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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lay Morals, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+(#10 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)
+
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+
+Title: Lay Morals
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: December, 1995  [EBook #373]
+[This file was first posted on November 25, 1995]
+[Most recently updated: August 18, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, LAY MORALS ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the Chatto and Windus 1911 edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+LAY MORALS AND OTHER PAPERS
+
+
+
+
+Contents:
+   Lay Morals
+      Chapter I
+      Chapter II
+      Chapter III
+      Chapter IV
+   Father Damien
+   The Pentland Rising
+      Chapter I--The Causes of the Revolt
+      Chapter II--The Beginning
+      Chapter III--The March of the Rebels
+      Chapter IV--Rullion Green
+      Chapter V--A Record of Blood
+   The Day After To-morrow
+   College Papers
+      Chapter I--Edinburgh Students in 1824
+      Chapter II--The Modern Student
+      Chapter III--Debating Societies
+   Criticisms
+      Chapter I--Lord Lytton's "Fables in Song"
+      Chapter II--Salvini's Macbeth
+      Chapter III--Bagster's "Pilgrim's Progress"
+   Sketches
+      The Satirist
+      Nuits Blanches
+      The Wreath of Immortelles
+      Nurses
+      A Character
+   The Great North Road
+      Chapter I--Nance at the "Green Dragon"
+      Chapter II--In which Mr. Archer is Installed
+      Chapter III--Jonathan Holdaway
+      Chapter IV--Mingling Threads
+      Chapter V--Life in the Castle
+      Chapter IV--The Bad Half-Crown
+      Chapter VII--The Bleaching-Green
+      Chapter VIII--The Mail Guard
+   The Young Chevalier
+      Prologue:  The Wine-Seller's Wife
+      Chapter I--The Prince
+   Heathercat
+      Chapter I--Traqairs of Montroymont
+      Chapter II--Francie
+      Chapter III--The Hill-End of Drumlowe
+
+
+
+
+LAY MORALS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+The problem of education is twofold:  first to know, and then to
+utter.  Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks
+more nobly and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers
+can impart only broken images of the truth which they perceive.
+Speech which goes from one to another between two natures, and,
+what is worse, between two experiences, is doubly relative.  The
+speaker buries his meaning; it is for the hearer to dig it up
+again; and all speech, written or spoken, is in a dead language
+until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.  Such, moreover, is
+the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details in our
+advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of
+education is to throw out some magnanimous hints.  No man was ever
+so poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or
+actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is
+a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no
+process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps
+varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of
+events and circumstances.
+
+A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and contempt
+for others, try earnestly to set forth as much as they can grasp of
+this inner law; but the vast majority, when they come to advise the
+young, must be content to retail certain doctrines which have been
+already retailed to them in their own youth.  Every generation has
+to educate another which it has brought upon the stage.  People who
+readily accept the responsibility of parentship, having very
+different matters in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when that
+responsibility falls due.  What are they to tell the child about
+life and conduct, subjects on which they have themselves so few and
+such confused opinions?  Indeed, I do not know; the least said,
+perhaps, the soonest mended; and yet the child keeps asking, and
+the parent must find some words to say in his own defence.  Where
+does he find them? and what are they when found?
+
+As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine
+cases out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat
+three bad things:  the terror of public opinion, and, flowing from
+that as a fountain, the desire of wealth and applause.  Besides
+these, or what might be deduced as corollaries from these, he will
+teach not much else of any effective value:  some dim notions of
+divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping, and how to walk through a
+quadrille.
+
+But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians.
+It may be want of penetration, but I have not yet been able to
+perceive it.  As an honest man, whatever we teach, and be it good
+or evil, it is not the doctrine of Christ.  What he taught (and in
+this he is like all other teachers worthy of the name) was not a
+code of rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of
+truth; not views, but a view.  What he showed us was an attitude of
+mind.  Towards the many considerations on which conduct is built,
+each man stands in a certain relation.  He takes life on a certain
+principle.  He has a compass in his spirit which points in a
+certain direction.  It is the attitude, the relation, the point of
+the compass, that is the whole body and gist of what he has to
+teach us; in this, the details are comprehended; out of this the
+specific precepts issue, and by this, and this only, can they be
+explained and applied.  And thus, to learn aright from any teacher,
+we must first of all, like a historical artist, think ourselves
+into sympathy with his position and, in the technical phrase,
+create his character.  A historian confronted with some ambiguous
+politician, or an actor charged with a part, have but one pre-
+occupation; they must search all round and upon every side, and
+grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify
+the most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an
+enigma, or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian
+sentiment and big words; but once that is found, all enters into a
+plan, a human nature appears, the politician or the stage-king is
+understood from point to point, from end to end.  This is a degree
+of trouble which will be gladly taken by a very humble artist; but
+not even the terror of eternal fire can teach a business man to
+bend his imagination to such athletic efforts.  Yet without this,
+all is vain; until we understand the whole, we shall understand
+none of the parts; and otherwise we have no more than broken images
+and scattered words; the meaning remains buried; and the language
+in which our prophet speaks to us is a dead language in our ears.
+
+Take a few of Christ's sayings and compare them with our current
+doctrines.
+
+'Ye cannot,' he says, 'serve God and Mammon.'  Cannot?  And our
+whole system is to teach us how we can!
+
+'The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the
+children of light.'  Are they?  I had been led to understand the
+reverse:  that the Christian merchant, for example, prospered
+exceedingly in his affairs; that honesty was the best policy; that
+an author of repute had written a conclusive treatise 'How to make
+the best of both worlds.'  Of both worlds indeed!  Which am I to
+believe then--Christ or the author of repute?
+
+'Take no thought for the morrow.'  Ask the Successful Merchant;
+interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that this is
+not only a silly but an immoral position.  All we believe, all we
+hope, all we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands
+condemned in this one sentence, or, if you take the other view,
+condemns the sentence as unwise and inhumane.  We are not then of
+the 'same mind that was in Christ.'  We disagree with Christ.
+Either Christ meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong.
+Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from the New Testament,
+and finding a strange echo of another style which the reader may
+recognise:  'Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from
+any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of
+that meeting-house upon another.'
+
+It may be objected that these are what are called 'hard sayings';
+and that a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian
+although it leave some of these sayings upon one side.  But this is
+a very gross delusion.  Although truth is difficult to state, it is
+both easy and agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet
+it ere the phrase be done.  The universe, in relation to what any
+man can say of it, is plain, patent and staringly comprehensible.
+In itself, it is a great and travailing ocean, unsounded,
+unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man; or, let us say, it is a
+monstrous and impassable mountain, one side of which, and a few
+near slopes and foothills, we can dimly study with these mortal
+eyes.  But what any man can say of it, even in his highest
+utterance, must have relation to this little and plain corner,
+which is no less visible to us than to him.  We are looking on the
+same map; it will go hard if we cannot follow the demonstration.
+The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear
+and shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly perceive
+the aspect and drift of his intention.  The longest argument is but
+a finger pointed; once we get our own finger rightly parallel, and
+we see what the man meant, whether it be a new star or an old
+street-lamp.  And briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is
+because we are thinking of something else.
+
+But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our
+prophet, and to think of different things in the same order.  To be
+of the same mind with another is to see all things in the same
+perspective; it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near
+at hand and not much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest
+flights, to see the force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in
+the centre of his vision that whatever he may express, your eyes
+will light at once on the original, that whatever he may see to
+declare, your mind will at once accept.  You do not belong to the
+school of any philosopher, because you agree with him that theft
+is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun is overhead at
+noon.  It is by the hard sayings that discipleship is tested.  We
+are all agreed about the middling and indifferent parts of
+knowledge and morality; even the most soaring spirits too often
+take them tamely upon trust.  But the man, the philosopher or the
+moralist, does not stand upon these chance adhesions; and the
+purpose of any system looks towards those extreme points where it
+steps valiantly beyond tradition and returns with some covert hint
+of things outside.  Then only can you be certain that the words are
+not words of course, nor mere echoes of the past; then only are you
+sure that if he be indicating anything at all, it is a star and not
+a street-lamp; then only do you touch the heart of the mystery,
+since it was for these that the author wrote his book.
+
+Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ
+finds a word that transcends all common-place morality; every now
+and then he quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and
+throws out a pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by
+some bold poetry of thought that men can be strung up above the
+level of everyday conceptions to take a broader look upon
+experience or accept some higher principle of conduct.  To a man
+who is of the same mind that was in Christ, who stands at some
+centre not too far from his, and looks at the world and conduct
+from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing attitude--or,
+shortly, to a man who is of Christ's philosophy--every such saying
+should come home with a thrill of joy and corroboration; he should
+feel each one below his feet as another sure foundation in the flux
+of time and chance; each should be another proof that in the
+torrent of the years and generations, where doctrines and great
+armaments and empires are swept away and swallowed, he stands
+immovable, holding by the eternal stars.  But alas! at this
+juncture of the ages it is not so with us; on each and every such
+occasion our whole fellowship of Christians falls back in
+disapproving wonder and implicitly denies the saying.  Christians!
+the farce is impudently broad.  Let us stand up in the sight of
+heaven and confess.  The ethics that we hold are those of Benjamin
+Franklin.  HONESTY IS THE BEST POLICY, is perhaps a hard saying; it
+is certainly one by which a wise man of these days will not too
+curiously direct his steps; but I think it shows a glimmer of
+meaning to even our most dimmed intelligences; I think we perceive
+a principle behind it; I think, without hyperbole, we are of the
+same mind that was in Benjamin Franklin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+But, I may be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of
+morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and
+religion; and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his
+mind must follow after profit with some conscience and Christianity
+of method.  A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours
+his parents, nor kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears
+false witness; for these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast
+field of duty.
+
+Alas! what is a precept?  It is at best an illustration; it is case
+law at the best which can be learned by precept.  The letter is not
+only dead, but killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot be
+uttered, alone is true and helpful.  This is trite to sickness; but
+familiarity has a cunning disenchantment; in a day or two she can
+steal all beauty from the mountain tops; and the most startling
+words begin to fall dead upon the ear after several repetitions.
+If you see a thing too often, you no longer see it; if you hear a
+thing too often, you no longer hear it.  Our attention requires to
+be surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or to gain a
+thoughtful hearing from the ruck of mankind, are feats of about an
+equal difficulty and must be tried by not dissimilar means.  The
+whole Bible has thus lost its message for the common run of
+hearers; it has become mere words of course; and the parson may
+bawl himself scarlet and beat the pulpit like a thing possessed,
+but his hearers will continue to nod; they are strangely at peace,
+they know all he has to say; ring the old bell as you choose, it is
+still the old bell and it cannot startle their composure.  And so
+with this byword about the letter and the spirit.  It is quite
+true, no doubt; but it has no meaning in the world to any man of
+us.  Alas! it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less:
+that while the spirit is true, the letter is eternally false.
+
+The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon,
+perfect, clear, and stable like the earth.  But let a man set
+himself to mark out the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he
+never so nimble and never so exact, what with the multiplicity of
+the leaves and the progression of the shadow as it flees before the
+travelling sun, long ere he has made the circuit the whole figure
+will have changed.  Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but
+to a great and complicated forest; circumstance is more swiftly
+changing than a shadow, language much more inexact than the tools
+of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are renewed; the
+very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole world of
+leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time.  Look
+now for your shadows.  O man of formulae, is this a place for you?
+Have you fitted the spirit to a single case?  Alas, in the cycle of
+the ages when shall such another be proposed for the judgment of
+man?  Now when the sun shines and the winds blow, the wood is
+filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously
+tossed and changing; and at every gust the whole carpet leaps and
+becomes new.  Can you or your heart say more?
+
+Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life;
+and although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had
+every step of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory,
+tell me what definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to
+manhood, or from both to age?  The settled tenor which first
+strikes the eye is but the shadow of a delusion.  This is gone;
+that never truly was; and you yourself are altered beyond
+recognition.  Times and men and circumstances change about your
+changing character, with a speed of which no earthly hurricane
+affords an image.  What was the best yesterday, is it still the
+best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow?  Will your own Past
+truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future?  And if
+this be questionable, with what humble, with what hopeless eyes,
+should we not watch other men driving beside us on their unknown
+careers, seeing with unlike eyes, impelled by different gales,
+doing and suffering in another sphere of things?
+
+And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene,
+do you offer me these two score words? these five bald
+prohibitions?  For the moral precepts are no more than five; the
+first four deal rather with matters of observance than of conduct;
+the tenth, THOU SHALT NOT COVET, stands upon another basis, and
+shall be spoken of ere long.  The Jews, to whom they were first
+given, in the course of years began to find these precepts
+insufficient; and made an addition of no less than six hundred and
+fifty others!  They hoped to make a pocket-book of reference on
+morals, which should stand to life in some such relation, say, as
+Hoyle stands in to the scientific game of whist.  The comparison is
+just, and condemns the design; for those who play by rule will
+never be more than tolerable players; and you and I would like to
+play our game in life to the noblest and the most divine advantage.
+Yet if the Jews took a petty and huckstering view of conduct, what
+view do we take ourselves, who callously leave youth to go forth
+into the enchanted forest, full of spells and dire chimeras, with
+no guidance more complete than is afforded by these five precepts?
+
+HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER.  Yes, but does that mean to obey?
+and if so, how long and how far?  THOU SHALL NOT KILL.  Yet the
+very intention and purport of the prohibition may be best fulfilled
+by killing.  THOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY.  But some of the
+ugliest adulteries are committed in the bed of marriage and under
+the sanction of religion and law.  THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE
+WITNESS.  How? by speech or by silence also? or even by a smile?
+THOU SHALT NOT STEAL.  Ah, that indeed!  But what is TO STEAL?
+
+To steal?  It is another word to be construed; and who is to be our
+guide?  The police will give us one construction, leaving the word
+only that least minimum of meaning without which society would fall
+in pieces; but surely we must take some higher sense than this;
+surely we hope more than a bare subsistence for mankind; surely we
+wish mankind to prosper and go on from strength to strength, and
+ourselves to live rightly in the eye of some more exacting
+potentate than a policeman.  The approval or the disapproval of the
+police must be eternally indifferent to a man who is both valorous
+and good.  There is extreme discomfort, but no shame, in the
+condemnation of the law.  The law represents that modicum of
+morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind; but what
+is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own more stringent
+judge?  I observe with pleasure that no brave man has ever given a
+rush for such considerations.  The Japanese have a nobler and more
+sentimental feeling for this social bond into which we all are born
+when we come into the world, and whose comforts and protection we
+all indifferently share throughout our lives:- but even to them, no
+more than to our Western saints and heroes, does the law of the
+state supersede the higher law of duty.  Without hesitation and
+without remorse, they transgress the stiffest enactments rather
+than abstain from doing right.  But the accidental superior duty
+being thus fulfilled, they at once return in allegiance to the
+common duty of all citizens; and hasten to denounce themselves; and
+value at an equal rate their just crime and their equally just
+submission to its punishment.
+
+The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active
+conscience or a thoughtful head.  But to show you how one or the
+other may trouble a man, and what a vast extent of frontier is left
+unridden by this invaluable eighth commandment, let me tell you a
+few pages out of a young man's life.
+
+He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous,
+flighty, as variable as youth itself, but always with some high
+motions and on the search for higher thoughts of life.  I should
+tell you at once that he thoroughly agrees with the eighth
+commandment.  But he got hold of some unsettling works, the New
+Testament among others, and this loosened his views of life and led
+him into many perplexities.  As he was the son of a man in a
+certain position, and well off, my friend had enjoyed from the
+first the advantages of education, nay, he had been kept alive
+through a sickly childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and
+change of air; for all of which he was indebted to his father's
+wealth.
+
+At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who
+followed the plough in summer-time to pay their college fees in
+winter; and this inequality struck him with some force.  He was at
+that age of a conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the
+aspects of life; and he spent much of his time scraping
+acquaintance with all classes of man- and woman-kind.  In this way
+he came upon many depressed ambitions, and many intelligences
+stunted for want of opportunity; and this also struck him.  He
+began to perceive that life was a handicap upon strange, wrong-
+sided principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair and equal
+race.  He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly
+favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and
+comfort closed against so many of his superiors and equals, and
+held unwearyingly open before so idle, so desultory, and so
+dissolute a being as himself.  There sat a youth beside him on the
+college benches, who had only one shirt to his back, and, at
+intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to have it
+washed.  It was my friend's principle to stay away as often as he
+dared; for I fear he was no friend to learning.  But there was
+something that came home to him sharply, in this fellow who had to
+give over study till his shirt was washed, and the scores of others
+who had never an opportunity at all.  IF ONE OF THESE COULD TAKE
+HIS PLACE, he thought; and the thought tore away a bandage from his
+eyes.  He was eaten by the shame of his discoveries, and despised
+himself as an unworthy favourite and a creature of the back-stairs
+of Fortune.  He could no longer see without confusion one of these
+brave young fellows battling up-hill against adversity.  Had he not
+filched that fellow's birthright?  At best was he not coldly
+profiting by the injustice of society, and greedily devouring
+stolen goods?  The money, indeed, belonged to his father, who had
+worked, and thought, and given up his liberty to earn it; but by
+what justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet,
+done nothing but help to squander it?  A more sturdy honesty,
+joined to a more even and impartial temperament, would have drawn
+from these considerations a new force of industry, that this
+equivocal position might be brought as swiftly as possible to an
+end, and some good services to mankind justify the appropriation of
+expense.  It was not so with my friend, who was only unsettled and
+discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting anger with which
+young men regard injustices in the first blush of youth; although
+in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in their existence, and
+knowingly profit by their complications.  Yet all this while he
+suffered many indignant pangs.  And once, when he put on his boots,
+like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was his
+best consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free
+himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his,
+and do battle equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.
+
+Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great
+expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his
+perplexities were thickest.  When he thought of all the other young
+men of singular promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who
+must remain at home to die, and with all their possibilities be
+lost to life and mankind; and how he, by one more unmerited favour,
+was chosen out from all these others to survive; he felt as if
+there were no life, no labour, no devotion of soul and body, that
+could repay and justify these partialities.  A religious lady, to
+whom he communicated these reflections, could see no force in them
+whatever.  'It was God's will,' said she.  But he knew it was by
+God's will that Joan of Arc was burnt at Rouen, which cleared
+neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon; and again, by God's will that
+Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, which excused neither the
+rancour of the priests nor the timidity of Pilate.  He knew,
+moreover, that although the possibility of this favour he was now
+enjoying issued from his circumstances, its acceptance was the act
+of his own will; and he had accepted it greedily, longing for rest
+and sunshine.  And hence this allegation of God's providence did
+little to relieve his scruples.  I promise you he had a very
+troubled mind.  And I would not laugh if I were you, though while
+he was thus making mountains out of what you think molehills, he
+were still (as perhaps he was) contentedly practising many other
+things that to you seem black as hell.  Every man is his own judge
+and mountain-guide through life.  There is an old story of a mote
+and a beam, apparently not true, but worthy perhaps of some
+consideration.  I should, if I were you, give some consideration to
+these scruples of his, and if I were he, I should do the like by
+yours; for it is not unlikely that there may be something under
+both.  In the meantime you must hear how my friend acted.  Like
+many invalids, he supposed that he would die.  Now, should he die,
+he saw no means of repaying this huge loan which, by the hands of
+his father, mankind had advanced him for his sickness.  In that
+case it would be lost money.  So he determined that the advance
+should be as small as possible; and, so long as he continued to
+doubt his recovery, lived in an upper room, and grudged himself all
+but necessaries.  But so soon as he began to perceive a change for
+the better, he felt justified in spending more freely, to speed and
+brighten his return to health, and trusted in the future to lend a
+help to mankind, as mankind, out of its treasury, had lent a help
+to him.
+
+I do not say but that my friend was a little too curious and
+partial in his view; nor thought too much of himself and too little
+of his parents; but I do say that here are some scruples which
+tormented my friend in his youth, and still, perhaps, at odd times
+give him a prick in the midst of his enjoyments, and which after
+all have some foundation in justice, and point, in their confused
+way, to some more honourable honesty within the reach of man.  And
+at least, is not this an unusual gloss upon the eighth commandment?
+And what sort of comfort, guidance, or illumination did that
+precept afford my friend throughout these contentions?  'Thou shalt
+not steal.'  With all my heart!  But AM I stealing?
+
+The truly quaint materialism of our view of life disables us from
+pursuing any transaction to an end.  You can make no one understand
+that his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point
+of fact it is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or
+an evil to the world.  We have a sort of blindness which prevents
+us from seeing anything but sovereigns.  If one man agrees to give
+another so many shillings for so many hours' work, and then
+wilfully gives him a certain proportion of the price in bad money
+and only the remainder in good, we can see with half an eye that
+this man is a thief.  But if the other spends a certain proportion
+of the hours in smoking a pipe of tobacco, and a certain other
+proportion in looking at the sky, or the clock, or trying to recall
+an air, or in meditation on his own past adventures, and only the
+remainder in downright work such as he is paid to do, is he,
+because the theft is one of time and not of money,--is he any the
+less a thief?  The one gave a bad shilling, the other an imperfect
+hour; but both broke the bargain, and each is a thief.  In
+piecework, which is what most of us do, the case is none the less
+plain for being even less material.  If you forge a bad knife, you
+have wasted some of mankind's iron, and then, with unrivalled
+cynicism, you pocket some of mankind's money for your trouble.  Is
+there any man so blind who cannot see that this is theft?  Again,
+if you carelessly cultivate a farm, you have been playing fast and
+loose with mankind's resources against hunger; there will be less
+bread in consequence, and for lack of that bread somebody will die
+next winter:  a grim consideration.  And you must not hope to
+shuffle out of blame because you got less money for your less
+quantity of bread; for although a theft be partly punished, it is
+none the less a theft for that.  You took the farm against
+competitors; there were others ready to shoulder the responsibility
+and be answerable for the tale of loaves; but it was you who took
+it.  By the act you came under a tacit bargain with mankind to
+cultivate that farm with your best endeavour; you were under no
+superintendence, you were on parole; and you have broke your
+bargain, and to all who look closely, and yourself among the rest
+if you have moral eyesight, you are a thief.  Or take the case of
+men of letters.  Every piece of work which is not as good as you
+can make it, which you have palmed off imperfect, meagrely thought,
+niggardly in execution, upon mankind who is your paymaster on
+parole and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue
+performance, should rise up against you in the court of your own
+heart and condemn you for a thief.  Have you a salary?  If you
+trifle with your health, and so render yourself less capable for
+duty, and still touch, and still greedily pocket the emolument--
+what are you but a thief?  Have you double accounts? do you by any
+time-honoured juggle, deceit, or ambiguous process, gain more from
+those who deal with you than it you were bargaining and dealing
+face to face in front of God?--What are you but a thief?  Lastly,
+if you fill an office, or produce an article, which, in your heart
+of hearts, you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind, and still
+draw your salary and go through the sham manoeuvres of this office,
+or still book your profits and keep on flooding the world with
+these injurious goods?--though you were old, and bald, and the
+first at church, and a baronet, what are you but a thief?  These
+may seem hard words and mere curiosities of the intellect, in an
+age when the spirit of honesty is so sparingly cultivated that all
+business is conducted upon lies and so-called customs of the trade,
+that not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or
+honourableness of his pursuit.  I would say less if I thought less.
+But looking to my own reason and the right of things, I can only
+avow that I am a thief myself, and that I passionately suspect my
+neighbours of the same guilt.
+
+Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest?  Do you find that
+in your Bible?  Easy!  It is easy to be an ass and follow the
+multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am
+well aware, is what you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest.  But
+it will not bear the stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.
+Even before the lowest of all tribunals,--before a court of law,
+whose business it is, not to keep men right, or within a thousand
+miles of right, but to withhold them from going so tragically wrong
+that they will pull down the whole jointed fabric of society by
+their misdeeds--even before a court of law, as we begin to see in
+these last days, our easy view of following at each other's tails,
+alike to good and evil, is beginning to be reproved and punished,
+and declared no honesty at all, but open theft and swindling; and
+simpletons who have gone on through life with a quiet conscience
+may learn suddenly, from the lips of a judge, that the custom of
+the trade may be a custom of the devil.  You thought it was easy to
+be honest.  Did you think it was easy to be just and kind and
+truthful?  Did you think the whole duty of aspiring man was as
+simple as a horn-pipe? and you could walk through life like a
+gentleman and a hero, with no more concern than it takes to go to
+church or to address a circular?  And yet all this time you had the
+eighth commandment! and, what makes it richer, you would not have
+broken it for the world!
+
+The truth is, that these commandments by themselves are of little
+use in private judgment.  If compression is what you want, you have
+their whole spirit compressed into the golden rule; and yet there
+expressed with more significance, since the law is there
+spiritually and not materially stated.  And in truth, four out of
+these ten commands, from the sixth to the ninth, are rather legal
+than ethical.  The police-court is their proper home.  A magistrate
+cannot tell whether you love your neighbour as yourself, but he can
+tell more or less whether you have murdered, or stolen, or
+committed adultery, or held up your hand and testified to that
+which was not; and these things, for rough practical tests, are as
+good as can be found.  And perhaps, therefore, the best
+condensation of the Jewish moral law is in the maxims of the
+priests, 'neminem laedere' and 'suum cuique tribuere.'  But all
+this granted, it becomes only the more plain that they are
+inadequate in the sphere of personal morality; that while they tell
+the magistrate roughly when to punish, they can never direct an
+anxious sinner what to do.
+
+Only Polonius, or the like solemn sort of ass, can offer us a
+succinct proverb by way of advice, and not burst out blushing in
+our faces.  We grant them one and all and for all that they are
+worth; it is something above and beyond that we desire.  Christ was
+in general a great enemy to such a way of teaching; we rarely find
+him meddling with any of these plump commands but it was to open
+them out, and lift his hearers from the letter to the spirit.  For
+morals are a personal affair; in the war of righteousness every man
+fights for his own hand; all the six hundred precepts of the Mishna
+cannot shake my private judgment; my magistracy of myself is an
+indefeasible charge, and my decisions absolute for the time and
+case.  The moralist is not a judge of appeal, but an advocate who
+pleads at my tribunal.  He has to show not the law, but that the
+law applies.  Can he convince me? then he gains the cause.  And
+thus you find Christ giving various counsels to varying people, and
+often jealously careful to avoid definite precept.  Is he asked,
+for example, to divide a heritage?  He refuses:  and the best
+advice that he will offer is but a paraphrase of that tenth
+commandment which figures so strangely among the rest.  TAKE HEED,
+AND BEWARE OF COVETOUSNESS.  If you complain that this is vague, I
+have failed to carry you along with me in my argument.  For no
+definite precept can be more than an illustration, though its truth
+were resplendent like the sun, and it was announced from heaven by
+the voice of God.  And life is so intricate and changing, that
+perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in the ages, shall
+we find that nice consent of circumstances to which alone it can
+apply.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to
+our experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment
+slumbers within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our
+surroundings to rekindle our astonishment.  No length of habit can
+blunt our first surprise.  Of the world I have but little to say in
+this connection; a few strokes shall suffice.  We inhabit a dead
+ember swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it
+swims, and lighted up from several million miles away by a more
+horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived by the theological
+imagination.  Yet the dead ember is a green, commodious dwelling-
+place; and the reverberation of this hell-fire ripens flower and
+fruit and mildly warms us on summer eves upon the lawn.  Far off on
+all hands other dead embers, other flaming suns, wheel and race in
+the apparent void; the nearest is out of call, the farthest so far
+that the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the distance.
+Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the
+truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home compared with
+mankind on its bullet.  Even to us who have known no other, it
+seems a strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.
+
+But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of
+wonders that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to
+himself.  He inhabits a body which he is continually outliving,
+discarding and renewing.  Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy,
+restore his spirits and the freshness of his countenance.  Hair
+grows on him like grass; his eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst
+for action; he joys to see and touch and hear, to partake the sun
+and wind, to sit down and intently ponder on his astonishing
+attributes and situation, to rise up and run, to perform the
+strange and revolting round of physical functions.  The sight of a
+flower, the note of a bird, will often move him deeply; yet he
+looks unconcerned on the impassable distances and portentous
+bonfires of the universe.  He comprehends, he designs, he tames
+nature, rides the sea, ploughs, climbs the air in a balloon, makes
+vast inquiries, begins interminable labours, joins himself into
+federations and populous cities, spends his days to deliver the
+ends of the earth or to benefit unborn posterity; and yet knows
+himself for a piece of unsurpassed fragility and the creature of a
+few days.  His sight, which conducts him, which takes notice of the
+farthest stars, which is miraculous in every way and a thing
+defying explanation or belief, is yet lodged in a piece of jelly,
+and can be extinguished with a touch.  His heart, which all through
+life so indomitably, so athletically labours, is but a capsule, and
+may be stopped with a pin.  His whole body, for all its savage
+energies, its leaping and its winged desires, may yet be tamed and
+conquered by a draught of air or a sprinkling of cold dew.  What he
+calls death, which is the seeming arrest of everything, and the
+ruin and hateful transformation of the visible body, lies in wait
+for him outwardly in a thousand accidents, and grows up in secret
+diseases from within.  He is still learning to be a man when his
+faculties are already beginning to decline; he has not yet
+understood himself or his position before he inevitably dies.  And
+yet this mad, chimerical creature can take no thought of his last
+end, lives as though he were eternal, plunges with his vulnerable
+body into the shock of war, and daily affronts death with
+unconcern.  He cannot take a step without pain or pleasure.  His
+life is a tissue of sensations, which he distinguishes as they seem
+to come more directly from himself or his surroundings.  He is
+conscious of himself as a joyer or a sufferer, as that which
+craves, chooses, and is satisfied; conscious of his surroundings as
+it were of an inexhaustible purveyor, the source of aspects,
+inspirations, wonders, cruel knocks and transporting caresses.
+Thus he goes on his way, stumbling among delights and agonies.
+
+Matter is a far-fetched theory, and materialism is without a root
+in man.  To him everything is important in the degree to which it
+moves him.  The telegraph wires and posts, the electricity speeding
+from clerk to clerk, the clerks, the glad or sorrowful import of
+the message, and the paper on which it is finally brought to him at
+home, are all equally facts, all equally exist for man.  A word or
+a thought can wound him as acutely as a knife of steel.  If he
+thinks he is loved, he will rise up and glory to himself, although
+he be in a distant land and short of necessary bread.  Does he
+think he is not loved?--he may have the woman at his beck, and
+there is not a joy for him in all the world.  Indeed, if we are to
+make any account of this figment of reason, the distinction between
+material and immaterial, we shall conclude that the life of each
+man as an individual is immaterial, although the continuation and
+prospects of mankind as a race turn upon material conditions.  The
+physical business of each man's body is transacted for him; like a
+sybarite, he has attentive valets in his own viscera; he breathes,
+he sweats, he digests without an effort, or so much as a consenting
+volition; for the most part he even eats, not with a wakeful
+consciousness, but as it were between two thoughts.  His life is
+centred among other and more important considerations; touch him in
+his honour or his love, creatures of the imagination which attach
+him to mankind or to an individual man or woman; cross him in his
+piety which connects his soul with heaven; and he turns from his
+food, he loathes his breath, and with a magnanimous emotion cuts
+the knots of his existence and frees himself at a blow from the web
+of pains and pleasures.
+
+It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded
+and autonomous empire; but that in the same body with him there
+dwell other powers tributary but independent.  If I now behold one
+walking in a garden, curiously coloured and illuminated by the sun,
+digesting his food with elaborate chemistry, breathing, circulating
+blood, directing himself by the sight of his eyes, accommodating
+his body by a thousand delicate balancings to the wind and the
+uneven surface of the path, and all the time, perhaps, with his
+mind engaged about America, or the dog-star, or the attributes of
+God--what am I to say, or how am I to describe the thing I see?  Is
+that truly a man, in the rigorous meaning of the word? or is it not
+a man and something else?  What, then, are we to count the centre-
+bit and axle of a being so variously compounded?  It is a question
+much debated.  Some read his history in a certain intricacy of
+nerve and the success of successive digestions; others find him an
+exiled piece of heaven blown upon and determined by the breath of
+God; and both schools of theorists will scream like scalded
+children at a word of doubt.  Yet either of these views, however
+plausible, is beside the question; either may be right; and I care
+not; I ask a more particular answer, and to a more immediate point.
+What is the man?  There is Something that was before hunger and
+that remains behind after a meal.  It may or may not be engaged in
+any given act or passion, but when it is, it changes, heightens,
+and sanctifies.  Thus it is not engaged in lust, where satisfaction
+ends the chapter; and it is engaged in love, where no satisfaction
+can blunt the edge of the desire, and where age, sickness, or
+alienation may deface what was desirable without diminishing the
+sentiment.  This something, which is the man, is a permanence which
+abides through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and now
+triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate distress of
+appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all.  So, to the man,
+his own central self fades and grows clear again amid the tumult of
+the senses, like a revolving Pharos in the night.  It is forgotten;
+it is hid, it seems, for ever; and yet in the next calm hour he
+shall behold himself once more, shining and unmoved among changes
+and storm.
+
+Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and eats,
+that generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the outer and
+lower sides of man.  This inner consciousness, this lantern
+alternately obscured and shining, to and by which the individual
+exists and must order his conduct, is something special to himself
+and not common to the race.  His joys delight, his sorrows wound
+him, according as THIS is interested or indifferent in the affair;
+according as they arise in an imperial war or in a broil conducted
+by the tributary chieftains of the mind.  He may lose all, and THIS
+not suffer; he may lose what is materially a trifle, and THIS leap
+in his bosom with a cruel pang.  I do not speak of it to hardened
+theorists:  the living man knows keenly what it is I mean.
+
+'Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and more
+divine than the things which cause the various effects, and, as it
+were, pull thee by the strings.  What is that now in thy mind? is
+it fear, or suspicion, or desire, or anything of that kind?'  Thus
+far Marcus Aurelius, in one of the most notable passages in any
+book.  Here is a question worthy to be answered.  What is in thy
+mind?  What is the utterance of your inmost self when, in a quiet
+hour, it can be heard intelligibly?  It is something beyond the
+compass of your thinking, inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it not
+of a higher spirit than you had dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect
+above all base considerations?  This soul seems hardly touched with
+our infirmities; we can find in it certainly no fear, suspicion, or
+desire; we are only conscious--and that as though we read it in the
+eyes of some one else--of a great and unqualified readiness.  A
+readiness to what? to pass over and look beyond the objects of
+desire and fear, for something else.  And this something else? this
+something which is apart from desire and fear, to which all the
+kingdoms of the world and the immediate death of the body are alike
+indifferent and beside the point, and which yet regards conduct--by
+what name are we to call it?  It may be the love of God; or it may
+be an inherited (and certainly well concealed) instinct to preserve
+self and propagate the race; I am not, for the moment, averse to
+either theory; but it will save time to call it righteousness.  By
+so doing I intend no subterfuge to beg a question; I am indeed
+ready, and more than willing, to accept the rigid consequence, and
+lay aside, as far as the treachery of the reason will permit, all
+former meanings attached to the word righteousness.  What is right
+is that for which a man's central self is ever ready to sacrifice
+immediate or distant interests; what is wrong is what the central
+self discards or rejects as incompatible with the fixed design of
+righteousness.
+
+To make this admission is to lay aside all hope of definition.
+That which is right upon this theory is intimately dictated to each
+man by himself, but can never be rigorously set forth in language,
+and never, above all, imposed upon another.  The conscience has,
+then, a vision like that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and
+for the most part illuminates none but its possessor.  When many
+people perceive the same or any cognate facts, they agree upon a
+word as symbol; and hence we have such words as TREE, STAR, LOVE,
+HONOUR, or DEATH; hence also we have this word RIGHT, which, like
+the others, we all understand, most of us understand differently,
+and none can express succinctly otherwise.  Yet even on the
+straitest view, we can make some steps towards comprehension of our
+own superior thoughts.  For it is an incredible and most
+bewildering fact that a man, through life, is on variable terms
+with himself; he is aware of tiffs and reconciliations; the
+intimacy is at times almost suspended, at times it is renewed again
+with joy.  As we said before, his inner self or soul appears to him
+by successive revelations, and is frequently obscured.  It is from
+a study of these alternations that we can alone hope to discover,
+even dimly, what seems right and what seems wrong to this veiled
+prophet of ourself.
+
+All that is in the man in the larger sense, what we call impression
+as well as what we call intuition, so far as my argument looks, we
+must accept.  It is not wrong to desire food, or exercise, or
+beautiful surroundings, or the love of sex, or interest which is
+the food of the mind.  All these are craved; all these should be
+craved; to none of these in itself does the soul demur; where there
+comes an undeniable want, we recognise a demand of nature.  Yet we
+know that these natural demands may be superseded; for the demands
+which are common to mankind make but a shadowy consideration in
+comparison to the demands of the individual soul.  Food is almost
+the first prerequisite; and yet a high character will go without
+food to the ruin and death of the body rather than gain it in a
+manner which the spirit disavows.  Pascal laid aside mathematics;
+Origen doctored his body with a knife; every day some one is thus
+mortifying his dearest interests and desires, and, in Christ's
+words, entering maim into the Kingdom of Heaven.  This is to
+supersede the lesser and less harmonious affections by
+renunciation; and though by this ascetic path we may get to heaven,
+we cannot get thither a whole and perfect man.  But there is
+another way, to supersede them by reconciliation, in which the soul
+and all the faculties and senses pursue a common route and share in
+one desire.  Thus, man is tormented by a very imperious physical
+desire; it spoils his rest, it is not to be denied; the doctors
+will tell you, not I, how it is a physical need, like the want of
+food or slumber.  In the satisfaction of this desire, as it first
+appears, the soul sparingly takes part; nay, it oft unsparingly
+regrets and disapproves the satisfaction.  But let the man learn to
+love a woman as far as he is capable of love; and for this random
+affection of the body there is substituted a steady determination,
+a consent of all his powers and faculties, which supersedes,
+adopts, and commands the other.  The desire survives, strengthened,
+perhaps, but taught obedience and changed in scope and character.
+Life is no longer a tale of betrayals and regrets; for the man now
+lives as a whole; his consciousness now moves on uninterrupted like
+a river; through all the extremes and ups and downs of passion, he
+remains approvingly conscious of himself.
+
+Now to me, this seems a type of that rightness which the soul
+demands.  It demands that we shall not live alternately with our
+opposing tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and disgust,
+but seek some path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose,
+but serve each other to a common end.  It demands that we shall not
+pursue broken ends, but great and comprehensive purposes, in which
+soul and body may unite like notes in a harmonious chord.  That
+were indeed a way of peace and pleasure, that were indeed a heaven
+upon earth.  It does not demand, however, or, to speak in measure,
+it does not demand of me, that I should starve my appetites for no
+purpose under heaven but as a purpose in itself; or, in a weak
+despair, pluck out the eye that I have not yet learned to guide and
+enjoy with wisdom.  The soul demands unity of purpose, not the
+dismemberment of man; it seeks to roll up all his strength and
+sweetness, all his passion and wisdom, into one, and make of him a
+perfect man exulting in perfection.  To conclude ascetically is to
+give up, and not to solve, the problem.  The ascetic and the
+creeping hog, although they are at different poles, have equally
+failed in life.  The one has sacrificed his crew; the other brings
+back his seamen in a cock-boat, and has lost the ship.  I believe
+there are not many sea-captains who would plume themselves on
+either result as a success.
+
+But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive
+impulses and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one
+thing more unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is
+irretrievable and draws on the rest.  And this is to lose
+consciousness of oneself.  In the best of times, it is but by
+flashes, when our whole nature is clear, strong and conscious, and
+events conspire to leave us free, that we enjoy communion with our
+soul.  At the worst, we are so fallen and passive that we may say
+shortly we have none.  An arctic torpor seizes upon men.  Although
+built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating world, they
+develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness becomes
+engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and soon
+loses both the will and power to look higher considerations in the
+face.  This is ruin; this is the last failure in life; this is
+temporal damnation, damnation on the spot and without the form of
+judgment.  'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world
+and LOSE HIMSELF?'
+
+It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and
+its fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral
+and religious education is directed; not only that of words and
+doctors, but the sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all
+God's scholars till we die.  If, as teachers, we are to say
+anything to the purpose, we must say what will remind the pupil of
+his soul; we must speak that soul's dialect; we must talk of life
+and conduct as his soul would have him think of them.  If, from
+some conformity between us and the pupil, or perhaps among all men,
+we do in truth speak in such a dialect and express such views,
+beyond question we shall touch in him a spring; beyond question he
+will recognise the dialect as one that he himself has spoken in his
+better hours; beyond question he will cry, 'I had forgotten, but
+now I remember; I too have eyes, and I had forgot to use them!  I
+too have a soul of my own, arrogantly upright, and to that I will
+listen and conform.'  In short, say to him anything that he has
+once thought, or been upon the point of thinking, or show him any
+view of life that he has once clearly seen, or been upon the point
+of clearly seeing; and you have done your part and may leave him to
+complete the education for himself.
+
+Now, the view taught at the present time seems to me to want
+greatness; and the dialect in which alone it can be intelligibly
+uttered is not the dialect of my soul.  It is a sort of
+postponement of life; nothing quite is, but something different is
+to be; we are to keep our eyes upon the indirect from the cradle to
+the grave.  We are to regulate our conduct not by desire, but by a
+politic eye upon the future; and to value acts as they will bring
+us money or good opinion; as they will bring us, in one word,
+PROFIT.  We must be what is called respectable, and offend no one
+by our carriage; it will not do to make oneself conspicuous--who
+knows? even in virtue? says the Christian parent!  And we must be
+what is called prudent and make money; not only because it is
+pleasant to have money, but because that also is a part of
+respectability, and we cannot hope to be received in society
+without decent possessions.  Received in society! as if that were
+the kingdom of heaven!  There is dear Mr. So-and-so;--look at him!-
+-so much respected--so much looked up to--quite the Christian
+merchant!  And we must cut our conduct as strictly as possible
+after the pattern of Mr. So-and-so; and lay our whole lives to make
+money and be strictly decent.  Besides these holy injunctions,
+which form by far the greater part of a youth's training in our
+Christian homes, there are at least two other doctrines.  We are to
+live just now as well as we can, but scrape at last into heaven,
+where we shall be good.  We are to worry through the week in a lay,
+disreputable way, but, to make matters square, live a different
+life on Sunday.
+
+The train of thought we have been following gives us a key to all
+these positions, without stepping aside to justify them on their
+own ground.  It is because we have been disgusted fifty times with
+physical squalls, and fifty times torn between conflicting
+impulses, that we teach people this indirect and tactical procedure
+in life, and to judge by remote consequences instead of the
+immediate face of things.  The very desire to act as our own souls
+would have us, coupled with a pathetic disbelief in ourselves,
+moves us to follow the example of others; perhaps, who knows? they
+may be on the right track; and the more our patterns are in number,
+the better seems the chance; until, if we be acting in concert with
+a whole civilised nation, there are surely a majority of chances
+that we must be acting right.  And again, how true it is that we
+can never behave as we wish in this tormented sphere, and can only
+aspire to different and more favourable circumstances, in order to
+stand out and be ourselves wholly and rightly!  And yet once more,
+if in the hurry and pressure of affairs and passions you tend to
+nod and become drowsy, here are twenty-four hours of Sunday set
+apart for you to hold counsel with your soul and look around you on
+the possibilities of life.
+
+This is not, of course, all that is to be, or even should be, said
+for these doctrines.  Only, in the course of this chapter, the
+reader and I have agreed upon a few catchwords, and been looking at
+morals on a certain system; it was a pity to lose an opportunity of
+testing the catchwords, and seeing whether, by this system as well
+as by others, current doctrines could show any probable
+justification.  If the doctrines had come too badly out of the
+trial, it would have condemned the system.  Our sight of the world
+is very narrow; the mind but a pedestrian instrument; there's
+nothing new under the sun, as Solomon says, except the man himself;
+and though that changes the aspect of everything else, yet he must
+see the same things as other people, only from a different side.
+
+And now, having admitted so much, let us turn to criticism.
+
+If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him,
+unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of the
+majority of his contemporaries, you must discredit in his eyes the
+one authoritative voice of his own soul.  He may be a docile
+citizen; he will never be a man.  It is ours, on the other hand, to
+disregard this babble and chattering of other men better and worse
+than we are, and to walk straight before us by what light we have.
+They may be right; but so, before heaven, are we.  They may know;
+but we know also, and by that knowledge we must stand or fall.
+There is such a thing as loyalty to a man's own better self; and
+from those who have not that, God help me, how am I to look for
+loyalty to others?  The most dull, the most imbecile, at a certain
+moment turn round, at a certain point will hear no further
+argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational sense
+of right.  It is not only by steel or fire, but through contempt
+and blame, that the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul.
+Be glad if you are not tried by such extremities.  But although all
+the world ranged themselves in one line to tell you 'This is
+wrong,' be you your own faithful vassal and the ambassador of God--
+throw down the glove and answer 'This is right.'  Do you think you
+are only declaring yourself?  Perhaps in some dim way, like a child
+who delivers a message not fully understood, you are opening wider
+the straits of prejudice and preparing mankind for some truer and
+more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you stand forth for your
+own judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones with your body;
+perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided the guilt of
+false witness against humanity and the little ones unborn.  It is
+good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to respect
+oneself and utter the voice of God.  God, if there be any God,
+speaks daily in a new language by the tongues of men; the thoughts
+and habits of each fresh generation and each new-coined spirit
+throw another light upon the universe and contain another
+commentary on the printed Bibles; every scruple, every true
+dissent, every glimpse of something new, is a letter of God's
+alphabet; and though there is a grave responsibility for all who
+speak, is there none for those who unrighteously keep silence and
+conform?  Is not that also to conceal and cloak God's counsel?  And
+how should we regard the man of science who suppressed all facts
+that would not tally with the orthodoxy of the hour?
+
+Wrong?  You are as surely wrong as the sun rose this morning round
+the revolving shoulder of the world.  Not truth, but truthfulness,
+is the good of your endeavour.  For when will men receive that
+first part and prerequisite of truth, that, by the order of things,
+by the greatness of the universe, by the darkness and partiality of
+man's experience, by the inviolate secrecy of God, kept close in
+His most open revelations, every man is, and to the end of the ages
+must be, wrong?  Wrong to the universe; wrong to mankind; wrong to
+God.  And yet in another sense, and that plainer and nearer, every
+man of men, who wishes truly, must be right.  He is right to
+himself, and in the measure of his sagacity and candour.  That let
+him do in all sincerity and zeal, not sparing a thought for
+contrary opinions; that, for what it is worth, let him proclaim.
+Be not afraid; although he be wrong, so also is the dead, stuffed
+Dagon he insults.  For the voice of God, whatever it is, is not
+that stammering, inept tradition which the people holds.  These
+truths survive in travesty, swamped in a world of spiritual
+darkness and confusion; and what a few comprehend and faithfully
+hold, the many, in their dead jargon, repeat, degrade, and
+misinterpret.
+
+So far of Respectability; what the Covenanters used to call 'rank
+conformity':  the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on
+men.  And now of Profit.  And this doctrine is perhaps the more
+redoubtable, because it harms all sorts of men; not only the heroic
+and self-reliant, but the obedient, cowlike squadrons.  A man, by
+this doctrine, looks to consequences at the second, or third, or
+fiftieth turn.  He chooses his end, and for that, with wily turns
+and through a great sea of tedium, steers this mortal bark.  There
+may be political wisdom in such a view; but I am persuaded there
+can spring no great moral zeal.  To look thus obliquely upon life
+is the very recipe for moral slumber.  Our intention and endeavour
+should be directed, not on some vague end of money or applause,
+which shall come to us by a ricochet in a month or a year, or
+twenty years, but on the act itself; not on the approval of others,
+but on the rightness of that act.  At every instant, at every step
+in life, the point has to be decided, our soul has to be saved,
+heaven has to be gained or lost.  At every step our spirits must
+applaud, at every step we must set down the foot and sound the
+trumpet.  'This have I done,' we must say; 'right or wrong, this
+have I done, in unfeigned honour of intention, as to myself and
+God.'  The profit of every act should be this, that it was right
+for us to do it.  Any other profit than that, if it involved a
+kingdom or the woman I love, ought, if I were God's upright
+soldier, to leave me untempted.
+
+It is the mark of what we call a righteous decision, that it is
+made directly and for its own sake.  The whole man, mind and body,
+having come to an agreement, tyrannically dictates conduct.  There
+are two dispositions eternally opposed:  that in which we recognise
+that one thing is wrong and another right, and that in which, not
+seeing any clear distinction, we fall back on the consideration of
+consequences.  The truth is, by the scope of our present teaching,
+nothing is thought very wrong and nothing very right, except a few
+actions which have the disadvantage of being disrespectable when
+found out; the more serious part of men inclining to think all
+things RATHER WRONG, the more jovial to suppose them RIGHT ENOUGH
+FOR PRACTICAL PURPOSES.  I will engage my head, they do not find
+that view in their own hearts; they have taken it up in a dark
+despair; they are but troubled sleepers talking in their sleep.
+The soul, or my soul at least, thinks very distinctly upon many
+points of right and wrong, and often differs flatly with what is
+held out as the thought of corporate humanity in the code of
+society or the code of law.  Am I to suppose myself a monster?  I
+have only to read books, the Christian Gospels for example, to
+think myself a monster no longer; and instead I think the mass of
+people are merely speaking in their sleep.
+
+It is a commonplace, enshrined, if I mistake not, even in school
+copy-books, that honour is to be sought and not fame.  I ask no
+other admission; we are to seek honour, upright walking with our
+own conscience every hour of the day, and not fame, the
+consequence, the far-off reverberation of our footsteps.  The walk,
+not the rumour of the walk, is what concerns righteousness.  Better
+disrespectable honour than dishonourable fame.  Better useless or
+seemingly hurtful honour, than dishonour ruling empires and filling
+the mouths of thousands.  For the man must walk by what he sees,
+and leave the issue with God who made him and taught him by the
+fortune of his life.  You would not dishonour yourself for money;
+which is at least tangible; would you do it, then, for a doubtful
+forecast in politics, or another person's theory in morals?
+
+So intricate is the scheme of our affairs, that no man can
+calculate the bearing of his own behaviour even on those
+immediately around him, how much less upon the world at large or on
+succeeding generations!  To walk by external prudence and the rule
+of consequences would require, not a man, but God.  All that we
+know to guide us in this changing labyrinth is our soul with its
+fixed design of righteousness, and a few old precepts which commend
+themselves to that.  The precepts are vague when we endeavour to
+apply them; consequences are more entangled than a wisp of string,
+and their confusion is unrestingly in change; we must hold to what
+we know and walk by it.  We must walk by faith, indeed, and not by
+knowledge.
+
+You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or eminently
+respectable:  you love him because you love him; that is love, and
+any other only a derision and grimace.  It should be the same with
+all our actions.  If we were to conceive a perfect man, it should
+be one who was never torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on
+the absolute consent of all his parts and faculties, submitted in
+every action of his life to a self-dictation as absolute and
+unreasoned as that which bids him love one woman and be true to her
+till death.  But we should not conceive him as sagacious,
+ascetical, playing off his appetites against each other, turning
+the wing of public respectable immorality instead of riding it
+directly down, or advancing toward his end through a thousand
+sinister compromises and considerations.  The one man might be
+wily, might be adroit, might be wise, might be respectable, might
+be gloriously useful; it is the other man who would be good.
+
+The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be
+successful; to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not
+outwardly, respectable.  Does your soul ask profit?  Does it ask
+money?  Does it ask the approval of the indifferent herd?  I
+believe not.  For my own part, I want but little money, I hope; and
+I do not want to be decent at all, but to be good.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+We have spoken of that supreme self-dictation which keeps varying
+from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and
+circumstances.  Now, for us, that is ultimate.  It may be founded
+on some reasonable process, but it is not a process which we can
+follow or comprehend.  And moreover the dictation is not
+continuous, or not continuous except in very lively and well-living
+natures; and between-whiles we must brush along without it.
+Practice is a more intricate and desperate business than the
+toughest theorising; life is an affair of cavalry, where rapid
+judgment and prompt action are alone possible and right.  As a
+matter of fact, there is no one so upright but he is influenced by
+the world's chatter; and no one so headlong but he requires to
+consider consequences and to keep an eye on profit.  For the soul
+adopts all affections and appetites without exception, and cares
+only to combine them for some common purpose which shall interest
+all.  Now, respect for the opinion of others, the study of
+consequences, and the desire of power and comfort, are all
+undeniably factors in the nature of man; and the more undeniably
+since we find that, in our current doctrines, they have swallowed
+up the others and are thought to conclude in themselves all the
+worthy parts of man.  These, then, must also be suffered to affect
+conduct in the practical domain, much or little according as they
+are forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.
+
+Now, a man's view of the universe is mostly a view of the civilised
+society in which he lives.  Other men and women are so much more
+grossly and so much more intimately palpable to his perceptions,
+that they stand between him and all the rest; they are larger to
+his eye than the sun, he hears them more plainly than thunder, with
+them, by them, and for them, he must live and die.  And hence the
+laws that affect his intercourse with his fellow-men, although
+merely customary and the creatures of a generation, are more
+clearly and continually before his mind than those which bind him
+into the eternal system of things, support him in his upright
+progress on this whirling ball, or keep up the fire of his bodily
+life.  And hence it is that money stands in the first rank of
+considerations and so powerfully affects the choice.  For our
+society is built with money for mortar; money is present in every
+joint of circumstance; it might be named the social atmosphere,
+since, in society, it is by that alone that men continue to live,
+and only through that or chance that they can reach or affect one
+another.  Money gives us food, shelter, and privacy; it permits us
+to be clean in person, opens for us the doors of the theatre, gains
+us books for study or pleasure, enables us to help the distresses
+of others, and puts us above necessity so that we can choose the
+best in life.  If we love, it enables us to meet and live with the
+loved one, or even to prolong her health and life; if we have
+scruples, it gives us an opportunity to be honest; if we have any
+bright designs, here is what will smooth the way to their
+accomplishment.  Penury is the worst slavery, and will soon lead to
+death.
+
+But money is only a means; it presupposes a man to use it.  The
+rich can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere.
+He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has
+neither patience to read nor intelligence to see.  The table may be
+loaded and the appetite wanting; the purse may be full, and the
+heart empty.  He may have gained the world and lost himself; and
+with all his wealth around him, in a great house and spacious and
+beautiful demesne, he may live as blank a life as any tattered
+ditcher.  Without an appetite, without an aspiration, void of
+appreciation, bankrupt of desire and hope, there, in his great
+house, let him sit and look upon his fingers.  It is perhaps a more
+fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be
+born a millionaire.  Although neither is to be despised, it is
+always better policy to learn an interest than to make a thousand
+pounds; for the money will soon be spent, or perhaps you may feel
+no joy in spending it; but the interest remains imperishable and
+ever new.  To become a botanist, a geologist, a social philosopher,
+an antiquary, or an artist, is to enlarge one's possessions in the
+universe by an incalculably higher degree, and by a far surer sort
+of property, than to purchase a farm of many acres.  You had
+perhaps two thousand a year before the transaction; perhaps you
+have two thousand five hundred after it.  That represents your gain
+in the one case.  But in the other, you have thrown down a barrier
+which concealed significance and beauty.  The blind man has learned
+to see.  The prisoner has opened up a window in his cell and
+beholds enchanting prospects; he will never again be a prisoner as
+he was; he can watch clouds and changing seasons, ships on the
+river, travellers on the road, and the stars at night; happy
+prisoner! his eyes have broken jail!  And again he who has learned
+to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day
+of riches; if prosperity come, he will not enter poor into his
+inheritance; he will not slumber and forget himself in the lap of
+money, or spend his hours in counting idle treasures, but be up and
+briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic touch, which is not
+that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into living delight
+and satisfaction.  Etre et pas avoir--to be, not to possess--that
+is the problem of life.  To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first
+requisite and money but the second.  To be of a quick and healthy
+blood, to share in all honourable curiosities, to be rich in
+admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of
+others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is
+still a dear possession in absence or unkindness--these are the
+gifts of fortune which money cannot buy and without which money can
+buy nothing.  For what can a man possess, or what can he enjoy,
+except himself?  If he enlarge his nature, it is then that he
+enlarges his estates.  If his nature be happy and valiant, he will
+enjoy the universe as if it were his park and orchard.
+
+But money is not only to be spent; it has also to be earned.  It is
+not merely a convenience or a necessary in social life; but it is
+the coin in which mankind pays his wages to the individual man.
+And from this side, the question of money has a very different
+scope and application.  For no man can be honest who does not work.
+Service for service.  If the farmer buys corn, and the labourer
+ploughs and reaps, and the baker sweats in his hot bakery, plainly
+you who eat must do something in your turn.  It is not enough to
+take off your hat, or to thank God upon your knees for the
+admirable constitution of society and your own convenient situation
+in its upper and more ornamental stories.  Neither is it enough to
+buy the loaf with a sixpence; for then you are only changing the
+point of the inquiry; and you must first have BOUGHT THE SIXPENCE.
+Service for service:  how have you bought your sixpences?  A man of
+spirit desires certainty in a thing of such a nature; he must see
+to it that there is some reciprocity between him and mankind; that
+he pays his expenditure in service; that he has not a lion's share
+in profit and a drone's in labour; and is not a sleeping partner
+and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile concern of mankind.
+
+Services differ so widely with different gifts, and some are so
+inappreciable to external tests, that this is not only a matter for
+the private conscience, but one which even there must be leniently
+and trustfully considered.  For remember how many serve mankind who
+do no more than meditate; and how many are precious to their
+friends for no more than a sweet and joyous temper.  To perform the
+function of a man of letters it is not necessary to write; nay, it
+is perhaps better to be a living book.  So long as we love we
+serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that
+we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
+The true services of life are inestimable in money, and are never
+paid.  Kind words and caresses, high and wise thoughts, humane
+designs, tender behaviour to the weak and suffering, and all the
+charities of man's existence, are neither bought nor sold.
+
+Yet the dearest and readiest, if not the most just, criterion of a
+man's services, is the wage that mankind pays him or, briefly, what
+he earns.  There at least there can be no ambiguity.  St. Paul is
+fully and freely entitled to his earnings as a tentmaker, and
+Socrates fully and freely entitled to his earnings as a sculptor,
+although the true business of each was not only something
+different, but something which remained unpaid.  A man cannot
+forget that he is not superintended, and serves mankind on parole.
+He would like, when challenged by his own conscience, to reply:  'I
+have done so much work, and no less, with my own hands and brain,
+and taken so much profit, and no more, for my own personal
+delight.'  And though St. Paul, if he had possessed a private
+fortune, would probably have scorned to waste his time in making
+tents, yet of all sacrifices to public opinion none can be more
+easily pardoned than that by which a man, already spiritually
+useful to the world, should restrict the field of his chief
+usefulness to perform services more apparent, and possess a
+livelihood that neither stupidity nor malice could call in
+question.  Like all sacrifices to public opinion and mere external
+decency, this would certainly be wrong; for the soul should rest
+contented with its own approval and indissuadably pursue its own
+calling.  Yet, so grave and delicate is the question, that a man
+may well hesitate before he decides it for himself; he may well
+fear that he sets too high a valuation on his own endeavours after
+good; he may well condescend upon a humbler duty, where others than
+himself shall judge the service and proportion the wage.
+
+And yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are born.
+They can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are their own
+paymasters on parole; and must pay themselves fair wages and no
+more.  For I suppose that in the course of ages, and through reform
+and civil war and invasion, mankind was pursuing some other and
+more general design than to set one or two Englishmen of the
+nineteenth century beyond the reach of needs and duties.  Society
+was scarce put together, and defended with so much eloquence and
+blood, for the convenience of two or three millionaires and a few
+hundred other persons of wealth and position.  It is plain that if
+mankind thus acted and suffered during all these generations, they
+hoped some benefit, some ease, some wellbeing, for themselves and
+their descendants; that if they supported law and order, it was to
+secure fair-play for all; that if they denied themselves in the
+present, they must have had some designs upon the future.  Now, a
+great hereditary fortune is a miracle of man's wisdom and mankind's
+forbearance; it has not only been amassed and handed down, it has
+been suffered to be amassed and handed down; and surely in such a
+consideration as this, its possessor should find only a new spur to
+activity and honour, that with all this power of service he should
+not prove unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure should
+return in benefits upon the race.  If he had twenty, or thirty, or
+a hundred thousand at his banker's, or if all Yorkshire or all
+California were his to manage or to sell, he would still be morally
+penniless, and have the world to begin like Whittington, until he
+had found some way of serving mankind.  His wage is physically in
+his own hand; but, in honour, that wage must still be earned.  He
+is only steward on parole of what is called his fortune.  He must
+honourably perform his stewardship.  He must estimate his own
+services and allow himself a salary in proportion, for that will be
+one among his functions.  And while he will then be free to spend
+that salary, great or little, on his own private pleasures, the
+rest of his fortune he but holds and disposes under trust for
+mankind; it is not his, because he has not earned it; it cannot be
+his, because his services have already been paid; but year by year
+it is his to distribute, whether to help individuals whose
+birthright and outfit have been swallowed up in his, or to further
+public works and institutions.
+
+At this rate, short of inspiration, it seems hardly possible to be
+both rich and honest; and the millionaire is under a far more
+continuous temptation to thieve than the labourer who gets his
+shilling daily for despicable toils.  Are you surprised?  It is
+even so.  And you repeat it every Sunday in your churches.  'It is
+easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a
+rich man to enter the kingdom of God.'  I have heard this and
+similar texts ingeniously explained away and brushed from the path
+of the aspiring Christian by the tender Great-heart of the parish.
+One excellent clergyman told us that the 'eye of a needle' meant a
+low, Oriental postern through which camels could not pass till they
+were unloaded--which is very likely just; and then went on, bravely
+confounding the 'kingdom of God' with heaven, the future paradise,
+to show that of course no rich person could expect to carry his
+riches beyond the grave--which, of course, he could not and never
+did.  Various greedy sinners of the congregation drank in the
+comfortable doctrine with relief.  It was worth the while having
+come to church that Sunday morning!  All was plain.  The Bible, as
+usual, meant nothing in particular; it was merely an obscure and
+figurative school-copybook; and if a man were only respectable, he
+was a man after God's own heart.
+
+Alas! I fear not.  And though this matter of a man's services is
+one for his own conscience, there are some cases in which it is
+difficult to restrain the mind from judging.  Thus I shall be very
+easily persuaded that a man has earned his daily bread; and if he
+has but a friend or two to whom his company is delightful at heart,
+I am more than persuaded at once.  But it will be very hard to
+persuade me that any one has earned an income of a hundred
+thousand.  What he is to his friends, he still would be if he were
+made penniless to-morrow; for as to the courtiers of luxury and
+power, I will neither consider them friends, nor indeed consider
+them at all.  What he does for mankind there are most likely
+hundreds who would do the same, as effectually for the race and as
+pleasurably to themselves, for the merest fraction of this
+monstrous wage.  Why it is paid, I am, therefore, unable to
+conceive, and as the man pays it himself, out of funds in his
+detention, I have a certain backwardness to think him honest.
+
+At least, we have gained a very obvious point:  that WHAT A MAN
+SPENDS UPON HIMSELF, HE SHALL HAVE EARNED BY SERVICES TO THE RACE.
+Thence flows a principle for the outset of life, which is a little
+different from that taught in the present day.  I am addressing the
+middle and the upper classes; those who have already been fostered
+and prepared for life at some expense; those who have some choice
+before them, and can pick professions; and above all, those who are
+what is called independent, and need do nothing unless pushed by
+honour or ambition.  In this particular the poor are happy; among
+them, when a lad comes to his strength, he must take the work that
+offers, and can take it with an easy conscience.  But in the richer
+classes the question is complicated by the number of opportunities
+and a variety of considerations.  Here, then, this principle of
+ours comes in helpfully.  The young man has to seek, not a road to
+wealth, but an opportunity of service; not money, but honest work.
+If he has some strong propensity, some calling of nature, some
+over-weening interest in any special field of industry, inquiry, or
+art, he will do right to obey the impulse; and that for two
+reasons:  the first external, because there he will render the best
+services; the second personal, because a demand of his own nature
+is to him without appeal whenever it can be satisfied with the
+consent of his other faculties and appetites.  If he has no such
+elective taste, by the very principle on which he chooses any
+pursuit at all he must choose the most honest and serviceable, and
+not the most highly remunerated.  We have here an external problem,
+not from or to ourself, but flowing from the constitution of
+society; and we have our own soul with its fixed design of
+righteousness.  All that can be done is to present the problem in
+proper terms, and leave it to the soul of the individual.  Now, the
+problem to the poor is one of necessity:  to earn wherewithal to
+live, they must find remunerative labour.  But the problem to the
+rich is one of honour:  having the wherewithal, they must find
+serviceable labour.  Each has to earn his daily bread:  the one,
+because he has not yet got it to eat; the other, who has already
+eaten it, because he has not yet earned it.
+
+Of course, what is true of bread is true of luxuries and comforts,
+whether for the body or the mind.  But the consideration of
+luxuries leads us to a new aspect of the whole question, and to a
+second proposition no less true, and maybe no less startling, than
+the last.
+
+At the present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of
+surfeit and disgrace after meat.  Plethora has filled us with
+indifference; and we are covered from head to foot with the
+callosities of habitual opulence.  Born into what is called a
+certain rank, we live, as the saying is, up to our station.  We
+squander without enjoyment, because our fathers squandered.  We eat
+of the best, not from delicacy, but from brazen habit.  We do not
+keenly enjoy or eagerly desire the presence of a luxury; we are
+unaccustomed to its absence.  And not only do we squander money
+from habit, but still more pitifully waste it in ostentation.  I
+can think of no more melancholy disgrace for a creature who
+professes either reason or pleasure for his guide, than to spend
+the smallest fraction of his income upon that which he does not
+desire; and to keep a carriage in which you do not wish to drive,
+or a butler of whom you are afraid, is a pathetic kind of folly.
+Money, being a means of happiness, should make both parties happy
+when it changes hands; rightly disposed, it should be twice blessed
+in its employment; and buyer and seller should alike have their
+twenty shillings worth of profit out of every pound.  Benjamin
+Franklin went through life an altered man, because he once paid too
+dearly for a penny whistle.  My concern springs usually from a
+deeper source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not
+want one.  I find I regret this, or would regret it if I gave
+myself the time, not only on personal but on moral and
+philanthropical considerations.  For, first, in a world where money
+is wanting to buy books for eager students and food and medicine
+for pining children, and where a large majority are starved in
+their most immediate desires, it is surely base, stupid, and cruel
+to squander money when I am pushed by no appetite and enjoy no
+return of genuine satisfaction.  My philanthropy is wide enough in
+scope to include myself; and when I have made myself happy, I have
+at least one good argument that I have acted rightly; but where
+that is not so, and I have bought and not enjoyed, my mouth is
+closed, and I conceive that I have robbed the poor.  And, second,
+anything I buy or use which I do not sincerely want or cannot
+vividly enjoy, disturbs the balance of supply and demand, and
+contributes to remove industrious hands from the production of what
+is useful or pleasurable and to keep them busy upon ropes of sand
+and things that are a weariness to the flesh.  That extravagance is
+truly sinful, and a very silly sin to boot, in which we impoverish
+mankind and ourselves.  It is another question for each man's
+heart.  He knows if he can enjoy what he buys and uses; if he
+cannot, he is a dog in the manger; nay, it he cannot, I contend he
+is a thief, for nothing really belongs to a man which he cannot
+use.  Proprietor is connected with propriety; and that only is the
+man's which is proper to his wants and faculties.
+
+A youth, in choosing a career, must not be alarmed by poverty.
+Want is a sore thing, but poverty does not imply want.  It remains
+to be seen whether with half his present income, or a third, he
+cannot, in the most generous sense, live as fully as at present.
+He is a fool who objects to luxuries; but he is also a fool who
+does not protest against the waste of luxuries on those who do not
+desire and cannot enjoy them.  It remains to be seen, by each man
+who would live a true life to himself and not a merely specious
+life to society, how many luxuries he truly wants and to how many
+he merely submits as to a social propriety; and all these last he
+will immediately forswear.  Let him do this, and he will be
+surprised to find how little money it requires to keep him in
+complete contentment and activity of mind and senses.  Life at any
+level among the easy classes is conceived upon a principle of
+rivalry, where each man and each household must ape the tastes and
+emulate the display of others.  One is delicate in eating, another
+in wine, a third in furniture or works of art or dress; and I, who
+care nothing for any of these refinements, who am perhaps a plain
+athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer, flannel shirts and
+a camp bed, am yet called upon to assimilate all these other tastes
+and make these foreign occasions of expenditure my own.  It may be
+cynical:  I am sure I shall be told it is selfish; but I will spend
+my money as I please and for my own intimate personal
+gratification, and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay
+out the colour of a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or
+duty.  I shall not wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless
+I am born with a delight in them.  Dress is my own affair, and that
+of one other in the world; that, in fact and for an obvious reason,
+of any woman who shall chance to be in love with me.  I shall lodge
+where I have a mind.  If I do not ask society to live with me, they
+must be silent; and even if I do, they have no further right but to
+refuse the invitation!  There is a kind of idea abroad that a man
+must live up to his station, that his house, his table, and his
+toilette, shall be in a ratio of equivalence, and equally imposing
+to the world.  If this is in the Bible, the passage has eluded my
+inquiries.  If it is not in the Bible, it is nowhere but in the
+heart of the fool.  Throw aside this fancy.  See what you want, and
+spend upon that; distinguish what you do not care about, and spend
+nothing upon that.  There are not many people who can differentiate
+wines above a certain and that not at all a high price.  Are you
+sure you are one of these?  Are you sure you prefer cigars at
+sixpence each to pipes at some fraction of a farthing?  Are you
+sure you wish to keep a gig?  Do you care about where you sleep, or
+are you not as much at your ease in a cheap lodging as in an
+Elizabethan manor-house?  Do you enjoy fine clothes?  It is not
+possible to answer these questions without a trial; and there is
+nothing more obvious to my mind, than that a man who has not
+experienced some ups and downs, and been forced to live more
+cheaply than in his father's house, has still his education to
+begin.  Let the experiment be made, and he will find to his
+surprise that he has been eating beyond his appetite up to that
+hour; that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country
+clothes, the plain table, have not only no power to damp his
+spirits, but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the
+dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and waking, in his former
+callous and somnambulous submission to wealth.
+
+The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary
+Bohemians of literature, is exactly described by such a principle
+of life.  The Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good
+for him and prefers anything to work, and wears strange clothes, is
+for the most part a respectable Bohemian, respectable in
+disrespectability, living for the outside, and an adventurer.  But
+the man I mean lives wholly to himself, does what he wishes, and
+not what is thought proper, buys what he wants for himself, and not
+what is thought proper, works at what he believes he can do well
+and not what will bring him in money or favour.  You may be the
+most respectable of men, and yet a true Bohemian.  And the test is
+this:  a Bohemian, for as poor as he may be, is always open-handed
+to his friends; he knows what he can do with money and how he can
+do without it, a far rarer and more useful knowledge; he has had
+less, and continued to live in some contentment; and hence he cares
+not to keep more, and shares his sovereign or his shilling with a
+friend.  The poor, if they are generous, are Bohemian in virtue of
+their birth.  Do you know where beggars go?  Not to the great
+houses where people sit dazed among their thousands, but to the
+doors of poor men who have seen the world; and it was the widow who
+had only two mites, who cast half her fortune into the treasury.
+
+But a young man who elects to save on dress or on lodging, or who
+in any way falls out of the level of expenditure which is common to
+his level in society, falls out of society altogether.  I suppose
+the young man to have chosen his career on honourable principles;
+he finds his talents and instincts can be best contented in a
+certain pursuit; in a certain industry, he is sure that he is
+serving mankind with a healthy and becoming service; and he is not
+sure that he would be doing so, or doing so equally well, in any
+other industry within his reach.  Then that is his true sphere in
+life; not the one in which he was born to his father, but the one
+which is proper to his talents and instincts.  And suppose he does
+fall out of society, is that a cause of sorrow?  Is your heart so
+dead that you prefer the recognition of many to the love of a few?
+Do you think society loves you?  Put it to the proof.  Decline in
+material expenditure, and you will find they care no more for you
+than for the Khan of Tartary.  You will lose no friends.  If you
+had any, you will keep them.  Only those who were friends to your
+coat and equipage will disappear; the smiling faces will disappear
+as by enchantment; but the kind hearts will remain steadfastly
+kind.  Are you so lost, are you so dead, are you so little sure of
+your own soul and your own footing upon solid fact, that you prefer
+before goodness and happiness the countenance of sundry diners-out,
+who will flee from you at a report of ruin, who will drop you with
+insult at a shadow of disgrace, who do not know you and do not care
+to know you but by sight, and whom you in your turn neither know
+nor care to know in a more human manner?  Is it not the principle
+of society, openly avowed, that friendship must not interfere with
+business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a
+consideration of money goes before any consideration of affection
+known to this cold-blooded gang, that they have not even the honour
+of thieves, and will rook their nearest and dearest as readily as a
+stranger?  I hope I would go as far as most to serve a friend; but
+I declare openly I would not put on my hat to do a pleasure to
+society.  I may starve my appetites and control my temper for the
+sake of those I love; but society shall take me as I choose to be,
+or go without me.  Neither they nor I will lose; for where there is
+no love, it is both laborious and unprofitable to associate.
+
+But it is obvious that if it is only right for a man to spend money
+on that which he can truly and thoroughly enjoy, the doctrine
+applies with equal force to the rich and to the poor, to the man
+who has amassed many thousands as well as to the youth precariously
+beginning life.  And it may be asked, Is not this merely preparing
+misers, who are not the best of company?  But the principle was
+this:  that which a man has not fairly earned, and, further, that
+which he cannot fully enjoy, does not belong to him, but is a part
+of mankind's treasure which he holds as steward on parole.  To
+mankind, then, it must be made profitable; and how this should be
+done is, once more, a problem which each man must solve for
+himself, and about which none has a right to judge him.  Yet there
+are a few considerations which are very obvious and may here be
+stated.  Mankind is not only the whole in general, but every one in
+particular.  Every man or woman is one of mankind's dear
+possessions; to his or her just brain, and kind heart, and active
+hands, mankind intrusts some of its hopes for the future; he or she
+is a possible well-spring of good acts and source of blessings to
+the race.  This money which you do not need, which, in a rigid
+sense, you do not want, may therefore be returned not only in
+public benefactions to the race, but in private kindnesses.  Your
+wife, your children, your friends stand nearest to you, and should
+be helped the first.  There at least there can be little imposture,
+for you know their necessities of your own knowledge.  And
+consider, if all the world did as you did, and according to their
+means extended help in the circle of their affections, there would
+be no more crying want in times of plenty and no more cold,
+mechanical charity given with a doubt and received with confusion.
+Would not this simple rule make a new world out of the old and
+cruel one which we inhabit?
+
+
+[After two more sentences the fragment breaks off.]
+
+
+
+
+FATHER DAMIEN
+AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND
+DR. HYDE OF HONOLULU
+
+
+
+
+SYDNEY,
+February 25, 1890.
+
+
+Sir,--It may probably occur to you that we have met, and visited,
+and conversed; on my side, with interest.  You may remember that
+you have done me several courtesies, for which I was prepared to be
+grateful.  But there are duties which come before gratitude, and
+offences which justly divide friends, far more acquaintances.  Your
+letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage is a document which, in my sight,
+if you had filled me with bread when I was starving, if you had sat
+up to nurse my father when he lay a-dying, would yet absolve me
+from the bonds of gratitude.  You know enough, doubtless, of the
+process of canonisation to be aware that, a hundred years after the
+death of Damien, there will appear a man charged with the painful
+office of the DEVIL'S ADVOCATE.  After that noble brother of mine,
+and of all frail clay, shall have lain a century at rest, one shall
+accuse, one defend him.  The circumstance is unusual that the
+devil's advocate should be a volunteer, should be a member of a
+sect immediately rival, and should make haste to take upon himself
+his ugly office ere the bones are cold; unusual, and of a taste
+which I shall leave my readers free to qualify; unusual, and to me
+inspiring.  If I have at all learned the trade of using words to
+convey truth and to arouse emotion, you have at last furnished me
+with a subject.  For it is in the interest of all mankind, and the
+cause of public decency in every quarter of the world, not only
+that Damien should be righted, but that you and your letter should
+be displayed at length, in their true colours, to the public eye.
+
+To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at large:  I shall
+then proceed to criticise your utterance from several points of
+view, divine and human, in the course of which I shall attempt to
+draw again, and with more specification, the character of the dead
+saint whom it has pleased you to vilify:  so much being done, I
+shall say farewell to you for ever.
+
+
+'HONOLULU,
+'August 2, 1889.
+
+
+'Rev. H. B. GAGE.
+
+'Dear Brother,--In answer to your inquiries about Father Damien, I
+can only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the
+extravagant newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly
+philanthropist.  The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man,
+head-strong and bigoted.  He was not sent to Molokai, but went
+there without orders; did not stay at the leper settlement (before
+he became one himself), but circulated freely over the whole island
+(less than half the island is devoted to the lepers), and he came
+often to Honolulu.  He had no hand in the reforms and improvements
+inaugurated, which were the work of our Board of Health, as
+occasion required and means were provided.  He was not a pure man
+in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died
+should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.  Others have
+done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the government
+physicians, and so forth, but never with the Catholic idea of
+meriting eternal life.--Yours, etc.,
+
+'C. M. HYDE.' {1}
+
+
+To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must draw at the
+outset on my private knowledge of the signatory and his sect.  It
+may offend others; scarcely you, who have been so busy to collect,
+so bold to publish, gossip on your rivals.  And this is perhaps the
+moment when I may best explain to you the character of what you are
+to read:  I conceive you as a man quite beyond and below the
+reticences of civility:  with what measure you mete, with that
+shall it be measured you again; with you, at last, I rejoice to
+feel the button off the foil and to plunge home.  And if in aught
+that I shall say I should offend others, your colleagues, whom I
+respect and remember with affection, I can but offer them my
+regret; I am not free, I am inspired by the consideration of
+interests far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted by
+anything from me must be indeed trifling when compared with the
+pain with which they read your letter.  It is not the hangman, but
+the criminal, that brings dishonour on the house.
+
+You belong, sir, to a sect--I believe my sect, and that in which my
+ancestors laboured--which has enjoyed, and partly failed to
+utilise, an exceptional advantage in the islands of Hawaii.  The
+first missionaries came; they found the land already self-purged of
+its old and bloody faith; they were embraced, almost on their
+arrival, with enthusiasm; what troubles they supported came far
+more from whites than from Hawaiians; and to these last they stood
+(in a rough figure) in the shoes of God.  This is not the place to
+enter into the degree or causes of their failure, such as it is.
+One element alone is pertinent, and must here be plainly dealt
+with.  In the course of their evangelical calling, they--or too
+many of them--grew rich.  It may be news to you that the houses of
+missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets of Honolulu.  It
+will at least be news to you, that when I returned your civil
+visit, the driver of my cab commented on the size, the taste, and
+the comfort of your home.  It would have been news certainly to
+myself, had any one told me that afternoon that I should live to
+drag such matter into print.  But you see, sir, how you degrade
+better men to your own level; and it is needful that those who are
+to judge betwixt you and me, betwixt Damien and the devil's
+advocate, should understand your letter to have been penned in a
+house which could raise, and that very justly, the envy and the
+comments of the passers-by.  I think (to employ a phrase of yours
+which I admire) it 'should be attributed' to you that you have
+never visited the scene of Damien's life and death.  If you had,
+and had recalled it, and looked about your pleasant rooms, even
+your pen perhaps would have been stayed.
+
+Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine)
+has not done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom.  When
+calamity befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended
+and took root in the Eight Islands, a quid pro quo was to be looked
+for.  To that prosperous mission, and to you, as one of its
+adornments, God had sent at last an opportunity.  I know I am
+touching here upon a nerve acutely sensitive.  I know that others
+of your colleagues look back on the inertia of your Church, and the
+intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to
+be called remorse.  I am sure it is so with yourself; I am
+persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not
+essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied in that
+performance.  You were thinking of the lost chance, the past day;
+of that which should have been conceived and was not; of the
+service due and not rendered.  Time was, said the voice in your
+ear, in your pleasant room, as you sat raging and writing; and if
+the words written were base beyond parallel, the rage, I am happy
+to repeat--it is the only compliment I shall pay you--the rage was
+almost virtuous.  But, sir, when we have failed, and another has
+succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped in; when
+we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain,
+uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and
+succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself
+afflicted in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour--the
+battle cannot be retrieved as your unhappy irritation has
+suggested.  It is a lost battle, and lost for ever.  One thing
+remained to you in your defeat--some rags of common honour; and
+these you have made haste to cast away.
+
+Common honour; not the honour of having done anything right, but
+the honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul; the honour
+of the inert:  that was what remained to you.  We are not all
+expected to be Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly,
+he may love his comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him
+for that.  But will a gentleman of your reverend profession allow
+me an example from the fields of gallantry?  When two gentlemen
+compete for the favour of a lady, and the one succeeds and the
+other is rejected, and (as will sometimes happen) matter damaging
+to the successful rival's credit reaches the ear of the defeated,
+it is held by plain men of no pretensions that his mouth is, in the
+circumstance, almost necessarily closed.  Your Church and Damien's
+were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well:  to help, to edify, to
+set divine examples.  You having (in one huge instance) failed, and
+Damien succeeded, I marvel it should not have occurred to you that
+you were doomed to silence; that when you had been outstripped in
+that high rivalry, and sat inglorious in the midst of your
+wellbeing, in your pleasant room--and Damien, crowned with glories
+and horrors, toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under the
+cliffs of Kalawao--you, the elect who would not, were the last man
+on earth to collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would
+and did.
+
+I think I see you--for I try to see you in the flesh as I write
+these sentences--I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a
+hyperbolical expression at the best.  'He had no hand in the
+reforms,' he was 'a coarse, dirty man'; these were your own words;
+and you may think it possible that I am come to support you with
+fresh evidence.  In a sense, it is even so.  Damien has been too
+much depicted with a conventional halo and conventional features;
+so drawn by men who perhaps had not the eye to remark or the pen to
+express the individual; or who perhaps were only blinded and
+silenced by generous admiration, such as I partly envy for myself--
+such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would envy on your
+bended knees.  It is the least defect of such a method of
+portraiture that it makes the path easy for the devil's advocate,
+and leaves for the misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of
+truth.  For the truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest
+weapon of the enemy.  The world, in your despite, may perhaps owe
+you something, if your letter be the means of substituting once for
+all a credible likeness for a wax abstraction.  For, if that world
+at all remember you, on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be
+named Saint, it will be in virtue of one work:  your letter to the
+Reverend H. B. Gage.
+
+You may ask on what authority I speak.  It was my inclement destiny
+to become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde.  When I
+visited the lazaretto, Damien was already in his resting grave.
+But such information as I have, I gathered on the spot in
+conversation with those who knew him well and long:  some indeed
+who revered his memory; but others who had sparred and wrangled
+with him, who beheld him with no halo, who perhaps regarded him
+with small respect, and through whose unprepared and scarcely
+partial communications the plain, human features of the man shone
+on me convincingly.  These gave me what knowledge I possess; and I
+learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely and
+sensitively understood--Kalawao, which you have never visited,
+about which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform
+yourself; for, brief as your letter is, you have found the means to
+stumble into that confession.  'LESS THAN ONE-HALF of the island,'
+you say, 'is devoted to the lepers.'  Molokai--'Molokai ahina,' the
+'grey,' lofty, and most desolate island--along all its northern
+side plunges a front of precipice into a sea of unusual profundity.
+This range of cliff is, from east to west, the true end and
+frontier of the island.  Only in one spot there projects into the
+ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy, stony, windy,
+and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater:  the whole
+bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation
+as a bracket to a wall.  With this hint you will now be able to
+pick out the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how
+much of Molokai is thus cut off between the surf and precipice,
+whether less than a half, or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a
+tenth--or, say, a twentieth; and the next time you burst into print
+you will be in a position to share with us the issue of your
+calculations.
+
+I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness
+of that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to
+behold.  You, who do not even know its situation on the map,
+probably denounce sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs
+the while in your pleasant parlour on Beretania Street.  When I was
+pulled ashore there one early morning, there sat with me in the
+boat two sisters, bidding farewell (in humble imitation of Damien)
+to the lights and joys of human life.  One of these wept silently;
+I could not withhold myself from joining her.  Had you been there,
+it is my belief that nature would have triumphed even in you; and
+as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you beheld the stairs
+crowded with abominable deformations of our common manhood, and saw
+yourself landing in the midst of such a population as only now and
+then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare--what a haggard eye
+you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards the
+house on Beretania Street!  Had you gone on; had you found every
+fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital
+and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost
+unrecognisable, but still breathing, still thinking, still
+remembering; you would have understood that life in the lazaretto
+is an ordeal from which the nerves of a man's spirit shrink, even
+as his eye quails under the brightness of the sun; you would have
+felt it was (even to-day) a pitiful place to visit and a hell to
+dwell in.  It is not the fear of possible infection.  That seems a
+little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the disgust
+of the visitor's surroundings, and the atmosphere of affliction,
+disease, and physical disgrace in which he breathes.  I do not
+think I am a man more than usually timid; but I never recall the
+days and nights I spent upon that island promontory (eight days and
+seven nights), without heartfelt thankfulness that I am somewhere
+else.  I find in my diary that I speak of my stay as a 'grinding
+experience':  I have once jotted in the margin, 'HARROWING is the
+word'; and when the Mokolii bore me at last towards the outer
+world, I kept repeating to myself, with a new conception of their
+pregnancy, those simple words of the song -
+
+
+''Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.'
+
+
+And observe:  that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement
+purged, bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital
+and the Bishop-Home excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor,
+and the missionaries, all indefatigable in their noble tasks.  It
+was a different place when Damien came there and made his great
+renunciation, and slept that first night under a tree amidst his
+rotting brethren:  alone with pestilence; and looking forward (with
+what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of dread, God only knows)
+to a lifetime of dressing sores and stumps.
+
+You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful
+abound in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and
+nurses.  I have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the
+nurses.  But there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as
+Kalawao and Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like
+every inch of length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of
+the impression; for what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum
+of human suffering by which he stands surrounded.  Lastly, no
+doctor or nurse is called upon to enter once for all the doors of
+that gehenna; they do not say farewell, they need not abandon hope,
+on its sad threshold; they but go for a time to their high calling,
+and can look forward as they go to relief, to recreation, and to
+rest.  But Damien shut-to with his own hand the doors of his own
+sepulchre.
+
+I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.
+
+A.  'Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully remembered in
+the field of his labours and sufferings.  "He was a good man, but
+very officious," says one.  Another tells me he had fallen (as
+other priests so easily do) into something of the ways and habits
+of thought of a Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise the fact,
+and the good sense to laugh at' [over] 'it.  A plain man it seems
+he was; I cannot find he was a popular.'
+
+B.  'After Ragsdale's death' [Ragsdale was a famous Luna, or
+overseer, of the unruly settlement] 'there followed a brief term of
+office by Father Damien which served only to publish the weakness
+of that noble man.  He was rough in his ways, and he had no
+control.  Authority was relaxed; Damien's life was threatened, and
+he was soon eager to resign.'
+
+C.  'Of Damien I begin to have an idea.  He seems to have been a
+man of the peasant class, certainly of the peasant type:  shrewd,
+ignorant and bigoted, yet with an open mind, and capable of
+receiving and digesting a reproof if it were bluntly administered;
+superbly generous in the least thing as well as in the greatest,
+and as ready to give his last shirt (although not without human
+grumbling) as he had been to sacrifice his life; essentially
+indiscreet and officious, which made him a troublesome colleague;
+domineering in all his ways, which made him incurably unpopular
+with the Kanakas, but yet destitute of real authority, so that his
+boys laughed at him and he must carry out his wishes by the means
+of bribes.  He learned to have a mania for doctoring; and set up
+the Kanakas against the remedies of his regular rivals:  perhaps
+(if anything matter at all in the treatment of such a disease) the
+worst thing that he did, and certainly the easiest.  The best and
+worst of the man appear very plainly in his dealings with Mr.
+Chapman's money; he had originally laid it out' [intended to lay it
+out] 'entirely for the benefit of Catholics, and even so not
+wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his error fully
+and revised the list.  The sad state of the boys' home is in part
+the result of his lack of control; in part, of his own slovenly
+ways and false ideas of hygiene.  Brother officials used to call it
+"Damien's Chinatown."  "Well," they would say, "your China-town
+keeps growing."  And he would laugh with perfect good-nature, and
+adhere to his errors with perfect obstinacy.  So much I have
+gathered of truth about this plain, noble human brother and father
+of ours; his imperfections are the traits of his face, by which we
+know him for our fellow; his martyrdom and his example nothing can
+lessen or annul; and only a person here on the spot can properly
+appreciate their greatness.'
+
+I have set down these private passages, as you perceive, without
+correction; thanks to you, the public has them in their bluntness.
+They are almost a list of the man's faults, for it is rather these
+that I was seeking:  with his virtues, with the heroic profile of
+his life, I and the world were already sufficiently acquainted.  I
+was besides a little suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no ill
+sense, but merely because Damien's admirers and disciples were the
+least likely to be critical.  I know you will be more suspicious
+still; and the facts set down above were one and all collected from
+the lips of Protestants who had opposed the father in his life.
+Yet I am strangely deceived, or they build up the image of a man,
+with all his weaknesses, essentially heroic, and alive with rugged
+honesty, generosity, and mirth.
+
+Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst sides
+of Damien's character, collected from the lips of those who had
+laboured with and (in your own phrase) 'knew the man';--though I
+question whether Damien would have said that he knew you.  Take it,
+and observe with wonder how well you were served by your gossips,
+how ill by your intelligence and sympathy; in how many points of
+fact we are at one, and how widely our appreciations vary.  There
+is something wrong here; either with you or me.  It is possible,
+for instance, that you, who seem to have so many ears in Kalawao,
+had heard of the affair of Mr. Chapman's money, and were singly
+struck by Damien's intended wrong-doing.  I was struck with that
+also, and set it fairly down; but I was struck much more by the
+fact that he had the honesty of mind to be convinced.  I may here
+tell you that it was a long business; that one of his colleagues
+sat with him late into the night, multiplying arguments and
+accusations; that the father listened as usual with 'perfect good-
+nature and perfect obstinacy'; but at the last, when he was
+persuaded--'Yes,' said he, 'I am very much obliged to you; you have
+done me a service; it would have been a theft.'  There are many
+(not Catholics merely) who require their heroes and saints to be
+infallible; to these the story will be painful; not to the true
+lovers, patrons, and servants of mankind.
+
+And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of
+those who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a
+pleasure to find and publish them; and that, having found them, you
+make haste to forget the overvailing virtues and the real success
+which had alone introduced them to your knowledge.  It is a
+dangerous frame of mind.  That you may understand how dangerous,
+and into what a situation it has already brought you, we will (if
+you please) go hand-in-hand through the different phrases of your
+letter, and candidly examine each from the point of view of its
+truth, its appositeness, and its charity.
+
+Damien was COARSE.
+
+It is very possible.  You make us sorry for the lepers, who had
+only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father.  But you,
+who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the
+lights of culture?  Or may I remind you that we have some reason to
+doubt if John the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of Peter,
+on whose career you doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no
+doubt at all he was a 'coarse, headstrong' fisherman!  Yet even in
+our Protestant Bibles Peter is called Saint.
+
+Damien was DIRTY.
+
+He was.  Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade!
+But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.
+
+Damien was HEADSTRONG.
+
+I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head
+and heart.
+
+Damien was BIGOTED.
+
+I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of me.
+But what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it as a blemish
+in a priest?  Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity
+of a peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do.
+For this, I wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only
+character, should have avoided him in life.  But the point of
+interest in Damien, which has caused him to be so much talked about
+and made him at last the subject of your pen and mine, was that, in
+him, his bigotry, his intense and narrow faith, wrought potently
+for good, and strengthened him to be one of the world's heroes and
+exemplars.
+
+Damien WAS NOT SENT TO MOLOKAI, BUT WENT THERE WITHOUT ORDERS.
+
+Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words for blame?  I
+have heard Christ, in the pulpits of our Church, held up for
+imitation on the ground that His sacrifice was voluntary.  Does Dr.
+Hyde think otherwise?
+
+Damien DID NOT STAY AT THE SETTLEMENT, ETC.
+
+It is true he was allowed many indulgences.  Am I to understand
+that you blame the father for profiting by these, or the officers
+for granting them?  In either case, it is a mighty Spartan standard
+to issue from the house on Beretania Street; and I am convinced you
+will find yourself with few supporters.
+
+Damien HAD NO HAND IN THE REFORMS, ETC.
+
+I think even you will admit that I have already been frank in my
+description of the man I am defending; but before I take you up
+upon this head, I will be franker still, and tell you that perhaps
+nowhere in the world can a man taste a more pleasurable sense of
+contrast than when he passes from Damien's 'Chinatown' at Kalawao
+to the beautiful Bishop-Home at Kalaupapa.  At this point, in my
+desire to make all fair for you, I will break my rule and adduce
+Catholic testimony.  Here is a passage from my diary about my visit
+to the Chinatown, from which you will see how it is (even now)
+regarded by its own officials:  'We went round all the dormitories,
+refectories, etc.--dark and dingy enough, with a superficial
+cleanliness, which he' [Mr. Dutton, the lay-brother] 'did not seek
+to defend.  "It is almost decent," said he; "the sisters will make
+that all right when we get them here."'  And yet I gathered it was
+already better since Damien was dead, and far better than when he
+was there alone and had his own (not always excellent) way.  I have
+now come far enough to meet you on a common ground of fact; and I
+tell you that, to a mind not prejudiced by jealousy, all the
+reforms of the lazaretto, and even those which he most vigorously
+opposed, are properly the work of Damien.  They are the evidence of
+his success; they are what his heroism provoked from the reluctant
+and the careless.  Many were before him in the field; Mr. Meyer,
+for instance, of whose faithful work we hear too little:  there
+have been many since; and some had more worldly wisdom, though none
+had more devotion, than our saint.  Before his day, even you will
+confess, they had effected little.  It was his part, by one
+striking act of martyrdom, to direct all men's eyes on that
+distressful country.  At a blow, and with the price of his life, he
+made the place illustrious and public.  And that, if you will
+consider largely, was the one reform needful; pregnant of all that
+should succeed.  It brought money; it brought (best individual
+addition of them all) the sisters; it brought supervision, for
+public opinion and public interest landed with the man at Kalawao.
+If ever any man brought reforms, and died to bring them, it was he.
+There is not a clean cup or towel in the Bishop-Home, but dirty
+Damien washed it.
+
+Damien WAS NOT A PURE MAN IN HIS RELATIONS WITH WOMEN, ETC.
+
+How do you know that?  Is this the nature of the conversation in
+that house on Beretania Street which the cabman envied, driving
+past?--racy details of the misconduct of the poor peasant priest,
+toiling under the cliffs of Molokai?
+
+Many have visited the station before me; they seem not to have
+heard the rumour.  When I was there I heard many shocking tales,
+for my informants were men speaking with the plainness of the
+laity; and I heard plenty of complaints of Damien.  Why was this
+never mentioned? and how came it to you in the retirement of your
+clerical parlour?
+
+But I must not even seem to deceive you.  This scandal, when I read
+it in your letter, was not new to me.  I had heard it once before;
+and I must tell you how.  There came to Samoa a man from Honolulu;
+he, in a public-house on the beach, volunteered the statement that
+Damien had 'contracted the disease from having connection with the
+female lepers'; and I find a joy in telling you how the report was
+welcomed in a public-house.  A man sprang to his feet; I am not at
+liberty to give his name, but from what I heard I doubt if you
+would care to have him to dinner in Beretania Street.  'You
+miserable little--' (here is a word I dare not print, it would so
+shock your ears).  'You miserable little--,' he cried, 'if the
+story were a thousand times true, can't you see you are a million
+times a lower--for daring to repeat it?'  I wish it could be told
+of you that when the report reached you in your house, perhaps
+after family worship, you had found in your soul enough holy anger
+to receive it with the same expressions; ay, even with that one
+which I dare not print; it would not need to have been blotted
+away, like Uncle Toby's oath, by the tears of the recording angel;
+it would have been counted to you for your brightest righteousness.
+But you have deliberately chosen the part of the man from Honolulu,
+and you have played it with improvements of your own.  The man from
+Honolulu--miserable, leering creature--communicated the tale to a
+rude knot of beach-combing drinkers in a public-house, where (I
+will so far agree with your temperance opinions) man is not always
+at his noblest; and the man from Honolulu had himself been
+drinking--drinking, we may charitably fancy, to excess.  It was to
+your 'Dear Brother, the Reverend H. B. Gage,' that you chose to
+communicate the sickening story; and the blue ribbon which adorns
+your portly bosom forbids me to allow you the extenuating plea that
+you were drunk when it was done.  Your 'dear brother'--a brother
+indeed--made haste to deliver up your letter (as a means of grace,
+perhaps) to the religious papers; where, after many months, I found
+and read and wondered at it; and whence I have now reproduced it
+for the wonder of others.  And you and your dear brother have, by
+this cycle of operations, built up a contrast very edifying to
+examine in detail.  The man whom you would not care to have to
+dinner, on the one side; on the other, the Reverend Dr. Hyde and
+the Reverend H. B. Gage:  the Apia bar-room, the Honolulu manse.
+
+But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men;
+and to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true.
+I will suppose--and God forgive me for supposing it--that Damien
+faltered and stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose
+that, in the horror of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of
+incipient disease, he, who was doing so much more than he had
+sworn, failed in the letter of his priestly oath--he, who was so
+much a better man than either you or me, who did what we have never
+dreamed of daring--he too tasted of our common frailty.  'O, Iago,
+the pity of it!'  The least tender should be moved to tears; the
+most incredulous to prayer.  And all that you could do was to pen
+your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage!
+
+Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of
+your own heart?  I will try yet once again to make it clearer.  You
+had a father:  suppose this tale were about him, and some informant
+brought it to you, proof in hand:  I am not making too high an
+estimate of your emotional nature when I suppose you would regret
+the circumstance? that you would feel the tale of frailty the more
+keenly since it shamed the author of your days? and that the last
+thing you would do would be to publish it in the religious press?
+Well, the man who tried to do what Damien did, is my father, and
+the father of the man in the Apia bar, and the father of all who
+love goodness; and he was your father too, if God had given you
+grace to see it.
+
+
+
+
+THE PENTLAND RISING
+A PAGE OF HISTORY
+1666
+
+
+
+
+'A cloud of witnesses lyes here,
+Who for Christ's interest did appear.'
+Inscription on Battlefield at Rullion Green.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT
+
+
+
+'Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see,
+This tomb doth show for what some men did die.'
+Monument, Greyfriars' Churchyard, Edinburgh,
+1661-1668. {2a}
+
+
+Two hundred years ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the memory
+whereof has been in great measure lost or obscured by the deep
+tragedies which followed it.  It is, as it were, the evening of the
+night of persecution--a sort of twilight, dark indeed to us, but
+light as the noonday when compared with the midnight gloom which
+followed.  This fact, of its being the very threshold of
+persecution, lends it, however, an additional interest.
