for any Englishman whose heart is quick within
+his bosom not to feel it beat faster with thanksgiving and pride as he
+reads the flawless periods of this glorious speech.
+
+As the final word of consolation, sanctification, and benediction, closing
+the awful agony of the greatest of all wars, preserve, Antony, this
+magnificent threnody in your memory imperishable.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+35
+
+
+MY DEAR ANTONY,
+
+I have come now to the end of my citations for the present. My object,
+Antony, has been to rouse in your heart, if I can, a love, admiration,
+and reverence for the wonders to be found in the treasure-house of
+English prose literature.
+
+I have only opened a little door here and there, so that you can peep in
+and see the visions of splendour within.
+
+Some day perhaps, when you have explored for yourself, you may feel
+surprised that in these letters I have quoted nothing from Sir John Eliot,
+or Addison, or Scott, or Thackeray, or Charles Lamb, or De Quincey, or
+Hazlitt, or other kings and princes of style innumerable. Many, many
+writers whom I have not quoted in these letters have adorned
+everything they touched, but do not seem to me to reach the snow-line
+or rise into great and moving eloquence. Charles Lamb, for example,
+never descends from his equable and altogether pleasing level, far
+above the plain of the commonplace, but neither does he reach up to
+the lofty altitudes of the lonely peaks; and if I began to quote from him,
+I see no obstacle to my quoting his entire works! And of Addison,
+Johnson wrote, "His page is always luminous, but never blazes in
+unexpected splendour"; and he adds, "Whoever wishes to attain an
+English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious,
+must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison."
+
+In selecting such passages as I have in these letters I have necessarily
+followed my own taste, and taste--as I said when I first began writing
+to you--is illusive. I could do no more than cite that which makes my
+own heart beat faster from a compelling sense of its nobility and
+beauty.
+
+When I was young, Antony, I lived long in my father's house among his
+twelve thousand books, with his scholarly mind as my companion, and
+his exact memory as my guide; for more than a quarter of a century
+since those days I have lived in the more modest library of my own
+collecting, and have long learnt how much fine literature there is that I
+have never read, and now can never read. But, Antony, you may not
+find, in these crowded days, even so much time for reading, or so much
+repose for study as I have found, and therefore it is that I have offered
+you in these letters the preferences of my lifetime, even though it has
+been the lifetime of one who makes no claim to be a literary authority.
+
+As you look back at those from whom you have sprung, you will see
+that for five generations they have been men of letters--many
+distinguished, and one world-famous; and though I myself am but a
+puny link in the chain, yet I may perhaps afford you the opportunity
+of hitching your wagon by and by to the star that has for so long ruled
+the destinies of our house.
+
+Farewell, then, dear Antony; and if "the dear God who loveth us" listens
+to the benedictions of the old upon their children's children, may He
+guide and bless you to your life's end.
+
+Your loving old
+G.P.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Glory of English Prose, by Stephen Coleridge
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GLORY OF ENGLISH PROSE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 13785.txt or 13785.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/3/7/8/13785/
+
+Produced by Juliet, Spooty, Reda and the PG Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/old/13785.zip b/old/13785.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..692ffd6
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/13785.zip