+
+The prejudices of the people against Episcopacy were 'out of
+measure increased,' says Bishop Burnet, 'by the new incumbents who
+were put in the places of the ejected preachers, and were generally
+very mean and despicable in all respects.  They were the worst
+preachers I ever heard; they were ignorant to a reproach; and many
+of them were openly vicious.  They . . . were indeed the dreg and
+refuse of the northern parts.  Those of them who arose above
+contempt or scandal were men of such violent tempers that they were
+as much hated as the others were despised.' {2b}  It was little to
+be wondered at, from this account that the country-folk refused to
+go to the parish church, and chose rather to listen to outed
+ministers in the fields.  But this was not to be allowed, and their
+persecutors at last fell on the method of calling a roll of the
+parishioners' names every Sabbath, and marking a fine of twenty
+shillings Scots to the name of each absenter.  In this way very
+large debts were incurred by persons altogether unable to pay.
+Besides this, landlords were fined for their tenants' absences,
+tenants for their landlords', masters for their servants', servants
+for their masters', even though they themselves were perfectly
+regular in their attendance.  And as the curates were allowed to
+fine with the sanction of any common soldier, it may be imagined
+that often the pretexts were neither very sufficient nor well
+proven.
+
+When the fines could not be paid at once, Bibles, clothes, and
+household utensils were seized upon, or a number of soldiers,
+proportionate to his wealth, were quartered on the offender.  The
+coarse and drunken privates filled the houses with woe; snatched
+the bread from the children to feed their dogs; shocked the
+principles, scorned the scruples, and blasphemed the religion of
+their humble hosts; and when they had reduced them to destitution,
+sold the furniture, and burned down the roof-tree which was
+consecrated to the peasants by the name of Home.  For all this
+attention each of these soldiers received from his unwilling
+landlord a certain sum of money per day--three shillings sterling,
+according to Naphtali.  And frequently they were forced to pay
+quartering money for more men than were in reality 'cessed on
+them.'  At that time it was no strange thing to behold a strong man
+begging for money to pay his fines, and many others who were deep
+in arrears, or who had attracted attention in some other way, were
+forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge from arrest and
+imprisonment among the wild mosses of the uplands. {2c}
+
+One example in particular we may cite:
+
+John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was,
+unfortunately for himself, a Nonconformist.  First he was fined in
+four hundred pounds Scots, and then through cessing he lost
+nineteen hundred and ninety-three pounds Scots.  He was next
+obliged to leave his house and flee from place to place, during
+which wanderings he lost his horse.  His wife and children were
+turned out of doors, and then his tenants were fined till they too
+were almost ruined.  As a final stroke, they drove away all his
+cattle to Glasgow and sold them. {2d}  Surely it was time that
+something were done to alleviate so much sorrow, to overthrow such
+tyranny.
+
+About this time too there arrived in Galloway a person calling
+himself Captain Andrew Gray, and advising the people to revolt.  He
+displayed some documents purporting to be from the northern
+Covenanters, and stating that they were prepared to join in any
+enterprise commenced by their southern brethren.  The leader of the
+persecutors was Sir James Turner, an officer afterwards degraded
+for his share in the matter.  'He was naturally fierce, but was mad
+when he was drunk, and that was very often,' said Bishop Burnet.
+'He was a learned man, but had always been in armies, and knew no
+other rule but to obey orders.  He told me he had no regard to any
+law, but acted, as he was commanded, in a military way.' {2e}
+
+This was the state of matters, when an outrage was committed which
+gave spirit and determination to the oppressed countrymen, lit the
+flame of insubordination, and for the time at least recoiled on
+those who perpetrated it with redoubled force.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE BEGINNING
+
+
+
+I love no warres,
+I love no jarres,
+Nor strife's fire.
+May discord cease,
+Let's live in peace:
+This I desire.
+
+If it must be
+Warre we must see
+(So fates conspire),
+May we not feel
+The force of steel:
+This I desire.
+
+T. JACKSON, 1651 {3a}
+
+
+Upon Tuesday, November 13th, 1666, Corporal George Deanes and three
+other soldiers set upon an old man in the clachan of Dalry and
+demanded the payment of his fines.  On the old man's refusing to
+pay, they forced a large party of his neighbours to go with them
+and thresh his corn.  The field was a certain distance out of the
+clachan, and four persons, disguised as countrymen, who had been
+out on the moors all night, met this mournful drove of slaves,
+compelled by the four soldiers to work for the ruin of their
+friend.  However, chided to the bone by their night on the hills,
+and worn out by want of food, they proceeded to the village inn to
+refresh themselves.  Suddenly some people rushed into the room
+where they were sitting, and told them that the soldiers were about
+to roast the old man, naked, on his own girdle.  This was too much
+for them to stand, and they repaired immediately to the scene of
+this gross outrage, and at first merely requested that the captive
+should be released.  On the refusal of the two soldiers who were in
+the front room, high words were given and taken on both sides, and
+the other two rushed forth from an adjoining chamber and made at
+the countrymen with drawn swords.  One of the latter, John M'Lellan
+of Barscob, drew a pistol and shot the corporal in the body.  The
+pieces of tobacco-pipe with which it was loaded, to the number of
+ten at least, entered him, and he was so much disturbed that he
+never appears to have recovered, for we find long afterwards a
+petition to the Privy Council requesting a pension for him.  The
+other soldiers then laid down their arms, the old man was rescued,
+and the rebellion was commenced. {3b}
+
+And now we must turn to Sir James Turner's memoirs of himself; for,
+strange to say, this extraordinary man was remarkably fond of
+literary composition, and wrote, besides the amusing account of his
+own adventures just mentioned, a large number of essays and short
+biographies, and a work on war, entitled Pallas Armata.  The
+following are some of the shorter pieces 'Magick,' 'Friendship,'
+'Imprisonment,' 'Anger,' 'Revenge,' 'Duells,' 'Cruelty,' 'A Defence
+of some of the Ceremonies of the English Liturgie--to wit--Bowing
+at the Name of Jesus, The frequent repetition of the Lord's Prayer
+and Good Lord deliver us, Of the Doxologie, Of Surplesses,
+Rotchets, Canonnicall Coats,' etc.  From what we know of his
+character we should expect 'Anger' and 'Cruelty' to be very full
+and instructive.  But what earthly right he had to meddle with
+ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to see.
+
+Upon the 12th of the month he had received some information
+concerning Gray's proceedings, but as it was excessively indefinite
+in its character, he paid no attention to it.  On the evening of
+the 14th, Corporal Deanes was brought into Dumfries, who affirmed
+stoutly that he had been shot while refusing to sign the Covenant--
+a story rendered singularly unlikely by the after conduct of the
+rebels.  Sir James instantly dispatched orders to the cessed
+soldiers either to come to Dumfries or meet him on the way to
+Dalry, and commanded the thirteen or fourteen men in the town with
+him to come at nine next morning to his lodging for supplies.
+
+On the morning of Thursday the rebels arrived at Dumfries with 50
+horse and 150 foot.  Neilson of Corsack, and Gray, who commanded,
+with a considerable troop, entered the town, and surrounded Sir
+James Turner's lodging.  Though it was between eight and nine
+o'clock, that worthy, being unwell, was still in bed, but rose at
+once and went to the window.
+
+Neilson and some others cried, 'You may have fair quarter.'
+
+'I need no quarter,' replied Sir James; 'nor can I be a prisoner,
+seeing there is no war declared.'  On being told, however, that he
+must either be a prisoner or die, he came down, and went into the
+street in his night-shirt.  Here Gray showed himself very desirous
+of killing him, but he was overruled by Corsack.  However, he was
+taken away a prisoner, Captain Gray mounting him on his own horse,
+though, as Turner naively remarks, 'there was good reason for it,
+for he mounted himself on a farre better one of mine.'  A large
+coffer containing his clothes and money, together with all his
+papers, were taken away by the rebels.  They robbed Master
+Chalmers, the Episcopalian minister of Dumfries, of his horse,
+drank the King's health at the market cross, and then left
+Dumfries. {3c}
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE MARCH OF THE REBELS
+
+
+
+'Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads,
+At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads;
+Our right hands stood at Lanark, these we want,
+Because with them we signed the Covenant.'
+Epitaph on a Tombstone at Hamilton. {4a}
+
+
+On Friday the 16th, Bailie Irvine of Dumfries came to the Council
+at Edinburgh, and gave information concerning this 'horrid
+rebellion.'  In the absence of Rothes, Sharpe presided--much to the
+wrath of some members; and as he imagined his own safety
+endangered, his measures were most energetic.  Dalzell was ordered
+away to the West, the guards round the city were doubled, officers
+and soldiers were forced to take the oath of allegiance, and all
+lodgers were commanded to give in their names.  Sharpe, surrounded
+with all these guards and precautions, trembled--trembled as he
+trembled when the avengers of blood drew him from his chariot on
+Magus Muir,--for he knew how he had sold his trust, how he had
+betrayed his charge, and he felt that against him must their
+chiefest hatred be directed, against him their direst thunder-bolts
+be forged.  But even in his fear the apostate Presbyterian was
+unrelenting, unpityingly harsh; he published in his manifesto no
+promise of pardon, no inducement to submission.  He said, 'If you
+submit not you must die,' but never added, 'If you submit you may
+live!' {4b}
+
+Meantime the insurgents proceeded on their way.  At Carsphairn they
+were deserted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless in a fit of oblivion,
+neglected to leave behind him the coffer containing Sir James's
+money.  Who he was is a mystery, unsolved by any historian; his
+papers were evidently forgeries--that, and his final flight, appear
+to indicate that he was an agent of the Royalists, for either the
+King or the Duke of York was heard to say, 'That, if he might have
+his wish, he would have them all turn rebels and go to arms.' {4c}
+
+Upon the 18th day of the month they left Carsphairn and marched
+onwards.
+
+Turner was always lodged by his captors at a good inn, frequently
+at the best of which their halting-place could boast.  Here many
+visits were paid to him by the ministers and officers of the
+insurgent force.  In his description of these interviews he
+displays a vein of satiric severity, admitting any kindness that
+was done to him with some qualifying souvenir of former harshness,
+and gloating over any injury, mistake, or folly, which it was his
+chance to suffer or to hear.  He appears, notwithstanding all this,
+to have been on pretty good terms with his cruel 'phanaticks,' as
+the following extract sufficiently proves:
+
+'Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard, and
+order given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be preached
+by Mr. Welch.  Maxwell of Morith, and Major M'Cullough invited me
+to heare "that phanatick sermon" (for soe they merrilie called it).
+They said that preaching might prove an effectual meane to turne
+me, which they heartilie wished.  I answered to them that I was
+under guards, and that if they intended to heare that sermon, it
+was probable I might likewise, for it was not like my guards wold
+goe to church and leave me alone at my lodgeings.  Bot to what they
+said of my conversion, I said it wold be hard to turne a Turner.
+Bot because I founde them in a merrie humour, I said, if I did not
+come to heare Mr. Welch preach, then they might fine me in fortie
+shillings Scots, which was double the suome of what I had exacted
+from the phanatics.' {4d}
+
+This took place at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month.  The
+following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and
+certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed
+with wheat, and how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged
+in this movement; nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present
+with impartiality all the alleged facts to the reader:
+
+'Towards the evening Mr. Robinsone and Mr. Crukshank gaue me a
+visite; I called for some ale purposelie to heare one of them
+blesse it.  It fell Mr. Robinsone to seeke the blessing, who said
+one of the most bombastick graces that ever I heard in my life.  He
+summoned God Allmightie very imperiouslie to be their secondarie
+(for that was his language).  "And if," said he, "thou wilt not be
+our Secondarie, we will not fight for thee at all, for it is not
+our cause bot thy cause; and if thou wilt not fight for our cause
+and thy oune cause, then we are not obliged to fight for it.  They
+say," said he, "that Dukes, Earles, and Lords are coming with the
+King's General against us, bot they shall be nothing bot a
+threshing to us."  This grace did more fullie satisfie me of the
+folly and injustice of their cause, then the ale did quench my
+thirst.' {4e}
+
+Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside alehouse, or
+in some convenient park, where Colonel Wallace, who had now taken
+the command, would review the horse and foot, during which time
+Turner was sent either into the alehouse or round the shoulder of
+the hill, to prevent him from seeing the disorders which were
+likely to arise.  He was, at last, on the 25th day of the month,
+between Douglas and Lanark, permitted to behold their evolutions.
+'I found their horse did consist of four hundreth and fortie, and
+the foot of five hundreth and upwards. . . . The horsemen were
+armed for most part with suord and pistoll, some onlie with suord.
+The foot with musket, pike, sith (scythe), forke, and suord; and
+some with suords great and long.'  He admired much the proficiency
+of their cavalry, and marvelled how they had attained to it in so
+short a time. {4f}
+
+At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this great
+wapinshaw, they were charged--awful picture of depravity!--with the
+theft of a silver spoon and a nightgown.  Could it be expected that
+while the whole country swarmed with robbers of every description,
+such a rare opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues--that
+among a thousand men, even though fighting for religion, there
+should not be one Achan in the camp?  At Lanark a declaration was
+drawn up and signed by the chief rebels.  In it occurs the
+following:
+
+'The just sense whereof '--the sufferings of the country--'made us
+choose, rather to betake ourselves to the fields for self-defence,
+than to stay at home, burdened daily with the calamities of others,
+and tortured with the fears of our own approaching misery.' {4g}
+
+The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony the
+epitaph at the head of this chapter seems to refer.
+
+A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to
+Bathgate, where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied
+army stopped.  But at twelve o'clock the cry, which served them for
+a trumpet, of 'Horse! horse!' and 'Mount the prisoner!' resounded
+through the night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from their
+well-earned rest to toil onwards in their march.  The wind howled
+fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended.
+Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the
+knees in mire, onward they marched to destruction.  One by one the
+weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the
+rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to
+hide till daybreak.  One by one at first, then in gradually
+increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen, whole troops
+left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the
+ferocity of the tempest.  To right and left nought could be
+descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of
+their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky night, plodding
+onwards through the sinking moss.  Those who kept together--a
+miserable few--often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their
+lagging comrades to overtake them.  Then onward they went again,
+still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward
+again, through the wind, and the rain, and the darkness--onward to
+their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at Edinburgh.  It was
+calculated that they lost one half of their army on that disastrous
+night-march.
+
+Next night they reached the village of Colinton, four miles from
+Edinburgh, where they halted for the last time. {4h}
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--RULLION GREEN
+
+
+
+'From Covenanters with uplifted hands,
+From Remonstrators with associate bands,
+Good Lord, deliver us!'
+Royalist Rhyme, KIRKTON, p. 127.
+
+
+Late on the fourth night of November, exactly twenty-four days
+before Rullion Green, Richard and George Chaplain, merchants in
+Haddington, beheld four men, clad like West-country Whigamores,
+standing round some object on the ground.  It was at the two-mile
+cross, and within that distance from their homes.  At last, to
+their horror, they discovered that the recumbent figure was a livid
+corpse, swathed in a blood-stained winding-sheet. {5a}  Many
+thought that this apparition was a portent of the deaths connected
+with the Pentland Rising.
+
+On the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of November 1666, they left
+Colinton and marched to Rullion Green.  There they arrived about
+sunset.  The position was a strong one.  On the summit of a bare,
+heathery spur of the Pentlands are two hillocks, and between them
+lies a narrow band of flat marshy ground.  On the highest of the
+two mounds--that nearest the Pentlands, and on the left hand of the
+main body--was the greater part of the cavalry, under Major
+Learmont; on the other Barscob and the Galloway gentlemen; and in
+the centre Colonel Wallace and the weak, half-armed infantry.
+Their position was further strengthened by the depth of the valley
+below, and the deep chasm-like course of the Rullion Burn.
+
+The sun, going down behind the Pentlands, cast golden lights and
+blue shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the
+rich plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless,
+snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the
+distance.  To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded
+amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the course of the Esk, near
+Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge; the broad, brown
+expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness in the
+south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills.  In sooth, that
+scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was cast over that
+peaceful evening scene from the spot where the rebels awaited their
+defeat; and when the fight was over, many a noble fellow lifted his
+head from the blood-stained heather to strive with darkening
+eyeballs to behold that landscape, over which, as over his life and
+his cause, the shadows of night and of gloom were falling and
+thickening.
+
+It was while waiting on this spot that the fear-inspiring cry was
+raised:  'The enemy!  Here come the enemy!'
+
+Unwilling to believe their own doom--for our insurgents still hoped
+for success in some negotiations for peace which had been carried
+on at Colinton--they called out, 'They are some of our own.'
+
+'They are too blacke ' (i.e. numerous), 'fie! fie! for ground to
+draw up on,' cried Wallace, fully realising the want of space for
+his men, and proving that it was not till after this time that his
+forces were finally arranged. {5b}
+
+First of all the battle was commenced by fifty Royalist horse sent
+obliquely across the hill to attack the left wing of the rebels.
+An equal number of Learmont's men met them, and, after a struggle,
+drove them back.  The course of the Rullion Burn prevented almost
+all pursuit, and Wallace, on perceiving it, dispatched a body of
+foot to occupy both the burn and some ruined sheep-walls on the
+farther side.
+
+Dalzell changed his position, and drew up his army at the foot of
+the hill, on the top of which were his foes.  He then dispatched a
+mingled body of infantry and cavalry to attack Wallace's outpost,
+but they also were driven back.  A third charge produced a still
+more disastrous effect, for Dalzell had to check the pursuit of his
+men by a reinforcement.
+
+These repeated checks bred a panic in the Lieutenant-General's
+ranks, for several of his men flung down their arms.  Urged by such
+fatal symptoms, and by the approaching night, he deployed his men,
+and closed in overwhelming numbers on the centre and right flank of
+the insurgent army.  In the increasing twilight the burning matches
+of the firelocks, shimmering on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent
+to the approaching army a picturesque effect, like a huge, many-
+armed giant breathing flame into the darkness.
+
+Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch and Semple cried aloud, 'The
+God of Jacob! The God of Jacob!' and prayed with uplifted hands for
+victory. {5c}
+
+But still the Royalist troops closed in.
+
+Captain John Paton was observed by Dalzell, who determined to
+capture him with his own hands.  Accordingly he charged forward,
+presenting his pistols.  Paton fired, but the balls hopped off
+Dalzell's buff coat and fell into his boot.  With the superstition
+peculiar to his age, the Nonconformist concluded that his adversary
+was rendered bullet-proof by enchantment, and, pulling some small
+silver coins from his pocket, charged his pistol therewith.
+Dalzell, seeing this, and supposing, it is likely, that Paton was
+putting in larger balls, hid behind his servant, who was killed.
+{5d}
+
+Meantime the outposts were forced, and the army of Wallace was
+enveloped in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor--tightening,
+closing, crushing every semblance of life from the victim enclosed
+in his toils.  The flanking parties of horse were forced in upon
+the centre, and though, as even Turner grants, they fought with
+desperation, a general flight was the result.
+
+But when they fell there was none to sing their coronach or wail
+the death-wail over them.  Those who sacrificed themselves for the
+peace, the liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen,
+lay bleaching in the field of death for long, and when at last they
+were buried by charity, the peasants dug up their bodies,
+desecrated their graves, and cast them once more upon the open
+heath for the sorry value of their winding-sheets!
+
+
+Inscription on stone at Rullion Green:
+
+
+HERE
+AND NEAR TO
+THIS PLACE LYES THE
+REVEREND MR JOHN CROOKSHANK
+AND MR ANDREW MCCORMICK
+MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL AND
+ABOUT FIFTY OTHER TRUE COVENANTED
+PRESBYTERIANS WHO WERE
+KILLED IN THIS PLACE IN THEIR OWN
+INOCENT SELF DEFENCE AND DEFFENCE
+OF THE COVENANTED WORK OF
+REFORMATION BY THOMAS DALZEEL OF BINS
+UPON THE 28 OF NOVEMBER
+1666.  REV. 12. 11. ERECTED
+SEPT. 28 1738.
+
+
+Back of stone:
+
+
+A Cloud of Witnesses lyes here,
+Who for Christ's Interest did appear,
+For to restore true Liberty,
+O'erturned then by tyranny.
+And by proud Prelats who did Rage
+Against the Lord's Own heritage.
+They sacrificed were for the laws
+Of Christ their king, his noble cause.
+These heroes fought with great renown;
+By falling got the Martyr's crown. {5e}
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--A RECORD OF BLOOD
+
+
+
+'They cut his hands ere he was dead,
+And after that struck of his head.
+His blood under the altar cries
+For vengeance on Christ's enemies.'
+Epitaph on Tomb at Longcross of Clermont. {6a}
+
+
+Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow,
+on the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and
+the march of many feet beneath his window.  He gazed out.  With
+colours flying, and with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious,
+entered Edinburgh.  But his banners were dyed in blood, and a band
+of prisoners were marched within his ranks.  The old man knew it
+all.  That martial and triumphant strain was the death-knell of his
+friends and of their cause, the rust-hued spots upon the flags were
+the tokens of their courage and their death, and the prisoners were
+the miserable remnant spared from death in battle to die upon the
+scaffold.  Poor old man! he had outlived all joy.  Had he lived
+longer he would have seen increasing torment and increasing woe; he
+would have seen the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast a more
+than midnight darkness over his native hills, and have fallen a
+victim to those bloody persecutions which, later, sent their red
+memorials to the sea by many a burn.  By a merciful Providence all
+this was spared to him--he fell beneath the first blow; and ere
+four days had passed since Rullion Green, the aged minister of God
+was gathered to is fathers. {6b}
+
+When Sharpe first heard of the rebellion, he applied to Sir
+Alexander Ramsay, the Provost, for soldiers to guard his house.
+Disliking their occupation, the soldiers gave him an ugly time of
+it.  All the night through they kept up a continuous series of
+'alarms and incursions,' 'cries of "Stand!" "Give fire!"' etc.,
+which forced the prelate to flee to the Castle in the morning,
+hoping there to find the rest which was denied him at home. {6c}
+Now, however, when all danger to himself was past, Sharpe came out
+in his true colours, and scant was the justice likely to be shown
+to the foes of Scottish Episcopacy when the Primate was by.  The
+prisoners were lodged in Haddo's Hole, a part of St. Giles'
+Cathedral, where, by the kindness of Bishop Wishart, to his credit
+be it spoken, they were amply supplied with food. {6d}
+
+Some people urged, in the Council, that the promise of quarter
+which had been given on the field of battle should protect the
+lives of the miserable men.  Sir John Gilmoure, the greatest
+lawyer, gave no opinion--certainly a suggestive circumstance--but
+Lord Lee declared that this would not interfere with their legal
+trial, 'so to bloody executions they went.' {6e}  To the number of
+thirty they were condemned and executed; while two of them, Hugh
+M'Kail, a young minister, and Neilson of Corsack, were tortured
+with the boots.
+
+The goods of those who perished were confiscated, and their bodies
+were dismembered and distributed to different parts of the country;
+'the heads of Major M'Culloch and the two Gordons,' it was
+resolved, says Kirkton, 'should be pitched on the gate of
+Kirkcudbright; the two Hamiltons and Strong's head should be
+affixed at Hamilton, and Captain Arnot's sett on the Watter Gate at
+Edinburgh.  The armes of all the ten, because they hade with
+uplifted hands renewed the Covenant at Lanark, were sent to the
+people of that town to expiate that crime, by placing these arms on
+the top of the prison.' {6f}  Among these was John Neilson, the
+Laird of Corsack, who saved Turner's life at Dumfries; in return
+for which service Sir James attempted, though without success, to
+get the poor man reprieved.  One of the condemned died of his
+wounds between the day of condemnation and the day of execution.  '
+None of them,' says Kirkton, 'would save their life by taking the
+declaration and renouncing the Covenant, though it was offered to
+them. . . . But never men died in Scotland so much lamented by the
+people, not only spectators, but those in the country.  When
+Knockbreck and his brother were turned over, they clasped each
+other in their armes, and so endured the pangs of death.  When
+Humphrey Colquhoun died, he spoke not like an ordinary citizen, but
+like a heavenly minister, relating his comfortable Christian
+experiences, and called for his Bible, and laid it on his wounded
+arm, and read John iii. 8, and spoke upon it to the admiration of
+all.  But most of all, when Mr. M'Kail died, there was such a
+lamentation as was never known in Scotland before; not one dry
+cheek upon all the street, or in all the numberless windows in the
+mercate place.' {6g}
+
+The following passage from this speech speaks for itself and its
+author:
+
+'Hereafter I will not talk with flesh and blood, nor think on the
+world's consolations.  Farewell to all my friends, whose company
+hath been refreshful to me in my pilgrimage.  I have done with the
+light of the sun and the moon; welcome eternal light, eternal life,
+everlasting love, everlasting praise, everlasting glory.  Praise to
+Him that sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb for ever!  Bless the
+Lord, O my soul, that hath pardoned all my iniquities in the blood
+of His Son, and healed all my diseases.  Bless Him, O all ye His
+angels that excel in strength, ye ministers of His that do His
+pleasure.  Bless the Lord, O my soul!' {6h}
+
+After having ascended the gallows ladder he again broke forth in
+the following words of touching eloquence:  'And now I leave off to
+speak any more to creatures, and begin my intercourse with God,
+which shall never be broken off.  Farewell father and mother,
+friends and relations!  Farewell the world and all delights!
+Farewell meat and drink!  Farewell sun, moon, and stars!--Welcome
+God and Father!  Welcome sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the
+new covenant!  Welcome blessed Spirit of grace and God of all
+consolation!  Welcome glory!  Welcome eternal life!  Welcome
+Death!' {6i}
+
+At Glasgow, too, where some were executed, they caused the soldiers
+to beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their closing ears.
+Hideous refinement of revenge!  Even the last words which drop from
+the lips of a dying man--words surely the most sincere and the most
+unbiassed which mortal mouth can utter--even these were looked upon
+as poisoned and as poisonous.  'Drown their last accents,' was the
+cry, 'lest they should lead the crowd to take their part, or at the
+least to mourn their doom!' {6j}  But, after all, perhaps it was
+more merciful than one would think--unintentionally so, of course;
+perhaps the storm of harsh and fiercely jubilant noises, the
+clanging of trumpets, the rattling of drums, and the hootings and
+jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the last they heard on
+earth, might, when the mortal fight was over, when the river of
+death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the
+angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached.
+
+Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the
+peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian,
+pursued, captured, plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives
+who fell in their way.  One strange story have we of these times of
+blood and persecution:  Kirkton the historian and popular tradition
+tell us alike of a flame which often would arise from the grave, in
+a moss near Carnwath, of some of those poor rebels:  of how it
+crept along the ground; of how it covered the house of their
+murderer; and of how it scared him with its lurid glare.
+
+Hear Daniel Defoe:  {6k}
+
+'If the poor people were by these insupportable violences made
+desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild despair, who
+can justly reflect on them when they read in the Word of God "That
+oppression makes a wise man mad"?  And therefore were there no
+other original of the insurrection known by the name of the Rising
+of Pentland, it was nothing but what the intolerable oppressions of
+those times might have justified to all the world, nature having
+dictated to all people a right of defence when illegally and
+arbitrarily attacked in a manner not justifiable either by laws of
+nature, the laws of God, or the laws of the country.'
+
+Bear this remonstrance of Defoe's in mind, and though it is the
+fashion of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and to contemn,
+the noble band of Covenanters--though the bitter laugh at their
+old-world religious views, the curl of the lip at their merits, and
+the chilling silence on their bravery and their determination, are
+but too rife through all society--be charitable to what was evil
+and honest to what was good about the Pentland insurgents, who
+fought for life and liberty, for country and religion, on the 28th
+of November 1666, now just two hundred years ago.
+
+
+EDINBURGH, 28th November 1866.
+
+
+
+
+THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW
+
+
+
+History is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are told, no
+doubt correctly; and rival historians expose each other's blunders
+with gratification.  Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of
+the period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that
+in which we live.  The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a
+thousand reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and
+sheer mass and multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by
+reason of an insidious shifting of landmarks.  Parties and ideas
+continually move, but not by measurable marches on a stable course;
+the political soil itself steals forth by imperceptible degrees,
+like a travelling glacier, carrying on its bosom not only political
+parties but their flag-posts and cantonments; so that what appears
+to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a flying island of
+Laputa.  It is for this reason in particular that we are all
+becoming Socialists without knowing it; by which I would not in the
+least refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing
+supporters, sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of
+our individualist Jericho--but to the stealthy change that has come
+over the spirit of Englishmen and English legislation.  A little
+while ago, and we were still for liberty; 'crowd a few more
+thousands on the bench of Government,' we seemed to cry; 'keep her
+head direct on liberty, and we cannot help but come to port.'  This
+is over; laisser faire declines in favour; our legislation grows
+authoritative, grows philanthropical, bristles with new duties and
+new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, who now begin,
+note-book in hand, to darken the face of England.  It may be right
+or wrong, we are not trying that; but one thing it is beyond doubt:
+it is Socialism in action, and the strange thing is that we
+scarcely know it.
+
+Liberty has served us a long while, and it may be time to seek new
+altars.  Like all other principles, she has been proved to be self-
+exclusive in the long run.  She has taken wages besides (like all
+other virtues) and dutifully served Mammon; so that many things we
+were accustomed to admire as the benefits of freedom and common to
+all were truly benefits of wealth, and took their value from our
+neighbours' poverty.  A few shocks of logic, a few disclosures (in
+the journalistic phrase) of what the freedom of manufacturers,
+landlords, or shipowners may imply for operatives, tenants, or
+seamen, and we not unnaturally begin to turn to that other pole of
+hope, beneficent tyranny.  Freedom, to be desirable, involves
+kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the free; but the free man
+as we have seen him in action has been, as of yore, only the master
+of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-
+taught, ill-housed, insolently treated, and driven to their mines
+and workshops by the lash of famine.  So much, in other men's
+affairs, we have begun to see clearly; we have begun to despair of
+virtue in these other men, and from our seat in Parliament begin to
+discharge upon them, thick as arrows, the host of our inspectors.
+The landlord has long shaken his head over the manufacturer; those
+who do business on land have lost all trust in the virtues of the
+shipowner; the professions look askance upon the retail traders and
+have even started their co-operative stores to ruin them; and from
+out the smoke-wreaths of Birmingham a finger has begun to write
+upon the wall the condemnation of the landlord.  Thus, piece by
+piece, do we condemn each other, and yet not perceive the
+conclusion, that our whole estate is somewhat damnable.  Thus,
+piece by piece, each acting against his neighbour, each sawing away
+the branch on which some other interest is seated, do we apply in
+detail our Socialistic remedies, and yet not perceive that we are
+all labouring together to bring in Socialism at large.  A tendency
+so stupid and so selfish is like to prove invincible; and if
+Socialism be at all a practicable rule of life, there is every
+chance that our grand-children will see the day and taste the
+pleasures of existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any
+previous human polity.  And this not in the least because of the
+voice of Mr. Hyndman or the horns of his followers; but by the mere
+glacier movement of the political soil, bearing forward on its
+bosom, apparently undisturbed, the proud camps of Whig and Tory.
+If Mr. Hyndman were a man of keen humour, which is far from my
+conception of his character, he might rest from his troubling and
+look on:  the walls of Jericho begin already to crumble and
+dissolve.  That great servile war, the Armageddon of money and
+numbers, to which we looked forward when young, becomes more and
+more unlikely; and we may rather look to see a peaceable and
+blindfold evolution, the work of dull men immersed in political
+tactics and dead to political results.
+
+The principal scene of this comedy lies, of course, in the House of
+Commons; it is there, besides, that the details of this new
+evolution (if it proceed) will fall to be decided; so that the
+state of Parliament is not only diagnostic of the present but
+fatefully prophetic of the future.  Well, we all know what
+Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.  We may pardon it some
+faults, indeed, on the ground of Irish obstruction--a bitter trial,
+which it supports with notable good humour.  But the excuse is
+merely local; it cannot apply to similar bodies in America and
+France; and what are we to say of these?  President Cleveland's
+letter may serve as a picture of the one; a glance at almost any
+paper will convince us of the weakness of the other.  Decay appears
+to have seized on the organ of popular government in every land;
+and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to it, as to an
+oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs to be
+unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself our
+frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our own
+virtues.  For that, in few words, is the case.  We cannot trust
+ourselves to behave with decency; we cannot trust our consciences;
+and the remedy proposed is to elect a round number of our
+neighbours, pretty much at random, and say to these:  'Be ye our
+conscience; make laws so wise, and continue from year to year to
+administer them so wisely, that they shall save us from ourselves
+and make us righteous and happy, world without end.  Amen.'  And
+who can look twice at the British Parliament and then seriously
+bring it such a task?  I am not advancing this as an argument
+against Socialism:  once again, nothing is further from my mind.
+There are great truths in Socialism, or no one, not even Mr.
+Hyndman, would be found to hold it; and if it came, and did one-
+tenth part of what it offers, I for one should make it welcome.
+But if it is to come, we may as well have some notion of what it
+will be like; and the first thing to grasp is that our new polity
+will be designed and administered (to put it courteously) with
+something short of inspiration.  It will be made, or will grow, in
+a human parliament; and the one thing that will not very hugely
+change is human nature.  The Anarchists think otherwise, from which
+it is only plain that they have not carried to the study of history
+the lamp of human sympathy.
+
+Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon-load of laws, what
+headmarks must we look for in the life?  We chafe a good deal at
+that excellent thing, the income-tax, because it brings into our
+affairs the prying fingers, and exposes us to the tart words, of
+the official.  The official, in all degrees, is already something
+of a terror to many of us.  I would not willingly have to do with
+even a police-constable in any other spirit than that of kindness.
+I still remember in my dreams the eye-glass of a certain attache at
+a certain embassy--an eyeglass that was a standing indignity to all
+on whom it looked; and my next most disagreeable remembrance is of
+a bracing, Republican postman in the city of San Francisco.  I
+lived in that city among working folk, and what my neighbours
+accepted at the postman's hands--nay, what I took from him myself--
+it is still distasteful to recall.  The bourgeois, residing in the
+upper parts of society, has but few opportunities of tasting this
+peculiar bowl; but about the income-tax, as I have said, or perhaps
+about a patent, or in the halls of an embassy at the hands of my
+friend of the eye-glass, he occasionally sets his lips to it; and
+he may thus imagine (if he has that faculty of imagination, without
+which most faculties are void) how it tastes to his poorer
+neighbours, who must drain it to the dregs.  In every contact with
+authority, with their employer, with the police, with the School
+Board officer, in the hospital, or in the workhouse, they have
+equally the occasion to appreciate the light-hearted civility of
+the man in office; and as an experimentalist in several out-of-the-
+way provinces of life, I may say it has but to be felt to be
+appreciated.  Well, this golden age of which we are speaking will
+be the golden age of officials.  In all our concerns it will be
+their beloved duty to meddle, with what tact, with what obliging
+words, analogy will aid us to imagine.  It is likely these
+gentlemen will be periodically elected; they will therefore have
+their turn of being underneath, which does not always sweeten men's
+conditions.  The laws they will have to administer will be no
+clearer than those we know to-day, and the body which is to
+regulate their administration no wiser than the British Parliament.
+So that upon all hands we may look for a form of servitude most
+galling to the blood--servitude to many and changing masters, and
+for all the slights that accompany the rule of jack-in-office.  And
+if the Socialistic programme be carried out with the least fulness,
+we shall have lost a thing, in most respects not much to be
+regretted, but as a moderator of oppression, a thing nearly
+invaluable--the newspaper.  For the independent journal is a
+creature of capital and competition; it stands and falls with
+millionaires and railway bonds and all the abuses and glories of
+to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent to
+authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on private
+property, the days of the independent journal are numbered.  State
+railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State
+newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State
+officials.
+
+But again, these officials would have no sinecure.  Crime would
+perhaps be less, for some of the motives of crime we may suppose
+would pass away.  But if Socialism were carried out with any
+fulness, there would be more contraventions.  We see already new
+sins ringing up like mustard--School Board sins, factory sins,
+Merchant Shipping Act sins--none of which I would be thought to
+except against in particular, but all of which, taken together,
+show us that Socialism can be a hard master even in the beginning.
+If it go on to such heights as we hear proposed and lauded, if it
+come actually to its ideal of the ant-heap, ruled with iron
+justice, the number of new contraventions will be out of all
+proportion multiplied.  Take the case of work alone.  Man is an
+idle animal.  He is at least as intelligent as the ant; but
+generations of advisers have in vain recommended him the ant's
+example.  Of those who are found truly indefatigable in business,
+some are misers; some are the practisers of delightful industries,
+like gardening; some are students, artists, inventors, or
+discoverers, men lured forward by successive hopes; and the rest
+are those who live by games of skill or hazard--financiers,
+billiard-players, gamblers, and the like.  But in unloved toils,
+even under the prick of necessity, no man is continually sedulous.
+Once eliminate the fear of starvation, once eliminate or bound the
+hope of riches, and we shall see plenty of skulking and
+malingering.  Society will then be something not wholly unlike a
+cotton plantation in the old days; with cheerful, careless,
+demoralised slaves, with elected overseers, and, instead of the
+planter, a chaotic popular assembly.  If the blood be purposeful
+and the soil strong, such a plantation may succeed, and be, indeed,
+a busy ant-heap, with full granaries and long hours of leisure.
+But even then I think the whip will be in the overseer's hands, and
+not in vain.  For, when it comes to be a question of each man doing
+his own share or the rest doing more, prettiness of sentiment will
+be forgotten.  To dock the skulker's food is not enough; many will
+rather eat haws and starve on petty pilferings than put their
+shoulder to the wheel for one hour daily.  For such as these, then,
+the whip will be in the overseer's hand; and his own sense of
+justice and the superintendence of a chaotic popular assembly will
+be the only checks on its employment.  Now, you may be an
+industrious man and a good citizen, and yet not love, nor yet be
+loved by, Dr. Fell the inspector.  It is admitted by private
+soldiers that the disfavour of a sergeant is an evil not to be
+combated; offend the sergeant, they say, and in a brief while you
+will either be disgraced or have deserted.  And the sergeant can no
+longer appeal to the lash.  But if these things go on, we shall
+see, or our sons shall see, what it is to have offended an
+inspector.
+
+This for the unfortunate.  But with the fortunate also, even those
+whom the inspector loves, it may not be altogether well.  It is
+concluded that in such a state of society, supposing it to be
+financially sound, the level of comfort will be high.  It does not
+follow:  there are strange depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-
+got sufficiency, as in the case of the sago-eaters, often quenching
+the desire for all besides; and it is possible that the men of the
+richest ant-heaps may sink even into squalor.  But suppose they do
+not; suppose our tricksy instrument of human nature, when we play
+upon it this new tune, should respond kindly; suppose no one to be
+damped and none exasperated by the new conditions, the whole
+enterprise to be financially sound--a vaulting supposition--and all
+the inhabitants to dwell together in a golden mean of comfort:  we
+have yet to ask ourselves if this be what man desire, or if it be
+what man will even deign to accept for a continuance.  It is
+certain that man loves to eat, it is not certain that he loves that
+only or that best.  He is supposed to love comfort; it is not a
+love, at least, that he is faithful to.  He is supposed to love
+happiness; it is my contention that he rather loves excitement.
+Danger, enterprise, hope, the novel, the aleatory, are dearer to
+man than regular meals.  He does not think so when he is hungry,
+but he thinks so again as soon as he is fed; and on the hypothesis
+of a successful ant-heap, he would never go hungry.  It would be
+always after dinner in that society, as, in the land of the Lotos-
+eaters, it was always afternoon; and food, which, when we have it
+not, seems all-important, drops in our esteem, as soon as we have
+it, to a mere prerequisite of living.
+
+That for which man lives is not the same thing for all individuals
+nor in all ages; yet it has a common base; what he seeks and what
+he must have is that which will seize and hold his attention.
+Regular meals and weatherproof lodgings will not do this long.
+Play in its wide sense, as the artificial induction of sensation,
+including all games and all arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him
+conscious of himself; but in the end he wearies for realities.
+Study or experiment, to some rare natures, is the unbroken pastime
+of a life.  These are enviable natures; people shut in the house by
+sickness often bitterly envy them; but the commoner man cannot
+continue to exist upon such altitudes:  his feet itch for physical
+adventure; his blood boils for physical dangers, pleasures, and
+triumphs; his fancy, the looker after new things, cannot continue
+to look for them in books and crucibles, but must seek them on the
+breathing stage of life.  Pinches, buffets, the glow of hope, the
+shock of disappointment, furious contention with obstacles:  these
+are the true elixir for all vital spirits, these are what they seek
+alike in their romantic enterprises and their unromantic
+dissipations.  When they are taken in some pinch closer than the
+common, they cry, 'Catch me here again!' and sure enough you catch
+them there again--perhaps before the week is out.  It is as old as
+Robinson Crusoe; as old as man.  Our race has not been strained for
+all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural
+Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the
+voices of its fathers call it forth.  Already in our society as it
+exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in
+living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often
+out of reach of any vicissitude but one of health; and there he
+yawns.  If the people in the next villa took pot-shots at him, he
+might be killed indeed, but so long as he escaped he would find his
+blood oxygenated and his views of the world brighter.  If Mr.
+Mallock, on his way to the publishers, should have his skirts
+pinned to a wall by a javelin, it would not occur to him--at least
+for several hours--to ask if life were worth living; and if such
+peril were a daily matter, he would ask it never more; he would
+have other things to think about, he would be living indeed--not
+lying in a box with cotton, safe, but immeasurably dull.  The
+aleatory, whether it touch life, or fortune, or renown--whether we
+explore Africa or only toss for halfpence--that is what I conceive
+men to love best, and that is what we are seeking to exclude from
+men's existences.  Of all forms of the aleatory, that which most
+commonly attends our working men--the danger of misery from want of
+work--is the least inspiriting:  it does not whip the blood, it
+does not evoke the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it is
+passive; and yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly
+touching them, it does truly season the men's lives.  Of those who
+fail, I do not speak--despair should be sacred; but to those who
+even modestly succeed, the changes of their life bring interest:  a
+job found, a shilling saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells
+of pleasure springing afresh for the successful poor; and it is not
+from these but from the villa-dweller that we hear complaints of
+the unworthiness of life.  Much, then, as the average of the
+proletariat would gain in this new state of life, they would also
+lose a certain something, which would not be missed in the
+beginning, but would be missed progressively and progressively
+lamented.  Soon there would be a looking back:  there would be
+tales of the old world humming in young men's ears, tales of the
+tramp and the pedlar, and the hopeful emigrant.  And in the stall-
+fed life of the successful ant-heap--with its regular meals,
+regular duties, regular pleasures, an even course of life, and fear
+excluded--the vicissitudes, delights, and havens of to-day will
+seem of epic breadth.  This may seem a shallow observation; but the
+springs by which men are moved lie much on the surface.  Bread, I
+believe, has always been considered first, but the circus comes
+close upon its heels.  Bread we suppose to be given amply; the cry
+for circuses will be the louder, and if the life of our descendants
+be such as we have conceived, there are two beloved pleasures on
+which they will be likely to fall back:  the pleasures of intrigue
+and of sedition.
+
+In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound.
+I am no economist, only a writer of fiction; but even as such, I
+know one thing that bears on the economic question--I know the
+imperfection of man's faculty for business.  The Anarchists, who
+count some rugged elements of common sense among what seem to me
+their tragic errors, have said upon this matter all that I could
+wish to say, and condemned beforehand great economical polities.
+So far it is obvious that they are right; they may be right also in
+predicting a period of communal independence, and they may even be
+right in thinking that desirable.  But the rise of communes is none
+the less the end of economic equality, just when we were told it
+was beginning.  Communes will not be all equal in extent, nor in
+quality of soil, nor in growth of population; nor will the surplus
+produce of all be equally marketable.  It will be the old story of
+competing interests, only with a new unit; and, as it appears to
+me, a new, inevitable danger.  For the merchant and the
+manufacturer, in this new world, will be a sovereign commune; it is
+a sovereign power that will see its crops undersold, and its
+manufactures worsted in the market.  And all the more dangerous
+that the sovereign power should be small.  Great powers are slow to
+stir; national affronts, even with the aid of newspapers, filter
+slowly into popular consciousness; national losses are so unequally
+shared, that one part of the population will be counting its gains
+while another sits by a cold hearth.  But in the sovereign commune
+all will be centralised and sensitive.  When jealousy springs up,
+when (let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached the commune
+of Dorchester, irritation will run like quicksilver throughout the
+body politic; each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly
+in his diet and his dress; even the secretary, who drafts the
+official correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered, as a
+man who has dined ill and may expect to dine worse; and thus a
+business difference between communes will take on much the same
+colour as a dispute between diggers in the lawless West, and will
+lead as directly to the arbitrament of blows.  So that the
+establishment of the communal system will not only reintroduce all
+the injustices and heart-burnings of economic inequality, but will,
+in all human likelihood, inaugurate a world of hedgerow warfare.
+Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne on Dorchester, Wimborne
+on both; the waggons will be fired on as they follow the highway,
+the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will go armed into
+the field of tillage; and if we have not a return of ballad
+literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein
+the victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum.  At
+least this will not be dull; when I was younger, I could have
+welcomed such a world with relief; but it is the New-Old with a
+vengeance, and irresistibly suggests the growth of military powers
+and the foundation of new empires.
+
+
+
+
+COLLEGE PAPERS
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824
+
+
+
+On the 2nd of January 1824 was issued the prospectus of the Lapsus
+Linguae; or, the College Tatler; and on the 7th the first number
+appeared.  On Friday the 2nd of April 'Mr. Tatler became
+speechless.'  Its history was not all one success; for the editor
+(who applies to himself the words of Iago, 'I am nothing if I am
+not critical') overstepped the bounds of caution, and found himself
+seriously embroiled with the powers that were.  There appeared in
+No. XVI. a most bitter satire upon Sir John Leslie, in which he was
+compared to Falstaff, charged with puffing himself, and very
+prettily censured for publishing only the first volume of a class-
+book, and making all purchasers pay for both.  Sir John Leslie took
+up the matter angrily, visited Carfrae the publisher, and
+threatened him with an action, till he was forced to turn the
+hapless Lapsus out of doors.  The maltreated periodical found
+shelter in the shop of Huie, Infirmary Street; and No. XVII. was
+duly issued from the new office.  No. XVII. beheld Mr. Tatler's
+humiliation, in which, with fulsome apology and not very credible
+assurances of respect and admiration, he disclaims the article in
+question, and advertises a new issue of No. XVI. with all
+objectionable matter omitted.  This, with pleasing euphemism, he
+terms in a later advertisement, 'a new and improved edition.'  This
+was the only remarkable adventure of Mr. Tatler's brief existence;
+unless we consider as such a silly Chaldee manuscript in imitation
+of Blackwood, and a letter of reproof from a divinity student on
+the impiety of the same dull effusion.  He laments the near
+approach of his end in pathetic terms.  'How shall we summon up
+sufficient courage,' says he, 'to look for the last time on our
+beloved little devil and his inestimable proof-sheet?  How shall we
+be able to pass No. 14 Infirmary Street and feel that all its
+attractions are over?  How shall we bid farewell for ever to that
+excellent man, with the long greatcoat, wooden leg and wooden
+board, who acts as our representative at the gate of Alma Mater?'
+But alas! he had no choice:  Mr. Tatler, whose career, he says
+himself, had been successful, passed peacefully away, and has ever
+since dumbly implored 'the bringing home of bell and burial.'
+
+Alter et idem.  A very different affair was the Lapsus Linguae from
+the Edinburgh University Magazine.  The two prospectuses alone,
+laid side by side, would indicate the march of luxury and the
+repeal of the paper duty.  The penny bi-weekly broadside of session
+1828-4 was almost wholly dedicated to Momus.  Epigrams, pointless
+letters, amorous verses, and University grievances are the
+continual burthen of the song.  But Mr. Tatler was not without a
+vein of hearty humour; and his pages afford what is much better:
+to wit, a good picture of student life as it then was.  The
+students of those polite days insisted on retaining their hats in
+the class-room.  There was a cab-stance in front of the College;
+and 'Carriage Entrance' was posted above the main arch, on what the
+writer pleases to call 'coarse, unclassic boards.'  The benches of
+the 'Speculative' then, as now, were red; but all other Societies
+(the 'Dialectic' is the only survivor) met downstairs, in some
+rooms of which it is pointedly said that 'nothing else could
+conveniently be made of them.'  However horrible these dungeons may
+have been, it is certain that they were paid for, and that far too
+heavily for the taste of session 1823-4, which found enough calls
+upon its purse for porter and toasted cheese at Ambrose's, or
+cranberry tarts and ginger-wine at Doull's.  Duelling was still a
+possibility; so much so that when two medicals fell to fisticuffs
+in Adam Square, it was seriously hinted that single combat would be
+the result.  Last and most wonderful of all, Gall and Spurzheim
+were in every one's mouth; and the Law student, after having
+exhausted Byron's poetry and Scott's novels, informed the ladies of
+his belief in phrenology.  In the present day he would dilate on
+'Red as a rose is she,' and then mention that he attends Old
+Greyfriars', as a tacit claim to intellectual superiority.  I do
+not know that the advance is much.
+
+But Mr. Tatler's best performances were three short papers in which
+he hit off pretty smartly the idiosyncrasies of the 'Divinity,' the
+'Medical,' and the 'Law' of session 1823-4.  The fact that there
+was no notice of the 'Arts' seems to suggest that they stood in the
+same intermediate position as they do now--the epitome of student-
+kind.  Mr. Tatler's satire is, on the whole, good-humoured, and has
+not grown superannuated in ALL its limbs.  His descriptions may
+limp at some points, but there are certain broad traits that apply
+equally well to session 1870-1.  He shows us the DIVINITY of the
+period--tall, pale, and slender--his collar greasy, and his coat
+bare about the seams--'his white neckcloth serving four days, and
+regularly turned the third'--'the rim of his hat deficient in
+wool'--and 'a weighty volume of theology under his arm.'  He was
+the man to buy cheap 'a snuff-box, or a dozen of pencils, or a six-
+bladed knife, or a quarter of a hundred quills,' at any of the
+public sale-rooms.  He was noted for cheap purchases, and for
+exceeding the legal tender in halfpence.  He haunted 'the darkest
+and remotest corner of the Theatre Gallery.'  He was to be seen
+issuing from 'aerial lodging-houses.'  Withal, says mine author,
+'there were many good points about him:  he paid his landlady's
+bill, read his Bible, went twice to church on Sunday, seldom swore,
+was not often tipsy, and bought the Lapsus Linguae.'
+
+The MEDICAL, again, 'wore a white greatcoat, and consequently
+talked loud'--(there is something very delicious in that
+CONSEQUENTLY).  He wore his hat on one side.  He was active,
+volatile, and went to the top of Arthur's Seat on the Sunday
+forenoon.  He was as quiet in a debating society as he was loud in
+the streets.  He was reckless and imprudent:  yesterday he insisted
+on your sharing a bottle of claret with him (and claret was claret
+then, before the cheap-and-nasty treaty), and to-morrow he asks you
+for the loan of a penny to buy the last number of the Lapsus.
+
+The student of LAW, again, was a learned man.  'He had turned over
+the leaves of Justinian's Institutes, and knew that they were
+written in Latin.  He was well acquainted with the title-page of
+Blackstone's Commentaries, and argal (as the gravedigger in Hamlet
+says) he was not a person to be laughed at.'  He attended the
+Parliament House in the character of a critic, and could give you
+stale sneers at all the celebrated speakers.  He was the terror of
+essayists at the Speculative or the Forensic.  In social qualities
+he seems to have stood unrivalled.  Even in the police-office we
+find him shining with undiminished lustre.  'If a CHARLIE should
+find him rather noisy at an untimely hour, and venture to take him
+into custody, he appears next morning like a Daniel come to
+judgment.  He opens his mouth to speak, and the divine precepts of
+unchanging justice and Scots law flow from his tongue.  The
+magistrate listens in amazement, and fines him only a couple of
+guineas.'
+
+Such then were our predecessors and their College Magazine.
+Barclay, Ambrose, Young Amos, and Fergusson were to them what the
+Cafe, the Rainbow, and Rutherford's are to us.  An hour's reading
+in these old pages absolutely confuses us, there is so much that is
+similar and so much that is different; the follies and amusements
+are so like our own, and the manner of frolicking and enjoying are
+so changed, that one pauses and looks about him in philosophic
+judgment.  The muddy quadrangle is thick with living students; but
+in our eyes it swarms also with the phantasmal white greatcoats and
+tilted hats of 1824.  Two races meet:  races alike and diverse.
+Two performances are played before our eyes; but the change seems
+merely of impersonators, of scenery, of costume.  Plot and passion
+are the same.  It is the fall of the spun shilling whether seventy-
+one or twenty-four has the best of it.
+
+In a future number we hope to give a glance at the individualities
+of the present, and see whether the cast shall be head or tail--
+whether we or the readers of the Lapsus stand higher in the
+balance.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY
+
+
+
+We have now reached the difficult portion of our task.  Mr. Tatler,
+for all that we care, may have been as virulent as he liked about
+the students of a former; but for the iron to touch our sacred
+selves, for a brother of the Guild to betray its most privy
+infirmities, let such a Judas look to himself as he passes on his
+way to the Scots Law or the Diagnostic, below the solitary lamp at
+the corner of the dark quadrangle.  We confess that this idea
+alarms us.  We enter a protest.  We bind ourselves over verbally to
+keep the peace.  We hope, moreover, that having thus made you
+secret to our misgivings, you will excuse us if we be dull, and set
+that down to caution which you might before have charged to the
+account of stupidity.
+
+The natural tendency of civilisation is to obliterate those
+distinctions which are the best salt of life.  All the fine old
+professional flavour in language has evaporated.  Your very
+gravedigger has forgotten his avocation in his electorship, and
+would quibble on the Franchise over Ophelia's grave, instead of
+more appropriately discussing the duration of bodies under ground.
+From this tendency, from this gradual attrition of life, in which
+everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed down, till
+the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth
+undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must
+not attempt to join Mr. Taller in his simple division of students
+into LAW, DIVINITY, and MEDICAL.  Nowadays the Faculties may shake
+hands over their follies; and, like Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight
+(in Love for Love) they may stand in the doors of opposite class-
+rooms, crying:  'Sister, Sister--Sister everyway!'  A few
+restrictions, indeed, remain to influence the followers of
+individual branches of study.  The Divinity, for example, must be
+an avowed believer; and as this, in the present day, is unhappily
+considered by many as a confession of weakness, he is fain to
+choose one of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus.
+Some swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a
+credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw
+philosopher, although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His
+own authority.  Others again (and this we think the worst method),
+finding German grammar a somewhat dry morsel, run their own little
+heresy as a proof of independence; and deny one of the cardinal
+doctrines that they may hold the others without being laughed at.
+
+Besides, however, such influences as these, there is little more
+distinction between the faculties than the traditionary ideal,
+handed down through a long sequence of students, and getting
+rounder and more featureless at each successive session.  The
+plague of uniformity has descended on the College.  Students (and
+indeed all sorts and conditions of men) now require their faculty
+and character hung round their neck on a placard, like the scenes
+in Shakespeare's theatre.  And in the midst of all this weary
+sameness, not the least common feature is the gravity of every
+face.  No more does the merry medical run eagerly in the clear
+winter morning up the rugged sides of Arthur's Seat, and hear the
+church bells begin and thicken and die away below him among the
+gathered smoke of the city.  He will not break Sunday to so little
+purpose.  He no longer finds pleasure in the mere output of his
+surplus energy.  He husbands his strength, and lays out walks, and
+reading, and amusement with deep consideration, so that he may get
+as much work and pleasure out of his body as he can, and waste none
+of his energy on mere impulse, or such flat enjoyment as an
+excursion in the country.
+
+See the quadrangle in the interregnum of classes, in those two or
+three minutes when it is full of passing students, and we think you
+will admit that, if we have not made it 'an habitation of dragons,'
+we have at least transformed it into 'a court for owls.'  Solemnity
+broods heavily over the enclosure; and wherever you seek it, you
+will find a dearth of merriment, an absence of real youthful
+enjoyment.  You might as well try
+
+
+'To move wild laughter in the throat of death'
+
+
+as to excite any healthy stir among the bulk of this staid company.
+
+The studious congregate about the doors of the different classes,
+debating the matter of the lecture, or comparing note-books.  A
+reserved rivalry sunders them.  Here are some deep in Greek
+particles:  there, others are already inhabitants of that land
+
+
+'Where entity and quiddity,
+'Like ghosts of defunct bodies fly -
+Where Truth in person does appear
+Like words congealed in northern air.'
+
+
+But none of them seem to find any relish for their studies--no
+pedantic love of this subject or that lights up their eyes--science
+and learning are only means for a livelihood, which they have
+considerately embraced and which they solemnly pursue.  'Labour's
+pale priests,' their lips seem incapable of laughter, except in the
+way of polite recognition of professorial wit.  The stains of ink
+are chronic on their meagre fingers.  They walk like Saul among the
+asses.
+
+The dandies are not less subdued.  In 1824 there was a noisy dapper
+dandyism abroad.  Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial--a
+matter of white greatcoats and loud voices--strangely different
+from the stately frippery that is rife at present.  These men are
+out of their element in the quadrangle.  Even the small remains of
+boisterous humour, which still clings to any collection of young
+men, jars painfully on their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a
+hasty retreat to resume their perfunctory march along Princes
+Street.  Flirtation is to them a great social duty, a painful
+obligation, which they perform on every occasion in the same chill
+official manner, and with the same commonplace advances, the same
+dogged observance of traditional behaviour.  The shape of their
+raiment is a burden almost greater than they can bear, and they
+halt in their walk to preserve the due adjustment of their trouser-
+knees, till one would fancy he had mixed in a procession of Jacobs.
+We speak, of course, for ourselves; but we would as soon associate
+with a herd of sprightly apes as with these gloomy modern beaux.
+Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines, even our Brummels, should
+have left their mantles upon nothing more amusing!
+
+Nor are the fast men less constrained.  Solemnity, even in
+dissipation, is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with
+a perverse seriousness, a systematic rationalism of wickedness that
+would have surprised the simpler sinners of old.  Some of these men
+whom we see gravely conversing on the steps have but a slender
+acquaintance with each other.  Their intercourse consists
+principally of mutual bulletins of depravity; and, week after week,
+as they meet they reckon up their items of transgression, and give
+an abstract of their downward progress for approval and
+encouragement.  These folk form a freemasonry of their own.  An
+oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship.  Once they
+hear a man swear, it is wonderful how their tongues loosen and
+their bashful spirits take enlargement, under the consciousness of
+brotherhood.  There is no folly, no pardoning warmth of temper
+about them; they are as steady-going and systematic in their own
+way as the studious in theirs.
+
+Not that we are without merry men.  No.  We shall not be ungrateful
+to those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter, whose active
+feet in the 'College Anthem' have beguiled so many weary hours and
+added a pleasant variety to the strain of close attention.  But
+even these are too evidently professional in their antics.  They go
+about cogitating puns and inventing tricks.  It is their vocation,
+Hal.  They are the gratuitous jesters of the class-room; and, like
+the clown when he leaves the stage, their merriment too often sinks
+as the bell rings the hour of liberty, and they pass forth by the
+Post-Office, grave and sedate, and meditating fresh gambols for the
+morrow.
+
+This is the impression left on the mind of any observing student by
+too many of his fellows.  They seem all frigid old men; and one
+pauses to think how such an unnatural state of matters is produced.
+We feel inclined to blame for it the unfortunate absence of
+UNIVERSITY FEELING which is so marked a characteristic of our
+Edinburgh students.  Academical interests are so few and far
+between--students, as students, have so little in common, except a
+peevish rivalry--there is such an entire want of broad college
+sympathies and ordinary college friendships, that we fancy that no
+University in the kingdom is in so poor a plight.  Our system is
+full of anomalies.  A, who cut B whilst he was a shabby student,
+curries sedulously up to him and cudgels his memory for anecdotes
+about him when he becomes the great so-and-so.  Let there be an end
+of this shy, proud reserve on the one hand, and this shuddering
+fine ladyism on the other; and we think we shall find both
+ourselves and the College bettered.  Let it be a sufficient reason
+for intercourse that two men sit together on the same benches.  Let
+the great A be held excused for nodding to the shabby B in Princes
+Street, if he can say, 'That fellow is a student.'  Once this could
+be brought about, we think you would find the whole heart of the
+University beat faster.  We think you would find a fusion among the
+students, a growth of common feelings, an increasing sympathy
+between class and class, whose influence (in such a heterogeneous
+company as ours) might be of incalculable value in all branches of
+politics and social progress.  It would do more than this.  If we
+could find some method of making the University a real mother to
+her sons--something beyond a building of class-rooms, a Senatus and
+a lottery of somewhat shabby prizes--we should strike a death-blow
+at the constrained and unnatural attitude of our Society.  At
+present we are not a united body, but a loose gathering of
+individuals, whose inherent attraction is allowed to condense them
+into little knots and coteries.  Our last snowball riot read us a
+plain lesson on our condition.  There was no party spirit--no unity
+of interests.  A few, who were mischievously inclined, marched off
+to the College of Surgeons in a pretentious file; but even before
+they reached their destination the feeble inspiration had died out
+in many, and their numbers were sadly thinned.  Some followed
+strange gods in the direction of Drummond Street, and others slunk
+back to meek good-boyism at the feet of the Professors.  The same
+is visible in better things.  As you send a man to an English
+University that he may have his prejudices rubbed off, you might
+send him to Edinburgh that he may have them ingrained--rendered
+indelible--fostered by sympathy into living principles of his
+spirit.  And the reason of it is quite plain.  From this absence of
+University feeling it comes that a man's friendships are always the
+direct and immediate results of these very prejudices.  A common
+weakness is the best master of ceremonies in our quadrangle:  a
+mutual vice is the readiest introduction.  The studious associate
+with the studious alone--the dandies with the dandies.  There is
+nothing to force them to rub shoulders with the others; and so they
+grow day by day more wedded to their own original opinions and
+affections.  They see through the same spectacles continually.  All
+broad sentiments, all real catholic humanity expires; and the mind
+gets gradually stiffened into one position--becomes so habituated
+to a contracted atmosphere, that it shudders and withers under the
+least draught of the free air that circulates in the general field
+of mankind.
+
+Specialism in Society then is, we think, one cause of our present
+state.  Specialism in study is another.  We doubt whether this has
+ever been a good thing since the world began; but we are sure it is
+much worse now than it was.  Formerly, when a man became a
+specialist, it was out of affection for his subject.  With a
+somewhat grand devotion he left all the world of Science to follow
+his true love; and he contrived to find that strange pedantic
+interest which inspired the man who
+
+
+'Settled Hoti's business--let it be -
+Properly based Oun -
+Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
+Dead from the waist down.'
+
+
+Nowadays it is quite different.  Our pedantry wants even the saving
+clause of Enthusiasm.  The election is now matter of necessity and
+not of choice.  Knowledge is now too broad a field for your Jack-
+of-all-Trades; and, from beautifully utilitarian reasons, he makes
+his choice, draws his pen through a dozen branches of study, and
+behold--John the Specialist.  That this is the way to be wealthy we
+shall not deny; but we hold that it is NOT the way to be healthy or
+wise.  The whole mind becomes narrowed and circumscribed to one
+'punctual spot' of knowledge.  A rank unhealthy soil breeds a
+harvest of prejudices.  Feeling himself above others in his one
+little branch--in the classification of toadstools, or Carthaginian
+history--he waxes great in his own eyes and looks down on others.
+Having all his sympathies educated in one way, they die out in
+every other; and he is apt to remain a peevish, narrow, and
+intolerant bigot.  Dilettante is now a term of reproach; but there
+is a certain form of dilettantism to which no one can object.  It
+is this that we want among our students.  We wish them to abandon
+no subject until they have seen and felt its merit--to act under a
+general interest in all branches of knowledge, not a commercial
+eagerness to excel in one.
+
+In both these directions our sympathies are constipated.  We are
+apostles of our own caste and our own subject of study, instead of
+being, as we should, true men and LOVING students.  Of course both
+of these could be corrected by the students themselves; but this is
+nothing to the purpose:  it is more important to ask whether the
+Senatus or the body of alumni could do nothing towards the growth
+of better feeling and wider sentiments.  Perhaps in another paper
+we may say something upon this head.
+
+One other word, however, before we have done.  What shall we be
+when we grow really old?  Of yore, a man was thought to lay on
+restrictions and acquire new deadweight of mournful experience with
+every year, till he looked back on his youth as the very summer of
+impulse and freedom.  We please ourselves with thinking that it
+cannot be so with us.  We would fain hope that, as we have begun in
+one way, we may end in another; and that when we are in fact the
+octogenarians that we SEEM at present, there shall be no merrier
+men on earth.  It is pleasant to picture us, sunning ourselves in
+Princes Street of a morning, or chirping over our evening cups,
+with all the merriment that we wanted in youth.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--DEBATING SOCIETIES
+
+
+
+A debating society is at first somewhat of a disappointment.  You
+do not often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his pebbles in
+the same room with you; or, even if you do, you will probably think
+the performance little to be admired.  As a general rule, the
+members speak shamefully ill.  The subjects of debate are heavy;
+and so are the fines.  The Ballot Question--oldest of dialectic
+nightmares--is often found astride of a somnolent sederunt.  The
+Greeks and Romans, too, are reserved as sort of GENERAL-UTILITY
+men, to do all the dirty work of illustration; and they fill as
+many functions as the famous waterfall scene at the 'Princess's,'
+which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in Peru, a haunt
+of German robbers, and a peaceful vale in the Scottish borders.
+There is a sad absence of striking argument or real lively
+discussion.  Indeed, you feel a growing contempt for your fellow-
+members; and it is not until you rise yourself to hawk and hesitate
+and sit shamefully down again, amid eleemosynary applause, that you
+begin to find your level and value others rightly.  Even then, even
+when failure has damped your critical ardour, you will see many
+things to be laughed at in the deportment of your rivals.
+
+Most laughable, perhaps, are your indefatigable strivers after
+eloquence.  They are of those who 'pursue with eagerness the
+phantoms of hope,' and who, since they expect that 'the
+deficiencies of last sentence will be supplied by the next,' have
+been recommended by Dr. Samuel Johnson to 'attend to the History of
+Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.'  They are characterised by a hectic
+hopefulness.  Nothing damps them.  They rise from the ruins of one
+abortive sentence, to launch forth into another with unabated
+vigour.  They have all the manner of an orator.  From the tone of
+their voice, you would expect a splendid period--and lo! a string
+of broken-backed, disjointed clauses, eked out with stammerings and
+throat-clearings.  They possess the art (learned from the pulpit)
+of rounding an uneuphonious sentence by dwelling on a single
+syllable--of striking a balance in a top-heavy period by
+lengthening out a word into a melancholy quaver.  Withal, they
+never cease to hope.  Even at last, even when they have exhausted
+all their ideas, even after the would-be peroration has finally
+refused to perorate, they remain upon their feet with their mouths
+open, waiting for some further inspiration, like Chaucer's widow's
+son in the dung-hole, after
+
+
+'His throat was kit unto the nekke bone,'
+
+
+in vain expectation of that seed that was to be laid upon his
+tongue, and give him renewed and clearer utterance.
+
+These men may have something to say, if they could only say it--
+indeed they generally have; but the next class are people who,
+having nothing to say, are cursed with a facility and an unhappy
+command of words, that makes them the prime nuisances of the
+society they affect.  They try to cover their absence of matter by
+an unwholesome vitality of delivery.  They look triumphantly round
+the room, as if courting applause, after a torrent of diluted
+truism.  They talk in a circle, harping on the same dull round of
+argument, and returning again and again to the same remark with the
+same sprightliness, the same irritating appearance of novelty.
+
+After this set, any one is tolerable; so we shall merely hint at a
+few other varieties.  There is your man who is pre-eminently
+conscientious, whose face beams with sincerity as he opens on the
+negative, and who votes on the affirmative at the end, looking
+round the room with an air of chastened pride.  There is also the
+irrelevant speaker, who rises, emits a joke or two, and then sits
+down again, without ever attempting to tackle the subject of
+debate.  Again, we have men who ride pick-a-back on their family
+reputation, or, if their family have none, identify themselves with
+some well-known statesman, use his opinions, and lend him their
+patronage on all occasions.  This is a dangerous plan, and serves
+oftener, I am afraid, to point a difference than to adorn a speech.
+
+But alas! a striking failure may be reached without tempting
+Providence by any of these ambitious tricks.  Our own stature will
+be found high enough for shame.  The success of three simple
+sentences lures us into a fatal parenthesis in the fourth, from
+whose shut brackets we may never disentangle the thread of our
+discourse.  A momentary flush tempts us into a quotation; and we
+may be left helpless in the middle of one of Pope's couplets, a
+white film gathering before our eyes, and our kind friends
+charitably trying to cover our disgrace by a feeble round of
+applause.  Amis lecteurs, this is a painful topic.  It is possible
+that we too, we, the 'potent, grave, and reverend' editor, may have
+suffered these things, and drunk as deep as any of the cup of
+shameful failure.  Let us dwell no longer on so delicate a subject.
+
+In spite, however, of these disagreeables, I should recommend any
+student to suffer them with Spartan courage, as the benefits he
+receives should repay him an hundredfold for them all.  The life of
+the debating society is a handy antidote to the life of the
+classroom and quadrangle.  Nothing could be conceived more
+excellent as a weapon against many of those PECCANT HUMOURS that we
+have been railing against in the jeremiad of our last 'College
+Paper'--particularly in the field of intellect.  It is a sad sight
+to see our heather-scented students, our boys of seventeen, coming
+up to College with determined views--roues in speculation--having
+gauged the vanity of philosophy or learned to shun it as the
+middle-man of heresy--a company of determined, deliberate
+opinionists, not to be moved by all the sleights of logic.  What
+have such men to do with study?  If their minds are made up
+irrevocably, why burn the 'studious lamp' in search of further
+confirmation?  Every set opinion I hear a student deliver I feel a
+certain lowering of my regard.  He who studies, he who is yet
+employed in groping for his premises, should keep his mind fluent
+and sensitive, keen to mark flaws, and willing to surrender
+untenable positions.  He should keep himself teachable, or cease
+the expensive farce of being taught.  It is to further this docile
+spirit that we desire to press the claims of debating societies.
+It is as a means of melting down this museum of premature
+petrifactions into living and impressionable soul that we insist on
+their utility.  If we could once prevail on our students to feel no
+shame in avowing an uncertain attitude towards any subject, if we
+could teach them that it was unnecessary for every lad to have his
+opinionette on every topic, we should have gone a far way towards
+bracing the intellectual tone of the coming race of thinkers; and
+this it is which debating societies are so well fitted to perform.
+
+We there meet people of every shade of opinion, and make friends
+with them.  We are taught to rail against a man the whole session
+through, and then hob-a-nob with him at the concluding
+entertainment.  We find men of talent far exceeding our own, whose
+conclusions are widely different from ours; and we are thus taught
+to distrust ourselves.  But the best means of all towards
+catholicity is that wholesome rule which some folk are most
+inclined to condemn--I mean the law of OBLIGED SPEECHES.  Your
+senior member commands; and you must take the affirmative or the
+negative, just as suits his best convenience.  This tends to the
+most perfect liberality.  It is no good hearing the arguments of an
+opponent, for in good verity you rarely follow them; and even if
+you do take the trouble to listen, it is merely in a captious
+search for weaknesses.  This is proved, I fear, in every debate;
+when you hear each speaker arguing out his own prepared specialite
+(he never intended speaking, of course, until some remarks of,
+etc.), arguing out, I say, his own COACHED-UP subject without the
+least attention to what has gone before, as utterly at sea about
+the drift of his adversary's speech as Panurge when he argued with
+Thaumaste, and merely linking his own prelection to the last by a
+few flippant criticisms.  Now, as the rule stands, you are saddled
+with the side you disapprove, and so you are forced, by regard for
+your own fame, to argue out, to feel with, to elaborate completely,
+the case as it stands against yourself; and what a fund of wisdom
+do you not turn up in this idle digging of the vineyard!  How many
+new difficulties take form before your eyes? how many superannuated
+arguments cripple finally into limbo, under the glance of your
+enforced eclecticism!
+
+Nor is this the only merit of Debating Societies.  They tend also
+to foster taste, and to promote friendship between University men.
+This last, as we have had occasion before to say, is the great
+requirement of our student life; and it will therefore be no waste
+of time if we devote a paragraph to this subject in its connection
+with Debating Societies.  At present they partake too much of the
+nature of a clique.  Friends propose friends, and mutual friends
+second them, until the society degenerates into a sort of family
+party.  You may confirm old acquaintances, but you can rarely make
+new ones.  You find yourself in the atmosphere of your own daily
+intercourse.  Now, this is an unfortunate circumstance, which it
+seems to me might readily be rectified.  Our Principal has shown
+himself so friendly towards all College improvements that I cherish
+the hope of seeing shortly realised a certain suggestion, which is
+not a new one with me, and which must often have been proposed and
+canvassed heretofore--I mean, a real University Debating Society,
+patronised by the Senatus, presided over by the Professors, to
+which every one might gain ready admittance on sight of his
+matriculation ticket, where it would be a favour and not a
+necessity to speak, and where the obscure student might have
+another object for attendance besides the mere desire to save his
+fines:  to wit, the chance of drawing on himself the favourable
+consideration of his teachers.  This would be merely following in
+the good tendency, which has been so noticeable during all this
+session, to increase and multiply student societies and clubs of
+every sort.  Nor would it be a matter of much difficulty.  The
+united societies would form a nucleus:  one of the class-rooms at
+first, and perhaps afterwards the great hall above the library,
+might be the place of meeting.  There would be no want of
+attendance or enthusiasm, I am sure; for it is a very different
+thing to speak under the bushel of a private club on the one hand,
+and, on the other, in a public place, where a happy period or a
+subtle argument may do the speaker permanent service in after life.
+Such a club might end, perhaps, by rivalling the 'Union' at
+Cambridge or the 'Union' at Oxford.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS {7}
+
+
+
+It is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our whole
+Society by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius--that
+our climate is essentially wet.  A mere arbitrary distinction, like
+the walking-swords of yore, might have remained the symbol of
+foresight and respectability, had not the raw mists and dropping
+showers of our island pointed the inclination of Society to another
+exponent of those virtues.  A ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a
+string of medals may prove a person's courage; a title may prove
+his birth; a professorial chair his study and acquirement; but it
+is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of
+Respectability.  The umbrella has become the acknowledged index of
+social position.
+
+Robinson Crusoe presents us with a touching instance of the
+hankering after them inherent in the civilised and educated mind.
+To the superficial, the hot suns of Juan Fernandez may sufficiently
+account for his quaint choice of a luxury; but surely one who had
+borne the hard labour of a seaman under the tropics for all these
+years could have supported an excursion after goats or a peaceful
+CONSTITUTIONAL arm in arm with the nude Friday.  No, it was not
+this:  the memory of a vanished respectability called for some
+outward manifestation, and the result was--an umbrella.  A pious
+castaway might have rigged up a belfry and solaced his Sunday
+mornings with the mimicry of church-bells; but Crusoe was rather a
+moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an
+example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under
+adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
+
+It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the
+very foremost badge of modern civilisation--the Urim and Thummim of
+respectability.  Its pregnant symbolism has taken its rise in the
+most natural manner.  Consider, for a moment, when umbrellas were
+first introduced into this country, what manner of men would use
+them, and what class would adhere to the useless but ornamental
+cane.  The first, without doubt, would be the hypochondriacal, out
+of solicitude for their health, or the frugal, out of care for
+their raiment; the second, it is equally plain, would include the
+fop, the fool, and the Bobadil.  Any one acquainted with the growth
+of Society, and knowing out of what small seeds of cause are
+produced great revolutions, and wholly new conditions of
+intercourse, sees from this simple thought how the carriage of an
+umbrella came to indicate frugality, judicious regard for bodily
+welfare, and scorn for mere outward adornment, and, in one word,
+all those homely and solid virtues implied in the term
+RESPECTABILITY.  Not that the umbrella's costliness has nothing to
+do with its great influence.  Its possession, besides symbolising
+(as we have already indicated) the change from wild Esau to plain
+Jacob dwelling in tents, implies a certain comfortable provision of
+fortune.  It is not every one that can expose twenty-six shillings'
+worth of property to so many chances of loss and theft.  So
+strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost
+inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned
+umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise.  They have a qualification
+standing in their lobbies; they carry a sufficient stake in the
+common-weal below their arm.  One who bears with him an umbrella--
+such a complicated structure of whalebone, of silk, and of cane,
+that it becomes a very microcosm of modern industry--is necessarily
+a man of peace.  A half-crown cane may be applied to an offender's
+head on a very moderate provocation; but a six-and-twenty shilling
+silk is a possession too precious to be adventured in the shock of
+war.
+
+These are but a few glances at how umbrellas (in the general) came
+to their present high estate.  But the true Umbrella-Philosopher
+meets with far stranger applications as he goes about the streets.
+
+Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the
+individual who carries them:  indeed, they are far more capable of
+betraying his trust; for whereas a face is given to us so far ready
+made, and all our power over it is in frowning, and laughing, and
+grimacing, during the first three or four decades of life, each
+umbrella is selected from a whole shopful, as being most consonant
+to the purchaser's disposition.  An undoubted power of diagnosis
+rests with the practised Umbrella-Philosopher.  O you who lisp, and
+amble, and change the fashion of your countenances--you who conceal
+all these, how little do you think that you left a proof of your
+weakness in our umbrella-stand--that even now, as you shake out the
+folds to meet the thickening snow, we read in its ivory handle the
+outward and visible sign of your snobbery, or from the exposed
+gingham of its cover detect, through coat and waistcoat, the hidden
+hypocrisy of the 'DICKEY'!  But alas! even the umbrella is no
+certain criterion.  The falsity and the folly of the human race
+have degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty; and
+while some umbrellas, from carelessness in selection, are not
+strikingly characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves that
+he displays his real nature), others, from certain prudential
+motives, are chosen directly opposite to the person's disposition.
+A mendacious umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation.
+Hypocrisy naturally shelters itself below a silk; while the fast
+youth goes to visit his religious friends armed with the decent and
+reputable gingham.  May it not be said of the bearers of these
+inappropriate umbrellas that they go about the streets 'with a lie
+in their right hand'?
+
+The kings of Siam, as we read, besides having a graduated social
+scale of umbrellas (which was a good thing), prevented the great
+bulk of their subjects from having any at all, which was certainly
+a bad thing.  We should be sorry to believe that this Eastern
+legislator was a fool--the idea of an aristocracy of umbrellas is
+too philosophic to have originated in a nobody--and we have
+accordingly taken exceeding pains to find out the reason of this
+harsh restriction.  We think we have succeeded; but, while admiring
+the principle at which he aimed, and while cordially recognising in
+the Siamese potentate the only man before ourselves who had taken a
+real grasp of the umbrella, we must be allowed to point out how
+unphilosophically the great man acted in this particular.  His
+object, plainly, was to prevent any unworthy persons from bearing
+the sacred symbol of domestic virtues.  We cannot excuse his
+limiting these virtues to the circle of his court.  We must only
+remember that such was the feeling of the age in which he lived.
+Liberalism had not yet raised the war-cry of the working classes.
+But here was his mistake:  it was a needless regulation.  Except in
+a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect, men,
+not by nature UMBRELLARIANS, have tried again and again to become
+so by art, and yet have failed--have expended their patrimony in
+the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have
+systematically lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits
+and shrunken purses, given up their vain struggle, and relied on
+theft and borrowing for the remainder of their lives.  This is the
+most remarkable fact that we have had occasion to notice; and yet
+we challenge the candid reader to call it in question.  Now, as
+there cannot be any MORAL SELECTION in a mere dead piece of
+furniture--as the umbrella cannot be supposed to have an affinity
+for individual men equal and reciprocal to that which men certainly
+feel toward individual umbrellas--we took the trouble of consulting
+a scientific friend as to whether there was any possible physical
+explanation of the phenomenon.  He was unable to supply a plausible
+theory, or even hypothesis; but we extract from his letter the
+following interesting passage relative to the physical
+peculiarities of umbrellas:  'Not the least important, and by far
+the most curious property of the umbrella, is the energy which it
+displays in affecting the atmospheric strata.  There is no fact in
+meteorology better established--indeed, it is almost the only one
+on which meteorologists are agreed--than that the carriage of an
+umbrella produces desiccation of the air; while if it be left at
+home, aqueous vapour is largely produced, and is soon deposited in
+the form of rain.  No theory,' my friend continues, 'competent to
+explain this hygrometric law has been given (as far as I am aware)
+by Herschel, Dove, Glaisher, Tait, Buchan, or any other writer; nor
+do I pretend to supply the defect.  I venture, however, to throw
+out the conjecture that it will be ultimately found to belong to
+the same class of natural laws as that agreeable to which a slice
+of toast always descends with the buttered surface downwards.'
+
+But it is time to draw to a close.  We could expatiate much longer
+upon this topic, but want of space constrains us to leave
+unfinished these few desultory remarks--slender contributions
+towards a subject which has fallen sadly backward, and which, we
+grieve to say, was better understood by the king of Siam in 1686
+than by all the philosophers of to-day.  If, however, we have
+awakened in any rational mind an interest in the symbolism of
+umbrellas--in any generous heart a more complete sympathy with the
+dumb companion of his daily walk--or in any grasping spirit a pure
+notion of respectability strong enough to make him expend his six-
+and-twenty shillings--we shall have deserved well of the world, to
+say nothing of the many industrious persons employed in the
+manufacture of the article.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE
+
+
+
+'How many Caesars and Pompeys, by mere inspirations of the names,
+have been rendered worthy of them?  And how many are there, who
+might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their
+characters and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus'd into
+nothing?'--Tristram Shandy, vol. I. chap xix.
+
+
+Such were the views of the late Walter Shandy, Esq., Turkey
+merchant.  To the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who
+fairly pointed out the incalculable influence of nomenclature upon
+the whole life--who seems first to have recognised the one child,
+happy in an heroic appellation, soaring upwards on the wings of
+fortune, and the other, like the dead sailor in his shotted
+hammock, haled down by sheer weight of name into the abysses of
+social failure.  Solomon possibly had his eye on some such theory
+when he said that 'a good name is better than precious ointment';
+and perhaps we may trace a similar spirit in the compilers of the
+English Catechism, and the affectionate interest with which they
+linger round the catechumen's name at the very threshold of their
+work.  But, be these as they may, I think no one can censure me for
+appending, in pursuance of the expressed wish of his son, the
+Turkey merchant's name to his system, and pronouncing, without
+further preface, a short epitome of the 'Shandean Philosophy of
+Nomenclature.'
+
+To begin, then:  the influence of our name makes itself felt from
+the very cradle.  As a schoolboy I remember the pride with which I
+hailed Robin Hood, Robert Bruce, and Robert le Diable as my name-
+fellows; and the feeling of sore disappointment that fell on my
+heart when I found a freebooter or a general who did not share with
+me a single one of my numerous praenomina.  Look at the delight
+with which two children find they have the same name.  They are
+friends from that moment forth; they have a bond of union stronger
+than exchange of nuts and sweetmeats.  This feeling, I own, wears
+off in later life.  Our names lose their freshness and interest,
+become trite and indifferent.  But this, dear reader, is merely one
+of the sad effects of those 'shades of the prison-house' which come
+gradually betwixt us and nature with advancing years; it affords no
+weapon against the philosophy of names.
+
+In after life, although we fail to trace its working, that name
+which careless godfathers lightly applied to your unconscious
+infancy will have been moulding your character, and influencing
+with irresistible power the whole course of your earthly fortunes.
+But the last name, overlooked by Mr. Shandy, is no whit less
+important as a condition of success.  Family names, we must
+recollect, are but inherited nicknames; and if the sobriquet were
+applicable to the ancestor, it is most likely applicable to the
+descendant also.  You would not expect to find Mr. M'Phun acting as
+a mute, or Mr. M'Lumpha excelling as a professor of dancing.
+Therefore, in what follows, we shall consider names, independent of
+whether they are first or last.  And to begin with, look what a
+pull Cromwell had over Pym--the one name full of a resonant
+imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging, and unheroic to a
+degree.  Who would expect eloquence from Pym--who would read poems
+by Pym--who would bow to the opinion of Pym?  He might have been a
+dentist, but he should never have aspired to be a statesman.  I can
+only wonder that he succeeded as he did.  Pym and Habakkuk stand
+first upon the roll of men who have triumphed, by sheer force of
+genius, over the most unfavourable appellations.  But even these
+have suffered; and, had they been more fitly named, the one might
+have been Lord Protector, and the other have shared the laurels
+with Isaiah.  In this matter we must not forget that all our great
+poets have borne great names.  Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
+Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley--what a constellation of lordly
+words!  Not a single common-place name among them--not a Brown, not
+a Jones, not a Robinson; they are all names that one would stop and
+look at on a door-plate.  Now, imagine if Pepys had tried to
+clamber somehow into the enclosure of poetry, what a blot would
+that word have made upon the list!  The thing was impossible.  In
+the first place a certain natural consciousness that men would have
+held him down to the level of his name, would have prevented him
+from rising above the Pepsine standard, and so haply withheld him
+altogether from attempting verse.  Next, the booksellers would
+refuse to publish, and the world to read them, on the mere evidence
+of the fatal appellation.  And now, before I close this section, I
+must say one word as to PUNNABLE names, names that stand alone,
+that have a significance and life apart from him that bears them.
+These are the bitterest of all.  One friend of mine goes bowed and
+humbled through life under the weight of this misfortune; for it is
+an awful thing when a man's name is a joke, when he cannot be
+mentioned without exciting merriment, and when even the intimation
+of his death bids fair to carry laughter into many a home.
+
+So much for people who are badly named.  Now for people who are TOO
+well named, who go top-heavy from the font, who are baptized into a
+false position, and find themselves beginning life eclipsed under
+the fame of some of the great ones of the past.  A man, for
+instance, called William Shakespeare could never dare to write
+plays.  He is thrown into too humbling an apposition with the
+author of Hamlet.  Its own name coming after is such an anti-
+climax.  'The plays of William Shakespeare'? says the reader--'O
+no!  The plays of William Shakespeare Cockerill,' and he throws the
+book aside.  In wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John Milton
+Hengler, who not long since delighted us in this favoured town, has
+never attempted to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and
+has excelled upon the tight-rope.  A marked example of triumph over
+this is the case of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  On the face of the
+matter, I should have advised him to imitate the pleasing modesty
+of the last-named gentleman, and confine his ambition to the
+sawdust.  But Mr. Rossetti has triumphed.  He has even dared to
+translate from his mighty name-father; and the voice of fame
+supports him in his boldness.
+
+Dear readers, one might write a year upon this matter.  A lifetime
+of comparison and research could scarce suffice for its
+elucidation.  So here, if it please you, we shall let it rest.
+Slight as these notes have been, I would that the great founder of
+the system had been alive to see them.  How he had warmed and
+brightened, how his persuasive eloquence would have fallen on the
+ears of Toby; and what a letter of praise and sympathy would not
+the editor have received before the month was out!  Alas, the thing
+was not to be.  Walter Shandy died and was duly buried, while yet
+his theory lay forgotten and neglected by his fellow-countrymen.
+But, reader, the day will come, I hope, when a paternal government
+will stamp out, as seeds of national weakness, all depressing
+patronymics, and when godfathers and godmothers will soberly and
+earnestly debate the interest of the nameless one, and not rush
+blindfold to the christening.  In these days there shall be written
+a 'Godfather's Assistant,' in shape of a dictionary of names, with
+their concomitant virtues and vices; and this book shall be
+scattered broadcast through the land, and shall be on the table of
+every one eligible for godfathership, until such a thing as a
+vicious or untoward appellation shall have ceased from off the face
+of the earth.
+
+
+
+
+CRITICISMS
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--LORD LYTTON'S 'FABLES IN SONG'
+
+
+
+It seems as if Lord Lytton, in this new book of his, had found the
+form most natural to his talent.  In some ways, indeed, it may be
+held inferior to Chronicles and Characters; we look in vain for
+anything like the terrible intensity of the night-scene in Irene,
+or for any such passages of massive and memorable writing as
+appeared, here and there, in the earlier work, and made it not
+altogether unworthy of its model, Hugo's Legend of the Ages.  But
+it becomes evident, on the most hasty retrospect, that this earlier
+work was a step on the way towards the later.  It seems as if the
+author had been feeling about for his definite medium, and was
+already, in the language of the child's game, growing hot.  There
+are many pieces in Chronicles and Characters that might be detached
+from their original setting, and embodied, as they stand, among the
+Fables in Song.
+
+For the term Fable is not very easy to define rigorously.  In the
+most typical form some moral precept is set forth by means of a
+conception purely fantastic, and usually somewhat trivial into the
+bargain; there is something playful about it, that will not support
+a very exacting criticism, and the lesson must be apprehended by
+the fancy at half a hint.  Such is the great mass of the old
+stories of wise animals or foolish men that have amused our
+childhood.  But we should expect the fable, in company with other
+and more important literary forms, to be more and more loosely, or
+at least largely, comprehended as time went on, and so to
+degenerate in conception from this original type.  That depended
+for much of its piquancy on the very fact that it was fantastic:
+the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous inappropriateness;
+and it is natural enough that pleasantry of this description should
+become less common, as men learn to suspect some serious analogy
+underneath.  Thus a comical story of an ape touches us quite
+differently after the proposition of Mr. Darwin's theory.
+Moreover, there lay, perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort
+of fable, a humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; so that at the
+end of some story, in which vice or folly had met with its destined
+punishment, the fabulist might be able to assure his auditors, as
+we have often to assure tearful children on the like occasions,
+that they may dry their eyes, for none of it was true.
+
+But this benefit of fiction becomes lost with more sophisticated
+hearers and authors:  a man is no longer the dupe of his own
+artifice, and cannot deal playfully with truths that are a matter
+of bitter concern to him in his life.  And hence, in the
+progressive centralisation of modern thought, we should expect the
+old form of fable to fall gradually into desuetude, and be
+gradually succeeded by another, which is a fable in all points
+except that it is not altogether fabulous.  And this new form, such
+as we should expect, and such as we do indeed find, still presents
+the essential character of brevity; as in any other fable also,
+there is, underlying and animating the brief action, a moral idea;
+and as in any other fable, the object is to bring this home to the
+reader through the intellect rather than through the feelings; so
+that, without being very deeply moved or interested by the
+characters of the piece, we should recognise vividly the hinges on
+which the little plot revolves.  But the fabulist now seeks
+analogies where before he merely sought humorous situations.  There
+will be now a logical nexus between the moral expressed and the
+machinery employed to express it.  The machinery, in fact, as this
+change is developed, becomes less and less fabulous.  We find
+ourselves in presence of quite a serious, if quite a miniature
+division of creative literature; and sometimes we have the lesson
+embodied in a sober, everyday narration, as in the parables of the
+New Testament, and sometimes merely the statement or, at most, the
+collocation of significant facts in life, the reader being left to
+resolve for himself the vague, troublesome, and not yet definitely
+moral sentiment which has been thus created.  And step by step with
+the development of this change, yet another is developed:  the
+moral tends to become more indeterminate and large.  It ceases to
+be possible to append it, in a tag, to the bottom of the piece, as
+one might write the name below a caricature; and the fable begins
+to take rank with all other forms of creative literature, as
+something too ambitious, in spite of its miniature dimensions, to
+be resumed in any succinct formula without the loss of all that is
+deepest and most suggestive in it.
+
+Now it is in this widest sense that Lord Lytton understands the
+term; there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of all the
+forms already mentioned, and even of another which can only be
+admitted among fables by the utmost possible leniency of
+construction.  'Composure,' 'Et Caetera,' and several more, are
+merely similes poetically elaborated.  So, too, is the pathetic
+story of the grandfather and grandchild:  the child, having
+treasured away an icicle and forgotten it for ten minutes, comes
+back to find it already nearly melted, and no longer beautiful:  at
+the same time, the grandfather has just remembered and taken out a
+bundle of love-letters, which he too had stored away in years gone
+by, and then long neglected; and, behold! the letters are as faded
+and sorrowfully disappointing as the icicle.  This is merely a
+simile poetically worked out; and yet it is in such as these, and
+some others, to be mentioned further on, that the author seems at
+his best.  Wherever he has really written after the old model,
+there is something to be deprecated:  in spite of all the spirit
+and freshness, in spite of his happy assumption of that cheerful
+acceptation of things as they are, which, rightly or wrongly, we
+come to attribute to the ideal fabulist, there is ever a sense as
+of something a little out of place.  A form of literature so very
+innocent and primitive looks a little over-written in Lord Lytton's
+conscious and highly-coloured style.  It may be bad taste, but
+sometimes we should prefer a few sentences of plain prose
+narration, and a little Bewick by way of tail-piece.  So that it is
+not among those fables that conform most nearly to the old model,
+but one had nearly said among those that most widely differ from
+it, that we find the most satisfactory examples of the author's
+manner.
+
+In the mere matter of ingenuity, the metaphysical fables are the
+most remarkable; such as that of the windmill who imagined that it
+was he who raised the wind; or that of the grocer's balance
+('Cogito ergo sum') who considered himself endowed with free-will,
+reason, and an infallible practical judgment; until, one fine day,
+the police made a descent upon the shop, and find the weights false
+and the scales unequal; and the whole thing is broken up for old
+iron.  Capital fables, also, in the same ironical spirit, are
+'Prometheus Unbound,' the tale of the vainglorying of a champagne-
+cork, and 'Teleology,' where a nettle justifies the ways of God to
+nettles while all goes well with it, and, upon a change of luck,
+promptly changes its divinity.
+
+In all these there is still plenty of the fabulous if you will,
+although, even here, there may be two opinions possible; but there
+is another group, of an order of merit perhaps still higher, where
+we look in vain for any such playful liberties with Nature.  Thus
+we have 'Conservation of Force'; where a musician, thinking of a
+certain picture, improvises in the twilight; a poet, hearing the
+music, goes home inspired, and writes a poem; and then a painter,
+under the influence of this poem, paints another picture, thus
+lineally descended from the first.  This is fiction, but not what
+we have been used to call fable.  We miss the incredible element,
+the point of audacity with which the fabulist was wont to mock at
+his readers.  And still more so is this the case with others.  'The
+Horse and the Fly' states one of the unanswerable problems of life
+in quite a realistic and straightforward way.  A fly startles a
+cab-horse, the coach is overset; a newly-married pair within and
+the driver, a man with a wife and family, are all killed.  The
+horse continues to gallop off in the loose traces, and ends the
+tragedy by running over an only child; and there is some little
+pathetic detail here introduced in the telling, that makes the
+reader's indignation very white-hot against some one.  It remains
+to be seen who that some one is to be:  the fly?  Nay, but on
+closer inspection, it appears that the fly, actuated by maternal
+instinct, was only seeking a place for her eggs:  is maternal
+instinct, then, 'sole author of these mischiefs all'?  'Who's in
+the Right?' one of the best fables in the book, is somewhat in the
+same vein.  After a battle has been won, a group of officers
+assemble inside a battery, and debate together who should have the
+honour of the success; the Prince, the general staff, the cavalry,
+the engineer who posted the battery in which they then stand
+talking, are successively named:  the sergeant, who pointed the
+guns, sneers to himself at the mention of the engineer; and, close
+by, the gunner, who had applied the match, passes away with a smile
+of triumph, since it was through his hand that the victorious blow
+had been dealt.  Meanwhile, the cannon claims the honour over the
+gunner; the cannon-ball, who actually goes forth on the dread
+mission, claims it over the cannon, who remains idly behind; the
+powder reminds the cannon-ball that, but for him, it would still be
+lying on the arsenal floor; and the match caps the discussion;
+powder, cannon-ball, and cannon would be all equally vain and
+ineffectual without fire.  Just then there comes on a shower of
+rain, which wets the powder and puts out the match, and completes
+this lesson of dependence, by indicating the negative conditions
+which are as necessary for any effect, in their absence, as is the
+presence of this great fraternity of positive conditions, not any
+one of which can claim priority over any other.  But the fable does
+not end here, as perhaps, in all logical strictness, it should.  It
+wanders off into a discussion as to which is the truer greatness,
+that of the vanquished fire or that of the victorious rain.  And
+the speech of the rain is charming:
+
+
+'Lo, with my little drops I bless again
+And beautify the fields which thou didst blast!
+Rend, wither, waste, and ruin, what thou wilt,
+But call not Greatness what the Gods call Guilt.
+Blossoms and grass from blood in battle spilt,
+And poppied corn, I bring.
+'Mid mouldering Babels, to oblivion built,
+My violets spring.
+Little by little my small drops have strength
+To deck with green delights the grateful earth.'
+
+
+And so forth, not quite germane (it seems to me) to the matter in
+hand, but welcome for its own sake.
+
+Best of all are the fables that deal more immediately with the
+emotions.  There is, for instance, that of 'The Two Travellers,'
+which is profoundly moving in conception, although by no means as
+well written as some others.  In this, one of the two, fearfully
+frost-bitten, saves his life out of the snow at the cost of all
+that was comely in his body; just as, long before, the other, who
+has now quietly resigned himself to death, had violently freed
+himself from Love at the cost of all that was finest and fairest in
+his character.  Very graceful and sweet is the fable (if so it
+should be called) in which the author sings the praises of that
+'kindly perspective,' which lets a wheat-stalk near the eye cover
+twenty leagues of distant country, and makes the humble circle
+about a man's hearth more to him than all the possibilities of the
+external world.  The companion fable to this is also excellent.  It
+tells us of a man who had, all his life through, entertained a
+passion for certain blue hills on the far horizon, and had promised
+himself to travel thither ere he died, and become familiar with
+these distant friends.  At last, in some political trouble, he is
+banished to the very place of his dreams.  He arrives there
+overnight, and, when he rises and goes forth in the morning, there
+sure enough are the blue hills, only now they have changed places
+with him, and smile across to him, distant as ever, from the old
+home whence he has come.  Such a story might have been very
+cynically treated; but it is not so done, the whole tone is kindly
+and consolatory, and the disenchanted man submissively takes the
+lesson, and understands that things far away are to be loved for
+their own sake, and that the unattainable is not truly
+unattainable, when we can make the beauty of it our own.  Indeed,
+throughout all these two volumes, though there is much practical
+scepticism, and much irony on abstract questions, this kindly and
+consolatory spirit is never absent.  There is much that is cheerful
+and, after a sedate, fireside fashion, hopeful.  No one will be
+discouraged by reading the book; but the ground of all this
+hopefulness and cheerfulness remains to the end somewhat vague.  It
+does not seem to arise from any practical belief in the future
+either of the individual or the race, but rather from the profound
+personal contentment of the writer.  This is, I suppose, all we
+must look for in the case.  It is as much as we can expect, if the
+fabulist shall prove a shrewd and cheerful fellow-wayfarer, one
+with whom the world does not seem to have gone much amiss, but who
+has yet laughingly learned something of its evil.  It will depend
+much, of course, upon our own character and circumstances, whether
+the encounter will be agreeable and bracing to the spirits, or
+offend us as an ill-timed mockery.  But where, as here, there is a
+little tincture of bitterness along with the good-nature, where it
+is plainly not the humour of a man cheerfully ignorant, but of one
+who looks on, tolerant and superior and smilingly attentive, upon
+the good and bad of our existence, it will go hardly if we do not
+catch some reflection of the same spirit to help us on our way.
+There is here no impertinent and lying proclamation of peace--none
+of the cheap optimism of the well-to-do; what we find here is a
+view of life that would be even grievous, were it not enlivened
+with this abiding cheerfulness, and ever and anon redeemed by a
+stroke of pathos.
+
+It is natural enough, I suppose, that we should find wanting in
+this book some of the intenser qualities of the author's work; and
+their absence is made up for by much happy description after a
+quieter fashion.  The burst of jubilation over the departure of the
+snow, which forms the prelude to 'The Thistle,' is full of spirit
+and of pleasant images.  The speech of the forest in 'Sans Souci'
+is inspired by a beautiful sentiment for nature of the modern sort,
+and pleases us more, I think, as poetry should please us, than
+anything in Chronicles and Characters.  There are some admirable
+felicities of expression here and there; as that of the hill, whose
+summit
+
+
+   'Did print
+The azure air with pines.'
+
+
+Moreover, I do not recollect in the author's former work any
+symptom of that sympathetic treatment of still life, which is
+noticeable now and again in the fables; and perhaps most
+noticeably, when he sketches the burned letters as they hover along
+the gusty flue, 'Thin, sable veils, wherein a restless spark Yet
+trembled.'  But the description is at its best when the subjects
+are unpleasant, or even grisly.  There are a few capital lines in
+this key on the last spasm of the battle before alluded to.  Surely
+nothing could be better, in its own way, than the fish in 'The Last
+Cruise of the Arrogant,' 'the shadowy, side-faced, silent things,'
+that come butting and staring with lidless eyes at the sunken
+steam-engine.  And although, in yet another, we are told,
+pleasantly enough, how the water went down into the valleys, where
+it set itself gaily to saw wood, and on into the plains, where it
+would soberly carry grain to town; yet the real strength of the
+fable is when it dealt with the shut pool in which certain
+unfortunate raindrops are imprisoned among slugs and snails, and in
+the company of an old toad.  The sodden contentment of the fallen
+acorn is strangely significant; and it is astonishing how
+unpleasantly we are startled by the appearance of her horrible
+lover, the maggot.
+
+And now for a last word, about the style.  This is not easy to
+criticise.  It is impossible to deny to it rapidity, spirit, and a
+full sound; the lines are never lame, and the sense is carried
+forward with an uninterrupted, impetuous rush.  But it is not
+equal.  After passages of really admirable versification, the
+author falls back upon a sort of loose, cavalry manner, not unlike
+the style of some of Mr. Browning's minor pieces, and almost
+inseparable from wordiness, and an easy acceptation of somewhat
+cheap finish.  There is nothing here of that compression which is
+the note of a really sovereign style.  It is unfair, perhaps, to
+set a not remarkable passage from Lord Lytton side by side with one
+of the signal masterpieces of another, and a very perfect poet; and
+yet it is interesting, when we see how the portraiture of a dog,
+detailed through thirty odd lines, is frittered down and finally
+almost lost in the mere laxity of the style, to compare it with the
+clear, simple, vigorous delineation that Burns, in four couplets,
+has given us of the ploughman's collie.  It is interesting, at
+first, and then it becomes a little irritating; for when we think
+of other passages so much more finished and adroit, we cannot help
+feeling, that with a little more ardour after perfection of form,
+criticism would have found nothing left for her to censure.  A
+similar mark of precipitate work is the number of adjectives
+tumultuously heaped together, sometimes to help out the sense, and
+sometimes (as one cannot but suspect) to help out the sound of the
+verses.  I do not believe, for instance, that Lord Lytton himself
+would defend the lines in which we are told how Laocoon 'Revealed
+to Roman crowds, now Christian grown, That Pagan anguish which, in
+Parian stone, The Rhodian artist,' and so on.  It is not only that
+this is bad in itself; but that it is unworthy of the company in
+which it is found; that such verses should not have appeared with
+the name of a good versifier like Lord Lytton.  We must take
+exception, also, in conclusion, to the excess of alliteration.
+Alliteration is so liable to be abused that we can scarcely be too
+sparing of it; and yet it is a trick that seems to grow upon the
+author with years.  It is a pity to see fine verses, such as some
+in 'Demos,' absolutely spoiled by the recurrence of one wearisome
+consonant.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--SALVINI'S MACBETH
+
+
+
+Salvini closed his short visit to Edinburgh by a performance of
+Macbeth.  It was, perhaps, from a sentiment of local colour that he
+chose to play the Scottish usurper for the first time before
+Scotsmen; and the audience were not insensible of the privilege.
+Few things, indeed, can move a stronger interest than to see a
+great creation taking shape for the first time.  If it is not
+purely artistic, the sentiment is surely human.  And the thought
+that you are before all the world, and have the start of so many
+others as eager as yourself, at least keeps you in a more
+unbearable suspense before the curtain rises, if it does not
+enhance the delight with which you follow the performance and see
+the actor 'bend up each corporal agent' to realise a masterpiece of
+a few hours' duration.  With a player so variable as Salvini, who
+trusts to the feelings of the moment for so much detail, and who,
+night after night, does the same thing differently but always well,
+it can never be safe to pass judgment after a single hearing.  And
+this is more particularly true of last week's Macbeth; for the
+whole third act was marred by a grievously humorous misadventure.
+Several minutes too soon the ghost of Banquo joined the party, and
+after having sat helpless a while at a table, was ignominiously
+withdrawn.  Twice was this ghostly Jack-in-the-box obtruded on the
+stage before his time; twice removed again; and yet he showed so
+little hurry when he was really wanted, that, after an awkward
+pause, Macbeth had to begin his apostrophe to empty air.  The
+arrival of the belated spectre in the middle, with a jerk that made
+him nod all over, was the last accident in the chapter, and
+worthily topped the whole.  It may be imagined how lamely matters
+went throughout these cross purposes.
+
+In spite of this, and some other hitches, Salvini's Macbeth had an
+emphatic success.  The creation is worthy of a place beside the
+same artist's Othello and Hamlet.  It is the simplest and most
+unsympathetic of the three; but the absence of the finer lineaments
+of Hamlet is redeemed by gusto, breadth, and a headlong unity.
+Salvini sees nothing great in Macbeth beyond the royalty of muscle,
+and that courage which comes of strong and copious circulation.
+The moral smallness of the man is insisted on from the first, in
+the shudder of uncontrollable jealousy with which he sees Duncan
+embracing Banquo.  He may have some northern poetry of speech, but
+he has not much logical understanding.  In his dealings with the
+supernatural powers he is like a savage with his fetich, trusting
+them beyond bounds while all goes well, and whenever he is crossed,
+casting his belief aside and calling 'fate into the list.'  For his
+wife, he is little more than an agent, a frame of bone and sinew
+for her fiery spirit to command.  The nature of his feeling towards
+her is rendered with a most precise and delicate touch.  He always
+yields to the woman's fascination; and yet his caresses (and we
+know how much meaning Salvini can give to a caress) are singularly
+hard and unloving.  Sometimes he lays his hand on her as he might
+take hold of any one who happened to be nearest to him at a moment
+of excitement.  Love has fallen out of this marriage by the way,
+and left a curious friendship.  Only once--at the very moment when
+she is showing herself so little a woman and so much a high-
+spirited man--only once is he very deeply stirred towards her; and
+that finds expression in the strange and horrible transport of
+admiration, doubly strange and horrible on Salvini's lips--'Bring
+forth men-children only!'
+
+The murder scene, as was to be expected, pleased the audience best.
+Macbeth's voice, in the talk with his wife, was a thing not to be
+forgotten; and when he spoke of his hangman's hands he seemed to
+have blood in his utterance.  Never for a moment, even in the very
+article of the murder, does he possess his own soul.  He is a man
+on wires.  From first to last it is an exhibition of hideous
+cowardice.  For, after all, it is not here, but in broad daylight,
+with the exhilaration of conflict, where he can assure himself at
+every blow he has the longest sword and the heaviest hand, that
+this man's physical bravery can keep him up; he is an unwieldy
+ship, and needs plenty of way on before he will steer.
+
+In the banquet scene, while the first murderer gives account of
+what he has done, there comes a flash of truculent joy at the
+'twenty trenched gashes' on Banquo's head.  Thus Macbeth makes
+welcome to his imagination those very details of physical horror
+which are so soon to turn sour in him.  As he runs out to embrace
+these cruel circumstances, as he seeks to realise to his mind's eye
+the reassuring spectacle of his dead enemy, he is dressing out the
+phantom to terrify himself; and his imagination, playing the part
+of justice, is to 'commend to his own lips the ingredients of his
+poisoned chalice.'  With the recollection of Hamlet and his
+father's spirit still fresh upon him, and the holy awe with which
+that good man encountered things not dreamt of in his philosophy,
+it was not possible to avoid looking for resemblances between the
+two apparitions and the two men haunted.  But there are none to be
+found.  Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for Banquo's spirit
+and the 'twenty trenched gashes.'  He is afraid of he knows not
+what.  He is abject, and again blustering.  In the end he so far
+forgets himself, his terror, and the nature of what is before him,
+that he rushes upon it as he would upon a man.  When his wife tells
+him he needs repose, there is something really childish in the way
+he looks about the room, and, seeing nothing, with an expression of
+almost sensual relief, plucks up heart enough to go to bed.  And
+what is the upshot of the visitation?  It is written in
+Shakespeare, but should be read with the commentary of Salvini's
+voice and expression:- 'O! siam nell' opra ancor fanciulli'-- 'We
+are yet but young in deed.'  Circle below circle.  He is looking
+with horrible satisfaction into the mouth of hell.  There may still
+be a prick to-day; but to-morrow conscience will be dead, and he
+may move untroubled in this element of blood.
+
+In the fifth act we see this lowest circle reached; and it is
+Salvini's finest moment throughout the play.  From the first he was
+admirably made up, and looked Macbeth to the full as perfectly as
+ever he looked Othello.  From the first moment he steps upon the
+stage you can see this character is a creation to the fullest
+meaning of the phrase; for the man before you is a type you know
+well already.  He arrives with Banquo on the heath, fair and red-
+bearded, sparing of gesture, full of pride and the sense of animal
+wellbeing, and satisfied after the battle like a beast who has
+eaten his fill.  But in the fifth act there is a change.  This is
+still the big, burly, fleshly, handsome-looking Thane; here is
+still the same face which in the earlier acts could be
+superficially good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous.  But
+now the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has
+entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature; and an
+indescribable degradation, a slackness and puffiness, has overtaken
+his features.  He has breathed the air of carnage, and supped full
+of horrors.  Lady Macbeth complains of the smell of blood on her
+hand:  Macbeth makes no complaint--he has ceased to notice it now;
+but the same smell is in his nostrils.  A contained fury and
+disgust possesses him.  He taunts the messenger and the doctor as
+people would taunt their mortal enemies.  And, indeed, as he knows
+right well, every one is his enemy now, except his wife.  About her
+he questions the doctor with something like a last human anxiety;
+and, in tones of grisly mystery, asks him if he can 'minister to a
+mind diseased.'  When the news of her death is brought him, he is
+staggered and falls into a seat; but somehow it is not anything we
+can call grief that he displays.  There had been two of them
+against God and man; and now, when there is only one, it makes
+perhaps less difference than he had expected.  And so her death is
+not only an affliction, but one more disillusion; and he redoubles
+in bitterness.  The speech that follows, given with tragic cynicism
+in every word, is a dirge, not so much for her as for himself.
+From that time forth there is nothing human left in him, only 'the
+fiend of Scotland,' Macduff's 'hell-hound,' whom, with a stern
+glee, we see baited like a bear and hunted down like a wolf.  He is
+inspired and set above fate by a demoniacal energy, a lust of
+wounds and slaughter.  Even after he meets Macduff his courage does
+not fail; but when he hears the Thane was not born of woman, all
+virtue goes out of him; and though he speaks sounding words of
+defiance, the last combat is little better than a suicide.
+
+The whole performance is, as I said, so full of gusto and a
+headlong unity; the personality of Macbeth is so sharp and
+powerful; and within these somewhat narrow limits there is so much
+play and saliency that, so far as concerns Salvini himself, a third
+great success seems indubitable.  Unfortunately, however, a great
+actor cannot fill more than a very small fraction of the boards;
+and though Banquo's ghost will probably be more seasonable in his
+future apparitions, there are some more inherent difficulties in
+the piece.  The company at large did not distinguish themselves.
+Macduff, to the huge delight of the gallery, out-Macduff'd the
+average ranter.  The lady who filled the principal female part has
+done better on other occasions, but I fear she has not metal for
+what she tried last week.  Not to succeed in the sleep-walking
+scene is to make a memorable failure.  As it was given, it
+succeeded in being wrong in art without being true to nature.
+
+And there is yet another difficulty, happily easy to reform, which
+somewhat interfered with the success of the performance.  At the
+end of the incantation scene the Italian translator has made
+Macbeth fall insensible upon the stage.  This is a change of
+questionable propriety from a psychological point of view; while in
+point of view of effect it leaves the stage for some moments empty
+of all business.  To remedy this, a bevy of green ballet-girls came
+forth and pointed their toes about the prostrate king.  A dance of
+High Church curates, or a hornpipe by Mr. T. P. Cooke, would not be
+more out of the key; though the gravity of a Scots audience was not
+to be overcome, and they merely expressed their disapprobation by a
+round of moderate hisses, a similar irruption of Christmas fairies
+would most likely convulse a London theatre from pit to gallery
+with inextinguishable laughter.  It is, I am told, the Italian
+tradition; but it is one more honoured in the breach than the
+observance.  With the total disappearance of these damsels, with a
+stronger Lady Macbeth, and, if possible, with some compression of
+those scenes in which Salvini does not appear, and the spectator is
+left at the mercy of Macduffs and Duncans, the play would go twice
+as well, and we should be better able to follow and enjoy an
+admirable work of dramatic art.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--BAGSTER'S 'PILGRIM'S PROGRESS'
+
+
+
+I have here before me an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, bound
+in green, without a date, and described as 'illustrated by nearly
+three hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan.'  On the outside it
+is lettered 'Bagster's Illustrated Edition,' and after the author's
+apology, facing the first page of the tale, a folding pictorial
+'Plan of the Road' is marked as 'drawn by the late Mr. T. Conder,'
+and engraved by J. Basire.  No further information is anywhere
+vouchsafed; perhaps the publishers had judged the work too
+unimportant; and we are still left ignorant whether or not we owe
+the woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same hand that drew
+the plan.  It seems, however, more than probable.  The literal
+particularity of mind which, in the map, laid down the flower-plots
+in the devil's garden, and carefully introduced the court-house in
+the town of Vanity, is closely paralleled in many of the cuts; and
+in both, the architecture of the buildings and the disposition of
+the gardens have a kindred and entirely English air.  Whoever he
+was, the author of these wonderful little pictures may lay claim to
+be the best illustrator of Bunyan.  They are not only good
+illustrations, like so many others; but they are like so few, good
+illustrations of Bunyan.  Their spirit, in defect and quality, is
+still the same as his own.  The designer also has lain down and
+dreamed a dream, as literal, as quaint, and almost as apposite as
+Bunyan's; and text and pictures make but the two sides of the same
+homespun yet impassioned story.  To do justice to the designs, it
+will be necessary to say, for the hundredth time, a word or two
+about the masterpiece which they adorn.
+
+All allegories have a tendency to escape from the purpose of their
+creators; and as the characters and incidents become more and more
+interesting in themselves, the moral, which these were to show
+forth, falls more and more into neglect.  An architect may command
+a wreath of vine-leaves round the cornice of a monument; but if, as
+each leaf came from the chisel, it took proper life and fluttered
+freely on the wall, and if the vine grew, and the building were
+hidden over with foliage and fruit, the architect would stand in
+much the same situation as the writer of allegories.  The Faery
+Queen was an allegory, I am willing to believe; but it survives as
+an imaginative tale in incomparable verse.  The case of Bunyan is
+widely different; and yet in this also Allegory, poor nymph,
+although never quite forgotten, is sometimes rudely thrust against
+the wall.  Bunyan was fervently in earnest; with 'his fingers in
+his ears, he ran on,' straight for his mark.  He tells us himself,
+in the conclusion to the first part, that he did not fear to raise
+a laugh; indeed, he feared nothing, and said anything; and he was
+greatly served in this by a certain rustic privilege of his style,
+which, like the talk of strong uneducated men, when it does not
+impress by its force, still charms by its simplicity.  The mere
+story and the allegorical design enjoyed perhaps his equal favour.
+He believed in both with an energy of faith that was capable of
+moving mountains.  And we have to remark in him, not the parts
+where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and merely
+decorative invention, but the parts where faith has grown to be
+credulity, and his characters become so real to him that he forgets
+the end of their creation.  We can follow him step by step into the
+trap which he lays for himself by his own entire good faith and
+triumphant literality of vision, till the trap closes and shuts him
+in an inconsistency.  The allegories of the Interpreter and of the
+Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains are all actually performed,
+like stage-plays, before the pilgrims.  The son of Mr. Great-grace
+visibly 'tumbles hills about with his words.'  Adam the First has
+his condemnation written visibly on his forehead, so that Faithful
+reads it.  At the very instant the net closes round the pilgrims,
+'the white robe falls from the black man's body.'  Despair 'getteth
+him a grievous crab-tree cudgel'; it was in 'sunshiny weather' that
+he had his fits; and the birds in the grove about the House
+Beautiful, 'our country birds,' only sing their little pious verses
+'at the spring, when the flowers appear and the sun shines warm.'
+'I often,' says Piety, 'go out to hear them; we also ofttimes keep
+them tame on our house.'  The post between Beulah and the Celestial
+City sounds his horn, as you may yet hear in country places.  Madam
+Bubble, that 'tall, comely dame, something of a swarthy complexion,
+in very pleasant attire, but old,' 'gives you a smile at the end of
+each sentence'--a real woman she; we all know her.  Christiana
+dying 'gave Mr. Stand-fast a ring,' for no possible reason in the
+allegory, merely because the touch was human and affecting.  Look
+at Great-heart, with his soldierly ways, garrison ways, as I had
+almost called them; with his taste in weapons; his delight in any
+that 'he found to be a man of his hands'; his chivalrous point of
+honour, letting Giant Maul get up again when he was down, a thing
+fairly flying in the teeth of the moral; above all, with his
+language in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing:  'I thought I
+should have lost my man'--'chicken-hearted'--'at last he came in,
+and I will say that for my lord, he carried it wonderful lovingly
+to him.'  This is no Independent minister; this is a stout, honest,
+big-busted ancient, adjusting his shoulder-belts, twirling his long
+moustaches as he speaks.  Last and most remarkable, 'My sword,'
+says the dying Valiant-for-Truth, he in whom Great-heart delighted,
+'my sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, AND
+MY COURAGE AND SKILL TO HIM THAT CAN GET IT.'  And after this
+boast, more arrogantly unorthodox than was ever dreamed of by the
+rejected Ignorance, we are told that 'all the trumpets sounded for
+him on the other side.'
+
+In every page the book is stamped with the same energy of vision
+and the same energy of belief.  The quality is equally and
+indifferently displayed in the spirit of the fighting, the
+tenderness of the pathos, the startling vigour and strangeness of
+the incidents, the natural strain of the conversations, and the
+humanity and charm of the characters.  Trivial talk over a meal,
+the dying words of heroes, the delights of Beulah or the Celestial
+City, Apollyon and my Lord Hate-good, Great-heart, and Mr. Worldly-
+Wiseman, all have been imagined with the same clearness, all
+written of with equal gusto and precision, all created in the same
+mixed element, of simplicity that is almost comical, and art that,
+for its purpose, is faultless.
+
+It was in much the same spirit that our artist sat down to his
+drawings.  He is by nature a Bunyan of the pencil.  He, too, will
+draw anything, from a butcher at work on a dead sheep, up to the
+courts of Heaven.  'A Lamb for Supper' is the name of one of his
+designs, 'Their Glorious Entry' of another.  He has the same
+disregard for the ridiculous, and enjoys somewhat of the same
+privilege of style, so that we are pleased even when we laugh the
+most.  He is literal to the verge of folly.  If dust is to be
+raised from the unswept parlour, you may be sure it will 'fly
+abundantly' in the picture.  If Faithful is to lie 'as dead' before
+Moses, dead he shall lie with a warrant--dead and stiff like
+granite; nay (and here the artist must enhance upon the symbolism
+of the author), it is with the identical stone tables of the law
+that Moses fells the sinner.  Good and bad people, whom we at once
+distinguish in the text by their names, Hopeful, Honest, and
+Valiant-for-Truth, on the one hand, as against By-ends, Sir Having
+Greedy, and the Lord Old-man on the other, are in these drawings as
+simply distinguished by their costume.  Good people, when not armed
+cap-a-pie, wear a speckled tunic girt about the waist, and low
+hats, apparently of straw.  Bad people swagger in tail-coats and
+chimney-pots, a few with knee-breeches, but the large majority in
+trousers, and for all the world like guests at a garden-party.
+Worldly-Wiseman alone, by some inexplicable quirk, stands before
+Christian in laced hat, embroidered waistcoat, and trunk-hose.  But
+above all examples of this artist's intrepidity, commend me to the
+print entitled 'Christian Finds it Deep.'  'A great darkness and
+horror,' says the text, have fallen on the pilgrim; it is the
+comfortless deathbed with which Bunyan so strikingly concludes the
+sorrows and conflicts of his hero.  How to represent this worthily
+the artist knew not; and yet he was determined to represent it
+somehow.  This was how he did:  Hopeful is still shown to his neck
+above the water of death; but Christian has bodily disappeared, and
+a blot of solid blackness indicates his place.
+
+As you continue to look at these pictures, about an inch square for
+the most part, sometimes printed three or more to the page, and
+each having a printed legend of its own, however trivial the event
+recorded, you will soon become aware of two things:  first, that
+the man can draw, and, second, that he possesses the gift of an
+imagination.  'Obstinate reviles,' says the legend; and you should
+see Obstinate reviling.  'He warily retraces his steps'; and there
+is Christian, posting through the plain, terror and speed in every
+muscle.  'Mercy yearns to go' shows you a plain interior with
+packing going forward, and, right in the middle, Mercy yearning to
+go--every line of the girl's figure yearning.  In 'The Chamber
+called Peace' we see a simple English room, bed with white
+curtains, window valance and door, as may be found in many thousand
+unpretentious houses; but far off, through the open window, we
+behold the sun uprising out of a great plain, and Christian hails
+it with his hand:
+
+
+'Where am I now! is this the love and care
+Of Jesus, for the men that pilgrims are!
+Thus to provide!  That I should be forgiven!
+And dwell already the next door to heaven!'
+
+
+A page or two further, from the top of the House Beautiful, the
+damsels point his gaze toward the Delectable Mountains:  'The
+Prospect,' so the cut is ticketed--and I shall be surprised, if on
+less than a square inch of paper you can show me one so wide and
+fair.  Down a cross road on an English plain, a cathedral city
+outlined on the horizon, a hazel shaw upon the left, comes Madam
+Wanton dancing with her fair enchanted cup, and Faithful, book in
+hand, half pauses.  The cut is perfect as a symbol; the giddy
+movement of the sorceress, the uncertain poise of the man struck to
+the heart by a temptation, the contrast of that even plain of life
+whereon he journeys with the bold, ideal bearing of the wanton--the
+artist who invented and portrayed this had not merely read Bunyan,
+he had also thoughtfully lived.  The Delectable Mountains--I
+continue skimming the first part--are not on the whole happily
+rendered.  Once, and once only, the note is struck, when Christian
+and Hopeful are seen coming, shoulder-high, through a thicket of
+green shrubs--box, perhaps, or perfumed nutmeg; while behind them,
+domed or pointed, the hills stand ranged against the sky.  A little
+further, and we come to that masterpiece of Bunyan's insight into
+life, the Enchanted Ground; where, in a few traits, he has set down
+the latter end of such a number of the would-be good; where his
+allegory goes so deep that, to people looking seriously on life, it
+cuts like satire.  The true significance of this invention lies, of
+course, far out of the way of drawing; only one feature, the great
+tedium of the land, the growing weariness in well-doing, may be
+somewhat represented in a symbol.  The pilgrims are near the end:
+'Two Miles Yet,' says the legend.  The road goes ploughing up and
+down over a rolling heath; the wayfarers, with outstretched arms,
+are already sunk to the knees over the brow of the nearest hill;
+they have just passed a milestone with the cipher two; from
+overhead a great, piled, summer cumulus, as of a slumberous summer
+afternoon, beshadows them:  two miles! it might be hundreds.  In
+dealing with the Land of Beulah the artist lags, in both parts,
+miserably behind the text, but in the distant prospect of the
+Celestial City more than regains his own.  You will remember when
+Christian and Hopeful 'with desire fell sick.'  'Effect of the
+Sunbeams' is the artist's title.  Against the sky, upon a cliffy
+mountain, the radiant temple beams upon them over deep, subjacent
+woods; they, behind a mound, as if seeking shelter from the
+splendour--one prostrate on his face, one kneeling, and with hands
+ecstatically lifted--yearn with passion after that immortal city.
+Turn the page, and we behold them walking by the very shores of
+death; Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen half-way to the
+zenith, and sheds a wider glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against
+that brightness, walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts.
+No cut more thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the
+weakness of the artist.  Each pilgrim sings with a book in his
+grasp--a family Bible at the least for bigness; tomes so recklessly
+enormous that our second, impulse is to laughter.  And yet that is
+not the first thought, nor perhaps the last.  Something in the
+attitude of the manikins--faces they have none, they are too small
+for that--something in the way they swing these monstrous volumes
+to their singing, something perhaps borrowed from the text, some
+subtle differentiation from the cut that went before and the cut
+that follows after--something, at least, speaks clearly of a
+fearful joy, of Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the horror of the
+last passage no less than of the glorious coming home.  There is
+that in the action of one of them which always reminds me, with a
+difference, of that haunting last glimpse of Thomas Idle,
+travelling to Tyburn in the cart.  Next come the Shining Ones,
+wooden and trivial enough; the pilgrims pass into the river; the
+blot already mentioned settles over and obliterates Christian.  In
+two more cuts we behold them drawing nearer to the other shore; and
+then, between two radiant angels, one of whom points upward, we see
+them mounting in new weeds, their former lendings left behind them
+on the inky river.  More angels meet them; Heaven is displayed, and
+if no better, certainly no worse, than it has been shown by others-
+-a place, at least, infinitely populous and glorious with light--a
+place that haunts solemnly the hearts of children.  And then this
+symbolic draughtsman once more strikes into his proper vein.  Three
+cuts conclude the first part.  In the first the gates close, black
+against the glory struggling from within.  The second shows us
+Ignorance--alas! poor Arminian!--hailing, in a sad twilight, the
+ferryman Vain-Hope; and in the third we behold him, bound hand and
+foot, and black already with the hue of his eternal fate, carried
+high over the mountain-tops of the world by two angels of the anger
+of the Lord.  'Carried to Another Place,' the artist enigmatically
+names his plate--a terrible design.
+
+Wherever he touches on the black side of the supernatural his
+pencil grows more daring and incisive.  He has many true inventions
+in the perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares
+realised.  It is not easy to select the best; some may like one and
+some another; the nude, depilated devil bounding and casting darts
+against the Wicket Gate; the scroll of flying horrors that hang
+over Christian by the Mouth of Hell; the horned shade that comes
+behind him whispering blasphemies; the daylight breaking through
+that rent cave-mouth of the mountains and falling chill adown the
+haunted tunnel; Christian's further progress along the causeway,
+between the two black pools, where, at every yard or two, a gin, a
+pitfall, or a snare awaits the passer-by--loathsome white devilkins
+harbouring close under the bank to work the springes, Christian
+himself pausing and pricking with his sword's point at the nearest
+noose, and pale discomfortable mountains rising on the farther
+side; or yet again, the two ill-favoured ones that beset the first
+of Christian's journey, with the frog-like structure of the skull,
+the frog-like limberness of limbs--crafty, slippery, lustful-
+looking devils, drawn always in outline as though possessed of a
+dim, infernal luminosity.  Horrid fellows are they, one and all;
+horrid fellows and horrific scenes.  In another spirit that Good-
+Conscience 'to whom Mr. Honest had spoken in his lifetime,' a
+cowled, grey, awful figure, one hand pointing to the heavenly
+shore, realises, I will not say all, but some at least of the
+strange impressiveness of Bunyan's words.  It is no easy nor
+pleasant thing to speak in one's lifetime with Good-Conscience; he
+is an austere, unearthly friend, whom maybe Torquemada knew; and
+the folds of his raiment are not merely claustral, but have
+something of the horror of the pall.  Be not afraid, however; with
+the hand of that appearance Mr. Honest will get safe across.
+
+Yet perhaps it is in sequences that this artist best displays
+himself.  He loves to look at either side of a thing:  as, for
+instance, when he shows us both sides of the wall--'Grace
+Inextinguishable' on the one side, with the devil vainly pouring
+buckets on the flame, and 'The Oil of Grace' on the other, where
+the Holy Spirit, vessel in hand, still secretly supplies the fire.
+He loves, also, to show us the same event twice over, and to repeat
+his instantaneous photographs at the interval of but a moment.  So
+we have, first, the whole troop of pilgrims coming up to Valiant,
+and Great-heart to the front, spear in hand and parleying; and
+next, the same cross-roads, from a more distant view, the convoy
+now scattered and looking safely and curiously on, and Valiant
+handing over for inspection his 'right Jerusalem blade.'  It is
+true that this designer has no great care after consistency:
+Apollyon's spear is laid by, his quiver of darts will disappear,
+whenever they might hinder the designer's freedom; and the fiend's
+tail is blobbed or forked at his good pleasure.  But this is not
+unsuitable to the illustration of the fervent Bunyan, breathing
+hurry and momentary inspiration.  He, with his hot purpose, hunting
+sinners with a lasso, shall himself forget the things that he has
+written yesterday.  He shall first slay Heedless in the Valley of
+the Shadow, and then take leave of him talking in his sleep, as if
+nothing had happened, in an arbour on the Enchanted Ground.  And
+again, in his rhymed prologue, he shall assign some of the glory of
+the siege of Doubting Castle to his favourite Valiant-for-the-
+Truth, who did not meet with the besiegers till long after, at that
+dangerous corner by Deadman's Lane.  And, with all inconsistencies
+and freedoms, there is a power shown in these sequences of cuts:  a
+power of joining on one action or one humour to another; a power of
+following out the moods, even of the dismal subterhuman fiends
+engendered by the artist's fancy; a power of sustained continuous
+realisation, step by step, in nature's order, that can tell a
+story, in all its ins and outs, its pauses and surprises, fully and
+figuratively, like the art of words.
+
+One such sequence is the fight of Christian and Apollyon--six cuts,
+weird and fiery, like the text.  The pilgrim is throughout a pale
+and stockish figure; but the devil covers a multitude of defects.
+There is no better devil of the conventional order than our
+artist's Apollyon, with his mane, his wings, his bestial legs, his
+changing and terrifying expression, his infernal energy to slay.
+In cut the first you see him afar off, still obscure in form, but
+already formidable in suggestion.  Cut the second, 'The Fiend in
+Discourse,' represents him, not reasoning, railing rather, shaking
+his spear at the pilgrim, his shoulder advanced, his tail writhing
+in the air, his foot ready for a spring, while Christian stands
+back a little, timidly defensive.  The third illustrates these
+magnificent words:  'Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole
+breadth of the way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter:
+prepare thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den that thou
+shalt go no farther:  here will I spill thy soul!  And with that he
+threw a flaming dart at his breast.'  In the cut he throws a dart
+with either hand, belching pointed flames out of his mouth,
+spreading his broad vans, and straddling the while across the path,
+as only a fiend can straddle who has just sworn by his infernal
+den.  The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames,
+such red-hot nether energy.  And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he
+has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion, and
+roaring as he leaps.  The fifth shows the climacteric of the
+battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got his sword, and
+dealt that deadly home-thrust, the fiend still stretched upon him,
+but 'giving back, as one that had received his mortal wound.'  The
+raised head, the bellowing mouth, the paw clapped upon the sword,
+the one wing relaxed in agony, all realise vividly these words of
+the text.  In the sixth and last, the trivial armed figure of the
+pilgrim is seen kneeling with clasped hands on the betrodden scene
+of contest and among the shivers of the darts; while just at the
+margin the hinder quarters and the tail of Apollyon are whisking
+off, indignant and discounted.
+
+In one point only do these pictures seem to be unworthy of the
+text, and that point is one rather of the difference of arts than
+the difference of artists.  Throughout his best and worst, in his
+highest and most divine imaginations as in the narrowest sallies of
+his sectarianism, the human-hearted piety of Bunyan touches and
+ennobles, convinces, accuses the reader.  Through no art beside the
+art of words can the kindness of a man's affections be expressed.
+In the cuts you shall find faithfully parodied the quaintness and
+the power, the triviality and the surprising freshness of the
+author's fancy; there you shall find him out-stripped in ready
+symbolism and the art of bringing things essentially invisible
+before the eyes:  but to feel the contact of essential goodness, to
+be made in love with piety, the book must be read and not the
+prints examined.
+
+Farewell should not be taken with a grudge; nor can I dismiss in
+any other words than those of gratitude a series of pictures which
+have, to one at least, been the visible embodiment of Bunyan from
+childhood up, and shown him, through all his years, Great-heart
+lungeing at Giant Maul, and Apollyon breathing fire at Christian,
+and every turn and town along the road to the Celestial City, and
+that bright place itself, seen as to a stave of music, shining afar
+off upon the hill-top, the candle of the world.
+
+
+
+
+SKETCHES
+
+
+
+
+THE SATIRIST
+
+
+
+My companion enjoyed a cheap reputation for wit and insight.  He
+was by habit and repute a satirist.  If he did occasionally condemn
+anything or anybody who richly deserved it, and whose demerits had
+hitherto escaped, it was simply because he condemned everything and
+everybody.  While I was with him he disposed of St. Paul with an
+epigram, shook my reverence for Shakespeare in a neat antithesis,
+and fell foul of the Almighty Himself, on the score of one or two
+out of the ten commandments.  Nothing escaped his blighting
+censure.  At every sentence he overthrew an idol, or lowered my
+estimation of a friend.  I saw everything with new eyes, and could
+only marvel at my former blindness.  How was it possible that I had
+not before observed A's false hair, B's selfishness, or C's boorish
+manners?  I and my companion, methought, walked the streets like a
+couple of gods among a swarm of vermin; for every one we saw seemed
+to bear openly upon his brow the mark of the apocalyptic beast.  I
+half expected that these miserable beings, like the people of
+Lystra, would recognise their betters and force us to the altar; in
+which case, warned by the late of Paul and Barnabas, I do not know
+that my modesty would have prevailed upon me to decline.  But there
+was no need for such churlish virtue.  More blinded than the
+Lycaonians, the people saw no divinity in our gait; and as our
+temporary godhead lay more in the way of observing than healing
+their infirmities, we were content to pass them by in scorn.
+
+I could not leave my companion, not from regard or even from
+interest, but from a very natural feeling, inseparable from the
+case.  To understand it, let us take a simile.  Suppose yourself
+walking down the street with a man who continues to sprinkle the
+crowd out of a flask of vitriol.  You would be much diverted with
+the grimaces and contortions of his victims; and at the same time
+you would fear to leave his arm until his bottle was empty, knowing
+that, when once among the crowd, you would run a good chance
+yourself of baptism with his biting liquor.  Now my companion's
+vitriol was inexhaustible.
+
+It was perhaps the consciousness of this, the knowledge that I was
+being anointed already out of the vials of his wrath, that made me
+fall to criticising the critic, whenever we had parted.
+
+After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into
+his neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to
+go farther and discover what is really true.  He is content to find
+that things are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it
+that they do not exist at all.  He sees our virtues are not what
+they pretend they are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us
+the possession of virtue altogether.  He has learnt the first
+lesson, that no man is wholly good; but he has not even suspected
+that there is another equally true, to wit, that no man is wholly
+bad.  Like the inmate of a coloured star, he has eyes for one
+colour alone.  He has a keen scent after evil, but his nostrils are
+plugged against all good, as people plugged their nostrils before
+going about the streets of the plague-struck city.
+
+Why does he do this?  It is most unreasonable to flee the knowledge
+of good like the infection of a horrible disease, and batten and
+grow fat in the real atmosphere of a lazar-house.  This was my
+first thought; but my second was not like unto it, and I saw that
+our satirist was wise, wise in his generation, like the unjust
+steward.  He does not want light, because the darkness is more
+pleasant.  He does not wish to see the good, because he is happier
+without it.  I recollect that when I walked with him, I was in a
+state of divine exaltation, such as Adam and Eve must have enjoyed
+when the savour of the fruit was still unfaded between their lips;
+and I recognise that this must be the man's habitual state.  He has
+the forbidden fruit in his waist-coat pocket, and can make himself
+a god as often and as long as he likes.  He has raised himself upon
+a glorious pedestal above his fellows; he has touched the summit of
+ambition; and he envies neither King nor Kaiser, Prophet nor
+Priest, content in an elevation as high as theirs, and much more
+easily attained.  Yes, certes, much more easily attained.  He has
+not risen by climbing himself, but by pushing others down.  He has
+grown great in his own estimation, not by blowing himself out, and
+risking the fate of AEsop's frog, but simply by the habitual use of
+a diminishing glass on everybody else.  And I think altogether that
+his is a better, a safer, and a surer recipe than most others.
+
+After all, however, looking back on what I have written, I detect a
+spirit suspiciously like his own.  All through, I have been
+comparing myself with our satirist, and all through, I have had the
+best of the comparison.  Well, well, contagion is as often mental
+as physical; and I do not think my readers, who have all been under
+his lash, will blame me very much for giving the headsman a
+mouthful of his own sawdust.
+
+
+
+NUITS BLANCHES
+
+
+
+If any one should know the pleasure and pain of a sleepless night,
+it should be I.  I remember, so long ago, the sickly child that
+woke from his few hours' slumber with the sweat of a nightmare on
+his brow, to lie awake and listen and long for the first signs of
+life among the silent streets.  These nights of pain and weariness
+are graven on my mind; and so when the same thing happened to me
+again, everything that I heard or saw was rather a recollection
+than a discovery.
+
+Weighed upon by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I listened
+eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet.  But nothing
+came, save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the old cabinet that
+was made by Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle of the coals on the
+extinguished fire.  It was a calm; or I know that I should have
+heard in the roar and clatter of the storm, as I have not heard it
+for so many years, the wild career of a horseman, always scouring
+up from the distance and passing swiftly below the window; yet
+always returning again from the place whence first he came, as
+though, baffled by some higher power, he had retraced his steps to
+gain impetus for another and another attempt.
+
+As I lay there, there arose out of the utter stillness the rumbling
+of a carriage a very great way off, that drew near, and passed
+within a few streets of the house, and died away as gradually as it
+had arisen.  This, too, was as a reminiscence.
+
+I rose and lifted a corner of the blind.  Over the black belt of
+the garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there
+a lighted window.  How often before had my nurse lifted me out of
+bed and pointed them out to me, while we wondered together if,
+there also, there were children that could not sleep, and if these
+lighted oblongs were signs of those that waited like us for the
+morning.
+
+I went out into the lobby, and looked down into the great deep well
+of the staircase.  For what cause I know not, just as it used to be
+in the old days that the feverish child might be the better served,
+a peep of gas illuminated a narrow circle far below me.  But where
+I was, all was darkness and silence, save the dry monotonous
+ticking of the clock that came ceaselessly up to my ear.
+
+The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of reproduction
+on the pictures of my memory, was the arrival of that time for
+which, all night through, I waited and longed of old.  It was my
+custom, as the hours dragged on, to repeat the question, 'When will
+the carts come in?' and repeat it again and again until at last
+those sounds arose in the street that I have heard once more this
+morning.  The road before our house is a great thoroughfare for
+early carts.  I know not, and I never have known, what they carry,
+whence they come, or whither they go.  But I know that, long ere
+dawn, and for hours together, they stream continuously past, with
+the same rolling and jerking of wheels and the same clink of
+horses' feet.  It was not for nothing that they made the burthen of
+my wishes all night through.  They are really the first throbbings
+of life, the harbingers of day; and it pleases you as much to hear
+them as it must please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a
+hand of flesh and blood after years of miserable solitude.  They
+have the freshness of the daylight life about them.  You can hear
+the carters cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their
+horses or to one another; and sometimes even a peal of healthy,
+harsh horse-laughter comes up to you through the darkness.  There
+is now an end of mystery and fear.  Like the knocking at the door
+in Macbeth, {8} or the cry of the watchman in the Tour de Nesle,
+they show that the horrible caesura is over and the nightmares have
+fled away, because the day is breaking and the ordinary life of men
+is beginning to bestir itself among the streets.
+
+In the middle of it all I fell asleep, to be wakened by the
+officious knocking at my door, and I find myself twelve years older
+than I had dreamed myself all night.
+
+
+
+THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES
+
+
+
+It is all very well to talk of death as 'a pleasant potion of
+immortality', but the most of us, I suspect, are of 'queasy
+stomachs,' and find it none of the sweetest. {9a}  The graveyard
+may be cloak-room to Heaven; but we must admit that it is a very
+ugly and offensive vestibule in itself, however fair may be the
+life to which it leads.  And though Enoch and Elias went into the
+temple through a gate which certainly may be called Beautiful, the
+rest of us have to find our way to it through Ezekiel's low-bowed
+door and the vault full of creeping things and all manner of
+abominable beasts.  Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of mind
+to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an
+alleviation.  If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.
+It was in obedience to this wise regulation that the other morning
+found me lighting my pipe at the entrance to Old Greyfriars',
+thoroughly sick of the town, the country, and myself.
+
+Two of the men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a
+spade in hands still crusted with the soil of graves.  Their very
+aspect was delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking
+to pick up some snatch of sexton gossip, some 'talk fit for a
+charnel,' {9b} something, in fine, worthy of that fastidious
+logician, that adept in coroner's law, who has come down to us as
+the patron of Yaughan's liquor, and the very prince of
+gravediggers.  Scots people in general are so much wrapped up in
+their profession that I had a good chance of overhearing such
+conversation:  the talk of fish-mongers running usually on
+stockfish and haddocks; while of the Scots sexton I could repeat
+stories and speeches that positively smell of the graveyard.  But
+on this occasion I was doomed to disappointment.  My two friends
+were far into the region of generalities.  Their profession was
+forgotten in their electorship.  Politics had engulfed the narrower
+economy of grave-digging.  'Na, na,' said the one, 'ye're a'
+wrang.'  'The English and Irish Churches,' answered the other, in a
+tone as if he had made the remark before, and it had been called in
+question--'The English and Irish Churches have IMPOVERISHED the
+country.'
+
+'Such are the results of education,' thought I as I passed beside
+them and came fairly among the tombs.  Here, at least, there were
+no commonplace politics, no diluted this-morning's leader, to
+distract or offend me.  The old shabby church showed, as usual, its
+quaint extent of roofage and the relievo skeleton on one gable,
+still blackened with the fire of thirty years ago.  A chill dank
+mist lay over all.  The Old Greyfriars' churchyard was in
+perfection that morning, and one could go round and reckon up the
+associations with no fear of vulgar interruption.  On this stone
+the Covenant was signed.  In that vault, as the story goes, John
+Knox took hiding in some Reformation broil.  From that window Burke
+the murderer looked out many a time across the tombs, and perhaps
+o' nights let himself down over the sill to rob some new-made
+grave.  Certainly he would have a selection here.  The very walks
+have been carried over forgotten resting-places; and the whole
+ground is uneven, because (as I was once quaintly told) 'when the
+wood rots it stands to reason the soil should fall in,' which, from
+the law of gravitation, is certainly beyond denial.  But it is
+round the boundary that there are the finest tombs.  The whole
+irregular space is, as it were, fringed with quaint old monuments,
+rich in death's-heads and scythes and hour-glasses, and doubly rich
+in pious epitaphs and Latin mottoes--rich in them to such an extent
+that their proper space has run over, and they have crawled end-
+long up the shafts of columns and ensconced themselves in all sorts
+of odd corners among the sculpture.  These tombs raise their backs
+against the rabble of squalid dwelling-houses, and every here and
+there a clothes-pole projects between two monuments its fluttering
+trophy of white and yellow and red.  With a grim irony they recall
+the banners in the Invalides, banners as appropriate perhaps over
+the sepulchres of tailors and weavers as these others above the
+dust of armies.  Why they put things out to dry on that particular
+morning it was hard to imagine.  The grass was grey with drops of
+rain, the headstones black with moisture.  Yet, in despite of
+weather and common sense, there they hung between the tombs; and
+beyond them I could see through open windows into miserable rooms
+where whole families were born and fed, and slept and died.  At one
+a girl sat singing merrily with her back to the graveyard; and from
+another came the shrill tones of a scolding woman.  Every here and
+there was a town garden full of sickly flowers, or a pile of
+crockery inside upon the window-seat.  But you do not grasp the
+full connection between these houses of the dead and the living,
+the unnatural marriage of stately sepulchres and squalid houses,
+till, lower down, where the road has sunk far below the surface of
+the cemetery, and the very roofs are scarcely on a level with its
+wall, you observe that a proprietor has taken advantage of a tall
+monument and trained a chimney-stack against its back.  It startles
+you to see the red, modern pots peering over the shoulder of the
+tomb.
+
+A man was at work on a grave, his spade clinking away the drift of
+bones that permeates the thin brown soil; but my first
+disappointment had taught me to expect little from Greyfriars'
+sextons, and I passed him by in silence.  A slater on the slope of
+a neighbouring roof eyed me curiously.  A lean black cat, looking
+as if it had battened on strange meats, slipped past me.  A little
+boy at a window put his finger to his nose in so offensive a manner
+that I was put upon my dignity, and turned grandly off to read old
+epitaphs and peer through the gratings into the shadow of vaults.
+
+Just then I saw two women coming down a path, one of them old, and
+the other younger, with a child in her arms.  Both had faces eaten
+with famine and hardened with sin, and both had reached that stage
+of degradation, much lower in a woman than a man, when all care for
+dress is lost.  As they came down they neared a grave, where some
+pious friend or relative had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put
+a bell glass over it, as is the custom.  The effect of that ring of
+dull yellow among so many blackened and dusty sculptures was more
+pleasant than it is in modern cemeteries, where every second mound
+can boast a similar coronal; and here, where it was the exception
+and not the rule, I could even fancy the drops of moisture that
+dimmed the covering were the tears of those who laid it where it
+was.  As the two women came up to it, one of them kneeled down on
+the wet grass and looked long and silently through the clouded
+shade, while the second stood above her, gently oscillating to and
+fro to lull the muling baby.  I was struck a great way off with
+something religious in the attitude of these two unkempt and
+haggard women; and I drew near faster, but still cautiously, to
+hear what they were saying.  Surely on them the spirit of death and
+decay had descended; I had no education to dread here:  should I
+not have a chance of seeing nature?  Alas! a pawnbroker could not
+have been more practical and commonplace, for this was what the
+kneeling woman said to the woman upright--this and nothing more:
+'Eh, what extravagance!'
+
+O nineteenth century, wonderful art thou indeed--wonderful, but
+wearisome in thy stale and deadly uniformity.  Thy men are more
+like numerals than men.  They must bear their idiosyncrasies or
+their professions written on a placard about their neck, like the
+scenery in Shakespeare's theatre.  Thy precepts of economy have
+pierced into the lowest ranks of life; and there is now a decorum
+in vice, a respectability among the disreputable, a pure spirit of
+Philistinism among the waifs and strays of thy Bohemia.  For lo!
+thy very gravediggers talk politics; and thy castaways kneel upon
+new graves, to discuss the cost of the monument and grumble at the
+improvidence of love.
+
+Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of the
+gates again, happily satisfied in myself, and feeling that I alone
+of all whom I had seen was able to profit by the silent poem of
+these green mounds and blackened headstones.
+
+
+
+NURSES
+
+
+
+I knew one once, and the room where, lonely and old, she waited for
+death.  It was pleasant enough, high up above the lane, and looking
+forth upon a hill-side, covered all day with sheets and yellow
+blankets, and with long lines of underclothing fluttering between
+the battered posts.  There were any number of cheap prints, and a
+drawing by one of 'her children,' and there were flowers in the
+window, and a sickly canary withered into consumption in an
+ornamental cage.  The bed, with its checked coverlid, was in a
+closet.  A great Bible lay on the table; and her drawers were full
+of 'scones,' which it was her pleasure to give to young visitors
+such as I was then.
+
+You may not think this a melancholy picture; but the canary, and
+the cat, and the white mouse that she had for a while, and that
+died, were all indications of the want that ate into her heart.  I
+think I know a little of what that old woman felt; and I am as sure
+as if I had seen her, that she sat many an hour in silent tears,
+with the big Bible open before her clouded eyes.
+
+If you could look back upon her life, and feel the great chain that
+had linked her to one child after another, sometimes to be wrenched
+suddenly through, and sometimes, which is infinitely worse, to be
+torn gradually off through years of growing neglect, or perhaps
+growing dislike!  She had, like the mother, overcome that natural
+repugnance--repugnance which no man can conquer--towards the infirm
+and helpless mass of putty of the earlier stage.  She had spent her
+best and happiest years in tending, watching, and learning to love
+like a mother this child, with which she has no connection and to
+which she has no tie.  Perhaps she refused some sweetheart (such
+things have been), or put him off and off, until he lost heart and
+turned to some one else, all for fear of leaving this creature that
+had wound itself about her heart.  And the end of it all--her
+month's warning, and a present perhaps, and the rest of the life to
+vain regret.  Or, worse still, to see the child gradually
+forgetting and forsaking her, fostered in disrespect and neglect on
+the plea of growing manliness, and at last beginning to treat her
+as a servant whom he had treated a few years before as a mother.
+She sees the Bible or the Psalm-book, which with gladness and love
+unutterable in her heart she had bought for him years ago out of
+her slender savings, neglected for some newer gift of his father,
+lying in dust in the lumber-room or given away to a poor child, and
+the act applauded for its unfeeling charity.  Little wonder if she
+becomes hurt and angry, and attempts to tyrannise and to grasp her
+old power back again.  We are not all patient Grizzels, by good
+fortune, but the most of us human beings with feelings and tempers
+of our own.
+
+And so, in the end, behold her in the room that I described.  Very
+likely and very naturally, in some fling of feverish misery or
+recoil of thwarted love, she has quarrelled with her old employers
+and the children are forbidden to see her or to speak to her; or at
+best she gets her rent paid and a little to herself, and now and
+then her late charges are sent up (with another nurse, perhaps) to
+pay her a short visit.  How bright these visits seem as she looks
+forward to them on her lonely bed!  How unsatisfactory their
+realisation, when the forgetful child, half wondering, checks with
+every word and action the outpouring of her maternal love!  How
+bitter and restless the memories that they leave behind!  And for
+the rest, what else has she?--to watch them with eager eyes as they
+go to school, to sit in church where she can see them every Sunday,
+to be passed some day unnoticed in the street, or deliberately cut
+because the great man or the great woman are with friends before
+whom they are ashamed to recognise the old woman that loved them.
+
+When she goes home that night, how lonely will the room appear to
+her!  Perhaps the neighbours may hear her sobbing to herself in the
+dark, with the fire burnt out for want of fuel, and the candle
+still unlit upon the table.
+
+And it is for this that they live, these quasi-mothers--mothers in
+everything but the travail and the thanks.  It is for this that
+they have remained virtuous in youth, living the dull life of a
+household servant.  It is for this that they refused the old
+sweetheart, and have no fireside or offspring of their own.
+
+I believe in a better state of things, that there will be no more
+nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own offspring; for
+what can be more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the
+tenderest feelings of a woman's heart and cherish them yourself as
+long as you need them, as long as your children require a nurse to
+love them, and then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever
+your own use for them is at an end.  This may be Utopian; but it is
+always a little thing if one mother or two mothers can be brought
+to feel more tenderly to those who share their toil and have no
+part in their reward.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--A CHARACTER
+
+
+
+The man has a red, bloated face, and his figure is short and squat.
+So far there is nothing in him to notice, but when you see his
+eyes, you can read in these hard and shallow orbs a depravity
+beyond measure depraved, a thirst after wickedness, the pure,
+disinterested love of Hell for its own sake.  The other night, in
+the street, I was watching an omnibus passing with lit-up windows,
+when I heard some one coughing at my side as though he would cough
+his soul out; and turning round, I saw him stopping under a lamp,
+with a brown greatcoat buttoned round him and his whole face
+convulsed.  It seemed as if he could not live long; and so the
+sight set my mind upon a train of thought, as I finished my cigar
+up and down the lighted streets.
+
+He is old, but all these years have not yet quenched his thirst for
+evil, and his eyes still delight themselves in wickedness.  He is
+dumb; but he will not let that hinder his foul trade, or perhaps I
+should say, his yet fouler amusement, and he has pressed a slate
+into the service of corruption.  Look at him, and he will sign to
+you with his bloated head, and when you go to him in answer to the
+sign, thinking perhaps that the poor dumb man has lost his way, you
+will see what he writes upon his slate.  He haunts the doors of
+schools, and shows such inscriptions as these to the innocent
+children that come out.  He hangs about picture-galleries, and
+makes the noblest pictures the text for some silent homily of vice.
+His industry is a lesson to ourselves.  Is it not wonderful how he
+can triumph over his infirmities and do such an amount of harm
+without a tongue?  Wonderful industry--strange, fruitless,
+pleasureless toil?  Must not the very devil feel a soft emotion to
+see his disinterested and laborious service?  Ah, but the devil
+knows better than this:  he knows that this man is penetrated with
+the love of evil and that all his pleasure is shut up in
+wickedness:  he recognises him, perhaps, as a fit type for mankind
+of his satanic self, and watches over his effigy as we might watch
+over a favourite likeness.  As the business man comes to love the
+toil, which he only looked upon at first as a ladder towards other
+desires and less unnatural gratifications, so the dumb man has felt
+the charm of his trade and fallen captivated before the eyes of
+sin.  It is a mistake when preachers tell us that vice is hideous
+and loathsome; for even vice has her Horsel and her devotees, who
+love her for her own sake.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--NANCE AT THE 'GREEN DRAGON'
+
+
+
+Nance Holdaway was on her knees before the fire blowing the green
+wood that voluminously smoked upon the dogs, and only now and then
+shot forth a smothered flame; her knees already ached and her eyes
+smarted, for she had been some while at this ungrateful task, but
+her mind was gone far away to meet the coming stranger.  Now she
+met him in the wood, now at the castle gate, now in the kitchen by
+candle-light; each fresh presentment eclipsed the one before; a
+form so elegant, manners so sedate, a countenance so brave and
+comely, a voice so winning and resolute--sure such a man was never
+seen!  The thick-coming fancies poured and brightened in her head
+like the smoke and flames upon the hearth.
+
+Presently the heavy foot of her uncle Jonathan was heard upon the
+stair, and as he entered the room she bent the closer to her work.
+He glanced at the green fagots with a sneer, and looked askance at
+the bed and the white sheets, at the strip of carpet laid, like an
+island, on the great expanse of the stone floor, and at the broken
+glazing of the casement clumsily repaired with paper.
+
+'Leave that fire a-be,' he cried.  'What, have I toiled all my life
+to turn innkeeper at the hind end?  Leave it a-be, I say.'
+
+'La, uncle, it doesn't burn a bit; it only smokes,' said Nance,
+looking up from her position.
+
+'You are come of decent people on both sides,' returned the old
+man.  'Who are you to blow the coals for any Robin-run-agate?  Get
+up, get on your hood, make yourself useful, and be off to the
+"Green Dragon."'
+
+'I thought you was to go yourself,' Nance faltered.
+
+'So did I,' quoth Jonathan; 'but it appears I was mistook.'
+
+The very excess of her eagerness alarmed her, and she began to hang
+back.  'I think I would rather not, dear uncle,' she said.  'Night
+is at hand, and I think, dear, I would rather not.'
+
+'Now you look here,' replied Jonathan, 'I have my lord's orders,
+have I not?  Little he gives me, but it's all my livelihood.  And
+do you fancy, if I disobey my lord, I'm likely to turn round for a
+lass like you?  No, I've that hell-fire of pain in my old knee, I
+wouldn't walk a mile, not for King George upon his bended knees.'
+And he walked to the window and looked down the steep scarp to
+where the river foamed in the bottom of the dell.
+
+Nance stayed for no more bidding.  In her own room, by the glimmer
+of the twilight, she washed her hands and pulled on her Sunday
+mittens; adjusted her black hood, and tied a dozen times its cherry
+ribbons; and in less than ten minutes, with a fluttering heart and
+excellently bright eyes, she passed forth under the arch and over
+the bridge, into the thickening shadows of the groves.  A well-
+marked wheel-track conducted her.  The wood, which upon both sides
+of the river dell was a mere scrambling thicket of hazel, hawthorn,
+and holly, boasted on the level of more considerable timber.
+Beeches came to a good growth, with here and there an oak; and the
+track now passed under a high arcade of branches, and now ran under
+the open sky in glades.  As the girl proceeded these glades became
+more frequent, the trees began again to decline in size, and the
+wood to degenerate into furzy coverts.  Last of all there was a
+fringe of elders; and beyond that the track came forth upon an
+open, rolling moorland, dotted with wind-bowed and scanty bushes,
+and all golden brown with the winter, like a grouse.  Right over
+against the girl the last red embers of the sunset burned under
+horizontal clouds; the night fell clear and still and frosty, and
+the track in low and marshy passages began to crackle under foot
+with ice.
+
+Some half a mile beyond the borders of the wood the lights of the
+'Green Dragon' hove in sight, and running close beside them, very
+faint in the dying dusk, the pale ribbon of the Great North Road.
+It was the back of the post-house that was presented to Nance
+Holdaway; and as she continued to draw near and the night to fall
+more completely, she became aware of an unusual brightness and
+bustle.  A post-chaise stood in the yard, its lamps already
+lighted:  light shone hospitably in the windows and from the open
+door; moving lights and shadows testified to the activity of
+servants bearing lanterns.  The clank of pails, the stamping of
+hoofs on the firm causeway, the jingle of harness, and, last of
+all, the energetic hissing of a groom, began to fall upon her ear.
+By the stir you would have thought the mail was at the door, but it
+was still too early in the night.  The down mail was not due at the
+'Green Dragon' for hard upon an hour; the up mail from Scotland not
+before two in the black morning.
+
+Nance entered the yard somewhat dazzled.  Sam, the tall ostler, was
+polishing a curb-chain wit sand; the lantern at his feet letting up
+spouts of candle-light through the holes with which its conical
+roof was peppered.
+
+'Hey, miss,' said he jocularly, 'you won't look at me any more, now
+you have gentry at the castle.'
+
+Her cheeks burned with anger.
+
+'That's my lord's chay,' the man continued, nodding at the chaise,
+'Lord Windermoor's.  Came all in a fluster--dinner, bowl of punch,
+and put the horses to. For all the world like a runaway match, my
+dear--bar the bride.  He brought Mr. Archer in the chay with him.'
+
+'Is that Holdaway?' cried the landlord from the lighted entry,
+where he stood shading his eyes.
+
+'Only me, sir,' answered Nance.
+
+'O, you, Miss Nance,' he said.  'Well, come in quick, my pretty.
+My lord is waiting for your uncle.'
+
+And he ushered Nance into a room cased with yellow wainscot and
+lighted by tall candles, where two gentlemen sat at a table
+finishing a bowl of punch.  One of these was stout, elderly, and
+irascible, with a face like a full moon, well dyed with liquor,
+thick tremulous lips, a short, purple hand, in which he brandished
+a long pipe, and an abrupt and gobbling utterance.  This was my
+Lord Windermoor.  In his companion Nance beheld a younger man,
+tall, quiet, grave, demurely dressed, and wearing his own hair.
+Her glance but lighted on him, and she flushed, for in that second
+she made sure that she had twice betrayed herself--betrayed by the
+involuntary flash of her black eyes her secret impatience to behold
+this new companion, and, what was far worse, betrayed her
+disappointment in the realisation of her dreams.  He, meanwhile, as
+if unconscious, continued to regard her with unmoved decorum.
+
+'O, a man of wood,' thought Nance.
+
+'What--what?' said his lordship.  'Who is this?'
+
+'If you please, my lord, I am Holdaway's niece,' replied Nance,
+with a curtsey.
+
+'Should have been here himself,' observed his lordship.  'Well, you
+tell Holdaway that I'm aground, not a stiver--not a stiver.  I'm
+running from the beagles--going abroad, tell Holdaway.  And he need
+look for no more wages:  glad of 'em myself, if I could get 'em.
+He can live in the castle if he likes, or go to the devil.  O, and
+here is Mr. Archer; and I recommend him to take him in--a friend of
+mine--and Mr. Archer will pay, as I wrote.  And I regard that in
+the light of a precious good thing for Holdaway, let me tell you,
+and a set-off against the wages.'
+
+'But O, my lord!' cried Nance, 'we live upon the wages, and what
+are we to do without?'
+
+'What am I to do?--what am I to do?' replied Lord Windermoor with
+some exasperation.  'I have no wages.  And there is Mr. Archer.
+And if Holdaway doesn't like it, he can go to the devil, and you
+with him!--and you with him!'
+
+'And yet, my lord,' said Mr. Archer, 'these good people will have
+as keen a sense of loss as you or I; keener, perhaps, since they
+have done nothing to deserve it.'
+
+'Deserve it?' cried the peer.  'What?  What?  If a rascally
+highwayman comes up to me with a confounded pistol, do you say that
+I've deserved it?  How often am I to tell you, sir, that I was
+cheated--that I was cheated?'
+
+'You are happy in the belief,' returned Mr. Archer gravely.
+
+'Archer, you would be the death of me!' exclaimed his lordship.
+'You know you're drunk; you know it, sir; and yet you can't get up
+a spark of animation.'
+
+'I have drunk fair, my lord,' replied the younger man; 'but I own I
+am conscious of no exhilaration.'
+
+'If you had as black a look-out as me, sir,' cried the peer, 'you
+would be very glad of a little innocent exhilaration, let me tell
+you.  I am glad of it--glad of it, and I only wish I was drunker.
+For let me tell you it's a cruel hard thing upon a man of my time
+of life and my position, to be brought down to beggary because the
+world is full of thieves and rascals--thieves and rascals.  What?
+For all I know, you may be a thief and a rascal yourself; and I
+would fight you for a pinch of snuff--a pinch of snuff,' exclaimed
+his lordship.
+
+Here Mr. Archer turned to Nance Holdaway with a pleasant smile, so
+full of sweetness, kindness, and composure that, at one bound, her
+dreams returned to her.  'My good Miss Holdaway,' said he, 'if you
+are willing to show me the road, I am even eager to be gone.  As
+for his lordship and myself, compose yourself; there is no fear;
+this is his lordship's way.'
+
+'What? what?' cried his lordship.  'My way?  Ish no such a thing,
+my way.'
+
+'Come, my lord,' cried Archer; 'you and I very thoroughly
+understand each other; and let me suggest, it is time that both of
+us were gone.  The mail will soon be due.  Here, then, my lord, I
+take my leave of you, with the most earnest assurance of my
+gratitude for the past, and a sincere offer of any services I may
+be able to render in the future.'
+
+'Archer,' exclaimed Lord Windermoor, 'I love you like a son.  Le'
+'s have another bowl.'
+
+'My lord, for both our sakes, you will excuse me,' replied Mr.
+Archer.  'We both require caution; we must both, for some while at
+least, avoid the chance of a pursuit.'
+
+'Archer,' quoth his lordship, 'this is a rank ingratishood.  What?
+I'm to go firing away in the dark in the cold po'chaise, and not so
+much as a game of ecarte possible, unless I stop and play with the
+postillion, the postillion; and the whole country swarming with
+thieves and rascals and highwaymen.'
+
+'I beg your lordship's pardon,' put in the landlord, who now
+appeared in the doorway to announce the chaise, 'but this part of
+the North Road is known for safety.  There has not been a robbery,
+to call a robbery, this five years' time.  Further south, of
+course, it's nearer London, and another story,' he added.
+
+'Well, then, if that's so,' concluded my lord, 'le' 's have t'other
+bowl and a pack of cards.'
+
+'My lord, you forget,' said Archer, 'I might still gain; but it is
+hardly possible for me to lose.'
+
+'Think I'm a sharper?' inquired the peer.  'Gen'leman's parole's
+all I ask.'
+
+But Mr. Archer was proof against these blandishments, and said
+farewell gravely enough to Lord Windermoor, shaking his hand and at
+the same time bowing very low.  'You will never know,' says he,
+'the service you have done me.'  And with that, and before my lord
+had finally taken up his meaning, he had slipped about the table,
+touched Nance lightly but imperiously on the arm, and left the
+room.  In face of the outbreak of his lordship's lamentations she
+made haste to follow the truant.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--IN WHICH MR. ARCHER IS INSTALLED
+
+
+
+The chaise had been driven round to the front door; the courtyard
+lay all deserted, and only lit by a lantern set upon a window-sill.
+Through this Nance rapidly led the way, and began to ascend the
+swellings of the moor with a heart that somewhat fluttered in her
+bosom.  She was not afraid, but in the course of these last
+passages with Lord Windermoor Mr. Archer had ascended to that
+pedestal on which her fancy waited to instal him.  The reality, she
+felt, excelled her dreams, and this cold night walk was the first
+romantic incident in her experience.
+
+It was the rule in these days to see gentlemen unsteady after
+dinner, yet Nance was both surprised and amused when her companion,
+who had spoken so soberly, began to stumble and waver by her side
+with the most airy divagations.  Sometimes he would get so close to
+her that she must edge away; and at others lurch clear out of the
+track and plough among deep heather.  His courtesy and gravity
+meanwhile remained unaltered.  He asked her how far they had to go;
+whether the way lay all upon the moorland, and when he learned they
+had to pass a wood expressed his pleasure.  'For,' said he, 'I am
+passionately fond of trees.  Trees and fair lawns, if you consider
+of it rightly, are the ornaments of nature, as palaces and fine
+approaches--'  And here he stumbled into a patch of slough and
+nearly fell.  The girl had hard work not to laugh, but at heart she
+was lost in admiration for one who talked so elegantly.
+
+They had got to about a quarter of a mile from the 'Green Dragon,'
+and were near the summit of the rise, when a sudden rush of wheels
+arrested them.  Turning and looking back, they saw the post-house,
+now much declined in brightness; and speeding away northward the
+two tremulous bright dots of my Lord Windermoor's chaise-lamps.
+Mr. Archer followed these yellow and unsteady stars until they
+dwindled into points and disappeared.
+
+'There goes my only friend,' he said.  'Death has cut off those
+that loved me, and change of fortune estranged my flatterers; and
+but for you, poor bankrupt, my life is as lonely as this moor.'
+
+The tone of his voice affected both of them.  They stood there on
+the side of the moor, and became thrillingly conscious of the void
+waste of the night, without a feature for the eye, and except for
+the fainting whisper of the carriage-wheels without a murmur for
+the ear.  And instantly, like a mockery, there broke out, very far
+away, but clear and jolly, the note of the mail-guard's horn.
+'Over the hills' was his air.  It rose to the two watchers on the
+moor with the most cheerful sentiment of human company and travel,
+and at the same time in and around the 'Green Dragon' it woke up a
+great bustle of lights running to and fro and clattering hoofs.
+Presently after, out of the darkness to southward, the mail grew
+near with a growing rumble.  Its lamps were very large and bright,
+and threw their radiance forward in overlapping cones; the four
+cantering horses swarmed and steamed; the body of the coach
+followed like a great shadow; and this lit picture slid with a sort
+of ineffectual swiftness over the black field of night, and was
+eclipsed by the buildings of the 'Green Dragon.'
+
+Mr. Archer turned abruptly and resumed his former walk; only that
+he was now more steady, kept better alongside his young conductor,
+and had fallen into a silence broken by sighs.  Nance waxed very
+pitiful over his fate, contrasting an imaginary past of courts and
+great society, and perhaps the King himself, with the tumbledown
+ruin in a wood to which she was now conducting him.
+
+'You must try, sir, to keep your spirits up,' said she.  'To be
+sure this is a great change for one like you; but who knows the
+future?'
+
+Mr. Archer turned towards her in the darkness, and she could
+clearly perceive that he smiled upon her very kindly.  'There spoke
+a sweet nature,' said he, 'and I must thank you for these words.
+But I would not have you fancy that I regret the past for any
+happiness found in it, or that I fear the simplicity and hardship
+of the country.  I am a man that has been much tossed about in
+life; now up, now down; and do you think that I shall not be able
+to support what you support--you who are kind, and therefore know
+how to feel pain; who are beautiful, and therefore hope; who are
+young, and therefore (or am I the more mistaken?) discontented?'
+
+'Nay, sir, not that, at least,' said Nance; 'not discontented.  If
+I were to be discontented, how should I look those that have real
+sorrows in the face?  I have faults enough, but not that fault; and
+I have my merits too, for I have a good opinion of myself.  But for
+beauty, I am not so simple but that I can tell a banter from a
+compliment.'
+
+'Nay, nay,' said Mr. Archer, 'I had half forgotten; grief is
+selfish, and I was thinking of myself and not of you, or I had
+never blurted out so bold a piece of praise.  'Tis the best proof
+of my sincerity.  But come, now, I would lay a wager you are no
+coward?'
+
+'Indeed, sir, I am not more afraid than another,' said Nance.
+'None of my blood are given to fear.'
+
+'And you are honest?' he returned.
+
+'I will answer for that,' said she.
+
+'Well, then, to be brave, to be honest, to be kind, and to be
+contented, since you say you are so--is not that to fill up a great
+part of virtue?'
+
+'I fear you are but a flatterer,' said Nance, but she did not say
+it clearly, for what with bewilderment and satisfaction, her heart
+was quite oppressed.
+
+There could be no harm, certainly, in these grave compliments; but
+yet they charmed and frightened her, and to find favour, for
+reasons however obscure, in the eyes of this elegant, serious, and
+most unfortunate young gentleman, was a giddy elevation, was almost
+an apotheosis, for a country maid.
+
+But she was to be no more exercised; for Mr. Archer, disclaiming
+any thought of flattery, turned off to other subjects, and held her
+all through the wood in conversation, addressing her with an air of
+perfect sincerity, and listening to her answers with every mark of
+interest.  Had open flattery continued, Nance would have soon found
+refuge in good sense; but the more subtle lure she could not
+suspect, much less avoid.  It was the first time she had ever taken
+part in a conversation illuminated by any ideas.  All was then true
+that she had heard and dreamed of gentlemen; they were a race
+apart, like deities knowing good and evil.  And then there burst
+upon her soul a divine thought, hope's glorious sunrise:  since she
+could understand, since it seemed that she too, even she, could
+interest this sorrowful Apollo, might she not learn? or was she not
+learning?  Would not her soul awake and put forth wings?  Was she
+not, in fact, an enchanted princess, waiting but a touch to become
+royal?  She saw herself transformed, radiantly attired, but in the
+most exquisite taste:  her face grown longer and more refined; her
+tint etherealised; and she heard herself with delighted wonder
+talking like a book.
+
+Meanwhile they had arrived at where the track comes out above the
+river dell, and saw in front of them the castle, faintly shadowed
+on the night, covering with its broken battlements a bold
+projection of the bank, and showing at the extreme end, where were
+the habitable tower and wing, some crevices of candle-light.  Hence
+she called loudly upon her uncle, and he was seen to issue, lantern
+in hand, from the tower door, and, where the ruins did not
+intervene, to pick his way over the swarded courtyard, avoiding
+treacherous cellars and winding among blocks of fallen masonry.
+The arch of the great gate was still entire, flanked by two
+tottering bastions, and it was here that Jonathan met them,
+standing at the edge of the bridge, bent somewhat forward, and
+blinking at them through the glow of his own lantern.  Mr. Archer
+greeted him with civility; but the old man was in no humour of
+compliance.  He guided the newcomer across the court-yard, looking
+sharply and quickly in his face, and grumbling all the time about
+the cold, and the discomfort and dilapidation of the castle.  He
+was sure he hoped that Mr. Archer would like it; but in truth he
+could not think what brought him there.  Doubtless he had a good
+reason--this with a look of cunning scrutiny--but, indeed, the
+place was quite unfit for any person of repute; he himself was
+eaten up with the rheumatics.  It was the most rheumaticky place in
+England, and some fine day the whole habitable part (to call it
+habitable) would fetch away bodily and go down the slope into the
+river.  He had seen the cracks widening; there was a plaguy issue
+in the bank below; he thought a spring was mining it; it might be
+to-morrow, it might be next day; but they were all sure of a come-
+down sooner or later.  'And that is a poor death,' said he, 'for
+any one, let alone a gentleman, to have a whole old ruin dumped
+upon his belly.  Have a care to your left there; these cellar
+vaults have all broke down, and the grass and hemlock hide 'em.
+Well, sir, here is welcome to you, such as it is, and wishing you
+well away.'
+
+And with that Jonathan ushered his guest through the tower door,
+and down three steps on the left hand into the kitchen or common
+room of the castle.  It was a huge, low room, as large as a meadow,
+occupying the whole width of the habitable wing, with six barred
+windows looking on the court, and two into the river valley.  A
+dresser, a table, and a few chairs stood dotted here and there upon
+the uneven flags.  Under the great chimney a good fire burned in an
+iron fire-basket; a high old settee, rudely carved with figures and
+Gothic lettering, flanked it on either side; there was a hinge
+table and a stone bench in the chimney corner, and above the arch
+hung guns, axes, lanterns, and great sheaves of rusty keys.
+
+Jonathan looked about him, holding up the lantern, and shrugged his
+shoulders, with a pitying grimace.  'Here it is,' he said.  'See
+the damp on the floor, look at the moss; where there's moss you may
+be sure that it's rheumaticky.  Try and get near that fire for to
+warm yourself; it'll blow the coat off your back.  And with a young
+gentleman with a face like yours, as pale as a tallow-candle, I'd
+be afeard of a churchyard cough and a galloping decline,' says
+Jonathan, naming the maladies with gloomy gusto, 'or the cold might
+strike and turn your blood,' he added.
+
+Mr. Archer fairly laughed.  'My good Mr. Holdaway,' said he, 'I was
+born with that same tallow-candle face, and the only fear that you
+inspire me with is the fear that I intrude unwelcomely upon your
+private hours.  But I think I can promise you that I am very little
+troublesome, and I am inclined to hope that the terms which I can
+offer may still pay you the derangement.'
+
+'Yes, the terms,' said Jonathan, 'I was thinking of that.  As you
+say, they are very small,' and he shook his head.
+
+'Unhappily, I can afford no more,' said Mr. Archer.  'But this we
+have arranged already,' he added with a certain stiffness; 'and as
+I am aware that Miss Holdaway has matter to communicate, I will, if
+you permit, retire at once.  To-night I must bivouac; to-morrow my
+trunk is to follow from the "Dragon."  So if you will show me to my
+room I shall wish you a good slumber and a better awakening.'
+
+Jonathan silently gave the lantern to Nance, and she, turning and
+curtseying in the doorway, proceeded to conduct their guest up the
+broad winding staircase of the tower.  He followed with a very
+brooding face.
+
+'Alas!' cried Nance, as she entered the room, 'your fire black
+out,' and, setting down the lantern, she clapped upon her knees
+before the chimney and began to rearrange the charred and still
+smouldering remains.  Mr. Archer looked about the gaunt apartment
+with a sort of shudder.  The great height, the bare stone, the
+shattered windows, the aspect of the uncurtained bed, with one of
+its four fluted columns broken short, all struck a chill upon his
+fancy.  From this dismal survey his eyes returned to Nance
+crouching before the fire, the candle in one hand and artfully
+puffing at the embers; the flames as they broke forth played upon
+the soft outline of her cheek--she was alive and young, coloured
+with the bright hues of life, and a woman.  He looked upon her,
+softening; and then sat down and continued to admire the picture.
+
+'There, sir,' said she, getting upon her feet, 'your fire is doing
+bravely now.  Good-night.'
+
+He rose and held out his hand.  'Come,' said he, 'you are my only
+friend in these parts, and you must shake hands.'
+
+She brushed her hand upon her skirt and offered it, blushing.
+
+'God bless you, my dear,' said he.
+
+And then, when he was alone, he opened one of the windows, and
+stared down into the dark valley.  A gentle wimpling of the river
+among stones ascended to his ear; the trees upon the other bank
+stood very black against the sky; farther away an owl was hooting.
+It was dreary and cold, and as he turned back to the hearth and the
+fine glow of fire, 'Heavens!' said he to himself, 'what an
+unfortunate destiny is mine!'
+
+He went to bed, but sleep only visited his pillow in uneasy
+snatches.  Outbreaks of loud speech came up the staircase; he heard
+the old stones of the castle crack in the frosty night with sharp
+reverberations, and the bed complained under his tossings.  Lastly,
+far on into the morning, he awakened from a doze to hear, very far
+off, in the extreme and breathless quiet, a wailing flourish on the
+horn.  The down mail was drawing near to the 'Green Dragon.'  He
+sat up in bed; the sound was tragical by distance, and the
+modulation appealed to his ear like human speech.  It seemed to
+call upon him with a dreary insistence--to call him far away, to
+address him personally, and to have a meaning that he failed to
+seize.  It was thus, at least, in this nodding castle, in a cold,
+miry woodland, and so far from men and society, that the traffic on
+the Great North Road spoke to him in the intervals of slumber.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III-- JONATHAN HOLDAWAY
+
+
+
+Nance descended the tower stair, pausing at every step.  She was in
+no hurry to confront her uncle with bad news, and she must dwell a
+little longer on the rich note of Mr. Archer's voice, the charm of
+his kind words, and the beauty of his manner and person.  But, once
+at the stair-foot, she threw aside the spell and recovered her
+sensible and workaday self.
+
+Jonathan was seated in the middle of the settle, a mug of ale
+beside him, in the attitude of one prepared for trouble; but he did
+not speak, and suffered her to fetch her supper and eat of it, with
+a very excellent appetite, in silence.  When she had done, she,
+too, drew a tankard of home-brewed, and came and planted herself in
+front of him upon the settle.
+
+'Well?' said Jonathan.
+
+'My lord has run away,' said Nance.
+
+'What?' cried the old man.
+
+'Abroad,' she continued; 'run away from creditors.  He said he had
+not a stiver, but he was drunk enough.  He said you might live on
+in the castle, and Mr. Archer would pay you; but you was to look
+for no more wages, since he would be glad of them himself.'
+
+Jonathan's face contracted; the flush of a black, bilious anger
+mounted to the roots of his hair; he gave an inarticulate cry,
+leapt upon his feet, and began rapidly pacing the stone floor.  At
+first he kept his hands behind his back in a tight knot; then he
+began to gesticulate as he turned.
+
+'This man--this lord,' he shouted, 'who is he?  He was born with a
+gold spoon in his mouth, and I with a dirty straw.  He rolled in
+his coach when he was a baby.  I have dug and toiled and laboured
+since I was that high--that high.'  And he shouted again.  'I'm
+bent and broke, and full of pains.  D' ye think I don't know the
+taste of sweat?  Many's the gallon I've drunk of it--ay, in the
+midwinter, toiling like a slave.  All through, what has my life
+been?  Bend, bend, bend my old creaking back till it would ache
+like breaking; wade about in the foul mire, never a dry stitch;
+empty belly, sore hands, hat off to my Lord Redface; kicks and
+ha'pence; and now, here, at the hind end, when I'm worn to my poor
+bones, a kick and done with it.'  He walked a little while in
+silence, and then, extending his hand, 'Now you, Nance Holdaway,'
+says he, 'you come of my blood, and you're a good girl.  When that
+man was a boy, I used to carry his gun for him.  I carried the gun
+all day on my two feet, and many a stitch I had, and chewed a
+bullet for.  He rode upon a horse, with feathers in his hat; but it
+was him that had the shots and took the game home.  Did I complain?
+Not I.  I knew my station.  What did I ask, but just the chance to
+live and die honest?  Nance Holdaway, don't let them deny it to me-
+-don't let them do it.  I've been as poor as Job, and as honest as
+the day, but now, my girl, you mark these words of mine, I'm
+getting tired of it.'
+
+'I wouldn't say such words, at least,' said Nance.
+
+'You wouldn't?' said the old man grimly.  'Well, and did I when I
+was your age?  Wait till your back's broke and your hands tremble,
+and your eyes fail, and you're weary of the battle and ask no more
+but to lie down in your bed and give the ghost up like an honest
+man; and then let there up and come some insolent, ungodly fellow--
+ah! if I had him in these hands!  "Where's my money that you
+gambled?" I should say.  "Where's my money that you drank and
+diced?"  "Thief!" is what I would say; "Thief!"' he roared,
+'"Thief"'
+
+'Mr. Archer will hear you if you don't take care,' said Nance, 'and
+I would be ashamed, for one, that he should hear a brave, old,
+honest, hard-working man like Jonathan Holdaway talk nonsense like
+a boy.'
+
+'D' ye think I mind for Mr. Archer?' he cried shrilly, with a clack
+of laughter; and then he came close up to her, stooped down with
+his two palms upon his knees, and looked her in the eyes, with a
+strange hard expression, something like a smile.  'Do I mind for
+God, my girl?' he said; 'that's what it's come to be now, do I mind
+for God?'
+
+'Uncle Jonathan,' she said, getting up and taking him by the arm;
+'you sit down again, where you were sitting.  There, sit still;
+I'll have no more of this; you'll do yourself a mischief.  Come,
+take a drink of this good ale, and I'll warm a tankard for you.
+La, we'll pull through, you'll see.  I'm young, as you say, and
+it's my turn to carry the bundle; and don't you worry your bile, or
+we'll have sickness, too, as well as sorrow.'
+
+'D' ye think that I'd forgotten you?' said Jonathan, with something
+like a groan; and thereupon his teeth clicked to, and he sat silent
+with the tankard in his hand and staring straight before him.
+
+'Why,' says Nance, setting on the ale to mull, 'men are always
+children, they say, however old; and if ever I heard a thing like
+this, to set to and make yourself sick, just when the money's
+failing.  Keep a good heart up; you haven't kept a good heart these
+seventy years, nigh hand, to break down about a pound or two.
+Here's this Mr. Archer come to lodge, that you disliked so much.
+Well, now you see it was a clear Providence.  Come, let's think
+upon our mercies.  And here is the ale mulling lovely; smell of it;
+I'll take a drop myself, it smells so sweet.  And, Uncle Jonathan,
+you let me say one word.  You've lost more than money before now;
+you lost my aunt, and bore it like a man.  Bear this.'
+
+His face once more contracted; his fist doubled, and shot forth
+into the air, and trembled.  'Let them look out!' he shouted.
+'Here, I warn all men; I've done with this foul kennel of knaves.
+Let them look out!'
+
+'Hush, hush! for pity's sake,' cried Nance.
+
+And then all of a sudden he dropped his face into his hands, and
+broke out with a great hiccoughing dry sob that was horrible to
+hear.  'O,' he cried, 'my God, if my son hadn't left me, if my Dick
+was here!' and the sobs shook him; Nance sitting still and watching
+him, with distress.  'O, if he were here to help his father!' he
+went on again.  'If I had a son like other fathers, he would save
+me now, when all is breaking down; O, he would save me!  Ay, but
+where is he?  Raking taverns, a thief perhaps.  My curse be on
+him!' he added, rising again into wrath.
+
+'Hush!' cried Nance, springing to her feet:  'your boy, your dead
+wife's boy--Aunt Susan's baby that she loved--would you curse him?
+O, God forbid!'
+
+The energy of her address surprised him from his mood.  He looked
+upon her, tearless and confused.  'Let me go to my bed,' he said at
+last, and he rose, and, shaking as with ague, but quite silent,
+lighted his candle, and left the kitchen.
+
+Poor Nance! the pleasant current of her dreams was all diverted.
+She beheld a golden city, where she aspired to dwell; she had
+spoken with a deity, and had told herself that she might rise to be
+his equal; and now the earthly ligaments that bound her down had
+been tightened.  She was like a tree looking skyward, her roots
+were in the ground.  It seemed to her a thing so coarse, so rustic,
+to be thus concerned about a loss in money; when Mr. Archer, fallen
+from the sky-level of counts and nobles, faced his changed destiny
+with so immovable a courage.  To weary of honesty; that, at least,
+no one could do, but even to name it was already a disgrace; and
+she beheld in fancy her uncle, and the young lad, all laced and
+feathered, hand upon hip, bestriding his small horse.  The
+opposition seemed to perpetuate itself from generation to
+generation; one side still doomed to the clumsy and the servile,
+the other born to beauty.
+
+She thought of the golden zones in which gentlemen were bred, and
+figured with so excellent a grace; zones in which wisdom and smooth
+words, white linen and slim hands, were the mark of the desired
+inhabitants; where low temptations were unknown, and honesty no
+virtue, but a thing as natural as breathing.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--MINGLING THREADS
+
+
+
+It was nearly seven before Mr. Archer left his apartment.  On the
+landing he found another door beside his own opening on a roofless
+corridor, and presently he was walking on the top of the ruins.  On
+one hand he could look down a good depth into the green court-yard;
+on the other his eye roved along the downward course of the river,
+the wet woods all smoking, the shadows long and blue, the mists
+golden and rosy in the sun, here and there the water flashing
+across an obstacle.  His heart expanded and softened to a grateful
+melancholy, and with his eye fixed upon the distance, and no
+thought of present danger, he continued to stroll along the
+elevated and treacherous promenade.
+
+A terror-stricken cry rose to him from the courtyard.  He looked
+down, and saw in a glimpse Nance standing below with hands clasped
+in horror and his own foot trembling on the margin of a gulf.  He
+recoiled and leant against a pillar, quaking from head to foot, and
+covering his face with his hands; and Nance had time to run round
+by the stair and rejoin him where he stood before he had changed a
+line of his position.
+
+'Ah!' he cried, and clutched her wrist; 'don't leave me.  The place
+rocks; I have no head for altitudes.'
+
+'Sit down against that pillar,' said Nance.  'Don't you be afraid;
+I won't leave you, and don't look up or down:  look straight at me.
+How white you are!'
+
+'The gulf,' he said, and closed his eyes again and shuddered.
+
+'Why,' said Nance, 'what a poor climber you must be!  That was
+where my cousin Dick used to get out of the castle after Uncle
+Jonathan had shut the gate.  I've been down there myself with him
+helping me.  I wouldn't try with you,' she said, and laughed
+merrily.
+
+The sound of her laughter was sincere and musical, and perhaps its
+beauty barbed the offence to Mr. Archer.  The blood came into his
+face with a quick jet, and then left it paler than before.  'It is
+a physical weakness,' he said harshly, 'and very droll, no doubt,
+but one that I can conquer on necessity.  See, I am still shaking.
+Well, I advance to the battlements and look down.  Show me your
+cousin's path.'
+
+'He would go sure-foot along that little ledge,' said Nance,
+pointing as she spoke; 'then out through the breach and down by
+yonder buttress.  It is easier coming back, of course, because you
+see where you are going.  From the buttress foot a sheep-walk goes
+along the scarp--see, you can follow it from here in the dry grass.
+And now, sir,' she added, with a touch of womanly pity, 'I would
+come away from here if I were you, for indeed you are not fit.'
+
+Sure enough Mr. Archer's pallor and agitation had continued to
+increase; his cheeks were deathly, his clenched fingers trembled
+pitifully.  'The weakness is physical,' he sighed, and had nearly
+fallen.  Nance led him from the spot, and he was no sooner back in
+the tower-stair, than he fell heavily against the wall and put his
+arm across his eyes.  A cup of brandy had to be brought him before
+he could descend to breakfast; and the perfection of Nance's dream
+was for the first time troubled.
+
+Jonathan was waiting for them at table, with yellow, blood-shot
+eyes and a peculiar dusky complexion.  He hardly waited till they
+found their seats, before, raising one hand, and stooping with his
+mouth above his plate, he put up a prayer for a blessing on the
+food and a spirit of gratitude in the eaters, and thereupon, and
+without more civility, fell to.  But it was notable that he was no
+less speedily satisfied than he had been greedy to begin.  He
+pushed his plate away and drummed upon the table.
+
+'These are silly prayers,' said he, 'that they teach us.  Eat and
+be thankful, that's no such wonder.  Speak to me of starving--
+there's the touch.  You're a man, they tell me, Mr. Archer, that
+has met with some reverses?'
+
+'I have met with many,' replied Mr. Archer.
+
+'Ha!' said Jonathan.  'None reckons but the last.  Now, see; I
+tried to make this girl here understand me.'
+
+'Uncle,' said Nance, 'what should Mr. Archer care for your
+concerns?  He hath troubles of his own, and came to be at peace, I
+think.'
+
+'I tried to make her understand me,' repeated Jonathan doggedly;
+'and now I'll try you.  Do you think this world is fair?'
+
+'Fair and false!' quoth Mr. Archer.
+
+The old man laughed immoderately.  'Good,' said he, 'very good, but
+what I mean is this:  do you know what it is to get up early and go
+to bed late, and never take so much as a holiday but four:  and one
+of these your own marriage day, and the other three the funerals of
+folk you loved, and all that, to have a quiet old age in shelter,
+and bread for your old belly, and a bed to lay your crazy bones
+upon, with a clear conscience?'
+
+'Sir,' said Mr. Archer, with an inclination of his head, 'you
+portray a very brave existence.'
+
+'Well,' continued Jonathan, 'and in the end thieves deceive you,
+thieves rob and rook you, thieves turn you out in your old age and
+send you begging.  What have you got for all your honesty?  A fine
+return!  You that might have stole scores of pounds, there you are
+out in the rain with your rheumatics!'
+
+Mr. Archer had forgotten to eat; with his hand upon his chin he was
+studying the old man's countenance.  'And you conclude?' he asked.
+
+'Conclude!' cried Jonathan.  'I conclude I'll be upsides with
+them.'
+
+'Ay,' said the other, 'we are all tempted to revenge.'
+
+'You have lost money?' asked Jonathan.
+
+'A great estate,' said Archer quietly.
+
+'See now!' says Jonathan, 'and where is it?'
+
+'Nay, I sometimes think that every one has had his share of it but
+me,' was the reply.  'All England hath paid his taxes with my
+patrimony:  I was a sheep that left my wool on every briar.'
+
+'And you sit down under that?' cried the old man.  'Come now, Mr.
+Archer, you and me belong to different stations; and I know mine--
+no man better--but since we have both been rooked, and are both
+sore with it, why, here's my hand with a very good heart, and I ask
+for yours, and no offence, I hope.'
+
+'There is surely no offence, my friend,' returned Mr. Archer, as
+they shook hands across the table; 'for, believe me, my sympathies
+are quite acquired to you.  This life is an arena where we fight
+with beasts; and, indeed,' he added, sighing, 'I sometimes marvel
+why we go down to it unarmed.'
+
+In the meanwhile a creaking of ungreased axles had been heard
+descending through the wood; and presently after, the door opened,
+and the tall ostler entered the kitchen carrying one end of Mr.
+Archer's trunk.  The other was carried by an aged beggar man of
+that district, known and welcome for some twenty miles about under
+the name of 'Old Cumberland.'  Each was soon perched upon a settle,
+with a cup of ale; and the ostler, who valued himself upon his
+affability, began to entertain the company, still with half an eye
+on Nance, to whom in gallant terms he expressly dedicated every sip
+of ale.  First he told of the trouble they had to get his Lordship
+started in the chaise; and how he had dropped a rouleau of gold on
+the threshold, and the passage and doorstep had been strewn with
+guinea-pieces.  At this old Jonathan looked at Mr. Archer.  Next
+the visitor turned to news of a more thrilling character:  how the
+down mail had been stopped again near Grantham by three men on
+horseback--a white and two bays; how they had handkerchiefs on
+their faces; how Tom the guard's blunderbuss missed fire, but he
+swore he had winged one of them with a pistol; and how they had got
+clean away with seventy pounds in money, some valuable papers, and
+a watch or two.
+
+'Brave! brave!' cried Jonathan in ecstasy.  'Seventy pounds!  O,
+it's brave!'
+
+'Well, I don't see the great bravery,' observed the ostler,
+misapprehending him.  'Three men, and you may call that three to
+one.  I'll call it brave when some one stops the mail single-
+handed; that's a risk.'
+
+'And why should they hesitate?' inquired Mr. Archer.  'The poor
+souls who are fallen to such a way of life, pray what have they to
+lose?  If they get the money, well; but if a ball should put them
+from their troubles, why, so better.'
+
+'Well, sir,' said the ostler, 'I believe you'll find they won't
+agree with you.  They count on a good fling, you see; or who would
+risk it?--And here's my best respects to you, Miss Nance.'
+
+'And I forgot the part of cowardice,' resumed Mr. Archer.  'All men
+fear.'
+
+'O, surely not!' cried Nance.
+
+'All men,' reiterated Mr. Archer.
+
+'Ay, that's a true word,' observed Old Cumberland, 'and a thief,
+anyway, for it's a coward's trade.'
+
+'But these fellows, now,' said Jonathan, with a curious, appealing
+manner--'these fellows with their seventy pounds!  Perhaps, Mr.
+Archer, they were no true thieves after all, but just people who
+had been robbed and tried to get their own again.  What was that
+you said, about all England and the taxes?  One takes, another
+gives; why, that's almost fair.  If I've been rooked and robbed,
+and the coat taken off my back, I call it almost fair to take
+another's.'
+
+'Ask Old Cumberland,' observed the ostler; 'you ask Old Cumberland,
+Miss Nance!' and he bestowed a wink upon his favoured fair one.
+
+'Why that?' asked Jonathan.
+
+'He had his coat taken--ay, and his shirt too,' returned the
+ostler.
+
+'Is that so?' cried Jonathan eagerly.  'Was you robbed too?'
+
+'That was I,' replied Cumberland, 'with a warrant!  I was a well-
+to-do man when I was young.'
+
+'Ay!  See that!' says Jonathan.  'And you don't long for a
+revenge?'
+
+'Eh!  Not me!' answered the beggar.  'It's too long ago.  But if
+you'll give me another mug of your good ale, my pretty lady, I
+won't say no to that.'
+
+'And shalt have!  And shalt have!' cried Jonathan.  'Or brandy
+even, if you like it better.'
+
+And as Cumberland did like it better, and the ostler chimed in, the
+party pledged each other in a dram of brandy before separating.
+
+As for Nance, she slipped forth into the ruins, partly to avoid the
+ostler's gallantries, partly to lament over the defects of Mr.
+Archer.  Plainly, he was no hero.  She pitied him; she began to
+feel a protecting interest mingle with and almost supersede her
+admiration, and was at the same time disappointed and yet drawn to
+him.  She was, indeed, conscious of such unshaken fortitude in her
+own heart, that she was almost tempted by an occasion to be bold
+for two.  She saw herself, in a brave attitude, shielding her
+imperfect hero from the world; and she saw, like a piece of heaven,
+his gratitude for her protection.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--LIFE IN THE CASTLE
+
+
+
+From that day forth the life of these three persons in the ruin ran
+very smoothly.  Mr. Archer now sat by the fire with a book, and now
+passed whole days abroad, returning late, dead weary.  His manner
+was a mask; but it was half transparent; through the even tenor of
+his gravity and courtesy profound revolutions of feeling were
+betrayed, seasons of numb despair, of restlessness, of aching
+temper.  For days he would say nothing beyond his usual courtesies
+and solemn compliments; and then, all of a sudden, some fine
+evening beside the kitchen fire, he would fall into a vein of
+elegant gossip, tell of strange and interesting events, the secrets
+of families, brave deeds of war, the miraculous discovery of crime,
+the visitations of the dead.  Nance and her uncle would sit till
+the small hours with eyes wide open:  Jonathan applauding the
+unexpected incidents with many a slap of his big hand; Nance,
+perhaps, more pleased with the narrator's eloquence and wise
+reflections; and then, again, days would follow of abstraction, of
+listless humming, of frequent apologies and long hours of silence.
+Once only, and then after a week of unrelieved melancholy, he went
+over to the 'Green Dragon,' spent the afternoon with the landlord
+and a bowl of punch, and returned as on the first night, devious in
+step but courteous and unperturbed of speech.
+
+If he seemed more natural and more at his ease it was when he found
+Nance alone; and, laying by some of his reserve, talked before her
+rather than to her of his destiny, character and hopes.  To Nance
+these interviews were but a doubtful privilege.  At times he would
+seem to take a pleasure in her presence, to consult her gravely, to
+hear and to discuss her counsels; at times even, but these were
+rare and brief, he would talk of herself, praise the qualities that
+she possessed, touch indulgently on her defects, and lend her books
+to read and even examine her upon her reading; but far more often
+he would fall into a half unconsciousness, put her a question and
+then answer it himself, drop into the veiled tone of voice of one
+soliloquising, and leave her at last as though he had forgotten her
+existence.  It was odd, too, that in all this random converse, not
+a fact of his past life, and scarce a name, should ever cross his
+lips.  A profound reserve kept watch upon his most unguarded
+moments.  He spoke continually of himself, indeed, but still in
+enigmas; a veiled prophet of egoism.
+
+The base of Nance's feelings for Mr. Archer was admiration as for a
+superior being; and with this, his treatment, consciously or not,
+accorded happily.  When he forgot her, she took the blame upon
+herself.  His formal politeness was so exquisite that this
+essential brutality stood excused.  His compliments, besides, were
+always grave and rational; he would offer reason for his praise,
+convict her of merit, and thus disarm suspicion.  Nay, and the very
+hours when he forgot and remembered her alternately could by the
+ardent fallacies of youth be read in the light of an attention.
+She might be far from his confidence; but still she was nearer it
+than any one.  He might ignore her presence, but yet he sought it.
+
+Moreover, she, upon her side, was conscious of one point of
+superiority.  Beside this rather dismal, rather effeminate man, who
+recoiled from a worm, who grew giddy on the castle wall, who bore
+so helplessly the weight of his misfortunes, she felt herself a
+head and shoulders taller in cheerful and sterling courage.  She
+could walk head in air along the most precarious rafter; her hand
+feared neither the grossness nor the harshness of life's web, but
+was thrust cheerfully, if need were, into the briar bush, and could
+take hold of any crawling horror.  Ruin was mining the walls of her
+cottage, as already it had mined and subverted Mr. Archer's palace.
+Well, she faced it with a bright countenance and a busy hand.  She
+had got some washing, some rough seamstress work from the 'Green
+Dragon,' and from another neighbour ten miles away across the moor.
+At this she cheerfully laboured, and from that height she could
+afford to pity the useless talents and poor attitude of Mr. Archer.
+It did not change her admiration, but it made it bearable.  He was
+above her in all ways; but she was above him in one.  She kept it
+to herself, and hugged it.  When, like all young creatures, she
+made long stories to justify, to nourish, and to forecast the
+course of her affection, it was this private superiority that made
+all rosy, that cut the knot, and that, at last, in some great
+situation, fetched to her knees the dazzling but imperfect hero.
+With this pretty exercise she beguiled the hours of labour, and
+consoled herself for Mr. Archer's bearing.
+
+Pity was her weapon and her weakness.  To accept the loved one's
+faults, although it has an air of freedom, is to kiss the chain,
+and this pity it was which, lying nearer to her heart, lent the one
+element of true emotion to a fanciful and merely brain-sick love.
+
+Thus it fell out one day that she had gone to the 'Green Dragon'
+and brought back thence a letter to Mr. Archer.  He, upon seeing
+it, winced like a man under the knife:  pain, shame, sorrow, and
+the most trenchant edge of mortification cut into his heart and
+wrung the steady composure of his face.
+
+'Dear heart! have you bad news?' she cried.
+
+But he only replied by a gesture and fled to his room, and when,
+later on, she ventured to refer to it, he stopped her on the
+threshold, as if with words prepared beforehand.  'There are some
+pains,' said he, 'too acute for consolation, or I would bring them
+to my kind consoler.  Let the memory of that letter, if you please,
+be buried.'  And then as she continued to gaze at him, being, in
+spite of herself, pained by his elaborate phrase, doubtfully
+sincere in word and manner:  'Let it be enough,' he added
+haughtily, 'that if this matter wring my heart, it doth not touch
+my conscience.  I am a man, I would have you to know, who suffers
+undeservedly.'
+
+He had never spoken so directly:  never with so convincing an
+emotion; and her heart thrilled for him.  She could have taken his
+pains and died of them with joy.
+
+Meanwhile she was left without support.  Jonathan now swore by his
+lodger, and lived for him.  He was a fine talker.  He knew the
+finest sight of stories; he was a man and a gentleman, take him for
+all in all, and a perfect credit to Old England.  Such were the old
+man's declared sentiments, and sure enough he clung to Mr. Archer's
+side, hung upon his utterance when he spoke, and watched him with
+unwearing interest when he was silent.  And yet his feeling was not
+clear; in the partial wreck of his mind, which was leaning to
+decay, some after-thought was strongly present.  As he gazed in Mr.
+Archer's face a sudden brightness would kindle in his rheumy eyes,
+his eye-brows would lift as with a sudden thought, his mouth would
+open as though to speak, and close again on silence.  Once or twice
+he even called Mr. Archer mysteriously forth into the dark
+courtyard, took him by the button, and laid a demonstrative finger
+on his chest; but there his ideas or his courage failed him; he
+would shufflingly excuse himself and return to his position by the
+fire without a word of explanation.  'The good man was growing
+old,' said Mr. Archer with a suspicion of a shrug.  But the good
+man had his idea, and even when he was alone the name of Mr. Archer
+fell from his lips continually in the course of mumbled and
+gesticulative conversation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--THE BAD HALF-CROWN
+
+
+
+However early Nance arose, and she was no sluggard, the old man,
+who had begun to outlive the earthly habit of slumber, would
+usually have been up long before, the fire would be burning
+brightly, and she would see him wandering among the ruins, lantern
+in hand, and talking assiduously to himself.  One day, however,
+after he had returned late from the market town, she found that she
+had stolen a march upon that indefatigable early riser.  The
+kitchen was all blackness.  She crossed the castle-yard to the
+wood-cellar, her steps printing the thick hoarfrost.  A scathing
+breeze blew out of the north-east and slowly carried a regiment of
+black and tattered clouds over the face of heaven, which was
+already kindled with the wild light of morning, but where she
+walked, in shelter of the ruins, the flame of her candle burned
+steady.  The extreme cold smote upon her conscience.  She could not
+bear to think this bitter business fell usually to the lot of one
+so old as Jonathan, and made desperate resolutions to be earlier in
+the future.
+
+The fire was a good blaze before he entered, limping dismally into
+the kitchen.  'Nance,' said he, 'I be all knotted up with the
+rheumatics; will you rub me a bit?'  She came and rubbed him where
+and how he bade her.  'This is a cruel thing that old age should be
+rheumaticky,' said he.  'When I was young I stood my turn of the
+teethache like a man! for why? because it couldn't last for ever;
+but these rheumatics come to live and die with you.  Your aunt was
+took before the time came; never had an ache to mention.  Now I lie
+all night in my single bed and the blood never warms in me; this
+knee of mine it seems like lighted up with rheumatics; it seems as
+though you could see to sew by it; and all the strings of my old
+body ache, as if devils was pulling 'em.  Thank you kindly; that's
+someways easier now, but an old man, my dear, has little to look
+for; it's pain, pain, pain to the end of the business, and I'll
+never be rightly warm again till I get under the sod,' he said, and
+looked down at her with a face so aged and weary that she had
+nearly wept.
+
+'I lay awake all night,' he continued; 'I do so mostly, and a long
+walk kills me.  Eh, deary me, to think that life should run to such
+a puddle!  And I remember long syne when I was strong, and the
+blood all hot and good about me, and I loved to run, too--deary me,
+to run!  Well, that's all by.  You'd better pray to be took early,
+Nance, and not live on till you get to be like me, and are robbed
+in your grey old age, your cold, shivering, dark old age, that's
+like a winter's morning'; and he bitterly shuddered, spreading his
+hands before the fire.
+
+'Come now,' said Nance, 'the more you say the less you'll like it,
+Uncle Jonathan; but if I were you I would be proud for to have
+lived all your days honest and beloved, and come near the end with
+your good name:  isn't that a fine thing to be proud of?  Mr.
+Archer was telling me in some strange land they used to run races
+each with a lighted candle, and the art was to keep the candle
+burning.  Well, now, I thought that was like life:  a man's good
+conscience is the flame he gets to carry, and if he comes to the
+winning-post with that still burning, why, take it how you will,
+the man's a hero--even if he was low-born like you and me.'
+
+'Did Mr. Archer tell you that?' asked Jonathan.
+
+'No, dear,' said she, 'that's my own thought about it.  He told me
+of the race.  But see, now,' she continued, putting on the
+porridge, 'you say old age is a hard season, but so is youth.
+You're half out of the battle, I would say; you loved my aunt and
+got her, and buried her, and some of these days soon you'll go to
+meet her; and take her my love and tell her I tried to take good
+care of you; for so I do, Uncle Jonathan.'
+
+Jonathan struck with his fist upon the settle.  'D' ye think I want
+to die, ye vixen?' he shouted.  'I want to live ten hundred years.'
+
+This was a mystery beyond Nance's penetration, and she stared in
+wonder as she made the porridge.
+
+'I want to live,' he continued, 'I want to live and to grow rich.
+I want to drive my carriage and to dice in hells and see the ring,
+I do.  Is this a life that I lived?  I want to be a rake, d' ye
+understand?  I want to know what things are like.  I don't want to
+die like a blind kitten, and me seventy-six.'
+
+'O fie!' said Nance.
+
+The old man thrust out his jaw at her, with the grimace of an
+irreverent schoolboy.  Upon that aged face it seemed a blasphemy.
+Then he took out of his bosom a long leather purse, and emptying
+its contents on the settle, began to count and recount the pieces,
+ringing and examining each, and suddenly he leapt like a young man.
+'What!' he screamed.  'Bad?  O Lord!  I'm robbed again!'  And
+falling on his knees before the settle he began to pour forth the
+most dreadful curses on the head of his deceiver.  His eyes were
+shut, for to him this vile solemnity was prayer.  He held up the
+bad half-crown in his right hand, as though he were displaying it
+to Heaven, and what increased the horror of the scene, the curses
+he invoked were those whose efficacy he had tasted--old age and
+poverty, rheumatism and an ungrateful son.  Nance listened
+appalled; then she sprang forward and dragged down his arm and laid
+her hand upon his mouth.
+
+'Whist!' she cried.  'Whist ye, for God's sake!  O my man, whist
+ye!  If Heaven were to hear; if poor Aunt Susan were to hear!
+Think, she may be listening.'  And with the histrionism of strong
+emotion she pointed to a corner of the kitchen.
+
+His eyes followed her finger.  He looked there for a little,
+thinking, blinking; then he got stiffly to his feet and resumed his
+place upon the settle, the bad piece still in his hand.  So he sat
+for some time, looking upon the half-crown, and now wondering to
+himself on the injustice and partiality of the law, now computing
+again and again the nature of his loss.  So he was still sitting
+when Mr. Archer entered the kitchen.  At this a light came into his
+face, and after some seconds of rumination he dispatched Nance upon
+an errand.
+
+'Mr. Archer,' said he, as soon as they were alone together, 'would
+you give me a guinea-piece for silver?'
+
+'Why, sir, I believe I can,' said Mr. Archer.
+
+And the exchange was just effected when Nance re-entered the
+apartment.  The blood shot into her face.
+
+'What's to do here?' she asked rudely.
+
+'Nothing, my dearie,' said old Jonathan, with a touch of whine.
+
+'What's to do?' she said again.
+
+'Your uncle was but changing me a piece of gold,' returned Mr.
+Archer.
+
+'Let me see what he hath given you, Mr. Archer,' replied the girl.
+'I had a bad piece, and I fear it is mixed up among the good.'
+
+'Well, well,' replied Mr. Archer, smiling, 'I must take the
+merchant's risk of it.  The money is now mixed.'
+
+'I know my piece,' quoth Nance.  'Come, let me see your silver, Mr.
+Archer.  If I have to get it by a theft I'll see that money,' she
+cried.
+
+'Nay, child, if you put as much passion to be honest as the world
+to steal, I must give way, though I betray myself,' said Mr.
+Archer.  'There it is as I received it.'
+
+Nance quickly found the bad half-crown.
+
+'Give him another,' she said, looking Jonathan in the face; and
+when that had been done, she walked over to the chimney and flung
+the guilty piece into the reddest of the fire.  Its base
+constituents began immediately to run; even as she watched it the
+disc crumbled, and the lineaments of the King became confused.
+Jonathan, who had followed close behind, beheld these changes from
+over her shoulder, and his face darkened sorely.
+
+'Now,' said she, 'come back to table, and to-day it is I that shall
+say grace, as I used to do in the old times, day about with Dick';
+and covering her eyes with one hand, 'O Lord,' said she with deep
+emotion, 'make us thankful; and, O Lord, deliver us from evil!  For
+the love of the poor souls that watch for us in heaven, O deliver
+us from evil.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--THE BLEACHING-GREEN
+
+
+
+The year moved on to March; and March, though it blew bitter keen
+from the North Sea, yet blinked kindly between whiles on the river
+dell.  The mire dried up in the closest covert; life ran in the
+bare branches, and the air of the afternoon would be suddenly sweet
+with the fragrance of new grass.
+
+Above and below the castle the river crooked like the letter 'S.'
+The lower loop was to the left, and embraced the high and steep
+projection which was crowned by the ruins; the upper loop enclosed
+a lawny promontory, fringed by thorn and willow.  It was easy to
+reach it from the castle side, for the river ran in this part very
+quietly among innumerable boulders and over dam-like walls of rock.
+The place was all enclosed, the wind a stranger, the turf smooth
+and solid; so it was chosen by Nance to be her bleaching-green.
+
+One day she brought a bucketful of linen, and had but begun to
+wring and lay them out when Mr. Archer stepped from the thicket on
+the far side, drew very deliberately near, and sat down in silence
+on the grass.  Nance looked up to greet him with a smile, but
+finding her smile was not returned, she fell into embarrassment and
+stuck the more busily to her employment.  Man or woman, the whole
+world looks well at any work to which they are accustomed; but the
+girl was ashamed of what she did.  She was ashamed, besides, of the
+sun-bonnet that so well became her, and ashamed of her bare arms,
+which were her greatest beauty.
+
+'Nausicaa,' said Mr. Archer at last, 'I find you like Nausicaa.'
+
+'And who was she?' asked Nance, and laughed in spite of herself, an
+empty and embarrassed laugh, that sounded in Mr. Archer's ears,
+indeed, like music, but to her own like the last grossness of
+rusticity.
+
+'She was a princess of the Grecian islands,' he replied.  'A king,
+being shipwrecked, found her washing by the shore.  Certainly I,
+too, was shipwrecked,' he continued, plucking at the grass.  'There
+was never a more desperate castaway--to fall from polite life,
+fortune, a shrine of honour, a grateful conscience, duties
+willingly taken up and faithfully discharged; and to fall to this--
+idleness, poverty, inutility, remorse.'  He seemed to have
+forgotten her presence, but here he remembered her again.  'Nance,'
+said he, 'would you have a man sit down and suffer or rise up and
+strive?'
+
+'Nay,' she said.  'I would always rather see him doing.'
+
+'Ha!' said Mr. Archer, 'but yet you speak from an imperfect
+knowledge.  Conceive a man damned to a choice of only evil--
+misconduct upon either side, not a fault behind him, and yet naught
+before him but this choice of sins.  How would you say then?'
+
+'I would say that he was much deceived, Mr. Archer,' returned
+Nance.  'I would say there was a third choice, and that the right
+one.'
+
+'I tell you,' said Mr. Archer, 'the man I have in view hath two
+ways open, and no more.  One to wait, like a poor mewling baby,
+till Fate save or ruin him; the other to take his troubles in his
+hand, and to perish or be saved at once.  It is no point of morals;
+both are wrong.  Either way this step-child of Providence must
+fall; which shall he choose, by doing or not doing?'
+
+'Fall, then, is what I would say,' replied Nance.  'Fall where you
+will, but do it!  For O, Mr. Archer,' she continued, stooping to
+her work, 'you that are good and kind, and so wise, it doth
+sometimes go against my heart to see you live on here like a sheep
+in a turnip-field!  If you were braver--' and here she paused,
+conscience-smitten.
+
+'Do I, indeed, lack courage?' inquired Mr. Archer of himself.
+'Courage, the footstool of the virtues, upon which they stand?
+Courage, that a poor private carrying a musket has to spare of;
+that does not fail a weasel or a rat; that is a brutish faculty?  I
+to fail there, I wonder?  But what is courage, then?  The constancy
+to endure oneself or to see others suffer?  The itch of ill-advised
+activity:  mere shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and patient?  To
+inquire of the significance of words is to rob ourselves of what we
+seem to know, and yet, of all things, certainly to stand still is
+the least heroic.  Nance,' he said, 'did you ever hear of Hamlet?'
+
+'Never,' said Nance.
+
+''Tis an old play,' returned Mr. Archer, 'and frequently enacted.
+This while I have been talking Hamlet.  You must know this Hamlet
+was a Prince among the Danes,' and he told her the play in a very
+good style, here and there quoting a verse or two with solemn
+emphasis.
+
+'It is strange,' said Nance; 'he was then a very poor creature?'
+
+'That was what he could not tell,' said Mr. Archer.  'Look at me,
+am I as poor a creature?'
+
+She looked, and what she saw was the familiar thought of all her
+hours; the tall figure very plainly habited in black, the spotless
+ruffles, the slim hands; the long, well-shapen, serious, shaven
+face, the wide and somewhat thin-lipped mouth, the dark eyes that
+were so full of depth and change and colour.  He was gazing at her
+with his brows a little knit, his chin upon one hand and that elbow
+resting on his knee.
+
+'Ye look a man!' she cried, 'ay, and should be a great one!  The
+more shame to you to lie here idle like a dog before the fire.'
+
+'My fair Holdaway,' quoth Mr. Archer, 'you are much set on action.
+I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed.'  He continued, looking at her
+with a half-absent fixity, ''Tis a strange thing, certainly, that
+in my years of fortune I should never taste happiness, and now when
+I am broke, enjoy so much of it, for was I ever happier than to-
+day?  Was the grass softer, the stream pleasanter in sound, the air
+milder, the heart more at peace?  Why should I not sink?  To dig--
+why, after all, it should be easy.  To take a mate, too?  Love is
+of all grades since Jupiter; love fails to none; and children'--but
+here he passed his hand suddenly over his eyes.  'O fool and
+coward, fool and coward!' he said bitterly; 'can you forget your
+fetters?  You did not know that I was fettered, Nance?' he asked,
+again addressing her.
+
+But Nance was somewhat sore.  'I know you keep talking,' she said,
+and, turning half away from him, began to wring out a sheet across
+her shoulder.  'I wonder you are not wearied of your voice.  When
+the hands lie abed the tongue takes a walk.'
+
+Mr. Archer laughed unpleasantly, rose and moved to the water's
+edge.  In this part the body of the river poured across a little
+narrow fell, ran some ten feet very smoothly over a bed of pebbles,
+then getting wind, as it were, of another shelf of rock which
+barred the channel, began, by imperceptible degrees, to separate
+towards either shore in dancing currents, and to leave the middle
+clear and stagnant.  The set towards either side was nearly equal;
+about one half of the whole water plunged on the side of the
+castle, through a narrow gullet; about one half ran ripping past
+the margin of the green and slipped across a babbling rapid.
+
+'Here,' said Mr. Archer, after he had looked for some time at the
+fine and shifting demarcation of these currents, 'come here and see
+me try my fortune.'
+
+'I am not like a man,' said Nance; 'I have no time to waste.'
+
+'Come here,' he said again.  'I ask you seriously, Nance.  We are
+not always childish when we seem so.'
+
+She drew a little nearer.
+
+'Now,' said he, 'you see these two channels--choose one.'
+
+'I'll choose the nearest, to save time,' said Nance.
+
+'Well, that shall be for action,' returned Mr. Archer.  'And since
+I wish to have the odds against me, not only the other channel but
+yon stagnant water in the midst shall be for lying still.  You see
+this?' he continued, pulling up a withered rush.  'I break it in
+three.  I shall put each separately at the top of the upper fall,
+and according as they go by your way or by the other I shall guide
+my life.'
+
+'This is very silly,' said Nance, with a movement of her shoulders.
+
+'I do not think it so,' said Mr. Archer.
+
+'And then,' she resumed, 'if you are to try your fortune, why not
+evenly?'
+
+'Nay,' returned Mr. Archer with a smile, 'no man can put complete
+reliance in blind fate; he must still cog the dice.'
+
+By this time he had got upon the rock beside the upper fall, and,
+bidding her look out, dropped a piece of rush into the middle of
+the intake.  The rusty fragment was sucked at once over the fall,
+came up again far on the right hand, leaned ever more and more in
+the same direction, and disappeared under the hanging grasses on
+the castle side.
+
+'One,' said Mr. Archer, 'one for standing still.'
+
+But the next launch had a different fate, and after hanging for a
+while about the edge of the stagnant water, steadily approached the
+bleaching-green and danced down the rapid under Nance's eyes.
+
+'One for me,' she cried with some exultation; and then she observed
+that Mr. Archer had grown pale, and was kneeling on the rock, with
+his hand raised like a person petrified.  'Why,' said she, 'you do
+not mind it, do you?'
+
+'Does a man not mind a throw of dice by which a fortune hangs?'
+said Mr. Archer, rather hoarsely.  'And this is more than fortune.
+Nance, if you have any kindness for my fate, put up a prayer before
+I launch the next one.'
+
+'A prayer,' she cried, 'about a game like this?  I would not be so
+heathen.'
+
+'Well,' said he, 'then without,' and he closed his eyes and dropped
+the piece of rush.  This time there was no doubt.  It went for the
+rapid as straight as any arrow.
+
+'Action then!' said Mr. Archer, getting to his feet; 'and then God
+forgive us,' he added, almost to himself.
+
+'God forgive us, indeed,' cried Nance, 'for wasting the good
+daylight!  But come, Mr. Archer, if I see you look so serious I
+shall begin to think you was in earnest.'
+
+'Nay,' he said, turning upon her suddenly, with a full smile; 'but
+is not this good advice?  I have consulted God and demigod; the
+nymph of the river, and what I far more admire and trust, my blue-
+eyed Minerva.  Both have said the same.  My own heart was telling
+it already.  Action, then, be mine; and into the deep sea with all
+this paralysing casuistry.  I am happy to-day for the first time.'
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--THE MAIL GUARD
+
+
+
+Somewhere about two in the morning a squall had burst upon the
+castle, a clap of screaming wind that made the towers rock, and a
+copious drift of rain that streamed from the windows.  The wind
+soon blew itself out, but the day broke cloudy and dripping, and
+when the little party assembled at breakfast their humours appeared
+to have changed with the change of weather.  Nance had been
+brooding on the scene at the river-side, applying it in various
+ways to her particular aspirations, and the result, which was
+hardly to her mind, had taken the colour out of her cheeks.  Mr.
+Archer, too, was somewhat absent, his thoughts were of a mingled
+strain; and even upon his usually impassive countenance there were
+betrayed successive depths of depression and starts of exultation,
+which the girl translated in terms of her own hopes and fears.  But
+Jonathan was the most altered:  he was strangely silent, hardly
+passing a word, and watched Mr. Archer with an eager and furtive
+eye.  It seemed as if the idea that had so long hovered before him
+had now taken a more solid shape, and, while it still attracted,
+somewhat alarmed his imagination.
+
+At this rate, conversation languished into a silence which was only
+broken by the gentle and ghostly noises of the rain on the stone
+roof and about all that field of ruins; and they were all relieved
+when the note of a man whistling and the sound of approaching
+footsteps in the grassy court announced a visitor.  It was the
+ostler from the 'Green Dragon' bringing a letter for Mr. Archer.
+Nance saw her hero's face contract and then relax again at sight of
+it; and she thought that she knew why, for the sprawling, gross
+black characters of the address were easily distinguishable from
+the fine writing on the former letter that had so much disturbed
+him.  He opened it and began to read; while the ostler sat down to
+table with a pot of ale, and proceeded to make himself agreeable
+after his fashion.
+
+'Fine doings down our way, Miss Nance,' said he.  'I haven't been
+abed this blessed night.'
+
+Nance expressed a polite interest, but her eye was on Mr. Archer,
+who was reading his letter with a face of such extreme indifference
+that she was tempted to suspect him of assumption.
+
+'Yes,' continued the ostler, 'not been the like of it this fifteen
+years:  the North Mail stopped at the three stones.'
+
+Jonathan's cup was at his lip, but at this moment he choked with a
+great splutter; and Mr. Archer, as if startled by the noise, made
+so sudden a movement that one corner of the sheet tore off and
+stayed between his finger and thumb.  It was some little time
+before the old man was sufficiently recovered to beg the ostler to
+go on, and he still kept coughing and crying and rubbing his eyes.
+Mr. Archer, on his side, laid the letter down, and, putting his
+hands in his pocket, listened gravely to the tale.
+
+'Yes,' resumed Sam, 'the North Mail was stopped by a single
+horseman; dash my wig, but I admire him!  There were four insides
+and two out, and poor Tom Oglethorpe, the guard.  Tom showed
+himself a man; let fly his blunderbuss at him; had him covered,
+too, and could swear to that; but the Captain never let on, up with
+a pistol and fetched poor Tom a bullet through the body.  Tom, he
+squelched upon the seat, all over blood.  Up comes the Captain to
+the window.  "Oblige me," says he, "with what you have."  Would you
+believe it?  Not a man says cheep!--not them.  "Thy hands over thy
+head."  Four watches, rings, snuff-boxes, seven-and-forty pounds
+overhead in gold.  One Dicksee, a grazier, tries it on:  gives him
+a guinea.  "Beg your pardon," says the Captain, "I think too highly
+of you to take it at your hand.  I will not take less than ten from
+such a gentleman."  This Dicksee had his money in his stocking, but
+there was the pistol at his eye.  Down he goes, offs with his
+stocking, and there was thirty golden guineas.  "Now," says the
+Captain, "you've tried it on with me, but I scorns the advantage.
+Ten I said," he says, "and ten I take."  So, dash my buttons, I
+call that man a man!' cried Sam in cordial admiration.
+
+'Well, and then?' says Mr. Archer.
+
+'Then,' resumed Sam, 'that old fat fagot Engleton, him as held the
+ribbons and drew up like a lamb when he was told to, picks up his
+cattle, and drives off again.  Down they came to the "Dragon," all
+singing like as if they was scalded, and poor Tom saying nothing.
+You would 'a' thought they had all lost the King's crown to hear
+them.  Down gets this Dicksee.  "Postmaster," he says, taking him
+by the arm, "this is a most abominable thing," he says.  Down gets
+a Major Clayton, and gets the old man by the other arm.  "We've
+been robbed," he cries, "robbed!"  Down gets the others, and all
+around the old man telling their story, and what they had lost, and
+how they was all as good as ruined; till at last Old Engleton says,
+says he, "How about Oglethorpe?" says he.  "Ay," says the others,
+"how about the guard?"  Well, with that we bousted him down, as
+white as a rag and all blooded like a sop.  I thought he was dead.
+Well, he ain't dead; but he's dying, I fancy.'
+
+'Did you say four watches?' said Jonathan.
+
+'Four, I think.  I wish it had been forty,' cried Sam.  'Such a
+party of soused herrings I never did see--not a man among them bar
+poor Tom.  But us that are the servants on the road have all the
+risk and none of the profit.'
+
+'And this brave fellow,' asked Mr. Archer, very quietly, 'this
+Oglethorpe--how is he now?'
+
+'Well, sir, with my respects, I take it he has a hole bang through
+him,' said Sam.  'The doctor hasn't been yet.  He'd 'a' been bright
+and early if it had been a passenger.  But, doctor or no, I'll make
+a good guess that Tom won't see to-morrow.  He'll die on a Sunday,
+will poor Tom; and they do say that's fortunate.'
+
+'Did Tom see him that did it?' asked Jonathan.
+
+'Well, he saw him,' replied Sam, 'but not to swear by.  Said he was
+a very tall man, and very big, and had a 'ankerchief about his
+face, and a very quick shot, and sat his horse like a thorough
+gentleman, as he is.'
+
+'A gentleman!' cried Nance.  'The dirty knave!'
+
+'Well, I calls a man like that a gentleman,' returned the ostler;
+'that's what I mean by a gentleman.'
+
+'You don't know much of them, then,' said Nance.
+
+'A gentleman would scorn to stoop to such a thing.  I call my uncle
+a better gentleman than any thief.'
+
+'And you would be right,' said Mr. Archer.
+
+'How many snuff-boxes did he get?' asked Jonathan.
+
+'O, dang me if I know,' said Sam; 'I didn't take an inventory.'
+
+'I will go back with you, if you please,' said Mr. Archer.  'I
+should like to see poor Oglethorpe.  He has behaved well.'
+
+'At your service, sir,' said Sam, jumping to his feet.  'I dare to
+say a gentleman like you would not forget a poor fellow like Tom--
+no, nor a plain man like me, sir, that went without his sleep to
+nurse him.  And excuse me, sir,' added Sam, 'you won't forget about
+the letter neither?'
+
+'Surely not,' said Mr. Archer.
+
+Oglethorpe lay in a low bed, one of several in a long garret of the
+inn.  The rain soaked in places through the roof and fell in minute
+drops; there was but one small window; the beds were occupied by
+servants, the air of the garret was both close and chilly.  Mr.
+Archer's heart sank at the threshold to see a man lying perhaps
+mortally hurt in so poor a sick-room, and as he drew near the low
+bed he took his hat off.  The guard was a big, blowsy, innocent-
+looking soul with a thick lip and a broad nose, comically turned
+up; his cheeks were crimson, and when Mr. Archer laid a finger on
+his brow he found him burning with fever.
+
+'I fear you suffer much,' he said, with a catch in his voice, as he
+sat down on the bedside.
+
+'I suppose I do, sir,' returned Oglethorpe; 'it is main sore.'
+
+'I am used to wounds and wounded men,' returned the visitor.  'I
+have been in the wars and nursed brave fellows before now; and, if
+you will suffer me, I propose to stay beside you till the doctor
+comes.'
+
+'It is very good of you, sir, I am sure,' said Oglethorpe.  'The
+trouble is they won't none of them let me drink.'
+
+'If you will not tell the doctor,' said Mr. Archer, 'I will give
+you some water.  They say it is bad for a green wound, but in the
+Low Countries we all drank water when we found the chance, and I
+could never perceive we were the worse for it.'
+
+'Been wounded yourself, sir, perhaps?' called Oglethorpe.
+
+'Twice,' said Mr. Archer, 'and was as proud of these hurts as any
+lady of her bracelets.  'Tis a fine thing to smart for one's duty;
+even in the pangs of it there is contentment.'
+
+'Ah, well!' replied the guard, 'if you've been shot yourself, that
+explains.  But as for contentment, why, sir, you see, it smarts, as
+you say.  And then, I have a good wife, you see, and a bit of a
+brat--a little thing, so high.'
+
+'Don't move,' said Mr. Archer.
+
+'No, sir, I will not, and thank you kindly,' said Oglethorpe.  'At
+York they are.  A very good lass is my wife--far too good for me.
+And the little rascal--well, I don't know how to say it, but he
+sort of comes round you.  If I were to go, sir, it would be hard on
+my poor girl--main hard on her!'
+
+'Ay, you must feel bitter hardly to the rogue that laid you here,'
+said Archer.
+
+'Why, no, sir, more against Engleton and the passengers,' replied
+the guard.  'He played his hand, if you come to look at it; and I
+wish he had shot worse, or me better.  And yet I'll go to my grave
+but what I covered him,' he cried.  'It looks like witchcraft.
+I'll go to my grave but what he was drove full of slugs like a
+pepper-box.'
+
+'Quietly,' said Mr. Archer, 'you must not excite yourself.  These
+deceptions are very usual in war; the eye, in the moment of alert,
+is hardly to be trusted, and when the smoke blows away you see the
+man you fired at, taking aim, it may be, at yourself.  You should
+observe, too, that you were in the dark night, and somewhat dazzled
+by the lamps, and that the sudden stopping of the mail had jolted
+you.  In such circumstances a man may miss, ay, even with a
+blunder-buss, and no blame attach to his marksmanship.' . . .
+
+
+
+
+THE YOUNG CHEVALIER
+
+
+
+
+PROLOGUE--THE WINE-SELLER'S WIFE
+
+
+
+There was a wine-seller's shop, as you went down to the river in
+the city of the Anti-popes.  There a man was served with good wine
+of the country and plain country fare; and the place being clean
+and quiet, with a prospect on the river, certain gentlemen who
+dwelt in that city in attendance on a great personage made it a
+practice (when they had any silver in their purses) to come and eat
+there and be private.
+
+They called the wine-seller Paradou.  He was built more like a
+bullock than a man, huge in bone and brawn, high in colour, and
+with a hand like a baby for size.  Marie-Madeleine was the name of
+his wife; she was of Marseilles, a city of entrancing women, nor
+was any fairer than herself.  She was tall, being almost of a
+height with Paradou; full-girdled, point-device in every form, with
+an exquisite delicacy in the face; her nose and nostrils a delight
+to look at from the fineness of the sculpture, her eyes inclined a
+hair's-breadth inward, her colour between dark and fair, and laid
+on even like a flower's.  A faint rose dwelt in it, as though she
+had been found unawares bathing, and had blushed from head to foot.
+She was of a grave countenance, rarely smiling; yet it seemed to be
+written upon every part of her that she rejoiced in life.  Her
+husband loved the heels of her feet and the knuckles of her
+fingers; he loved her like a glutton and a brute; his love hung
+about her like an atmosphere; one that came by chance into the
+wine-shop was aware of that passion; and it might be said that by
+the strength of it the woman had been drugged or spell-bound.  She
+knew not if she loved or loathed him; he was always in her eyes
+like something monstrous--monstrous in his love, monstrous in his
+person, horrific but imposing in his violence; and her sentiment
+swung back and forward from desire to sickness.  But the mean,
+where it dwelt chiefly, was an apathetic fascination, partly of
+horror; as of Europa in mid ocean with her bull.
+
+On the 10th November 1749 there sat two of the foreign gentlemen in
+the wine-seller's shop.  They were both handsome men of a good
+presence, richly dressed.  The first was swarthy and long and lean,
+with an alert, black look, and a mole upon his cheek.  The other
+was more fair.  He seemed very easy and sedate, and a little
+melancholy for so young a man, but his smile was charming.  In his
+grey eyes there was much abstraction, as of one recalling fondly
+that which was past and lost.  Yet there was strength and swiftness
+in his limbs; and his mouth set straight across his face, the under
+lip a thought upon side, like that of a man accustomed to resolve.
+These two talked together in a rude outlandish speech that no
+frequenter of that wine-shop understood.  The swarthy man answered
+to the name of Ballantrae; he of the dreamy eyes was sometimes
+called Balmile, and sometimes MY LORD, or MY LORD GLADSMUIR; but
+when the title was given him, he seemed to put it by as if in
+jesting, not without bitterness.
+
+The mistral blew in the city.  The first day of that wind, they say
+in the countries where its voice is heard, it blows away all the
+dust, the second all the stones, and the third it blows back others
+from the mountains.  It was now come to the third day; outside the
+pebbles flew like hail, and the face of the river was puckered, and
+the very building-stones in the walls of houses seemed to be
+curdled with the savage cold and fury of that continuous blast.  It
+could be heard to hoot in all the chimneys of the city; it swept
+about the wine-shop, filling the room with eddies; the chill and
+gritty touch of it passed between the nearest clothes and the bare
+flesh; and the two gentlemen at the far table kept their mantles
+loose about their shoulders.  The roughness of these outer hulls,
+for they were plain travellers' cloaks that had seen service, set
+the greater mark of richness on what showed below of their laced
+clothes; for the one was in scarlet and the other in violet and
+white, like men come from a scene of ceremony; as indeed they were.
+
+It chanced that these fine clothes were not without their influence
+on the scene which followed, and which makes the prologue of our
+tale.  For a long time Balmile was in the habit to come to the
+wine-shop and eat a meal or drink a measure of wine; sometimes with
+a comrade; more often alone, when he would sit and dream and drum
+upon the table, and the thoughts would show in the man's face in
+little glooms and lightenings, like the sun and the clouds upon a
+water.  For a long time Marie-Madeleine had observed him apart.
+His sadness, the beauty of his smile when by any chance he
+remembered her existence and addressed her, the changes of his mind
+signalled forth by an abstruse play of feature, the mere fact that
+he was foreign and a thing detached from the local and the
+accustomed, insensibly attracted and affected her.  Kindness was
+ready in her mind; it but lacked the touch of an occasion to
+effervesce and crystallise.  Now Balmile had come hitherto in a
+very poor plain habit; and this day of the mistral, when his mantle
+was just open, and she saw beneath it the glancing of the violet
+and the velvet and the silver, and the clustering fineness of the
+lace, it seemed to set the man in a new light, with which he shone
+resplendent to her fancy.
+
+The high inhuman note of the wind, the violence and continuity of
+its outpouring, and the fierce touch of it upon man's whole
+periphery, accelerated the functions of the mind.  It set thoughts
+whirling, as it whirled the trees of the forest; it stirred them up
+in flights, as it stirred up the dust in chambers.  As brief as
+sparks, the fancies glittered and succeeded each other in the mind
+of Marie-Madeleine; and the grave man with the smile, and the
+bright clothes under the plain mantle, haunted her with incongruous
+explanations.  She considered him, the unknown, the speaker of an
+unknown tongue, the hero (as she placed him) of an unknown romance,
+the dweller upon unknown memories.  She recalled him sitting there
+alone, so immersed, so stupefied; yet she was sure he was not
+stupid.  She recalled one day when he had remained a long time
+motionless, with parted lips, like one in the act of starting up,
+his eyes fixed on vacancy.  Any one else must have looked foolish;
+but not he.  She tried to conceive what manner of memory had thus
+entranced him; she forged for him a past; she showed him to herself
+in every light of heroism and greatness and misfortune; she brooded
+with petulant intensity on all she knew and guessed of him.  Yet,
+though she was already gone so deep, she was still unashamed, still
+unalarmed; her thoughts were still disinterested; she had still to
+reach the stage at which--beside the image of that other whom we
+love to contemplate and to adorn--we place the image of ourself and
+behold them together with delight.
+
+She stood within the counter, her hands clasped behind her back,
+her shoulders pressed against the wall, her feet braced out.  Her
+face was bright with the wind and her own thoughts; as a fire in a
+similar day of tempest glows and brightens on a hearth, so she
+seemed to glow, standing there, and to breathe out energy.  It was
+the first time Ballantrae had visited that wine-seller's, the first
+time he had seen the wife; and his eyes were true to her.
+
+'I perceive your reason for carrying me to this very draughty
+tavern,' he said at last.
+
+'I believe it is propinquity,' returned Balmile.
+
+'You play dark,' said Ballantrae, 'but have a care!  Be more frank
+with me, or I will cut you out.  I go through no form of qualifying
+my threat, which would be commonplace and not conscientious.  There
+is only one point in these campaigns:  that is the degree of
+admiration offered by the man; and to our hostess I am in a posture
+to make victorious love.'
+
+'If you think you have the time, or the game worth the candle,'
+replied the other with a shrug.
+
+'One would suppose you were never at the pains to observe her,'
+said Ballantrae.
+
+'I am not very observant,' said Balmile.  'She seems comely.'
+
+'You very dear and dull dog!' cried Ballantrae; 'chastity is the
+most besotting of the virtues.  Why, she has a look in her face
+beyond singing!  I believe, if you was to push me hard, I might
+trace it home to a trifle of a squint.  What matters?  The height
+of beauty is in the touch that's wrong, that's the modulation in a
+tune.  'Tis the devil we all love; I owe many a conquest to my
+mole'--he touched it as he spoke with a smile, and his eyes
+glittered;--'we are all hunchbacks, and beauty is only that kind of
+deformity that I happen to admire.  But come!  Because you are
+chaste, for which I am sure I pay you my respects, that is no
+reason why you should be blind.  Look at her, look at the delicious
+nose of her, look at her cheek, look at her ear, look at her hand
+and wrist--look at the whole baggage from heels to crown, and tell
+me if she wouldn't melt on a man's tongue.'
+
+As Ballantrae spoke, half jesting, half enthusiastic, Balmile was
+constrained to do as he was bidden.  He looked at the woman,
+admired her excellences, and was at the same time ashamed for
+himself and his companion.  So it befell that when Marie-Madeleine
+raised her eyes, she met those of the subject of her contemplations
+fixed directly on herself with a look that is unmistakable, the
+look of a person measuring and valuing another--and, to clench the
+false impression, that his glance was instantly and guiltily
+withdrawn.  The blood beat back upon her heart and leaped again;
+her obscure thoughts flashed clear before her; she flew in fancy
+straight to his arms like a wanton, and fled again on the instant
+like a nymph.  And at that moment there chanced an interruption,
+which not only spared her embarrassment, but set the last
+consecration on her now articulate love.
+
+Into the wine-shop there came a French gentleman, arrayed in the
+last refinement of the fashion, though a little tumbled by his
+passage in the wind.  It was to be judged he had come from the same
+formal gathering at which the others had preceded him; and perhaps
+that he had gone there in the hope to meet with them, for he came
+up to Ballantrae with unceremonious eagerness.
+
+'At last, here you are!' he cried in French.  'I thought I was to
+miss you altogether.'
+
+The Scotsmen rose, and Ballantrae, after the first greetings, laid
+his hand on his companion's shoulder.
+
+'My lord,' said he, 'allow me to present to you one of my best
+friends and one of our best soldiers, the Lord Viscount Gladsmuir.'
+
+The two bowed with the elaborate elegance of the period.
+
+'Monseigneur,' said Balmile, 'je n'ai pas la pretention de
+m'affubler d'un titre que la mauvaise fortune de mon roi ne me
+permet pas de porter comma il sied.  Je m'appelle, pour vous
+servir, Blair de Balmile tout court.'  [My lord, I have not the
+effrontery to cumber myself with a title which the ill fortunes of
+my king will not suffer me to bear the way it should be.  I call
+myself, at your service, plain Blair of Balmile.]
+
+'Monsieur le Vicomte ou monsieur Bler' de Balmail,' replied the
+newcomer, 'le nom n'y fait rien, et l'on connait vos beaux faits.'
+[The name matters nothing, your gallant actions are known.]
+
+A few more ceremonies, and these three, sitting down together to
+the table, called for wine.  It was the happiness of Marie-
+Madeleine to wait unobserved upon the prince of her desires.  She
+poured the wine, he drank of it; and that link between them seemed
+to her, for the moment, close as a caress.  Though they lowered
+their tones, she surprised great names passing in their
+conversation, names of kings, the names of de Gesvre and Belle-
+Isle; and the man who dealt in these high matters, and she who was
+now coupled with him in her own thoughts, seemed to swim in mid air
+in a transfiguration.  Love is a crude core, but it has singular
+and far-reaching fringes; in that passionate attraction for the
+stranger that now swayed and mastered her, his harsh
+incomprehensible language, and these names of grandees in his talk,
+were each an element.
+
+The Frenchman stayed not long, but it was plain he left behind him
+matter of much interest to his companions; they spoke together
+earnestly, their heads down, the woman of the wine-shop totally
+forgotten; and they were still so occupied when Paradou returned.
+
+This man's love was unsleeping.  The even bluster of the mistral,
+with which he had been combating some hours, had not suspended,
+though it had embittered, that predominant passion.  His first look
+was for his wife, a look of hope and suspicion, menace and humility
+and love, that made the over-blooming brute appear for the moment
+almost beautiful.  She returned his glance, at first as though she
+knew him not, then with a swiftly waxing coldness of intent; and at
+last, without changing their direction, she had closed her eyes.
+
+There passed across her mind during that period much that Paradou
+could not have understood had it been told to him in words:
+chiefly the sense of an enlightening contrast betwixt the man who
+talked of kings and the man who kept a wine-shop, betwixt the love
+she yearned for and that to which she had been long exposed like a
+victim bound upon the altar.  There swelled upon her, swifter than
+the Rhone, a tide of abhorrence and disgust.  She had succumbed to
+the monster, humbling herself below animals; and now she loved a
+hero, aspiring to the semi-divine.  It was in the pang of that
+humiliating thought that she had closed her eyes.
+
+Paradou--quick as beasts are quick, to translate silence--felt the
+insult through his blood; his inarticulate soul bellowed within him
+for revenge.  He glanced about the shop.  He saw the two
+indifferent gentlemen deep in talk, and passed them over:  his
+fancy flying not so high.  There was but one other present, a
+country lout who stood swallowing his wine, equally unobserved by
+all and unobserving--to him he dealt a glance of murderous
+suspicion, and turned direct upon his wife.  The wine-shop had lain
+hitherto, a space of shelter, the scene of a few ceremonial
+passages and some whispered conversation, in the howling river of
+the wind; the clock had not yet ticked a score of times since
+Paradou's appearance; and now, as he suddenly gave tongue, it
+seemed as though the mistral had entered at his heels.
+
+'What ails you, woman?' he cried, smiting on the counter.
+
+'Nothing ails me,' she replied.  It was strange; but she spoke and
+stood at that moment like a lady of degree, drawn upward by her
+aspirations.
+
+'You speak to me, by God, as though you scorned me!' cried the
+husband.
+
+The man's passion was always formidable; she had often looked on
+upon its violence with a thrill, it had been one ingredient in her
+fascination; and she was now surprised to behold him, as from afar
+off, gesticulating but impotent.  His fury might be dangerous like
+a torrent or a gust of wind, but it was inhuman; it might be feared
+or braved, it should never be respected.  And with that there came
+in her a sudden glow of courage and that readiness to die which
+attends so closely upon all strong passions.
+
+'I do scorn you,' she said.
+
+'What is that?' he cried.
+
+'I scorn you,' she repeated, smiling.
+
+'You love another man!' said he.
+
+'With all my soul,' was her reply.
+
+The wine-seller roared aloud so that the house rang and shook with
+it.
+
+'Is this the--?' he cried, using a foul word, common in the South;
+and he seized the young countryman and dashed him to the ground.
+There he lay for the least interval of time insensible; thence fled
+from the house, the most terrified person in the county.  The heavy
+measure had escaped from his hands, splashing the wine high upon
+the wall.  Paradou caught it.  'And you?' he roared to his wife,
+giving her the same name in the feminine, and he aimed at her the
+deadly missile.  She expected it, motionless, with radiant eyes.
+
+But before it sped, Paradou was met by another adversary, and the
+unconscious rivals stood confronted.  It was hard to say at that
+moment which appeared the more formidable.  In Paradou, the whole
+muddy and truculent depths of the half-man were stirred to frenzy;
+the lust of destruction raged in him; there was not a feature in
+his face but it talked murder.  Balmile had dropped his cloak:  he
+shone out at once in his finery, and stood to his full stature;
+girt in mind and body all his resources, all his temper, perfectly
+in command in his face the light of battle.  Neither spoke; there
+was no blow nor threat of one; it was war reduced to its last
+element, the spiritual; and the huge wine-seller slowly lowered his
+weapon.  Balmile was a noble, he a commoner; Balmile exulted in an
+honourable cause.  Paradou already perhaps began to be ashamed of
+his violence.  Of a sudden, at least, the tortured brute turned and
+fled from the shop in the footsteps of his former victim, to whose
+continued flight his reappearance added wings.
+
+So soon as Balmile appeared between her husband and herself, Marie-
+Madeleine transferred to him her eyes.  It might be her last
+moment, and she fed upon that face; reading there inimitable
+courage and illimitable valour to protect.  And when the momentary
+peril was gone by, and the champion turned a little awkwardly
+towards her whom he had rescued, it was to meet, and quail before,
+a gaze of admiration more distinct than words.  He bowed, he
+stammered, his words failed him; he who had crossed the floor a
+moment ago, like a young god, to smite, returned like one
+discomfited; got somehow to his place by the table, muffled himself
+again in his discarded cloak, and for a last touch of the
+ridiculous, seeking for anything to restore his countenance, drank
+of the wine before him, deep as a porter after a heavy lift.  It
+was little wonder if Ballantrae, reading the scene with malevolent
+eyes, laughed out loud and brief, and drank with raised glass, 'To
+the champion of the Fair.'
+
+Marie-Madeleine stood in her old place within the counter; she
+disdained the mocking laughter; it fell on her ears, but it did not
+reach her spirit.  For her, the world of living persons was all
+resumed again into one pair, as in the days of Eden; there was but
+the one end in life, the one hope before her, the one thing
+needful, the one thing possible--to be his.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE PRINCE
+
+
+
+That same night there was in the city of Avignon a young man in
+distress of mind.  Now he sat, now walked in a high apartment, full
+of draughts and shadows.  A single candle made the darkness
+visible; and the light scarce sufficed to show upon the wall, where
+they had been recently and rudely nailed, a few miniatures and a
+copper medal of the young man's head.  The same was being sold that
+year in London, to admiring thousands.  The original was fair; he
+had beautiful brown eyes, a beautiful bright open face; a little
+feminine, a little hard, a little weak; still full of the light of
+youth, but already beginning to be vulgarised; a sordid bloom come
+upon it, the lines coarsened with a touch of puffiness.  He was
+dressed, as for a gala, in peach-colour and silver; his breast
+sparkled with stars and was bright with ribbons; for he had held a
+levee in the afternoon and received a distinguished personage
+incognito.  Now he sat with a bowed head, now walked precipitately
+to and fro, now went and gazed from the uncurtained window, where
+the wind was still blowing, and the lights winked in the darkness.
+
+The bells of Avignon rose into song as he was gazing; and the high
+notes and the deep tossed and drowned, boomed suddenly near or were
+suddenly swallowed up, in the current of the mistral.  Tears sprang
+in the pale blue eyes; the expression of his face was changed to
+that of a more active misery, it seemed as if the voices of the
+bells reached, and touched and pained him, in a waste of vacancy
+where even pain was welcome.  Outside in the night they continued
+to sound on, swelling and fainting; and the listener heard in his
+memory, as it were their harmonies, joy-bells clashing in a
+northern city, and the acclamations of a multitude, the cries of
+battle, the gross voices of cannon, the stridor of an animated
+life.  And then all died away, and he stood face to face with
+himself in the waste of vacancy, and a horror came upon his mind,
+and a faintness on his brain, such as seizes men upon the brink of
+cliffs.
+
+On the table, by the side of the candle, stood a tray of glasses, a
+bottle, and a silver bell.  He went thither swiftly, then his hand
+lowered first above the bell, then settled on the bottle.  Slowly
+he filled a glass, slowly drank it out; and, as a tide of animal
+warmth recomforted the recesses of his nature, stood there smiling
+at himself.  He remembered he was young; the funeral curtains rose,
+and he saw his life shine and broaden and flow out majestically,
+like a river sunward.  The smile still on his lips, he lit a second
+candle and a third; a fire stood ready built in a chimney, he lit
+that also; and the fir-cones and the gnarled olive billets were
+swift to break in flame and to crackle on the hearth, and the room
+brightened and enlarged about him like his hopes.  To and fro, to
+and fro, he went, his hands lightly clasped, his breath deeply and
+pleasurably taken.  Victory walked with him; he marched to crowns
+and empires among shouting followers; glory was his dress.  And
+presently again the shadows closed upon the solitary.  Under the
+gilt of flame and candle-light, the stone walls of the apartment
+showed down bare and cold; behind the depicted triumph loomed up
+the actual failure:  defeat, the long distress of the flight,
+exile, despair, broken followers, mourning faces, empty pockets,
+friends estranged.  The memory of his father rose in his mind:  he,
+too, estranged and defied; despair sharpened into wrath.  There was
+one who had led armies in the field, who had staked his life upon
+the family enterprise, a man of action and experience, of the open
+air, the camp, the court, the council-room; and he was to accept
+direction from an old, pompous gentleman in a home in Italy, and
+buzzed about by priests?  A pretty king, if he had not a martial
+son to lean upon!  A king at all?
+
+'There was a weaver (of all people) joined me at St. Ninians; he
+was more of a man than my papa!' he thought.  'I saw him lie
+doubled in his blood and a grenadier below him--and he died for my
+papa!  All died for him, or risked the dying, and I lay for him all
+those months in the rain and skulked in heather like a fox; and now
+he writes me his advice! calls me Carluccio--me, the man of the
+house, the only king in that king's race.'  He ground his teeth.
+'The only king in Europe!'  Who else?  Who has done and suffered
+except me? who has lain and run and hidden with his faithful
+subjects, like a second Bruce?  Not my accursed cousin, Louis of
+France, at least, the lewd effeminate traitor!'  And filling the
+glass to the brim, he drank a king's damnation.  Ah, if he had the
+power of Louis, what a king were here!
+
+The minutes followed each other into the past, and still he
+persevered in this debilitating cycle of emotions, still fed the
+fire of his excitement with driblets of Rhine wine:  a boy at odds
+with life, a boy with a spark of the heroic, which he was now
+burning out and drowning down in futile reverie and solitary
+excess.
+
+From two rooms beyond, the sudden sound of a raised voice attracted
+him.
+
+'By . . .
+
+
+
+
+HEATHERCAT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--TRAQUAIRS OF MONTROYMONT
+
+
+
+The period of this tale is in the heat of the KILLING-TIME; the
+scene laid for the most part in solitary hills and morasses,
+haunted only by the so-called Mountain Wanderers, the dragoons that
+came in chase of them, the women that wept on their dead bodies,
+and the wild birds of the moorland that have cried there since the
+beginning.  It is a land of many rain-clouds; a land of much mute
+history, written there in prehistoric symbols.  Strange green raths
+are to be seen commonly in the country, above all by the kirkyards;
+barrows of the dead, standing stones; beside these, the faint,
+durable footprints and handmarks of the Roman; and an antiquity
+older perhaps than any, and still living and active--a complete
+Celtic nomenclature and a scarce-mingled Celtic population.  These
+rugged and grey hills were once included in the boundaries of the
+Caledonian Forest.  Merlin sat here below his apple-tree and
+lamented Gwendolen; here spoke with Kentigern; here fell into his
+enchanted trance.  And the legend of his slumber seems to body
+forth the story of that Celtic race, deprived for so many centuries
+of their authentic speech, surviving with their ancestral
+inheritance of melancholy perversity and patient, unfortunate
+courage.
+
+The Traquairs of Montroymont (Mons Romanus, as the erudite expound
+it) had long held their seat about the head-waters of the Dule and
+in the back parts of the moorland parish of Balweary.  For two
+hundred years they had enjoyed in these upland quarters a certain
+decency (almost to be named distinction) of repute; and the annals
+of their house, or what is remembered of them, were obscure and
+bloody.  Ninian Traquair was 'cruallie slochtered' by the Crozers
+at the kirk-door of Balweary, anno 1482.  Francis killed Simon
+Ruthven of Drumshoreland, anno 1540; bought letters of slayers at
+the widow and heir, and, by a barbarous form of compounding,
+married (without tocher) Simon's daughter Grizzel, which is the way
+the Traquairs and Ruthvens came first to an intermarriage.  About
+the last Traquair and Ruthven marriage, it is the business of this
+book, among many other things, to tell.
+
+The Traquairs were always strong for the Covenant; for the King
+also, but the Covenant first; and it began to be ill days for
+Montroymont when the Bishops came in and the dragoons at the heels
+of them.  Ninian (then laird) was an anxious husband of himself and
+the property, as the times required, and it may be said of him,
+that he lost both.  He was heavily suspected of the Pentland Hills
+rebellion.  When it came the length of Bothwell Brig, he stood his
+trial before the Secret Council, and was convicted of talking with
+some insurgents by the wayside, the subject of the conversation not
+very clearly appearing, and of the reset and maintenance of one
+Gale, a gardener man, who was seen before Bothwell with a musket,
+and afterwards, for a continuance of months, delved the garden at
+Montroymont.  Matters went very ill with Ninian at the Council;
+some of the lords were clear for treason; and even the boot was
+talked of.  But he was spared that torture; and at last, having
+pretty good friendship among great men, he came off with a fine of
+seven thousand marks, that caused the estate to groan.  In this
+case, as in so many others, it was the wife that made the trouble.
+She was a great keeper of conventicles; would ride ten miles to
+one, and when she was fined, rejoiced greatly to suffer for the
+Kirk; but it was rather her husband that suffered.  She had their
+only son, Francis, baptized privately by the hands of Mr. Kidd;
+there was that much the more to pay for!  She could neither be
+driven nor wiled into the parish kirk; as for taking the sacrament
+at the hands of any Episcopalian curate, and tenfold more at those
+of Curate Haddo, there was nothing further from her purposes; and
+Montroymont had to put his hand in his pocket month by month and
+year by year.  Once, indeed, the little lady was cast in prison,
+and the laird, worthy, heavy, uninterested man, had to ride up and
+take her place; from which he was not discharged under nine months
+and a sharp fine.  It scarce seemed she had any gratitude to him;
+she came out of gaol herself, and plunged immediately deeper in
+conventicles, resetting recusants, and all her old, expensive
+folly, only with greater vigour and openness, because Montroymont
+was safe in the Tolbooth and she had no witness to consider.  When
+he was liberated and came back, with his fingers singed, in
+December 1680, and late in the black night, my lady was from home.
+He came into the house at his alighting, with a riding-rod yet in
+his hand; and, on the servant-maid telling him, caught her by the
+scruff of the neck, beat her violently, flung her down in the
+passageway, and went upstairs to his bed fasting and without a
+light.  It was three in the morning when my lady returned from that
+conventicle, and, hearing of the assault (because the maid had sat
+up for her, weeping), went to their common chamber with a lantern
+in hand and stamping with her shoes so as to wake the dead; it was
+supposed, by those that heard her, from a design to have it out
+with the good man at once.  The house-servants gathered on the
+stair, because it was a main interest with them to know which of
+these two was the better horse; and for the space of two hours they
+were heard to go at the matter, hammer and tongs.  Montroymont
+alleged he was at the end of possibilities; it was no longer within
+his power to pay the annual rents; she had served him basely by
+keeping conventicles while he lay in prison for her sake; his
+friends were weary, and there was nothing else before him but the
+entire loss of the family lands, and to begin life again by the
+wayside as a common beggar.  She took him up very sharp and high:
+called upon him, if he were a Christian? and which he most
+considered, the loss of a few dirty, miry glebes, or of his soul?
+Presently he was heard to weep, and my lady's voice to go on
+continually like a running burn, only the words indistinguishable;
+whereupon it was supposed a victory for her ladyship, and the
+domestics took themselves to bed.  The next day Traquair appeared
+like a man who had gone under the harrows; and his lady wife
+thenceforward continued in her old course without the least
+deflection.
+
+Thenceforward Ninian went on his way without complaint, and
+suffered his wife to go on hers without remonstrance.  He still
+minded his estate, of which it might be said he took daily a fresh
+farewell, and counted it already lost; looking ruefully on the
+acres and the graves of his fathers, on the moorlands where the
+wild-fowl consorted, the low, gurgling pool of the trout, and the
+high, windy place of the calling curlews--things that were yet his
+for the day and would be another's to-morrow; coming back again,
+and sitting ciphering till the dusk at his approaching ruin, which
+no device of arithmetic could postpone beyond a year or two.  He
+was essentially the simple ancient man, the farmer and landholder;
+he would have been content to watch the seasons come and go, and
+his cattle increase, until the limit of age; he would have been
+content at any time to die, if he could have left the estates
+undiminished to an heir-male of his ancestors, that duty standing
+first in his instinctive calendar.  And now he saw everywhere the
+image of the new proprietor come to meet him, and go sowing and
+reaping, or fowling for his pleasure on the red moors, or eating
+the very gooseberries in the Place garden; and saw always, on the
+other hand, the figure of Francis go forth, a beggar, into the
+broad world.
+
+It was in vain the poor gentleman sought to moderate; took every
+test and took advantage of every indulgence; went and drank with
+the dragoons in Balweary; attended the communion and came regularly
+to the church to Curate Haddo, with his son beside him.  The mad,
+raging, Presbyterian zealot of a wife at home made all of no avail;
+and indeed the house must have fallen years before if it had not
+been for the secret indulgence of the curate, who had a great
+sympathy with the laird, and winked hard at the doings in
+Montroymont.  This curate was a man very ill reputed in the
+countryside, and indeed in all Scotland.  'Infamous Haddo' is
+Shield's expression.  But Patrick Walker is more copious.  'Curate
+Hall Haddo,' says he, sub voce Peden, 'or Hell Haddo, as he was
+more justly to be called, a pokeful of old condemned errors and the
+filthy vile lusts of the flesh, a published whore-monger, a common
+gross drunkard, continually and godlessly scraping and skirling on
+a fiddle, continually breathing flames against the remnant of
+Israel.  But the Lord put an end to his piping, and all these
+offences were composed into one bloody grave.'  No doubt this was
+written to excuse his slaughter; and I have never heard it claimed
+for Walker that he was either a just witness or an indulgent judge.
+At least, in a merely human character, Haddo comes off not wholly
+amiss in the matter of these Traquairs:  not that he showed any
+graces of the Christian, but had a sort of Pagan decency, which
+might almost tempt one to be concerned about his sudden, violent,
+and unprepared fate.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--FRANCIE
+
+
+
+Francie was eleven years old, shy, secret, and rather childish of
+his age, though not backward in schooling, which had been pushed on
+far by a private governor, one M'Brair, a forfeited minister
+harboured in that capacity at Montroymont.  The boy, already much
+employed in secret by his mother, was the most apt hand conceivable
+to run upon a message, to carry food to lurking fugitives, or to
+stand sentry on the skyline above a conventicle.  It seemed no
+place on the moorlands was so naked but what he would find cover
+there; and as he knew every hag, boulder, and heather-bush in a
+circuit of seven miles about Montroymont, there was scarce any spot
+but what he could leave or approach it unseen.  This dexterity had
+won him a reputation in that part of the country; and among the
+many children employed in these dangerous affairs, he passed under
+the by-name of Heathercat.
+
+How much his father knew of this employment might be doubted.  He
+took much forethought for the boy's future, seeing he was like to
+be left so poorly, and would sometimes assist at his lessons,
+sighing heavily, yawning deep, and now and again patting Francie on
+the shoulder if he seemed to be doing ill, by way of a private,
+kind encouragement.  But a great part of the day was passed in
+aimless wanderings with his eyes sealed, or in his cabinet sitting
+bemused over the particulars of the coming bankruptcy; and the boy
+would be absent a dozen times for once that his father would
+observe it.
+
+On 2nd of July 1682 the boy had an errand from his mother, which
+must be kept private from all, the father included in the first of
+them.  Crossing the braes, he hears the clatter of a horse's shoes,
+and claps down incontinent in a hag by the wayside.  And presently
+he spied his father come riding from one direction, and Curate
+Haddo walking from another; and Montroymont leaning down from the
+saddle, and Haddo getting on his toes (for he was a little, ruddy,
+bald-pated man, more like a dwarf), they greeted kindly, and came
+to a halt within two fathoms of the child.
+
+'Montroymont,' the curate said, 'the deil's in 't but I'll have to
+denunciate your leddy again.'
+
+'Deil's in 't indeed!' says the laird.
+
+'Man! can ye no induce her to come to the kirk?' pursues Haddo; 'or
+to a communion at the least of it?  For the conventicles, let be!
+and the same for yon solemn fule, M'Brair:  I can blink at them.
+But she's got to come to the kirk, Montroymont.'
+
+'Dinna speak of it,' says the laird.  'I can do nothing with her.'
+
+'Couldn't ye try the stick to her? it works wonders whiles,'
+suggested Haddo.  'No?  I'm wae to hear it.  And I suppose ye ken
+where you're going?'
+
+'Fine!' said Montroymont.  'Fine do I ken where:  bankrup'cy and
+the Bass Rock!'
+
+'Praise to my bones that I never married!' cried the curate.
+'Well, it's a grievous thing to me to see an auld house dung down
+that was here before Flodden Field.  But naebody can say it was
+with my wish.'
+
+'No more they can, Haddo!' says the laird.  'A good friend ye've
+been to me, first and last.  I can give you that character with a
+clear conscience.'
+
+Whereupon they separated, and Montroymont rode briskly down into
+the Dule Valley.  But of the curate Francis was not to be quit so
+easily.  He went on with his little, brisk steps to the corner of a
+dyke, and stopped and whistled and waved upon a lassie that was
+herding cattle there.  This Janet M'Clour was a big lass, being
+taller than the curate; and what made her look the more so, she was
+kilted very high.  It seemed for a while she would not come, and
+Francie heard her calling Haddo a 'daft auld fule,' and saw her
+running and dodging him among the whins and hags till he was fairly
+blown.  But at the last he gets a bottle from his plaid-neuk and
+holds it up to her; whereupon she came at once into a composition,
+and the pair sat, drinking of the bottle, and daffing and laughing
+together, on a mound of heather.  The boy had scarce heard of these
+vanities, or he might have been minded of a nymph and satyr, if
+anybody could have taken long-leggit Janet for a nymph.  But they
+seemed to be huge friends, he thought; and was the more surprised,
+when the curate had taken his leave, to see the lassie fling stones
+after him with screeches of laughter, and Haddo turn about and
+caper, and shake his staff at her, and laugh louder than herself.
+A wonderful merry pair, they seemed; and when Francie had crawled
+out of the hag, he had a great deal to consider in his mind.  It
+was possible they were all fallen in error about Mr. Haddo, he
+reflected--having seen him so tender with Montroymont, and so kind
+and playful with the lass Janet; and he had a temptation to go out
+of his road and question her herself upon the matter.  But he had a
+strong spirit of duty on him; and plodded on instead over the braes
+till he came near the House of Cairngorm.  There, in a hollow place
+by the burnside that was shaded by some birks, he was aware of a
+barefoot boy, perhaps a matter of three years older than himself.
+The two approached with the precautions of a pair of strange dogs,
+looking at each other queerly.
+
+'It's ill weather on the hills,' said the stranger, giving the
+watchword.
+
+'For a season,' said Francie, 'but the Lord will appear.'
+
+'Richt,' said the barefoot boy; 'wha're ye frae?'
+
+'The Leddy Montroymont,' says Francie.
+
+'Ha'e, then!' says the stranger, and handed him a folded paper, and
+they stood and looked at each other again.  'It's unco het,' said
+the boy.
+
+'Dooms het,' says Francie.
+
+'What do they ca' ye?' says the other.
+
+'Francie,' says he.  'I'm young Montroymont.  They ca' me
+Heathercat.'
+
+'I'm Jock Crozer,' said the boy.  And there was another pause,
+while each rolled a stone under his foot.
+
+'Cast your jaiket and I'll fecht ye for a bawbee,' cried the elder
+boy with sudden violence, and dramatically throwing back his
+jacket.
+
+'Na, I've nae time the now,' said Francie, with a sharp thrill of
+alarm, because Crozer was much the heavier boy.
+
+'Ye're feared.  Heathercat indeed!' said Crozer, for among this
+infantile army of spies and messengers, the fame of Crozer had gone
+forth and was resented by his rivals.  And with that they
+separated.
+
+On his way home Francie was a good deal occupied with the
+recollection of this untoward incident.  The challenge had been
+fairly offered and basely refused:  the tale would be carried all
+over the country, and the lustre of the name of Heathercat be
+dimmed.  But the scene between Curate Haddo and Janet M'Clour had
+also given him much to think of:  and he was still puzzling over
+the case of the curate, and why such ill words were said of him,
+and why, if he were so merry-spirited, he should yet preach so dry,
+when coming over a knowe, whom should he see but Janet, sitting
+with her back to him, minding her cattle!  He was always a great
+child for secret, stealthy ways, having been employed by his mother
+on errands when the same was necessary; and he came behind the lass
+without her hearing.
+
+'Jennet,' says he.
+
+'Keep me,' cries Janet, springing up.  'O, it's you, Maister
+Francie!  Save us, what a fricht ye gied me.'
+
+'Ay, it's me,' said Francie.  'I've been thinking, Jennet; I saw
+you and the curate a while back--'
+
+'Brat!' cried Janet, and coloured up crimson; and the one moment
+made as if she would have stricken him with a ragged stick she had
+to chase her bestial with, and the next was begging and praying
+that he would mention it to none.  It was 'naebody's business,
+whatever,' she said; 'it would just start a clash in the country';
+and there would be nothing left for her but to drown herself in
+Dule Water.
+
+'Why?' says Francie.
+
+The girl looked at him and grew scarlet again.
+
+'And it isna that, anyway,' continued Francie.  'It was just that
+he seemed so good to ye--like our Father in heaven, I thought; and
+I thought that mebbe, perhaps, we had all been wrong about him from
+the first.  But I'll have to tell Mr. M'Brair; I'm under a kind of
+a bargain to him to tell him all.'
+
+'Tell it to the divil if ye like for me!' cried the lass.  'I've
+naething to be ashamed of.  Tell M'Brair to mind his ain affairs,'
+she cried again:  'they'll be hot eneugh for him, if Haddie likes!'
+And so strode off, shoving her beasts before her, and ever and
+again looking back and crying angry words to the boy, where he
+stood mystified.
+
+By the time he had got home his mind was made up that he would say
+nothing to his mother.  My Lady Montroymont was in the keeping-
+room, reading a godly book; she was a wonderful frail little wife
+to make so much noise in the world and be able to steer about that
+patient sheep her husband; her eyes were like sloes, the fingers of
+her hands were like tobacco-pipe shanks, her mouth shut tight like
+a trap; and even when she was the most serious, and still more when
+she was angry, there hung about her face the terrifying semblance
+of a smile.
+
+'Have ye gotten the billet, Francie said she; and when he had
+handed it over, and she had read and burned it, 'Did you see
+anybody?' she asked.
+
+'I saw the laird,' said Francie.
+
+'He didna see you, though?' asked his mother.
+
+'Deil a fear,' from Francie.
+
+'Francie!' she cried.  'What's that I hear? an aith?  The Lord
+forgive me, have I broughten forth a brand for the burning, a fagot
+for hell-fire?'
+
+'I'm very sorry, ma'am,' said Francie.  'I humbly beg the Lord's
+pardon, and yours, for my wickedness.'
+
+'H'm,' grunted the lady.  'Did ye see nobody else?'
+
+'No, ma'am,' said Francie, with the face of an angel, 'except Jock
+Crozer, that gied me the billet.'
+
+'Jock Crozer!' cried the lady.  'I'll Crozer them!  Crozers indeed!
+What next?  Are we to repose the lives of a suffering remnant in
+Crozers?  The whole clan of them wants hanging, and if I had my way
+of it, they wouldna want it long.  Are you aware, sir, that these
+Crozers killed your forebear at the kirk-door?'
+
+'You see, he was bigger 'n me,' said Francie.
+
+'Jock Crozer!' continued the lady.  'That'll be Clement's son, the
+biggest thief and reiver in the country-side.  To trust a note to
+him!  But I'll give the benefit of my opinions to Lady Whitecross
+when we two forgather.  Let her look to herself!  I have no
+patience with half-hearted carlines, that complies on the Lord's
+day morning with the kirk, and comes taigling the same night to the
+conventicle.  The one or the other! is what I say:  hell or heaven-
+-Haddie's abominations or the pure word of God dreeping from the
+lips of Mr. Arnot,
+
+
+'"Like honey from the honeycomb
+That dreepeth, sweeter far."'
+
+
+My lady was now fairly launched, and that upon two congenial
+subjects:  the deficiencies of the Lady Whitecross and the
+turpitudes of the whole Crozer race--which, indeed, had never been
+conspicuous for respectability.  She pursued the pair of them for
+twenty minutes on the clock with wonderful animation and detail,
+something of the pulpit manner, and the spirit of one possessed.
+'O hellish compliance!' she exclaimed.  'I would not suffer a
+complier to break bread with Christian folk.  Of all the sins of
+this day there is not one so God-defying, so Christ-humiliating, as
+damnable compliance':  the boy standing before her meanwhile, and
+brokenly pursuing other thoughts, mainly of Haddo and Janet, and
+Jock Crozer stripping off his jacket.  And yet, with all his
+distraction, it might be argued that he heard too much:  his father
+and himself being 'compliers'--that is to say, attending the church
+of the parish as the law required.
+
+Presently, the lady's passion beginning to decline, or her flux of
+ill words to be exhausted, she dismissed her audience.  Francie
+bowed low, left the room, closed the door behind him:  and then
+turned him about in the passage-way, and with a low voice, but a
+prodigious deal of sentiment, repeated the name of the evil one
+twenty times over, to the end of which, for the greater efficacy,
+he tacked on 'damnable' and 'hellish.'  Fas est ab hoste doceri--
+disrespect is made more pungent by quotation; and there is no doubt
+but he felt relieved, and went upstairs into his tutor's chamber
+with a quiet mind.  M'Brair sat by the cheek of the peat-fire and
+shivered, for he had a quartan ague and this was his day.  The
+great night-cap and plaid, the dark unshaven cheeks of the man, and
+the white, thin hands that held the plaid about his chittering
+body, made a sorrowful picture.  But Francie knew and loved him;
+came straight in, nestled close to the refugee, and told his story.
+M'Brair had been at the College with Haddo; the Presbytery had
+licensed both on the same day; and at this tale, told with so much
+innocency by the boy, the heart of the tutor was commoved.
+
+'Woe upon him!  Woe upon that man!' he cried.  'O the unfaithful
+shepherd!  O the hireling and apostate minister!  Make my matters
+hot for me? quo' she! the shameless limmer!  And true it is, that
+he could repose me in that nasty, stinking hole, the Canongate
+Tolbooth, from which your mother drew me out--the Lord reward her
+for it!--or to that cold, unbieldy, marine place of the Bass Rock,
+which, with my delicate kist, would be fair ruin to me.  But I will
+be valiant in my Master's service.  I have a duty here:  a duty to
+my God, to myself, and to Haddo:  in His strength, I will perform
+it.'
+
+Then he straitly discharged Francie to repeat the tale, and bade
+him in the future to avert his very eyes from the doings of the
+curate.  'You must go to his place of idolatry; look upon him
+there!' says he, 'but nowhere else.  Avert your eyes, close your
+ears, pass him by like a three days' corp.  He is like that
+damnable monster Basiliscus, which defiles--yea, poisons!--by the
+sight.'--All which was hardly claratory to the boy's mind.
+
+Presently Montroymont came home, and called up the stairs to
+Francie.  Traquair was a good shot and swordsman:  and it was his
+pleasure to walk with his son over the braes of the moorfowl, or to
+teach him arms in the back court, when they made a mighty comely
+pair, the child being so lean, and light, and active, and the laird
+himself a man of a manly, pretty stature, his hair (the periwig
+being laid aside) showing already white with many anxieties, and
+his face of an even, flaccid red.  But this day Francie's heart was
+not in the fencing.
+
+'Sir,' says he, suddenly lowering his point, 'will ye tell me a
+thing if I was to ask it?'
+
+'Ask away,' says the father.
+
+'Well, it's this,' said Francie:  'Why do you and me comply if it's
+so wicked?'
+
+'Ay, ye have the cant of it too!' cries Montroymont.  'But I'll
+tell ye for all that.  It's to try and see if we can keep the
+rigging on this house, Francie.  If she had her way, we would be
+beggar-folk, and hold our hands out by the wayside.  When ye hear
+her--when ye hear folk,' he corrected himself briskly, 'call me a
+coward, and one that betrayed the Lord, and I kenna what else, just
+mind it was to keep a bed to ye to sleep in and a bite for ye to
+eat.--On guard!' he cried, and the lesson proceeded again till they
+were called to supper.
+
+'There's another thing yet,' said Francie, stopping his father.
+'There's another thing that I am not sure that I am very caring
+for.  She--she sends me errands.'
+
+'Obey her, then, as is your bounden duty,' said Traquair.
+
+'Ay, but wait till I tell ye,' says the boy.  'If I was to see you
+I was to hide.'
+
+Montroymont sighed.  'Well, and that's good of her too,' said he.
+'The less that I ken of thir doings the better for me; and the best
+thing you can do is just to obey her, and see and be a good son to
+her, the same as ye are to me, Francie.'
+
+At the tenderness of this expression the heart of Francie swelled
+within his bosom, and his remorse was poured out.  'Faither!' he
+cried, 'I said "deil" to-day; many's the time I said it, and
+DAMNABLE too, and HELLITSH.  I ken they're all right; they're
+beeblical.  But I didna say them beeblically; I said them for sweir
+words--that's the truth of it.'
+
+'Hout, ye silly bairn!' said the father, 'dinna do it nae mair, and
+come in by to your supper.'  And he took the boy, and drew him
+close to him a moment, as they went through the door, with
+something very fond and secret, like a caress between a pair of
+lovers.
+
+The next day M'Brair was abroad in the afternoon, and had a long
+advising with Janet on the braes where she herded cattle.  What
+passed was never wholly known; but the lass wept bitterly, and fell
+on her knees to him among the whins.  The same night, as soon as it
+was dark, he took the road again for Balweary.  In the Kirkton,
+where the dragoons quartered, he saw many lights, and heard the
+noise of a ranting song and people laughing grossly, which was
+highly offensive to his mind.  He gave it the wider berth, keeping
+among fields; and came down at last by the water-side, where the
+manse stands solitary between the river and the road.  He tapped at
+the back door, and the old woman called upon him to come in, and
+guided him through the house to the study, as they still called it,
+though there was little enough study there in Haddo's days, and
+more song-books than theology.
+
+'Here's yin to speak wi' ye, Mr. Haddie!' cries the old wife.
+
+And M'Brair, opening the door and entering, found the little,
+round, red man seated in one chair and his feet upon another.  A
+clear fire and a tallow dip lighted him barely.  He was taking
+tobacco in a pipe, and smiling to himself; and a brandy-bottle and
+glass, and his fiddle and bow, were beside him on the table.
+
+'Hech, Patey M'Briar, is this you?' said he, a trifle tipsily.
+'Step in by, man, and have a drop brandy:  for the stomach's sake!
+Even the deil can quote Scripture--eh, Patey?'
+
+'I will neither eat nor drink with you,' replied M'Brair.  'I am
+come upon my Master's errand:  woe be upon me if I should anyways
+mince the same.  Hall Haddo, I summon you to quit this kirk which
+you encumber.'
+
+'Muckle obleeged!' says Haddo, winking.
+
+'You and me have been to kirk and market together,' pursued
+M'Brair; 'we have had blessed seasons in the kirk, we have sat in
+the same teaching-rooms and read in the same book; and I know you
+still retain for me some carnal kindness.  It would be my shame if
+I denied it; I live here at your mercy and by your favour, and
+glory to acknowledge it.  You have pity on my wretched body, which
+is but grass, and must soon be trodden under:  but O, Haddo! how
+much greater is the yearning with which I yearn after and pity your
+immortal soul!  Come now, let us reason together!  I drop all
+points of controversy, weighty though these be; I take your defaced
+and damnified kirk on your own terms; and I ask you, Are you a
+worthy minister?  The communion season approaches; how can you
+pronounce thir solemn words, "The elders will now bring forrit the
+elements," and not quail?  A parishioner may be summoned to-night;
+you may have to rise from your miserable orgies; and I ask you,
+Haddo, what does your conscience tell you?  Are you fit?  Are you
+fit to smooth the pillow of a parting Christian?  And if the
+summons should be for yourself, how then?'
+
+Haddo was startled out of all composure and the better part of his
+temper.  'What's this of it?' he cried.  'I'm no waur than my
+neebours.  I never set up to be speeritual; I never did.  I'm a
+plain, canty creature; godliness is cheerfulness, says I; give me
+my fiddle and a dram, and I wouldna hairm a flee.'
+
+'And I repeat my question,' said M'Brair:  'Are you fit--fit for
+this great charge? fit to carry and save souls?'
+
+'Fit?  Blethers!  As fit's yoursel',' cried Haddo.
+
+'Are you so great a self-deceiver?' said M'Brair.  'Wretched man,
+trampler upon God's covenants, crucifier of your Lord afresh.  I
+will ding you to the earth with one word:  How about the young
+woman, Janet M'Clour?'
+
+'Weel, what about her? what do I ken?' cries Haddo.  'M'Brair, ye
+daft auld wife, I tell ye as true's truth, I never meddled her.  It
+was just daffing, I tell ye:  daffing, and nae mair:  a piece of
+fun, like!  I'm no denying but what I'm fond of fun, sma' blame to
+me!  But for onything sarious--hout, man, it might come to a
+deposeetion!  I'll sweir it to ye.  Where's a Bible, till you hear
+me sweir?'
+
+'There is nae Bible in your study,' said M'Brair severely.
+
+And Haddo, after a few distracted turns, was constrained to accept
+the fact.
+
+'Weel, and suppose there isna?' he cried, stamping.  'What mair can
+ye say of us, but just that I'm fond of my joke, and so's she?  I
+declare to God, by what I ken, she might be the Virgin Mary--if she
+would just keep clear of the dragoons.  But me! na, deil haet o'
+me!'
+
+'She is penitent at least,' says M'Brair.
+
+'Do you mean to actually up and tell me to my face that she accused
+me?' cried the curate.
+
+'I canna just say that,' replied M'Brair.  'But I rebuked her in
+the name of God, and she repented before me on her bended knees.'
+
+'Weel, I daursay she's been ower far wi' the dragoons,' said Haddo.
+'I never denied that.  I ken naething by it.'
+
+'Man, you but show your nakedness the more plainly,' said M'Brair.
+'Poor, blind, besotted creature--and I see you stoytering on the
+brink of dissolution:  your light out, and your hours numbered.
+Awake, man!' he shouted with a formidable voice, 'awake, or it be
+ower late.'
+
+'Be damned if I stand this!' exclaimed Haddo, casting his tobacco-
+pipe violently on the table, where it was smashed in pieces.  'Out
+of my house with ye, or I'll call for the dragoons.'
+
+'The speerit of the Lord is upon me,' said M'Brair with solemn
+ecstasy.  'I sist you to compear before the Great White Throne, and
+I warn you the summons shall be bloody and sudden.'
+
+And at this, with more agility than could have been expected, he
+got clear of the room and slammed the door behind him in the face
+of the pursuing curate.  The next Lord's day the curate was ill,
+and the kirk closed, but for all his ill words, Mr. M'Brair abode
+unmolested in the house of Montroymont.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE HILL-END OF DRUMLOWE
+
+
+
+This was a bit of a steep broken hill that overlooked upon the west
+a moorish valley, full of ink-black pools.  These presently drained
+into a burn that made off, with little noise and no celerity of
+pace, about the corner of the hill.  On the far side the ground
+swelled into a bare heath, black with junipers, and spotted with
+the presence of the standing stones for which the place was famous.
+They were many in that part, shapeless, white with lichen--you
+would have said with age:  and had made their abode there for
+untold centuries, since first the heathens shouted for their
+installation.  The ancients had hallowed them to some ill religion,
+and their neighbourhood had long been avoided by the prudent before
+the fall of day; but of late, on the upspringing of new
+requirements, these lonely stones on the moor had again become a
+place of assembly.  A watchful picket on the Hill-end commanded all
+the northern and eastern approaches; and such was the disposition
+of the ground, that by certain cunningly posted sentries the west
+also could be made secure against surprise:  there was no place in
+the country where a conventicle could meet with more quiet of mind
+or a more certain retreat open, in the case of interference from
+the dragoons.  The minister spoke from a knowe close to the edge of
+the ring, and poured out the words God gave him on the very
+threshold of the devils of yore.  When they pitched a tent (which
+was often in wet weather, upon a communion occasion) it was rigged
+over the huge isolated pillar that had the name of Anes-Errand,
+none knew why.  And the congregation sat partly clustered on the
+slope below, and partly among the idolatrous monoliths and on the
+turfy soil of the Ring itself.  In truth the situation was well
+qualified to give a zest to Christian doctrines, had there been any
+wanted.  But these congregations assembled under conditions at once
+so formidable and romantic as made a zealot of the most cold.  They
+were the last of the faithful; God, who had averted His face from
+all other countries of the world, still leaned from heaven to
+observe, with swelling sympathy, the doings of His moorland
+remnant; Christ was by them with His eternal wounds, with dropping
+tears; the Holy Ghost (never perfectly realised nor firmly adopted
+by Protestant imaginations) was dimly supposed to be in the heart
+of each and on the lips of the minister.  And over against them was
+the army of the hierarchies, from the men Charles and James Stuart,
+on to King Lewie and the Emperor; and the scarlet Pope, and the
+muckle black devil himself, peering out the red mouth of hell in an
+ecstasy of hate and hope.  'One pull more!' he seemed to cry; 'one
+pull more, and it's done.  There's only Clydesdale and the
+Stewartry, and the three Bailiaries of Ayr, left for God.'  And
+with such an august assistance of powers and principalities looking
+on at the last conflict of good and evil, it was scarce possible to
+spare a thought to those old, infirm, debile, ab agendo devils
+whose holy place they were now violating.
+
+There might have been three hundred to four hundred present.  At
+least there were three hundred horses tethered for the most part in
+the ring; though some of the hearers on the outskirts of the crowd
+stood with their bridles in their hand, ready to mount at the first
+signal.  The circle of faces was strangely characteristic; long,
+serious, strongly marked, the tackle standing out in the lean brown
+cheeks, the mouth set and the eyes shining with a fierce
+enthusiasm; the shepherd, the labouring man, and the rarer laird,
+stood there in their broad blue bonnets or laced hats, and
+presenting an essential identity of type.  From time to time a
+long-drawn groan of adhesion rose in this audience, and was
+propagated like a wave to the outskirts, and died away among the
+keepers of the horses.  It had a name; it was called 'a holy
+groan.'
+
+A squall came up; a great volley of flying mist went out before it
+and whelmed the scene; the wind stormed with a sudden fierceness
+that carried away the minister's voice and twitched his tails and
+made him stagger, and turned the congregation for a moment into a
+mere pother of blowing plaid-ends and prancing horses; and the rain
+followed and was dashed straight into their faces.  Men and women
+panted aloud in the shock of that violent shower-bath; the teeth
+were bared along all the line in an involuntary grimace; plaids,
+mantles, and riding-coats were proved vain, and the worshippers
+felt the water stream on their naked flesh.  The minister,
+reinforcing his great and shrill voice, continued to contend
+against and triumph over the rising of the squall and the dashing
+of the rain.
+
+'In that day ye may go thirty mile and not hear a crawing cock,' he
+said; 'and fifty mile and not get a light to your pipe; and an
+hundred mile and not see a smoking house.  For there'll be naething
+in all Scotland but deid men's banes and blackness, and the living
+anger of the Lord.  O, where to find a bield--O sirs, where to find
+a bield from the wind of the Lord's anger?  Do ye call THIS a wind?
+Bethankit!  Sirs, this is but a temporary dispensation; this is but
+a puff of wind, this is but a spit of rain and by with it.  Already
+there's a blue bow in the west, and the sun will take the crown of
+the causeway again, and your things'll be dried upon ye, and your
+flesh will be warm upon your bones.  But O, sirs, sirs! for the day
+of the Lord's anger!'
+
+His rhetoric was set forth with an ear-piercing elocution, and a
+voice that sometimes crashed like cannon.  Such as it was, it was
+the gift of all hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or
+identity.  Their images scarce ranged beyond the red horizon of the
+moor and the rainy hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-
+piece, a spade, a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and
+the withdrawal of the sun.  An occasional pathos of simple
+humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the
+homely tissue.  It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine,
+and redolent of the soil.
+
+A little before the coming of the squall there was a different
+scene enacting at the outposts.  For the most part, the sentinels
+were faithful to their important duty; the Hill-end of Drumlowe was
+known to be a safe meeting-place; and the out-pickets on this
+particular day had been somewhat lax from the beginning, and grew
+laxer during the inordinate length of the discourse.  Francie lay
+there in his appointed hiding-hole, looking abroad between two
+whin-bushes.  His view was across the course of the burn, then over
+a piece of plain moorland, to a gap between two hills; nothing
+moved but grouse, and some cattle who slowly traversed his field of
+view, heading northward:  he heard the psalms, and sang words of
+his own to the savage and melancholy music; for he had his own
+design in hand, and terror and cowardice prevailed in his bosom
+alternately, like the hot and the cold fit of an ague.  Courage was
+uppermost during the singing, which he accompanied through all its
+length with this impromptu strain:
+
+
+'And I will ding Jock Crozer down
+No later than the day.'
+
+
+Presently the voice of the preacher came to him in wafts, at the
+wind's will, as by the opening and shutting of a door; wild spasms
+of screaming, as of some undiscerned gigantic hill-bird stirred
+with inordinate passion, succeeded to intervals of silence; and
+Francie heard them with a critical ear.  'Ay,' he thought at last,
+'he'll do; he has the bit in his mou' fairly.'
+
+He had observed that his friend, or rather his enemy, Jock Crozer,
+had been established at a very critical part of the line of
+outposts; namely, where the burn issues by an abrupt gorge from the
+semicircle of high moors.  If anything was calculated to nerve him
+to battle it was this.  The post was important; next to the Hill-
+end itself, it might be called the key to the position; and it was
+where the cover was bad, and in which it was most natural to place
+a child.  It should have been Heathercat's; why had it been given
+to Crozer?  An exquisite fear of what should be the answer passed
+through his marrow every time he faced the question.  Was it
+possible that Crozer could have boasted? that there were rumours
+abroad to his--Heathercat's--discredit? that his honour was
+publicly sullied?  All the world went dark about him at the
+thought; he sank without a struggle into the midnight pool of
+despair; and every time he so sank, he brought back with him--not
+drowned heroism indeed, but half-drowned courage by the locks.  His
+heart beat very slowly as he deserted his station, and began to
+crawl towards that of Crozer.  Something pulled him back, and it
+was not the sense of duty, but a remembrance of Crozer's build and
+hateful readiness of fist.  Duty, as he conceived it, pointed him
+forward on the rueful path that he was travelling.  Duty bade him
+redeem his name if he were able, at the risk of broken bones; and
+his bones and every tooth in his head ached by anticipation.  An
+awful subsidiary fear whispered him that if he were hurt, he should
+disgrace himself by weeping.  He consoled himself, boy-like, with
+the consideration that he was not yet committed; he could easily
+steal over unseen to Crozer's post, and he had a continuous private
+idea that he would very probably steal back again.  His course took
+him so near the minister that he could hear some of his words:
+'What news, minister, of Claver'se?  He's going round like a
+roaring rampaging lion. . . .
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{1} From the Sydney Presbyterian, October 26, 1889.
+
+{2a}  Theater of Mortality, p. 10; Edin. 1713.
+
+{2b}  History of My Own Times, beginning 1660, by Bishop Gilbert
+Burnet, p. 158.
+
+{2c}  Wodrow's Church History, Book II. chap. i. sect. I.
+
+{2d}  Crookshank's Church History, 1751, second ed. p. 202.
+
+{2e}  Burnet, p. 348.
+
+{3a}  Fuller's Historie of the Holy Warre, fourth ed. 1651.
+
+{3b}  Wodrow, vol. ii. p. 17.
+
+{3c}  Sir J. Turner's Memoirs, pp. 148-50.
+
+{4a}  A Cloud of Witnesses, p. 376.
+
+{4b}  Wodrow, pp. 19, 20.
+
+{4c}  A Hind Let Loose, p. 123.
+
+{4d}  Turner, p. 163.
+
+{4e}  Turner, p. 198.
+
+{4f}  Ibid. p. 167.
+
+{4g}  Wodrow, p. 29.
+
+{4h}  Turner, Wodrow, and Church History by James Kirkton, an outed
+minister of the period.
+
+{5a}  Kirkton, p. 244.
+
+{5b}  Kirkton.
+
+{5c}  Turner.
+
+{5d}  Kirkton.
+
+{5e}  Kirkton.
+
+{6a}  Cloud of Witnesses, p. 389; Edin. 1765.
+
+{6b}  Kirkton, p. 247.
+
+{6c}  Ibid. p. 254.
+
+{6d}  Ibid. p. 247.
+
+{6e}  Ibid. pp. 247, 248.
+
+{6f}  Kirkton, p. 248.
+
+{6g}  Kirkton, p. 249.
+
+{6h}  Naphtali, p. 205; Glasgow, 1721.
+
+{6i}  Wodrow, p. 59.
+
+{6j}  Kirkton, p. 246.
+
+{6k}  Defoe's History of the Church of Scotland.
+
+{7}  'This paper was written in collaboration with James Waiter
+Ferrier, and if reprinted this is to be stated, though his
+principal collaboration was to lie back in an easy-chair and
+laugh.'--[R.L.S., Oct. 25, 1894.]
+
+{8}  See a short essay of De Quincey's.
+
+{9a}  Religio Medici, Part ii.
+
+{9b}  Duchess of Malfi.
+
+
+
+
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+<a href="#startoftext">Lay Morals, by Robert Louis Stevenson</a>
+</h2>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lay Morals, by Robert Louis Stevenson
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: Lay Morals
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: December, 1995  [EBook #373]
+[This file was first posted on November 25, 1995]
+[Most recently updated: August 18, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+</pre>
+<p>
+<a name="startoftext"></a>
+Transcribed from the Chatto and Windus 1911 edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+LAY MORALS AND OTHER PAPERS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Contents:<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Lay Morals<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter I<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter II<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter III<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter IV<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Father Damien<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Pentland Rising<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter I - The Causes of the Revolt<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter II - The Beginning<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter III - The March of the Rebels<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter IV - Rullion Green<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter V - A Record of Blood<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Day After To-morrow<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;College Papers<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter I - Edinburgh Students in
+1824<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter II - The Modern Student<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter III - Debating Societies<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Criticisms<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter I - Lord Lytton's &ldquo;Fables
+in Song&rdquo;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter II - Salvini&rsquo;s Macbeth<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter III - Bagster&rsquo;s &ldquo;Pilgrim&rsquo;s
+Progress&rdquo;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Sketches<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Satirist<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Nuits Blanches<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Wreath of Immortelles<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Nurses<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A Character<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Great North Road<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter I - Nance at the &ldquo;Green
+Dragon&rdquo;<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter II - In which Mr. Archer
+is Installed<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter III - Jonathan Holdaway<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter IV - Mingling Threads<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter V - Life in the Castle<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter IV - The Bad Half-Crown<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter VII - The Bleaching-Green<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter VIII - The Mail Guard<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;The Young Chevalier<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Prologue: The Wine-Seller&rsquo;s
+Wife<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter I - The Prince<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Heathercat<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter I - Traqairs of Montroymont<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter II - Francie<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Chapter III - The Hill-End of Drumlowe<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+LAY MORALS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter.&nbsp;
+Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly
+and profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only
+broken images of the truth which they perceive.&nbsp; Speech which goes
+from one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between
+two experiences, is doubly relative.&nbsp; The speaker buries his meaning;
+it is for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or
+spoken, is in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared
+hearer.&nbsp; Such, moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we
+condescend upon details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend
+on error; and the best of education is to throw out some magnanimous
+hints.&nbsp; No man was ever so poor that he could express all he has
+in him by words, looks, or actions; his true knowledge is eternally
+incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom
+comes to him by no process of the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation,
+which keeps varying from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation
+of events and circumstances.<br>
+<br>
+A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and contempt for
+others, try earnestly to set forth as much as they can grasp of this
+inner law; but the vast majority, when they come to advise the young,
+must be content to retail certain doctrines which have been already
+retailed to them in their own youth.&nbsp; Every generation has to educate
+another which it has brought upon the stage.&nbsp; People who readily
+accept the responsibility of parentship, having very different matters
+in their eye, are apt to feel rueful when that responsibility falls
+due.&nbsp; What are they to tell the child about life and conduct, subjects
+on which they have themselves so few and such confused opinions?&nbsp;
+Indeed, I do not know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended;
+and yet the child keeps asking, and the parent must find some words
+to say in his own defence.&nbsp; Where does he find them? and what are
+they when found?<br>
+<br>
+As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases
+out of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat three bad
+things: the terror of public opinion, and, flowing from that as a fountain,
+the desire of wealth and applause.&nbsp; Besides these, or what might
+be deduced as corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of
+any effective value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping,
+and how to walk through a quadrille.<br>
+<br>
+But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians.&nbsp;
+It may be want of penetration, but I have not yet been able to perceive
+it.&nbsp; As an honest man, whatever we teach, and be it good or evil,
+it is not the doctrine of Christ.&nbsp; What he taught (and in this
+he is like all other teachers worthy of the name) was not a code of
+rules, but a ruling spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth; not views,
+but a view.&nbsp; What he showed us was an attitude of mind.&nbsp; Towards
+the many considerations on which conduct is built, each man stands in
+a certain relation.&nbsp; He takes life on a certain principle.&nbsp;
+He has a compass in his spirit which points in a certain direction.&nbsp;
+It is the attitude, the relation, the point of the compass, that is
+the whole body and gist of what he has to teach us; in this, the details
+are comprehended; out of this the specific precepts issue, and by this,
+and this only, can they be explained and applied.&nbsp; And thus, to
+learn aright from any teacher, we must first of all, like a historical
+artist, think ourselves into sympathy with his position and, in the
+technical phrase, create his character.&nbsp; A historian confronted
+with some ambiguous politician, or an actor charged with a part, have
+but one pre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every side,
+and grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify
+the most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an
+enigma, or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian sentiment
+and big words; but once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human
+nature appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from
+point to point, from end to end.&nbsp; This is a degree of trouble which
+will be gladly taken by a very humble artist; but not even the terror
+of eternal fire can teach a business man to bend his imagination to
+such athletic efforts.&nbsp; Yet without this, all is vain; until we
+understand the whole, we shall understand none of the parts; and otherwise
+we have no more than broken images and scattered words; the meaning
+remains buried; and the language in which our prophet speaks to us is
+a dead language in our ears.<br>
+<br>
+Take a few of Christ&rsquo;s sayings and compare them with our current
+doctrines.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ye cannot,&rsquo; he says, &lsquo;<i>serve God and Mammon</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Cannot?&nbsp; And our whole system is to teach us how we can!<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;<i>The children of this world are wiser in their generation than
+the children of light</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; Are they?&nbsp; I had been led
+to understand the reverse: that the Christian merchant, for example,
+prospered exceedingly in his affairs; that honesty was the best policy;
+that an author of repute had written a conclusive treatise &lsquo;How
+to make the best of both worlds.&rsquo;&nbsp; Of both worlds indeed!&nbsp;
+Which am I to believe then - Christ or the author of repute?<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;<i>Take no thought for the morrow</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; Ask the Successful
+Merchant; interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that
+this is not only a silly but an immoral position.&nbsp; All we believe,
+all we hope, all we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands
+condemned in this one sentence, or, if you take the other view, condemns
+the sentence as unwise and inhumane.&nbsp; We are not then of the &lsquo;same
+mind that was in Christ.&rsquo;&nbsp; We disagree with Christ.&nbsp;
+Either Christ meant nothing, or else he or we must be in the wrong.&nbsp;
+Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts from the New Testament, and
+finding a strange echo of another style which the reader may recognise:
+&lsquo;Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any pulpit
+in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that meeting-house
+upon another.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+It may be objected that these are what are called &lsquo;hard sayings&rsquo;;
+and that a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian
+although it leave some of these sayings upon one side.&nbsp; But this
+is a very gross delusion.&nbsp; Although truth is difficult to state,
+it is both easy and agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet
+it ere the phrase be done.&nbsp; The universe, in relation to what any
+man can say of it, is plain, patent and staringly comprehensible.&nbsp;
+In itself, it is a great and travailing ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable,
+an eternal mystery to man; or, let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable
+mountain, one side of which, and a few near slopes and foothills, we
+can dimly study with these mortal eyes.&nbsp; But what any man can say
+of it, even in his highest utterance, must have relation to this little
+and plain corner, which is no less visible to us than to him.&nbsp;
+We are looking on the same map; it will go hard if we cannot follow
+the demonstration.&nbsp; The longest and most abstruse flight of a philosopher
+becomes clear and shallow, in the flash of a moment, when we suddenly
+perceive the aspect and drift of his intention.&nbsp; The longest argument
+is but a finger pointed; once we get our own finger rightly parallel,
+and we see what the man meant, whether it be a new star or an old street-lamp.&nbsp;
+And briefly, if a saying is hard to understand, it is because we are
+thinking of something else.<br>
+<br>
+But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet,
+and to think of different things in the same order.&nbsp; To be of the
+same mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective;
+it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not
+much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the
+force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision
+that whatever he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original,
+that whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept.&nbsp;
+You do not belong to the school of any philosopher, because you agree
+with him that theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun
+is overhead at noon.&nbsp; It is by the hard sayings that discipleship
+is tested.&nbsp; We are all agreed about the middling and indifferent
+parts of knowledge and morality; even the most soaring spirits too often
+take them tamely upon trust.&nbsp; But the man, the philosopher or the
+moralist, does not stand upon these chance adhesions; and the purpose
+of any system looks towards those extreme points where it steps valiantly
+beyond tradition and returns with some covert hint of things outside.&nbsp;
+Then only can you be certain that the words are not words of course,
+nor mere echoes of the past; then only are you sure that if he be indicating
+anything at all, it is a star and not a street-lamp; then only do you
+touch the heart of the mystery, since it was for these that the author
+wrote his book.<br>
+<br>
+Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ finds
+a word that transcends all common-place morality; every now and then
+he quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out
+a pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry
+of thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday conceptions
+to take a broader look upon experience or accept some higher principle
+of conduct.&nbsp; To a man who is of the same mind that was in Christ,
+who stands at some centre not too far from his, and looks at the world
+and conduct from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing attitude
+- or, shortly, to a man who is of Christ&rsquo;s philosophy - every
+such saying should come home with a thrill of joy and corroboration;
+he should feel each one below his feet as another sure foundation in
+the flux of time and chance; each should be another proof that in the
+torrent of the years and generations, where doctrines and great armaments
+and empires are swept away and swallowed, he stands immovable, holding
+by the eternal stars.&nbsp; But alas! at this juncture of the ages it
+is not so with us; on each and every such occasion our whole fellowship
+of Christians falls back in disapproving wonder and implicitly denies
+the saying.&nbsp; Christians! the farce is impudently broad.&nbsp; Let
+us stand up in the sight of heaven and confess.&nbsp; The ethics that
+we hold are those of Benjamin Franklin.&nbsp; <i>Honesty is the best</i>
+<i>policy</i>, is perhaps a hard saying; it is certainly one by which
+a wise man of these days will not too curiously direct his steps; but
+I think it shows a glimmer of meaning to even our most dimmed intelligences;
+I think we perceive a principle behind it; I think, without hyperbole,
+we are of the same mind that was in Benjamin Franklin.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+But, I may be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of
+morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and religion;
+and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his mind must follow
+after profit with some conscience and Christianity of method.&nbsp;
+A man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his parents,
+nor kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears false witness;
+for these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast field of duty.<br>
+<br>
+Alas! what is a precept?&nbsp; It is at best an illustration; it is
+case law at the best which can be learned by precept.&nbsp; The letter
+is not only dead, but killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot
+be uttered, alone is true and helpful.&nbsp; This is trite to sickness;
+but familiarity has a cunning disenchantment; in a day or two she can
+steal all beauty from the mountain tops; and the most startling words
+begin to fall dead upon the ear after several repetitions.&nbsp; If
+you see a thing too often, you no longer see it; if you hear a thing
+too often, you no longer hear it.&nbsp; Our attention requires to be
+surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or to gain a thoughtful hearing
+from the ruck of mankind, are feats of about an equal difficulty and
+must be tried by not dissimilar means.&nbsp; The whole Bible has thus
+lost its message for the common run of hearers; it has become mere words
+of course; and the parson may bawl himself scarlet and beat the pulpit
+like a thing possessed, but his hearers will continue to nod; they are
+strangely at peace, they know all he has to say; ring the old bell as
+you choose, it is still the old bell and it cannot startle their composure.&nbsp;
+And so with this byword about the letter and the spirit.&nbsp; It is
+quite true, no doubt; but it has no meaning in the world to any man
+of us.&nbsp; Alas! it has just this meaning, and neither more nor less:
+that while the spirit is true, the letter is eternally false.<br>
+<br>
+The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon, perfect,
+clear, and stable like the earth.&nbsp; But let a man set himself to
+mark out the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he never so nimble
+and never so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the
+progression of the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long
+ere he has made the circuit the whole figure will have changed.&nbsp;
+Life may be compared, not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated
+forest; circumstance is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language
+much more inexact than the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the
+trees fall and are renewed; the very essences are fleeting as we look;
+and the whole world of leaves is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds
+of time.&nbsp; Look now for your shadows.&nbsp; O man of formulae, is
+this a place for you?&nbsp; Have you fitted the spirit to a single case?&nbsp;
+Alas, in the cycle of the ages when shall such another be proposed for
+the judgment of man?&nbsp; Now when the sun shines and the winds blow,
+the wood is filled with an innumerable multitude of shadows, tumultuously
+tossed and changing; and at every gust the whole carpet leaps and becomes
+new.&nbsp; Can you or your heart say more?<br>
+<br>
+Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life; and
+although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had every step
+of conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory, tell me what
+definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from
+both to age?&nbsp; The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is
+but the shadow of a delusion.&nbsp; This is gone; that never truly was;
+and you yourself are altered beyond recognition.&nbsp; Times and men
+and circumstances change about your changing character, with a speed
+of which no earthly hurricane affords an image.&nbsp; What was the best
+yesterday, is it still the best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow?&nbsp;
+Will your own Past truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected
+Future?&nbsp; And if this be questionable, with what humble, with what
+hopeless eyes, should we not watch other men driving beside us on their
+unknown careers, seeing with unlike eyes, impelled by different gales,
+doing and suffering in another sphere of things?<br>
+<br>
+And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene, do
+you offer me these two score words? these five bald prohibitions?&nbsp;
+For the moral precepts are no more than five; the first four deal rather
+with matters of observance than of conduct; the tenth, <i>Thou shalt
+not covet</i>, stands upon another basis, and shall be spoken of ere
+long.&nbsp; The Jews, to whom they were first given, in the course of
+years began to find these precepts insufficient; and made an addition
+of no less than six hundred and fifty others!&nbsp; They hoped to make
+a pocket-book of reference on morals, which should stand to life in
+some such relation, say, as Hoyle stands in to the scientific game of
+whist.&nbsp; The comparison is just, and condemns the design; for those
+who play by rule will never be more than tolerable players; and you
+and I would like to play our game in life to the noblest and the most
+divine advantage.&nbsp; Yet if the Jews took a petty and huckstering
+view of conduct, what view do we take ourselves, who callously leave
+youth to go forth into the enchanted forest, full of spells and dire
+chimeras, with no guidance more complete than is afforded by these five
+precepts?<br>
+<br>
+<i>Honour thy father and thy mother</i>.&nbsp; Yes, but does that mean
+to obey? and if so, how long and how far?&nbsp; <i>Thou shall not kill</i>.&nbsp;
+Yet the very intention and purport of the prohibition may be best fulfilled
+by killing.&nbsp; <i>Thou shall not commit adultery</i>.&nbsp; But some
+of the ugliest adulteries are committed in the bed of marriage and under
+the sanction of religion and law.&nbsp; <i>Thou shalt not bear false
+witness</i>.&nbsp; How? by speech or by silence also? or even by a smile?&nbsp;
+<i>Thou shalt</i> <i>not steal</i>.&nbsp; Ah, that indeed!&nbsp; But
+what is <i>to steal</i>?<br>
+<br>
+To steal?&nbsp; It is another word to be construed; and who is to be
+our guide?&nbsp; The police will give us one construction, leaving the
+word only that least minimum of meaning without which society would
+fall in pieces; but surely we must take some higher sense than this;
+surely we hope more than a bare subsistence for mankind; surely we wish
+mankind to prosper and go on from strength to strength, and ourselves
+to live rightly in the eye of some more exacting potentate than a policeman.&nbsp;
+The approval or the disapproval of the police must be eternally indifferent
+to a man who is both valorous and good.&nbsp; There is extreme discomfort,
+but no shame, in the condemnation of the law.&nbsp; The law represents
+that modicum of morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind;
+but what is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own more stringent
+judge?&nbsp; I observe with pleasure that no brave man has ever given
+a rush for such considerations.&nbsp; The Japanese have a nobler and
+more sentimental feeling for this social bond into which we all are
+born when we come into the world, and whose comforts and protection
+we all indifferently share throughout our lives:- but even to them,
+no more than to our Western saints and heroes, does the law of the state
+supersede the higher law of duty.&nbsp; Without hesitation and without
+remorse, they transgress the stiffest enactments rather than abstain
+from doing right.&nbsp; But the accidental superior duty being thus
+fulfilled, they at once return in allegiance to the common duty of all
+citizens; and hasten to denounce themselves; and value at an equal rate
+their just crime and their equally just submission to its punishment.<br>
+<br>
+The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active conscience
+or a thoughtful head.&nbsp; But to show you how one or the other may
+trouble a man, and what a vast extent of frontier is left unridden by
+this invaluable eighth commandment, let me tell you a few pages out
+of a young man&rsquo;s life.<br>
+<br>
+He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous, flighty,
+as variable as youth itself, but always with some high motions and on
+the search for higher thoughts of life.&nbsp; I should tell you at once
+that he thoroughly agrees with the eighth commandment.&nbsp; But he
+got hold of some unsettling works, the New Testament among others, and
+this loosened his views of life and led him into many perplexities.&nbsp;
+As he was the son of a man in a certain position, and well off, my friend
+had enjoyed from the first the advantages of education, nay, he had
+been kept alive through a sickly childhood by constant watchfulness,
+comforts, and change of air; for all of which he was indebted to his
+father&rsquo;s wealth.<br>
+<br>
+At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who followed
+the plough in summer-time to pay their college fees in winter; and this
+inequality struck him with some force.&nbsp; He was at that age of a
+conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the aspects of life; and
+he spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of
+man- and woman-kind.&nbsp; In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions,
+and many intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this also
+struck him.&nbsp; He began to perceive that life was a handicap upon
+strange, wrong-sided principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair
+and equal race.&nbsp; He began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly
+favoured, when he saw all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort
+closed against so many of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly
+open before so idle, so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself.&nbsp;
+There sat a youth beside him on the college benches, who had only one
+shirt to his back, and, at intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay
+at home to have it washed.&nbsp; It was my friend&rsquo;s principle
+to stay away as often as he dared; for I fear he was no friend to learning.&nbsp;
+But there was something that came home to him sharply, in this fellow
+who had to give over study till his shirt was washed, and the scores
+of others who had never an opportunity at all.&nbsp; <i>If one of these
+could take his place</i>, he thought; and the thought tore away a bandage
+from his eyes.&nbsp; He was eaten by the shame of his discoveries, and
+despised himself as an unworthy favourite and a creature of the back-stairs
+of Fortune.&nbsp; He could no longer see without confusion one of these
+brave young fellows battling up-hill against adversity.&nbsp; Had he
+not filched that fellow&rsquo;s birthright?&nbsp; At best was he not
+coldly profiting by the injustice of society, and greedily devouring
+stolen goods?&nbsp; The money, indeed, belonged to his father, who had
+worked, and thought, and given up his liberty to earn it; but by what
+justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet, done nothing
+but help to squander it?&nbsp; A more sturdy honesty, joined to a more
+even and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these considerations
+a new force of industry, that this equivocal position might be brought
+as swiftly as possible to an end, and some good services to mankind
+justify the appropriation of expense.&nbsp; It was not so with my friend,
+who was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting
+anger with which young men regard injustices in the first blush of youth;
+although in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in their existence,
+and knowingly profit by their complications.&nbsp; Yet all this while
+he suffered many indignant pangs.&nbsp; And once, when he put on his
+boots, like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was his
+best consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free himself
+from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his, and do battle
+equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.<br>
+<br>
+Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great
+expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his perplexities
+were thickest.&nbsp; When he thought of all the other young men of singular
+promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who must remain at home
+to die, and with all their possibilities be lost to life and mankind;
+and how he, by one more unmerited favour, was chosen out from all these
+others to survive; he felt as if there were no life, no labour, no devotion
+of soul and body, that could repay and justify these partialities.&nbsp;
+A religious lady, to whom he communicated these reflections, could see
+no force in them whatever.&nbsp; &lsquo;It was God&rsquo;s will,&rsquo;
+said she.&nbsp; But he knew it was by God&rsquo;s will that Joan of
+Arc was burnt at Rouen, which cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon;
+and again, by God&rsquo;s will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem,
+which excused neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity of
+Pilate.&nbsp; He knew, moreover, that although the possibility of this
+favour he was now enjoying issued from his circumstances, its acceptance
+was the act of his own will; and he had accepted it greedily, longing
+for rest and sunshine.&nbsp; And hence this allegation of God&rsquo;s
+providence did little to relieve his scruples.&nbsp; I promise you he
+had a very troubled mind.&nbsp; And I would not laugh if I were you,
+though while he was thus making mountains out of what you think molehills,
+he were still (as perhaps he was) contentedly practising many other
+things that to you seem black as hell.&nbsp; Every man is his own judge
+and mountain-guide through life.&nbsp; There is an old story of a mote
+and a beam, apparently not true, but worthy perhaps of some consideration.&nbsp;
+I should, if I were you, give some consideration to these scruples of
+his, and if I were he, I should do the like by yours; for it is not
+unlikely that there may be something under both.&nbsp; In the meantime
+you must hear how my friend acted.&nbsp; Like many invalids, he supposed
+that he would die.&nbsp; Now, should he die, he saw no means of repaying
+this huge loan which, by the hands of his father, mankind had advanced
+him for his sickness.&nbsp; In that case it would be lost money.&nbsp;
+So he determined that the advance should be as small as possible; and,
+so long as he continued to doubt his recovery, lived in an upper room,
+and grudged himself all but necessaries.&nbsp; But so soon as he began
+to perceive a change for the better, he felt justified in spending more
+freely, to speed and brighten his return to health, and trusted in the
+future to lend a help to mankind, as mankind, out of its treasury, had
+lent a help to him.<br>
+<br>
+I do not say but that my friend was a little too curious and partial
+in his view; nor thought too much of himself and too little of his parents;
+but I do say that here are some scruples which tormented my friend in
+his youth, and still, perhaps, at odd times give him a prick in the
+midst of his enjoyments, and which after all have some foundation in
+justice, and point, in their confused way, to some more honourable honesty
+within the reach of man.&nbsp; And at least, is not this an unusual
+gloss upon the eighth commandment?&nbsp; And what sort of comfort, guidance,
+or illumination did that precept afford my friend throughout these contentions?&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Thou shalt not steal.&rsquo;&nbsp; With all my heart!&nbsp; But
+<i>am</i> I stealing?<br>
+<br>
+The truly quaint materialism of our view of life disables us from pursuing
+any transaction to an end.&nbsp; You can make no one understand that
+his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point of fact
+it is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or an evil
+to the world.&nbsp; We have a sort of blindness which prevents us from
+seeing anything but sovereigns.&nbsp; If one man agrees to give another
+so many shillings for so many hours&rsquo; work, and then wilfully gives
+him a certain proportion of the price in bad money and only the remainder
+in good, we can see with half an eye that this man is a thief.&nbsp;
+But if the other spends a certain proportion of the hours in smoking
+a pipe of tobacco, and a certain other proportion in looking at the
+sky, or the clock, or trying to recall an air, or in meditation on his
+own past adventures, and only the remainder in downright work such as
+he is paid to do, is he, because the theft is one of time and not of
+money, - is he any the less a thief?&nbsp; The one gave a bad shilling,
+the other an imperfect hour; but both broke the bargain, and each is
+a thief.&nbsp; In piecework, which is what most of us do, the case is
+none the less plain for being even less material.&nbsp; If you forge
+a bad knife, you have wasted some of mankind&rsquo;s iron, and then,
+with unrivalled cynicism, you pocket some of mankind&rsquo;s money for
+your trouble.&nbsp; Is there any man so blind who cannot see that this
+is theft?&nbsp; Again, if you carelessly cultivate a farm, you have
+been playing fast and loose with mankind&rsquo;s resources against hunger;
+there will be less bread in consequence, and for lack of that bread
+somebody will die next winter: a grim consideration.&nbsp; And you must
+not hope to shuffle out of blame because you got less money for your
+less quantity of bread; for although a theft be partly punished, it
+is none the less a theft for that.&nbsp; You took the farm against competitors;
+there were others ready to shoulder the responsibility and be answerable
+for the tale of loaves; but it was you who took it.&nbsp; By the act
+you came under a tacit bargain with mankind to cultivate that farm with
+your best endeavour; you were under no superintendence, you were on
+parole; and you have broke your bargain, and to all who look closely,
+and yourself among the rest if you have moral eyesight, you are a thief.&nbsp;
+Or take the case of men of letters.&nbsp; Every piece of work which
+is not as good as you can make it, which you have palmed off imperfect,
+meagrely thought, niggardly in execution, upon mankind who is your paymaster
+on parole and in a sense your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue
+performance, should rise up against you in the court of your own heart
+and condemn you for a thief.&nbsp; Have you a salary?&nbsp; If you trifle
+with your health, and so render yourself less capable for duty, and
+still touch, and still greedily pocket the emolument - what are you
+but a thief?&nbsp; Have you double accounts? do you by any time-honoured
+juggle, deceit, or ambiguous process, gain more from those who deal
+with you than it you were bargaining and dealing face to face in front
+of God? - What are you but a thief?&nbsp; Lastly, if you fill an office,
+or produce an article, which, in your heart of hearts, you think a delusion
+and a fraud upon mankind, and still draw your salary and go through
+the sham manoeuvres of this office, or still book your profits and keep
+on flooding the world with these injurious goods? - though you were
+old, and bald, and the first at church, and a baronet, what are you
+but a thief?&nbsp; These may seem hard words and mere curiosities of
+the intellect, in an age when the spirit of honesty is so sparingly
+cultivated that all business is conducted upon lies and so-called customs
+of the trade, that not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or
+honourableness of his pursuit.&nbsp; I would say less if I thought less.&nbsp;
+But looking to my own reason and the right of things, I can only avow
+that I am a thief myself, and that I passionately suspect my neighbours
+of the same guilt.<br>
+<br>
+Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest?&nbsp; Do you find
+that in your Bible?&nbsp; Easy!&nbsp; It is easy to be an ass and follow
+the multitude like a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I
+am well aware, is what you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest.&nbsp;
+But it will not bear the stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.&nbsp;
+Even before the lowest of all tribunals, - before a court of law, whose
+business it is, not to keep men right, or within a thousand miles of
+right, but to withhold them from going so tragically wrong that they
+will pull down the whole jointed fabric of society by their misdeeds
+- even before a court of law, as we begin to see in these last days,
+our easy view of following at each other&rsquo;s tails, alike to good
+and evil, is beginning to be reproved and punished, and declared no
+honesty at all, but open theft and swindling; and simpletons who have
+gone on through life with a quiet conscience may learn suddenly, from
+the lips of a judge, that the custom of the trade may be a custom of
+the devil.&nbsp; You thought it was easy to be honest.&nbsp; Did you
+think it was easy to be just and kind and truthful?&nbsp; Did you think
+the whole duty of aspiring man was as simple as a horn-pipe? and you
+could walk through life like a gentleman and a hero, with no more concern
+than it takes to go to church or to address a circular?&nbsp; And yet
+all this time you had the eighth commandment! and, what makes it richer,
+you would not have broken it for the world!<br>
+<br>
+The truth is, that these commandments by themselves are of little use
+in private judgment.&nbsp; If compression is what you want, you have
+their whole spirit compressed into the golden rule; and yet there expressed
+with more significance, since the law is there spiritually and not materially
+stated.&nbsp; And in truth, four out of these ten commands, from the
+sixth to the ninth, are rather legal than ethical.&nbsp; The police-court
+is their proper home.&nbsp; A magistrate cannot tell whether you love
+your neighbour as yourself, but he can tell more or less whether you
+have murdered, or stolen, or committed adultery, or held up your hand
+and testified to that which was not; and these things, for rough practical
+tests, are as good as can be found.&nbsp; And perhaps, therefore, the
+best condensation of the Jewish moral law is in the maxims of the priests,
+&lsquo;neminem laedere&rsquo; and &lsquo;suum cuique tribuere.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+But all this granted, it becomes only the more plain that they are inadequate
+in the sphere of personal morality; that while they tell the magistrate
+roughly when to punish, they can never direct an anxious sinner what
+to do.<br>
+<br>
+Only Polonius, or the like solemn sort of ass, can offer us a succinct
+proverb by way of advice, and not burst out blushing in our faces.&nbsp;
+We grant them one and all and for all that they are worth; it is something
+above and beyond that we desire.&nbsp; Christ was in general a great
+enemy to such a way of teaching; we rarely find him meddling with any
+of these plump commands but it was to open them out, and lift his hearers
+from the letter to the spirit.&nbsp; For morals are a personal affair;
+in the war of righteousness every man fights for his own hand; all the
+six hundred precepts of the Mishna cannot shake my private judgment;
+my magistracy of myself is an indefeasible charge, and my decisions
+absolute for the time and case.&nbsp; The moralist is not a judge of
+appeal, but an advocate who pleads at my tribunal.&nbsp; He has to show
+not the law, but that the law applies.&nbsp; Can he convince me? then
+he gains the cause.&nbsp; And thus you find Christ giving various counsels
+to varying people, and often jealously careful to avoid definite precept.&nbsp;
+Is he asked, for example, to divide a heritage?&nbsp; He refuses: and
+the best advice that he will offer is but a paraphrase of that tenth
+commandment which figures so strangely among the rest.&nbsp; <i>Take
+heed, and beware of</i> <i>covetousness</i>.&nbsp; If you complain that
+this is vague, I have failed to carry you along with me in my argument.&nbsp;
+For no definite precept can be more than an illustration, though its
+truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was announced from heaven
+by the voice of God.&nbsp; And life is so intricate and changing, that
+perhaps not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we
+find that nice consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to our
+experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment slumbers
+within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings
+to rekindle our astonishment.&nbsp; No length of habit can blunt our
+first surprise.&nbsp; Of the world I have but little to say in this
+connection; a few strokes shall suffice.&nbsp; We inhabit a dead ember
+swimming wide in the blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and
+lighted up from several million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire
+than was ever conceived by the theological imagination.&nbsp; Yet the
+dead ember is a green, commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation
+of this hell-fire ripens flower and fruit and mildly warms us on summer
+eves upon the lawn.&nbsp; Far off on all hands other dead embers, other
+flaming suns, wheel and race in the apparent void; the nearest is out
+of call, the farthest so far that the heart sickens in the effort to
+conceive the distance.&nbsp; Shipwrecked seamen on the deep, though
+they bestride but the truncheon of a boom, are safe and near at home
+compared with mankind on its bullet.&nbsp; Even to us who have known
+no other, it seems a strange, if not an appalling, place of residence.<br>
+<br>
+But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of wonders
+that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to himself.&nbsp;
+He inhabits a body which he is continually outliving, discarding and
+renewing.&nbsp; Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy, restore his spirits
+and the freshness of his countenance.&nbsp; Hair grows on him like grass;
+his eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and
+touch and hear, to partake the sun and wind, to sit down and intently
+ponder on his astonishing attributes and situation, to rise up and run,
+to perform the strange and revolting round of physical functions.&nbsp;
+The sight of a flower, the note of a bird, will often move him deeply;
+yet he looks unconcerned on the impassable distances and portentous
+bonfires of the universe.&nbsp; He comprehends, he designs, he tames
+nature, rides the sea, ploughs, climbs the air in a balloon, makes vast
+inquiries, begins interminable labours, joins himself into federations
+and populous cities, spends his days to deliver the ends of the earth
+or to benefit unborn posterity; and yet knows himself for a piece of
+unsurpassed fragility and the creature of a few days.&nbsp; His sight,
+which conducts him, which takes notice of the farthest stars, which
+is miraculous in every way and a thing defying explanation or belief,
+is yet lodged in a piece of jelly, and can be extinguished with a touch.&nbsp;
+His heart, which all through life so indomitably, so athletically labours,
+is but a capsule, and may be stopped with a pin.&nbsp; His whole body,
+for all its savage energies, its leaping and its winged desires, may
+yet be tamed and conquered by a draught of air or a sprinkling of cold
+dew.&nbsp; What he calls death, which is the seeming arrest of everything,
+and the ruin and hateful transformation of the visible body, lies in
+wait for him outwardly in a thousand accidents, and grows up in secret
+diseases from within.&nbsp; He is still learning to be a man when his
+faculties are already beginning to decline; he has not yet understood
+himself or his position before he inevitably dies.&nbsp; And yet this
+mad, chimerical creature can take no thought of his last end, lives
+as though he were eternal, plunges with his vulnerable body into the
+shock of war, and daily affronts death with unconcern.&nbsp; He cannot
+take a step without pain or pleasure.&nbsp; His life is a tissue of
+sensations, which he distinguishes as they seem to come more directly
+from himself or his surroundings.&nbsp; He is conscious of himself as
+a joyer or a sufferer, as that which craves, chooses, and is satisfied;
+conscious of his surroundings as it were of an inexhaustible purveyor,
+the source of aspects, inspirations, wonders, cruel knocks and transporting
+caresses.&nbsp; Thus he goes on his way, stumbling among delights and
+agonies.<br>
+<br>
+Matter is a far-fetched theory, and materialism is without a root in
+man.&nbsp; To him everything is important in the degree to which it
+moves him.&nbsp; The telegraph wires and posts, the electricity speeding
+from clerk to clerk, the clerks, the glad or sorrowful import of the
+message, and the paper on which it is finally brought to him at home,
+are all equally facts, all equally exist for man.&nbsp; A word or a
+thought can wound him as acutely as a knife of steel.&nbsp; If he thinks
+he is loved, he will rise up and glory to himself, although he be in
+a distant land and short of necessary bread.&nbsp; Does he think he
+is not loved? - he may have the woman at his beck, and there is not
+a joy for him in all the world.&nbsp; Indeed, if we are to make any
+account of this figment of reason, the distinction between material
+and immaterial, we shall conclude that the life of each man as an individual
+is immaterial, although the continuation and prospects of mankind as
+a race turn upon material conditions.&nbsp; The physical business of
+each man&rsquo;s body is transacted for him; like a sybarite, he has
+attentive valets in his own viscera; he breathes, he sweats, he digests
+without an effort, or so much as a consenting volition; for the most
+part he even eats, not with a wakeful consciousness, but as it were
+between two thoughts.&nbsp; His life is centred among other and more
+important considerations; touch him in his honour or his love, creatures
+of the imagination which attach him to mankind or to an individual man
+or woman; cross him in his piety which connects his soul with heaven;
+and he turns from his food, he loathes his breath, and with a magnanimous
+emotion cuts the knots of his existence and frees himself at a blow
+from the web of pains and pleasures.<br>
+<br>
+It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded and
+autonomous empire; but that in the same body with him there dwell other
+powers tributary but independent.&nbsp; If I now behold one walking
+in a garden, curiously coloured and illuminated by the sun, digesting
+his food with elaborate chemistry, breathing, circulating blood, directing
+himself by the sight of his eyes, accommodating his body by a thousand
+delicate balancings to the wind and the uneven surface of the path,
+and all the time, perhaps, with his mind engaged about America, or the
+dog-star, or the attributes of God - what am I to say, or how am I to
+describe the thing I see?&nbsp; Is that truly a man, in the rigorous
+meaning of the word? or is it not a man and something else?&nbsp; What,
+then, are we to count the centre-bit and axle of a being so variously
+compounded?&nbsp; It is a question much debated.&nbsp; Some read his
+history in a certain intricacy of nerve and the success of successive
+digestions; others find him an exiled piece of heaven blown upon and
+determined by the breath of God; and both schools of theorists will
+scream like scalded children at a word of doubt.&nbsp; Yet either of
+these views, however plausible, is beside the question; either may be
+right; and I care not; I ask a more particular answer, and to a more
+immediate point.&nbsp; What is the man?&nbsp; There is Something that
+was before hunger and that remains behind after a meal.&nbsp; It may
+or may not be engaged in any given act or passion, but when it is, it
+changes, heightens, and sanctifies.&nbsp; Thus it is not engaged in
+lust, where satisfaction ends the chapter; and it is engaged in love,
+where no satisfaction can blunt the edge of the desire, and where age,
+sickness, or alienation may deface what was desirable without diminishing
+the sentiment.&nbsp; This something, which is the man, is a permanence
+which abides through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and
+now triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate distress
+of appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all.&nbsp; So, to the
+man, his own central self fades and grows clear again amid the tumult
+of the senses, like a revolving Pharos in the night.&nbsp; It is forgotten;
+it is hid, it seems, for ever; and yet in the next calm hour he shall
+behold himself once more, shining and unmoved among changes and storm.<br>
+<br>
+Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and eats, that
+generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the outer and lower sides
+of man.&nbsp; This inner consciousness, this lantern alternately obscured
+and shining, to and by which the individual exists and must order his
+conduct, is something special to himself and not common to the race.&nbsp;
+His joys delight, his sorrows wound him, according as <i>this</i> is
+interested or indifferent in the affair; according as they arise in
+an imperial war or in a broil conducted by the tributary chieftains
+of the mind.&nbsp; He may lose all, and <i>this</i> not suffer; he may
+lose what is materially a trifle, and <i>this</i> leap in his bosom
+with a cruel pang.&nbsp; I do not speak of it to hardened theorists:
+the living man knows keenly what it is I mean.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and
+more divine than the things which cause the various effects, and, as
+it were, pull thee by the strings.&nbsp; What is that now in thy mind?
+is it fear, or suspicion, or desire, or anything of that kind?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Thus far Marcus Aurelius, in one of the most notable passages in any
+book.&nbsp; Here is a question worthy to be answered.&nbsp; What is
+in thy mind?&nbsp; What is the utterance of your inmost self when, in
+a quiet hour, it can be heard intelligibly?&nbsp; It is something beyond
+the compass of your thinking, inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it
+not of a higher spirit than you had dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect
+above all base considerations?&nbsp; This soul seems hardly touched
+with our infirmities; we can find in it certainly no fear, suspicion,
+or desire; we are only conscious - and that as though we read it in
+the eyes of some one else - of a great and unqualified readiness.&nbsp;
+A readiness to what? to pass over and look beyond the objects of desire
+and fear, for something else.&nbsp; And this something else? this something
+which is apart from desire and fear, to which all the kingdoms of the
+world and the immediate death of the body are alike indifferent and
+beside the point, and which yet regards conduct - by what name are we
+to call it?&nbsp; It may be the love of God; or it may be an inherited
+(and certainly well concealed) instinct to preserve self and propagate
+the race; I am not, for the moment, averse to either theory; but it
+will save time to call it righteousness.&nbsp; By so doing I intend
+no subterfuge to beg a question; I am indeed ready, and more than willing,
+to accept the rigid consequence, and lay aside, as far as the treachery
+of the reason will permit, all former meanings attached to the word
+righteousness.&nbsp; What is right is that for which a man&rsquo;s central
+self is ever ready to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what
+is wrong is what the central self discards or rejects as incompatible
+with the fixed design of righteousness.<br>
+<br>
+To make this admission is to lay aside all hope of definition.&nbsp;
+That which is right upon this theory is intimately dictated to each
+man by himself, but can never be rigorously set forth in language, and
+never, above all, imposed upon another.&nbsp; The conscience has, then,
+a vision like that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and for the
+most part illuminates none but its possessor.&nbsp; When many people
+perceive the same or any cognate facts, they agree upon a word as symbol;
+and hence we have such words as <i>tree, star</i>, <i>love, honour</i>,
+or <i>death</i>; hence also we have this word <i>right</i>, which, like
+the others, we all understand, most of us understand differently, and
+none can express succinctly otherwise.&nbsp; Yet even on the straitest
+view, we can make some steps towards comprehension of our own superior
+thoughts.&nbsp; For it is an incredible and most bewildering fact that
+a man, through life, is on variable terms with himself; he is aware
+of tiffs and reconciliations; the intimacy is at times almost suspended,
+at times it is renewed again with joy.&nbsp; As we said before, his
+inner self or soul appears to him by successive revelations, and is
+frequently obscured.&nbsp; It is from a study of these alternations
+that we can alone hope to discover, even dimly, what seems right and
+what seems wrong to this veiled prophet of ourself.<br>
+<br>
+All that is in the man in the larger sense, what we call impression
+as well as what we call intuition, so far as my argument looks, we must
+accept.&nbsp; It is not wrong to desire food, or exercise, or beautiful
+surroundings, or the love of sex, or interest which is the food of the
+mind.&nbsp; All these are craved; all these should be craved; to none
+of these in itself does the soul demur; where there comes an undeniable
+want, we recognise a demand of nature.&nbsp; Yet we know that these
+natural demands may be superseded; for the demands which are common
+to mankind make but a shadowy consideration in comparison to the demands
+of the individual soul.&nbsp; Food is almost the first prerequisite;
+and yet a high character will go without food to the ruin and death
+of the body rather than gain it in a manner which the spirit disavows.&nbsp;
+Pascal laid aside mathematics; Origen doctored his body with a knife;
+every day some one is thus mortifying his dearest interests and desires,
+and, in Christ&rsquo;s words, entering maim into the Kingdom of Heaven.&nbsp;
+This is to supersede the lesser and less harmonious affections by renunciation;
+and though by this ascetic path we may get to heaven, we cannot get
+thither a whole and perfect man.&nbsp; But there is another way, to
+supersede them by reconciliation, in which the soul and all the faculties
+and senses pursue a common route and share in one desire.&nbsp; Thus,
+man is tormented by a very imperious physical desire; it spoils his
+rest, it is not to be denied; the doctors will tell you, not I, how
+it is a physical need, like the want of food or slumber.&nbsp; In the
+satisfaction of this desire, as it first appears, the soul sparingly
+takes part; nay, it oft unsparingly regrets and disapproves the satisfaction.&nbsp;
+But let the man learn to love a woman as far as he is capable of love;
+and for this random affection of the body there is substituted a steady
+determination, a consent of all his powers and faculties, which supersedes,
+adopts, and commands the other.&nbsp; The desire survives, strengthened,
+perhaps, but taught obedience and changed in scope and character.&nbsp;
+Life is no longer a tale of betrayals and regrets; for the man now lives
+as a whole; his consciousness now moves on uninterrupted like a river;
+through all the extremes and ups and downs of passion, he remains approvingly
+conscious of himself.<br>
+<br>
+Now to me, this seems a type of that rightness which the soul demands.&nbsp;
+It demands that we shall not live alternately with our opposing tendencies
+in continual see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some path on which
+the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other to a common
+end.&nbsp; It demands that we shall not pursue broken ends, but great
+and comprehensive purposes, in which soul and body may unite like notes
+in a harmonious chord.&nbsp; That were indeed a way of peace and pleasure,
+that were indeed a heaven upon earth.&nbsp; It does not demand, however,
+or, to speak in measure, it does not demand of me, that I should starve
+my appetites for no purpose under heaven but as a purpose in itself;
+or, in a weak despair, pluck out the eye that I have not yet learned
+to guide and enjoy with wisdom.&nbsp; The soul demands unity of purpose,
+not the dismemberment of man; it seeks to roll up all his strength and
+sweetness, all his passion and wisdom, into one, and make of him a perfect
+man exulting in perfection.&nbsp; To conclude ascetically is to give
+up, and not to solve, the problem.&nbsp; The ascetic and the creeping
+hog, although they are at different poles, have equally failed in life.&nbsp;
+The one has sacrificed his crew; the other brings back his seamen in
+a cock-boat, and has lost the ship.&nbsp; I believe there are not many
+sea-captains who would plume themselves on either result as a success.<br>
+<br>
+But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive impulses
+and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one thing more
+unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is irretrievable
+and draws on the rest.&nbsp; And this is to lose consciousness of oneself.&nbsp;
+In the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is
+clear, strong and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free, that
+we enjoy communion with our soul.&nbsp; At the worst, we are so fallen
+and passive that we may say shortly we have none.&nbsp; An arctic torpor
+seizes upon men.&nbsp; Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a
+stimulating world, they develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness
+becomes engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and
+soon loses both the will and power to look higher considerations in
+the face.&nbsp; This is ruin; this is the last failure in life; this
+is temporal damnation, damnation on the spot and without the form of
+judgment.&nbsp; &lsquo;What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole
+world and <i>lose himself</i>?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and its
+fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral and religious
+education is directed; not only that of words and doctors, but the sharp
+ferule of calamity under which we are all God&rsquo;s scholars till
+we die.&nbsp; If, as teachers, we are to say anything to the purpose,
+we must say what will remind the pupil of his soul; we must speak that
+soul&rsquo;s dialect; we must talk of life and conduct as his soul would
+have him think of them.&nbsp; If, from some conformity between us and
+the pupil, or perhaps among all men, we do in truth speak in such a
+dialect and express such views, beyond question we shall touch in him
+a spring; beyond question he will recognise the dialect as one that
+he himself has spoken in his better hours; beyond question he will cry,
+&lsquo;I had forgotten, but now I remember; I too have eyes, and I had
+forgot to use them!&nbsp; I too have a soul of my own, arrogantly upright,
+and to that I will listen and conform.&rsquo;&nbsp; In short, say to
+him anything that he has once thought, or been upon the point of thinking,
+or show him any view of life that he has once clearly seen, or been
+upon the point of clearly seeing; and you have done your part and may
+leave him to complete the education for himself.<br>
+<br>
+Now, the view taught at the present time seems to me to want greatness;
+and the dialect in which alone it can be intelligibly uttered is not
+the dialect of my soul.&nbsp; It is a sort of postponement of life;
+nothing quite is, but something different is to be; we are to keep our
+eyes upon the indirect from the cradle to the grave.&nbsp; We are to
+regulate our conduct not by desire, but by a politic eye upon the future;
+and to value acts as they will bring us money or good opinion; as they
+will bring us, in one word, <i>profit</i>.&nbsp; We must be what is
+called respectable, and offend no one by our carriage; it will not do
+to make oneself conspicuous - who knows? even in virtue? says the Christian
+parent!&nbsp; And we must be what is called prudent and make money;
+not only because it is pleasant to have money, but because that also
+is a part of respectability, and we cannot hope to be received in society
+without decent possessions.&nbsp; Received in society! as if that were
+the kingdom of heaven!&nbsp; There is dear Mr. So-and-so; - look at
+him! - so much respected - so much looked up to - quite the Christian
+merchant!&nbsp; And we must cut our conduct as strictly as possible
+after the pattern of Mr. So-and-so; and lay our whole lives to make
+money and be strictly decent.&nbsp; Besides these holy injunctions,
+which form by far the greater part of a youth&rsquo;s training in our
+Christian homes, there are at least two other doctrines.&nbsp; We are
+to live just now as well as we can, but scrape at last into heaven,
+where we shall be good.&nbsp; We are to worry through the week in a
+lay, disreputable way, but, to make matters square, live a different
+life on Sunday.<br>
+<br>
+The train of thought we have been following gives us a key to all these
+positions, without stepping aside to justify them on their own ground.&nbsp;
+It is because we have been disgusted fifty times with physical squalls,
+and fifty times torn between conflicting impulses, that we teach people
+this indirect and tactical procedure in life, and to judge by remote
+consequences instead of the immediate face of things.&nbsp; The very
+desire to act as our own souls would have us, coupled with a pathetic
+disbelief in ourselves, moves us to follow the example of others; perhaps,
+who knows? they may be on the right track; and the more our patterns
+are in number, the better seems the chance; until, if we be acting in
+concert with a whole civilised nation, there are surely a majority of
+chances that we must be acting right.&nbsp; And again, how true it is
+that we can never behave as we wish in this tormented sphere, and can
+only aspire to different and more favourable circumstances, in order
+to stand out and be ourselves wholly and rightly!&nbsp; And yet once
+more, if in the hurry and pressure of affairs and passions you tend
+to nod and become drowsy, here are twenty-four hours of Sunday set apart
+for you to hold counsel with your soul and look around you on the possibilities
+of life.<br>
+<br>
+This is not, of course, all that is to be, or even should be, said for
+these doctrines.&nbsp; Only, in the course of this chapter, the reader
+and I have agreed upon a few catchwords, and been looking at morals
+on a certain system; it was a pity to lose an opportunity of testing
+the catchwords, and seeing whether, by this system as well as by others,
+current doctrines could show any probable justification.&nbsp; If the
+doctrines had come too badly out of the trial, it would have condemned
+the system.&nbsp; Our sight of the world is very narrow; the mind but
+a pedestrian instrument; there&rsquo;s nothing new under the sun, as
+Solomon says, except the man himself; and though that changes the aspect
+of everything else, yet he must see the same things as other people,
+only from a different side.<br>
+<br>
+And now, having admitted so much, let us turn to criticism.<br>
+<br>
+If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him, unthinkingly
+to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority of his contemporaries,
+you must discredit in his eyes the one authoritative voice of his own
+soul.&nbsp; He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a man.&nbsp;
+It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard this babble and chattering
+of other men better and worse than we are, and to walk straight before
+us by what light we have.&nbsp; They may be right; but so, before heaven,
+are we.&nbsp; They may know; but we know also, and by that knowledge
+we must stand or fall.&nbsp; There is such a thing as loyalty to a man&rsquo;s
+own better self; and from those who have not that, God help me, how
+am I to look for loyalty to others?&nbsp; The most dull, the most imbecile,
+at a certain moment turn round, at a certain point will hear no further
+argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational sense
+of right.&nbsp; It is not only by steel or fire, but through contempt
+and blame, that the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul.&nbsp;
+Be glad if you are not tried by such extremities.&nbsp; But although
+all the world ranged themselves in one line to tell you &lsquo;This
+is wrong,&rsquo; be you your own faithful vassal and the ambassador
+of God - throw down the glove and answer &lsquo;This is right.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Do you think you are only declaring yourself?&nbsp; Perhaps in some
+dim way, like a child who delivers a message not fully understood, you
+are opening wider the straits of prejudice and preparing mankind for
+some truer and more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you stand
+forth for your own judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones with
+your body; perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided the
+guilt of false witness against humanity and the little ones unborn.&nbsp;
+It is good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to respect
+oneself and utter the voice of God.&nbsp; God, if there be any God,
+speaks daily in a new language by the tongues of men; the thoughts and
+habits of each fresh generation and each new-coined spirit throw another
+light upon the universe and contain another commentary on the printed
+Bibles; every scruple, every true dissent, every glimpse of something
+new, is a letter of God&rsquo;s alphabet; and though there is a grave
+responsibility for all who speak, is there none for those who unrighteously
+keep silence and conform?&nbsp; Is not that also to conceal and cloak
+God&rsquo;s counsel?&nbsp; And how should we regard the man of science
+who suppressed all facts that would not tally with the orthodoxy of
+the hour?<br>
+<br>
+Wrong?&nbsp; You are as surely wrong as the sun rose this morning round
+the revolving shoulder of the world.&nbsp; Not truth, but truthfulness,
+is the good of your endeavour.&nbsp; For when will men receive that
+first part and prerequisite of truth, that, by the order of things,
+by the greatness of the universe, by the darkness and partiality of
+man&rsquo;s experience, by the inviolate secrecy of God, kept close
+in His most open revelations, every man is, and to the end of the ages
+must be, wrong?&nbsp; Wrong to the universe; wrong to mankind; wrong
+to God.&nbsp; And yet in another sense, and that plainer and nearer,
+every man of men, who wishes truly, must be right.&nbsp; He is right
+to himself, and in the measure of his sagacity and candour.&nbsp; That
+let him do in all sincerity and zeal, not sparing a thought for contrary
+opinions; that, for what it is worth, let him proclaim.&nbsp; Be not
+afraid; although he be wrong, so also is the dead, stuffed Dagon he
+insults.&nbsp; For the voice of God, whatever it is, is not that stammering,
+inept tradition which the people holds.&nbsp; These truths survive in
+travesty, swamped in a world of spiritual darkness and confusion; and
+what a few comprehend and faithfully hold, the many, in their dead jargon,
+repeat, degrade, and misinterpret.<br>
+<br>
+So far of Respectability; what the Covenanters used to call &lsquo;rank
+conformity&rsquo;: the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid
+on men.&nbsp; And now of Profit.&nbsp; And this doctrine is perhaps
+the more redoubtable, because it harms all sorts of men; not only the
+heroic and self-reliant, but the obedient, cowlike squadrons.&nbsp;
+A man, by this doctrine, looks to consequences at the second, or third,
+or fiftieth turn.&nbsp; He chooses his end, and for that, with wily
+turns and through a great sea of tedium, steers this mortal bark.&nbsp;
+There may be political wisdom in such a view; but I am persuaded there
+can spring no great moral zeal.&nbsp; To look thus obliquely upon life
+is the very recipe for moral slumber.&nbsp; Our intention and endeavour
+should be directed, not on some vague end of money or applause, which
+shall come to us by a ricochet in a month or a year, or twenty years,
+but on the act itself; not on the approval of others, but on the rightness
+of that act.&nbsp; At every instant, at every step in life, the point
+has to be decided, our soul has to be saved, heaven has to be gained
+or lost.&nbsp; At every step our spirits must applaud, at every step
+we must set down the foot and sound the trumpet.&nbsp; &lsquo;This have
+I done,&rsquo; we must say; &lsquo;right or wrong, this have I done,
+in unfeigned honour of intention, as to myself and God.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The profit of every act should be this, that it was right for us to
+do it.&nbsp; Any other profit than that, if it involved a kingdom or
+the woman I love, ought, if I were God&rsquo;s upright soldier, to leave
+me untempted.<br>
+<br>
+It is the mark of what we call a righteous decision, that it is made
+directly and for its own sake.&nbsp; The whole man, mind and body, having
+come to an agreement, tyrannically dictates conduct.&nbsp; There are
+two dispositions eternally opposed: that in which we recognise that
+one thing is wrong and another right, and that in which, not seeing
+any clear distinction, we fall back on the consideration of consequences.&nbsp;
+The truth is, by the scope of our present teaching, nothing is thought
+very wrong and nothing very right, except a few actions which have the
+disadvantage of being disrespectable when found out; the more serious
+part of men inclining to think all things <i>rather</i> <i>wrong</i>,
+the more jovial to suppose them <i>right enough for</i> <i>practical
+purposes</i>.&nbsp; I will engage my head, they do not find that view
+in their own hearts; they have taken it up in a dark despair; they are
+but troubled sleepers talking in their sleep.&nbsp; The soul, or my
+soul at least, thinks very distinctly upon many points of right and
+wrong, and often differs flatly with what is held out as the thought
+of corporate humanity in the code of society or the code of law.&nbsp;
+Am I to suppose myself a monster?&nbsp; I have only to read books, the
+Christian Gospels for example, to think myself a monster no longer;
+and instead I think the mass of people are merely speaking in their
+sleep.<br>
+<br>
+It is a commonplace, enshrined, if I mistake not, even in school copy-books,
+that honour is to be sought and not fame.&nbsp; I ask no other admission;
+we are to seek honour, upright walking with our own conscience every
+hour of the day, and not fame, the consequence, the far-off reverberation
+of our footsteps.&nbsp; The walk, not the rumour of the walk, is what
+concerns righteousness.&nbsp; Better disrespectable honour than dishonourable
+fame.&nbsp; Better useless or seemingly hurtful honour, than dishonour
+ruling empires and filling the mouths of thousands.&nbsp; For the man
+must walk by what he sees, and leave the issue with God who made him
+and taught him by the fortune of his life.&nbsp; You would not dishonour
+yourself for money; which is at least tangible; would you do it, then,
+for a doubtful forecast in politics, or another person&rsquo;s theory
+in morals?<br>
+<br>
+So intricate is the scheme of our affairs, that no man can calculate
+the bearing of his own behaviour even on those immediately around him,
+how much less upon the world at large or on succeeding generations!&nbsp;
+To walk by external prudence and the rule of consequences would require,
+not a man, but God.&nbsp; All that we know to guide us in this changing
+labyrinth is our soul with its fixed design of righteousness, and a
+few old precepts which commend themselves to that.&nbsp; The precepts
+are vague when we endeavour to apply them; consequences are more entangled
+than a wisp of string, and their confusion is unrestingly in change;
+we must hold to what we know and walk by it.&nbsp; We must walk by faith,
+indeed, and not by knowledge.<br>
+<br>
+You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or eminently respectable:
+you love him because you love him; that is love, and any other only
+a derision and grimace.&nbsp; It should be the same with all our actions.&nbsp;
+If we were to conceive a perfect man, it should be one who was never
+torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on the absolute consent
+of all his parts and faculties, submitted in every action of his life
+to a self-dictation as absolute and unreasoned as that which bids him
+love one woman and be true to her till death.&nbsp; But we should not
+conceive him as sagacious, ascetical, playing off his appetites against
+each other, turning the wing of public respectable immorality instead
+of riding it directly down, or advancing toward his end through a thousand
+sinister compromises and considerations.&nbsp; The one man might be
+wily, might be adroit, might be wise, might be respectable, might be
+gloriously useful; it is the other man who would be good.<br>
+<br>
+The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be successful;
+to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not outwardly, respectable.&nbsp;
+Does your soul ask profit?&nbsp; Does it ask money?&nbsp; Does it ask
+the approval of the indifferent herd?&nbsp; I believe not.&nbsp; For
+my own part, I want but little money, I hope; and I do not want to be
+decent at all, but to be good.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IV<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+We have spoken of that supreme self-dictation which keeps varying from
+hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.&nbsp;
+Now, for us, that is ultimate.&nbsp; It may be founded on some reasonable
+process, but it is not a process which we can follow or comprehend.&nbsp;
+And moreover the dictation is not continuous, or not continuous except
+in very lively and well-living natures; and between-whiles we must brush
+along without it.&nbsp; Practice is a more intricate and desperate business
+than the toughest theorising; life is an affair of cavalry, where rapid
+judgment and prompt action are alone possible and right.&nbsp; As a
+matter of fact, there is no one so upright but he is influenced by the
+world&rsquo;s chatter; and no one so headlong but he requires to consider
+consequences and to keep an eye on profit.&nbsp; For the soul adopts
+all affections and appetites without exception, and cares only to combine
+them for some common purpose which shall interest all.&nbsp; Now, respect
+for the opinion of others, the study of consequences, and the desire
+of power and comfort, are all undeniably factors in the nature of man;
+and the more undeniably since we find that, in our current doctrines,
+they have swallowed up the others and are thought to conclude in themselves
+all the worthy parts of man.&nbsp; These, then, must also be suffered
+to affect conduct in the practical domain, much or little according
+as they are forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.<br>
+<br>
+Now, a man&rsquo;s view of the universe is mostly a view of the civilised
+society in which he lives.&nbsp; Other men and women are so much more
+grossly and so much more intimately palpable to his perceptions, that
+they stand between him and all the rest; they are larger to his eye
+than the sun, he hears them more plainly than thunder, with them, by
+them, and for them, he must live and die.&nbsp; And hence the laws that
+affect his intercourse with his fellow-men, although merely customary
+and the creatures of a generation, are more clearly and continually
+before his mind than those which bind him into the eternal system of
+things, support him in his upright progress on this whirling ball, or
+keep up the fire of his bodily life.&nbsp; And hence it is that money
+stands in the first rank of considerations and so powerfully affects
+the choice.&nbsp; For our society is built with money for mortar; money
+is present in every joint of circumstance; it might be named the social
+atmosphere, since, in society, it is by that alone that men continue
+to live, and only through that or chance that they can reach or affect
+one another.&nbsp; Money gives us food, shelter, and privacy; it permits
+us to be clean in person, opens for us the doors of the theatre, gains
+us books for study or pleasure, enables us to help the distresses of
+others, and puts us above necessity so that we can choose the best in
+life.&nbsp; If we love, it enables us to meet and live with the loved
+one, or even to prolong her health and life; if we have scruples, it
+gives us an opportunity to be honest; if we have any bright designs,
+here is what will smooth the way to their accomplishment.&nbsp; Penury
+is the worst slavery, and will soon lead to death.<br>
+<br>
+But money is only a means; it presupposes a man to use it.&nbsp; The
+rich can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere.&nbsp;
+He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither
+patience to read nor intelligence to see.&nbsp; The table may be loaded
+and the appetite wanting; the purse may be full, and the heart empty.&nbsp;
+He may have gained the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth
+around him, in a great house and spacious and beautiful demesne, he
+may live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher.&nbsp; Without an appetite,
+without an aspiration, void of appreciation, bankrupt of desire and
+hope, there, in his great house, let him sit and look upon his fingers.&nbsp;
+It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting
+shells than to be born a millionaire.&nbsp; Although neither is to be
+despised, it is always better policy to learn an interest than to make
+a thousand pounds; for the money will soon be spent, or perhaps you
+may feel no joy in spending it; but the interest remains imperishable
+and ever new.&nbsp; To become a botanist, a geologist, a social philosopher,
+an antiquary, or an artist, is to enlarge one&rsquo;s possessions in
+the universe by an incalculably higher degree, and by a far surer sort
+of property, than to purchase a farm of many acres.&nbsp; You had perhaps
+two thousand a year before the transaction; perhaps you have two thousand
+five hundred after it.&nbsp; That represents your gain in the one case.&nbsp;
+But in the other, you have thrown down a barrier which concealed significance
+and beauty.&nbsp; The blind man has learned to see.&nbsp; The prisoner
+has opened up a window in his cell and beholds enchanting prospects;
+he will never again be a prisoner as he was; he can watch clouds and
+changing seasons, ships on the river, travellers on the road, and the
+stars at night; happy prisoner! his eyes have broken jail!&nbsp; And
+again he who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up
+riches against the day of riches; if prosperity come, he will not enter
+poor into his inheritance; he will not slumber and forget himself in
+the lap of money, or spend his hours in counting idle treasures, but
+be up and briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic touch, which
+is not that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into living delight
+and satisfaction.&nbsp; <i>Ecirctre et pas avoir</i> - to be, not to
+possess - that is the problem of life.&nbsp; To be wealthy, a rich nature
+is the first requisite and money but the second.&nbsp; To be of a quick
+and healthy blood, to share in all honourable curiosities, to be rich
+in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of
+others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still
+a dear possession in absence or unkindness - these are the gifts of
+fortune which money cannot buy and without which money can buy nothing.&nbsp;
+For what can a man possess, or what can he enjoy, except himself?&nbsp;
+If he enlarge his nature, it is then that he enlarges his estates.&nbsp;
+If his nature be happy and valiant, he will enjoy the universe as if
+it were his park and orchard.<br>
+<br>
+But money is not only to be spent; it has also to be earned.&nbsp; It
+is not merely a convenience or a necessary in social life; but it is
+the coin in which mankind pays his wages to the individual man.&nbsp;
+And from this side, the question of money has a very different scope
+and application.&nbsp; For no man can be honest who does not work.&nbsp;
+Service for service.&nbsp; If the farmer buys corn, and the labourer
+ploughs and reaps, and the baker sweats in his hot bakery, plainly you
+who eat must do something in your turn.&nbsp; It is not enough to take
+off your hat, or to thank God upon your knees for the admirable constitution
+of society and your own convenient situation in its upper and more ornamental
+stories.&nbsp; Neither is it enough to buy the loaf with a sixpence;
+for then you are only changing the point of the inquiry; and you must
+first have <i>bought the</i> <i>sixpence</i>.&nbsp; Service for service:
+how have you bought your sixpences?&nbsp; A man of spirit desires certainty
+in a thing of such a nature; he must see to it that there is some reciprocity
+between him and mankind; that he pays his expenditure in service; that
+he has not a lion&rsquo;s share in profit and a drone&rsquo;s in labour;
+and is not a sleeping partner and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile
+concern of mankind.<br>
+<br>
+Services differ so widely with different gifts, and some are so inappreciable
+to external tests, that this is not only a matter for the private conscience,
+but one which even there must be leniently and trustfully considered.&nbsp;
+For remember how many serve mankind who do no more than meditate; and
+how many are precious to their friends for no more than a sweet and
+joyous temper.&nbsp; To perform the function of a man of letters it
+is not necessary to write; nay, it is perhaps better to be a living
+book.&nbsp; So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by
+others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is
+useless while he has a friend.&nbsp; The true services of life are inestimable
+in money, and are never paid.&nbsp; Kind words and caresses, high and
+wise thoughts, humane designs, tender behaviour to the weak and suffering,
+and all the charities of man&rsquo;s existence, are neither bought nor
+sold.<br>
+<br>
+Yet the dearest and readiest, if not the most just, criterion of a man&rsquo;s
+services, is the wage that mankind pays him or, briefly, what he earns.&nbsp;
+There at least there can be no ambiguity.&nbsp; St. Paul is fully and
+freely entitled to his earnings as a tentmaker, and Socrates fully and
+freely entitled to his earnings as a sculptor, although the true business
+of each was not only something different, but something which remained
+unpaid.&nbsp; A man cannot forget that he is not superintended, and
+serves mankind on parole.&nbsp; He would like, when challenged by his
+own conscience, to reply: &lsquo;I have done so much work, and no less,
+with my own hands and brain, and taken so much profit, and no more,
+for my own personal delight.&rsquo;&nbsp; And though St. Paul, if he
+had possessed a private fortune, would probably have scorned to waste
+his time in making tents, yet of all sacrifices to public opinion none
+can be more easily pardoned than that by which a man, already spiritually
+useful to the world, should restrict the field of his chief usefulness
+to perform services more apparent, and possess a livelihood that neither
+stupidity nor malice could call in question.&nbsp; Like all sacrifices
+to public opinion and mere external decency, this would certainly be
+wrong; for the soul should rest contented with its own approval and
+indissuadably pursue its own calling.&nbsp; Yet, so grave and delicate
+is the question, that a man may well hesitate before he decides it for
+himself; he may well fear that he sets too high a valuation on his own
+endeavours after good; he may well condescend upon a humbler duty, where
+others than himself shall judge the service and proportion the wage.<br>
+<br>
+And yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are born.&nbsp;
+They can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are their own paymasters
+on parole; and must pay themselves fair wages and no more.&nbsp; For
+I suppose that in the course of ages, and through reform and civil war
+and invasion, mankind was pursuing some other and more general design
+than to set one or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century beyond the
+reach of needs and duties.&nbsp; Society was scarce put together, and
+defended with so much eloquence and blood, for the convenience of two
+or three millionaires and a few hundred other persons of wealth and
+position.&nbsp; It is plain that if mankind thus acted and suffered
+during all these generations, they hoped some benefit, some ease, some
+wellbeing, for themselves and their descendants; that if they supported
+law and order, it was to secure fair-play for all; that if they denied
+themselves in the present, they must have had some designs upon the
+future.&nbsp; Now, a great hereditary fortune is a miracle of man&rsquo;s
+wisdom and mankind&rsquo;s forbearance; it has not only been amassed
+and handed down, it has been suffered to be amassed and handed down;
+and surely in such a consideration as this, its possessor should find
+only a new spur to activity and honour, that with all this power of
+service he should not prove unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure
+should return in benefits upon the race.&nbsp; If he had twenty, or
+thirty, or a hundred thousand at his banker&rsquo;s, or if all Yorkshire
+or all California were his to manage or to sell, he would still be morally
+penniless, and have the world to begin like Whittington, until he had
+found some way of serving mankind.&nbsp; His wage is physically in his
+own hand; but, in honour, that wage must still be earned.&nbsp; He is
+only steward on parole of what is called his fortune.&nbsp; He must
+honourably perform his stewardship.&nbsp; He must estimate his own services
+and allow himself a salary in proportion, for that will be one among
+his functions.&nbsp; And while he will then be free to spend that salary,
+great or little, on his own private pleasures, the rest of his fortune
+he but holds and disposes under trust for mankind; it is not his, because
+he has not earned it; it cannot be his, because his services have already
+been paid; but year by year it is his to distribute, whether to help
+individuals whose birthright and outfit have been swallowed up in his,
+or to further public works and institutions.<br>
+<br>
+At this rate, short of inspiration, it seems hardly possible to be both
+rich and honest; and the millionaire is under a far more continuous
+temptation to thieve than the labourer who gets his shilling daily for
+despicable toils.&nbsp; Are you surprised?&nbsp; It is even so.&nbsp;
+And you repeat it every Sunday in your churches.&nbsp; &lsquo;It is
+easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich
+man to enter the kingdom of God.&rsquo;&nbsp; I have heard this and
+similar texts ingeniously explained away and brushed from the path of
+the aspiring Christian by the tender Great-heart of the parish.&nbsp;
+One excellent clergyman told us that the &lsquo;eye of a needle&rsquo;
+meant a low, Oriental postern through which camels could not pass till
+they were unloaded - which is very likely just; and then went on, bravely
+confounding the &lsquo;kingdom of God&rsquo; with heaven, the future
+paradise, to show that of course no rich person could expect to carry
+his riches beyond the grave - which, of course, he could not and never
+did.&nbsp; Various greedy sinners of the congregation drank in the comfortable
+doctrine with relief.&nbsp; It was worth the while having come to church
+that Sunday morning!&nbsp; All was plain.&nbsp; The Bible, as usual,
+meant nothing in particular; it was merely an obscure and figurative
+school-copybook; and if a man were only respectable, he was a man after
+God&rsquo;s own heart.<br>
+<br>
+Alas! I fear not.&nbsp; And though this matter of a man&rsquo;s services
+is one for his own conscience, there are some cases in which it is difficult
+to restrain the mind from judging.&nbsp; Thus I shall be very easily
+persuaded that a man has earned his daily bread; and if he has but a
+friend or two to whom his company is delightful at heart, I am more
+than persuaded at once.&nbsp; But it will be very hard to persuade me
+that any one has earned an income of a hundred thousand.&nbsp; What
+he is to his friends, he still would be if he were made penniless to-morrow;
+for as to the courtiers of luxury and power, I will neither consider
+them friends, nor indeed consider them at all.&nbsp; What he does for
+mankind there are most likely hundreds who would do the same, as effectually
+for the race and as pleasurably to themselves, for the merest fraction
+of this monstrous wage.&nbsp; Why it is paid, I am, therefore, unable
+to conceive, and as the man pays it himself, out of funds in his detention,
+I have a certain backwardness to think him honest.<br>
+<br>
+At least, we have gained a very obvious point: that <i>what a man spends
+upon himself, he shall have earned by services to the race</i>.&nbsp;
+Thence flows a principle for the outset of life, which is a little different
+from that taught in the present day.&nbsp; I am addressing the middle
+and the upper classes; those who have already been fostered and prepared
+for life at some expense; those who have some choice before them, and
+can pick professions; and above all, those who are what is called independent,
+and need do nothing unless pushed by honour or ambition.&nbsp; In this
+particular the poor are happy; among them, when a lad comes to his strength,
+he must take the work that offers, and can take it with an easy conscience.&nbsp;
+But in the richer classes the question is complicated by the number
+of opportunities and a variety of considerations.&nbsp; Here, then,
+this principle of ours comes in helpfully.&nbsp; The young man has to
+seek, not a road to wealth, but an opportunity of service; not money,
+but honest work.&nbsp; If he has some strong propensity, some calling
+of nature, some over-weening interest in any special field of industry,
+inquiry, or art, he will do right to obey the impulse; and that for
+two reasons: the first external, because there he will render the best
+services; the second personal, because a demand of his own nature is
+to him without appeal whenever it can be satisfied with the consent
+of his other faculties and appetites.&nbsp; If he has no such elective
+taste, by the very principle on which he chooses any pursuit at all
+he must choose the most honest and serviceable, and not the most highly
+remunerated.&nbsp; We have here an external problem, not from or to
+ourself, but flowing from the constitution of society; and we have our
+own soul with its fixed design of righteousness.&nbsp; All that can
+be done is to present the problem in proper terms, and leave it to the
+soul of the individual.&nbsp; Now, the problem to the poor is one of
+necessity: to earn wherewithal to live, they must find remunerative
+labour.&nbsp; But the problem to the rich is one of honour: having the
+wherewithal, they must find serviceable labour.&nbsp; Each has to earn
+his daily bread: the one, because he has not yet got it to eat; the
+other, who has already eaten it, because he has not yet earned it.<br>
+<br>
+Of course, what is true of bread is true of luxuries and comforts, whether
+for the body or the mind.&nbsp; But the consideration of luxuries leads
+us to a new aspect of the whole question, and to a second proposition
+no less true, and maybe no less startling, than the last.<br>
+<br>
+At the present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of surfeit
+and disgrace after meat.&nbsp; Plethora has filled us with indifference;
+and we are covered from head to foot with the callosities of habitual
+opulence.&nbsp; Born into what is called a certain rank, we live, as
+the saying is, up to our station.&nbsp; We squander without enjoyment,
+because our fathers squandered.&nbsp; We eat of the best, not from delicacy,
+but from brazen habit.&nbsp; We do not keenly enjoy or eagerly desire
+the presence of a luxury; we are unaccustomed to its absence.&nbsp;
+And not only do we squander money from habit, but still more pitifully
+waste it in ostentation.&nbsp; I can think of no more melancholy disgrace
+for a creature who professes either reason or pleasure for his guide,
+than to spend the smallest fraction of his income upon that which he
+does not desire; and to keep a carriage in which you do not wish to
+drive, or a butler of whom you are afraid, is a pathetic kind of folly.&nbsp;
+Money, being a means of happiness, should make both parties happy when
+it changes hands; rightly disposed, it should be twice blessed in its
+employment; and buyer and seller should alike have their twenty shillings
+worth of profit out of every pound.&nbsp; Benjamin Franklin went through
+life an altered man, because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle.&nbsp;
+My concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having
+bought a whistle when I did not want one.&nbsp; I find I regret this,
+or would regret it if I gave myself the time, not only on personal but
+on moral and philanthropical considerations.&nbsp; For, first, in a
+world where money is wanting to buy books for eager students and food
+and medicine for pining children, and where a large majority are starved
+in their most immediate desires, it is surely base, stupid, and cruel
+to squander money when I am pushed by no appetite and enjoy no return
+of genuine satisfaction.&nbsp; My philanthropy is wide enough in scope
+to include myself; and when I have made myself happy, I have at least
+one good argument that I have acted rightly; but where that is not so,
+and I have bought and not enjoyed, my mouth is closed, and I conceive
+that I have robbed the poor.&nbsp; And, second, anything I buy or use
+which I do not sincerely want or cannot vividly enjoy, disturbs the
+balance of supply and demand, and contributes to remove industrious
+hands from the production of what is useful or pleasurable and to keep
+them busy upon ropes of sand and things that are a weariness to the
+flesh.&nbsp; That extravagance is truly sinful, and a very silly sin
+to boot, in which we impoverish mankind and ourselves.&nbsp; It is another
+question for each man&rsquo;s heart.&nbsp; He knows if he can enjoy
+what he buys and uses; if he cannot, he is a dog in the manger; nay,
+it he cannot, I contend he is a thief, for nothing really belongs to
+a man which he cannot use.&nbsp; Proprietor is connected with propriety;
+and that only is the man&rsquo;s which is proper to his wants and faculties.<br>
+<br>
+A youth, in choosing a career, must not be alarmed by poverty.&nbsp;
+Want is a sore thing, but poverty does not imply want.&nbsp; It remains
+to be seen whether with half his present income, or a third, he cannot,
+in the most generous sense, live as fully as at present.&nbsp; He is
+a fool who objects to luxuries; but he is also a fool who does not protest
+against the waste of luxuries on those who do not desire and cannot
+enjoy them.&nbsp; It remains to be seen, by each man who would live
+a true life to himself and not a merely specious life to society, how
+many luxuries he truly wants and to how many he merely submits as to
+a social propriety; and all these last he will immediately forswear.&nbsp;
+Let him do this, and he will be surprised to find how little money it
+requires to keep him in complete contentment and activity of mind and
+senses.&nbsp; Life at any level among the easy classes is conceived
+upon a principle of rivalry, where each man and each household must
+ape the tastes and emulate the display of others.&nbsp; One is delicate
+in eating, another in wine, a third in furniture or works of art or
+dress; and I, who care nothing for any of these refinements, who am
+perhaps a plain athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer, flannel
+shirts and a camp bed, am yet called upon to assimilate all these other
+tastes and make these foreign occasions of expenditure my own.&nbsp;
+It may be cynical: I am sure I shall be told it is selfish; but I will
+spend my money as I please and for my own intimate personal gratification,
+and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay out the colour of
+a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty.&nbsp; I shall not
+wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless I am born with a delight
+in them.&nbsp; Dress is my own affair, and that of one other in the
+world; that, in fact and for an obvious reason, of any woman who shall
+chance to be in love with me.&nbsp; I shall lodge where I have a mind.&nbsp;
+If I do not ask society to live with me, they must be silent; and even
+if I do, they have no further right but to refuse the invitation!&nbsp;
+There is a kind of idea abroad that a man must live up to his station,
+that his house, his table, and his toilette, shall be in a ratio of
+equivalence, and equally imposing to the world.&nbsp; If this is in
+the Bible, the passage has eluded my inquiries.&nbsp; If it is not in
+the Bible, it is nowhere but in the heart of the fool.&nbsp; Throw aside
+this fancy.&nbsp; See what you want, and spend upon that; distinguish
+what you do not care about, and spend nothing upon that.&nbsp; There
+are not many people who can differentiate wines above a certain and
+that not at all a high price.&nbsp; Are you sure you are one of these?&nbsp;
+Are you sure you prefer cigars at sixpence each to pipes at some fraction
+of a farthing?&nbsp; Are you sure you wish to keep a gig?&nbsp; Do you
+care about where you sleep, or are you not as much at your ease in a
+cheap lodging as in an Elizabethan manor-house?&nbsp; Do you enjoy fine
+clothes?&nbsp; It is not possible to answer these questions without
+a trial; and there is nothing more obvious to my mind, than that a man
+who has not experienced some ups and downs, and been forced to live
+more cheaply than in his father&rsquo;s house, has still his education
+to begin.&nbsp; Let the experiment be made, and he will find to his
+surprise that he has been eating beyond his appetite up to that hour;
+that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country clothes,
+the plain table, have not only no power to damp his spirits, but perhaps
+give him as keen pleasure in the using as the dainties that he took,
+betwixt sleep and waking, in his former callous and somnambulous submission
+to wealth.<br>
+<br>
+The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary Bohemians
+of literature, is exactly described by such a principle of life.&nbsp;
+The Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good for him and
+prefers anything to work, and wears strange clothes, is for the most
+part a respectable Bohemian, respectable in disrespectability, living
+for the outside, and an adventurer.&nbsp; But the man I mean lives wholly
+to himself, does what he wishes, and not what is thought proper, buys
+what he wants for himself, and not what is thought proper, works at
+what he believes he can do well and not what will bring him in money
+or favour.&nbsp; You may be the most respectable of men, and yet a true
+Bohemian.&nbsp; And the test is this: a Bohemian, for as poor as he
+may be, is always open-handed to his friends; he knows what he can do
+with money and how he can do without it, a far rarer and more useful
+knowledge; he has had less, and continued to live in some contentment;
+and hence he cares not to keep more, and shares his sovereign or his
+shilling with a friend.&nbsp; The poor, if they are generous, are Bohemian
+in virtue of their birth.&nbsp; Do you know where beggars go?&nbsp;
+Not to the great houses where people sit dazed among their thousands,
+but to the doors of poor men who have seen the world; and it was the
+widow who had only two mites, who cast half her fortune into the treasury.<br>
+<br>
+But a young man who elects to save on dress or on lodging, or who in
+any way falls out of the level of expenditure which is common to his
+level in society, falls out of society altogether.&nbsp; I suppose the
+young man to have chosen his career on honourable principles; he finds
+his talents and instincts can be best contented in a certain pursuit;
+in a certain industry, he is sure that he is serving mankind with a
+healthy and becoming service; and he is not sure that he would be doing
+so, or doing so equally well, in any other industry within his reach.&nbsp;
+Then that is his true sphere in life; not the one in which he was born
+to his father, but the one which is proper to his talents and instincts.&nbsp;
+And suppose he does fall out of society, is that a cause of sorrow?&nbsp;
+Is your heart so dead that you prefer the recognition of many to the
+love of a few?&nbsp; Do you think society loves you?&nbsp; Put it to
+the proof.&nbsp; Decline in material expenditure, and you will find
+they care no more for you than for the Khan of Tartary.&nbsp; You will
+lose no friends.&nbsp; If you had any, you will keep them.&nbsp; Only
+those who were friends to your coat and equipage will disappear; the
+smiling faces will disappear as by enchantment; but the kind hearts
+will remain steadfastly kind.&nbsp; Are you so lost, are you so dead,
+are you so little sure of your own soul and your own footing upon solid
+fact, that you prefer before goodness and happiness the countenance
+of sundry diners-out, who will flee from you at a report of ruin, who
+will drop you with insult at a shadow of disgrace, who do not know you
+and do not care to know you but by sight, and whom you in your turn
+neither know nor care to know in a more human manner?&nbsp; Is it not
+the principle of society, openly avowed, that friendship must not interfere
+with business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a consideration
+of money goes before any consideration of affection known to this cold-blooded
+gang, that they have not even the honour of thieves, and will rook their
+nearest and dearest as readily as a stranger?&nbsp; I hope I would go
+as far as most to serve a friend; but I declare openly I would not put
+on my hat to do a pleasure to society.&nbsp; I may starve my appetites
+and control my temper for the sake of those I love; but society shall
+take me as I choose to be, or go without me.&nbsp; Neither they nor
+I will lose; for where there is no love, it is both laborious and unprofitable
+to associate.<br>
+<br>
+But it is obvious that if it is only right for a man to spend money
+on that which he can truly and thoroughly enjoy, the doctrine applies
+with equal force to the rich and to the poor, to the man who has amassed
+many thousands as well as to the youth precariously beginning life.&nbsp;
+And it may be asked, Is not this merely preparing misers, who are not
+the best of company?&nbsp; But the principle was this: that which a
+man has not fairly earned, and, further, that which he cannot fully
+enjoy, does not belong to him, but is a part of mankind&rsquo;s treasure
+which he holds as steward on parole.&nbsp; To mankind, then, it must
+be made profitable; and how this should be done is, once more, a problem
+which each man must solve for himself, and about which none has a right
+to judge him.&nbsp; Yet there are a few considerations which are very
+obvious and may here be stated.&nbsp; Mankind is not only the whole
+in general, but every one in particular.&nbsp; Every man or woman is
+one of mankind&rsquo;s dear possessions; to his or her just brain, and
+kind heart, and active hands, mankind intrusts some of its hopes for
+the future; he or she is a possible well-spring of good acts and source
+of blessings to the race.&nbsp; This money which you do not need, which,
+in a rigid sense, you do not want, may therefore be returned not only
+in public benefactions to the race, but in private kindnesses.&nbsp;
+Your wife, your children, your friends stand nearest to you, and should
+be helped the first.&nbsp; There at least there can be little imposture,
+for you know their necessities of your own knowledge.&nbsp; And consider,
+if all the world did as you did, and according to their means extended
+help in the circle of their affections, there would be no more crying
+want in times of plenty and no more cold, mechanical charity given with
+a doubt and received with confusion.&nbsp; Would not this simple rule
+make a new world out of the old and cruel one which we inhabit?<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+[After two more sentences the fragment breaks off.]<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+FATHER DAMIEN<br>
+AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND<br>
+DR. HYDE OF HONOLULU<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+SYDNEY,<br>
+<i>February 25</i>, 1890.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Sir, - It may probably occur to you that we have met, and visited, and
+conversed; on my side, with interest.&nbsp; You may remember that you
+have done me several courtesies, for which I was prepared to be grateful.&nbsp;
+But there are duties which come before gratitude, and offences which
+justly divide friends, far more acquaintances.&nbsp; Your letter to
+the Reverend H. B. Gage is a document which, in my sight, if you had
+filled me with bread when I was starving, if you had sat up to nurse
+my father when he lay a-dying, would yet absolve me from the bonds of
+gratitude.&nbsp; You know enough, doubtless, of the process of canonisation
+to be aware that, a hundred years after the death of Damien, there will
+appear a man charged with the painful office of the <i>devil&rsquo;s
+advocate</i>.&nbsp; After that noble brother of mine, and of all frail
+clay, shall have lain a century at rest, one shall accuse, one defend
+him.&nbsp; The circumstance is unusual that the devil&rsquo;s advocate
+should be a volunteer, should be a member of a sect immediately rival,
+and should make haste to take upon himself his ugly office ere the bones
+are cold; unusual, and of a taste which I shall leave my readers free
+to qualify; unusual, and to me inspiring.&nbsp; If I have at all learned
+the trade of using words to convey truth and to arouse emotion, you
+have at last furnished me with a subject.&nbsp; For it is in the interest
+of all mankind, and the cause of public decency in every quarter of
+the world, not only that Damien should be righted, but that you and
+your letter should be displayed at length, in their true colours, to
+the public eye.<br>
+<br>
+To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at large: I shall then
+proceed to criticise your utterance from several points of view, divine
+and human, in the course of which I shall attempt to draw again, and
+with more specification, the character of the dead saint whom it has
+pleased you to vilify: so much being done, I shall say farewell to you
+for ever.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;HONOLULU,<br>
+<i>&lsquo;August</i> 2, 1889.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Rev. H. B. GAGE.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Dear Brother, - In answer to your inquiries about Father Damien,
+I can only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the extravagant
+newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly philanthropist.&nbsp;
+The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, head-strong and bigoted.&nbsp;
+He was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders; did not stay
+at the leper settlement (before he became one himself), but circulated
+freely over the whole island (less than half the island is devoted to
+the lepers), and he came often to Honolulu.&nbsp; He had no hand in
+the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were the work of our
+Board of Health, as occasion required and means were provided.&nbsp;
+He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the leprosy of
+which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.&nbsp;
+Others have done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the government
+physicians, and so forth, but never with the Catholic idea of meriting
+eternal life. - Yours, etc.,<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;C. M. HYDE.&rsquo; <a name="citation1"></a><a href="#footnote1">{1}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must draw at the outset
+on my private knowledge of the signatory and his sect.&nbsp; It may
+offend others; scarcely you, who have been so busy to collect, so bold
+to publish, gossip on your rivals.&nbsp; And this is perhaps the moment
+when I may best explain to you the character of what you are to read:
+I conceive you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility:
+with what measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you again;
+with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to
+plunge home.&nbsp; And if in aught that I shall say I should offend
+others, your colleagues, whom I respect and remember with affection,
+I can but offer them my regret; I am not free, I am inspired by the
+consideration of interests far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted
+by anything from me must be indeed trifling when compared with the pain
+with which they read your letter.&nbsp; It is not the hangman, but the
+criminal, that brings dishonour on the house.<br>
+<br>
+You belong, sir, to a sect - I believe my sect, and that in which my
+ancestors laboured - which has enjoyed, and partly failed to utilise,
+an exceptional advantage in the islands of Hawaii.&nbsp; The first missionaries
+came; they found the land already self-purged of its old and bloody
+faith; they were embraced, almost on their arrival, with enthusiasm;
+what troubles they supported came far more from whites than from Hawaiians;
+and to these last they stood (in a rough figure) in the shoes of God.&nbsp;
+This is not the place to enter into the degree or causes of their failure,
+such as it is.&nbsp; One element alone is pertinent, and must here be
+plainly dealt with.&nbsp; In the course of their evangelical calling,
+they - or too many of them - grew rich.&nbsp; It may be news to you
+that the houses of missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets
+of Honolulu.&nbsp; It will at least be news to you, that when I returned
+your civil visit, the driver of my cab commented on the size, the taste,
+and the comfort of your home.&nbsp; It would have been news certainly
+to myself, had any one told me that afternoon that I should live to
+drag such matter into print.&nbsp; But you see, sir, how you degrade
+better men to your own level; and it is needful that those who are to
+judge betwixt you and me, betwixt Damien and the devil&rsquo;s advocate,
+should understand your letter to have been penned in a house which could
+raise, and that very justly, the envy and the comments of the passers-by.&nbsp;
+I think (to employ a phrase of yours which I admire) it &lsquo;should
+be attributed&rsquo; to you that you have never visited the scene of
+Damien&rsquo;s life and death.&nbsp; If you had, and had recalled it,
+and looked about your pleasant rooms, even your pen perhaps would have
+been stayed.<br>
+<br>
+Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine) has
+not done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom.&nbsp; When
+calamity befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended
+and took root in the Eight Islands, a <i>quid pro quo</i> was to be
+looked for.&nbsp; To that prosperous mission, and to you, as one of
+its adornments, God had sent at last an opportunity.&nbsp; I know I
+am touching here upon a nerve acutely sensitive.&nbsp; I know that others
+of your colleagues look back on the inertia of your Church, and the
+intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to be
+called remorse.&nbsp; I am sure it is so with yourself; I am persuaded
+your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not essentially ignoble,
+and the one human trait to be espied in that performance.&nbsp; You
+were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of that which should
+have been conceived and was not; of the service due and not rendered.&nbsp;
+Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant room, as you
+sat raging and writing; and if the words written were base beyond parallel,
+the rage, I am happy to repeat - it is the only compliment I shall pay
+you - the rage was almost virtuous.&nbsp; But, sir, when we have failed,
+and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has stepped
+in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a plain,
+uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and succours
+the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted in his
+turn, and dies upon the field of honour - the battle cannot be retrieved
+as your unhappy irritation has suggested.&nbsp; It is a lost battle,
+and lost for ever.&nbsp; One thing remained to you in your defeat -
+some rags of common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.<br>
+<br>
+Common honour; not the honour of having done anything right, but the
+honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul; the honour of the
+inert: that was what remained to you.&nbsp; We are not all expected
+to be Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love
+his comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him for that.&nbsp;
+But will a gentleman of your reverend profession allow me an example
+from the fields of gallantry?&nbsp; When two gentlemen compete for the
+favour of a lady, and the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and
+(as will sometimes happen) matter damaging to the successful rival&rsquo;s
+credit reaches the ear of the defeated, it is held by plain men of no
+pretensions that his mouth is, in the circumstance, almost necessarily
+closed.&nbsp; Your Church and Damien&rsquo;s were in Hawaii upon a rivalry
+to do well: to help, to edify, to set divine examples.&nbsp; You having
+(in one huge instance) failed, and Damien succeeded, I marvel it should
+not have occurred to you that you were doomed to silence; that when
+you had been outstripped in that high rivalry, and sat inglorious in
+the midst of your wellbeing, in your pleasant room - and Damien, crowned
+with glories and horrors, toiled and rotted in that pigsty of his under
+the cliffs of Kalawao - you, the elect who would not, were the last
+man on earth to collect and propagate gossip on the volunteer who would
+and did.<br>
+<br>
+I think I see you - for I try to see you in the flesh as I write these
+sentences - I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a hyperbolical
+expression at the best.&nbsp; &lsquo;He had no hand in the reforms,&rsquo;
+he was &lsquo;a coarse, dirty man&rsquo;; these were your own words;
+and you may think it possible that I am come to support you with fresh
+evidence.&nbsp; In a sense, it is even so.&nbsp; Damien has been too
+much depicted with a conventional halo and conventional features; so
+drawn by men who perhaps had not the eye to remark or the pen to express
+the individual; or who perhaps were only blinded and silenced by generous
+admiration, such as I partly envy for myself - such as you, if your
+soul were enlightened, would envy on your bended knees.&nbsp; It is
+the least defect of such a method of portraiture that it makes the path
+easy for the devil&rsquo;s advocate, and leaves for the misuse of the
+slanderer a considerable field of truth.&nbsp; For the truth that is
+suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.&nbsp; The
+world, in your despite, may perhaps owe you something, if your letter
+be the means of substituting once for all a credible likeness for a
+wax abstraction.&nbsp; For, if that world at all remember you, on the
+day when Damien of Molokai shall be named Saint, it will be in virtue
+of one work: your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.<br>
+<br>
+You may ask on what authority I speak.&nbsp; It was my inclement destiny
+to become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde.&nbsp; When
+I visited the lazaretto, Damien was already in his resting grave.&nbsp;
+But such information as I have, I gathered on the spot in conversation
+with those who knew him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory;
+but others who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with
+no halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through whose
+unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain, human features
+of the man shone on me convincingly.&nbsp; These gave me what knowledge
+I possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely
+and sensitively understood - Kalawao, which you have never visited,
+about which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform yourself;
+for, brief as your letter is, you have found the means to stumble into
+that confession.&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>Less than one-half</i> of the island,&rsquo;
+you say, &lsquo;is devoted to the lepers.&rsquo;&nbsp; Molokai - &lsquo;<i>Molokai
+ahina</i>,&rsquo; the &lsquo;grey,&rsquo; lofty, and most desolate island
+- along all its northern side plunges a front of precipice into a sea
+of unusual profundity.&nbsp; This range of cliff is, from east to west,
+the true end and frontier of the island.&nbsp; Only in one spot there
+projects into the ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy,
+stony, windy, and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater:
+the whole bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation
+as a bracket to a wall.&nbsp; With this hint you will now be able to
+pick out the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how much
+of Molokai is thus cut off between the surf and precipice, whether less
+than a half, or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a tenth - or, say,
+a twentieth; and the next time you burst into print you will be in a
+position to share with us the issue of your calculations.<br>
+<br>
+I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness
+of that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to behold.&nbsp;
+You, who do not even know its situation on the map, probably denounce
+sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in your pleasant
+parlour on Beretania Street.&nbsp; When I was pulled ashore there one
+early morning, there sat with me in the boat two sisters, bidding farewell
+(in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys of human life.&nbsp;
+One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself from joining
+her.&nbsp; Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would have
+triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer, and
+you beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our common
+manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a population
+as only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare - what
+a haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards
+the house on Beretania Street!&nbsp; Had you gone on; had you found
+every fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital
+and seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable,
+but still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have
+understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves
+of a man&rsquo;s spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness
+of the sun; you would have felt it was (even to-day) a pitiful place
+to visit and a hell to dwell in.&nbsp; It is not the fear of possible
+infection.&nbsp; That seems a little thing when compared with the pain,
+the pity, and the disgust of the visitor&rsquo;s surroundings, and the
+atmosphere of affliction, disease, and physical disgrace in which he
+breathes.&nbsp; I do not think I am a man more than usually timid; but
+I never recall the days and nights I spent upon that island promontory
+(eight days and seven nights), without heartfelt thankfulness that I
+am somewhere else.&nbsp; I find in my diary that I speak of my stay
+as a &lsquo;grinding experience&rsquo;: I have once jotted in the margin,
+&lsquo;<i>Harrowing</i> is the word&rsquo;; and when the <i>Mokolii</i>
+bore me at last towards the outer world, I kept repeating to myself,
+with a new conception of their pregnancy, those simple words of the
+song -<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;&rsquo;Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement purged,
+bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the Bishop-Home
+excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the missionaries,
+all indefatigable in their noble tasks.&nbsp; It was a different place
+when Damien came there and made his great renunciation, and slept that
+first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with pestilence;
+and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful sinkings of
+dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and stumps.<br>
+<br>
+You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful abound
+in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and nurses.&nbsp;
+I have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the nurses.&nbsp;
+But there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and
+Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of
+length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression;
+for what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human suffering
+by which he stands surrounded.&nbsp; Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called
+upon to enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they do not say
+farewell, they need not abandon hope, on its sad threshold; they but
+go for a time to their high calling, and can look forward as they go
+to relief, to recreation, and to rest.&nbsp; But Damien shut-to with
+his own hand the doors of his own sepulchre.<br>
+<br>
+I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.<br>
+<br>
+<i>A</i>.&nbsp; &lsquo;Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully
+remembered in the field of his labours and sufferings.&nbsp; &ldquo;He
+was a good man, but very officious,&rdquo; says one.&nbsp; Another tells
+me he had fallen (as other priests so easily do) into something of the
+ways and habits of thought of a Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise
+the fact, and the good sense to laugh at&rsquo; [over] &lsquo;it.&nbsp;
+A plain man it seems he was; I cannot find he was a popular.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>B</i>.&nbsp; &lsquo;After Ragsdale&rsquo;s death&rsquo; [Ragsdale
+was a famous Luna, or overseer, of the unruly settlement] &lsquo;there
+followed a brief term of office by Father Damien which served only to
+publish the weakness of that noble man.&nbsp; He was rough in his ways,
+and he had no control.&nbsp; Authority was relaxed; Damien&rsquo;s life
+was threatened, and he was soon eager to resign.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>C</i>.&nbsp; &lsquo;Of Damien I begin to have an idea.&nbsp; He seems
+to have been a man of the peasant class, certainly of the peasant type:
+shrewd, ignorant and bigoted, yet with an open mind, and capable of
+receiving and digesting a reproof if it were bluntly administered; superbly
+generous in the least thing as well as in the greatest, and as ready
+to give his last shirt (although not without human grumbling) as he
+had been to sacrifice his life; essentially indiscreet and officious,
+which made him a troublesome colleague; domineering in all his ways,
+which made him incurably unpopular with the Kanakas, but yet destitute
+of real authority, so that his boys laughed at him and he must carry
+out his wishes by the means of bribes.&nbsp; He learned to have a mania
+for doctoring; and set up the Kanakas against the remedies of his regular
+rivals: perhaps (if anything matter at all in the treatment of such
+a disease) the worst thing that he did, and certainly the easiest.&nbsp;
+The best and worst of the man appear very plainly in his dealings with
+Mr. Chapman&rsquo;s money; he had originally laid it out&rsquo; [intended
+to lay it out] &lsquo;entirely for the benefit of Catholics, and even
+so not wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his error fully
+and revised the list.&nbsp; The sad state of the boys&rsquo; home is
+in part the result of his lack of control; in part, of his own slovenly
+ways and false ideas of hygiene.&nbsp; Brother officials used to call
+it &ldquo;Damien&rsquo;s Chinatown.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Well,&rdquo;
+they would say, &ldquo;your China-town keeps growing.&rdquo;&nbsp; And
+he would laugh with perfect good-nature, and adhere to his errors with
+perfect obstinacy.&nbsp; So much I have gathered of truth about this
+plain, noble human brother and father of ours; his imperfections are
+the traits of his face, by which we know him for our fellow; his martyrdom
+and his example nothing can lessen or annul; and only a person here
+on the spot can properly appreciate their greatness.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+I have set down these private passages, as you perceive, without correction;
+thanks to you, the public has them in their bluntness.&nbsp; They are
+almost a list of the man&rsquo;s faults, for it is rather these that
+I was seeking: with his virtues, with the heroic profile of his life,
+I and the world were already sufficiently acquainted.&nbsp; I was besides
+a little suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no ill sense, but merely
+because Damien&rsquo;s admirers and disciples were the least likely
+to be critical.&nbsp; I know you will be more suspicious still; and
+the facts set down above were one and all collected from the lips of
+Protestants who had opposed the father in his life.&nbsp; Yet I am strangely
+deceived, or they build up the image of a man, with all his weaknesses,
+essentially heroic, and alive with rugged honesty, generosity, and mirth.<br>
+<br>
+Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst sides of
+Damien&rsquo;s character, collected from the lips of those who had laboured
+with and (in your own phrase) &lsquo;knew the man&rsquo;; - though I
+question whether Damien would have said that he knew you.&nbsp; Take
+it, and observe with wonder how well you were served by your gossips,
+how ill by your intelligence and sympathy; in how many points of fact
+we are at one, and how widely our appreciations vary.&nbsp; There is
+something wrong here; either with you or me.&nbsp; It is possible, for
+instance, that you, who seem to have so many ears in Kalawao, had heard
+of the affair of Mr. Chapman&rsquo;s money, and were singly struck by
+Damien&rsquo;s intended wrong-doing.&nbsp; I was struck with that also,
+and set it fairly down; but I was struck much more by the fact that
+he had the honesty of mind to be convinced.&nbsp; I may here tell you
+that it was a long business; that one of his colleagues sat with him
+late into the night, multiplying arguments and accusations; that the
+father listened as usual with &lsquo;perfect good-nature and perfect
+obstinacy&rsquo;; but at the last, when he was persuaded - &lsquo;Yes,&rsquo;
+said he, &lsquo;I am very much obliged to you; you have done me a service;
+it would have been a theft.&rsquo;&nbsp; There are many (not Catholics
+merely) who require their heroes and saints to be infallible; to these
+the story will be painful; not to the true lovers, patrons, and servants
+of mankind.<br>
+<br>
+And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of those
+who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to
+find and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to
+forget the overvailing virtues and the real success which had alone
+introduced them to your knowledge.&nbsp; It is a dangerous frame of
+mind.&nbsp; That you may understand how dangerous, and into what a situation
+it has already brought you, we will (if you please) go hand-in-hand
+through the different phrases of your letter, and candidly examine each
+from the point of view of its truth, its appositeness, and its charity.<br>
+<br>
+Damien was <i>coarse.<br>
+<br>
+</i>It is very possible.&nbsp; You make us sorry for the lepers, who
+had only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father.&nbsp; But
+you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with
+the lights of culture?&nbsp; Or may I remind you that we have some reason
+to doubt if John the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of Peter,
+on whose career you doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no doubt
+at all he was a &lsquo;coarse, headstrong&rsquo; fisherman!&nbsp; Yet
+even in our Protestant Bibles Peter is called Saint.<br>
+<br>
+Damien was <i>dirty.<br>
+<br>
+</i>He was.&nbsp; Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade!&nbsp;
+But the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.<br>
+<br>
+Damien was <i>headstrong.<br>
+<br>
+</i>I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head
+and heart.<br>
+<br>
+Damien was <i>bigoted.<br>
+<br>
+</i>I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of me.&nbsp;
+But what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it as a blemish
+in a priest?&nbsp; Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity
+of a peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do.&nbsp;
+For this, I wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only character,
+should have avoided him in life.&nbsp; But the point of interest in
+Damien, which has caused him to be so much talked about and made him
+at last the subject of your pen and mine, was that, in him, his bigotry,
+his intense and narrow faith, wrought potently for good, and strengthened
+him to be one of the world&rsquo;s heroes and exemplars.<br>
+<br>
+Damien <i>was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders.<br>
+<br>
+</i>Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words for blame?&nbsp;
+I have heard Christ, in the pulpits of our Church, held up for imitation
+on the ground that His sacrifice was voluntary.&nbsp; Does Dr. Hyde
+think otherwise?<br>
+<br>
+Damien <i>did not stay at the settlement, etc.<br>
+<br>
+</i>It is true he was allowed many indulgences.&nbsp; Am I to understand
+that you blame the father for profiting by these, or the officers for
+granting them?&nbsp; In either case, it is a mighty Spartan standard
+to issue from the house on Beretania Street; and I am convinced you
+will find yourself with few supporters.<br>
+<br>
+Damien <i>had no hand</i> <i>in the reforms, etc.<br>
+<br>
+</i>I think even you will admit that I have already been frank in my
+description of the man I am defending; but before I take you up upon
+this head, I will be franker still, and tell you that perhaps nowhere
+in the world can a man taste a more pleasurable sense of contrast than
+when he passes from Damien&rsquo;s &lsquo;Chinatown&rsquo; at Kalawao
+to the beautiful Bishop-Home at Kalaupapa.&nbsp; At this point, in my
+desire to make all fair for you, I will break my rule and adduce Catholic
+testimony.&nbsp; Here is a passage from my diary about my visit to the
+Chinatown, from which you will see how it is (even now) regarded by
+its own officials: &lsquo;We went round all the dormitories, refectories,
+etc. - dark and dingy enough, with a superficial cleanliness, which
+he&rsquo; [Mr. Dutton, the lay-brother] &lsquo;did not seek to defend.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;It is almost decent,&rdquo; said he; &ldquo;the sisters will
+make that all right when we get them here.&rdquo;&rsquo;&nbsp; And yet
+I gathered it was already better since Damien was dead, and far better
+than when he was there alone and had his own (not always excellent)
+way.&nbsp; I have now come far enough to meet you on a common ground
+of fact; and I tell you that, to a mind not prejudiced by jealousy,
+all the reforms of the lazaretto, and even those which he most vigorously
+opposed, are properly the work of Damien.&nbsp; They are the evidence
+of his success; they are what his heroism provoked from the reluctant
+and the careless.&nbsp; Many were before him in the field; Mr. Meyer,
+for instance, of whose faithful work we hear too little: there have
+been many since; and some had more worldly wisdom, though none had more
+devotion, than our saint.&nbsp; Before his day, even you will confess,
+they had effected little.&nbsp; It was his part, by one striking act
+of martyrdom, to direct all men&rsquo;s eyes on that distressful country.&nbsp;
+At a blow, and with the price of his life, he made the place illustrious
+and public.&nbsp; And that, if you will consider largely, was the one
+reform needful; pregnant of all that should succeed.&nbsp; It brought
+money; it brought (best individual addition of them all) the sisters;
+it brought supervision, for public opinion and public interest landed
+with the man at Kalawao.&nbsp; If ever any man brought reforms, and
+died to bring them, it was he.&nbsp; There is not a clean cup or towel
+in the Bishop-Home, but dirty Damien washed it.<br>
+<br>
+Damien <i>was not a pure man in his relations with</i> <i>women, etc.<br>
+<br>
+</i>How do you know that?&nbsp; Is this the nature of the conversation
+in that house on Beretania Street which the cabman envied, driving past?
+- racy details of the misconduct of the poor peasant priest, toiling
+under the cliffs of Molokai?<br>
+<br>
+Many have visited the station before me; they seem not to have heard
+the rumour.&nbsp; When I was there I heard many shocking tales, for
+my informants were men speaking with the plainness of the laity; and
+I heard plenty of complaints of Damien.&nbsp; Why was this never mentioned?
+and how came it to you in the retirement of your clerical parlour?<br>
+<br>
+But I must not even seem to deceive you.&nbsp; This scandal, when I
+read it in your letter, was not new to me.&nbsp; I had heard it once
+before; and I must tell you how.&nbsp; There came to Samoa a man from
+Honolulu; he, in a public-house on the beach, volunteered the statement
+that Damien had &lsquo;contracted the disease from having connection
+with the female lepers&rsquo;; and I find a joy in telling you how the
+report was welcomed in a public-house.&nbsp; A man sprang to his feet;
+I am not at liberty to give his name, but from what I heard I doubt
+if you would care to have him to dinner in Beretania Street.&nbsp; &lsquo;You
+miserable little - &rsquo; (here is a word I dare not print, it would
+so shock your ears).&nbsp; &lsquo;You miserable little - ,&rsquo; he
+cried, &lsquo;if the story were a thousand times true, can&rsquo;t you
+see you are a million times a lower - for daring to repeat it?&rsquo;&nbsp;
+I wish it could be told of you that when the report reached you in your
+house, perhaps after family worship, you had found in your soul enough
+holy anger to receive it with the same expressions; ay, even with that
+one which I dare not print; it would not need to have been blotted away,
+like Uncle Toby&rsquo;s oath, by the tears of the recording angel; it
+would have been counted to you for your brightest righteousness.&nbsp;
+But you have deliberately chosen the part of the man from Honolulu,
+and you have played it with improvements of your own.&nbsp; The man
+from Honolulu - miserable, leering creature - communicated the tale
+to a rude knot of beach-combing drinkers in a public-house, where (I
+will so far agree with your temperance opinions) man is not always at
+his noblest; and the man from Honolulu had himself been drinking - drinking,
+we may charitably fancy, to excess.&nbsp; It was to your &lsquo;Dear
+Brother, the Reverend H. B. Gage,&rsquo; that you chose to communicate
+the sickening story; and the blue ribbon which adorns your portly bosom
+forbids me to allow you the extenuating plea that you were drunk when
+it was done.&nbsp; Your &lsquo;dear brother&rsquo; - a brother indeed
+- made haste to deliver up your letter (as a means of grace, perhaps)
+to the religious papers; where, after many months, I found and read
+and wondered at it; and whence I have now reproduced it for the wonder
+of others.&nbsp; And you and your dear brother have, by this cycle of
+operations, built up a contrast very edifying to examine in detail.&nbsp;
+The man whom you would not care to have to dinner, on the one side;
+on the other, the Reverend Dr. Hyde and the Reverend H. B. Gage: the
+Apia bar-room, the Honolulu manse.<br>
+<br>
+But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men;
+and to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true.&nbsp;
+I will suppose - and God forgive me for supposing it - that Damien faltered
+and stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the
+horror of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease,
+he, who was doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter
+of his priestly oath - he, who was so much a better man than either
+you or me, who did what we have never dreamed of daring - he too tasted
+of our common frailty.&nbsp; &lsquo;O, Iago, the pity of it!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The least tender should be moved to tears; the most incredulous to prayer.&nbsp;
+And all that you could do was to pen your letter to the Reverend H.
+B. Gage!<br>
+<br>
+Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your
+own heart?&nbsp; I will try yet once again to make it clearer.&nbsp;
+You had a father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant
+brought it to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate
+of your emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance?
+that you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed
+the author of your days? and that the last thing you would do would
+be to publish it in the religious press?&nbsp; Well, the man who tried
+to do what Damien did, is my father, and the father of the man in the
+Apia bar, and the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father
+too, if God had given you grace to see it.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE PENTLAND RISING<br>
+A PAGE OF HISTORY<br>
+1666<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;A cloud of witnesses lyes here,<br>
+Who for Christ&rsquo;s interest did appear.&rsquo;<br>
+<i>Inscription on Battlefield at Rullion Green</i>.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I - THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see,<br>
+This tomb doth show for what some men did die.&rsquo;<br>
+<i>Monument, Greyfriars&rsquo; Churchyard, Edinburgh,<br>
+</i>1661-1668. <a name="citation2a"></a><a href="#footnote2a">{2a}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Two hundred years ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the memory
+whereof has been in great measure lost or obscured by the deep tragedies
+which followed it.&nbsp; It is, as it were, the evening of the night
+of persecution - a sort of twilight, dark indeed to us, but light as
+the noonday when compared with the midnight gloom which followed.&nbsp;
+This fact, of its being the very threshold of persecution, lends it,
+however, an additional interest.<br>
+<br>
+The prejudices of the people against Episcopacy were &lsquo;out of measure
+increased,&rsquo; says Bishop Burnet, &lsquo;by the new incumbents who
+were put in the places of the ejected preachers, and were generally
+very mean and despicable in all respects.&nbsp; They were the worst
+preachers I ever heard; they were ignorant to a reproach; and many of
+them were openly vicious.&nbsp; They . . . were indeed the dreg and
+refuse of the northern parts.&nbsp; Those of them who arose above contempt
+or scandal were men of such violent tempers that they were as much hated
+as the others were despised.&rsquo; <a name="citation2b"></a><a href="#footnote2b">{2b}</a>&nbsp;
+It was little to be wondered at, from this account that the country-folk
+refused to go to the parish church, and chose rather to listen to outed
+ministers in the fields.&nbsp; But this was not to be allowed, and their
+persecutors at last fell on the method of calling a roll of the parishioners&rsquo;
+names every Sabbath, and marking a fine of twenty shillings Scots to
+the name of each absenter.&nbsp; In this way very large debts were incurred
+by persons altogether unable to pay.&nbsp; Besides this, landlords were
+fined for their tenants&rsquo; absences, tenants for their landlords&rsquo;,
+masters for their servants&rsquo;, servants for their masters&rsquo;,
+even though they themselves were perfectly regular in their attendance.&nbsp;
+And as the curates were allowed to fine with the sanction of any common
+soldier, it may be imagined that often the pretexts were neither very
+sufficient nor well proven.<br>
+<br>
+When the fines could not be paid at once, Bibles, clothes, and household
+utensils were seized upon, or a number of soldiers, proportionate to
+his wealth, were quartered on the offender.&nbsp; The coarse and drunken
+privates filled the houses with woe; snatched the bread from the children
+to feed their dogs; shocked the principles, scorned the scruples, and
+blasphemed the religion of their humble hosts; and when they had reduced
+them to destitution, sold the furniture, and burned down the roof-tree
+which was consecrated to the peasants by the name of Home.&nbsp; For
+all this attention each of these soldiers received from his unwilling
+landlord a certain sum of money per day - three shillings sterling,
+according to <i>Naphtali</i>.&nbsp; And frequently they were forced
+to pay quartering money for more men than were in reality &lsquo;cessed
+on them.&rsquo;&nbsp; At that time it was no strange thing to behold
+a strong man begging for money to pay his fines, and many others who
+were deep in arrears, or who had attracted attention in some other way,
+were forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge from arrest and
+imprisonment among the wild mosses of the uplands. <a name="citation2c"></a><a href="#footnote2c">{2c}</a><br>
+<br>
+One example in particular we may cite:<br>
+<br>
+John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was, unfortunately
+for himself, a Nonconformist.&nbsp; First he was fined in four hundred
+pounds Scots, and then through cessing he lost nineteen hundred and
+ninety-three pounds Scots.&nbsp; He was next obliged to leave his house
+and flee from place to place, during which wanderings he lost his horse.&nbsp;
+His wife and children were turned out of doors, and then his tenants
+were fined till they too were almost ruined.&nbsp; As a final stroke,
+they drove away all his cattle to Glasgow and sold them. <a name="citation2d"></a><a href="#footnote2d">{2d}</a>&nbsp;
+Surely it was time that something were done to alleviate so much sorrow,
+to overthrow such tyranny.<br>
+<br>
+About this time too there arrived in Galloway a person calling himself
+Captain Andrew Gray, and advising the people to revolt.&nbsp; He displayed
+some documents purporting to be from the northern Covenanters, and stating
+that they were prepared to join in any enterprise commenced by their
+southern brethren.&nbsp; The leader of the persecutors was Sir James
+Turner, an officer afterwards degraded for his share in the matter.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;He was naturally fierce, but was mad when he was drunk, and that
+was very often,&rsquo; said Bishop Burnet.&nbsp; &lsquo;He was a learned
+man, but had always been in armies, and knew no other rule but to obey
+orders.&nbsp; He told me he had no regard to any law, but acted, as
+he was commanded, in a military way.&rsquo; <a name="citation2e"></a><a href="#footnote2e">{2e}</a><br>
+<br>
+This was the state of matters, when an outrage was committed which gave
+spirit and determination to the oppressed countrymen, lit the flame
+of insubordination, and for the time at least recoiled on those who
+perpetrated it with redoubled force.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II - THE BEGINNING<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I love no warres,<br>
+I love no jarres,<br>
+Nor strife&rsquo;s fire.<br>
+May discord cease,<br>
+Let&rsquo;s live in peace:<br>
+This I desire.<br>
+<br>
+If it must be<br>
+Warre we must see<br>
+(So fates conspire),<br>
+May we not feel<br>
+The force of steel:<br>
+This I desire.<br>
+<br>
+T. JACKSON, 1651 <a name="citation3a"></a><a href="#footnote3a">{3a}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Upon Tuesday, November 13th, 1666, Corporal George Deanes and three
+other soldiers set upon an old man in the clachan of Dalry and demanded
+the payment of his fines.&nbsp; On the old man&rsquo;s refusing to pay,
+they forced a large party of his neighbours to go with them and thresh
+his corn.&nbsp; The field was a certain distance out of the clachan,
+and four persons, disguised as countrymen, who had been out on the moors
+all night, met this mournful drove of slaves, compelled by the four
+soldiers to work for the ruin of their friend.&nbsp; However, chided
+to the bone by their night on the hills, and worn out by want of food,
+they proceeded to the village inn to refresh themselves.&nbsp; Suddenly
+some people rushed into the room where they were sitting, and told them
+that the soldiers were about to roast the old man, naked, on his own
+girdle.&nbsp; This was too much for them to stand, and they repaired
+immediately to the scene of this gross outrage, and at first merely
+requested that the captive should be released.&nbsp; On the refusal
+of the two soldiers who were in the front room, high words were given
+and taken on both sides, and the other two rushed forth from an adjoining
+chamber and made at the countrymen with drawn swords.&nbsp; One of the
+latter, John M&rsquo;Lellan of Barscob, drew a pistol and shot the corporal
+in the body.&nbsp; The pieces of tobacco-pipe with which it was loaded,
+to the number of ten at least, entered him, and he was so much disturbed
+that he never appears to have recovered, for we find long afterwards
+a petition to the Privy Council requesting a pension for him.&nbsp;
+The other soldiers then laid down their arms, the old man was rescued,
+and the rebellion was commenced. <a name="citation3b"></a><a href="#footnote3b">{3b}</a><br>
+<br>
+And now we must turn to Sir James Turner&rsquo;s memoirs of himself;
+for, strange to say, this extraordinary man was remarkably fond of literary
+composition, and wrote, besides the amusing account of his own adventures
+just mentioned, a large number of essays and short biographies, and
+a work on war, entitled <i>Pallas Armata</i>.&nbsp; The following are
+some of the shorter pieces &lsquo;Magick,&rsquo; &lsquo;Friendship,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Imprisonment,&rsquo; &lsquo;Anger,&rsquo; &lsquo;Revenge,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Duells,&rsquo; &lsquo;Cruelty,&rsquo; &lsquo;A Defence of some
+of the Ceremonies of the English Liturgie - to wit - Bowing at the Name
+of Jesus, The frequent repetition of the Lord&rsquo;s Prayer and Good
+Lord deliver us, Of the Doxologie, Of Surplesses, Rotchets, Canonnicall
+Coats,&rsquo; etc.&nbsp; From what we know of his character we should
+expect &lsquo;Anger&rsquo; and &lsquo;Cruelty&rsquo; to be very full
+and instructive.&nbsp; But what earthly right he had to meddle with
+ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to see.<br>
+<br>
+Upon the 12th of the month he had received some information concerning
+Gray&rsquo;s proceedings, but as it was excessively indefinite in its
+character, he paid no attention to it.&nbsp; On the evening of the 14th,
+Corporal Deanes was brought into Dumfries, who affirmed stoutly that
+he had been shot while refusing to sign the Covenant - a story rendered
+singularly unlikely by the after conduct of the rebels.&nbsp; Sir James
+instantly dispatched orders to the cessed soldiers either to come to
+Dumfries or meet him on the way to Dalry, and commanded the thirteen
+or fourteen men in the town with him to come at nine next morning to
+his lodging for supplies.<br>
+<br>
+On the morning of Thursday the rebels arrived at Dumfries with 50 horse
+and 150 foot.&nbsp; Neilson of Corsack, and Gray, who commanded, with
+a considerable troop, entered the town, and surrounded Sir James Turner&rsquo;s
+lodging.&nbsp; Though it was between eight and nine o&rsquo;clock, that
+worthy, being unwell, was still in bed, but rose at once and went to
+the window.<br>
+<br>
+Neilson and some others cried, &lsquo;You may have fair quarter.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I need no quarter,&rsquo; replied Sir James; &lsquo;nor can I
+be a prisoner, seeing there is no war declared.&rsquo;&nbsp; On being
+told, however, that he must either be a prisoner or die, he came down,
+and went into the street in his night-shirt.&nbsp; Here Gray showed
+himself very desirous of killing him, but he was overruled by Corsack.&nbsp;
+However, he was taken away a prisoner, Captain Gray mounting him on
+his own horse, though, as Turner naively remarks, &lsquo;there was good
+reason for it, for he mounted himself on a farre better one of mine.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+A large coffer containing his clothes and money, together with all his
+papers, were taken away by the rebels.&nbsp; They robbed Master Chalmers,
+the Episcopalian minister of Dumfries, of his horse, drank the King&rsquo;s
+health at the market cross, and then left Dumfries. <a name="citation3c"></a><a href="#footnote3c">{3c}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III - THE MARCH OF THE REBELS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads,<br>
+At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads;<br>
+Our right hands stood at Lanark, these we want,<br>
+Because with them we signed the Covenant.&rsquo;<br>
+<i>Epitaph on a Tombstone at Hamilton</i>. <a name="citation4a"></a><a href="#footnote4a">{4a}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On Friday the 16th, Bailie Irvine of Dumfries came to the Council at
+Edinburgh, and gave information concerning this &lsquo;horrid rebellion.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+In the absence of Rothes, Sharpe presided - much to the wrath of some
+members; and as he imagined his own safety endangered, his measures
+were most energetic.&nbsp; Dalzell was ordered away to the West, the
+guards round the city were doubled, officers and soldiers were forced
+to take the oath of allegiance, and all lodgers were commanded to give
+in their names.&nbsp; Sharpe, surrounded with all these guards and precautions,
+trembled - trembled as he trembled when the avengers of blood drew him
+from his chariot on Magus Muir, - for he knew how he had sold his trust,
+how he had betrayed his charge, and he felt that against him must their
+chiefest hatred be directed, against him their direst thunder-bolts
+be forged.&nbsp; But even in his fear the apostate Presbyterian was
+unrelenting, unpityingly harsh; he published in his manifesto no promise
+of pardon, no inducement to submission.&nbsp; He said, &lsquo;If you
+submit not you must die,&rsquo; but never added, &lsquo;If you submit
+you may live!&rsquo; <a name="citation4b"></a><a href="#footnote4b">{4b}</a><br>
+<br>
+Meantime the insurgents proceeded on their way.&nbsp; At Carsphairn
+they were deserted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless in a fit of oblivion,
+neglected to leave behind him the coffer containing Sir James&rsquo;s
+money.&nbsp; Who he was is a mystery, unsolved by any historian; his
+papers were evidently forgeries - that, and his final flight, appear
+to indicate that he was an agent of the Royalists, for either the King
+or the Duke of York was heard to say, &lsquo;That, if he might have
+his wish, he would have them all turn rebels and go to arms.&rsquo;
+<a name="citation4c"></a><a href="#footnote4c">{4c}</a><br>
+<br>
+Upon the 18th day of the month they left Carsphairn and marched onwards.<br>
+<br>
+Turner was always lodged by his captors at a good inn, frequently at
+the best of which their halting-place could boast.&nbsp; Here many visits
+were paid to him by the ministers and officers of the insurgent force.&nbsp;
+In his description of these interviews he displays a vein of satiric
+severity, admitting any kindness that was done to him with some qualifying
+souvenir of former harshness, and gloating over any injury, mistake,
+or folly, which it was his chance to suffer or to hear.&nbsp; He appears,
+notwithstanding all this, to have been on pretty good terms with his
+cruel &lsquo;phanaticks,&rsquo; as the following extract sufficiently
+proves:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard,
+and order given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be preached
+by Mr. Welch.&nbsp; Maxwell of Morith, and Major M&rsquo;Cullough invited
+me to heare &ldquo;that phanatick sermon&rdquo; (for soe they merrilie
+called it).&nbsp; They said that preaching might prove an effectual
+meane to turne me, which they heartilie wished.&nbsp; I answered to
+them that I was under guards, and that if they intended to heare that
+sermon, it was probable I might likewise, for it was not like my guards
+wold goe to church and leave me alone at my lodgeings.&nbsp; Bot to
+what they said of my conversion, I said it wold be hard to turne a Turner.&nbsp;
+Bot because I founde them in a merrie humour, I said, if I did not come
+to heare Mr. Welch preach, then they might fine me in fortie shillings
+Scots, which was double the suome of what I had exacted from the phanatics.&rsquo;
+<a name="citation4d"></a><a href="#footnote4d">{4d}</a><br>
+<br>
+This took place at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month.&nbsp; The
+following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and certainly,
+if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed with wheat, and
+how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged in this movement;
+nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present with impartiality all
+the alleged facts to the reader:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Towards the evening Mr. Robinsone and Mr. Crukshank gaue me a
+visite; I called for some ale purposelie to heare one of them blesse
+it.&nbsp; It fell Mr. Robinsone to seeke the blessing, who said one
+of the most bombastick graces that ever I heard in my life.&nbsp; He
+summoned God Allmightie very imperiouslie to be their secondarie (for
+that was his language).&nbsp; &ldquo;And if,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;thou
+wilt not be our Secondarie, we will not fight for thee at all, for it
+is not our cause bot thy cause; and if thou wilt not fight for our cause
+and thy oune cause, then we are not obliged to fight for it.&nbsp; They
+say,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;that Dukes, Earles, and Lords are coming
+with the King&rsquo;s General against us, bot they shall be nothing
+bot a threshing to us.&rdquo;&nbsp; This grace did more fullie satisfie
+me of the folly and injustice of their cause, then the ale did quench
+my thirst.&rsquo; <a name="citation4e"></a><a href="#footnote4e">{4e}</a><br>
+<br>
+Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside alehouse, or in
+some convenient park, where Colonel Wallace, who had now taken the command,
+would review the horse and foot, during which time Turner was sent either
+into the alehouse or round the shoulder of the hill, to prevent him
+from seeing the disorders which were likely to arise.&nbsp; He was,
+at last, on the 25th day of the month, between Douglas and Lanark, permitted
+to behold their evolutions.&nbsp; &lsquo;I found their horse did consist
+of four hundreth and fortie, and the foot of five hundreth and upwards.
+. . . The horsemen were armed for most part with suord and pistoll,
+some onlie with suord.&nbsp; The foot with musket, pike, sith (scythe),
+forke, and suord; and some with suords great and long.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He admired much the proficiency of their cavalry, and marvelled how
+they had attained to it in so short a time. <a name="citation4f"></a><a href="#footnote4f">{4f}</a><br>
+<br>
+At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this great wapinshaw,
+they were charged - awful picture of depravity! - with the theft of
+a silver spoon and a nightgown.&nbsp; Could it be expected that while
+the whole country swarmed with robbers of every description, such a
+rare opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues - that among a
+thousand men, even though fighting for religion, there should not be
+one Achan in the camp?&nbsp; At Lanark a declaration was drawn up and
+signed by the chief rebels.&nbsp; In it occurs the following:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The just sense whereof &rsquo; - the sufferings of the country
+- &lsquo;made us choose, rather to betake ourselves to the fields for
+self-defence, than to stay at home, burdened daily with the calamities
+of others, and tortured with the fears of our own approaching misery.&rsquo;
+<a name="citation4g"></a><a href="#footnote4g">{4g}</a><br>
+<br>
+The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony the epitaph
+at the head of this chapter seems to refer.<br>
+<br>
+A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to Bathgate,
+where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied army stopped.&nbsp;
+But at twelve o&rsquo;clock the cry, which served them for a trumpet,
+of &lsquo;Horse! horse!&rsquo; and &lsquo;Mount the prisoner!&rsquo;
+resounded through the night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from
+their well-earned rest to toil onwards in their march.&nbsp; The wind
+howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended.&nbsp;
+Chilled to the bone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees
+in mire, onward they marched to destruction.&nbsp; One by one the weary
+peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked
+moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak.&nbsp;
+One by one at first, then in gradually increasing numbers, at every
+shelter that was seen, whole troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed
+to hide themselves from the ferocity of the tempest.&nbsp; To right
+and left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the moor,
+and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky
+night, plodding onwards through the sinking moss.&nbsp; Those who kept
+together - a miserable few - often halted to rest themselves, and to
+allow their lagging comrades to overtake them.&nbsp; Then onward they
+went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies;
+onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the darkness - onward
+to their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at Edinburgh.&nbsp;
+It was calculated that they lost one half of their army on that disastrous
+night-march.<br>
+<br>
+Next night they reached the village of Colinton, four miles from Edinburgh,
+where they halted for the last time. <a name="citation4h"></a><a href="#footnote4h">{4h}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IV - RULLION GREEN<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;From Covenanters with uplifted hands,<br>
+From Remonstrators with associate bands,<br>
+Good Lord, deliver us!&rsquo;<br>
+<i>Royalist Rhyme</i>, KIRKTON, p. 127.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Late on the fourth night of November, exactly twenty-four days before
+Rullion Green, Richard and George Chaplain, merchants in Haddington,
+beheld four men, clad like West-country Whigamores, standing round some
+object on the ground.&nbsp; It was at the two-mile cross, and within
+that distance from their homes.&nbsp; At last, to their horror, they
+discovered that the recumbent figure was a livid corpse, swathed in
+a blood-stained winding-sheet. <a name="citation5a"></a><a href="#footnote5a">{5a}</a>&nbsp;
+Many thought that this apparition was a portent of the deaths connected
+with the Pentland Rising.<br>
+<br>
+On the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of November 1666, they left Colinton
+and marched to Rullion Green.&nbsp; There they arrived about sunset.&nbsp;
+The position was a strong one.&nbsp; On the summit of a bare, heathery
+spur of the Pentlands are two hillocks, and between them lies a narrow
+band of flat marshy ground.&nbsp; On the highest of the two mounds -
+that nearest the Pentlands, and on the left hand of the main body -
+was the greater part of the cavalry, under Major Learmont; on the other
+Barscob and the Galloway gentlemen; and in the centre Colonel Wallace
+and the weak, half-armed infantry.&nbsp; Their position was further
+strengthened by the depth of the valley below, and the deep chasm-like
+course of the Rullion Burn.<br>
+<br>
+The sun, going down behind the Pentlands, cast golden lights and blue
+shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich
+plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled
+trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance.&nbsp; To the
+south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken;
+the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its
+gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue indistinctness
+in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills.&nbsp; In sooth,
+that scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was cast over that peaceful
+evening scene from the spot where the rebels awaited their defeat; and
+when the fight was over, many a noble fellow lifted his head from the
+blood-stained heather to strive with darkening eyeballs to behold that
+landscape, over which, as over his life and his cause, the shadows of
+night and of gloom were falling and thickening.<br>
+<br>
+It was while waiting on this spot that the fear-inspiring cry was raised:
+&lsquo;The enemy!&nbsp; Here come the enemy!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Unwilling to believe their own doom - for our insurgents still hoped
+for success in some negotiations for peace which had been carried on
+at Colinton - they called out, &lsquo;They are some of our own.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;They are too blacke &lsquo; (<i>i.e</i>. numerous), &lsquo;fie!
+fie! for ground to draw up on,&rsquo; cried Wallace, fully realising
+the want of space for his men, and proving that it was not till after
+this time that his forces were finally arranged. <a name="citation5b"></a><a href="#footnote5b">{5b}</a><br>
+<br>
+First of all the battle was commenced by fifty Royalist horse sent obliquely
+across the hill to attack the left wing of the rebels.&nbsp; An equal
+number of Learmont&rsquo;s men met them, and, after a struggle, drove
+them back.&nbsp; The course of the Rullion Burn prevented almost all
+pursuit, and Wallace, on perceiving it, dispatched a body of foot to
+occupy both the burn and some ruined sheep-walls on the farther side.<br>
+<br>
+Dalzell changed his position, and drew up his army at the foot of the
+hill, on the top of which were his foes.&nbsp; He then dispatched a
+mingled body of infantry and cavalry to attack Wallace&rsquo;s outpost,
+but they also were driven back.&nbsp; A third charge produced a still
+more disastrous effect, for Dalzell had to check the pursuit of his
+men by a reinforcement.<br>
+<br>
+These repeated checks bred a panic in the Lieutenant-General&rsquo;s
+ranks, for several of his men flung down their arms.&nbsp; Urged by
+such fatal symptoms, and by the approaching night, he deployed his men,
+and closed in overwhelming numbers on the centre and right flank of
+the insurgent army.&nbsp; In the increasing twilight the burning matches
+of the firelocks, shimmering on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent to
+the approaching army a picturesque effect, like a huge, many-armed giant
+breathing flame into the darkness.<br>
+<br>
+Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch and Semple cried aloud, &lsquo;The
+God of Jacob! The God of Jacob!&rsquo; and prayed with uplifted hands
+for victory. <a name="citation5c"></a><a href="#footnote5c">{5c}</a><br>
+<br>
+But still the Royalist troops closed in.<br>
+<br>
+Captain John Paton was observed by Dalzell, who determined to capture
+him with his own hands.&nbsp; Accordingly he charged forward, presenting
+his pistols.&nbsp; Paton fired, but the balls hopped off Dalzell&rsquo;s
+buff coat and fell into his boot.&nbsp; With the superstition peculiar
+to his age, the Nonconformist concluded that his adversary was rendered
+bullet-proof by enchantment, and, pulling some small silver coins from
+his pocket, charged his pistol therewith.&nbsp; Dalzell, seeing this,
+and supposing, it is likely, that Paton was putting in larger balls,
+hid behind his servant, who was killed. <a name="citation5d"></a><a href="#footnote5d">{5d}</a><br>
+<br>
+Meantime the outposts were forced, and the army of Wallace was enveloped
+in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor - tightening, closing, crushing
+every semblance of life from the victim enclosed in his toils.&nbsp;
+The flanking parties of horse were forced in upon the centre, and though,
+as even Turner grants, they fought with desperation, a general flight
+was the result.<br>
+<br>
+But when they fell there was none to sing their coronach or wail the
+death-wail over them.&nbsp; Those who sacrificed themselves for the
+peace, the liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen, lay
+bleaching in the field of death for long, and when at last they were
+buried by charity, the peasants dug up their bodies, desecrated their
+graves, and cast them once more upon the open heath for the sorry value
+of their winding-sheets!<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<i>Inscription on stone at Rullion Green:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+</i>HERE<br>
+AND NEAR TO<br>
+THIS PLACE LYES THE<br>
+REVEREND MR JOHN CROOKSHANK<br>
+AND MR ANDREW MCCORMICK<br>
+MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL AND<br>
+ABOUT FIFTY OTHER TRUE COVENANTED<br>
+PRESBYTERIANS WHO WERE<br>
+KILLED IN THIS PLACE IN THEIR OWN<br>
+INOCENT SELF DEFENCE AND DEFFENCE<br>
+OF THE COVENANTED WORK OF<br>
+REFORMATION BY THOMAS DALZEEL OF BINS<br>
+UPON THE 28 OF NOVEMBER<br>
+1666.&nbsp; REV. 12. 11. ERECTED<br>
+SEPT. 28 1738.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<i>Back of stone:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+</i>A Cloud of Witnesses lyes here,<br>
+Who for Christ&rsquo;s Interest did appear,<br>
+For to restore true Liberty,<br>
+O&rsquo;erturn&egrave;d then by tyranny.<br>
+And by proud Prelats who did Rage<br>
+Against the Lord&rsquo;s Own heritage.<br>
+They sacrificed were for the laws<br>
+Of Christ their king, his noble cause.<br>
+These heroes fought with great renown;<br>
+By falling got the Martyr&rsquo;s crown. <a name="citation5e"></a><a href="#footnote5e">{5e}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER V - A RECORD OF BLOOD<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;They cut his hands ere he was dead,<br>
+And after that struck of his head.<br>
+His blood under the altar cries<br>
+For vengeance on Christ&rsquo;s enemies.&rsquo;<br>
+<i>Epitaph on Tomb at Longcross of Clermont</i>. <a name="citation6a"></a><a href="#footnote6a">{6a}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow,
+on the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and the
+march of many feet beneath his window.&nbsp; He gazed out.&nbsp; With
+colours flying, and with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious, entered
+Edinburgh.&nbsp; But his banners were dyed in blood, and a band of prisoners
+were marched within his ranks.&nbsp; The old man knew it all.&nbsp;
+That martial and triumphant strain was the death-knell of his friends
+and of their cause, the rust-hued spots upon the flags were the tokens
+of their courage and their death, and the prisoners were the miserable
+remnant spared from death in battle to die upon the scaffold.&nbsp;
+Poor old man! he had outlived all joy.&nbsp; Had he lived longer he
+would have seen increasing torment and increasing woe; he would have
+seen the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast a more than midnight
+darkness over his native hills, and have fallen a victim to those bloody
+persecutions which, later, sent their red memorials to the sea by many
+a burn.&nbsp; By a merciful Providence all this was spared to him -
+he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four days had passed since Rullion
+Green, the aged minister of God was gathered to is fathers. <a name="citation6b"></a><a href="#footnote6b">{6b}</a><br>
+<br>
+When Sharpe first heard of the rebellion, he applied to Sir Alexander
+Ramsay, the Provost, for soldiers to guard his house.&nbsp; Disliking
+their occupation, the soldiers gave him an ugly time of it.&nbsp; All
+the night through they kept up a continuous series of &lsquo;alarms
+and incursions,&rsquo; &lsquo;cries of &ldquo;Stand!&rdquo; &ldquo;Give
+fire!&rdquo;&rsquo; etc., which forced the prelate to flee to the Castle
+in the morning, hoping there to find the rest which was denied him at
+home. <a name="citation6c"></a><a href="#footnote6c">{6c}</a>&nbsp;
+Now, however, when all danger to himself was past, Sharpe came out in
+his true colours, and scant was the justice likely to be shown to the
+foes of Scottish Episcopacy when the Primate was by.&nbsp; The prisoners
+were lodged in Haddo&rsquo;s Hole, a part of St. Giles&rsquo; Cathedral,
+where, by the kindness of Bishop Wishart, to his credit be it spoken,
+they were amply supplied with food. <a name="citation6d"></a><a href="#footnote6d">{6d}</a><br>
+<br>
+Some people urged, in the Council, that the promise of quarter which
+had been given on the field of battle should protect the lives of the
+miserable men.&nbsp; Sir John Gilmoure, the greatest lawyer, gave no
+opinion - certainly a suggestive circumstance - but Lord Lee declared
+that this would not interfere with their legal trial, &lsquo;so to bloody
+executions they went.&rsquo; <a name="citation6e"></a><a href="#footnote6e">{6e}</a>&nbsp;
+To the number of thirty they were condemned and executed; while two
+of them, Hugh M&rsquo;Kail, a young minister, and Neilson of Corsack,
+were tortured with the boots.<br>
+<br>
+The goods of those who perished were confiscated, and their bodies were
+dismembered and distributed to different parts of the country; &lsquo;the
+heads of Major M&rsquo;Culloch and the two Gordons,&rsquo; it was resolved,
+says Kirkton, &lsquo;should be pitched on the gate of Kirkcudbright;
+the two Hamiltons and Strong&rsquo;s head should be affixed at Hamilton,
+and Captain Arnot&rsquo;s sett on the Watter Gate at Edinburgh.&nbsp;
+The armes of all the ten, because they hade with uplifted hands renewed
+the Covenant at Lanark, were sent to the people of that town to expiate
+that crime, by placing these arms on the top of the prison.&rsquo; <a name="citation6f"></a><a href="#footnote6f">{6f}</a>&nbsp;
+Among these was John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, who saved Turner&rsquo;s
+life at Dumfries; in return for which service Sir James attempted, though
+without success, to get the poor man reprieved.&nbsp; One of the condemned
+died of his wounds between the day of condemnation and the day of execution.&nbsp;
+&lsquo; None of them,&rsquo; says Kirkton, &lsquo;would save their life
+by taking the declaration and renouncing the Covenant, though it was
+offered to them. . . . But never men died in Scotland so much lamented
+by the people, not only spectators, but those in the country.&nbsp;
+When Knockbreck and his brother were turned over, they clasped each
+other in their armes, and so endured the pangs of death.&nbsp; When
+Humphrey Colquhoun died, he spoke not like an ordinary citizen, but
+like a heavenly minister, relating his comfortable Christian experiences,
+and called for his Bible, and laid it on his wounded arm, and read John
+iii. 8, and spoke upon it to the admiration of all.&nbsp; But most of
+all, when Mr. M&rsquo;Kail died, there was such a lamentation as was
+never known in Scotland before; not one dry cheek upon all the street,
+or in all the numberless windows in the mercate place.&rsquo; <a name="citation6g"></a><a href="#footnote6g">{6g}</a><br>
+<br>
+The following passage from this speech speaks for itself and its author:<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Hereafter I will not talk with flesh and blood, nor think on
+the world&rsquo;s consolations.&nbsp; Farewell to all my friends, whose
+company hath been refreshful to me in my pilgrimage.&nbsp; I have done
+with the light of the sun and the moon; welcome eternal light, eternal
+life, everlasting love, everlasting praise, everlasting glory.&nbsp;
+Praise to Him that sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb for ever!&nbsp;
+Bless the Lord, O my soul, that hath pardoned all my iniquities in the
+blood of His Son, and healed all my diseases.&nbsp; Bless Him, O all
+ye His angels that excel in strength, ye ministers of His that do His
+pleasure.&nbsp; Bless the Lord, O my soul!&rsquo; <a name="citation6h"></a><a href="#footnote6h">{6h}</a><br>
+<br>
+After having ascended the gallows ladder he again broke forth in the
+following words of touching eloquence: &lsquo;And now I leave off to
+speak any more to creatures, and begin my intercourse with God, which
+shall never be broken off.&nbsp; Farewell father and mother, friends
+and relations!&nbsp; Farewell the world and all delights!&nbsp; Farewell
+meat and drink!&nbsp; Farewell sun, moon, and stars! - Welcome God and
+Father!&nbsp; Welcome sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the new covenant!&nbsp;
+Welcome blessed Spirit of grace and God of all consolation!&nbsp; Welcome
+glory!&nbsp; Welcome eternal life!&nbsp; Welcome Death!&rsquo; <a name="citation6i"></a><a href="#footnote6i">{6i}</a><br>
+<br>
+At Glasgow, too, where some were executed, they caused the soldiers
+to beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their closing ears.&nbsp;
+Hideous refinement of revenge!&nbsp; Even the last words which drop
+from the lips of a dying man - words surely the most sincere and the
+most unbiassed which mortal mouth can utter - even these were looked
+upon as poisoned and as poisonous.&nbsp; &lsquo;Drown their last accents,&rsquo;
+was the cry, &lsquo;lest they should lead the crowd to take their part,
+or at the least to mourn their doom!&rsquo; <a name="citation6j"></a><a href="#footnote6j">{6j}</a>&nbsp;
+But, after all, perhaps it was more merciful than one would think -
+unintentionally so, of course; perhaps the storm of harsh and fiercely
+jubilant noises, the clanging of trumpets, the rattling of drums, and
+the hootings and jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the last they
+heard on earth, might, when the mortal fight was over, when the river
+of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the angels,
+tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached.<br>
+<br>
+Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the peasantry,
+though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian, pursued, captured,
+plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives who fell in their way.&nbsp;
+One strange story have we of these times of blood and persecution: Kirkton
+the historian and popular tradition tell us alike of a flame which often
+would arise from the grave, in a moss near Carnwath, of some of those
+poor rebels: of how it crept along the ground; of how it covered the
+house of their murderer; and of how it scared him with its lurid glare.<br>
+<br>
+Hear Daniel Defoe: <a name="citation6k"></a><a href="#footnote6k">{6k}</a><br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;If the poor people were by these insupportable violences made
+desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild despair, who
+can justly reflect on them when they read in the Word of God &ldquo;That
+oppression makes a wise man mad&rdquo;?&nbsp; And therefore were there
+no other original of the insurrection known by the name of the Rising
+of Pentland, it was nothing but what the intolerable oppressions of
+those times might have justified to all the world, nature having dictated
+to all people a right of defence when illegally and arbitrarily attacked
+in a manner not justifiable either by laws of nature, the laws of God,
+or the laws of the country.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Bear this remonstrance of Defoe&rsquo;s in mind, and though it is the
+fashion of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and to contemn,
+the noble band of Covenanters - though the bitter laugh at their old-world
+religious views, the curl of the lip at their merits, and the chilling
+silence on their bravery and their determination, are but too rife through
+all society - be charitable to what was evil and honest to what was
+good about the Pentland insurgents, who fought for life and liberty,
+for country and religion, on the 28th of November 1666, now just two
+hundred years ago.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+EDINBURGH, <i>28th November 1866</i>.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+History is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are told, no doubt
+correctly; and rival historians expose each other&rsquo;s blunders with
+gratification.&nbsp; Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the
+period he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which
+we live.&nbsp; The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand
+reasons of inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and
+multiplicity of experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious
+shifting of landmarks.&nbsp; Parties and ideas continually move, but
+not by measurable marches on a stable course; the political soil itself
+steals forth by imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying
+on its bosom not only political parties but their flag-posts and cantonments;
+so that what appears to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a
+flying island of Laputa.&nbsp; It is for this reason in particular that
+we are all becoming Socialists without knowing it; by which I would
+not in the least refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing
+supporters, sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of our
+individualist Jericho - but to the stealthy change that has come over
+the spirit of Englishmen and English legislation.&nbsp; A little while
+ago, and we were still for liberty; &lsquo;crowd a few more thousands
+on the bench of Government,&rsquo; we seemed to cry; &lsquo;keep her
+head direct on liberty, and we cannot help but come to port.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+This is over; <i>laisser faire</i> declines in favour; our legislation
+grows authoritative, grows philanthropical, bristles with new duties
+and new penalties, and casts a spawn of inspectors, who now begin, note-book
+in hand, to darken the face of England.&nbsp; It may be right or wrong,
+we are not trying that; but one thing it is beyond doubt: it is Socialism
+in action, and the strange thing is that we scarcely know it.<br>
+<br>
+Liberty has served us a long while, and it may be time to seek new altars.&nbsp;
+Like all other principles, she has been proved to be self-exclusive
+in the long run.&nbsp; She has taken wages besides (like all other virtues)
+and dutifully served Mammon; so that many things we were accustomed
+to admire as the benefits of freedom and common to all were truly benefits
+of wealth, and took their value from our neighbours&rsquo; poverty.&nbsp;
+A few shocks of logic, a few disclosures (in the journalistic phrase)
+of what the freedom of manufacturers, landlords, or shipowners may imply
+for operatives, tenants, or seamen, and we not unnaturally begin to
+turn to that other pole of hope, beneficent tyranny.&nbsp; Freedom,
+to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the
+free; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of
+yore, only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed,
+ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently treated, and driven to
+their mines and workshops by the lash of famine.&nbsp; So much, in other
+men&rsquo;s affairs, we have begun to see clearly; we have begun to
+despair of virtue in these other men, and from our seat in Parliament
+begin to discharge upon them, thick as arrows, the host of our inspectors.&nbsp;
+The landlord has long shaken his head over the manufacturer; those who
+do business on land have lost all trust in the virtues of the shipowner;
+the professions look askance upon the retail traders and have even started
+their co-operative stores to ruin them; and from out the smoke-wreaths
+of Birmingham a finger has begun to write upon the wall the condemnation
+of the landlord.&nbsp; Thus, piece by piece, do we condemn each other,
+and yet not perceive the conclusion, that our whole estate is somewhat
+damnable.&nbsp; Thus, piece by piece, each acting against his neighbour,
+each sawing away the branch on which some other interest is seated,
+do we apply in detail our Socialistic remedies, and yet not perceive
+that we are all labouring together to bring in Socialism at large.&nbsp;
+A tendency so stupid and so selfish is like to prove invincible; and
+if Socialism be at all a practicable rule of life, there is every chance
+that our grand-children will see the day and taste the pleasures of
+existence in something far liker an ant-heap than any previous human
+polity.&nbsp; And this not in the least because of the voice of Mr.
+Hyndman or the horns of his followers; but by the mere glacier movement
+of the political soil, bearing forward on its bosom, apparently undisturbed,
+the proud camps of Whig and Tory.&nbsp; If Mr. Hyndman were a man of
+keen humour, which is far from my conception of his character, he might
+rest from his troubling and look on: the walls of Jericho begin already
+to crumble and dissolve.&nbsp; That great servile war, the Armageddon
+of money and numbers, to which we looked forward when young, becomes
+more and more unlikely; and we may rather look to see a peaceable and
+blindfold evolution, the work of dull men immersed in political tactics
+and dead to political results.<br>
+<br>
+The principal scene of this comedy lies, of course, in the House of
+Commons; it is there, besides, that the details of this new evolution
+(if it proceed) will fall to be decided; so that the state of Parliament
+is not only diagnostic of the present but fatefully prophetic of the
+future.&nbsp; Well, we all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed
+of it.&nbsp; We may pardon it some faults, indeed, on the ground of
+Irish obstruction - a bitter trial, which it supports with notable good
+humour.&nbsp; But the excuse is merely local; it cannot apply to similar
+bodies in America and France; and what are we to say of these?&nbsp;
+President Cleveland&rsquo;s letter may serve as a picture of the one;
+a glance at almost any paper will convince us of the weakness of the
+other.&nbsp; Decay appears to have seized on the organ of popular government
+in every land; and this just at the moment when we begin to bring to
+it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our private affairs
+to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take upon itself
+our frailties and play for us the part that should be played by our
+own virtues.&nbsp; For that, in few words, is the case.&nbsp; We cannot
+trust ourselves to behave with decency; we cannot trust our consciences;
+and the remedy proposed is to elect a round number of our neighbours,
+pretty much at random, and say to these: &lsquo;Be ye our conscience;
+make laws so wise, and continue from year to year to administer them
+so wisely, that they shall save us from ourselves and make us righteous
+and happy, world without end.&nbsp; Amen.&rsquo;&nbsp; And who can look
+twice at the British Parliament and then seriously bring it such a task?&nbsp;
+I am not advancing this as an argument against Socialism: once again,
+nothing is further from my mind.&nbsp; There are great truths in Socialism,
+or no one, not even Mr. Hyndman, would be found to hold it; and if it
+came, and did one-tenth part of what it offers, I for one should make
+it welcome.&nbsp; But if it is to come, we may as well have some notion
+of what it will be like; and the first thing to grasp is that our new
+polity will be designed and administered (to put it courteously) with
+something short of inspiration.&nbsp; It will be made, or will grow,
+in a human parliament; and the one thing that will not very hugely change
+is human nature.&nbsp; The Anarchists think otherwise, from which it
+is only plain that they have not carried to the study of history the
+lamp of human sympathy.<br>
+<br>
+Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon-load of laws, what
+headmarks must we look for in the life?&nbsp; We chafe a good deal at
+that excellent thing, the income-tax, because it brings into our affairs
+the prying fingers, and exposes us to the tart words, of the official.&nbsp;
+The official, in all degrees, is already something of a terror to many
+of us.&nbsp; I would not willingly have to do with even a police-constable
+in any other spirit than that of kindness.&nbsp; I still remember in
+my dreams the eye-glass of a certain <i>attach&eacute;</i> at a certain
+embassy - an eyeglass that was a standing indignity to all on whom it
+looked; and my next most disagreeable remembrance is of a bracing, Republican
+postman in the city of San Francisco.&nbsp; I lived in that city among
+working folk, and what my neighbours accepted at the postman&rsquo;s
+hands - nay, what I took from him myself - it is still distasteful to
+recall.&nbsp; The bourgeois, residing in the upper parts of society,
+has but few opportunities of tasting this peculiar bowl; but about the
+income-tax, as I have said, or perhaps about a patent, or in the halls
+of an embassy at the hands of my friend of the eye-glass, he occasionally
+sets his lips to it; and he may thus imagine (if he has that faculty
+of imagination, without which most faculties are void) how it tastes
+to his poorer neighbours, who must drain it to the dregs.&nbsp; In every
+contact with authority, with their employer, with the police, with the
+School Board officer, in the hospital, or in the workhouse, they have
+equally the occasion to appreciate the light-hearted civility of the
+man in office; and as an experimentalist in several out-of-the-way provinces
+of life, I may say it has but to be felt to be appreciated.&nbsp; Well,
+this golden age of which we are speaking will be the golden age of officials.&nbsp;
+In all our concerns it will be their beloved duty to meddle, with what
+tact, with what obliging words, analogy will aid us to imagine.&nbsp;
+It is likely these gentlemen will be periodically elected; they will
+therefore have their turn of being underneath, which does not always
+sweeten men&rsquo;s conditions.&nbsp; The laws they will have to administer
+will be no clearer than those we know to-day, and the body which is
+to regulate their administration no wiser than the British Parliament.&nbsp;
+So that upon all hands we may look for a form of servitude most galling
+to the blood - servitude to many and changing masters, and for all the
+slights that accompany the rule of jack-in-office.&nbsp; And if the
+Socialistic programme be carried out with the least fulness, we shall
+have lost a thing, in most respects not much to be regretted, but as
+a moderator of oppression, a thing nearly invaluable - the newspaper.&nbsp;
+For the independent journal is a creature of capital and competition;
+it stands and falls with millionaires and railway bonds and all the
+abuses and glories of to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken
+its bent to authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on
+private property, the days of the independent journal are numbered.&nbsp;
+State railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State
+newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials.<br>
+<br>
+But again, these officials would have no sinecure.&nbsp; Crime would
+perhaps be less, for some of the motives of crime we may suppose would
+pass away.&nbsp; But if Socialism were carried out with any fulness,
+there would be more contraventions.&nbsp; We see already new sins ringing
+up like mustard - School Board sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping
+Act sins - none of which I would be thought to except against in particular,
+but all of which, taken together, show us that Socialism can be a hard
+master even in the beginning.&nbsp; If it go on to such heights as we
+hear proposed and lauded, if it come actually to its ideal of the ant-heap,
+ruled with iron justice, the number of new contraventions will be out
+of all proportion multiplied.&nbsp; Take the case of work alone.&nbsp;
+Man is an idle animal.&nbsp; He is at least as intelligent as the ant;
+but generations of advisers have in vain recommended him the ant&rsquo;s
+example.&nbsp; Of those who are found truly indefatigable in business,
+some are misers; some are the practisers of delightful industries, like
+gardening; some are students, artists, inventors, or discoverers, men
+lured forward by successive hopes; and the rest are those who live by
+games of skill or hazard - financiers, billiard-players, gamblers, and
+the like.&nbsp; But in unloved toils, even under the prick of necessity,
+no man is continually sedulous.&nbsp; Once eliminate the fear of starvation,
+once eliminate or bound the hope of riches, and we shall see plenty
+of skulking and malingering.&nbsp; Society will then be something not
+wholly unlike a cotton plantation in the old days; with cheerful, careless,
+demoralised slaves, with elected overseers, and, instead of the planter,
+a chaotic popular assembly.&nbsp; If the blood be purposeful and the
+soil strong, such a plantation may succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap,
+with full granaries and long hours of leisure.&nbsp; But even then I
+think the whip will be in the overseer&rsquo;s hands, and not in vain.&nbsp;
+For, when it comes to be a question of each man doing his own share
+or the rest doing more, prettiness of sentiment will be forgotten.&nbsp;
+To dock the skulker&rsquo;s food is not enough; many will rather eat
+haws and starve on petty pilferings than put their shoulder to the wheel
+for one hour daily.&nbsp; For such as these, then, the whip will be
+in the overseer&rsquo;s hand; and his own sense of justice and the superintendence
+of a chaotic popular assembly will be the only checks on its employment.&nbsp;
+Now, you may be an industrious man and a good citizen, and yet not love,
+nor yet be loved by, Dr. Fell the inspector.&nbsp; It is admitted by
+private soldiers that the disfavour of a sergeant is an evil not to
+be combated; offend the sergeant, they say, and in a brief while you
+will either be disgraced or have deserted.&nbsp; And the sergeant can
+no longer appeal to the lash.&nbsp; But if these things go on, we shall
+see, or our sons shall see, what it is to have offended an inspector.<br>
+<br>
+This for the unfortunate.&nbsp; But with the fortunate also, even those
+whom the inspector loves, it may not be altogether well.&nbsp; It is
+concluded that in such a state of society, supposing it to be financially
+sound, the level of comfort will be high.&nbsp; It does not follow:
+there are strange depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency,
+as in the case of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all
+besides; and it is possible that the men of the richest ant-heaps may
+sink even into squalor.&nbsp; But suppose they do not; suppose our tricksy
+instrument of human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, should
+respond kindly; suppose no one to be damped and none exasperated by
+the new conditions, the whole enterprise to be financially sound - a
+vaulting supposition - and all the inhabitants to dwell together in
+a golden mean of comfort: we have yet to ask ourselves if this be what
+man desire, or if it be what man will even deign to accept for a continuance.&nbsp;
+It is certain that man loves to eat, it is not certain that he loves
+that only or that best.&nbsp; He is supposed to love comfort; it is
+not a love, at least, that he is faithful to.&nbsp; He is supposed to
+love happiness; it is my contention that he rather loves excitement.&nbsp;
+Danger, enterprise, hope, the novel, the aleatory, are dearer to man
+than regular meals.&nbsp; He does not think so when he is hungry, but
+he thinks so again as soon as he is fed; and on the hypothesis of a
+successful ant-heap, he would never go hungry.&nbsp; It would be always
+after dinner in that society, as, in the land of the Lotos-eaters, it
+was always afternoon; and food, which, when we have it not, seems all-important,
+drops in our esteem, as soon as we have it, to a mere prerequisite of
+living.<br>
+<br>
+That for which man lives is not the same thing for all individuals nor
+in all ages; yet it has a common base; what he seeks and what he must
+have is that which will seize and hold his attention.&nbsp; Regular
+meals and weatherproof lodgings will not do this long.&nbsp; Play in
+its wide sense, as the artificial induction of sensation, including
+all games and all arts, will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of
+himself; but in the end he wearies for realities.&nbsp; Study or experiment,
+to some rare natures, is the unbroken pastime of a life.&nbsp; These
+are enviable natures; people shut in the house by sickness often bitterly
+envy them; but the commoner man cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes:
+his feet itch for physical adventure; his blood boils for physical dangers,
+pleasures, and triumphs; his fancy, the looker after new things, cannot
+continue to look for them in books and crucibles, but must seek them
+on the breathing stage of life.&nbsp; Pinches, buffets, the glow of
+hope, the shock of disappointment, furious contention with obstacles:
+these are the true elixir for all vital spirits, these are what they
+seek alike in their romantic enterprises and their unromantic dissipations.&nbsp;
+When they are taken in some pinch closer than the common, they cry,
+&lsquo;Catch me here again!&rsquo; and sure enough you catch them there
+again - perhaps before the week is out.&nbsp; It is as old as <i>Robinson
+Crusoe</i>; as old as man.&nbsp; Our race has not been strained for
+all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection,
+to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the voices of its
+fathers call it forth.&nbsp; Already in our society as it exists, the
+bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits
+in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any
+vicissitude but one of health; and there he yawns.&nbsp; If the people
+in the next villa took pot-shots at him, he might be killed indeed,
+but so long as he escaped he would find his blood oxygenated and his
+views of the world brighter.&nbsp; If Mr. Mallock, on his way to the
+publishers, should have his skirts pinned to a wall by a javelin, it
+would not occur to him - at least for several hours - to ask if life
+were worth living; and if such peril were a daily matter, he would ask
+it never more; he would have other things to think about, he would be
+living indeed - not lying in a box with cotton, safe, but immeasurably
+dull.&nbsp; The aleatory, whether it touch life, or fortune, or renown
+- whether we explore Africa or only toss for halfpence - that is what
+I conceive men to love best, and that is what we are seeking to exclude
+from men&rsquo;s existences.&nbsp; Of all forms of the aleatory, that
+which most commonly attends our working men - the danger of misery from
+want of work - is the least inspiriting: it does not whip the blood,
+it does not evoke the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it is passive;
+and yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly touching
+them, it does truly season the men&rsquo;s lives.&nbsp; Of those who
+fail, I do not speak - despair should be sacred; but to those who even
+modestly succeed, the changes of their life bring interest: a job found,
+a shilling saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells of pleasure springing
+afresh for the successful poor; and it is not from these but from the
+villa-dweller that we hear complaints of the unworthiness of life.&nbsp;
+Much, then, as the average of the proletariat would gain in this new
+state of life, they would also lose a certain something, which would
+not be missed in the beginning, but would be missed progressively and
+progressively lamented.&nbsp; Soon there would be a looking back: there
+would be tales of the old world humming in young men&rsquo;s ears, tales
+of the tramp and the pedlar, and the hopeful emigrant.&nbsp; And in
+the stall-fed life of the successful ant-heap - with its regular meals,
+regular duties, regular pleasures, an even course of life, and fear
+excluded - the vicissitudes, delights, and havens of to-day will seem
+of epic breadth.&nbsp; This may seem a shallow observation; but the
+springs by which men are moved lie much on the surface.&nbsp; Bread,
+I believe, has always been considered first, but the circus comes close
+upon its heels.&nbsp; Bread we suppose to be given amply; the cry for
+circuses will be the louder, and if the life of our descendants be such
+as we have conceived, there are two beloved pleasures on which they
+will be likely to fall back: the pleasures of intrigue and of sedition.<br>
+<br>
+In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound.&nbsp;
+I am no economist, only a writer of fiction; but even as such, I know
+one thing that bears on the economic question - I know the imperfection
+of man&rsquo;s faculty for business.&nbsp; The Anarchists, who count
+some rugged elements of common sense among what seem to me their tragic
+errors, have said upon this matter all that I could wish to say, and
+condemned beforehand great economical polities.&nbsp; So far it is obvious
+that they are right; they may be right also in predicting a period of
+communal independence, and they may even be right in thinking that desirable.&nbsp;
+But the rise of communes is none the less the end of economic equality,
+just when we were told it was beginning.&nbsp; Communes will not be
+all equal in extent, nor in quality of soil, nor in growth of population;
+nor will the surplus produce of all be equally marketable.&nbsp; It
+will be the old story of competing interests, only with a new unit;
+and, as it appears to me, a new, inevitable danger.&nbsp; For the merchant
+and the manufacturer, in this new world, will be a sovereign commune;
+it is a sovereign power that will see its crops undersold, and its manufactures
+worsted in the market.&nbsp; And all the more dangerous that the sovereign
+power should be small.&nbsp; Great powers are slow to stir; national
+affronts, even with the aid of newspapers, filter slowly into popular
+consciousness; national losses are so unequally shared, that one part
+of the population will be counting its gains while another sits by a
+cold hearth.&nbsp; But in the sovereign commune all will be centralised
+and sensitive.&nbsp; When jealousy springs up, when (let us say) the
+commune of Poole has overreached the commune of Dorchester, irritation
+will run like quicksilver throughout the body politic; each man in Dorchester
+will have to suffer directly in his diet and his dress; even the secretary,
+who drafts the official correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered,
+as a man who has dined ill and may expect to dine worse; and thus a
+business difference between communes will take on much the same colour
+as a dispute between diggers in the lawless West, and will lead as directly
+to the arbitrament of blows.&nbsp; So that the establishment of the
+communal system will not only reintroduce all the injustices and heart-burnings
+of economic inequality, but will, in all human likelihood, inaugurate
+a world of hedgerow warfare.&nbsp; Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne
+on Dorchester, Wimborne on both; the waggons will be fired on as they
+follow the highway, the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will
+go armed into the field of tillage; and if we have not a return of ballad
+literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein the
+victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum.&nbsp; At least
+this will not be dull; when I was younger, I could have welcomed such
+a world with relief; but it is the New-Old with a vengeance, and irresistibly
+suggests the growth of military powers and the foundation of new empires.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+COLLEGE PAPERS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I - EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+On the 2nd of January 1824 was issued the prospectus of the <i>Lapsus
+Linguae</i>; <i>or, the College Tatler</i>; and on the 7th the first
+number appeared.&nbsp; On Friday the 2nd of April &lsquo;<i>Mr. Tatler</i>
+became speechless.&rsquo;&nbsp; Its history was not all one success;
+for the editor (who applies to himself the words of Iago, &lsquo;I am
+nothing if I am not critical&rsquo;) overstepped the bounds of caution,
+and found himself seriously embroiled with the powers that were.&nbsp;
+There appeared in No. XVI. a most bitter satire upon Sir John Leslie,
+in which he was compared to Falstaff, charged with puffing himself,
+and very prettily censured for publishing only the first volume of a
+class-book, and making all purchasers pay for both.&nbsp; Sir John Leslie
+took up the matter angrily, visited Carfrae the publisher, and threatened
+him with an action, till he was forced to turn the hapless <i>Lapsus</i>
+out of doors.&nbsp; The maltreated periodical found shelter in the shop
+of Huie, Infirmary Street; and No. XVII. was duly issued from the new
+office.&nbsp; No. XVII. beheld <i>Mr. Tatler&rsquo;s</i> humiliation,
+in which, with fulsome apology and not very credible assurances of respect
+and admiration, he disclaims the article in question, and advertises
+a new issue of No. XVI. with all objectionable matter omitted.&nbsp;
+This, with pleasing euphemism, he terms in a later advertisement, &lsquo;a
+new and improved edition.&rsquo;&nbsp; This was the only remarkable
+adventure of <i>Mr. Tatler&rsquo;s</i> brief existence; unless we consider
+as such a silly Chaldee manuscript in imitation of <i>Blackwood</i>,
+and a letter of reproof from a divinity student on the impiety of the
+same dull effusion.&nbsp; He laments the near approach of his end in
+pathetic terms.&nbsp; &lsquo;How shall we summon up sufficient courage,&rsquo;
+says he, &lsquo;to look for the last time on our beloved little devil
+and his inestimable proof-sheet?&nbsp; How shall we be able to pass
+No. 14 Infirmary Street and feel that all its attractions are over?&nbsp;
+How shall we bid farewell for ever to that excellent man, with the long
+greatcoat, wooden leg and wooden board, who acts as our representative
+at the gate of <i>Alma Mater</i>?&rsquo;&nbsp; But alas! he had no choice:
+<i>Mr. Tatler</i>, whose career, he says himself, had been successful,
+passed peacefully away, and has ever since dumbly implored &lsquo;the
+bringing home of bell and burial.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<i>Alter et idem</i>.&nbsp; A very different affair was the <i>Lapsus</i>
+<i>Linguae</i> from the <i>Edinburgh</i> <i>University Magazine</i>.&nbsp;
+The two prospectuses alone, laid side by side, would indicate the march
+of luxury and the repeal of the paper duty.&nbsp; The penny bi-weekly
+broadside of session 1828-4 was almost wholly dedicated to Momus.&nbsp;
+Epigrams, pointless letters, amorous verses, and University grievances
+are the continual burthen of the song.&nbsp; But <i>Mr. Tatler</i> was
+not without a vein of hearty humour; and his pages afford what is much
+better: to wit, a good picture of student life as it then was.&nbsp;
+The students of those polite days insisted on retaining their hats in
+the class-room.&nbsp; There was a cab-stance in front of the College;
+and &lsquo;Carriage Entrance&rsquo; was posted above the main arch,
+on what the writer pleases to call &lsquo;coarse, unclassic boards.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The benches of the &lsquo;Speculative&rsquo; then, as now, were red;
+but all other Societies (the &lsquo;Dialectic&rsquo; is the only survivor)
+met downstairs, in some rooms of which it is pointedly said that &lsquo;nothing
+else could conveniently be made of them.&rsquo;&nbsp; However horrible
+these dungeons may have been, it is certain that they were paid for,
+and that far too heavily for the taste of session 1823-4, which found
+enough calls upon its purse for porter and toasted cheese at Ambrose&rsquo;s,
+or cranberry tarts and ginger-wine at Doull&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Duelling
+was still a possibility; so much so that when two medicals fell to fisticuffs
+in Adam Square, it was seriously hinted that single combat would be
+the result.&nbsp; Last and most wonderful of all, Gall and Spurzheim
+were in every one&rsquo;s mouth; and the Law student, after having exhausted
+Byron&rsquo;s poetry and Scott&rsquo;s novels, informed the ladies of
+his belief in phrenology.&nbsp; In the present day he would dilate on
+&lsquo;Red as a rose is she,&rsquo; and then mention that he attends
+Old Greyfriars&rsquo;, as a tacit claim to intellectual superiority.&nbsp;
+I do not know that the advance is much.<br>
+<br>
+But <i>Mr. Tatler&rsquo;s</i> best performances were three short papers
+in which he hit off pretty smartly the idiosyncrasies of the &lsquo;<i>Divinity</i>,&rsquo;
+the &lsquo;<i>Medical</i>,&rsquo; and the &lsquo;<i>Law</i>&rsquo; of
+session 1823-4.&nbsp; The fact that there was no notice of the <i>&lsquo;Arts&rsquo;</i>
+seems to suggest that they stood in the same intermediate position as
+they do now - the epitome of student-kind.&nbsp; <i>Mr. Tatler&rsquo;s</i>
+satire is, on the whole, good-humoured, and has not grown superannuated
+in <i>all</i> its limbs.&nbsp; His descriptions may limp at some points,
+but there are certain broad traits that apply equally well to session
+1870-1.&nbsp; He shows us the <i>Divinity</i> of the period - tall,
+pale, and slender - his collar greasy, and his coat bare about the seams
+- &lsquo;his white neckcloth serving four days, and regularly turned
+the third&rsquo; - &lsquo;the rim of his hat deficient in wool&rsquo;
+- and &lsquo;a weighty volume of theology under his arm.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He was the man to buy cheap &lsquo;a snuff-box, or a dozen of pencils,
+or a six-bladed knife, or a quarter of a hundred quills,&rsquo; at any
+of the public sale-rooms.&nbsp; He was noted for cheap purchases, and
+for exceeding the legal tender in halfpence.&nbsp; He haunted &lsquo;the
+darkest and remotest corner of the Theatre Gallery.&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+was to be seen issuing from &lsquo;aerial lodging-houses.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Withal, says mine author, &lsquo;there were many good points about him:
+he paid his landlady&rsquo;s bill, read his Bible, went twice to church
+on Sunday, seldom swore, was not often tipsy, and bought the <i>Lapsus
+Linguae</i>.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The <i>Medical</i>, again, &lsquo;wore a white greatcoat, and consequently
+talked loud&rsquo; - (there is something very delicious in that <i>consequently</i>).&nbsp;
+He wore his hat on one side.&nbsp; He was active, volatile, and went
+to the top of Arthur&rsquo;s Seat on the Sunday forenoon.&nbsp; He was
+as quiet in a debating society as he was loud in the streets.&nbsp;
+He was reckless and imprudent: yesterday he insisted on your sharing
+a bottle of claret with him (and claret was claret then, before the
+cheap-and-nasty treaty), and to-morrow he asks you for the loan of a
+penny to buy the last number of the <i>Lapsus.<br>
+<br>
+</i>The student of <i>Law</i>, again, was a learned man.&nbsp; &lsquo;He
+had turned over the leaves of Justinian&rsquo;s <i>Institutes</i>, and
+knew that they were written in Latin.&nbsp; He was well acquainted with
+the title-page of Blackstone&rsquo;s <i>Commentaries</i>, and <i>argal</i>
+(as the gravedigger in <i>Hamlet</i> says) he was not a person to be
+laughed at.&rsquo;&nbsp; He attended the Parliament House in the character
+of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the celebrated speakers.&nbsp;
+He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative or the Forensic.&nbsp;
+In social qualities he seems to have stood unrivalled.&nbsp; Even in
+the police-office we find him shining with undiminished lustre.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;If a <i>Charlie</i> should find him rather noisy at an untimely
+hour, and venture to take him into custody, he appears next morning
+like a Daniel come to judgment.&nbsp; He opens his mouth to speak, and
+the divine precepts of unchanging justice and Scots law flow from his
+tongue.&nbsp; The magistrate listens in amazement, and fines him only
+a couple of guineas.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Such then were our predecessors and their College Magazine.&nbsp; Barclay,
+Ambrose, Young Amos, and Fergusson were to them what the Caf&eacute;,
+the Rainbow, and Rutherford&rsquo;s are to us.&nbsp; An hour&rsquo;s
+reading in these old pages absolutely confuses us, there is so much
+that is similar and so much that is different; the follies and amusements
+are so like our own, and the manner of frolicking and enjoying are so
+changed, that one pauses and looks about him in philosophic judgment.&nbsp;
+The muddy quadrangle is thick with living students; but in our eyes
+it swarms also with the phantasmal white greatcoats and tilted hats
+of 1824.&nbsp; Two races meet: races alike and diverse.&nbsp; Two performances
+are played before our eyes; but the change seems merely of impersonators,
+of scenery, of costume.&nbsp; Plot and passion are the same.&nbsp; It
+is the fall of the spun shilling whether seventy-one or twenty-four
+has the best of it.<br>
+<br>
+In a future number we hope to give a glance at the individualities of
+the present, and see whether the cast shall be head or tail - whether
+we or the readers of the <i>Lapsus</i> stand higher in the balance.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II - THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+We have now reached the difficult portion of our task.&nbsp; <i>Mr.
+Tatler</i>, for all that we care, may have been as virulent as he liked
+about the students of a former; but for the iron to touch our sacred
+selves, for a brother of the Guild to betray its most privy infirmities,
+let such a Judas look to himself as he passes on his way to the Scots
+Law or the Diagnostic, below the solitary lamp at the corner of the
+dark quadrangle.&nbsp; We confess that this idea alarms us.&nbsp; We
+enter a protest.&nbsp; We bind ourselves over verbally to keep the peace.&nbsp;
+We hope, moreover, that having thus made you secret to our misgivings,
+you will excuse us if we be dull, and set that down to caution which
+you might before have charged to the account of stupidity.<br>
+<br>
+The natural tendency of civilisation is to obliterate those distinctions
+which are the best salt of life.&nbsp; All the fine old professional
+flavour in language has evaporated.&nbsp; Your very gravedigger has
+forgotten his avocation in his electorship, and would quibble on the
+Franchise over Ophelia&rsquo;s grave, instead of more appropriately
+discussing the duration of bodies under ground.&nbsp; From this tendency,
+from this gradual attrition of life, in which everything pointed and
+characteristic is being rubbed down, till the whole world begins to
+slip between our fingers in smooth undistinguishable sands, from this,
+we say, it follows that we must not attempt to join <i>Mr. Taller</i>
+in his simple division of students into <i>Law, Divinity</i>, and <i>Medical</i>.&nbsp;
+Nowadays the Faculties may shake hands over their follies; and, like
+Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight (in <i>Love for Love</i>) they may stand
+in the doors of opposite class-rooms, crying: &lsquo;Sister, Sister
+- Sister everyway!&rsquo;&nbsp; A few restrictions, indeed, remain to
+influence the followers of individual branches of study.&nbsp; The Divinity,
+for example, must be an avowed believer; and as this, in the present
+day, is unhappily considered by many as a confession of weakness, he
+is fain to choose one of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox
+bolus.&nbsp; Some swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it
+is even a credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw
+philosopher, although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His
+own authority.&nbsp; Others again (and this we think the worst method),
+finding German grammar a somewhat dry morsel, run their own little heresy
+as a proof of independence; and deny one of the cardinal doctrines that
+they may hold the others without being laughed at.<br>
+<br>
+Besides, however, such influences as these, there is little more distinction
+between the faculties than the traditionary ideal, handed down through
+a long sequence of students, and getting rounder and more featureless
+at each successive session.&nbsp; The plague of uniformity has descended
+on the College.&nbsp; Students (and indeed all sorts and conditions
+of men) now require their faculty and character hung round their neck
+on a placard, like the scenes in Shakespeare&rsquo;s theatre.&nbsp;
+And in the midst of all this weary sameness, not the least common feature
+is the gravity of every face.&nbsp; No more does the merry medical run
+eagerly in the clear winter morning up the rugged sides of Arthur&rsquo;s
+Seat, and hear the church bells begin and thicken and die away below
+him among the gathered smoke of the city.&nbsp; He will not break Sunday
+to so little purpose.&nbsp; He no longer finds pleasure in the mere
+output of his surplus energy.&nbsp; He husbands his strength, and lays
+out walks, and reading, and amusement with deep consideration, so that
+he may get as much work and pleasure out of his body as he can, and
+waste none of his energy on mere impulse, or such flat enjoyment as
+an excursion in the country.<br>
+<br>
+See the quadrangle in the interregnum of classes, in those two or three
+minutes when it is full of passing students, and we think you will admit
+that, if we have not made it &lsquo;an habitation of dragons,&rsquo;
+we have at least transformed it into &lsquo;a court for owls.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Solemnity broods heavily over the enclosure; and wherever you seek it,
+you will find a dearth of merriment, an absence of real youthful enjoyment.&nbsp;
+You might as well try<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;To move wild laughter in the throat of death&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+as to excite any healthy stir among the bulk of this staid company.<br>
+<br>
+The studious congregate about the doors of the different classes, debating
+the matter of the lecture, or comparing note-books.&nbsp; A reserved
+rivalry sunders them.&nbsp; Here are some deep in Greek particles: there,
+others are already inhabitants of that land<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Where entity and quiddity,<br>
+&lsquo;Like ghosts of defunct bodies fly -<br>
+Where Truth in person does appear<br>
+Like words congealed in northern air.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+But none of them seem to find any relish for their studies - no pedantic
+love of this subject or that lights up their eyes - science and learning
+are only means for a livelihood, which they have considerately embraced
+and which they solemnly pursue.&nbsp; &lsquo;Labour&rsquo;s pale priests,&rsquo;
+their lips seem incapable of laughter, except in the way of polite recognition
+of professorial wit.&nbsp; The stains of ink are chronic on their meagre
+fingers.&nbsp; They walk like Saul among the asses.<br>
+<br>
+The dandies are not less subdued.&nbsp; In 1824 there was a noisy dapper
+dandyism abroad.&nbsp; Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial
+- a matter of white greatcoats and loud voices - strangely different
+from the stately frippery that is rife at present.&nbsp; These men are
+out of their element in the quadrangle.&nbsp; Even the small remains
+of boisterous humour, which still clings to any collection of young
+men, jars painfully on their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a hasty
+retreat to resume their perfunctory march along Princes Street.&nbsp;
+Flirtation is to them a great social duty, a painful obligation, which
+they perform on every occasion in the same chill official manner, and
+with the same commonplace advances, the same dogged observance of traditional
+behaviour.&nbsp; The shape of their raiment is a burden almost greater
+than they can bear, and they halt in their walk to preserve the due
+adjustment of their trouser-knees, till one would fancy he had mixed
+in a procession of Jacobs.&nbsp; We speak, of course, for ourselves;
+but we would as soon associate with a herd of sprightly apes as with
+these gloomy modern beaux.&nbsp; Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines,
+even our Brummels, should have left their mantles upon nothing more
+amusing!<br>
+<br>
+Nor are the fast men less constrained.&nbsp; Solemnity, even in dissipation,
+is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with a perverse seriousness,
+a systematic rationalism of wickedness that would have surprised the
+simpler sinners of old.&nbsp; Some of these men whom we see gravely
+conversing on the steps have but a slender acquaintance with each other.&nbsp;
+Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins of depravity;
+and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up their items of transgression,
+and give an abstract of their downward progress for approval and encouragement.&nbsp;
+These folk form a freemasonry of their own.&nbsp; An oath is the shibboleth
+of their sinister fellowship.&nbsp; Once they hear a man swear, it is
+wonderful how their tongues loosen and their bashful spirits take enlargement,
+under the consciousness of brotherhood.&nbsp; There is no folly, no
+pardoning warmth of temper about them; they are as steady-going and
+systematic in their own way as the studious in theirs.<br>
+<br>
+Not that we are without merry men.&nbsp; No.&nbsp; We shall not be ungrateful
+to those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter, whose active feet
+in the &lsquo;College Anthem&rsquo; have beguiled so many weary hours
+and added a pleasant variety to the strain of close attention.&nbsp;
+But even these are too evidently professional in their antics.&nbsp;
+They go about cogitating puns and inventing tricks.&nbsp; It is their
+vocation, Hal.&nbsp; They are the gratuitous jesters of the class-room;
+and, like the clown when he leaves the stage, their merriment too often
+sinks as the bell rings the hour of liberty, and they pass forth by
+the Post-Office, grave and sedate, and meditating fresh gambols for
+the morrow.<br>
+<br>
+This is the impression left on the mind of any observing student by
+too many of his fellows.&nbsp; They seem all frigid old men; and one
+pauses to think how such an unnatural state of matters is produced.&nbsp;
+We feel inclined to blame for it the unfortunate absence of <i>University
+feeling</i> which is so marked a characteristic of our Edinburgh students.&nbsp;
+Academical interests are so few and far between - students, as students,
+have so little in common, except a peevish rivalry - there is such an
+entire want of broad college sympathies and ordinary college friendships,
+that we fancy that no University in the kingdom is in so poor a plight.&nbsp;
+Our system is full of anomalies.&nbsp; A, who cut B whilst he was a
+shabby student, curries sedulously up to him and cudgels his memory
+for anecdotes about him when he becomes the great so-and-so.&nbsp; Let
+there be an end of this shy, proud reserve on the one hand, and this
+shuddering fine ladyism on the other; and we think we shall find both
+ourselves and the College bettered.&nbsp; Let it be a sufficient reason
+for intercourse that two men sit together on the same benches.&nbsp;
+Let the great A be held excused for nodding to the shabby B in Princes
+Street, if he can say, &lsquo;That fellow is a student.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Once this could be brought about, we think you would find the whole
+heart of the University beat faster.&nbsp; We think you would find a
+fusion among the students, a growth of common feelings, an increasing
+sympathy between class and class, whose influence (in such a heterogeneous
+company as ours) might be of incalculable value in all branches of politics
+and social progress.&nbsp; It would do more than this.&nbsp; If we could
+find some method of making the University a real mother to her sons
+- something beyond a building of class-rooms, a Senatus and a lottery
+of somewhat shabby prizes - we should strike a death-blow at the constrained
+and unnatural attitude of our Society.&nbsp; At present we are not a
+united body, but a loose gathering of individuals, whose inherent attraction
+is allowed to condense them into little knots and coteries.&nbsp; Our
+last snowball riot read us a plain lesson on our condition.&nbsp; There
+was no party spirit - no unity of interests.&nbsp; A few, who were mischievously
+inclined, marched off to the College of Surgeons in a pretentious file;
+but even before they reached their destination the feeble inspiration
+had died out in many, and their numbers were sadly thinned.&nbsp; Some
+followed strange gods in the direction of Drummond Street, and others
+slunk back to meek good-boyism at the feet of the Professors.&nbsp;
+The same is visible in better things.&nbsp; As you send a man to an
+English University that he may have his prejudices rubbed off, you might
+send him to Edinburgh that he may have them ingrained - rendered indelible
+- fostered by sympathy into living principles of his spirit.&nbsp; And
+the reason of it is quite plain.&nbsp; From this absence of University
+feeling it comes that a man&rsquo;s friendships are always the direct
+and immediate results of these very prejudices.&nbsp; A common weakness
+is the best master of ceremonies in our quadrangle: a mutual vice is
+the readiest introduction.&nbsp; The studious associate with the studious
+alone - the dandies with the dandies.&nbsp; There is nothing to force
+them to rub shoulders with the others; and so they grow day by day more
+wedded to their own original opinions and affections.&nbsp; They see
+through the same spectacles continually.&nbsp; All broad sentiments,
+all real catholic humanity expires; and the mind gets gradually stiffened
+into one position - becomes so habituated to a contracted atmosphere,
+that it shudders and withers under the least draught of the free air
+that circulates in the general field of mankind.<br>
+<br>
+Specialism in Society then is, we think, one cause of our present state.&nbsp;
+Specialism in study is another.&nbsp; We doubt whether this has ever
+been a good thing since the world began; but we are sure it is much
+worse now than it was.&nbsp; Formerly, when a man became a specialist,
+it was out of affection for his subject.&nbsp; With a somewhat grand
+devotion he left all the world of Science to follow his true love; and
+he contrived to find that strange pedantic interest which inspired the
+man who<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Settled <i>Hoti&rsquo;s</i> business - let it be -<br>
+Properly based <i>Oun</i> -<br>
+Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic <i>De</i>,<br>
+Dead from the waist down.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Nowadays it is quite different.&nbsp; Our pedantry wants even the saving
+clause of Enthusiasm.&nbsp; The election is now matter of necessity
+and not of choice.&nbsp; Knowledge is now too broad a field for your
+Jack-of-all-Trades; and, from beautifully utilitarian reasons, he makes
+his choice, draws his pen through a dozen branches of study, and behold
+- John the Specialist.&nbsp; That this is the way to be wealthy we shall
+not deny; but we hold that it is <i>not</i> the way to be healthy or
+wise.&nbsp; The whole mind becomes narrowed and circumscribed to one
+&lsquo;punctual spot&rsquo; of knowledge.&nbsp; A rank unhealthy soil
+breeds a harvest of prejudices.&nbsp; Feeling himself above others in
+his one little branch - in the classification of toadstools, or Carthaginian
+history - he waxes great in his own eyes and looks down on others.&nbsp;
+Having all his sympathies educated in one way, they die out in every
+other; and he is apt to remain a peevish, narrow, and intolerant bigot.&nbsp;
+Dilettante is now a term of reproach; but there is a certain form of
+dilettantism to which no one can object.&nbsp; It is this that we want
+among our students.&nbsp; We wish them to abandon no subject until they
+have seen and felt its merit - to act under a general interest in all
+branches of knowledge, not a commercial eagerness to excel in one.<br>
+<br>
+In both these directions our sympathies are constipated.&nbsp; We are
+apostles of our own caste and our own subject of study, instead of being,
+as we should, true men and <i>loving</i> students.&nbsp; Of course both
+of these could be corrected by the students themselves; but this is
+nothing to the purpose: it is more important to ask whether the Senatus
+or the body of alumni could do nothing towards the growth of better
+feeling and wider sentiments.&nbsp; Perhaps in another paper we may
+say something upon this head.<br>
+<br>
+One other word, however, before we have done.&nbsp; What shall we be
+when we grow really old?&nbsp; Of yore, a man was thought to lay on
+restrictions and acquire new deadweight of mournful experience with
+every year, till he looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse
+and freedom.&nbsp; We please ourselves with thinking that it cannot
+be so with us.&nbsp; We would fain hope that, as we have begun in one
+way, we may end in another; and that when we are in fact the octogenarians
+that we <i>seem</i> at present, there shall be no merrier men on earth.&nbsp;
+It is pleasant to picture us, sunning ourselves in Princes Street of
+a morning, or chirping over our evening cups, with all the merriment
+that we wanted in youth.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III - DEBATING SOCIETIES<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A debating society is at first somewhat of a disappointment.&nbsp; You
+do not often find the youthful Demosthenes chewing his pebbles in the
+same room with you; or, even if you do, you will probably think the
+performance little to be admired.&nbsp; As a general rule, the members
+speak shamefully ill.&nbsp; The subjects of debate are heavy; and so
+are the fines.&nbsp; The Ballot Question - oldest of dialectic nightmares
+- is often found astride of a somnolent sederunt.&nbsp; The Greeks and
+Romans, too, are reserved as sort of <i>general-utility</i> men, to
+do all the dirty work of illustration; and they fill as many functions
+as the famous waterfall scene at the &lsquo;Princess&rsquo;s,&rsquo;
+which I found doing duty on one evening as a gorge in Peru, a haunt
+of German robbers, and a peaceful vale in the Scottish borders.&nbsp;
+There is a sad absence of striking argument or real lively discussion.&nbsp;
+Indeed, you feel a growing contempt for your fellow-members; and it
+is not until you rise yourself to hawk and hesitate and sit shamefully
+down again, amid eleemosynary applause, that you begin to find your
+level and value others rightly.&nbsp; Even then, even when failure has
+damped your critical ardour, you will see many things to be laughed
+at in the deportment of your rivals.<br>
+<br>
+Most laughable, perhaps, are your indefatigable strivers after eloquence.&nbsp;
+They are of those who &lsquo;pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope,&rsquo;
+and who, since they expect that &lsquo;the deficiencies of last sentence
+will be supplied by the next,&rsquo; have been recommended by Dr. Samuel
+Johnson to &lsquo;attend to the History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+They are characterised by a hectic hopefulness.&nbsp; Nothing damps
+them.&nbsp; They rise from the ruins of one abortive sentence, to launch
+forth into another with unabated vigour.&nbsp; They have all the manner
+of an orator.&nbsp; From the tone of their voice, you would expect a
+splendid period - and lo! a string of broken-backed, disjointed clauses,
+eked out with stammerings and throat-clearings.&nbsp; They possess the
+art (learned from the pulpit) of rounding an uneuphonious sentence by
+dwelling on a single syllable - of striking a balance in a top-heavy
+period by lengthening out a word into a melancholy quaver.&nbsp; Withal,
+they never cease to hope.&nbsp; Even at last, even when they have exhausted
+all their ideas, even after the would-be peroration has finally refused
+to perorate, they remain upon their feet with their mouths open, waiting
+for some further inspiration, like Chaucer&rsquo;s widow&rsquo;s son
+in the dung-hole, after<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;His throat was kit unto the nekk&eacute; bone,&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+in vain expectation of that seed that was to be laid upon his tongue,
+and give him renewed and clearer utterance.<br>
+<br>
+These men may have something to say, if they could only say it - indeed
+they generally have; but the next class are people who, having nothing
+to say, are cursed with a facility and an unhappy command of words,
+that makes them the prime nuisances of the society they affect.&nbsp;
+They try to cover their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality
+of delivery.&nbsp; They look triumphantly round the room, as if courting
+applause, after a torrent of diluted truism.&nbsp; They talk in a circle,
+harping on the same dull round of argument, and returning again and
+again to the same remark with the same sprightliness, the same irritating
+appearance of novelty.<br>
+<br>
+After this set, any one is tolerable; so we shall merely hint at a few
+other varieties.&nbsp; There is your man who is pre-eminently conscientious,
+whose face beams with sincerity as he opens on the negative, and who
+votes on the affirmative at the end, looking round the room with an
+air of chastened pride.&nbsp; There is also the irrelevant speaker,
+who rises, emits a joke or two, and then sits down again, without ever
+attempting to tackle the subject of debate.&nbsp; Again, we have men
+who ride pick-a-back on their family reputation, or, if their family
+have none, identify themselves with some well-known statesman, use his
+opinions, and lend him their patronage on all occasions.&nbsp; This
+is a dangerous plan, and serves oftener, I am afraid, to point a difference
+than to adorn a speech.<br>
+<br>
+But alas! a striking failure may be reached without tempting Providence
+by any of these ambitious tricks.&nbsp; Our own stature will be found
+high enough for shame.&nbsp; The success of three simple sentences lures
+us into a fatal parenthesis in the fourth, from whose shut brackets
+we may never disentangle the thread of our discourse.&nbsp; A momentary
+flush tempts us into a quotation; and we may be left helpless in the
+middle of one of Pope&rsquo;s couplets, a white film gathering before
+our eyes, and our kind friends charitably trying to cover our disgrace
+by a feeble round of applause.&nbsp; <i>Amis lecteurs</i>, this is a
+painful topic.&nbsp; It is possible that we too, we, the &lsquo;potent,
+grave, and reverend&rsquo; editor, may have suffered these things, and
+drunk as deep as any of the cup of shameful failure.&nbsp; Let us dwell
+no longer on so delicate a subject.<br>
+<br>
+In spite, however, of these disagreeables, I should recommend any student
+to suffer them with Spartan courage, as the benefits he receives should
+repay him an hundredfold for them all.&nbsp; The life of the debating
+society is a handy antidote to the life of the classroom and quadrangle.&nbsp;
+Nothing could be conceived more excellent as a weapon against many of
+those <i>peccant</i> <i>humours</i> that we have been railing against
+in the jeremiad of our last &lsquo;College Paper&rsquo; - particularly
+in the field of intellect.&nbsp; It is a sad sight to see our heather-scented
+students, our boys of seventeen, coming up to College with determined
+views - <i>rou&eacute;s</i> in speculation - having gauged the vanity
+of philosophy or learned to shun it as the middle-man of heresy - a
+company of determined, deliberate opinionists, not to be moved by all
+the sleights of logic.&nbsp; What have such men to do with study?&nbsp;
+If their minds are made up irrevocably, why burn the &lsquo;studious
+lamp&rsquo; in search of further confirmation?&nbsp; Every set opinion
+I hear a student deliver I feel a certain lowering of my regard.&nbsp;
+He who studies, he who is yet employed in groping for his premises,
+should keep his mind fluent and sensitive, keen to mark flaws, and willing
+to surrender untenable positions.&nbsp; He should keep himself teachable,
+or cease the expensive farce of being taught.&nbsp; It is to further
+this docile spirit that we desire to press the claims of debating societies.&nbsp;
+It is as a means of melting down this museum of premature petrifactions
+into living and impressionable soul that we insist on their utility.&nbsp;
+If we could once prevail on our students to feel no shame in avowing
+an uncertain attitude towards any subject, if we could teach them that
+it was unnecessary for every lad to have his <i>opinionette</i> on every
+topic, we should have gone a far way towards bracing the intellectual
+tone of the coming race of thinkers; and this it is which debating societies
+are so well fitted to perform.<br>
+<br>
+We there meet people of every shade of opinion, and make friends with
+them.&nbsp; We are taught to rail against a man the whole session through,
+and then hob-a-nob with him at the concluding entertainment.&nbsp; We
+find men of talent far exceeding our own, whose conclusions are widely
+different from ours; and we are thus taught to distrust ourselves.&nbsp;
+But the best means of all towards catholicity is that wholesome rule
+which some folk are most inclined to condemn - I mean the law of <i>obliged
+speeches</i>.&nbsp; Your senior member commands; and you must take the
+affirmative or the negative, just as suits his best convenience.&nbsp;
+This tends to the most perfect liberality.&nbsp; It is no good hearing
+the arguments of an opponent, for in good verity you rarely follow them;
+and even if you do take the trouble to listen, it is merely in a captious
+search for weaknesses.&nbsp; This is proved, I fear, in every debate;
+when you hear each speaker arguing out his own prepared <i>sp&eacute;cialit&eacute;</i>
+(he never intended speaking, of course, until some remarks of, etc.),
+arguing out, I say, his own <i>coached-up</i> subject without the least
+attention to what has gone before, as utterly at sea about the drift
+of his adversary&rsquo;s speech as Panurge when he argued with Thaumaste,
+and merely linking his own prelection to the last by a few flippant
+criticisms.&nbsp; Now, as the rule stands, you are saddled with the
+side you disapprove, and so you are forced, by regard for your own fame,
+to argue out, to feel with, to elaborate completely, the case as it
+stands against yourself; and what a fund of wisdom do you not turn up
+in this idle digging of the vineyard!&nbsp; How many new difficulties
+take form before your eyes? how many superannuated arguments cripple
+finally into limbo, under the glance of your enforced eclecticism!<br>
+<br>
+Nor is this the only merit of Debating Societies.&nbsp; They tend also
+to foster taste, and to promote friendship between University men.&nbsp;
+This last, as we have had occasion before to say, is the great requirement
+of our student life; and it will therefore be no waste of time if we
+devote a paragraph to this subject in its connection with Debating Societies.&nbsp;
+At present they partake too much of the nature of a <i>clique</i>.&nbsp;
+Friends propose friends, and mutual friends second them, until the society
+degenerates into a sort of family party.&nbsp; You may confirm old acquaintances,
+but you can rarely make new ones.&nbsp; You find yourself in the atmosphere
+of your own daily intercourse.&nbsp; Now, this is an unfortunate circumstance,
+which it seems to me might readily be rectified.&nbsp; Our Principal
+has shown himself so friendly towards all College improvements that
+I cherish the hope of seeing shortly realised a certain suggestion,
+which is not a new one with me, and which must often have been proposed
+and canvassed heretofore - I mean, a real <i>University Debating Society</i>,
+patronised by the Senatus, presided over by the Professors, to which
+every one might gain ready admittance on sight of his matriculation
+ticket, where it would be a favour and not a necessity to speak, and
+where the obscure student might have another object for attendance besides
+the mere desire to save his fines: to wit, the chance of drawing on
+himself the favourable consideration of his teachers.&nbsp; This would
+be merely following in the good tendency, which has been so noticeable
+during all this session, to increase and multiply student societies
+and clubs of every sort.&nbsp; Nor would it be a matter of much difficulty.&nbsp;
+The united societies would form a nucleus: one of the class-rooms at
+first, and perhaps afterwards the great hall above the library, might
+be the place of meeting.&nbsp; There would be no want of attendance
+or enthusiasm, I am sure; for it is a very different thing to speak
+under the bushel of a private club on the one hand, and, on the other,
+in a public place, where a happy period or a subtle argument may do
+the speaker permanent service in after life.&nbsp; Such a club might
+end, perhaps, by rivalling the &lsquo;Union&rsquo; at Cambridge or the
+&lsquo;Union&rsquo; at Oxford.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IV - THE PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS <a name="citation7"></a><a href="#footnote7">{7}</a><br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It is wonderful to think what a turn has been given to our whole Society
+by the fact that we live under the sign of Aquarius - that our climate
+is essentially wet.&nbsp; A mere arbitrary distinction, like the walking-swords
+of yore, might have remained the symbol of foresight and respectability,
+had not the raw mists and dropping showers of our island pointed the
+inclination of Society to another exponent of those virtues.&nbsp; A
+ribbon of the Legion of Honour or a string of medals may prove a person&rsquo;s
+courage; a title may prove his birth; a professorial chair his study
+and acquirement; but it is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that
+is the stamp of Respectability.&nbsp; The umbrella has become the acknowledged
+index of social position.<br>
+<br>
+Robinson Crusoe presents us with a touching instance of the hankering
+after them inherent in the civilised and educated mind.&nbsp; To the
+superficial, the hot suns of Juan Fernandez may sufficiently account
+for his quaint choice of a luxury; but surely one who had borne the
+hard labour of a seaman under the tropics for all these years could
+have supported an excursion after goats or a peaceful <i>constitutional</i>
+arm in arm with the nude Friday.&nbsp; No, it was not this: the memory
+of a vanished respectability called for some outward manifestation,
+and the result was - an umbrella.&nbsp; A pious castaway might have
+rigged up a belfry and solaced his Sunday mornings with the mimicry
+of church-bells; but Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and
+his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving
+to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.<br>
+<br>
+It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very
+foremost badge of modern civilisation - the Urim and Thummim of respectability.&nbsp;
+Its pregnant symbolism has taken its rise in the most natural manner.&nbsp;
+Consider, for a moment, when umbrellas were first introduced into this
+country, what manner of men would use them, and what class would adhere
+to the useless but ornamental cane.&nbsp; The first, without doubt,
+would be the hypochondriacal, out of solicitude for their health, or
+the frugal, out of care for their raiment; the second, it is equally
+plain, would include the fop, the fool, and the Bobadil.&nbsp; Any one
+acquainted with the growth of Society, and knowing out of what small
+seeds of cause are produced great revolutions, and wholly new conditions
+of intercourse, sees from this simple thought how the carriage of an
+umbrella came to indicate frugality, judicious regard for bodily welfare,
+and scorn for mere outward adornment, and, in one word, all those homely
+and solid virtues implied in the term RESPECTABILITY.&nbsp; Not that
+the umbrella&rsquo;s costliness has nothing to do with its great influence.&nbsp;
+Its possession, besides symbolising (as we have already indicated) the
+change from wild Esau to plain Jacob dwelling in tents, implies a certain
+comfortable provision of fortune.&nbsp; It is not every one that can
+expose twenty-six shillings&rsquo; worth of property to so many chances
+of loss and theft.&nbsp; So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed,
+that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned
+umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise.&nbsp; They have a qualification
+standing in their lobbies; they carry a sufficient stake in the common-weal
+below their arm.&nbsp; One who bears with him an umbrella - such a complicated
+structure of whalebone, of silk, and of cane, that it becomes a very
+microcosm of modern industry - is necessarily a man of peace.&nbsp;
+A half-crown cane may be applied to an offender&rsquo;s head on a very
+moderate provocation; but a six-and-twenty shilling silk is a possession
+too precious to be adventured in the shock of war.<br>
+<br>
+These are but a few glances at how umbrellas (in the general) came to
+their present high estate.&nbsp; But the true Umbrella-Philosopher meets
+with far stranger applications as he goes about the streets.<br>
+<br>
+Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual
+who carries them: indeed, they are far more capable of betraying his
+trust; for whereas a face is given to us so far ready made, and all
+our power over it is in frowning, and laughing, and grimacing, during
+the first three or four decades of life, each umbrella is selected from
+a whole shopful, as being most consonant to the purchaser&rsquo;s disposition.&nbsp;
+An undoubted power of diagnosis rests with the practised Umbrella-Philosopher.&nbsp;
+O you who lisp, and amble, and change the fashion of your countenances
+- you who conceal all these, how little do you think that you left a
+proof of your weakness in our umbrella-stand - that even now, as you
+shake out the folds to meet the thickening snow, we read in its ivory
+handle the outward and visible sign of your snobbery, or from the exposed
+gingham of its cover detect, through coat and waistcoat, the hidden
+hypocrisy of the &lsquo;<i>dickey</i>&rsquo;!&nbsp; But alas! even the
+umbrella is no certain criterion.&nbsp; The falsity and the folly of
+the human race have degraded that graceful symbol to the ends of dishonesty;
+and while some umbrellas, from carelessness in selection, are not strikingly
+characteristic (for it is only in what a man loves that he displays
+his real nature), others, from certain prudential motives, are chosen
+directly opposite to the person&rsquo;s disposition.&nbsp; A mendacious
+umbrella is a sign of great moral degradation.&nbsp; Hypocrisy naturally
+shelters itself below a silk; while the fast youth goes to visit his
+religious friends armed with the decent and reputable gingham.&nbsp;
+May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas that
+they go about the streets &lsquo;with a lie in their right hand&rsquo;?<br>
+<br>
+The kings of Siam, as we read, besides having a graduated social scale
+of umbrellas (which was a good thing), prevented the great bulk of their
+subjects from having any at all, which was certainly a bad thing.&nbsp;
+We should be sorry to believe that this Eastern legislator was a fool
+- the idea of an aristocracy of umbrellas is too philosophic to have
+originated in a nobody - and we have accordingly taken exceeding pains
+to find out the reason of this harsh restriction.&nbsp; We think we
+have succeeded; but, while admiring the principle at which he aimed,
+and while cordially recognising in the Siamese potentate the only man
+before ourselves who had taken a real grasp of the umbrella, we must
+be allowed to point out how unphilosophically the great man acted in
+this particular.&nbsp; His object, plainly, was to prevent any unworthy
+persons from bearing the sacred symbol of domestic virtues.&nbsp; We
+cannot excuse his limiting these virtues to the circle of his court.&nbsp;
+We must only remember that such was the feeling of the age in which
+he lived.&nbsp; Liberalism had not yet raised the war-cry of the working
+classes.&nbsp; But here was his mistake: it was a needless regulation.&nbsp;
+Except in a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect,
+men, not by nature <i>umbrellarians</i>, have tried again and again
+to become so by art, and yet have failed - have expended their patrimony
+in the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have systematically
+lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits and shrunken purses,
+given up their vain struggle, and relied on theft and borrowing for
+the remainder of their lives.&nbsp; This is the most remarkable fact
+that we have had occasion to notice; and yet we challenge the candid
+reader to call it in question.&nbsp; Now, as there cannot be any <i>moral
+selection</i> in a mere dead piece of furniture - as the umbrella cannot
+be supposed to have an affinity for individual men equal and reciprocal
+to that which men certainly feel toward individual umbrellas - we took
+the trouble of consulting a scientific friend as to whether there was
+any possible physical explanation of the phenomenon.&nbsp; He was unable
+to supply a plausible theory, or even hypothesis; but we extract from
+his letter the following interesting passage relative to the physical
+peculiarities of umbrellas: &lsquo;Not the least important, and by far
+the most curious property of the umbrella, is the energy which it displays
+in affecting the atmospheric strata.&nbsp; There is no fact in meteorology
+better established - indeed, it is almost the only one on which meteorologists
+are agreed - than that the carriage of an umbrella produces desiccation
+of the air; while if it be left at home, aqueous vapour is largely produced,
+and is soon deposited in the form of rain.&nbsp; No theory,&rsquo; my
+friend continues, &lsquo;competent to explain this hygrometric law has
+been given (as far as I am aware) by Herschel, Dove, Glaisher, Tait,
+Buchan, or any other writer; nor do I pretend to supply the defect.&nbsp;
+I venture, however, to throw out the conjecture that it will be ultimately
+found to belong to the same class of natural laws as that agreeable
+to which a slice of toast always descends with the buttered surface
+downwards.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+But it is time to draw to a close.&nbsp; We could expatiate much longer
+upon this topic, but want of space constrains us to leave unfinished
+these few desultory remarks - slender contributions towards a subject
+which has fallen sadly backward, and which, we grieve to say, was better
+understood by the king of Siam in 1686 than by all the philosophers
+of to-day.&nbsp; If, however, we have awakened in any rational mind
+an interest in the symbolism of umbrellas - in any generous heart a
+more complete sympathy with the dumb companion of his daily walk - or
+in any grasping spirit a pure notion of respectability strong enough
+to make him expend his six-and-twenty shillings - we shall have deserved
+well of the world, to say nothing of the many industrious persons employed
+in the manufacture of the article.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER V - THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;How many Caesars and Pompeys, by mere inspirations of the names,
+have been rendered worthy of them?&nbsp; And how many are there, who
+might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters
+and spirits been totally depressed and Nicodemus&rsquo;d into nothing?&rsquo;
+- <i>Tristram</i> <i>Shandy</i>, vol. I. chap xix.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Such were the views of the late Walter Shandy, Esq., Turkey merchant.&nbsp;
+To the best of my belief, Mr. Shandy is the first who fairly pointed
+out the incalculable influence of nomenclature upon the whole life -
+who seems first to have recognised the one child, happy in an heroic
+appellation, soaring upwards on the wings of fortune, and the other,
+like the dead sailor in his shotted hammock, haled down by sheer weight
+of name into the abysses of social failure.&nbsp; Solomon possibly had
+his eye on some such theory when he said that &lsquo;a good name is
+better than precious ointment&rsquo;; and perhaps we may trace a similar
+spirit in the compilers of the English Catechism, and the affectionate
+interest with which they linger round the catechumen&rsquo;s name at
+the very threshold of their work.&nbsp; But, be these as they may, I
+think no one can censure me for appending, in pursuance of the expressed
+wish of his son, the Turkey merchant&rsquo;s name to his system, and
+pronouncing, without further preface, a short epitome of the &lsquo;Shandean
+Philosophy of Nomenclature.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+To begin, then: the influence of our name makes itself felt from the
+very cradle.&nbsp; As a schoolboy I remember the pride with which I
+hailed Robin Hood, Robert Bruce, and Robert le Diable as my name-fellows;
+and the feeling of sore disappointment that fell on my heart when I
+found a freebooter or a general who did not share with me a single one
+of my numerous <i>praenomina</i>.&nbsp; Look at the delight with which
+two children find they have the same name.&nbsp; They are friends from
+that moment forth; they have a bond of union stronger than exchange
+of nuts and sweetmeats.&nbsp; This feeling, I own, wears off in later
+life.&nbsp; Our names lose their freshness and interest, become trite
+and indifferent.&nbsp; But this, dear reader, is merely one of the sad
+effects of those &lsquo;shades of the prison-house&rsquo; which come
+gradually betwixt us and nature with advancing years; it affords no
+weapon against the philosophy of names.<br>
+<br>
+In after life, although we fail to trace its working, that name which
+careless godfathers lightly applied to your unconscious infancy will
+have been moulding your character, and influencing with irresistible
+power the whole course of your earthly fortunes.&nbsp; But the last
+name, overlooked by Mr. Shandy, is no whit less important as a condition
+of success.&nbsp; Family names, we must recollect, are but inherited
+nicknames; and if the <i>sobriquet</i> were applicable to the ancestor,
+it is most likely applicable to the descendant also.&nbsp; You would
+not expect to find Mr. M&rsquo;Phun acting as a mute, or Mr. M&rsquo;Lumpha
+excelling as a professor of dancing.&nbsp; Therefore, in what follows,
+we shall consider names, independent of whether they are first or last.&nbsp;
+And to begin with, look what a pull <i>Cromwell</i> had over <i>Pym</i>
+- the one name full of a resonant imperialism, the other, mean, pettifogging,
+and unheroic to a degree.&nbsp; Who would expect eloquence from <i>Pym</i>
+- who would read poems by <i>Pym</i> - who would bow to the opinion
+of <i>Pym</i>?&nbsp; He might have been a dentist, but he should never
+have aspired to be a statesman.&nbsp; I can only wonder that he succeeded
+as he did.&nbsp; Pym and Habakkuk stand first upon the roll of men who
+have triumphed, by sheer force of genius, over the most unfavourable
+appellations.&nbsp; But even these have suffered; and, had they been
+more fitly named, the one might have been Lord Protector, and the other
+have shared the laurels with Isaiah.&nbsp; In this matter we must not
+forget that all our great poets have borne great names.&nbsp; Chaucer,
+Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Shelley - what a constellation
+of lordly words!&nbsp; Not a single common-place name among them - not
+a Brown, not a Jones, not a Robinson; they are all names that one would
+stop and look at on a door-plate.&nbsp; Now, imagine if <i>Pepys</i>
+had tried to clamber somehow into the enclosure of poetry, what a blot
+would that word have made upon the list!&nbsp; The thing was impossible.&nbsp;
+In the first place a certain natural consciousness that men would have
+held him down to the level of his name, would have prevented him from
+rising above the Pepsine standard, and so haply withheld him altogether
+from attempting verse.&nbsp; Next, the booksellers would refuse to publish,
+and the world to read them, on the mere evidence of the fatal appellation.&nbsp;
+And now, before I close this section, I must say one word as to <i>punnable</i>
+names, names that stand alone, that have a significance and life apart
+from him that bears them.&nbsp; These are the bitterest of all.&nbsp;
+One friend of mine goes bowed and humbled through life under the weight
+of this misfortune; for it is an awful thing when a man&rsquo;s name
+is a joke, when he cannot be mentioned without exciting merriment, and
+when even the intimation of his death bids fair to carry laughter into
+many a home.<br>
+<br>
+So much for people who are badly named.&nbsp; Now for people who are
+<i>too</i> well named, who go top-heavy from the font, who are baptized
+into a false position, and find themselves beginning life eclipsed under
+the fame of some of the great ones of the past.&nbsp; A man, for instance,
+called William Shakespeare could never dare to write plays.&nbsp; He
+is thrown into too humbling an apposition with the author of <i>Hamlet</i>.&nbsp;
+Its own name coming after is such an anti-climax.&nbsp; &lsquo;The plays
+of William Shakespeare&rsquo;? says the reader - &lsquo;O no!&nbsp;
+The plays of William Shakespeare Cockerill,&rsquo; and he throws the
+book aside.&nbsp; In wise pursuance of such views, Mr. John Milton Hengler,
+who not long since delighted us in this favoured town, has never attempted
+to write an epic, but has chosen a new path, and has excelled upon the
+tight-rope.&nbsp; A marked example of triumph over this is the case
+of Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti.&nbsp; On the face of the matter, I should
+have advised him to imitate the pleasing modesty of the last-named gentleman,
+and confine his ambition to the sawdust.&nbsp; But Mr. Rossetti has
+triumphed.&nbsp; He has even dared to translate from his mighty name-father;
+and the voice of fame supports him in his boldness.<br>
+<br>
+Dear readers, one might write a year upon this matter.&nbsp; A lifetime
+of comparison and research could scarce suffice for its elucidation.&nbsp;
+So here, if it please you, we shall let it rest.&nbsp; Slight as these
+notes have been, I would that the great founder of the system had been
+alive to see them.&nbsp; How he had warmed and brightened, how his persuasive
+eloquence would have fallen on the ears of Toby; and what a letter of
+praise and sympathy would not the editor have received before the month
+was out!&nbsp; Alas, the thing was not to be.&nbsp; Walter Shandy died
+and was duly buried, while yet his theory lay forgotten and neglected
+by his fellow-countrymen.&nbsp; But, reader, the day will come, I hope,
+when a paternal government will stamp out, as seeds of national weakness,
+all depressing patronymics, and when godfathers and godmothers will
+soberly and earnestly debate the interest of the nameless one, and not
+rush blindfold to the christening.&nbsp; In these days there shall be
+written a &lsquo;Godfather&rsquo;s Assistant,&rsquo; in shape of a dictionary
+of names, with their concomitant virtues and vices; and this book shall
+be scattered broadcast through the land, and shall be on the table of
+every one eligible for godfathership, until such a thing as a vicious
+or untoward appellation shall have ceased from off the face of the earth.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CRITICISMS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I - LORD LYTTON&rsquo;S &lsquo;FABLES IN SONG&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It seems as if Lord Lytton, in this new book of his, had found the form
+most natural to his talent.&nbsp; In some ways, indeed, it may be held
+inferior to <i>Chronicles</i> <i>and Characters</i>; we look in vain
+for anything like the terrible intensity of the night-scene in <i>Irene</i>,
+or for any such passages of massive and memorable writing as appeared,
+here and there, in the earlier work, and made it not altogether unworthy
+of its model, Hugo&rsquo;s <i>Legend of the Ages</i>.&nbsp; But it becomes
+evident, on the most hasty retrospect, that this earlier work was a
+step on the way towards the later.&nbsp; It seems as if the author had
+been feeling about for his definite medium, and was already, in the
+language of the child&rsquo;s game, growing hot.&nbsp; There are many
+pieces in <i>Chronicles</i> <i>and Characters</i> that might be detached
+from their original setting, and embodied, as they stand, among the
+<i>Fables in Song.<br>
+<br>
+</i>For the term Fable is not very easy to define rigorously.&nbsp;
+In the most typical form some moral precept is set forth by means of
+a conception purely fantastic, and usually somewhat trivial into the
+bargain; there is something playful about it, that will not support
+a very exacting criticism, and the lesson must be apprehended by the
+fancy at half a hint.&nbsp; Such is the great mass of the old stories
+of wise animals or foolish men that have amused our childhood.&nbsp;
+But we should expect the fable, in company with other and more important
+literary forms, to be more and more loosely, or at least largely, comprehended
+as time went on, and so to degenerate in conception from this original
+type.&nbsp; That depended for much of its piquancy on the very fact
+that it was fantastic: the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous
+inappropriateness; and it is natural enough that pleasantry of this
+description should become less common, as men learn to suspect some
+serious analogy underneath.&nbsp; Thus a comical story of an ape touches
+us quite differently after the proposition of Mr. Darwin&rsquo;s theory.&nbsp;
+Moreover, there lay, perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort of
+fable, a humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; so that at the end
+of some story, in which vice or folly had met with its destined punishment,
+the fabulist might be able to assure his auditors, as we have often
+to assure tearful children on the like occasions, that they may dry
+their eyes, for none of it was true.<br>
+<br>
+But this benefit of fiction becomes lost with more sophisticated hearers
+and authors: a man is no longer the dupe of his own artifice, and cannot
+deal playfully with truths that are a matter of bitter concern to him
+in his life.&nbsp; And hence, in the progressive centralisation of modern
+thought, we should expect the old form of fable to fall gradually into
+desuetude, and be gradually succeeded by another, which is a fable in
+all points except that it is not altogether fabulous.&nbsp; And this
+new form, such as we should expect, and such as we do indeed find, still
+presents the essential character of brevity; as in any other fable also,
+there is, underlying and animating the brief action, a moral idea; and
+as in any other fable, the object is to bring this home to the reader
+through the intellect rather than through the feelings; so that, without
+being very deeply moved or interested by the characters of the piece,
+we should recognise vividly the hinges on which the little plot revolves.&nbsp;
+But the fabulist now seeks analogies where before he merely sought humorous
+situations.&nbsp; There will be now a logical nexus between the moral
+expressed and the machinery employed to express it.&nbsp; The machinery,
+in fact, as this change is developed, becomes less and less fabulous.&nbsp;
+We find ourselves in presence of quite a serious, if quite a miniature
+division of creative literature; and sometimes we have the lesson embodied
+in a sober, everyday narration, as in the parables of the New Testament,
+and sometimes merely the statement or, at most, the collocation of significant
+facts in life, the reader being left to resolve for himself the vague,
+troublesome, and not yet definitely moral sentiment which has been thus
+created.&nbsp; And step by step with the development of this change,
+yet another is developed: the moral tends to become more indeterminate
+and large.&nbsp; It ceases to be possible to append it, in a tag, to
+the bottom of the piece, as one might write the name below a caricature;
+and the fable begins to take rank with all other forms of creative literature,
+as something too ambitious, in spite of its miniature dimensions, to
+be resumed in any succinct formula without the loss of all that is deepest
+and most suggestive in it.<br>
+<br>
+Now it is in this widest sense that Lord Lytton understands the term;
+there are examples in his two pleasant volumes of all the forms already
+mentioned, and even of another which can only be admitted among fables
+by the utmost possible leniency of construction.&nbsp; &lsquo;Composure,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Et Caetera,&rsquo; and several more, are merely similes poetically
+elaborated.&nbsp; So, too, is the pathetic story of the grandfather
+and grandchild: the child, having treasured away an icicle and forgotten
+it for ten minutes, comes back to find it already nearly melted, and
+no longer beautiful: at the same time, the grandfather has just remembered
+and taken out a bundle of love-letters, which he too had stored away
+in years gone by, and then long neglected; and, behold! the letters
+are as faded and sorrowfully disappointing as the icicle.&nbsp; This
+is merely a simile poetically worked out; and yet it is in such as these,
+and some others, to be mentioned further on, that the author seems at
+his best.&nbsp; Wherever he has really written after the old model,
+there is something to be deprecated: in spite of all the spirit and
+freshness, in spite of his happy assumption of that cheerful acceptation
+of things as they are, which, rightly or wrongly, we come to attribute
+to the ideal fabulist, there is ever a sense as of something a little
+out of place.&nbsp; A form of literature so very innocent and primitive
+looks a little over-written in Lord Lytton&rsquo;s conscious and highly-coloured
+style.&nbsp; It may be bad taste, but sometimes we should prefer a few
+sentences of plain prose narration, and a little Bewick by way of tail-piece.&nbsp;
+So that it is not among those fables that conform most nearly to the
+old model, but one had nearly said among those that most widely differ
+from it, that we find the most satisfactory examples of the author&rsquo;s
+manner.<br>
+<br>
+In the mere matter of ingenuity, the metaphysical fables are the most
+remarkable; such as that of the windmill who imagined that it was he
+who raised the wind; or that of the grocer&rsquo;s balance (&lsquo;Cogito
+ergo sum&rsquo;) who considered himself endowed with free-will, reason,
+and an infallible practical judgment; until, one fine day, the police
+made a descent upon the shop, and find the weights false and the scales
+unequal; and the whole thing is broken up for old iron.&nbsp; Capital
+fables, also, in the same ironical spirit, are &lsquo;Prometheus Unbound,&rsquo;
+the tale of the vainglorying of a champagne-cork, and &lsquo;Teleology,&rsquo;
+where a nettle justifies the ways of God to nettles while all goes well
+with it, and, upon a change of luck, promptly changes its divinity.<br>
+<br>
+In all these there is still plenty of the fabulous if you will, although,
+even here, there may be two opinions possible; but there is another
+group, of an order of merit perhaps still higher, where we look in vain
+for any such playful liberties with Nature.&nbsp; Thus we have &lsquo;Conservation
+of Force&rsquo;; where a musician, thinking of a certain picture, improvises
+in the twilight; a poet, hearing the music, goes home inspired, and
+writes a poem; and then a painter, under the influence of this poem,
+paints another picture, thus lineally descended from the first.&nbsp;
+This is fiction, but not what we have been used to call fable.&nbsp;
+We miss the incredible element, the point of audacity with which the
+fabulist was wont to mock at his readers.&nbsp; And still more so is
+this the case with others.&nbsp; &lsquo;The Horse and the Fly&rsquo;
+states one of the unanswerable problems of life in quite a realistic
+and straightforward way.&nbsp; A fly startles a cab-horse, the coach
+is overset; a newly-married pair within and the driver, a man with a
+wife and family, are all killed.&nbsp; The horse continues to gallop
+off in the loose traces, and ends the tragedy by running over an only
+child; and there is some little pathetic detail here introduced in the
+telling, that makes the reader&rsquo;s indignation very white-hot against
+some one.&nbsp; It remains to be seen who that some one is to be: the
+fly?&nbsp; Nay, but on closer inspection, it appears that the fly, actuated
+by maternal instinct, was only seeking a place for her eggs: is maternal
+instinct, then, &lsquo;sole author of these mischiefs all&rsquo;?&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Who&rsquo;s in the Right?&rsquo; one of the best fables in the
+book, is somewhat in the same vein.&nbsp; After a battle has been won,
+a group of officers assemble inside a battery, and debate together who
+should have the honour of the success; the Prince, the general staff,
+the cavalry, the engineer who posted the battery in which they then
+stand talking, are successively named: the sergeant, who pointed the
+guns, sneers to himself at the mention of the engineer; and, close by,
+the gunner, who had applied the match, passes away with a smile of triumph,
+since it was through his hand that the victorious blow had been dealt.&nbsp;
+Meanwhile, the cannon claims the honour over the gunner; the cannon-ball,
+who actually goes forth on the dread mission, claims it over the cannon,
+who remains idly behind; the powder reminds the cannon-ball that, but
+for him, it would still be lying on the arsenal floor; and the match
+caps the discussion; powder, cannon-ball, and cannon would be all equally
+vain and ineffectual without fire.&nbsp; Just then there comes on a
+shower of rain, which wets the powder and puts out the match, and completes
+this lesson of dependence, by indicating the negative conditions which
+are as necessary for any effect, in their absence, as is the presence
+of this great fraternity of positive conditions, not any one of which
+can claim priority over any other.&nbsp; But the fable does not end
+here, as perhaps, in all logical strictness, it should.&nbsp; It wanders
+off into a discussion as to which is the truer greatness, that of the
+vanquished fire or that of the victorious rain.&nbsp; And the speech
+of the rain is charming:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Lo, with my little drops I bless again<br>
+And beautify the fields which thou didst blast!<br>
+Rend, wither, waste, and ruin, what thou wilt,<br>
+But call not Greatness what the Gods call Guilt.<br>
+Blossoms and grass from blood in battle spilt,<br>
+And poppied corn, I bring.<br>
+&lsquo;Mid mouldering Babels, to oblivion built,<br>
+My violets spring.<br>
+Little by little my small drops have strength<br>
+To deck with green delights the grateful earth.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+And so forth, not quite germane (it seems to me) to the matter in hand,
+but welcome for its own sake.<br>
+<br>
+Best of all are the fables that deal more immediately with the emotions.&nbsp;
+There is, for instance, that of &lsquo;The Two Travellers,&rsquo; which
+is profoundly moving in conception, although by no means as well written
+as some others.&nbsp; In this, one of the two, fearfully frost-bitten,
+saves his life out of the snow at the cost of all that was comely in
+his body; just as, long before, the other, who has now quietly resigned
+himself to death, had violently freed himself from Love at the cost
+of all that was finest and fairest in his character.&nbsp; Very graceful
+and sweet is the fable (if so it should be called) in which the author
+sings the praises of that &lsquo;kindly perspective,&rsquo; which lets
+a wheat-stalk near the eye cover twenty leagues of distant country,
+and makes the humble circle about a man&rsquo;s hearth more to him than
+all the possibilities of the external world.&nbsp; The companion fable
+to this is also excellent.&nbsp; It tells us of a man who had, all his
+life through, entertained a passion for certain blue hills on the far
+horizon, and had promised himself to travel thither ere he died, and
+become familiar with these distant friends.&nbsp; At last, in some political
+trouble, he is banished to the very place of his dreams.&nbsp; He arrives
+there overnight, and, when he rises and goes forth in the morning, there
+sure enough are the blue hills, only now they have changed places with
+him, and smile across to him, distant as ever, from the old home whence
+he has come.&nbsp; Such a story might have been very cynically treated;
+but it is not so done, the whole tone is kindly and consolatory, and
+the disenchanted man submissively takes the lesson, and understands
+that things far away are to be loved for their own sake, and that the
+unattainable is not truly unattainable, when we can make the beauty
+of it our own.&nbsp; Indeed, throughout all these two volumes, though
+there is much practical scepticism, and much irony on abstract questions,
+this kindly and consolatory spirit is never absent.&nbsp; There is much
+that is cheerful and, after a sedate, fireside fashion, hopeful.&nbsp;
+No one will be discouraged by reading the book; but the ground of all
+this hopefulness and cheerfulness remains to the end somewhat vague.&nbsp;
+It does not seem to arise from any practical belief in the future either
+of the individual or the race, but rather from the profound personal
+contentment of the writer.&nbsp; This is, I suppose, all we must look
+for in the case.&nbsp; It is as much as we can expect, if the fabulist
+shall prove a shrewd and cheerful fellow-wayfarer, one with whom the
+world does not seem to have gone much amiss, but who has yet laughingly
+learned something of its evil.&nbsp; It will depend much, of course,
+upon our own character and circumstances, whether the encounter will
+be agreeable and bracing to the spirits, or offend us as an ill-timed
+mockery.&nbsp; But where, as here, there is a little tincture of bitterness
+along with the good-nature, where it is plainly not the humour of a
+man cheerfully ignorant, but of one who looks on, tolerant and superior
+and smilingly attentive, upon the good and bad of our existence, it
+will go hardly if we do not catch some reflection of the same spirit
+to help us on our way.&nbsp; There is here no impertinent and lying
+proclamation of peace - none of the cheap optimism of the well-to-do;
+what we find here is a view of life that would be even grievous, were
+it not enlivened with this abiding cheerfulness, and ever and anon redeemed
+by a stroke of pathos.<br>
+<br>
+It is natural enough, I suppose, that we should find wanting in this
+book some of the intenser qualities of the author&rsquo;s work; and
+their absence is made up for by much happy description after a quieter
+fashion.&nbsp; The burst of jubilation over the departure of the snow,
+which forms the prelude to &lsquo;The Thistle,&rsquo; is full of spirit
+and of pleasant images.&nbsp; The speech of the forest in &lsquo;Sans
+Souci&rsquo; is inspired by a beautiful sentiment for nature of the
+modern sort, and pleases us more, I think, as poetry should please us,
+than anything in <i>Chronicles and Characters</i>.&nbsp; There are some
+admirable felicities of expression here and there; as that of the hill,
+whose summit<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&lsquo;Did print<br>
+The azure air with pines.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Moreover, I do not recollect in the author&rsquo;s former work any symptom
+of that sympathetic treatment of still life, which is noticeable now
+and again in the fables; and perhaps most noticeably, when he sketches
+the burned letters as they hover along the gusty flue, &lsquo;Thin,
+sable veils, wherein a restless spark Yet trembled.&rsquo;&nbsp; But
+the description is at its best when the subjects are unpleasant, or
+even grisly.&nbsp; There are a few capital lines in this key on the
+last spasm of the battle before alluded to.&nbsp; Surely nothing could
+be better, in its own way, than the fish in &lsquo;The Last Cruise of
+the Arrogant,&rsquo; &lsquo;the shadowy, side-faced, silent things,&rsquo;
+that come butting and staring with lidless eyes at the sunken steam-engine.&nbsp;
+And although, in yet another, we are told, pleasantly enough, how the
+water went down into the valleys, where it set itself gaily to saw wood,
+and on into the plains, where it would soberly carry grain to town;
+yet the real strength of the fable is when it dealt with the shut pool
+in which certain unfortunate raindrops are imprisoned among slugs and
+snails, and in the company of an old toad.&nbsp; The sodden contentment
+of the fallen acorn is strangely significant; and it is astonishing
+how unpleasantly we are startled by the appearance of her horrible lover,
+the maggot.<br>
+<br>
+And now for a last word, about the style.&nbsp; This is not easy to
+criticise.&nbsp; It is impossible to deny to it rapidity, spirit, and
+a full sound; the lines are never lame, and the sense is carried forward
+with an uninterrupted, impetuous rush.&nbsp; But it is not equal.&nbsp;
+After passages of really admirable versification, the author falls back
+upon a sort of loose, cavalry manner, not unlike the style of some of
+Mr. Browning&rsquo;s minor pieces, and almost inseparable from wordiness,
+and an easy acceptation of somewhat cheap finish.&nbsp; There is nothing
+here of that compression which is the note of a really sovereign style.&nbsp;
+It is unfair, perhaps, to set a not remarkable passage from Lord Lytton
+side by side with one of the signal masterpieces of another, and a very
+perfect poet; and yet it is interesting, when we see how the portraiture
+of a dog, detailed through thirty odd lines, is frittered down and finally
+almost lost in the mere laxity of the style, to compare it with the
+clear, simple, vigorous delineation that Burns, in four couplets, has
+given us of the ploughman&rsquo;s collie.&nbsp; It is interesting, at
+first, and then it becomes a little irritating; for when we think of
+other passages so much more finished and adroit, we cannot help feeling,
+that with a little more ardour after perfection of form, criticism would
+have found nothing left for her to censure.&nbsp; A similar mark of
+precipitate work is the number of adjectives tumultuously heaped together,
+sometimes to help out the sense, and sometimes (as one cannot but suspect)
+to help out the sound of the verses.&nbsp; I do not believe, for instance,
+that Lord Lytton himself would defend the lines in which we are told
+how Laoco&ouml;n &lsquo;Revealed to Roman crowds, now <i>Christian</i>
+grown, That <i>Pagan</i> anguish which, in <i>Parian</i> stone, The
+<i>Rhodian</i> artist,&rsquo; and so on.&nbsp; It is not only that this
+is bad in itself; but that it is unworthy of the company in which it
+is found; that such verses should not have appeared with the name of
+a good versifier like Lord Lytton.&nbsp; We must take exception, also,
+in conclusion, to the excess of alliteration.&nbsp; Alliteration is
+so liable to be abused that we can scarcely be too sparing of it; and
+yet it is a trick that seems to grow upon the author with years.&nbsp;
+It is a pity to see fine verses, such as some in &lsquo;Demos,&rsquo;
+absolutely spoiled by the recurrence of one wearisome consonant.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II - SALVINI&rsquo;S MACBETH<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Salvini closed his short visit to Edinburgh by a performance of <i>Macbeth</i>.&nbsp;
+It was, perhaps, from a sentiment of local colour that he chose to play
+the Scottish usurper for the first time before Scotsmen; and the audience
+were not insensible of the privilege.&nbsp; Few things, indeed, can
+move a stronger interest than to see a great creation taking shape for
+the first time.&nbsp; If it is not purely artistic, the sentiment is
+surely human.&nbsp; And the thought that you are before all the world,
+and have the start of so many others as eager as yourself, at least
+keeps you in a more unbearable suspense before the curtain rises, if
+it does not enhance the delight with which you follow the performance
+and see the actor &lsquo;bend up each corporal agent&rsquo; to realise
+a masterpiece of a few hours&rsquo; duration.&nbsp; With a player so
+variable as Salvini, who trusts to the feelings of the moment for so
+much detail, and who, night after night, does the same thing differently
+but always well, it can never be safe to pass judgment after a single
+hearing.&nbsp; And this is more particularly true of last week&rsquo;s
+<i>Macbeth</i>; for the whole third act was marred by a grievously humorous
+misadventure.&nbsp; Several minutes too soon the ghost of Banquo joined
+the party, and after having sat helpless a while at a table, was ignominiously
+withdrawn.&nbsp; Twice was this ghostly Jack-in-the-box obtruded on
+the stage before his time; twice removed again; and yet he showed so
+little hurry when he was really wanted, that, after an awkward pause,
+Macbeth had to begin his apostrophe to empty air.&nbsp; The arrival
+of the belated spectre in the middle, with a jerk that made him nod
+all over, was the last accident in the chapter, and worthily topped
+the whole.&nbsp; It may be imagined how lamely matters went throughout
+these cross purposes.<br>
+<br>
+In spite of this, and some other hitches, Salvini&rsquo;s Macbeth had
+an emphatic success.&nbsp; The creation is worthy of a place beside
+the same artist&rsquo;s Othello and Hamlet.&nbsp; It is the simplest
+and most unsympathetic of the three; but the absence of the finer lineaments
+of Hamlet is redeemed by gusto, breadth, and a headlong unity.&nbsp;
+Salvini sees nothing great in Macbeth beyond the royalty of muscle,
+and that courage which comes of strong and copious circulation.&nbsp;
+The moral smallness of the man is insisted on from the first, in the
+shudder of uncontrollable jealousy with which he sees Duncan embracing
+Banquo.&nbsp; He may have some northern poetry of speech, but he has
+not much logical understanding.&nbsp; In his dealings with the supernatural
+powers he is like a savage with his fetich, trusting them beyond bounds
+while all goes well, and whenever he is crossed, casting his belief
+aside and calling &lsquo;fate into the list.&rsquo;&nbsp; For his wife,
+he is little more than an agent, a frame of bone and sinew for her fiery
+spirit to command.&nbsp; The nature of his feeling towards her is rendered
+with a most precise and delicate touch.&nbsp; He always yields to the
+woman&rsquo;s fascination; and yet his caresses (and we know how much
+meaning Salvini can give to a caress) are singularly hard and unloving.&nbsp;
+Sometimes he lays his hand on her as he might take hold of any one who
+happened to be nearest to him at a moment of excitement.&nbsp; Love
+has fallen out of this marriage by the way, and left a curious friendship.&nbsp;
+Only once - at the very moment when she is showing herself so little
+a woman and so much a high-spirited man - only once is he very deeply
+stirred towards her; and that finds expression in the strange and horrible
+transport of admiration, doubly strange and horrible on Salvini&rsquo;s
+lips - &lsquo;Bring forth men-children only!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The murder scene, as was to be expected, pleased the audience best.&nbsp;
+Macbeth&rsquo;s voice, in the talk with his wife, was a thing not to
+be forgotten; and when he spoke of his hangman&rsquo;s hands he seemed
+to have blood in his utterance.&nbsp; Never for a moment, even in the
+very article of the murder, does he possess his own soul.&nbsp; He is
+a man on wires.&nbsp; From first to last it is an exhibition of hideous
+cowardice.&nbsp; For, after all, it is not here, but in broad daylight,
+with the exhilaration of conflict, where he can assure himself at every
+blow he has the longest sword and the heaviest hand, that this man&rsquo;s
+physical bravery can keep him up; he is an unwieldy ship, and needs
+plenty of way on before he will steer.<br>
+<br>
+In the banquet scene, while the first murderer gives account of what
+he has done, there comes a flash of truculent joy at the &lsquo;twenty
+trench&egrave;d gashes&rsquo; on Banquo&rsquo;s head.&nbsp; Thus Macbeth
+makes welcome to his imagination those very details of physical horror
+which are so soon to turn sour in him.&nbsp; As he runs out to embrace
+these cruel circumstances, as he seeks to realise to his mind&rsquo;s
+eye the reassuring spectacle of his dead enemy, he is dressing out the
+phantom to terrify himself; and his imagination, playing the part of
+justice, is to &lsquo;commend to his own lips the ingredients of his
+poisoned chalice.&rsquo;&nbsp; With the recollection of Hamlet and his
+father&rsquo;s spirit still fresh upon him, and the holy awe with which
+that good man encountered things not dreamt of in his philosophy, it
+was not possible to avoid looking for resemblances between the two apparitions
+and the two men haunted.&nbsp; But there are none to be found.&nbsp;
+Macbeth has a purely physical dislike for Banquo&rsquo;s spirit and
+the &lsquo;twenty trench&egrave;d gashes.&rsquo;&nbsp; He is afraid
+of he knows not what.&nbsp; He is abject, and again blustering.&nbsp;
+In the end he so far forgets himself, his terror, and the nature of
+what is before him, that he rushes upon it as he would upon a man.&nbsp;
+When his wife tells him he needs repose, there is something really childish
+in the way he looks about the room, and, seeing nothing, with an expression
+of almost sensual relief, plucks up heart enough to go to bed.&nbsp;
+And what is the upshot of the visitation?&nbsp; It is written in Shakespeare,
+but should be read with the commentary of Salvini&rsquo;s voice and
+expression:- &lsquo;O!<i> siam nell&rsquo; opra ancor fanciulli</i>&rsquo;
+-&nbsp; &lsquo;We are yet but young in deed.&rsquo;&nbsp; Circle below
+circle.&nbsp; He is looking with horrible satisfaction into the mouth
+of hell.&nbsp; There may still be a prick to-day; but to-morrow conscience
+will be dead, and he may move untroubled in this element of blood.<br>
+<br>
+In the fifth act we see this lowest circle reached; and it is Salvini&rsquo;s
+finest moment throughout the play.&nbsp; From the first he was admirably
+made up, and looked Macbeth to the full as perfectly as ever he looked
+Othello.&nbsp; From the first moment he steps upon the stage you can
+see this character is a creation to the fullest meaning of the phrase;
+for the man before you is a type you know well already.&nbsp; He arrives
+with Banquo on the heath, fair and red-bearded, sparing of gesture,
+full of pride and the sense of animal wellbeing, and satisfied after
+the battle like a beast who has eaten his fill.&nbsp; But in the fifth
+act there is a change.&nbsp; This is still the big, burly, fleshly,
+handsome-looking Thane; here is still the same face which in the earlier
+acts could be superficially good-humoured and sometimes royally courteous.&nbsp;
+But now the atmosphere of blood, which pervades the whole tragedy, has
+entered into the man and subdued him to its own nature; and an indescribable
+degradation, a slackness and puffiness, has overtaken his features.&nbsp;
+He has breathed the air of carnage, and supped full of horrors.&nbsp;
+Lady Macbeth complains of the smell of blood on her hand: Macbeth makes
+no complaint - he has ceased to notice it now; but the same smell is
+in his nostrils.&nbsp; A contained fury and disgust possesses him.&nbsp;
+He taunts the messenger and the doctor as people would taunt their mortal
+enemies.&nbsp; And, indeed, as he knows right well, every one is his
+enemy now, except his wife.&nbsp; About her he questions the doctor
+with something like a last human anxiety; and, in tones of grisly mystery,
+asks him if he can &lsquo;minister to a mind diseased.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+When the news of her death is brought him, he is staggered and falls
+into a seat; but somehow it is not anything we can call grief that he
+displays.&nbsp; There had been two of them against God and man; and
+now, when there is only one, it makes perhaps less difference than he
+had expected.&nbsp; And so her death is not only an affliction, but
+one more disillusion; and he redoubles in bitterness.&nbsp; The speech
+that follows, given with tragic cynicism in every word, is a dirge,
+not so much for her as for himself.&nbsp; From that time forth there
+is nothing human left in him, only &lsquo;the fiend of Scotland,&rsquo;
+Macduff&rsquo;s &lsquo;hell-hound,&rsquo; whom, with a stern glee, we
+see baited like a bear and hunted down like a wolf.&nbsp; He is inspired
+and set above fate by a demoniacal energy, a lust of wounds and slaughter.&nbsp;
+Even after he meets Macduff his courage does not fail; but when he hears
+the Thane was not born of woman, all virtue goes out of him; and though
+he speaks sounding words of defiance, the last combat is little better
+than a suicide.<br>
+<br>
+The whole performance is, as I said, so full of gusto and a headlong
+unity; the personality of Macbeth is so sharp and powerful; and within
+these somewhat narrow limits there is so much play and saliency that,
+so far as concerns Salvini himself, a third great success seems indubitable.&nbsp;
+Unfortunately, however, a great actor cannot fill more than a very small
+fraction of the boards; and though Banquo&rsquo;s ghost will probably
+be more seasonable in his future apparitions, there are some more inherent
+difficulties in the piece.&nbsp; The company at large did not distinguish
+themselves.&nbsp; Macduff, to the huge delight of the gallery, out-Macduff&rsquo;d
+the average ranter.&nbsp; The lady who filled the principal female part
+has done better on other occasions, but I fear she has not metal for
+what she tried last week.&nbsp; Not to succeed in the sleep-walking
+scene is to make a memorable failure.&nbsp; As it was given, it succeeded
+in being wrong in art without being true to nature.<br>
+<br>
+And there is yet another difficulty, happily easy to reform, which somewhat
+interfered with the success of the performance.&nbsp; At the end of
+the incantation scene the Italian translator has made Macbeth fall insensible
+upon the stage.&nbsp; This is a change of questionable propriety from
+a psychological point of view; while in point of view of effect it leaves
+the stage for some moments empty of all business.&nbsp; To remedy this,
+a bevy of green ballet-girls came forth and pointed their toes about
+the prostrate king.&nbsp; A dance of High Church curates, or a hornpipe
+by Mr. T. P. Cooke, would not be more out of the key; though the gravity
+of a Scots audience was not to be overcome, and they merely expressed
+their disapprobation by a round of moderate hisses, a similar irruption
+of Christmas fairies would most likely convulse a London theatre from
+pit to gallery with inextinguishable laughter.&nbsp; It is, I am told,
+the Italian tradition; but it is one more honoured in the breach than
+the observance.&nbsp; With the total disappearance of these damsels,
+with a stronger Lady Macbeth, and, if possible, with some compression
+of those scenes in which Salvini does not appear, and the spectator
+is left at the mercy of Macduffs and Duncans, the play would go twice
+as well, and we should be better able to follow and enjoy an admirable
+work of dramatic art.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III - BAGSTER&rsquo;S &lsquo;PILGRIM&rsquo;S PROGRESS&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I have here before me an edition of the <i>Pilgrim&rsquo;s</i> <i>Progress</i>,
+bound in green, without a date, and described as &lsquo;illustrated
+by nearly three hundred engravings, and memoir of Bunyan.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+On the outside it is lettered &lsquo;Bagster&rsquo;s Illustrated Edition,&rsquo;
+and after the author&rsquo;s apology, facing the first page of the tale,
+a folding pictorial &lsquo;Plan of the Road&rsquo; is marked as &lsquo;drawn
+by the late Mr. T. Conder,&rsquo; and engraved by J. Basire.&nbsp; No
+further information is anywhere vouchsafed; perhaps the publishers had
+judged the work too unimportant; and we are still left ignorant whether
+or not we owe the woodcuts in the body of the volume to the same hand
+that drew the plan.&nbsp; It seems, however, more than probable.&nbsp;
+The literal particularity of mind which, in the map, laid down the flower-plots
+in the devil&rsquo;s garden, and carefully introduced the court-house
+in the town of Vanity, is closely paralleled in many of the cuts; and
+in both, the architecture of the buildings and the disposition of the
+gardens have a kindred and entirely English air.&nbsp; Whoever he was,
+the author of these wonderful little pictures may lay claim to be the
+best illustrator of Bunyan.&nbsp; They are not only good illustrations,
+like so many others; but they are like so few, good illustrations of
+Bunyan.&nbsp; Their spirit, in defect and quality, is still the same
+as his own.&nbsp; The designer also has lain down and dreamed a dream,
+as literal, as quaint, and almost as apposite as Bunyan&rsquo;s; and
+text and pictures make but the two sides of the same homespun yet impassioned
+story.&nbsp; To do justice to the designs, it will be necessary to say,
+for the hundredth time, a word or two about the masterpiece which they
+adorn.<br>
+<br>
+All allegories have a tendency to escape from the purpose of their creators;
+and as the characters and incidents become more and more interesting
+in themselves, the moral, which these were to show forth, falls more
+and more into neglect.&nbsp; An architect may command a wreath of vine-leaves
+round the cornice of a monument; but if, as each leaf came from the
+chisel, it took proper life and fluttered freely on the wall, and if
+the vine grew, and the building were hidden over with foliage and fruit,
+the architect would stand in much the same situation as the writer of
+allegories.&nbsp; The <i>Fa&euml;ry</i> <i>Queen</i> was an allegory,
+I am willing to believe; but it survives as an imaginative tale in incomparable
+verse.&nbsp; The case of Bunyan is widely different; and yet in this
+also Allegory, poor nymph, although never quite forgotten, is sometimes
+rudely thrust against the wall.&nbsp; Bunyan was fervently in earnest;
+with &lsquo;his fingers in his ears, he ran on,&rsquo; straight for
+his mark.&nbsp; He tells us himself, in the conclusion to the first
+part, that he did not fear to raise a laugh; indeed, he feared nothing,
+and said anything; and he was greatly served in this by a certain rustic
+privilege of his style, which, like the talk of strong uneducated men,
+when it does not impress by its force, still charms by its simplicity.&nbsp;
+The mere story and the allegorical design enjoyed perhaps his equal
+favour.&nbsp; He believed in both with an energy of faith that was capable
+of moving mountains.&nbsp; And we have to remark in him, not the parts
+where inspiration fails and is supplied by cold and merely decorative
+invention, but the parts where faith has grown to be credulity, and
+his characters become so real to him that he forgets the end of their
+creation.&nbsp; We can follow him step by step into the trap which he
+lays for himself by his own entire good faith and triumphant literality
+of vision, till the trap closes and shuts him in an inconsistency.&nbsp;
+The allegories of the Interpreter and of the Shepherds of the Delectable
+Mountains are all actually performed, like stage-plays, before the pilgrims.&nbsp;
+The son of Mr. Great-grace visibly &lsquo;tumbles hills about with his
+words.&rsquo;&nbsp; Adam the First has his condemnation written visibly
+on his forehead, so that Faithful reads it.&nbsp; At the very instant
+the net closes round the pilgrims, &lsquo;the white robe falls from
+the black man&rsquo;s body.&rsquo;&nbsp; Despair &lsquo;getteth him
+a grievous crab-tree cudgel&rsquo;; it was in &lsquo;sunshiny weather&rsquo;
+that he had his fits; and the birds in the grove about the House Beautiful,
+&lsquo;our country birds,&rsquo; only sing their little pious verses
+&lsquo;at the spring, when the flowers appear and the sun shines warm.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I often,&rsquo; says Piety, &lsquo;go out to hear them; we also
+ofttimes keep them tame on our house.&rsquo;&nbsp; The post between
+Beulah and the Celestial City sounds his horn, as you may yet hear in
+country places.&nbsp; Madam Bubble, that &lsquo;tall, comely dame, something
+of a swarthy complexion, in very pleasant attire, but old,&rsquo; &lsquo;gives
+you a smile at the end of each sentence&rsquo; - a real woman she; we
+all know her.&nbsp; Christiana dying &lsquo;gave Mr. Stand-fast a ring,&rsquo;
+for no possible reason in the allegory, merely because the touch was
+human and affecting.&nbsp; Look at Great-heart, with his soldierly ways,
+garrison ways, as I had almost called them; with his taste in weapons;
+his delight in any that &lsquo;he found to be a man of his hands&rsquo;;
+his chivalrous point of honour, letting Giant Maul get up again when
+he was down, a thing fairly flying in the teeth of the moral; above
+all, with his language in the inimitable tale of Mr. Fearing: &lsquo;I
+thought I should have lost my man&rsquo; - &lsquo;chicken-hearted&rsquo;
+- &lsquo;at last he came in, and I will say that for my lord, he carried
+it wonderful lovingly to him.&rsquo;&nbsp; This is no Independent minister;
+this is a stout, honest, big-busted ancient, adjusting his shoulder-belts,
+twirling his long moustaches as he speaks.&nbsp; Last and most remarkable,
+&lsquo;My sword,&rsquo; says the dying Valiant-for-Truth, he in whom
+Great-heart delighted, &lsquo;my sword I give to him that shall succeed
+me in my pilgrimage, <i>and my courage and skill to him that can get
+it</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; And after this boast, more arrogantly unorthodox
+than was ever dreamed of by the rejected Ignorance, we are told that
+&lsquo;all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+In every page the book is stamped with the same energy of vision and
+the same energy of belief.&nbsp; The quality is equally and indifferently
+displayed in the spirit of the fighting, the tenderness of the pathos,
+the startling vigour and strangeness of the incidents, the natural strain
+of the conversations, and the humanity and charm of the characters.&nbsp;
+Trivial talk over a meal, the dying words of heroes, the delights of
+Beulah or the Celestial City, Apollyon and my Lord Hate-good, Great-heart,
+and Mr. Worldly-Wiseman, all have been imagined with the same clearness,
+all written of with equal gusto and precision, all created in the same
+mixed element, of simplicity that is almost comical, and art that, for
+its purpose, is faultless.<br>
+<br>
+It was in much the same spirit that our artist sat down to his drawings.&nbsp;
+He is by nature a Bunyan of the pencil.&nbsp; He, too, will draw anything,
+from a butcher at work on a dead sheep, up to the courts of Heaven.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;A Lamb for Supper&rsquo; is the name of one of his designs, &lsquo;Their
+Glorious Entry&rsquo; of another.&nbsp; He has the same disregard for
+the ridiculous, and enjoys somewhat of the same privilege of style,
+so that we are pleased even when we laugh the most.&nbsp; He is literal
+to the verge of folly.&nbsp; If dust is to be raised from the unswept
+parlour, you may be sure it will &lsquo;fly abundantly&rsquo; in the
+picture.&nbsp; If Faithful is to lie &lsquo;as dead&rsquo; before Moses,
+dead he shall lie with a warrant - dead and stiff like granite; nay
+(and here the artist must enhance upon the symbolism of the author),
+it is with the identical stone tables of the law that Moses fells the
+sinner.&nbsp; Good and bad people, whom we at once distinguish in the
+text by their names, Hopeful, Honest, and Valiant-for-Truth, on the
+one hand, as against By-ends, Sir Having Greedy, and the Lord Old-man
+on the other, are in these drawings as simply distinguished by their
+costume.&nbsp; Good people, when not armed <i>cap-&agrave;-pie</i>,
+wear a speckled tunic girt about the waist, and low hats, apparently
+of straw.&nbsp; Bad people swagger in tail-coats and chimney-pots, a
+few with knee-breeches, but the large majority in trousers, and for
+all the world like guests at a garden-party.&nbsp; Worldly-Wiseman alone,
+by some inexplicable quirk, stands before Christian in laced hat, embroidered
+waistcoat, and trunk-hose.&nbsp; But above all examples of this artist&rsquo;s
+intrepidity, commend me to the print entitled &lsquo;Christian Finds
+it Deep.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;A great darkness and horror,&rsquo; says
+the text, have fallen on the pilgrim; it is the comfortless deathbed
+with which Bunyan so strikingly concludes the sorrows and conflicts
+of his hero.&nbsp; How to represent this worthily the artist knew not;
+and yet he was determined to represent it somehow.&nbsp; This was how
+he did: Hopeful is still shown to his neck above the water of death;
+but Christian has bodily disappeared, and a blot of solid blackness
+indicates his place.<br>
+<br>
+As you continue to look at these pictures, about an inch square for
+the most part, sometimes printed three or more to the page, and each
+having a printed legend of its own, however trivial the event recorded,
+you will soon become aware of two things: first, that the man can draw,
+and, second, that he possesses the gift of an imagination.&nbsp; &lsquo;Obstinate
+reviles,&rsquo; says the legend; and you should see Obstinate reviling.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;He warily retraces his steps&rsquo;; and there is Christian,
+posting through the plain, terror and speed in every muscle.&nbsp; &lsquo;Mercy
+yearns to go&rsquo; shows you a plain interior with packing going forward,
+and, right in the middle, Mercy yearning to go - every line of the girl&rsquo;s
+figure yearning.&nbsp; In &lsquo;The Chamber called Peace&rsquo; we
+see a simple English room, bed with white curtains, window valance and
+door, as may be found in many thousand unpretentious houses; but far
+off, through the open window, we behold the sun uprising out of a great
+plain, and Christian hails it with his hand:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Where am I now! is this the love and care<br>
+Of Jesus, for the men that pilgrims are!<br>
+Thus to provide!&nbsp; That I should be forgiven!<br>
+And dwell already the next door to heaven!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A page or two further, from the top of the House Beautiful, the damsels
+point his gaze toward the Delectable Mountains: &lsquo;The Prospect,&rsquo;
+so the cut is ticketed - and I shall be surprised, if on less than a
+square inch of paper you can show me one so wide and fair.&nbsp; Down
+a cross road on an English plain, a cathedral city outlined on the horizon,
+a hazel shaw upon the left, comes Madam Wanton dancing with her fair
+enchanted cup, and Faithful, book in hand, half pauses.&nbsp; The cut
+is perfect as a symbol; the giddy movement of the sorceress, the uncertain
+poise of the man struck to the heart by a temptation, the contrast of
+that even plain of life whereon he journeys with the bold, ideal bearing
+of the wanton - the artist who invented and portrayed this had not merely
+read Bunyan, he had also thoughtfully lived.&nbsp; The Delectable Mountains
+- I continue skimming the first part - are not on the whole happily
+rendered.&nbsp; Once, and once only, the note is struck, when Christian
+and Hopeful are seen coming, shoulder-high, through a thicket of green
+shrubs - box, perhaps, or perfumed nutmeg; while behind them, domed
+or pointed, the hills stand ranged against the sky.&nbsp; A little further,
+and we come to that masterpiece of Bunyan&rsquo;s insight into life,
+the Enchanted Ground; where, in a few traits, he has set down the latter
+end of such a number of the would-be good; where his allegory goes so
+deep that, to people looking seriously on life, it cuts like satire.&nbsp;
+The true significance of this invention lies, of course, far out of
+the way of drawing; only one feature, the great tedium of the land,
+the growing weariness in well-doing, may be somewhat represented in
+a symbol.&nbsp; The pilgrims are near the end: &lsquo;Two Miles Yet,&rsquo;
+says the legend.&nbsp; The road goes ploughing up and down over a rolling
+heath; the wayfarers, with outstretched arms, are already sunk to the
+knees over the brow of the nearest hill; they have just passed a milestone
+with the cipher two; from overhead a great, piled, summer cumulus, as
+of a slumberous summer afternoon, beshadows them: two miles! it might
+be hundreds.&nbsp; In dealing with the Land of Beulah the artist lags,
+in both parts, miserably behind the text, but in the distant prospect
+of the Celestial City more than regains his own.&nbsp; You will remember
+when Christian and Hopeful &lsquo;with desire fell sick.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Effect of the Sunbeams&rsquo; is the artist&rsquo;s title.&nbsp;
+Against the sky, upon a cliffy mountain, the radiant temple beams upon
+them over deep, subjacent woods; they, behind a mound, as if seeking
+shelter from the splendour - one prostrate on his face, one kneeling,
+and with hands ecstatically lifted - yearn with passion after that immortal
+city.&nbsp; Turn the page, and we behold them walking by the very shores
+of death; Heaven, from this nigher view, has risen half-way to the zenith,
+and sheds a wider glory; and the two pilgrims, dark against that brightness,
+walk and sing out of the fulness of their hearts.&nbsp; No cut more
+thoroughly illustrates at once the merit and the weakness of the artist.&nbsp;
+Each pilgrim sings with a book in his grasp - a family Bible at the
+least for bigness; tomes so recklessly enormous that our second, impulse
+is to laughter.&nbsp; And yet that is not the first thought, nor perhaps
+the last.&nbsp; Something in the attitude of the manikins - faces they
+have none, they are too small for that - something in the way they swing
+these monstrous volumes to their singing, something perhaps borrowed
+from the text, some subtle differentiation from the cut that went before
+and the cut that follows after - something, at least, speaks clearly
+of a fearful joy, of Heaven seen from the deathbed, of the horror of
+the last passage no less than of the glorious coming home.&nbsp; There
+is that in the action of one of them which always reminds me, with a
+difference, of that haunting last glimpse of Thomas Idle, travelling
+to Tyburn in the cart.&nbsp; Next come the Shining Ones, wooden and
+trivial enough; the pilgrims pass into the river; the blot already mentioned
+settles over and obliterates Christian.&nbsp; In two more cuts we behold
+them drawing nearer to the other shore; and then, between two radiant
+angels, one of whom points upward, we see them mounting in new weeds,
+their former lendings left behind them on the inky river.&nbsp; More
+angels meet them; Heaven is displayed, and if no better, certainly no
+worse, than it has been shown by others - a place, at least, infinitely
+populous and glorious with light - a place that haunts solemnly the
+hearts of children.&nbsp; And then this symbolic draughtsman once more
+strikes into his proper vein.&nbsp; Three cuts conclude the first part.&nbsp;
+In the first the gates close, black against the glory struggling from
+within.&nbsp; The second shows us Ignorance - alas! poor Arminian! -
+hailing, in a sad twilight, the ferryman Vain-Hope; and in the third
+we behold him, bound hand and foot, and black already with the hue of
+his eternal fate, carried high over the mountain-tops of the world by
+two angels of the anger of the Lord.&nbsp; &lsquo;Carried to Another
+Place,&rsquo; the artist enigmatically names his plate - a terrible
+design.<br>
+<br>
+Wherever he touches on the black side of the supernatural his pencil
+grows more daring and incisive.&nbsp; He has many true inventions in
+the perilous and diabolic; he has many startling nightmares realised.&nbsp;
+It is not easy to select the best; some may like one and some another;
+the nude, depilated devil bounding and casting darts against the Wicket
+Gate; the scroll of flying horrors that hang over Christian by the Mouth
+of Hell; the horned shade that comes behind him whispering blasphemies;
+the daylight breaking through that rent cave-mouth of the mountains
+and falling chill adown the haunted tunnel; Christian&rsquo;s further
+progress along the causeway, between the two black pools, where, at
+every yard or two, a gin, a pitfall, or a snare awaits the passer-by
+- loathsome white devilkins harbouring close under the bank to work
+the springes, Christian himself pausing and pricking with his sword&rsquo;s
+point at the nearest noose, and pale discomfortable mountains rising
+on the farther side; or yet again, the two ill-favoured ones that beset
+the first of Christian&rsquo;s journey, with the frog-like structure
+of the skull, the frog-like limberness of limbs - crafty, slippery,
+lustful-looking devils, drawn always in outline as though possessed
+of a dim, infernal luminosity.&nbsp; Horrid fellows are they, one and
+all; horrid fellows and horrific scenes.&nbsp; In another spirit that
+Good-Conscience &lsquo;to whom Mr. Honest had spoken in his lifetime,&rsquo;
+a cowled, grey, awful figure, one hand pointing to the heavenly shore,
+realises, I will not say all, but some at least of the strange impressiveness
+of Bunyan&rsquo;s words.&nbsp; It is no easy nor pleasant thing to speak
+in one&rsquo;s lifetime with Good-Conscience; he is an austere, unearthly
+friend, whom maybe Torquemada knew; and the folds of his raiment are
+not merely claustral, but have something of the horror of the pall.&nbsp;
+Be not afraid, however; with the hand of that appearance Mr. Honest
+will get safe across.<br>
+<br>
+Yet perhaps it is in sequences that this artist best displays himself.&nbsp;
+He loves to look at either side of a thing: as, for instance, when he
+shows us both sides of the wall - &lsquo;Grace Inextinguishable&rsquo;
+on the one side, with the devil vainly pouring buckets on the flame,
+and &lsquo;The Oil of Grace&rsquo; on the other, where the Holy Spirit,
+vessel in hand, still secretly supplies the fire.&nbsp; He loves, also,
+to show us the same event twice over, and to repeat his instantaneous
+photographs at the interval of but a moment.&nbsp; So we have, first,
+the whole troop of pilgrims coming up to Valiant, and Great-heart to
+the front, spear in hand and parleying; and next, the same cross-roads,
+from a more distant view, the convoy now scattered and looking safely
+and curiously on, and Valiant handing over for inspection his &lsquo;right
+Jerusalem blade.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is true that this designer has no great
+care after consistency: Apollyon&rsquo;s spear is laid by, his quiver
+of darts will disappear, whenever they might hinder the designer&rsquo;s
+freedom; and the fiend&rsquo;s tail is blobbed or forked at his good
+pleasure.&nbsp; But this is not unsuitable to the illustration of the
+fervent Bunyan, breathing hurry and momentary inspiration.&nbsp; He,
+with his hot purpose, hunting sinners with a lasso, shall himself forget
+the things that he has written yesterday.&nbsp; He shall first slay
+Heedless in the Valley of the Shadow, and then take leave of him talking
+in his sleep, as if nothing had happened, in an arbour on the Enchanted
+Ground.&nbsp; And again, in his rhymed prologue, he shall assign some
+of the glory of the siege of Doubting Castle to his favourite Valiant-for-the-Truth,
+who did not meet with the besiegers till long after, at that dangerous
+corner by Deadman&rsquo;s Lane.&nbsp; And, with all inconsistencies
+and freedoms, there is a power shown in these sequences of cuts: a power
+of joining on one action or one humour to another; a power of following
+out the moods, even of the dismal subterhuman fiends engendered by the
+artist&rsquo;s fancy; a power of sustained continuous realisation, step
+by step, in nature&rsquo;s order, that can tell a story, in all its
+ins and outs, its pauses and surprises, fully and figuratively, like
+the art of words.<br>
+<br>
+One such sequence is the fight of Christian and Apollyon - six cuts,
+weird and fiery, like the text.&nbsp; The pilgrim is throughout a pale
+and stockish figure; but the devil covers a multitude of defects.&nbsp;
+There is no better devil of the conventional order than our artist&rsquo;s
+Apollyon, with his mane, his wings, his bestial legs, his changing and
+terrifying expression, his infernal energy to slay.&nbsp; In cut the
+first you see him afar off, still obscure in form, but already formidable
+in suggestion.&nbsp; Cut the second, &lsquo;The Fiend in Discourse,&rsquo;
+represents him, not reasoning, railing rather, shaking his spear at
+the pilgrim, his shoulder advanced, his tail writhing in the air, his
+foot ready for a spring, while Christian stands back a little, timidly
+defensive.&nbsp; The third illustrates these magnificent words: &lsquo;Then
+Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said,
+I am void of fear in this matter: prepare thyself to die; for I swear
+by my infernal den that thou shalt go no farther: here will I spill
+thy soul!&nbsp; And with that he threw a flaming dart at his breast.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+In the cut he throws a dart with either hand, belching pointed flames
+out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans, and straddling the while
+across the path, as only a fiend can straddle who has just sworn by
+his infernal den.&nbsp; The defence will not be long against such vice,
+such flames, such red-hot nether energy.&nbsp; And in the fourth cut,
+to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion,
+and roaring as he leaps.&nbsp; The fifth shows the climacteric of the
+battle; Christian has reached nimbly out and got his sword, and dealt
+that deadly home-thrust, the fiend still stretched upon him, but &lsquo;giving
+back, as one that had received his mortal wound.&rsquo;&nbsp; The raised
+head, the bellowing mouth, the paw clapped upon the sword, the one wing
+relaxed in agony, all realise vividly these words of the text.&nbsp;
+In the sixth and last, the trivial armed figure of the pilgrim is seen
+kneeling with clasped hands on the betrodden scene of contest and among
+the shivers of the darts; while just at the margin the hinder quarters
+and the tail of Apollyon are whisking off, indignant and discounted.<br>
+<br>
+In one point only do these pictures seem to be unworthy of the text,
+and that point is one rather of the difference of arts than the difference
+of artists.&nbsp; Throughout his best and worst, in his highest and
+most divine imaginations as in the narrowest sallies of his sectarianism,
+the human-hearted piety of Bunyan touches and ennobles, convinces, accuses
+the reader.&nbsp; Through no art beside the art of words can the kindness
+of a man&rsquo;s affections be expressed.&nbsp; In the cuts you shall
+find faithfully parodied the quaintness and the power, the triviality
+and the surprising freshness of the author&rsquo;s fancy; there you
+shall find him out-stripped in ready symbolism and the art of bringing
+things essentially invisible before the eyes: but to feel the contact
+of essential goodness, to be made in love with piety, the book must
+be read and not the prints examined.<br>
+<br>
+Farewell should not be taken with a grudge; nor can I dismiss in any
+other words than those of gratitude a series of pictures which have,
+to one at least, been the visible embodiment of Bunyan from childhood
+up, and shown him, through all his years, Great-heart lungeing at Giant
+Maul, and Apollyon breathing fire at Christian, and every turn and town
+along the road to the Celestial City, and that bright place itself,
+seen as to a stave of music, shining afar off upon the hill-top, the
+candle of the world.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+SKETCHES<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE SATIRIST<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+My companion enjoyed a cheap reputation for wit and insight.&nbsp; He
+was by habit and repute a satirist.&nbsp; If he did occasionally condemn
+anything or anybody who richly deserved it, and whose demerits had hitherto
+escaped, it was simply because he condemned everything and everybody.&nbsp;
+While I was with him he disposed of St. Paul with an epigram, shook
+my reverence for Shakespeare in a neat antithesis, and fell foul of
+the Almighty Himself, on the score of one or two out of the ten commandments.&nbsp;
+Nothing escaped his blighting censure.&nbsp; At every sentence he overthrew
+an idol, or lowered my estimation of a friend.&nbsp; I saw everything
+with new eyes, and could only marvel at my former blindness.&nbsp; How
+was it possible that I had not before observed A&rsquo;s false hair,
+B&rsquo;s selfishness, or C&rsquo;s boorish manners?&nbsp; I and my
+companion, methought, walked the streets like a couple of gods among
+a swarm of vermin; for every one we saw seemed to bear openly upon his
+brow the mark of the apocalyptic beast.&nbsp; I half expected that these
+miserable beings, like the people of Lystra, would recognise their betters
+and force us to the altar; in which case, warned by the late of Paul
+and Barnabas, I do not know that my modesty would have prevailed upon
+me to decline.&nbsp; But there was no need for such churlish virtue.&nbsp;
+More blinded than the Lycaonians, the people saw no divinity in our
+gait; and as our temporary godhead lay more in the way of observing
+than healing their infirmities, we were content to pass them by in scorn.<br>
+<br>
+I could not leave my companion, not from regard or even from interest,
+but from a very natural feeling, inseparable from the case.&nbsp; To
+understand it, let us take a simile.&nbsp; Suppose yourself walking
+down the street with a man who continues to sprinkle the crowd out of
+a flask of vitriol.&nbsp; You would be much diverted with the grimaces
+and contortions of his victims; and at the same time you would fear
+to leave his arm until his bottle was empty, knowing that, when once
+among the crowd, you would run a good chance yourself of baptism with
+his biting liquor.&nbsp; Now my companion&rsquo;s vitriol was inexhaustible.<br>
+<br>
+It was perhaps the consciousness of this, the knowledge that I was being
+anointed already out of the vials of his wrath, that made me fall to
+criticising the critic, whenever we had parted.<br>
+<br>
+After all, I thought, our satirist has just gone far enough into his
+neighbours to find that the outside is false, without caring to go farther
+and discover what is really true.&nbsp; He is content to find that things
+are not what they seem, and broadly generalises from it that they do
+not exist at all.&nbsp; He sees our virtues are not what they pretend
+they are; and, on the strength of that, he denies us the possession
+of virtue altogether.&nbsp; He has learnt the first lesson, that no
+man is wholly good; but he has not even suspected that there is another
+equally true, to wit, that no man is wholly bad.&nbsp; Like the inmate
+of a coloured star, he has eyes for one colour alone.&nbsp; He has a
+keen scent after evil, but his nostrils are plugged against all good,
+as people plugged their nostrils before going about the streets of the
+plague-struck city.<br>
+<br>
+Why does he do this?&nbsp; It is most unreasonable to flee the knowledge
+of good like the infection of a horrible disease, and batten and grow
+fat in the real atmosphere of a lazar-house.&nbsp; This was my first
+thought; but my second was not like unto it, and I saw that our satirist
+was wise, wise in his generation, like the unjust steward.&nbsp; He
+does not want light, because the darkness is more pleasant.&nbsp; He
+does not wish to see the good, because he is happier without it.&nbsp;
+I recollect that when I walked with him, I was in a state of divine
+exaltation, such as Adam and Eve must have enjoyed when the savour of
+the fruit was still unfaded between their lips; and I recognise that
+this must be the man&rsquo;s habitual state.&nbsp; He has the forbidden
+fruit in his waist-coat pocket, and can make himself a god as often
+and as long as he likes.&nbsp; He has raised himself upon a glorious
+pedestal above his fellows; he has touched the summit of ambition; and
+he envies neither King nor Kaiser, Prophet nor Priest, content in an
+elevation as high as theirs, and much more easily attained.&nbsp; Yes,
+certes, much more easily attained.&nbsp; He has not risen by climbing
+himself, but by pushing others down.&nbsp; He has grown great in his
+own estimation, not by blowing himself out, and risking the fate of
+AEsop&rsquo;s frog, but simply by the habitual use of a diminishing
+glass on everybody else.&nbsp; And I think altogether that his is a
+better, a safer, and a surer recipe than most others.<br>
+<br>
+After all, however, looking back on what I have written, I detect a
+spirit suspiciously like his own.&nbsp; All through, I have been comparing
+myself with our satirist, and all through, I have had the best of the
+comparison.&nbsp; Well, well, contagion is as often mental as physical;
+and I do not think my readers, who have all been under his lash, will
+blame me very much for giving the headsman a mouthful of his own sawdust.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+NUITS BLANCHES<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+If any one should know the pleasure and pain of a sleepless night, it
+should be I.&nbsp; I remember, so long ago, the sickly child that woke
+from his few hours&rsquo; slumber with the sweat of a nightmare on his
+brow, to lie awake and listen and long for the first signs of life among
+the silent streets.&nbsp; These nights of pain and weariness are graven
+on my mind; and so when the same thing happened to me again, everything
+that I heard or saw was rather a recollection than a discovery.<br>
+<br>
+Weighed upon by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I listened
+eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet.&nbsp; But nothing
+came, save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the old cabinet that was
+made by Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle of the coals on the extinguished
+fire.&nbsp; It was a calm; or I know that I should have heard in the
+roar and clatter of the storm, as I have not heard it for so many years,
+the wild career of a horseman, always scouring up from the distance
+and passing swiftly below the window; yet always returning again from
+the place whence first he came, as though, baffled by some higher power,
+he had retraced his steps to gain impetus for another and another attempt.<br>
+<br>
+As I lay there, there arose out of the utter stillness the rumbling
+of a carriage a very great way off, that drew near, and passed within
+a few streets of the house, and died away as gradually as it had arisen.&nbsp;
+This, too, was as a reminiscence.<br>
+<br>
+I rose and lifted a corner of the blind.&nbsp; Over the black belt of
+the garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there
+a lighted window.&nbsp; How often before had my nurse lifted me out
+of bed and pointed them out to me, while we wondered together if, there
+also, there were children that could not sleep, and if these lighted
+oblongs were signs of those that waited like us for the morning.<br>
+<br>
+I went out into the lobby, and looked down into the great deep well
+of the staircase.&nbsp; For what cause I know not, just as it used to
+be in the old days that the feverish child might be the better served,
+a peep of gas illuminated a narrow circle far below me.&nbsp; But where
+I was, all was darkness and silence, save the dry monotonous ticking
+of the clock that came ceaselessly up to my ear.<br>
+<br>
+The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of reproduction on
+the pictures of my memory, was the arrival of that time for which, all
+night through, I waited and longed of old.&nbsp; It was my custom, as
+the hours dragged on, to repeat the question, &lsquo;When will the carts
+come in?&rsquo; and repeat it again and again until at last those sounds
+arose in the street that I have heard once more this morning.&nbsp;
+The road before our house is a great thoroughfare for early carts.&nbsp;
+I know not, and I never have known, what they carry, whence they come,
+or whither they go.&nbsp; But I know that, long ere dawn, and for hours
+together, they stream continuously past, with the same rolling and jerking
+of wheels and the same clink of horses&rsquo; feet.&nbsp; It was not
+for nothing that they made the burthen of my wishes all night through.&nbsp;
+They are really the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of day;
+and it pleases you as much to hear them as it must please a shipwrecked
+seaman once again to grasp a hand of flesh and blood after years of
+miserable solitude.&nbsp; They have the freshness of the daylight life
+about them.&nbsp; You can hear the carters cracking their whips and
+crying hoarsely to their horses or to one another; and sometimes even
+a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter comes up to you through the
+darkness.&nbsp; There is now an end of mystery and fear.&nbsp; Like
+the knocking at the door in <i>Macbeth</i>, <a name="citation8"></a><a href="#footnote8">{8}</a>
+or the cry of the watchman in the <i>Tour de Nesle</i>, they show that
+the horrible caesura is over and the nightmares have fled away, because
+the day is breaking and the ordinary life of men is beginning to bestir
+itself among the streets.<br>
+<br>
+In the middle of it all I fell asleep, to be wakened by the officious
+knocking at my door, and I find myself twelve years older than I had
+dreamed myself all night.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE WREATH OF IMMORTELLES<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It is all very well to talk of death as &lsquo;a pleasant potion of
+immortality&rsquo;, but the most of us, I suspect, are of &lsquo;queasy
+stomachs,&rsquo; and find it none of the sweetest. <a name="citation9a"></a><a href="#footnote9a">{9a}</a>&nbsp;
+The graveyard may be cloak-room to Heaven; but we must admit that it
+is a very ugly and offensive vestibule in itself, however fair may be
+the life to which it leads.&nbsp; And though Enoch and Elias went into
+the temple through a gate which certainly may be called Beautiful, the
+rest of us have to find our way to it through Ezekiel&rsquo;s low-bowed
+door and the vault full of creeping things and all manner of abominable
+beasts.&nbsp; Nevertheless, there is a certain frame of mind to which
+a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation.&nbsp; If
+you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.&nbsp; It was in obedience
+to this wise regulation that the other morning found me lighting my
+pipe at the entrance to Old Greyfriars&rsquo;, thoroughly sick of the
+town, the country, and myself.<br>
+<br>
+Two of the men were talking at the gate, one of them carrying a spade
+in hands still crusted with the soil of graves.&nbsp; Their very aspect
+was delightful to me; and I crept nearer to them, thinking to pick up
+some snatch of sexton gossip, some &lsquo;talk fit for a charnel,&rsquo;
+<a name="citation9b"></a><a href="#footnote9b">{9b}</a> something, in
+fine, worthy of that fastidious logician, that adept in coroner&rsquo;s
+law, who has come down to us as the patron of Yaughan&rsquo;s liquor,
+and the very prince of gravediggers.&nbsp; Scots people in general are
+so much wrapped up in their profession that I had a good chance of overhearing
+such conversation: the talk of fish-mongers running usually on stockfish
+and haddocks; while of the Scots sexton I could repeat stories and speeches
+that positively smell of the graveyard.&nbsp; But on this occasion I
+was doomed to disappointment.&nbsp; My two friends were far into the
+region of generalities.&nbsp; Their profession was forgotten in their
+electorship.&nbsp; Politics had engulfed the narrower economy of grave-digging.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Na, na,&rsquo; said the one, &lsquo;ye&rsquo;re a&rsquo; wrang.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The English and Irish Churches,&rsquo; answered the other, in
+a tone as if he had made the remark before, and it had been called in
+question - &lsquo;The English and Irish Churches have <i>impoverished</i>
+the country.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Such are the results of education,&rsquo; thought I as I passed
+beside them and came fairly among the tombs.&nbsp; Here, at least, there
+were no commonplace politics, no diluted this-morning&rsquo;s leader,
+to distract or offend me.&nbsp; The old shabby church showed, as usual,
+its quaint extent of roofage and the relievo skeleton on one gable,
+still blackened with the fire of thirty years ago.&nbsp; A chill dank
+mist lay over all.&nbsp; The Old Greyfriars&rsquo; churchyard was in
+perfection that morning, and one could go round and reckon up the associations
+with no fear of vulgar interruption.&nbsp; On this stone the Covenant
+was signed.&nbsp; In that vault, as the story goes, John Knox took hiding
+in some Reformation broil.&nbsp; From that window Burke the murderer
+looked out many a time across the tombs, and perhaps o&rsquo; nights
+let himself down over the sill to rob some new-made grave.&nbsp; Certainly
+he would have a selection here.&nbsp; The very walks have been carried
+over forgotten resting-places; and the whole ground is uneven, because
+(as I was once quaintly told) &lsquo;when the wood rots it stands to
+reason the soil should fall in,&rsquo; which, from the law of gravitation,
+is certainly beyond denial.&nbsp; But it is round the boundary that
+there are the finest tombs.&nbsp; The whole irregular space is, as it
+were, fringed with quaint old monuments, rich in death&rsquo;s-heads
+and scythes and hour-glasses, and doubly rich in pious epitaphs and
+Latin mottoes - rich in them to such an extent that their proper space
+has run over, and they have crawled end-long up the shafts of columns
+and ensconced themselves in all sorts of odd corners among the sculpture.&nbsp;
+These tombs raise their backs against the rabble of squalid dwelling-houses,
+and every here and there a clothes-pole projects between two monuments
+its fluttering trophy of white and yellow and red.&nbsp; With a grim
+irony they recall the banners in the Invalides, banners as appropriate
+perhaps over the sepulchres of tailors and weavers as these others above
+the dust of armies.&nbsp; Why they put things out to dry on that particular
+morning it was hard to imagine.&nbsp; The grass was grey with drops
+of rain, the headstones black with moisture.&nbsp; Yet, in despite of
+weather and common sense, there they hung between the tombs; and beyond
+them I could see through open windows into miserable rooms where whole
+families were born and fed, and slept and died.&nbsp; At one a girl
+sat singing merrily with her back to the graveyard; and from another
+came the shrill tones of a scolding woman.&nbsp; Every here and there
+was a town garden full of sickly flowers, or a pile of crockery inside
+upon the window-seat.&nbsp; But you do not grasp the full connection
+between these houses of the dead and the living, the unnatural marriage
+of stately sepulchres and squalid houses, till, lower down, where the
+road has sunk far below the surface of the cemetery, and the very roofs
+are scarcely on a level with its wall, you observe that a proprietor
+has taken advantage of a tall monument and trained a chimney-stack against
+its back.&nbsp; It startles you to see the red, modern pots peering
+over the shoulder of the tomb.<br>
+<br>
+A man was at work on a grave, his spade clinking away the drift of bones
+that permeates the thin brown soil; but my first disappointment had
+taught me to expect little from Greyfriars&rsquo; sextons, and I passed
+him by in silence.&nbsp; A slater on the slope of a neighbouring roof
+eyed me curiously.&nbsp; A lean black cat, looking as if it had battened
+on strange meats, slipped past me.&nbsp; A little boy at a window put
+his finger to his nose in so offensive a manner that I was put upon
+my dignity, and turned grandly off to read old epitaphs and peer through
+the gratings into the shadow of vaults.<br>
+<br>
+Just then I saw two women coming down a path, one of them old, and the
+other younger, with a child in her arms.&nbsp; Both had faces eaten
+with famine and hardened with sin, and both had reached that stage of
+degradation, much lower in a woman than a man, when all care for dress
+is lost.&nbsp; As they came down they neared a grave, where some pious
+friend or relative had laid a wreath of immortelles, and put a bell
+glass over it, as is the custom.&nbsp; The effect of that ring of dull
+yellow among so many blackened and dusty sculptures was more pleasant
+than it is in modern cemeteries, where every second mound can boast
+a similar coronal; and here, where it was the exception and not the
+rule, I could even fancy the drops of moisture that dimmed the covering
+were the tears of those who laid it where it was.&nbsp; As the two women
+came up to it, one of them kneeled down on the wet grass and looked
+long and silently through the clouded shade, while the second stood
+above her, gently oscillating to and fro to lull the muling baby.&nbsp;
+I was struck a great way off with something religious in the attitude
+of these two unkempt and haggard women; and I drew near faster, but
+still cautiously, to hear what they were saying.&nbsp; Surely on them
+the spirit of death and decay had descended; I had no education to dread
+here: should I not have a chance of seeing nature?&nbsp; Alas! a pawnbroker
+could not have been more practical and commonplace, for this was what
+the kneeling woman said to the woman upright - this and nothing more:
+&lsquo;Eh, what extravagance!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+O nineteenth century, wonderful art thou indeed - wonderful, but wearisome
+in thy stale and deadly uniformity.&nbsp; Thy men are more like numerals
+than men.&nbsp; They must bear their idiosyncrasies or their professions
+written on a placard about their neck, like the scenery in Shakespeare&rsquo;s
+theatre.&nbsp; Thy precepts of economy have pierced into the lowest
+ranks of life; and there is now a decorum in vice, a respectability
+among the disreputable, a pure spirit of Philistinism among the waifs
+and strays of thy Bohemia.&nbsp; For lo! thy very gravediggers talk
+politics; and thy castaways kneel upon new graves, to discuss the cost
+of the monument and grumble at the improvidence of love.<br>
+<br>
+Such was the elegant apostrophe that I made as I went out of the gates
+again, happily satisfied in myself, and feeling that I alone of all
+whom I had seen was able to profit by the silent poem of these green
+mounds and blackened headstones.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+NURSES<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I knew one once, and the room where, lonely and old, she waited for
+death.&nbsp; It was pleasant enough, high up above the lane, and looking
+forth upon a hill-side, covered all day with sheets and yellow blankets,
+and with long lines of underclothing fluttering between the battered
+posts.&nbsp; There were any number of cheap prints, and a drawing by
+one of &lsquo;her children,&rsquo; and there were flowers in the window,
+and a sickly canary withered into consumption in an ornamental cage.&nbsp;
+The bed, with its checked coverlid, was in a closet.&nbsp; A great Bible
+lay on the table; and her drawers were full of &lsquo;scones,&rsquo;
+which it was her pleasure to give to young visitors such as I was then.<br>
+<br>
+You may not think this a melancholy picture; but the canary, and the
+cat, and the white mouse that she had for a while, and that died, were
+all indications of the want that ate into her heart.&nbsp; I think I
+know a little of what that old woman felt; and I am as sure as if I
+had seen her, that she sat many an hour in silent tears, with the big
+Bible open before her clouded eyes.<br>
+<br>
+If you could look back upon her life, and feel the great chain that
+had linked her to one child after another, sometimes to be wrenched
+suddenly through, and sometimes, which is infinitely worse, to be torn
+gradually off through years of growing neglect, or perhaps growing dislike!&nbsp;
+She had, like the mother, overcome that natural repugnance - repugnance
+which no man can conquer - towards the infirm and helpless mass of putty
+of the earlier stage.&nbsp; She had spent her best and happiest years
+in tending, watching, and learning to love like a mother this child,
+with which she has no connection and to which she has no tie.&nbsp;
+Perhaps she refused some sweetheart (such things have been), or put
+him off and off, until he lost heart and turned to some one else, all
+for fear of leaving this creature that had wound itself about her heart.&nbsp;
+And the end of it all - her month&rsquo;s warning, and a present perhaps,
+and the rest of the life to vain regret.&nbsp; Or, worse still, to see
+the child gradually forgetting and forsaking her, fostered in disrespect
+and neglect on the plea of growing manliness, and at last beginning
+to treat her as a servant whom he had treated a few years before as
+a mother.&nbsp; She sees the Bible or the Psalm-book, which with gladness
+and love unutterable in her heart she had bought for him years ago out
+of her slender savings, neglected for some newer gift of his father,
+lying in dust in the lumber-room or given away to a poor child, and
+the act applauded for its unfeeling charity.&nbsp; Little wonder if
+she becomes hurt and angry, and attempts to tyrannise and to grasp her
+old power back again.&nbsp; We are not all patient Grizzels, by good
+fortune, but the most of us human beings with feelings and tempers of
+our own.<br>
+<br>
+And so, in the end, behold her in the room that I described.&nbsp; Very
+likely and very naturally, in some fling of feverish misery or recoil
+of thwarted love, she has quarrelled with her old employers and the
+children are forbidden to see her or to speak to her; or at best she
+gets her rent paid and a little to herself, and now and then her late
+charges are sent up (with another nurse, perhaps) to pay her a short
+visit.&nbsp; How bright these visits seem as she looks forward to them
+on her lonely bed!&nbsp; How unsatisfactory their realisation, when
+the forgetful child, half wondering, checks with every word and action
+the outpouring of her maternal love!&nbsp; How bitter and restless the
+memories that they leave behind!&nbsp; And for the rest, what else has
+she? - to watch them with eager eyes as they go to school, to sit in
+church where she can see them every Sunday, to be passed some day unnoticed
+in the street, or deliberately cut because the great man or the great
+woman are with friends before whom they are ashamed to recognise the
+old woman that loved them.<br>
+<br>
+When she goes home that night, how lonely will the room appear to her!&nbsp;
+Perhaps the neighbours may hear her sobbing to herself in the dark,
+with the fire burnt out for want of fuel, and the candle still unlit
+upon the table.<br>
+<br>
+And it is for this that they live, these quasi-mothers - mothers in
+everything but the travail and the thanks.&nbsp; It is for this that
+they have remained virtuous in youth, living the dull life of a household
+servant.&nbsp; It is for this that they refused the old sweetheart,
+and have no fireside or offspring of their own.<br>
+<br>
+I believe in a better state of things, that there will be no more nurses,
+and that every mother will nurse her own offspring; for what can be
+more hardening and demoralising than to call forth the tenderest feelings
+of a woman&rsquo;s heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need
+them, as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and then
+to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your own use for them
+is at an end.&nbsp; This may be Utopian; but it is always a little thing
+if one mother or two mothers can be brought to feel more tenderly to
+those who share their toil and have no part in their reward.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER V - A CHARACTER<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The man has a red, bloated face, and his figure is short and squat.&nbsp;
+So far there is nothing in him to notice, but when you see his eyes,
+you can read in these hard and shallow orbs a depravity beyond measure
+depraved, a thirst after wickedness, the pure, disinterested love of
+Hell for its own sake.&nbsp; The other night, in the street, I was watching
+an omnibus passing with lit-up windows, when I heard some one coughing
+at my side as though he would cough his soul out; and turning round,
+I saw him stopping under a lamp, with a brown greatcoat buttoned round
+him and his whole face convulsed.&nbsp; It seemed as if he could not
+live long; and so the sight set my mind upon a train of thought, as
+I finished my cigar up and down the lighted streets.<br>
+<br>
+He is old, but all these years have not yet quenched his thirst for
+evil, and his eyes still delight themselves in wickedness.&nbsp; He
+is dumb; but he will not let that hinder his foul trade, or perhaps
+I should say, his yet fouler amusement, and he has pressed a slate into
+the service of corruption.&nbsp; Look at him, and he will sign to you
+with his bloated head, and when you go to him in answer to the sign,
+thinking perhaps that the poor dumb man has lost his way, you will see
+what he writes upon his slate.&nbsp; He haunts the doors of schools,
+and shows such inscriptions as these to the innocent children that come
+out.&nbsp; He hangs about picture-galleries, and makes the noblest pictures
+the text for some silent homily of vice.&nbsp; His industry is a lesson
+to ourselves.&nbsp; Is it not wonderful how he can triumph over his
+infirmities and do such an amount of harm without a tongue?&nbsp; Wonderful
+industry - strange, fruitless, pleasureless toil?&nbsp; Must not the
+very devil feel a soft emotion to see his disinterested and laborious
+service?&nbsp; Ah, but the devil knows better than this: he knows that
+this man is penetrated with the love of evil and that all his pleasure
+is shut up in wickedness: he recognises him, perhaps, as a fit type
+for mankind of his satanic self, and watches over his effigy as we might
+watch over a favourite likeness.&nbsp; As the business man comes to
+love the toil, which he only looked upon at first as a ladder towards
+other desires and less unnatural gratifications, so the dumb man has
+felt the charm of his trade and fallen captivated before the eyes of
+sin.&nbsp; It is a mistake when preachers tell us that vice is hideous
+and loathsome; for even vice has her H&ouml;rsel and her devotees, who
+love her for her own sake.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE GREAT NORTH ROAD<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I - NANCE AT THE &lsquo;GREEN DRAGON&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Nance Holdaway was on her knees before the fire blowing the green wood
+that voluminously smoked upon the dogs, and only now and then shot forth
+a smothered flame; her knees already ached and her eyes smarted, for
+she had been some while at this ungrateful task, but her mind was gone
+far away to meet the coming stranger.&nbsp; Now she met him in the wood,
+now at the castle gate, now in the kitchen by candle-light; each fresh
+presentment eclipsed the one before; a form so elegant, manners so sedate,
+a countenance so brave and comely, a voice so winning and resolute -
+sure such a man was never seen!&nbsp; The thick-coming fancies poured
+and brightened in her head like the smoke and flames upon the hearth.<br>
+<br>
+Presently the heavy foot of her uncle Jonathan was heard upon the stair,
+and as he entered the room she bent the closer to her work.&nbsp; He
+glanced at the green fagots with a sneer, and looked askance at the
+bed and the white sheets, at the strip of carpet laid, like an island,
+on the great expanse of the stone floor, and at the broken glazing of
+the casement clumsily repaired with paper.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Leave that fire a-be,&rsquo; he cried.&nbsp; &lsquo;What, have
+I toiled all my life to turn innkeeper at the hind end?&nbsp; Leave
+it a-be, I say.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;La, uncle, it doesn&rsquo;t burn a bit; it only smokes,&rsquo;
+said Nance, looking up from her position.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You are come of decent people on both sides,&rsquo; returned
+the old man.&nbsp; &lsquo;Who are you to blow the coals for any Robin-run-agate?&nbsp;
+Get up, get on your hood, make yourself useful, and be off to the &ldquo;Green
+Dragon.&rdquo;&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I thought you was to go yourself,&rsquo; Nance faltered.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;So did I,&rsquo; quoth Jonathan; &lsquo;but it appears I was
+mistook.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The very excess of her eagerness alarmed her, and she began to hang
+back.&nbsp; &lsquo;I think I would rather not, dear uncle,&rsquo; she
+said.&nbsp; &lsquo;Night is at hand, and I think, dear, I would rather
+not.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Now you look here,&rsquo; replied Jonathan, &lsquo;I have my
+lord&rsquo;s orders, have I not?&nbsp; Little he gives me, but it&rsquo;s
+all my livelihood.&nbsp; And do you fancy, if I disobey my lord, I&rsquo;m
+likely to turn round for a lass like you?&nbsp; No, I&rsquo;ve that
+hell-fire of pain in my old knee, I wouldn&rsquo;t walk a mile, not
+for King George upon his bended knees.&rsquo;&nbsp; And he walked to
+the window and looked down the steep scarp to where the river foamed
+in the bottom of the dell.<br>
+<br>
+Nance stayed for no more bidding.&nbsp; In her own room, by the glimmer
+of the twilight, she washed her hands and pulled on her Sunday mittens;
+adjusted her black hood, and tied a dozen times its cherry ribbons;
+and in less than ten minutes, with a fluttering heart and excellently
+bright eyes, she passed forth under the arch and over the bridge, into
+the thickening shadows of the groves.&nbsp; A well-marked wheel-track
+conducted her.&nbsp; The wood, which upon both sides of the river dell
+was a mere scrambling thicket of hazel, hawthorn, and holly, boasted
+on the level of more considerable timber.&nbsp; Beeches came to a good
+growth, with here and there an oak; and the track now passed under a
+high arcade of branches, and now ran under the open sky in glades.&nbsp;
+As the girl proceeded these glades became more frequent, the trees began
+again to decline in size, and the wood to degenerate into furzy coverts.&nbsp;
+Last of all there was a fringe of elders; and beyond that the track
+came forth upon an open, rolling moorland, dotted with wind-bowed and
+scanty bushes, and all golden brown with the winter, like a grouse.&nbsp;
+Right over against the girl the last red embers of the sunset burned
+under horizontal clouds; the night fell clear and still and frosty,
+and the track in low and marshy passages began to crackle under foot
+with ice.<br>
+<br>
+Some half a mile beyond the borders of the wood the lights of the &lsquo;Green
+Dragon&rsquo; hove in sight, and running close beside them, very faint
+in the dying dusk, the pale ribbon of the Great North Road.&nbsp; It
+was the back of the post-house that was presented to Nance Holdaway;
+and as she continued to draw near and the night to fall more completely,
+she became aware of an unusual brightness and bustle.&nbsp; A post-chaise
+stood in the yard, its lamps already lighted: light shone hospitably
+in the windows and from the open door; moving lights and shadows testified
+to the activity of servants bearing lanterns.&nbsp; The clank of pails,
+the stamping of hoofs on the firm causeway, the jingle of harness, and,
+last of all, the energetic hissing of a groom, began to fall upon her
+ear.&nbsp; By the stir you would have thought the mail was at the door,
+but it was still too early in the night.&nbsp; The down mail was not
+due at the &lsquo;Green Dragon&rsquo; for hard upon an hour; the up
+mail from Scotland not before two in the black morning.<br>
+<br>
+Nance entered the yard somewhat dazzled.&nbsp; Sam, the tall ostler,
+was polishing a curb-chain wit sand; the lantern at his feet letting
+up spouts of candle-light through the holes with which its conical roof
+was peppered.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Hey, miss,&rsquo; said he jocularly, &lsquo;you won&rsquo;t look
+at me any more, now you have gentry at the castle.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Her cheeks burned with anger.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;That&rsquo;s my lord&rsquo;s chay,&rsquo; the man continued,
+nodding at the chaise, &lsquo;Lord Windermoor&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Came all
+in a fluster - dinner, bowl of punch, and put the horses to. For all
+the world like a runaway match, my dear - bar the bride.&nbsp; He brought
+Mr. Archer in the chay with him.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Is that Holdaway?&rsquo; cried the landlord from the lighted
+entry, where he stood shading his eyes.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Only me, sir,&rsquo; answered Nance.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;O, you, Miss Nance,&rsquo; he said.&nbsp; &lsquo;Well, come in
+quick, my pretty.&nbsp; My lord is waiting for your uncle.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And he ushered Nance into a room cased with yellow wainscot and lighted
+by tall candles, where two gentlemen sat at a table finishing a bowl
+of punch.&nbsp; One of these was stout, elderly, and irascible, with
+a face like a full moon, well dyed with liquor, thick tremulous lips,
+a short, purple hand, in which he brandished a long pipe, and an abrupt
+and gobbling utterance.&nbsp; This was my Lord Windermoor.&nbsp; In
+his companion Nance beheld a younger man, tall, quiet, grave, demurely
+dressed, and wearing his own hair.&nbsp; Her glance but lighted on him,
+and she flushed, for in that second she made sure that she had twice
+betrayed herself - betrayed by the involuntary flash of her black eyes
+her secret impatience to behold this new companion, and, what was far
+worse, betrayed her disappointment in the realisation of her dreams.&nbsp;
+He, meanwhile, as if unconscious, continued to regard her with unmoved
+decorum.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;O, a man of wood,&rsquo; thought Nance.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What - what?&rsquo; said his lordship.&nbsp; &lsquo;Who is this?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;If you please, my lord, I am Holdaway&rsquo;s niece,&rsquo; replied
+Nance, with a curtsey.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Should have been here himself,&rsquo; observed his lordship.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Well, you tell Holdaway that I&rsquo;m aground, not a stiver
+- not a stiver.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m running from the beagles - going abroad,
+tell Holdaway.&nbsp; And he need look for no more wages: glad of &rsquo;em
+myself, if I could get &rsquo;em.&nbsp; He can live in the castle if
+he likes, or go to the devil.&nbsp; O, and here is Mr. Archer; and I
+recommend him to take him in - a friend of mine - and Mr. Archer will
+pay, as I wrote.&nbsp; And I regard that in the light of a precious
+good thing for Holdaway, let me tell you, and a set-off against the
+wages.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;But O, my lord!&rsquo; cried Nance, &lsquo;we live upon the wages,
+and what are we to do without?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What am I to do? - what am I to do?&rsquo; replied Lord Windermoor
+with some exasperation.&nbsp; &lsquo;I have no wages.&nbsp; And there
+is Mr. Archer.&nbsp; And if Holdaway doesn&rsquo;t like it, he can go
+to the devil, and you with him! - and you with him!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And yet, my lord,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, &lsquo;these good people
+will have as keen a sense of loss as you or I; keener, perhaps, since
+they have done nothing to deserve it.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Deserve it?&rsquo; cried the peer.&nbsp; &lsquo;What?&nbsp; What?&nbsp;
+If a rascally highwayman comes up to me with a confounded pistol, do
+you say that I&rsquo;ve deserved it?&nbsp; How often am I to tell you,
+sir, that I was cheated - that I was cheated?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You are happy in the belief,&rsquo; returned Mr. Archer gravely.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Archer, you would be the death of me!&rsquo; exclaimed his lordship.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;You know you&rsquo;re drunk; you know it, sir; and yet you can&rsquo;t
+get up a spark of animation.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I have drunk fair, my lord,&rsquo; replied the younger man; &lsquo;but
+I own I am conscious of no exhilaration.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;If you had as black a look-out as me, sir,&rsquo; cried the peer,
+&lsquo;you would be very glad of a little innocent exhilaration, let
+me tell you.&nbsp; I am glad of it - glad of it, and I only wish I was
+drunker.&nbsp; For let me tell you it&rsquo;s a cruel hard thing upon
+a man of my time of life and my position, to be brought down to beggary
+because the world is full of thieves and rascals - thieves and rascals.&nbsp;
+What?&nbsp; For all I know, you may be a thief and a rascal yourself;
+and I would fight you for a pinch of snuff - a pinch of snuff,&rsquo;
+exclaimed his lordship.<br>
+<br>
+Here Mr. Archer turned to Nance Holdaway with a pleasant smile, so full
+of sweetness, kindness, and composure that, at one bound, her dreams
+returned to her.&nbsp; &lsquo;My good Miss Holdaway,&rsquo; said he,
+&lsquo;if you are willing to show me the road, I am even eager to be
+gone.&nbsp; As for his lordship and myself, compose yourself; there
+is no fear; this is his lordship&rsquo;s way.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What? what?&rsquo; cried his lordship.&nbsp; &lsquo;My way?&nbsp;
+Ish no such a thing, my way.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Come, my lord,&rsquo; cried Archer; &lsquo;you and I very thoroughly
+understand each other; and let me suggest, it is time that both of us
+were gone.&nbsp; The mail will soon be due.&nbsp; Here, then, my lord,
+I take my leave of you, with the most earnest assurance of my gratitude
+for the past, and a sincere offer of any services I may be able to render
+in the future.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Archer,&rsquo; exclaimed Lord Windermoor, &lsquo;I love you like
+a son.&nbsp; Le&rsquo; &rsquo;s have another bowl.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;My lord, for both our sakes, you will excuse me,&rsquo; replied
+Mr. Archer.&nbsp; &lsquo;We both require caution; we must both, for
+some while at least, avoid the chance of a pursuit.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Archer,&rsquo; quoth his lordship, &lsquo;this is a rank ingratishood.&nbsp;
+What?&nbsp; I&rsquo;m to go firing away in the dark in the cold po&rsquo;chaise,
+and not so much as a game of &eacute;cart&eacute; possible, unless I
+stop and play with the postillion, the postillion; and the whole country
+swarming with thieves and rascals and highwaymen.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I beg your lordship&rsquo;s pardon,&rsquo; put in the landlord,
+who now appeared in the doorway to announce the chaise, &lsquo;but this
+part of the North Road is known for safety.&nbsp; There has not been
+a robbery, to call a robbery, this five years&rsquo; time.&nbsp; Further
+south, of course, it&rsquo;s nearer London, and another story,&rsquo;
+he added.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, then, if that&rsquo;s so,&rsquo; concluded my lord, &lsquo;le&rsquo;
+&rsquo;s have t&rsquo;other bowl and a pack of cards.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;My lord, you forget,&rsquo; said Archer, &lsquo;I might still
+gain; but it is hardly possible for me to lose.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Think I&rsquo;m a sharper?&rsquo; inquired the peer.&nbsp; &lsquo;Gen&rsquo;leman&rsquo;s
+parole&rsquo;s all I ask.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+But Mr. Archer was proof against these blandishments, and said farewell
+gravely enough to Lord Windermoor, shaking his hand and at the same
+time bowing very low.&nbsp; &lsquo;You will never know,&rsquo; says
+he, &lsquo;the service you have done me.&rsquo;&nbsp; And with that,
+and before my lord had finally taken up his meaning, he had slipped
+about the table, touched Nance lightly but imperiously on the arm, and
+left the room.&nbsp; In face of the outbreak of his lordship&rsquo;s
+lamentations she made haste to follow the truant.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II - IN WHICH MR. ARCHER IS INSTALLED<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The chaise had been driven round to the front door; the courtyard lay
+all deserted, and only lit by a lantern set upon a window-sill.&nbsp;
+Through this Nance rapidly led the way, and began to ascend the swellings
+of the moor with a heart that somewhat fluttered in her bosom.&nbsp;
+She was not afraid, but in the course of these last passages with Lord
+Windermoor Mr. Archer had ascended to that pedestal on which her fancy
+waited to instal him.&nbsp; The reality, she felt, excelled her dreams,
+and this cold night walk was the first romantic incident in her experience.<br>
+<br>
+It was the rule in these days to see gentlemen unsteady after dinner,
+yet Nance was both surprised and amused when her companion, who had
+spoken so soberly, began to stumble and waver by her side with the most
+airy divagations.&nbsp; Sometimes he would get so close to her that
+she must edge away; and at others lurch clear out of the track and plough
+among deep heather.&nbsp; His courtesy and gravity meanwhile remained
+unaltered.&nbsp; He asked her how far they had to go; whether the way
+lay all upon the moorland, and when he learned they had to pass a wood
+expressed his pleasure.&nbsp; &lsquo;For,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;I am
+passionately fond of trees.&nbsp; Trees and fair lawns, if you consider
+of it rightly, are the ornaments of nature, as palaces and fine approaches
+- &rsquo;&nbsp; And here he stumbled into a patch of slough and nearly
+fell.&nbsp; The girl had hard work not to laugh, but at heart she was
+lost in admiration for one who talked so elegantly.<br>
+<br>
+They had got to about a quarter of a mile from the &lsquo;Green Dragon,&rsquo;
+and were near the summit of the rise, when a sudden rush of wheels arrested
+them.&nbsp; Turning and looking back, they saw the post-house, now much
+declined in brightness; and speeding away northward the two tremulous
+bright dots of my Lord Windermoor&rsquo;s chaise-lamps.&nbsp; Mr. Archer
+followed these yellow and unsteady stars until they dwindled into points
+and disappeared.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;There goes my only friend,&rsquo; he said.&nbsp; &lsquo;Death
+has cut off those that loved me, and change of fortune estranged my
+flatterers; and but for you, poor bankrupt, my life is as lonely as
+this moor.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The tone of his voice affected both of them.&nbsp; They stood there
+on the side of the moor, and became thrillingly conscious of the void
+waste of the night, without a feature for the eye, and except for the
+fainting whisper of the carriage-wheels without a murmur for the ear.&nbsp;
+And instantly, like a mockery, there broke out, very far away, but clear
+and jolly, the note of the mail-guard&rsquo;s horn.&nbsp; &lsquo;Over
+the hills&rsquo; was his air.&nbsp; It rose to the two watchers on the
+moor with the most cheerful sentiment of human company and travel, and
+at the same time in and around the &lsquo;Green Dragon&rsquo; it woke
+up a great bustle of lights running to and fro and clattering hoofs.&nbsp;
+Presently after, out of the darkness to southward, the mail grew near
+with a growing rumble.&nbsp; Its lamps were very large and bright, and
+threw their radiance forward in overlapping cones; the four cantering
+horses swarmed and steamed; the body of the coach followed like a great
+shadow; and this lit picture slid with a sort of ineffectual swiftness
+over the black field of night, and was eclipsed by the buildings of
+the &lsquo;Green Dragon.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Archer turned abruptly and resumed his former walk; only that he
+was now more steady, kept better alongside his young conductor, and
+had fallen into a silence broken by sighs.&nbsp; Nance waxed very pitiful
+over his fate, contrasting an imaginary past of courts and great society,
+and perhaps the King himself, with the tumbledown ruin in a wood to
+which she was now conducting him.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You must try, sir, to keep your spirits up,&rsquo; said she.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;To be sure this is a great change for one like you; but who knows
+the future?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Archer turned towards her in the darkness, and she could clearly
+perceive that he smiled upon her very kindly.&nbsp; &lsquo;There spoke
+a sweet nature,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;and I must thank you for these
+words.&nbsp; But I would not have you fancy that I regret the past for
+any happiness found in it, or that I fear the simplicity and hardship
+of the country.&nbsp; I am a man that has been much tossed about in
+life; now up, now down; and do you think that I shall not be able to
+support what you support - you who are kind, and therefore know how
+to feel pain; who are beautiful, and therefore hope; who are young,
+and therefore (or am I the more mistaken?) discontented?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nay, sir, not that, at least,&rsquo; said Nance; &lsquo;not discontented.&nbsp;
+If I were to be discontented, how should I look those that have real
+sorrows in the face?&nbsp; I have faults enough, but not that fault;
+and I have my merits too, for I have a good opinion of myself.&nbsp;
+But for beauty, I am not so simple but that I can tell a banter from
+a compliment.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nay, nay,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, &lsquo;I had half forgotten;
+grief is selfish, and I was thinking of myself and not of you, or I
+had never blurted out so bold a piece of praise.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis the
+best proof of my sincerity.&nbsp; But come, now, I would lay a wager
+you are no coward?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Indeed, sir, I am not more afraid than another,&rsquo; said Nance.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;None of my blood are given to fear.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And you are honest?&rsquo; he returned.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I will answer for that,&rsquo; said she.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, then, to be brave, to be honest, to be kind, and to be
+contented, since you say you are so - is not that to fill up a great
+part of virtue?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I fear you are but a flatterer,&rsquo; said Nance, but she did
+not say it clearly, for what with bewilderment and satisfaction, her
+heart was quite oppressed.<br>
+<br>
+There could be no harm, certainly, in these grave compliments; but yet
+they charmed and frightened her, and to find favour, for reasons however
+obscure, in the eyes of this elegant, serious, and most unfortunate
+young gentleman, was a giddy elevation, was almost an apotheosis, for
+a country maid.<br>
+<br>
+But she was to be no more exercised; for Mr. Archer, disclaiming any
+thought of flattery, turned off to other subjects, and held her all
+through the wood in conversation, addressing her with an air of perfect
+sincerity, and listening to her answers with every mark of interest.&nbsp;
+Had open flattery continued, Nance would have soon found refuge in good
+sense; but the more subtle lure she could not suspect, much less avoid.&nbsp;
+It was the first time she had ever taken part in a conversation illuminated
+by any ideas.&nbsp; All was then true that she had heard and dreamed
+of gentlemen; they were a race apart, like deities knowing good and
+evil.&nbsp; And then there burst upon her soul a divine thought, hope&rsquo;s
+glorious sunrise: since she could understand, since it seemed that she
+too, even she, could interest this sorrowful Apollo, might she not learn?
+or was she not learning?&nbsp; Would not her soul awake and put forth
+wings?&nbsp; Was she not, in fact, an enchanted princess, waiting but
+a touch to become royal?&nbsp; She saw herself transformed, radiantly
+attired, but in the most exquisite taste: her face grown longer and
+more refined; her tint etherealised; and she heard herself with delighted
+wonder talking like a book.<br>
+<br>
+Meanwhile they had arrived at where the track comes out above the river
+dell, and saw in front of them the castle, faintly shadowed on the night,
+covering with its broken battlements a bold projection of the bank,
+and showing at the extreme end, where were the habitable tower and wing,
+some crevices of candle-light.&nbsp; Hence she called loudly upon her
+uncle, and he was seen to issue, lantern in hand, from the tower door,
+and, where the ruins did not intervene, to pick his way over the swarded
+courtyard, avoiding treacherous cellars and winding among blocks of
+fallen masonry.&nbsp; The arch of the great gate was still entire, flanked
+by two tottering bastions, and it was here that Jonathan met them, standing
+at the edge of the bridge, bent somewhat forward, and blinking at them
+through the glow of his own lantern.&nbsp; Mr. Archer greeted him with
+civility; but the old man was in no humour of compliance.&nbsp; He guided
+the newcomer across the court-yard, looking sharply and quickly in his
+face, and grumbling all the time about the cold, and the discomfort
+and dilapidation of the castle.&nbsp; He was sure he hoped that Mr.
+Archer would like it; but in truth he could not think what brought him
+there.&nbsp; Doubtless he had a good reason - this with a look of cunning
+scrutiny - but, indeed, the place was quite unfit for any person of
+repute; he himself was eaten up with the rheumatics.&nbsp; It was the
+most rheumaticky place in England, and some fine day the whole habitable
+part (to call it habitable) would fetch away bodily and go down the
+slope into the river.&nbsp; He had seen the cracks widening; there was
+a plaguy issue in the bank below; he thought a spring was mining it;
+it might be to-morrow, it might be next day; but they were all sure
+of a come-down sooner or later.&nbsp; &lsquo;And that is a poor death,&rsquo;
+said he, &lsquo;for any one, let alone a gentleman, to have a whole
+old ruin dumped upon his belly.&nbsp; Have a care to your left there;
+these cellar vaults have all broke down, and the grass and hemlock hide
+&rsquo;em.&nbsp; Well, sir, here is welcome to you, such as it is, and
+wishing you well away.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And with that Jonathan ushered his guest through the tower door, and
+down three steps on the left hand into the kitchen or common room of
+the castle.&nbsp; It was a huge, low room, as large as a meadow, occupying
+the whole width of the habitable wing, with six barred windows looking
+on the court, and two into the river valley.&nbsp; A dresser, a table,
+and a few chairs stood dotted here and there upon the uneven flags.&nbsp;
+Under the great chimney a good fire burned in an iron fire-basket; a
+high old settee, rudely carved with figures and Gothic lettering, flanked
+it on either side; there was a hinge table and a stone bench in the
+chimney corner, and above the arch hung guns, axes, lanterns, and great
+sheaves of rusty keys.<br>
+<br>
+Jonathan looked about him, holding up the lantern, and shrugged his
+shoulders, with a pitying grimace.&nbsp; &lsquo;Here it is,&rsquo; he
+said.&nbsp; &lsquo;See the damp on the floor, look at the moss; where
+there&rsquo;s moss you may be sure that it&rsquo;s rheumaticky.&nbsp;
+Try and get near that fire for to warm yourself; it&rsquo;ll blow the
+coat off your back.&nbsp; And with a young gentleman with a face like
+yours, as pale as a tallow-candle, I&rsquo;d be afeard of a churchyard
+cough and a galloping decline,&rsquo; says Jonathan, naming the maladies
+with gloomy gusto, &lsquo;or the cold might strike and turn your blood,&rsquo;
+he added.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Archer fairly laughed.&nbsp; &lsquo;My good Mr. Holdaway,&rsquo;
+said he, &lsquo;I was born with that same tallow-candle face, and the
+only fear that you inspire me with is the fear that I intrude unwelcomely
+upon your private hours.&nbsp; But I think I can promise you that I
+am very little troublesome, and I am inclined to hope that the terms
+which I can offer may still pay you the derangement.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Yes, the terms,&rsquo; said Jonathan, &lsquo;I was thinking of
+that.&nbsp; As you say, they are very small,&rsquo; and he shook his
+head.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Unhappily, I can afford no more,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;But this we have arranged already,&rsquo; he added with a certain
+stiffness; &lsquo;and as I am aware that Miss Holdaway has matter to
+communicate, I will, if you permit, retire at once.&nbsp; To-night I
+must bivouac; to-morrow my trunk is to follow from the &ldquo;Dragon.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+So if you will show me to my room I shall wish you a good slumber and
+a better awakening.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Jonathan silently gave the lantern to Nance, and she, turning and curtseying
+in the doorway, proceeded to conduct their guest up the broad winding
+staircase of the tower.&nbsp; He followed with a very brooding face.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Alas!&rsquo; cried Nance, as she entered the room, &lsquo;your
+fire black out,&rsquo; and, setting down the lantern, she clapped upon
+her knees before the chimney and began to rearrange the charred and
+still smouldering remains.&nbsp; Mr. Archer looked about the gaunt apartment
+with a sort of shudder.&nbsp; The great height, the bare stone, the
+shattered windows, the aspect of the uncurtained bed, with one of its
+four fluted columns broken short, all struck a chill upon his fancy.&nbsp;
+From this dismal survey his eyes returned to Nance crouching before
+the fire, the candle in one hand and artfully puffing at the embers;
+the flames as they broke forth played upon the soft outline of her cheek
+- she was alive and young, coloured with the bright hues of life, and
+a woman.&nbsp; He looked upon her, softening; and then sat down and
+continued to admire the picture.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;There, sir,&rsquo; said she, getting upon her feet, &lsquo;your
+fire is doing bravely now.&nbsp; Good-night.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+He rose and held out his hand.&nbsp; &lsquo;Come,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;you
+are my only friend in these parts, and you must shake hands.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+She brushed her hand upon her skirt and offered it, blushing.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;God bless you, my dear,&rsquo; said he.<br>
+<br>
+And then, when he was alone, he opened one of the windows, and stared
+down into the dark valley.&nbsp; A gentle wimpling of the river among
+stones ascended to his ear; the trees upon the other bank stood very
+black against the sky; farther away an owl was hooting.&nbsp; It was
+dreary and cold, and as he turned back to the hearth and the fine glow
+of fire, &lsquo;Heavens!&rsquo; said he to himself, &lsquo;what an unfortunate
+destiny is mine!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+He went to bed, but sleep only visited his pillow in uneasy snatches.&nbsp;
+Outbreaks of loud speech came up the staircase; he heard the old stones
+of the castle crack in the frosty night with sharp reverberations, and
+the bed complained under his tossings.&nbsp; Lastly, far on into the
+morning, he awakened from a doze to hear, very far off, in the extreme
+and breathless quiet, a wailing flourish on the horn.&nbsp; The down
+mail was drawing near to the &lsquo;Green Dragon.&rsquo;&nbsp; He sat
+up in bed; the sound was tragical by distance, and the modulation appealed
+to his ear like human speech.&nbsp; It seemed to call upon him with
+a dreary insistence - to call him far away, to address him personally,
+and to have a meaning that he failed to seize.&nbsp; It was thus, at
+least, in this nodding castle, in a cold, miry woodland, and so far
+from men and society, that the traffic on the Great North Road spoke
+to him in the intervals of slumber.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III -&nbsp; JONATHAN HOLDAWAY<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Nance descended the tower stair, pausing at every step.&nbsp; She was
+in no hurry to confront her uncle with bad news, and she must dwell
+a little longer on the rich note of Mr. Archer&rsquo;s voice, the charm
+of his kind words, and the beauty of his manner and person.&nbsp; But,
+once at the stair-foot, she threw aside the spell and recovered her
+sensible and workaday self.<br>
+<br>
+Jonathan was seated in the middle of the settle, a mug of ale beside
+him, in the attitude of one prepared for trouble; but he did not speak,
+and suffered her to fetch her supper and eat of it, with a very excellent
+appetite, in silence.&nbsp; When she had done, she, too, drew a tankard
+of home-brewed, and came and planted herself in front of him upon the
+settle.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well?&rsquo; said Jonathan.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;My lord has run away,&rsquo; said Nance.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What?&rsquo; cried the old man.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Abroad,&rsquo; she continued; &lsquo;run away from creditors.&nbsp;
+He said he had not a stiver, but he was drunk enough.&nbsp; He said
+you might live on in the castle, and Mr. Archer would pay you; but you
+was to look for no more wages, since he would be glad of them himself.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Jonathan&rsquo;s face contracted; the flush of a black, bilious anger
+mounted to the roots of his hair; he gave an inarticulate cry, leapt
+upon his feet, and began rapidly pacing the stone floor.&nbsp; At first
+he kept his hands behind his back in a tight knot; then he began to
+gesticulate as he turned.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;This man - this lord,&rsquo; he shouted, &lsquo;who is he?&nbsp;
+He was born with a gold spoon in his mouth, and I with a dirty straw.&nbsp;
+He rolled in his coach when he was a baby.&nbsp; I have dug and toiled
+and laboured since I was that high - that high.&rsquo;&nbsp; And he
+shouted again.&nbsp; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m bent and broke, and full of pains.&nbsp;
+D&rsquo; ye think I don&rsquo;t know the taste of sweat?&nbsp; Many&rsquo;s
+the gallon I&rsquo;ve drunk of it - ay, in the midwinter, toiling like
+a slave.&nbsp; All through, what has my life been?&nbsp; Bend, bend,
+bend my old creaking back till it would ache like breaking; wade about
+in the foul mire, never a dry stitch; empty belly, sore hands, hat off
+to my Lord Redface; kicks and ha&rsquo;pence; and now, here, at the
+hind end, when I&rsquo;m worn to my poor bones, a kick and done with
+it.&rsquo;&nbsp; He walked a little while in silence, and then, extending
+his hand, &lsquo;Now you, Nance Holdaway,&rsquo; says he, &lsquo;you
+come of my blood, and you&rsquo;re a good girl.&nbsp; When that man
+was a boy, I used to carry his gun for him.&nbsp; I carried the gun
+all day on my two feet, and many a stitch I had, and chewed a bullet
+for.&nbsp; He rode upon a horse, with feathers in his hat; but it was
+him that had the shots and took the game home.&nbsp; Did I complain?&nbsp;
+Not I.&nbsp; I knew my station.&nbsp; What did I ask, but just the chance
+to live and die honest?&nbsp; Nance Holdaway, don&rsquo;t let them deny
+it to me - don&rsquo;t let them do it.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been as poor
+as Job, and as honest as the day, but now, my girl, you mark these words
+of mine, I&rsquo;m getting tired of it.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I wouldn&rsquo;t say such words, at least,&rsquo; said Nance.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You wouldn&rsquo;t?&rsquo; said the old man grimly.&nbsp; &lsquo;Well,
+and did I when I was your age?&nbsp; Wait till your back&rsquo;s broke
+and your hands tremble, and your eyes fail, and you&rsquo;re weary of
+the battle and ask no more but to lie down in your bed and give the
+ghost up like an honest man; and then let there up and come some insolent,
+ungodly fellow - ah! if I had him in these hands!&nbsp; &ldquo;Where&rsquo;s
+my money that you gambled?&rdquo; I should say.&nbsp; &ldquo;Where&rsquo;s
+my money that you drank and diced?&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Thief!&rdquo;
+is what I would say; &ldquo;Thief!&rdquo;&rsquo; he roared, &lsquo;&ldquo;Thief&rdquo;&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Mr. Archer will hear you if you don&rsquo;t take care,&rsquo;
+said Nance, &lsquo;and I would be ashamed, for one, that he should hear
+a brave, old, honest, hard-working man like Jonathan Holdaway talk nonsense
+like a boy.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;D&rsquo; ye think I mind for Mr. Archer?&rsquo; he cried shrilly,
+with a clack of laughter; and then he came close up to her, stooped
+down with his two palms upon his knees, and looked her in the eyes,
+with a strange hard expression, something like a smile.&nbsp; &lsquo;Do
+I mind for God, my girl?&rsquo; he said; &lsquo;that&rsquo;s what it&rsquo;s
+come to be now, do I mind for God?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Uncle Jonathan,&rsquo; she said, getting up and taking him by
+the arm; &lsquo;you sit down again, where you were sitting.&nbsp; There,
+sit still; I&rsquo;ll have no more of this; you&rsquo;ll do yourself
+a mischief.&nbsp; Come, take a drink of this good ale, and I&rsquo;ll
+warm a tankard for you.&nbsp; La, we&rsquo;ll pull through, you&rsquo;ll
+see.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m young, as you say, and it&rsquo;s my turn to carry
+the bundle; and don&rsquo;t you worry your bile, or we&rsquo;ll have
+sickness, too, as well as sorrow.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;D&rsquo; ye think that I&rsquo;d forgotten you?&rsquo; said Jonathan,
+with something like a groan; and thereupon his teeth clicked to, and
+he sat silent with the tankard in his hand and staring straight before
+him.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Why,&rsquo; says Nance, setting on the ale to mull, &lsquo;men
+are always children, they say, however old; and if ever I heard a thing
+like this, to set to and make yourself sick, just when the money&rsquo;s
+failing.&nbsp; Keep a good heart up; you haven&rsquo;t kept a good heart
+these seventy years, nigh hand, to break down about a pound or two.&nbsp;
+Here&rsquo;s this Mr. Archer come to lodge, that you disliked so much.&nbsp;
+Well, now you see it was a clear Providence.&nbsp; Come, let&rsquo;s
+think upon our mercies.&nbsp; And here is the ale mulling lovely; smell
+of it; I&rsquo;ll take a drop myself, it smells so sweet.&nbsp; And,
+Uncle Jonathan, you let me say one word.&nbsp; You&rsquo;ve lost more
+than money before now; you lost my aunt, and bore it like a man.&nbsp;
+Bear this.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+His face once more contracted; his fist doubled, and shot forth into
+the air, and trembled.&nbsp; &lsquo;Let them look out!&rsquo; he shouted.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Here, I warn all men; I&rsquo;ve done with this foul kennel of
+knaves.&nbsp; Let them look out!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Hush, hush! for pity&rsquo;s sake,&rsquo; cried Nance.<br>
+<br>
+And then all of a sudden he dropped his face into his hands, and broke
+out with a great hiccoughing dry sob that was horrible to hear.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;O,&rsquo; he cried, &lsquo;my God, if my son hadn&rsquo;t left
+me, if my Dick was here!&rsquo; and the sobs shook him; Nance sitting
+still and watching him, with distress.&nbsp; &lsquo;O, if he were here
+to help his father!&rsquo; he went on again.&nbsp; &lsquo;If I had a
+son like other fathers, he would save me now, when all is breaking down;
+O, he would save me!&nbsp; Ay, but where is he?&nbsp; Raking taverns,
+a thief perhaps.&nbsp; My curse be on him!&rsquo; he added, rising again
+into wrath.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Hush!&rsquo; cried Nance, springing to her feet: &lsquo;your
+boy, your dead wife&rsquo;s boy - Aunt Susan&rsquo;s baby that she loved
+- would you curse him?&nbsp; O, God forbid!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The energy of her address surprised him from his mood.&nbsp; He looked
+upon her, tearless and confused.&nbsp; &lsquo;Let me go to my bed,&rsquo;
+he said at last, and he rose, and, shaking as with ague, but quite silent,
+lighted his candle, and left the kitchen.<br>
+<br>
+Poor Nance! the pleasant current of her dreams was all diverted.&nbsp;
+She beheld a golden city, where she aspired to dwell; she had spoken
+with a deity, and had told herself that she might rise to be his equal;
+and now the earthly ligaments that bound her down had been tightened.&nbsp;
+She was like a tree looking skyward, her roots were in the ground.&nbsp;
+It seemed to her a thing so coarse, so rustic, to be thus concerned
+about a loss in money; when Mr. Archer, fallen from the sky-level of
+counts and nobles, faced his changed destiny with so immovable a courage.&nbsp;
+To weary of honesty; that, at least, no one could do, but even to name
+it was already a disgrace; and she beheld in fancy her uncle, and the
+young lad, all laced and feathered, hand upon hip, bestriding his small
+horse.&nbsp; The opposition seemed to perpetuate itself from generation
+to generation; one side still doomed to the clumsy and the servile,
+the other born to beauty.<br>
+<br>
+She thought of the golden zones in which gentlemen were bred, and figured
+with so excellent a grace; zones in which wisdom and smooth words, white
+linen and slim hands, were the mark of the desired inhabitants; where
+low temptations were unknown, and honesty no virtue, but a thing as
+natural as breathing.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IV - MINGLING THREADS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It was nearly seven before Mr. Archer left his apartment.&nbsp; On the
+landing he found another door beside his own opening on a roofless corridor,
+and presently he was walking on the top of the ruins.&nbsp; On one hand
+he could look down a good depth into the green court-yard; on the other
+his eye roved along the downward course of the river, the wet woods
+all smoking, the shadows long and blue, the mists golden and rosy in
+the sun, here and there the water flashing across an obstacle.&nbsp;
+His heart expanded and softened to a grateful melancholy, and with his
+eye fixed upon the distance, and no thought of present danger, he continued
+to stroll along the elevated and treacherous promenade.<br>
+<br>
+A terror-stricken cry rose to him from the courtyard.&nbsp; He looked
+down, and saw in a glimpse Nance standing below with hands clasped in
+horror and his own foot trembling on the margin of a gulf.&nbsp; He
+recoiled and leant against a pillar, quaking from head to foot, and
+covering his face with his hands; and Nance had time to run round by
+the stair and rejoin him where he stood before he had changed a line
+of his position.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ah!&rsquo; he cried, and clutched her wrist; &lsquo;don&rsquo;t
+leave me.&nbsp; The place rocks; I have no head for altitudes.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Sit down against that pillar,&rsquo; said Nance.&nbsp; &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t
+you be afraid; I won&rsquo;t leave you, and don&rsquo;t look up or down:
+look straight at me.&nbsp; How white you are!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The gulf,&rsquo; he said, and closed his eyes again and shuddered.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Why,&rsquo; said Nance, &lsquo;what a poor climber you must be!&nbsp;
+That was where my cousin Dick used to get out of the castle after Uncle
+Jonathan had shut the gate.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve been down there myself
+with him helping me.&nbsp; I wouldn&rsquo;t try with you,&rsquo; she
+said, and laughed merrily.<br>
+<br>
+The sound of her laughter was sincere and musical, and perhaps its beauty
+barbed the offence to Mr. Archer.&nbsp; The blood came into his face
+with a quick jet, and then left it paler than before.&nbsp; &lsquo;It
+is a physical weakness,&rsquo; he said harshly, &lsquo;and very droll,
+no doubt, but one that I can conquer on necessity.&nbsp; See, I am still
+shaking.&nbsp; Well, I advance to the battlements and look down.&nbsp;
+Show me your cousin&rsquo;s path.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;He would go sure-foot along that little ledge,&rsquo; said Nance,
+pointing as she spoke; &lsquo;then out through the breach and down by
+yonder buttress.&nbsp; It is easier coming back, of course, because
+you see where you are going.&nbsp; From the buttress foot a sheep-walk
+goes along the scarp - see, you can follow it from here in the dry grass.&nbsp;
+And now, sir,&rsquo; she added, with a touch of womanly pity, &lsquo;I
+would come away from here if I were you, for indeed you are not fit.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Sure enough Mr. Archer&rsquo;s pallor and agitation had continued to
+increase; his cheeks were deathly, his clenched fingers trembled pitifully.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The weakness is physical,&rsquo; he sighed, and had nearly fallen.&nbsp;
+Nance led him from the spot, and he was no sooner back in the tower-stair,
+than he fell heavily against the wall and put his arm across his eyes.&nbsp;
+A cup of brandy had to be brought him before he could descend to breakfast;
+and the perfection of Nance&rsquo;s dream was for the first time troubled.<br>
+<br>
+Jonathan was waiting for them at table, with yellow, blood-shot eyes
+and a peculiar dusky complexion.&nbsp; He hardly waited till they found
+their seats, before, raising one hand, and stooping with his mouth above
+his plate, he put up a prayer for a blessing on the food and a spirit
+of gratitude in the eaters, and thereupon, and without more civility,
+fell to.&nbsp; But it was notable that he was no less speedily satisfied
+than he had been greedy to begin.&nbsp; He pushed his plate away and
+drummed upon the table.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;These are silly prayers,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;that they teach
+us.&nbsp; Eat and be thankful, that&rsquo;s no such wonder.&nbsp; Speak
+to me of starving - there&rsquo;s the touch.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re a man,
+they tell me, Mr. Archer, that has met with some reverses?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I have met with many,&rsquo; replied Mr. Archer.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ha!&rsquo; said Jonathan.&nbsp; &lsquo;None reckons but the last.&nbsp;
+Now, see; I tried to make this girl here understand me.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Uncle,&rsquo; said Nance, &lsquo;what should Mr. Archer care
+for your concerns?&nbsp; He hath troubles of his own, and came to be
+at peace, I think.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I tried to make her understand me,&rsquo; repeated Jonathan doggedly;
+&lsquo;and now I&rsquo;ll try you.&nbsp; Do you think this world is
+fair?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Fair and false!&rsquo; quoth Mr. Archer.<br>
+<br>
+The old man laughed immoderately.&nbsp; &lsquo;Good,&rsquo; said he,
+&lsquo;very good, but what I mean is this: do you know what it is to
+get up early and go to bed late, and never take so much as a holiday
+but four: and one of these your own marriage day, and the other three
+the funerals of folk you loved, and all that, to have a quiet old age
+in shelter, and bread for your old belly, and a bed to lay your crazy
+bones upon, with a clear conscience?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Sir,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, with an inclination of his head,
+&lsquo;you portray a very brave existence.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well,&rsquo; continued Jonathan, &lsquo;and in the end thieves
+deceive you, thieves rob and rook you, thieves turn you out in your
+old age and send you begging.&nbsp; What have you got for all your honesty?&nbsp;
+A fine return!&nbsp; You that might have stole scores of pounds, there
+you are out in the rain with your rheumatics!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Archer had forgotten to eat; with his hand upon his chin he was
+studying the old man&rsquo;s countenance.&nbsp; &lsquo;And you conclude?&rsquo;
+he asked.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Conclude!&rsquo; cried Jonathan.&nbsp; &lsquo;I conclude I&rsquo;ll
+be upsides with them.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ay,&rsquo; said the other, &lsquo;we are all tempted to revenge.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You have lost money?&rsquo; asked Jonathan.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;A great estate,&rsquo; said Archer quietly.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;See now!&rsquo; says Jonathan, &lsquo;and where is it?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nay, I sometimes think that every one has had his share of it
+but me,&rsquo; was the reply.&nbsp; &lsquo;All England hath paid his
+taxes with my patrimony: I was a sheep that left my wool on every briar.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And you sit down under that?&rsquo; cried the old man.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Come now, Mr. Archer, you and me belong to different stations;
+and I know mine - no man better - but since we have both been rooked,
+and are both sore with it, why, here&rsquo;s my hand with a very good
+heart, and I ask for yours, and no offence, I hope.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;There is surely no offence, my friend,&rsquo; returned Mr. Archer,
+as they shook hands across the table; &lsquo;for, believe me, my sympathies
+are quite acquired to you.&nbsp; This life is an arena where we fight
+with beasts; and, indeed,&rsquo; he added, sighing, &lsquo;I sometimes
+marvel why we go down to it unarmed.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+In the meanwhile a creaking of ungreased axles had been heard descending
+through the wood; and presently after, the door opened, and the tall
+ostler entered the kitchen carrying one end of Mr. Archer&rsquo;s trunk.&nbsp;
+The other was carried by an aged beggar man of that district, known
+and welcome for some twenty miles about under the name of &lsquo;Old
+Cumberland.&rsquo;&nbsp; Each was soon perched upon a settle, with a
+cup of ale; and the ostler, who valued himself upon his affability,
+began to entertain the company, still with half an eye on Nance, to
+whom in gallant terms he expressly dedicated every sip of ale.&nbsp;
+First he told of the trouble they had to get his Lordship started in
+the chaise; and how he had dropped a rouleau of gold on the threshold,
+and the passage and doorstep had been strewn with guinea-pieces.&nbsp;
+At this old Jonathan looked at Mr. Archer.&nbsp; Next the visitor turned
+to news of a more thrilling character: how the down mail had been stopped
+again near Grantham by three men on horseback - a white and two bays;
+how they had handkerchiefs on their faces; how Tom the guard&rsquo;s
+blunderbuss missed fire, but he swore he had winged one of them with
+a pistol; and how they had got clean away with seventy pounds in money,
+some valuable papers, and a watch or two.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Brave! brave!&rsquo; cried Jonathan in ecstasy.&nbsp; &lsquo;Seventy
+pounds!&nbsp; O, it&rsquo;s brave!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, I don&rsquo;t see the great bravery,&rsquo; observed the
+ostler, misapprehending him.&nbsp; &lsquo;Three men, and you may call
+that three to one.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll call it brave when some one stops
+the mail single-handed; that&rsquo;s a risk.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And why should they hesitate?&rsquo; inquired Mr. Archer.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The poor souls who are fallen to such a way of life, pray what
+have they to lose?&nbsp; If they get the money, well; but if a ball
+should put them from their troubles, why, so better.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, sir,&rsquo; said the ostler, &lsquo;I believe you&rsquo;ll
+find they won&rsquo;t agree with you.&nbsp; They count on a good fling,
+you see; or who would risk it? - And here&rsquo;s my best respects to
+you, Miss Nance.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And I forgot the part of cowardice,&rsquo; resumed Mr. Archer.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;All men fear.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;O, surely not!&rsquo; cried Nance.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;All men,&rsquo; reiterated Mr. Archer.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ay, that&rsquo;s a true word,&rsquo; observed Old Cumberland,
+&lsquo;and a thief, anyway, for it&rsquo;s a coward&rsquo;s trade.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;But these fellows, now,&rsquo; said Jonathan, with a curious,
+appealing manner - &lsquo;these fellows with their seventy pounds!&nbsp;
+Perhaps, Mr. Archer, they were no true thieves after all, but just people
+who had been robbed and tried to get their own again.&nbsp; What was
+that you said, about all England and the taxes?&nbsp; One takes, another
+gives; why, that&rsquo;s almost fair.&nbsp; If I&rsquo;ve been rooked
+and robbed, and the coat taken off my back, I call it almost fair to
+take another&rsquo;s.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ask Old Cumberland,&rsquo; observed the ostler; &lsquo;you ask
+Old Cumberland, Miss Nance!&rsquo; and he bestowed a wink upon his favoured
+fair one.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Why that?&rsquo; asked Jonathan.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;He had his coat taken - ay, and his shirt too,&rsquo; returned
+the ostler.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Is that so?&rsquo; cried Jonathan eagerly.&nbsp; &lsquo;Was you
+robbed too?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;That was I,&rsquo; replied Cumberland, &lsquo;with a warrant!&nbsp;
+I was a well-to-do man when I was young.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ay!&nbsp; See that!&rsquo; says Jonathan.&nbsp; &lsquo;And you
+don&rsquo;t long for a revenge?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Eh!&nbsp; Not me!&rsquo; answered the beggar.&nbsp; &lsquo;It&rsquo;s
+too long ago.&nbsp; But if you&rsquo;ll give me another mug of your
+good ale, my pretty lady, I won&rsquo;t say no to that.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And shalt have!&nbsp; And shalt have!&rsquo; cried Jonathan.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Or brandy even, if you like it better.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And as Cumberland did like it better, and the ostler chimed in, the
+party pledged each other in a dram of brandy before separating.<br>
+<br>
+As for Nance, she slipped forth into the ruins, partly to avoid the
+ostler&rsquo;s gallantries, partly to lament over the defects of Mr.
+Archer.&nbsp; Plainly, he was no hero.&nbsp; She pitied him; she began
+to feel a protecting interest mingle with and almost supersede her admiration,
+and was at the same time disappointed and yet drawn to him.&nbsp; She
+was, indeed, conscious of such unshaken fortitude in her own heart,
+that she was almost tempted by an occasion to be bold for two.&nbsp;
+She saw herself, in a brave attitude, shielding her imperfect hero from
+the world; and she saw, like a piece of heaven, his gratitude for her
+protection.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER V - LIFE IN THE CASTLE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+From that day forth the life of these three persons in the ruin ran
+very smoothly.&nbsp; Mr. Archer now sat by the fire with a book, and
+now passed whole days abroad, returning late, dead weary.&nbsp; His
+manner was a mask; but it was half transparent; through the even tenor
+of his gravity and courtesy profound revolutions of feeling were betrayed,
+seasons of numb despair, of restlessness, of aching temper.&nbsp; For
+days he would say nothing beyond his usual courtesies and solemn compliments;
+and then, all of a sudden, some fine evening beside the kitchen fire,
+he would fall into a vein of elegant gossip, tell of strange and interesting
+events, the secrets of families, brave deeds of war, the miraculous
+discovery of crime, the visitations of the dead.&nbsp; Nance and her
+uncle would sit till the small hours with eyes wide open: Jonathan applauding
+the unexpected incidents with many a slap of his big hand; Nance, perhaps,
+more pleased with the narrator&rsquo;s eloquence and wise reflections;
+and then, again, days would follow of abstraction, of listless humming,
+of frequent apologies and long hours of silence.&nbsp; Once only, and
+then after a week of unrelieved melancholy, he went over to the &lsquo;Green
+Dragon,&rsquo; spent the afternoon with the landlord and a bowl of punch,
+and returned as on the first night, devious in step but courteous and
+unperturbed of speech.<br>
+<br>
+If he seemed more natural and more at his ease it was when he found
+Nance alone; and, laying by some of his reserve, talked before her rather
+than to her of his destiny, character and hopes.&nbsp; To Nance these
+interviews were but a doubtful privilege.&nbsp; At times he would seem
+to take a pleasure in her presence, to consult her gravely, to hear
+and to discuss her counsels; at times even, but these were rare and
+brief, he would talk of herself, praise the qualities that she possessed,
+touch indulgently on her defects, and lend her books to read and even
+examine her upon her reading; but far more often he would fall into
+a half unconsciousness, put her a question and then answer it himself,
+drop into the veiled tone of voice of one soliloquising, and leave her
+at last as though he had forgotten her existence.&nbsp; It was odd,
+too, that in all this random converse, not a fact of his past life,
+and scarce a name, should ever cross his lips.&nbsp; A profound reserve
+kept watch upon his most unguarded moments.&nbsp; He spoke continually
+of himself, indeed, but still in enigmas; a veiled prophet of egoism.<br>
+<br>
+The base of Nance&rsquo;s feelings for Mr. Archer was admiration as
+for a superior being; and with this, his treatment, consciously or not,
+accorded happily.&nbsp; When he forgot her, she took the blame upon
+herself.&nbsp; His formal politeness was so exquisite that this essential
+brutality stood excused.&nbsp; His compliments, besides, were always
+grave and rational; he would offer reason for his praise, convict her
+of merit, and thus disarm suspicion.&nbsp; Nay, and the very hours when
+he forgot and remembered her alternately could by the ardent fallacies
+of youth be read in the light of an attention.&nbsp; She might be far
+from his confidence; but still she was nearer it than any one.&nbsp;
+He might ignore her presence, but yet he sought it.<br>
+<br>
+Moreover, she, upon her side, was conscious of one point of superiority.&nbsp;
+Beside this rather dismal, rather effeminate man, who recoiled from
+a worm, who grew giddy on the castle wall, who bore so helplessly the
+weight of his misfortunes, she felt herself a head and shoulders taller
+in cheerful and sterling courage.&nbsp; She could walk head in air along
+the most precarious rafter; her hand feared neither the grossness nor
+the harshness of life&rsquo;s web, but was thrust cheerfully, if need
+were, into the briar bush, and could take hold of any crawling horror.&nbsp;
+Ruin was mining the walls of her cottage, as already it had mined and
+subverted Mr. Archer&rsquo;s palace.&nbsp; Well, she faced it with a
+bright countenance and a busy hand.&nbsp; She had got some washing,
+some rough seamstress work from the &lsquo;Green Dragon,&rsquo; and
+from another neighbour ten miles away across the moor.&nbsp; At this
+she cheerfully laboured, and from that height she could afford to pity
+the useless talents and poor attitude of Mr. Archer.&nbsp; It did not
+change her admiration, but it made it bearable.&nbsp; He was above her
+in all ways; but she was above him in one.&nbsp; She kept it to herself,
+and hugged it.&nbsp; When, like all young creatures, she made long stories
+to justify, to nourish, and to forecast the course of her affection,
+it was this private superiority that made all rosy, that cut the knot,
+and that, at last, in some great situation, fetched to her knees the
+dazzling but imperfect hero.&nbsp; With this pretty exercise she beguiled
+the hours of labour, and consoled herself for Mr. Archer&rsquo;s bearing.<br>
+<br>
+Pity was her weapon and her weakness.&nbsp; To accept the loved one&rsquo;s
+faults, although it has an air of freedom, is to kiss the chain, and
+this pity it was which, lying nearer to her heart, lent the one element
+of true emotion to a fanciful and merely brain-sick love.<br>
+<br>
+Thus it fell out one day that she had gone to the &lsquo;Green Dragon&rsquo;
+and brought back thence a letter to Mr. Archer.&nbsp; He, upon seeing
+it, winced like a man under the knife: pain, shame, sorrow, and the
+most trenchant edge of mortification cut into his heart and wrung the
+steady composure of his face.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Dear heart! have you bad news?&rsquo; she cried.<br>
+<br>
+But he only replied by a gesture and fled to his room, and when, later
+on, she ventured to refer to it, he stopped her on the threshold, as
+if with words prepared beforehand.&nbsp; &lsquo;There are some pains,&rsquo;
+said he, &lsquo;too acute for consolation, or I would bring them to
+my kind consoler.&nbsp; Let the memory of that letter, if you please,
+be buried.&rsquo;&nbsp; And then as she continued to gaze at him, being,
+in spite of herself, pained by his elaborate phrase, doubtfully sincere
+in word and manner: &lsquo;Let it be enough,&rsquo; he added haughtily,
+&lsquo;that if this matter wring my heart, it doth not touch my conscience.&nbsp;
+I am a man, I would have you to know, who suffers undeservedly.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+He had never spoken so directly: never with so convincing an emotion;
+and her heart thrilled for him.&nbsp; She could have taken his pains
+and died of them with joy.<br>
+<br>
+Meanwhile she was left without support.&nbsp; Jonathan now swore by
+his lodger, and lived for him.&nbsp; He was a fine talker.&nbsp; He
+knew the finest sight of stories; he was a man and a gentleman, take
+him for all in all, and a perfect credit to Old England.&nbsp; Such
+were the old man&rsquo;s declared sentiments, and sure enough he clung
+to Mr. Archer&rsquo;s side, hung upon his utterance when he spoke, and
+watched him with unwearing interest when he was silent.&nbsp; And yet
+his feeling was not clear; in the partial wreck of his mind, which was
+leaning to decay, some after-thought was strongly present.&nbsp; As
+he gazed in Mr. Archer&rsquo;s face a sudden brightness would kindle
+in his rheumy eyes, his eye-brows would lift as with a sudden thought,
+his mouth would open as though to speak, and close again on silence.&nbsp;
+Once or twice he even called Mr. Archer mysteriously forth into the
+dark courtyard, took him by the button, and laid a demonstrative finger
+on his chest; but there his ideas or his courage failed him; he would
+shufflingly excuse himself and return to his position by the fire without
+a word of explanation.&nbsp; &lsquo;The good man was growing old,&rsquo;
+said Mr. Archer with a suspicion of a shrug.&nbsp; But the good man
+had his idea, and even when he was alone the name of Mr. Archer fell
+from his lips continually in the course of mumbled and gesticulative
+conversation.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VI - THE BAD HALF-CROWN<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+However early Nance arose, and she was no sluggard, the old man, who
+had begun to outlive the earthly habit of slumber, would usually have
+been up long before, the fire would be burning brightly, and she would
+see him wandering among the ruins, lantern in hand, and talking assiduously
+to himself.&nbsp; One day, however, after he had returned late from
+the market town, she found that she had stolen a march upon that indefatigable
+early riser.&nbsp; The kitchen was all blackness.&nbsp; She crossed
+the castle-yard to the wood-cellar, her steps printing the thick hoarfrost.&nbsp;
+A scathing breeze blew out of the north-east and slowly carried a regiment
+of black and tattered clouds over the face of heaven, which was already
+kindled with the wild light of morning, but where she walked, in shelter
+of the ruins, the flame of her candle burned steady.&nbsp; The extreme
+cold smote upon her conscience.&nbsp; She could not bear to think this
+bitter business fell usually to the lot of one so old as Jonathan, and
+made desperate resolutions to be earlier in the future.<br>
+<br>
+The fire was a good blaze before he entered, limping dismally into the
+kitchen.&nbsp; &lsquo;Nance,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;I be all knotted
+up with the rheumatics; will you rub me a bit?&rsquo;&nbsp; She came
+and rubbed him where and how he bade her.&nbsp; &lsquo;This is a cruel
+thing that old age should be rheumaticky,&rsquo; said he.&nbsp; &lsquo;When
+I was young I stood my turn of the teethache like a man! for why? because
+it couldn&rsquo;t last for ever; but these rheumatics come to live and
+die with you.&nbsp; Your aunt was took before the time came; never had
+an ache to mention.&nbsp; Now I lie all night in my single bed and the
+blood never warms in me; this knee of mine it seems like lighted up
+with rheumatics; it seems as though you could see to sew by it; and
+all the strings of my old body ache, as if devils was pulling &rsquo;em.&nbsp;
+Thank you kindly; that&rsquo;s someways easier now, but an old man,
+my dear, has little to look for; it&rsquo;s pain, pain, pain to the
+end of the business, and I&rsquo;ll never be rightly warm again till
+I get under the sod,&rsquo; he said, and looked down at her with a face
+so aged and weary that she had nearly wept.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I lay awake all night,&rsquo; he continued; &lsquo;I do so mostly,
+and a long walk kills me.&nbsp; Eh, deary me, to think that life should
+run to such a puddle!&nbsp; And I remember long syne when I was strong,
+and the blood all hot and good about me, and I loved to run, too - deary
+me, to run!&nbsp; Well, that&rsquo;s all by.&nbsp; You&rsquo;d better
+pray to be took early, Nance, and not live on till you get to be like
+me, and are robbed in your grey old age, your cold, shivering, dark
+old age, that&rsquo;s like a winter&rsquo;s morning&rsquo;; and he bitterly
+shuddered, spreading his hands before the fire.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Come now,&rsquo; said Nance, &lsquo;the more you say the less
+you&rsquo;ll like it, Uncle Jonathan; but if I were you I would be proud
+for to have lived all your days honest and beloved, and come near the
+end with your good name: isn&rsquo;t that a fine thing to be proud of?&nbsp;
+Mr. Archer was telling me in some strange land they used to run races
+each with a lighted candle, and the art was to keep the candle burning.&nbsp;
+Well, now, I thought that was like life: a man&rsquo;s good conscience
+is the flame he gets to carry, and if he comes to the winning-post with
+that still burning, why, take it how you will, the man&rsquo;s a hero
+- even if he was low-born like you and me.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Did Mr. Archer tell you that?&rsquo; asked Jonathan.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No, dear,&rsquo; said she, &lsquo;that&rsquo;s my own thought
+about it.&nbsp; He told me of the race.&nbsp; But see, now,&rsquo; she
+continued, putting on the porridge, &lsquo;you say old age is a hard
+season, but so is youth.&nbsp; You&rsquo;re half out of the battle,
+I would say; you loved my aunt and got her, and buried her, and some
+of these days soon you&rsquo;ll go to meet her; and take her my love
+and tell her I tried to take good care of you; for so I do, Uncle Jonathan.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Jonathan struck with his fist upon the settle.&nbsp; &lsquo;D&rsquo;
+ye think I want to die, ye vixen?&rsquo; he shouted.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+want to live ten hundred years.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+This was a mystery beyond Nance&rsquo;s penetration, and she stared
+in wonder as she made the porridge.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I want to live,&rsquo; he continued, &lsquo;I want to live and
+to grow rich.&nbsp; I want to drive my carriage and to dice in hells
+and see the ring, I do.&nbsp; Is this a life that I lived?&nbsp; I want
+to be a rake, d&rsquo; ye understand?&nbsp; I want to know what things
+are like.&nbsp; I don&rsquo;t want to die like a blind kitten, and me
+seventy-six.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;O fie!&rsquo; said Nance.<br>
+<br>
+The old man thrust out his jaw at her, with the grimace of an irreverent
+schoolboy.&nbsp; Upon that aged face it seemed a blasphemy.&nbsp; Then
+he took out of his bosom a long leather purse, and emptying its contents
+on the settle, began to count and recount the pieces, ringing and examining
+each, and suddenly he leapt like a young man.&nbsp; &lsquo;What!&rsquo;
+he screamed.&nbsp; &lsquo;Bad?&nbsp; O Lord!&nbsp; I&rsquo;m robbed
+again!&rsquo;&nbsp; And falling on his knees before the settle he began
+to pour forth the most dreadful curses on the head of his deceiver.&nbsp;
+His eyes were shut, for to him this vile solemnity was prayer.&nbsp;
+He held up the bad half-crown in his right hand, as though he were displaying
+it to Heaven, and what increased the horror of the scene, the curses
+he invoked were those whose efficacy he had tasted - old age and poverty,
+rheumatism and an ungrateful son.&nbsp; Nance listened appalled; then
+she sprang forward and dragged down his arm and laid her hand upon his
+mouth.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Whist!&rsquo; she cried.&nbsp; &lsquo;Whist ye, for God&rsquo;s
+sake!&nbsp; O my man, whist ye!&nbsp; If Heaven were to hear; if poor
+Aunt Susan were to hear!&nbsp; Think, she may be listening.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+And with the histrionism of strong emotion she pointed to a corner of
+the kitchen.<br>
+<br>
+His eyes followed her finger.&nbsp; He looked there for a little, thinking,
+blinking; then he got stiffly to his feet and resumed his place upon
+the settle, the bad piece still in his hand.&nbsp; So he sat for some
+time, looking upon the half-crown, and now wondering to himself on the
+injustice and partiality of the law, now computing again and again the
+nature of his loss.&nbsp; So he was still sitting when Mr. Archer entered
+the kitchen.&nbsp; At this a light came into his face, and after some
+seconds of rumination he dispatched Nance upon an errand.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Mr. Archer,&rsquo; said he, as soon as they were alone together,
+&lsquo;would you give me a guinea-piece for silver?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Why, sir, I believe I can,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer.<br>
+<br>
+And the exchange was just effected when Nance re-entered the apartment.&nbsp;
+The blood shot into her face.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What&rsquo;s to do here?&rsquo; she asked rudely.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nothing, my dearie,&rsquo; said old Jonathan, with a touch of
+whine.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What&rsquo;s to do?&rsquo; she said again.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Your uncle was but changing me a piece of gold,&rsquo; returned
+Mr. Archer.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Let me see what he hath given you, Mr. Archer,&rsquo; replied
+the girl.&nbsp; &lsquo;I had a bad piece, and I fear it is mixed up
+among the good.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, well,&rsquo; replied Mr. Archer, smiling, &lsquo;I must
+take the merchant&rsquo;s risk of it.&nbsp; The money is now mixed.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I know my piece,&rsquo; quoth Nance.&nbsp; &lsquo;Come, let me
+see your silver, Mr. Archer.&nbsp; If I have to get it by a theft I&rsquo;ll
+see that money,&rsquo; she cried.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nay, child, if you put as much passion to be honest as the world
+to steal, I must give way, though I betray myself,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;There it is as I received it.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Nance quickly found the bad half-crown.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Give him another,&rsquo; she said, looking Jonathan in the face;
+and when that had been done, she walked over to the chimney and flung
+the guilty piece into the reddest of the fire.&nbsp; Its base constituents
+began immediately to run; even as she watched it the disc crumbled,
+and the lineaments of the King became confused.&nbsp; Jonathan, who
+had followed close behind, beheld these changes from over her shoulder,
+and his face darkened sorely.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Now,&rsquo; said she, &lsquo;come back to table, and to-day it
+is I that shall say grace, as I used to do in the old times, day about
+with Dick&rsquo;; and covering her eyes with one hand, &lsquo;O Lord,&rsquo;
+said she with deep emotion, &lsquo;make us thankful; and, O Lord, deliver
+us from evil!&nbsp; For the love of the poor souls that watch for us
+in heaven, O deliver us from evil.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VII - THE BLEACHING-GREEN<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The year moved on to March; and March, though it blew bitter keen from
+the North Sea, yet blinked kindly between whiles on the river dell.&nbsp;
+The mire dried up in the closest covert; life ran in the bare branches,
+and the air of the afternoon would be suddenly sweet with the fragrance
+of new grass.<br>
+<br>
+Above and below the castle the river crooked like the letter &lsquo;S.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The lower loop was to the left, and embraced the high and steep projection
+which was crowned by the ruins; the upper loop enclosed a lawny promontory,
+fringed by thorn and willow.&nbsp; It was easy to reach it from the
+castle side, for the river ran in this part very quietly among innumerable
+boulders and over dam-like walls of rock.&nbsp; The place was all enclosed,
+the wind a stranger, the turf smooth and solid; so it was chosen by
+Nance to be her bleaching-green.<br>
+<br>
+One day she brought a bucketful of linen, and had but begun to wring
+and lay them out when Mr. Archer stepped from the thicket on the far
+side, drew very deliberately near, and sat down in silence on the grass.&nbsp;
+Nance looked up to greet him with a smile, but finding her smile was
+not returned, she fell into embarrassment and stuck the more busily
+to her employment.&nbsp; Man or woman, the whole world looks well at
+any work to which they are accustomed; but the girl was ashamed of what
+she did.&nbsp; She was ashamed, besides, of the sun-bonnet that so well
+became her, and ashamed of her bare arms, which were her greatest beauty.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nausicaa,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer at last, &lsquo;I find you like
+Nausicaa.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And who was she?&rsquo; asked Nance, and laughed in spite of
+herself, an empty and embarrassed laugh, that sounded in Mr. Archer&rsquo;s
+ears, indeed, like music, but to her own like the last grossness of
+rusticity.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;She was a princess of the Grecian islands,&rsquo; he replied.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;A king, being shipwrecked, found her washing by the shore.&nbsp;
+Certainly I, too, was shipwrecked,&rsquo; he continued, plucking at
+the grass.&nbsp; &lsquo;There was never a more desperate castaway -
+to fall from polite life, fortune, a shrine of honour, a grateful conscience,
+duties willingly taken up and faithfully discharged; and to fall to
+this - idleness, poverty, inutility, remorse.&rsquo;&nbsp; He seemed
+to have forgotten her presence, but here he remembered her again.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Nance,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;would you have a man sit down and
+suffer or rise up and strive?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nay,&rsquo; she said.&nbsp; &lsquo;I would always rather see
+him doing.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ha!&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, &lsquo;but yet you speak from an
+imperfect knowledge.&nbsp; Conceive a man damned to a choice of only
+evil - misconduct upon either side, not a fault behind him, and yet
+naught before him but this choice of sins.&nbsp; How would you say then?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I would say that he was much deceived, Mr. Archer,&rsquo; returned
+Nance.&nbsp; &lsquo;I would say there was a third choice, and that the
+right one.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I tell you,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, &lsquo;the man I have in
+view hath two ways open, and no more.&nbsp; One to wait, like a poor
+mewling baby, till Fate save or ruin him; the other to take his troubles
+in his hand, and to perish or be saved at once.&nbsp; It is no point
+of morals; both are wrong.&nbsp; Either way this step-child of Providence
+must fall; which shall he choose, by doing or not doing?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Fall, then, is what I would say,&rsquo; replied Nance.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Fall where you will, but do it!&nbsp; For O, Mr. Archer,&rsquo;
+she continued, stooping to her work, &lsquo;you that are good and kind,
+and so wise, it doth sometimes go against my heart to see you live on
+here like a sheep in a turnip-field!&nbsp; If you were braver - &rsquo;
+and here she paused, conscience-smitten.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Do I, indeed, lack courage?&rsquo; inquired Mr. Archer of himself.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Courage, the footstool of the virtues, upon which they stand?&nbsp;
+Courage, that a poor private carrying a musket has to spare of; that
+does not fail a weasel or a rat; that is a brutish faculty?&nbsp; I
+to fail there, I wonder?&nbsp; But what is courage, then?&nbsp; The
+constancy to endure oneself or to see others suffer?&nbsp; The itch
+of ill-advised activity: mere shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and
+patient?&nbsp; To inquire of the significance of words is to rob ourselves
+of what we seem to know, and yet, of all things, certainly to stand
+still is the least heroic.&nbsp; Nance,&rsquo; he said, &lsquo;did you
+ever hear of <i>Hamlet</i>?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Never,&rsquo; said Nance.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;&rsquo;Tis an old play,&rsquo; returned Mr. Archer, &lsquo;and
+frequently enacted.&nbsp; This while I have been talking Hamlet.&nbsp;
+You must know this Hamlet was a Prince among the Danes,&rsquo; and he
+told her the play in a very good style, here and there quoting a verse
+or two with solemn emphasis.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;It is strange,&rsquo; said Nance; &lsquo;he was then a very poor
+creature?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;That was what he could not tell,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Look at me, am I as poor a creature?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+She looked, and what she saw was the familiar thought of all her hours;
+the tall figure very plainly habited in black, the spotless ruffles,
+the slim hands; the long, well-shapen, serious, shaven face, the wide
+and somewhat thin-lipped mouth, the dark eyes that were so full of depth
+and change and colour.&nbsp; He was gazing at her with his brows a little
+knit, his chin upon one hand and that elbow resting on his knee.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ye look a man!&rsquo; she cried, &lsquo;ay, and should be a great
+one!&nbsp; The more shame to you to lie here idle like a dog before
+the fire.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;My fair Holdaway,&rsquo; quoth Mr. Archer, &lsquo;you are much
+set on action.&nbsp; I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He continued, looking at her with a half-absent fixity, &lsquo;&rsquo;Tis
+a strange thing, certainly, that in my years of fortune I should never
+taste happiness, and now when I am broke, enjoy so much of it, for was
+I ever happier than to-day?&nbsp; Was the grass softer, the stream pleasanter
+in sound, the air milder, the heart more at peace?&nbsp; Why should
+I not sink?&nbsp; To dig - why, after all, it should be easy.&nbsp;
+To take a mate, too?&nbsp; Love is of all grades since Jupiter; love
+fails to none; and children&rsquo; - but here he passed his hand suddenly
+over his eyes.&nbsp; &lsquo;O fool and coward, fool and coward!&rsquo;
+he said bitterly; &lsquo;can you forget your fetters?&nbsp; You did
+not know that I was fettered, Nance?&rsquo; he asked, again addressing
+her.<br>
+<br>
+But Nance was somewhat sore.&nbsp; &lsquo;I know you keep talking,&rsquo;
+she said, and, turning half away from him, began to wring out a sheet
+across her shoulder.&nbsp; &lsquo;I wonder you are not wearied of your
+voice.&nbsp; When the hands lie abed the tongue takes a walk.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Archer laughed unpleasantly, rose and moved to the water&rsquo;s
+edge.&nbsp; In this part the body of the river poured across a little
+narrow fell, ran some ten feet very smoothly over a bed of pebbles,
+then getting wind, as it were, of another shelf of rock which barred
+the channel, began, by imperceptible degrees, to separate towards either
+shore in dancing currents, and to leave the middle clear and stagnant.&nbsp;
+The set towards either side was nearly equal; about one half of the
+whole water plunged on the side of the castle, through a narrow gullet;
+about one half ran ripping past the margin of the green and slipped
+across a babbling rapid.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Here,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, after he had looked for some time
+at the fine and shifting demarcation of these currents, &lsquo;come
+here and see me try my fortune.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I am not like a man,&rsquo; said Nance; &lsquo;I have no time
+to waste.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Come here,&rsquo; he said again.&nbsp; &lsquo;I ask you seriously,
+Nance.&nbsp; We are not always childish when we seem so.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+She drew a little nearer.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Now,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;you see these two channels - choose
+one.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;ll choose the nearest, to save time,&rsquo; said Nance.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, that shall be for action,&rsquo; returned Mr. Archer.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;And since I wish to have the odds against me, not only the other
+channel but yon stagnant water in the midst shall be for lying still.&nbsp;
+You see this?&rsquo; he continued, pulling up a withered rush.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I break it in three.&nbsp; I shall put each separately at the
+top of the upper fall, and according as they go by your way or by the
+other I shall guide my life.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;This is very silly,&rsquo; said Nance, with a movement of her
+shoulders.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I do not think it so,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And then,&rsquo; she resumed, &lsquo;if you are to try your fortune,
+why not evenly?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nay,&rsquo; returned Mr. Archer with a smile, &lsquo;no man can
+put complete reliance in blind fate; he must still cog the dice.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+By this time he had got upon the rock beside the upper fall, and, bidding
+her look out, dropped a piece of rush into the middle of the intake.&nbsp;
+The rusty fragment was sucked at once over the fall, came up again far
+on the right hand, leaned ever more and more in the same direction,
+and disappeared under the hanging grasses on the castle side.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;One,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, &lsquo;one for standing still.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+But the next launch had a different fate, and after hanging for a while
+about the edge of the stagnant water, steadily approached the bleaching-green
+and danced down the rapid under Nance&rsquo;s eyes.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;One for me,&rsquo; she cried with some exultation; and then she
+observed that Mr. Archer had grown pale, and was kneeling on the rock,
+with his hand raised like a person petrified.&nbsp; &lsquo;Why,&rsquo;
+said she, &lsquo;you do not mind it, do you?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Does a man not mind a throw of dice by which a fortune hangs?&rsquo;
+said Mr. Archer, rather hoarsely.&nbsp; &lsquo;And this is more than
+fortune.&nbsp; Nance, if you have any kindness for my fate, put up a
+prayer before I launch the next one.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;A prayer,&rsquo; she cried, &lsquo;about a game like this?&nbsp;
+I would not be so heathen.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;then without,&rsquo; and he closed
+his eyes and dropped the piece of rush.&nbsp; This time there was no
+doubt.&nbsp; It went for the rapid as straight as any arrow.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Action then!&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, getting to his feet; &lsquo;and
+then God forgive us,&rsquo; he added, almost to himself.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;God forgive us, indeed,&rsquo; cried Nance, &lsquo;for wasting
+the good daylight!&nbsp; But come, Mr. Archer, if I see you look so
+serious I shall begin to think you was in earnest.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nay,&rsquo; he said, turning upon her suddenly, with a full smile;
+&lsquo;but is not this good advice?&nbsp; I have consulted God and demigod;
+the nymph of the river, and what I far more admire and trust, my blue-eyed
+Minerva.&nbsp; Both have said the same.&nbsp; My own heart was telling
+it already.&nbsp; Action, then, be mine; and into the deep sea with
+all this paralysing casuistry.&nbsp; I am happy to-day for the first
+time.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER VIII - THE MAIL GUARD<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Somewhere about two in the morning a squall had burst upon the castle,
+a clap of screaming wind that made the towers rock, and a copious drift
+of rain that streamed from the windows.&nbsp; The wind soon blew itself
+out, but the day broke cloudy and dripping, and when the little party
+assembled at breakfast their humours appeared to have changed with the
+change of weather.&nbsp; Nance had been brooding on the scene at the
+river-side, applying it in various ways to her particular aspirations,
+and the result, which was hardly to her mind, had taken the colour out
+of her cheeks.&nbsp; Mr. Archer, too, was somewhat absent, his thoughts
+were of a mingled strain; and even upon his usually impassive countenance
+there were betrayed successive depths of depression and starts of exultation,
+which the girl translated in terms of her own hopes and fears.&nbsp;
+But Jonathan was the most altered: he was strangely silent, hardly passing
+a word, and watched Mr. Archer with an eager and furtive eye.&nbsp;
+It seemed as if the idea that had so long hovered before him had now
+taken a more solid shape, and, while it still attracted, somewhat alarmed
+his imagination.<br>
+<br>
+At this rate, conversation languished into a silence which was only
+broken by the gentle and ghostly noises of the rain on the stone roof
+and about all that field of ruins; and they were all relieved when the
+note of a man whistling and the sound of approaching footsteps in the
+grassy court announced a visitor.&nbsp; It was the ostler from the &lsquo;Green
+Dragon&rsquo; bringing a letter for Mr. Archer.&nbsp; Nance saw her
+hero&rsquo;s face contract and then relax again at sight of it; and
+she thought that she knew why, for the sprawling, gross black characters
+of the address were easily distinguishable from the fine writing on
+the former letter that had so much disturbed him.&nbsp; He opened it
+and began to read; while the ostler sat down to table with a pot of
+ale, and proceeded to make himself agreeable after his fashion.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Fine doings down our way, Miss Nance,&rsquo; said he.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+haven&rsquo;t been abed this blessed night.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Nance expressed a polite interest, but her eye was on Mr. Archer, who
+was reading his letter with a face of such extreme indifference that
+she was tempted to suspect him of assumption.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; continued the ostler, &lsquo;not been the like of
+it this fifteen years: the North Mail stopped at the three stones.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Jonathan&rsquo;s cup was at his lip, but at this moment he choked with
+a great splutter; and Mr. Archer, as if startled by the noise, made
+so sudden a movement that one corner of the sheet tore off and stayed
+between his finger and thumb.&nbsp; It was some little time before the
+old man was sufficiently recovered to beg the ostler to go on, and he
+still kept coughing and crying and rubbing his eyes.&nbsp; Mr. Archer,
+on his side, laid the letter down, and, putting his hands in his pocket,
+listened gravely to the tale.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Yes,&rsquo; resumed Sam, &lsquo;the North Mail was stopped by
+a single horseman; dash my wig, but I admire him!&nbsp; There were four
+insides and two out, and poor Tom Oglethorpe, the guard.&nbsp; Tom showed
+himself a man; let fly his blunderbuss at him; had him covered, too,
+and could swear to that; but the Captain never let on, up with a pistol
+and fetched poor Tom a bullet through the body.&nbsp; Tom, he squelched
+upon the seat, all over blood.&nbsp; Up comes the Captain to the window.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Oblige me,&rdquo; says he, &ldquo;with what you have.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Would you believe it?&nbsp; Not a man says cheep! - not them.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Thy hands over thy head.&rdquo;&nbsp; Four watches, rings, snuff-boxes,
+seven-and-forty pounds overhead in gold.&nbsp; One Dicksee, a grazier,
+tries it on: gives him a guinea.&nbsp; &ldquo;Beg your pardon,&rdquo;
+says the Captain, &ldquo;I think too highly of you to take it at your
+hand.&nbsp; I will not take less than ten from such a gentleman.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+This Dicksee had his money in his stocking, but there was the pistol
+at his eye.&nbsp; Down he goes, offs with his stocking, and there was
+thirty golden guineas.&nbsp; &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; says the Captain, &ldquo;you&rsquo;ve
+tried it on with me, but I scorns the advantage.&nbsp; Ten I said,&rdquo;
+he says, &ldquo;and ten I take.&rdquo;&nbsp; So, dash my buttons, I
+call that man a man!&rsquo; cried Sam in cordial admiration.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, and then?&rsquo; says Mr. Archer.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Then,&rsquo; resumed Sam, &lsquo;that old fat fagot Engleton,
+him as held the ribbons and drew up like a lamb when he was told to,
+picks up his cattle, and drives off again.&nbsp; Down they came to the
+&ldquo;Dragon,&rdquo; all singing like as if they was scalded, and poor
+Tom saying nothing.&nbsp; You would &lsquo;a&rsquo; thought they had
+all lost the King&rsquo;s crown to hear them.&nbsp; Down gets this Dicksee.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Postmaster,&rdquo; he says, taking him by the arm, &ldquo;this
+is a most abominable thing,&rdquo; he says.&nbsp; Down gets a Major
+Clayton, and gets the old man by the other arm.&nbsp; &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve
+been robbed,&rdquo; he cries, &ldquo;robbed!&rdquo;&nbsp; Down gets
+the others, and all around the old man telling their story, and what
+they had lost, and how they was all as good as ruined; till at last
+Old Engleton says, says he, &ldquo;How about Oglethorpe?&rdquo; says
+he.&nbsp; &ldquo;Ay,&rdquo; says the others, &ldquo;how about the guard?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Well, with that we bousted him down, as white as a rag and all blooded
+like a sop.&nbsp; I thought he was dead.&nbsp; Well, he ain&rsquo;t
+dead; but he&rsquo;s dying, I fancy.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Did you say four watches?&rsquo; said Jonathan.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Four, I think.&nbsp; I wish it had been forty,&rsquo; cried Sam.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Such a party of soused herrings I never did see - not a man among
+them bar poor Tom.&nbsp; But us that are the servants on the road have
+all the risk and none of the profit.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And this brave fellow,&rsquo; asked Mr. Archer, very quietly,
+&lsquo;this Oglethorpe - how is he now?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, sir, with my respects, I take it he has a hole bang through
+him,&rsquo; said Sam.&nbsp; &lsquo;The doctor hasn&rsquo;t been yet.&nbsp;
+He&rsquo;d &lsquo;a&rsquo; been bright and early if it had been a passenger.&nbsp;
+But, doctor or no, I&rsquo;ll make a good guess that Tom won&rsquo;t
+see to-morrow.&nbsp; He&rsquo;ll die on a Sunday, will poor Tom; and
+they do say that&rsquo;s fortunate.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Did Tom see him that did it?&rsquo; asked Jonathan.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, he saw him,&rsquo; replied Sam, &lsquo;but not to swear
+by.&nbsp; Said he was a very tall man, and very big, and had a &rsquo;ankerchief
+about his face, and a very quick shot, and sat his horse like a thorough
+gentleman, as he is.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;A gentleman!&rsquo; cried Nance.&nbsp; &lsquo;The dirty knave!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, I calls a man like that a gentleman,&rsquo; returned the
+ostler; &lsquo;that&rsquo;s what I mean by a gentleman.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You don&rsquo;t know much of them, then,&rsquo; said Nance.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;A gentleman would scorn to stoop to such a thing.&nbsp; I call
+my uncle a better gentleman than any thief.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And you would be right,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;How many snuff-boxes did he get?&rsquo; asked Jonathan.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;O, dang me if I know,&rsquo; said Sam; &lsquo;I didn&rsquo;t
+take an inventory.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I will go back with you, if you please,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I should like to see poor Oglethorpe.&nbsp; He has behaved well.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;At your service, sir,&rsquo; said Sam, jumping to his feet.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I dare to say a gentleman like you would not forget a poor fellow
+like Tom - no, nor a plain man like me, sir, that went without his sleep
+to nurse him.&nbsp; And excuse me, sir,&rsquo; added Sam, &lsquo;you
+won&rsquo;t forget about the letter neither?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Surely not,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer.<br>
+<br>
+Oglethorpe lay in a low bed, one of several in a long garret of the
+inn.&nbsp; The rain soaked in places through the roof and fell in minute
+drops; there was but one small window; the beds were occupied by servants,
+the air of the garret was both close and chilly.&nbsp; Mr. Archer&rsquo;s
+heart sank at the threshold to see a man lying perhaps mortally hurt
+in so poor a sick-room, and as he drew near the low bed he took his
+hat off.&nbsp; The guard was a big, blowsy, innocent-looking soul with
+a thick lip and a broad nose, comically turned up; his cheeks were crimson,
+and when Mr. Archer laid a finger on his brow he found him burning with
+fever.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I fear you suffer much,&rsquo; he said, with a catch in his voice,
+as he sat down on the bedside.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I suppose I do, sir,&rsquo; returned Oglethorpe; &lsquo;it is
+main sore.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I am used to wounds and wounded men,&rsquo; returned the visitor.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I have been in the wars and nursed brave fellows before now;
+and, if you will suffer me, I propose to stay beside you till the doctor
+comes.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;It is very good of you, sir, I am sure,&rsquo; said Oglethorpe.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;The trouble is they won&rsquo;t none of them let me drink.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;If you will not tell the doctor,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, &lsquo;I
+will give you some water.&nbsp; They say it is bad for a green wound,
+but in the Low Countries we all drank water when we found the chance,
+and I could never perceive we were the worse for it.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Been wounded yourself, sir, perhaps?&rsquo; called Oglethorpe.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Twice,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, &lsquo;and was as proud of these
+hurts as any lady of her bracelets.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis a fine thing to
+smart for one&rsquo;s duty; even in the pangs of it there is contentment.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ah, well!&rsquo; replied the guard, &lsquo;if you&rsquo;ve been
+shot yourself, that explains.&nbsp; But as for contentment, why, sir,
+you see, it smarts, as you say.&nbsp; And then, I have a good wife,
+you see, and a bit of a brat - a little thing, so high.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Don&rsquo;t move,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No, sir, I will not, and thank you kindly,&rsquo; said Oglethorpe.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;At York they are.&nbsp; A very good lass is my wife - far too
+good for me.&nbsp; And the little rascal - well, I don&rsquo;t know
+how to say it, but he sort of comes round you.&nbsp; If I were to go,
+sir, it would be hard on my poor girl - main hard on her!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ay, you must feel bitter hardly to the rogue that laid you here,&rsquo;
+said Archer.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Why, no, sir, more against Engleton and the passengers,&rsquo;
+replied the guard.&nbsp; &lsquo;He played his hand, if you come to look
+at it; and I wish he had shot worse, or me better.&nbsp; And yet I&rsquo;ll
+go to my grave but what I covered him,&rsquo; he cried.&nbsp; &lsquo;It
+looks like witchcraft.&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll go to my grave but what he was
+drove full of slugs like a pepper-box.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Quietly,&rsquo; said Mr. Archer, &lsquo;you must not excite yourself.&nbsp;
+These deceptions are very usual in war; the eye, in the moment of alert,
+is hardly to be trusted, and when the smoke blows away you see the man
+you fired at, taking aim, it may be, at yourself.&nbsp; You should observe,
+too, that you were in the dark night, and somewhat dazzled by the lamps,
+and that the sudden stopping of the mail had jolted you.&nbsp; In such
+circumstances a man may miss, ay, even with a blunder-buss, and no blame
+attach to his marksmanship.&rsquo; . . .<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE YOUNG CHEVALIER<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+PROLOGUE - THE WINE-SELLER&rsquo;S WIFE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There was a wine-seller&rsquo;s shop, as you went down to the river
+in the city of the Anti-popes.&nbsp; There a man was served with good
+wine of the country and plain country fare; and the place being clean
+and quiet, with a prospect on the river, certain gentlemen who dwelt
+in that city in attendance on a great personage made it a practice (when
+they had any silver in their purses) to come and eat there and be private.<br>
+<br>
+They called the wine-seller Paradou.&nbsp; He was built more like a
+bullock than a man, huge in bone and brawn, high in colour, and with
+a hand like a baby for size.&nbsp; Marie-Madeleine was the name of his
+wife; she was of Marseilles, a city of entrancing women, nor was any
+fairer than herself.&nbsp; She was tall, being almost of a height with
+Paradou; full-girdled, point-device in every form, with an exquisite
+delicacy in the face; her nose and nostrils a delight to look at from
+the fineness of the sculpture, her eyes inclined a hair&rsquo;s-breadth
+inward, her colour between dark and fair, and laid on even like a flower&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+A faint rose dwelt in it, as though she had been found unawares bathing,
+and had blushed from head to foot.&nbsp; She was of a grave countenance,
+rarely smiling; yet it seemed to be written upon every part of her that
+she rejoiced in life.&nbsp; Her husband loved the heels of her feet
+and the knuckles of her fingers; he loved her like a glutton and a brute;
+his love hung about her like an atmosphere; one that came by chance
+into the wine-shop was aware of that passion; and it might be said that
+by the strength of it the woman had been drugged or spell-bound.&nbsp;
+She knew not if she loved or loathed him; he was always in her eyes
+like something monstrous - monstrous in his love, monstrous in his person,
+horrific but imposing in his violence; and her sentiment swung back
+and forward from desire to sickness.&nbsp; But the mean, where it dwelt
+chiefly, was an apathetic fascination, partly of horror; as of Europa
+in mid ocean with her bull.<br>
+<br>
+On the 10th November 1749 there sat two of the foreign gentlemen in
+the wine-seller&rsquo;s shop.&nbsp; They were both handsome men of a
+good presence, richly dressed.&nbsp; The first was swarthy and long
+and lean, with an alert, black look, and a mole upon his cheek.&nbsp;
+The other was more fair.&nbsp; He seemed very easy and sedate, and a
+little melancholy for so young a man, but his smile was charming.&nbsp;
+In his grey eyes there was much abstraction, as of one recalling fondly
+that which was past and lost.&nbsp; Yet there was strength and swiftness
+in his limbs; and his mouth set straight across his face, the under
+lip a thought upon side, like that of a man accustomed to resolve.&nbsp;
+These two talked together in a rude outlandish speech that no frequenter
+of that wine-shop understood.&nbsp; The swarthy man answered to the
+name of <i>Ballantrae</i>; he of the dreamy eyes was sometimes called
+<i>Balmile</i>, and sometimes <i>my Lord</i>, or <i>my</i> <i>Lord Gladsmuir</i>;
+but when the title was given him, he seemed to put it by as if in jesting,
+not without bitterness.<br>
+<br>
+The mistral blew in the city.&nbsp; The first day of that wind, they
+say in the countries where its voice is heard, it blows away all the
+dust, the second all the stones, and the third it blows back others
+from the mountains.&nbsp; It was now come to the third day; outside
+the pebbles flew like hail, and the face of the river was puckered,
+and the very building-stones in the walls of houses seemed to be curdled
+with the savage cold and fury of that continuous blast.&nbsp; It could
+be heard to hoot in all the chimneys of the city; it swept about the
+wine-shop, filling the room with eddies; the chill and gritty touch
+of it passed between the nearest clothes and the bare flesh; and the
+two gentlemen at the far table kept their mantles loose about their
+shoulders.&nbsp; The roughness of these outer hulls, for they were plain
+travellers&rsquo; cloaks that had seen service, set the greater mark
+of richness on what showed below of their laced clothes; for the one
+was in scarlet and the other in violet and white, like men come from
+a scene of ceremony; as indeed they were.<br>
+<br>
+It chanced that these fine clothes were not without their influence
+on the scene which followed, and which makes the prologue of our tale.&nbsp;
+For a long time Balmile was in the habit to come to the wine-shop and
+eat a meal or drink a measure of wine; sometimes with a comrade; more
+often alone, when he would sit and dream and drum upon the table, and
+the thoughts would show in the man&rsquo;s face in little glooms and
+lightenings, like the sun and the clouds upon a water.&nbsp; For a long
+time Marie-Madeleine had observed him apart.&nbsp; His sadness, the
+beauty of his smile when by any chance he remembered her existence and
+addressed her, the changes of his mind signalled forth by an abstruse
+play of feature, the mere fact that he was foreign and a thing detached
+from the local and the accustomed, insensibly attracted and affected
+her.&nbsp; Kindness was ready in her mind; it but lacked the touch of
+an occasion to effervesce and crystallise.&nbsp; Now Balmile had come
+hitherto in a very poor plain habit; and this day of the mistral, when
+his mantle was just open, and she saw beneath it the glancing of the
+violet and the velvet and the silver, and the clustering fineness of
+the lace, it seemed to set the man in a new light, with which he shone
+resplendent to her fancy.<br>
+<br>
+The high inhuman note of the wind, the violence and continuity of its
+outpouring, and the fierce touch of it upon man&rsquo;s whole periphery,
+accelerated the functions of the mind.&nbsp; It set thoughts whirling,
+as it whirled the trees of the forest; it stirred them up in flights,
+as it stirred up the dust in chambers.&nbsp; As brief as sparks, the
+fancies glittered and succeeded each other in the mind of Marie-Madeleine;
+and the grave man with the smile, and the bright clothes under the plain
+mantle, haunted her with incongruous explanations.&nbsp; She considered
+him, the unknown, the speaker of an unknown tongue, the hero (as she
+placed him) of an unknown romance, the dweller upon unknown memories.&nbsp;
+She recalled him sitting there alone, so immersed, so stupefied; yet
+she was sure he was not stupid.&nbsp; She recalled one day when he had
+remained a long time motionless, with parted lips, like one in the act
+of starting up, his eyes fixed on vacancy.&nbsp; Any one else must have
+looked foolish; but not he.&nbsp; She tried to conceive what manner
+of memory had thus entranced him; she forged for him a past; she showed
+him to herself in every light of heroism and greatness and misfortune;
+she brooded with petulant intensity on all she knew and guessed of him.&nbsp;
+Yet, though she was already gone so deep, she was still unashamed, still
+unalarmed; her thoughts were still disinterested; she had still to reach
+the stage at which - beside the image of that other whom we love to
+contemplate and to adorn - we place the image of ourself and behold
+them together with delight.<br>
+<br>
+She stood within the counter, her hands clasped behind her back, her
+shoulders pressed against the wall, her feet braced out.&nbsp; Her face
+was bright with the wind and her own thoughts; as a fire in a similar
+day of tempest glows and brightens on a hearth, so she seemed to glow,
+standing there, and to breathe out energy.&nbsp; It was the first time
+Ballantrae had visited that wine-seller&rsquo;s, the first time he had
+seen the wife; and his eyes were true to her.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I perceive your reason for carrying me to this very draughty
+tavern,&rsquo; he said at last.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I believe it is propinquity,&rsquo; returned Balmile.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You play dark,&rsquo; said Ballantrae, &lsquo;but have a care!&nbsp;
+Be more frank with me, or I will cut you out.&nbsp; I go through no
+form of qualifying my threat, which would be commonplace and not conscientious.&nbsp;
+There is only one point in these campaigns: that is the degree of admiration
+offered by the man; and to our hostess I am in a posture to make victorious
+love.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;If you think you have the time, or the game worth the candle,&rsquo;
+replied the other with a shrug.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;One would suppose you were never at the pains to observe her,&rsquo;
+said Ballantrae.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I am not very observant,&rsquo; said Balmile.&nbsp; &lsquo;She
+seems comely.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You very dear and dull dog!&rsquo; cried Ballantrae; &lsquo;chastity
+is the most besotting of the virtues.&nbsp; Why, she has a look in her
+face beyond singing!&nbsp; I believe, if you was to push me hard, I
+might trace it home to a trifle of a squint.&nbsp; What matters?&nbsp;
+The height of beauty is in the touch that&rsquo;s wrong, that&rsquo;s
+the modulation in a tune.&nbsp; &rsquo;Tis the devil we all love; I
+owe many a conquest to my mole&rsquo; - he touched it as he spoke with
+a smile, and his eyes glittered; - &lsquo;we are all hunchbacks, and
+beauty is only that kind of deformity that I happen to admire.&nbsp;
+But come!&nbsp; Because you are chaste, for which I am sure I pay you
+my respects, that is no reason why you should be blind.&nbsp; Look at
+her, look at the delicious nose of her, look at her cheek, look at her
+ear, look at her hand and wrist - look at the whole baggage from heels
+to crown, and tell me if she wouldn&rsquo;t melt on a man&rsquo;s tongue.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+As Ballantrae spoke, half jesting, half enthusiastic, Balmile was constrained
+to do as he was bidden.&nbsp; He looked at the woman, admired her excellences,
+and was at the same time ashamed for himself and his companion.&nbsp;
+So it befell that when Marie-Madeleine raised her eyes, she met those
+of the subject of her contemplations fixed directly on herself with
+a look that is unmistakable, the look of a person measuring and valuing
+another - and, to clench the false impression, that his glance was instantly
+and guiltily withdrawn.&nbsp; The blood beat back upon her heart and
+leaped again; her obscure thoughts flashed clear before her; she flew
+in fancy straight to his arms like a wanton, and fled again on the instant
+like a nymph.&nbsp; And at that moment there chanced an interruption,
+which not only spared her embarrassment, but set the last consecration
+on her now articulate love.<br>
+<br>
+Into the wine-shop there came a French gentleman, arrayed in the last
+refinement of the fashion, though a little tumbled by his passage in
+the wind.&nbsp; It was to be judged he had come from the same formal
+gathering at which the others had preceded him; and perhaps that he
+had gone there in the hope to meet with them, for he came up to Ballantrae
+with unceremonious eagerness.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;At last, here you are!&rsquo; he cried in French.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+thought I was to miss you altogether.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The Scotsmen rose, and Ballantrae, after the first greetings, laid his
+hand on his companion&rsquo;s shoulder.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;My lord,&rsquo; said he, &lsquo;allow me to present to you one
+of my best friends and one of our best soldiers, the Lord Viscount Gladsmuir.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+The two bowed with the elaborate elegance of the period.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;<i>Monseigneur</i>,&rsquo; said Balmile, &lsquo;<i>je n&rsquo;ai
+pas la pr&eacute;tention de m&rsquo;affubler d&rsquo;un titre que la
+mauvaise fortune de mon roi ne me permet pas de porter comma il sied.&nbsp;
+Je m&rsquo;appelle, pour vous servir, Blair de Balmile tout court</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+[My lord, I have not the effrontery to cumber myself with a title which
+the ill fortunes of my king will not suffer me to bear the way it should
+be.&nbsp; I call myself, at your service, plain Blair of Balmile.]<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;<i>Monsieur le Vicomte ou monsieur Bl&egrave;r&rsquo; de Balma&iuml;l</i>,&rsquo;
+replied the newcomer, &lsquo;<i>le nom n&rsquo;y fait rien, et l&rsquo;on
+conna&icirc;t vos beaux faits</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; [The name matters nothing,
+your gallant actions are known.]<br>
+<br>
+A few more ceremonies, and these three, sitting down together to the
+table, called for wine.&nbsp; It was the happiness of Marie-Madeleine
+to wait unobserved upon the prince of her desires.&nbsp; She poured
+the wine, he drank of it; and that link between them seemed to her,
+for the moment, close as a caress.&nbsp; Though they lowered their tones,
+she surprised great names passing in their conversation, names of kings,
+the names of de Gesvre and Belle-Isle; and the man who dealt in these
+high matters, and she who was now coupled with him in her own thoughts,
+seemed to swim in mid air in a transfiguration.&nbsp; Love is a crude
+core, but it has singular and far-reaching fringes; in that passionate
+attraction for the stranger that now swayed and mastered her, his harsh
+incomprehensible language, and these names of grandees in his talk,
+were each an element.<br>
+<br>
+The Frenchman stayed not long, but it was plain he left behind him matter
+of much interest to his companions; they spoke together earnestly, their
+heads down, the woman of the wine-shop totally forgotten; and they were
+still so occupied when Paradou returned.<br>
+<br>
+This man&rsquo;s love was unsleeping.&nbsp; The even bluster of the
+mistral, with which he had been combating some hours, had not suspended,
+though it had embittered, that predominant passion.&nbsp; His first
+look was for his wife, a look of hope and suspicion, menace and humility
+and love, that made the over-blooming brute appear for the moment almost
+beautiful.&nbsp; She returned his glance, at first as though she knew
+him not, then with a swiftly waxing coldness of intent; and at last,
+without changing their direction, she had closed her eyes.<br>
+<br>
+There passed across her mind during that period much that Paradou could
+not have understood had it been told to him in words: chiefly the sense
+of an enlightening contrast betwixt the man who talked of kings and
+the man who kept a wine-shop, betwixt the love she yearned for and that
+to which she had been long exposed like a victim bound upon the altar.&nbsp;
+There swelled upon her, swifter than the Rhone, a tide of abhorrence
+and disgust.&nbsp; She had succumbed to the monster, humbling herself
+below animals; and now she loved a hero, aspiring to the semi-divine.&nbsp;
+It was in the pang of that humiliating thought that she had closed her
+eyes.<br>
+<br>
+Paradou - quick as beasts are quick, to translate silence - felt the
+insult through his blood; his inarticulate soul bellowed within him
+for revenge.&nbsp; He glanced about the shop.&nbsp; He saw the two indifferent
+gentlemen deep in talk, and passed them over: his fancy flying not so
+high.&nbsp; There was but one other present, a country lout who stood
+swallowing his wine, equally unobserved by all and unobserving - to
+him he dealt a glance of murderous suspicion, and turned direct upon
+his wife.&nbsp; The wine-shop had lain hitherto, a space of shelter,
+the scene of a few ceremonial passages and some whispered conversation,
+in the howling river of the wind; the clock had not yet ticked a score
+of times since Paradou&rsquo;s appearance; and now, as he suddenly gave
+tongue, it seemed as though the mistral had entered at his heels.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What ails you, woman?&rsquo; he cried, smiting on the counter.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Nothing ails me,&rsquo; she replied.&nbsp; It was strange; but
+she spoke and stood at that moment like a lady of degree, drawn upward
+by her aspirations.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You speak to me, by God, as though you scorned me!&rsquo; cried
+the husband.<br>
+<br>
+The man&rsquo;s passion was always formidable; she had often looked
+on upon its violence with a thrill, it had been one ingredient in her
+fascination; and she was now surprised to behold him, as from afar off,
+gesticulating but impotent.&nbsp; His fury might be dangerous like a
+torrent or a gust of wind, but it was inhuman; it might be feared or
+braved, it should never be respected.&nbsp; And with that there came
+in her a sudden glow of courage and that readiness to die which attends
+so closely upon all strong passions.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I do scorn you,&rsquo; she said.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What is that?&rsquo; he cried.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I scorn you,&rsquo; she repeated, smiling.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You love another man!&rsquo; said he.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;With all my soul,&rsquo; was her reply.<br>
+<br>
+The wine-seller roared aloud so that the house rang and shook with it.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Is this the - ?&rsquo; he cried, using a foul word, common in
+the South; and he seized the young countryman and dashed him to the
+ground.&nbsp; There he lay for the least interval of time insensible;
+thence fled from the house, the most terrified person in the county.&nbsp;
+The heavy measure had escaped from his hands, splashing the wine high
+upon the wall.&nbsp; Paradou caught it.&nbsp; &lsquo;And you?&rsquo;
+he roared to his wife, giving her the same name in the feminine, and
+he aimed at her the deadly missile.&nbsp; She expected it, motionless,
+with radiant eyes.<br>
+<br>
+But before it sped, Paradou was met by another adversary, and the unconscious
+rivals stood confronted.&nbsp; It was hard to say at that moment which
+appeared the more formidable.&nbsp; In Paradou, the whole muddy and
+truculent depths of the half-man were stirred to frenzy; the lust of
+destruction raged in him; there was not a feature in his face but it
+talked murder.&nbsp; Balmile had dropped his cloak: he shone out at
+once in his finery, and stood to his full stature; girt in mind and
+body all his resources, all his temper, perfectly in command in his
+face the light of battle.&nbsp; Neither spoke; there was no blow nor
+threat of one; it was war reduced to its last element, the spiritual;
+and the huge wine-seller slowly lowered his weapon.&nbsp; Balmile was
+a noble, he a commoner; Balmile exulted in an honourable cause.&nbsp;
+Paradou already perhaps began to be ashamed of his violence.&nbsp; Of
+a sudden, at least, the tortured brute turned and fled from the shop
+in the footsteps of his former victim, to whose continued flight his
+reappearance added wings.<br>
+<br>
+So soon as Balmile appeared between her husband and herself, Marie-Madeleine
+transferred to him her eyes.&nbsp; It might be her last moment, and
+she fed upon that face; reading there inimitable courage and illimitable
+valour to protect.&nbsp; And when the momentary peril was gone by, and
+the champion turned a little awkwardly towards her whom he had rescued,
+it was to meet, and quail before, a gaze of admiration more distinct
+than words.&nbsp; He bowed, he stammered, his words failed him; he who
+had crossed the floor a moment ago, like a young god, to smite, returned
+like one discomfited; got somehow to his place by the table, muffled
+himself again in his discarded cloak, and for a last touch of the ridiculous,
+seeking for anything to restore his countenance, drank of the wine before
+him, deep as a porter after a heavy lift.&nbsp; It was little wonder
+if Ballantrae, reading the scene with malevolent eyes, laughed out loud
+and brief, and drank with raised glass, &lsquo;To the champion of the
+Fair.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Marie-Madeleine stood in her old place within the counter; she disdained
+the mocking laughter; it fell on her ears, but it did not reach her
+spirit.&nbsp; For her, the world of living persons was all resumed again
+into one pair, as in the days of Eden; there was but the one end in
+life, the one hope before her, the one thing needful, the one thing
+possible - to be his.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I - THE PRINCE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+That same night there was in the city of Avignon a young man in distress
+of mind.&nbsp; Now he sat, now walked in a high apartment, full of draughts
+and shadows.&nbsp; A single candle made the darkness visible; and the
+light scarce sufficed to show upon the wall, where they had been recently
+and rudely nailed, a few miniatures and a copper medal of the young
+man&rsquo;s head.&nbsp; The same was being sold that year in London,
+to admiring thousands.&nbsp; The original was fair; he had beautiful
+brown eyes, a beautiful bright open face; a little feminine, a little
+hard, a little weak; still full of the light of youth, but already beginning
+to be vulgarised; a sordid bloom come upon it, the lines coarsened with
+a touch of puffiness.&nbsp; He was dressed, as for a gala, in peach-colour
+and silver; his breast sparkled with stars and was bright with ribbons;
+for he had held a levee in the afternoon and received a distinguished
+personage incognito.&nbsp; Now he sat with a bowed head, now walked
+precipitately to and fro, now went and gazed from the uncurtained window,
+where the wind was still blowing, and the lights winked in the darkness.<br>
+<br>
+The bells of Avignon rose into song as he was gazing; and the high notes
+and the deep tossed and drowned, boomed suddenly near or were suddenly
+swallowed up, in the current of the mistral.&nbsp; Tears sprang in the
+pale blue eyes; the expression of his face was changed to that of a
+more active misery, it seemed as if the voices of the bells reached,
+and touched and pained him, in a waste of vacancy where even pain was
+welcome.&nbsp; Outside in the night they continued to sound on, swelling
+and fainting; and the listener heard in his memory, as it were their
+harmonies, joy-bells clashing in a northern city, and the acclamations
+of a multitude, the cries of battle, the gross voices of cannon, the
+stridor of an animated life.&nbsp; And then all died away, and he stood
+face to face with himself in the waste of vacancy, and a horror came
+upon his mind, and a faintness on his brain, such as seizes men upon
+the brink of cliffs.<br>
+<br>
+On the table, by the side of the candle, stood a tray of glasses, a
+bottle, and a silver bell.&nbsp; He went thither swiftly, then his hand
+lowered first above the bell, then settled on the bottle.&nbsp; Slowly
+he filled a glass, slowly drank it out; and, as a tide of animal warmth
+recomforted the recesses of his nature, stood there smiling at himself.&nbsp;
+He remembered he was young; the funeral curtains rose, and he saw his
+life shine and broaden and flow out majestically, like a river sunward.&nbsp;
+The smile still on his lips, he lit a second candle and a third; a fire
+stood ready built in a chimney, he lit that also; and the fir-cones
+and the gnarled olive billets were swift to break in flame and to crackle
+on the hearth, and the room brightened and enlarged about him like his
+hopes.&nbsp; To and fro, to and fro, he went, his hands lightly clasped,
+his breath deeply and pleasurably taken.&nbsp; Victory walked with him;
+he marched to crowns and empires among shouting followers; glory was
+his dress.&nbsp; And presently again the shadows closed upon the solitary.&nbsp;
+Under the gilt of flame and candle-light, the stone walls of the apartment
+showed down bare and cold; behind the depicted triumph loomed up the
+actual failure: defeat, the long distress of the flight, exile, despair,
+broken followers, mourning faces, empty pockets, friends estranged.&nbsp;
+The memory of his father rose in his mind: he, too, estranged and defied;
+despair sharpened into wrath.&nbsp; There was one who had led armies
+in the field, who had staked his life upon the family enterprise, a
+man of action and experience, of the open air, the camp, the court,
+the council-room; and he was to accept direction from an old, pompous
+gentleman in a home in Italy, and buzzed about by priests?&nbsp; A pretty
+king, if he had not a martial son to lean upon!&nbsp; A king at all?<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;There was a weaver (of all people) joined me at St. Ninians;
+he was more of a man than my papa!&rsquo; he thought.&nbsp; &lsquo;I
+saw him lie doubled in his blood and a grenadier below him - and he
+died for my papa!&nbsp; All died for him, or risked the dying, and I
+lay for him all those months in the rain and skulked in heather like
+a fox; and now he writes me his advice! calls me Carluccio - me, the
+man of the house, the only king in that king&rsquo;s race.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He ground his teeth.&nbsp; &lsquo;The only king in Europe!&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Who else?&nbsp; Who has done and suffered except me? who has lain and
+run and hidden with his faithful subjects, like a second Bruce?&nbsp;
+Not my accursed cousin, Louis of France, at least, the lewd effeminate
+traitor!&rsquo;&nbsp; And filling the glass to the brim, he drank a
+king&rsquo;s damnation.&nbsp; Ah, if he had the power of Louis, what
+a king were here!<br>
+<br>
+The minutes followed each other into the past, and still he persevered
+in this debilitating cycle of emotions, still fed the fire of his excitement
+with driblets of Rhine wine: a boy at odds with life, a boy with a spark
+of the heroic, which he was now burning out and drowning down in futile
+reverie and solitary excess.<br>
+<br>
+From two rooms beyond, the sudden sound of a raised voice attracted
+him.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;By . . .<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+HEATHERCAT<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I - TRAQUAIRS OF MONTROYMONT<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The period of this tale is in the heat of the <i>killing</i>-<i>time</i>;
+the scene laid for the most part in solitary hills and morasses, haunted
+only by the so-called Mountain Wanderers, the dragoons that came in
+chase of them, the women that wept on their dead bodies, and the wild
+birds of the moorland that have cried there since the beginning.&nbsp;
+It is a land of many rain-clouds; a land of much mute history, written
+there in prehistoric symbols.&nbsp; Strange green raths are to be seen
+commonly in the country, above all by the kirkyards; barrows of the
+dead, standing stones; beside these, the faint, durable footprints and
+handmarks of the Roman; and an antiquity older perhaps than any, and
+still living and active - a complete Celtic nomenclature and a scarce-mingled
+Celtic population.&nbsp; These rugged and grey hills were once included
+in the boundaries of the Caledonian Forest.&nbsp; Merlin sat here below
+his apple-tree and lamented Gwendolen; here spoke with Kentigern; here
+fell into his enchanted trance.&nbsp; And the legend of his slumber
+seems to body forth the story of that Celtic race, deprived for so many
+centuries of their authentic speech, surviving with their ancestral
+inheritance of melancholy perversity and patient, unfortunate courage.<br>
+<br>
+The Traquairs of Montroymont <i>(Mons Romanus</i>, as the erudite expound
+it) had long held their seat about the head-waters of the Dule and in
+the back parts of the moorland parish of Balweary.&nbsp; For two hundred
+years they had enjoyed in these upland quarters a certain decency (almost
+to be named distinction) of repute; and the annals of their house, or
+what is remembered of them, were obscure and bloody.&nbsp; Ninian Traquair
+was &lsquo;cruallie slochtered&rsquo; by the Crozers at the kirk-door
+of Balweary, anno 1482.&nbsp; Francis killed Simon Ruthven of Drumshoreland,
+anno 1540; bought letters of slayers at the widow and heir, and, by
+a barbarous form of compounding, married (without tocher) Simon&rsquo;s
+daughter Grizzel, which is the way the Traquairs and Ruthvens came first
+to an intermarriage.&nbsp; About the last Traquair and Ruthven marriage,
+it is the business of this book, among many other things, to tell.<br>
+<br>
+The Traquairs were always strong for the Covenant; for the King also,
+but the Covenant first; and it began to be ill days for Montroymont
+when the Bishops came in and the dragoons at the heels of them.&nbsp;
+Ninian (then laird) was an anxious husband of himself and the property,
+as the times required, and it may be said of him, that he lost both.&nbsp;
+He was heavily suspected of the Pentland Hills rebellion.&nbsp; When
+it came the length of Bothwell Brig, he stood his trial before the Secret
+Council, and was convicted of talking with some insurgents by the wayside,
+the subject of the conversation not very clearly appearing, and of the
+reset and maintenance of one Gale, a gardener man, who was seen before
+Bothwell with a musket, and afterwards, for a continuance of months,
+delved the garden at Montroymont.&nbsp; Matters went very ill with Ninian
+at the Council; some of the lords were clear for treason; and even the
+boot was talked of.&nbsp; But he was spared that torture; and at last,
+having pretty good friendship among great men, he came off with a fine
+of seven thousand marks, that caused the estate to groan.&nbsp; In this
+case, as in so many others, it was the wife that made the trouble.&nbsp;
+She was a great keeper of conventicles; would ride ten miles to one,
+and when she was fined, rejoiced greatly to suffer for the Kirk; but
+it was rather her husband that suffered.&nbsp; She had their only son,
+Francis, baptized privately by the hands of Mr. Kidd; there was that
+much the more to pay for!&nbsp; She could neither be driven nor wiled
+into the parish kirk; as for taking the sacrament at the hands of any
+Episcopalian curate, and tenfold more at those of Curate Haddo, there
+was nothing further from her purposes; and Montroymont had to put his
+hand in his pocket month by month and year by year.&nbsp; Once, indeed,
+the little lady was cast in prison, and the laird, worthy, heavy, uninterested
+man, had to ride up and take her place; from which he was not discharged
+under nine months and a sharp fine.&nbsp; It scarce seemed she had any
+gratitude to him; she came out of gaol herself, and plunged immediately
+deeper in conventicles, resetting recusants, and all her old, expensive
+folly, only with greater vigour and openness, because Montroymont was
+safe in the Tolbooth and she had no witness to consider.&nbsp; When
+he was liberated and came back, with his fingers singed, in December
+1680, and late in the black night, my lady was from home.&nbsp; He came
+into the house at his alighting, with a riding-rod yet in his hand;
+and, on the servant-maid telling him, caught her by the scruff of the
+neck, beat her violently, flung her down in the passageway, and went
+upstairs to his bed fasting and without a light.&nbsp; It was three
+in the morning when my lady returned from that conventicle, and, hearing
+of the assault (because the maid had sat up for her, weeping), went
+to their common chamber with a lantern in hand and stamping with her
+shoes so as to wake the dead; it was supposed, by those that heard her,
+from a design to have it out with the good man at once.&nbsp; The house-servants
+gathered on the stair, because it was a main interest with them to know
+which of these two was the better horse; and for the space of two hours
+they were heard to go at the matter, hammer and tongs.&nbsp; Montroymont
+alleged he was at the end of possibilities; it was no longer within
+his power to pay the annual rents; she had served him basely by keeping
+conventicles while he lay in prison for her sake; his friends were weary,
+and there was nothing else before him but the entire loss of the family
+lands, and to begin life again by the wayside as a common beggar.&nbsp;
+She took him up very sharp and high: called upon him, if he were a Christian?
+and which he most considered, the loss of a few dirty, miry glebes,
+or of his soul?&nbsp; Presently he was heard to weep, and my lady&rsquo;s
+voice to go on continually like a running burn, only the words indistinguishable;
+whereupon it was supposed a victory for her ladyship, and the domestics
+took themselves to bed.&nbsp; The next day Traquair appeared like a
+man who had gone under the harrows; and his lady wife thenceforward
+continued in her old course without the least deflection.<br>
+<br>
+Thenceforward Ninian went on his way without complaint, and suffered
+his wife to go on hers without remonstrance.&nbsp; He still minded his
+estate, of which it might be said he took daily a fresh farewell, and
+counted it already lost; looking ruefully on the acres and the graves
+of his fathers, on the moorlands where the wild-fowl consorted, the
+low, gurgling pool of the trout, and the high, windy place of the calling
+curlews - things that were yet his for the day and would be another&rsquo;s
+to-morrow; coming back again, and sitting ciphering till the dusk at
+his approaching ruin, which no device of arithmetic could postpone beyond
+a year or two.&nbsp; He was essentially the simple ancient man, the
+farmer and landholder; he would have been content to watch the seasons
+come and go, and his cattle increase, until the limit of age; he would
+have been content at any time to die, if he could have left the estates
+undiminished to an heir-male of his ancestors, that duty standing first
+in his instinctive calendar.&nbsp; And now he saw everywhere the image
+of the new proprietor come to meet him, and go sowing and reaping, or
+fowling for his pleasure on the red moors, or eating the very gooseberries
+in the Place garden; and saw always, on the other hand, the figure of
+Francis go forth, a beggar, into the broad world.<br>
+<br>
+It was in vain the poor gentleman sought to moderate; took every test
+and took advantage of every indulgence; went and drank with the dragoons
+in Balweary; attended the communion and came regularly to the church
+to Curate Haddo, with his son beside him.&nbsp; The mad, raging, Presbyterian
+zealot of a wife at home made all of no avail; and indeed the house
+must have fallen years before if it had not been for the secret indulgence
+of the curate, who had a great sympathy with the laird, and winked hard
+at the doings in Montroymont.&nbsp; This curate was a man very ill reputed
+in the countryside, and indeed in all Scotland.&nbsp; &lsquo;Infamous
+Haddo&rsquo; is Shield&rsquo;s expression.&nbsp; But Patrick Walker
+is more copious.&nbsp; &lsquo;Curate Hall Haddo,&rsquo; says he, <i>sub</i>
+<i>voce</i> Peden, &lsquo;or <i>Hell</i> Haddo, as he was more justly
+to be called, a pokeful of old condemned errors and the filthy vile
+lusts of the flesh, a published whore-monger, a common gross drunkard,
+continually and godlessly scraping and skirling on a fiddle, continually
+breathing flames against the remnant of Israel.&nbsp; But the Lord put
+an end to his piping, and all these offences were composed into one
+bloody grave.&rsquo;&nbsp; No doubt this was written to excuse his slaughter;
+and I have never heard it claimed for Walker that he was either a just
+witness or an indulgent judge.&nbsp; At least, in a merely human character,
+Haddo comes off not wholly amiss in the matter of these Traquairs: not
+that he showed any graces of the Christian, but had a sort of Pagan
+decency, which might almost tempt one to be concerned about his sudden,
+violent, and unprepared fate.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II - FRANCIE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Francie was eleven years old, shy, secret, and rather childish of his
+age, though not backward in schooling, which had been pushed on far
+by a private governor, one M&rsquo;Brair, a forfeited minister harboured
+in that capacity at Montroymont.&nbsp; The boy, already much employed
+in secret by his mother, was the most apt hand conceivable to run upon
+a message, to carry food to lurking fugitives, or to stand sentry on
+the skyline above a conventicle.&nbsp; It seemed no place on the moorlands
+was so naked but what he would find cover there; and as he knew every
+hag, boulder, and heather-bush in a circuit of seven miles about Montroymont,
+there was scarce any spot but what he could leave or approach it unseen.&nbsp;
+This dexterity had won him a reputation in that part of the country;
+and among the many children employed in these dangerous affairs, he
+passed under the by-name of Heathercat.<br>
+<br>
+How much his father knew of this employment might be doubted.&nbsp;
+He took much forethought for the boy&rsquo;s future, seeing he was like
+to be left so poorly, and would sometimes assist at his lessons, sighing
+heavily, yawning deep, and now and again patting Francie on the shoulder
+if he seemed to be doing ill, by way of a private, kind encouragement.&nbsp;
+But a great part of the day was passed in aimless wanderings with his
+eyes sealed, or in his cabinet sitting bemused over the particulars
+of the coming bankruptcy; and the boy would be absent a dozen times
+for once that his father would observe it.<br>
+<br>
+On 2nd of July 1682 the boy had an errand from his mother, which must
+be kept private from all, the father included in the first of them.&nbsp;
+Crossing the braes, he hears the clatter of a horse&rsquo;s shoes, and
+claps down incontinent in a hag by the wayside.&nbsp; And presently
+he spied his father come riding from one direction, and Curate Haddo
+walking from another; and Montroymont leaning down from the saddle,
+and Haddo getting on his toes (for he was a little, ruddy, bald-pated
+man, more like a dwarf), they greeted kindly, and came to a halt within
+two fathoms of the child.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Montroymont,&rsquo; the curate said, &lsquo;the deil&rsquo;s
+in &rsquo;t but I&rsquo;ll have to denunciate your leddy again.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Deil&rsquo;s in &rsquo;t indeed!&rsquo; says the laird.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Man! can ye no induce her to come to the kirk?&rsquo; pursues
+Haddo; &lsquo;or to a communion at the least of it?&nbsp; For the conventicles,
+let be! and the same for yon solemn fule, M&rsquo;Brair: I can blink
+at them.&nbsp; But she&rsquo;s got to come to the kirk, Montroymont.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Dinna speak of it,&rsquo; says the laird.&nbsp; &lsquo;I can
+do nothing with her.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Couldn&rsquo;t ye try the stick to her? it works wonders whiles,&rsquo;
+suggested Haddo.&nbsp; &lsquo;No?&nbsp; I&rsquo;m wae to hear it.&nbsp;
+And I suppose ye ken where you&rsquo;re going?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Fine!&rsquo; said Montroymont.&nbsp; &lsquo;Fine do I ken where:
+bankrup&rsquo;cy and the Bass Rock!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Praise to my bones that I never married!&rsquo; cried the curate.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Well, it&rsquo;s a grievous thing to me to see an auld house
+dung down that was here before Flodden Field.&nbsp; But naebody can
+say it was with my wish.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No more they can, Haddo!&rsquo; says the laird.&nbsp; &lsquo;A
+good friend ye&rsquo;ve been to me, first and last.&nbsp; I can give
+you that character with a clear conscience.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Whereupon they separated, and Montroymont rode briskly down into the
+Dule Valley.&nbsp; But of the curate Francis was not to be quit so easily.&nbsp;
+He went on with his little, brisk steps to the corner of a dyke, and
+stopped and whistled and waved upon a lassie that was herding cattle
+there.&nbsp; This Janet M&rsquo;Clour was a big lass, being taller than
+the curate; and what made her look the more so, she was kilted very
+high.&nbsp; It seemed for a while she would not come, and Francie heard
+her calling Haddo a &lsquo;daft auld fule,&rsquo; and saw her running
+and dodging him among the whins and hags till he was fairly blown.&nbsp;
+But at the last he gets a bottle from his plaid-neuk and holds it up
+to her; whereupon she came at once into a composition, and the pair
+sat, drinking of the bottle, and daffing and laughing together, on a
+mound of heather.&nbsp; The boy had scarce heard of these vanities,
+or he might have been minded of a nymph and satyr, if anybody could
+have taken long-leggit Janet for a nymph.&nbsp; But they seemed to be
+huge friends, he thought; and was the more surprised, when the curate
+had taken his leave, to see the lassie fling stones after him with screeches
+of laughter, and Haddo turn about and caper, and shake his staff at
+her, and laugh louder than herself.&nbsp; A wonderful merry pair, they
+seemed; and when Francie had crawled out of the hag, he had a great
+deal to consider in his mind.&nbsp; It was possible they were all fallen
+in error about Mr. Haddo, he reflected - having seen him so tender with
+Montroymont, and so kind and playful with the lass Janet; and he had
+a temptation to go out of his road and question her herself upon the
+matter.&nbsp; But he had a strong spirit of duty on him; and plodded
+on instead over the braes till he came near the House of Cairngorm.&nbsp;
+There, in a hollow place by the burnside that was shaded by some birks,
+he was aware of a barefoot boy, perhaps a matter of three years older
+than himself.&nbsp; The two approached with the precautions of a pair
+of strange dogs, looking at each other queerly.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;It&rsquo;s ill weather on the hills,&rsquo; said the stranger,
+giving the watchword.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;For a season,&rsquo; said Francie, &lsquo;but the Lord will appear.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Richt,&rsquo; said the barefoot boy; &lsquo;wha&rsquo;re ye frae?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The Leddy Montroymont,&rsquo; says Francie.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ha&rsquo;e, then!&rsquo; says the stranger, and handed him a
+folded paper, and they stood and looked at each other again.&nbsp; &lsquo;It&rsquo;s
+unco het,&rsquo; said the boy.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Dooms het,&rsquo; says Francie.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;What do they ca&rsquo; ye?&rsquo; says the other.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Francie,&rsquo; says he.&nbsp; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m young Montroymont.&nbsp;
+They ca&rsquo; me Heathercat.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;m Jock Crozer,&rsquo; said the boy.&nbsp; And there was
+another pause, while each rolled a stone under his foot.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Cast your jaiket and I&rsquo;ll fecht ye for a bawbee,&rsquo;
+cried the elder boy with sudden violence, and dramatically throwing
+back his jacket.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Na, I&rsquo;ve nae time the now,&rsquo; said Francie, with a
+sharp thrill of alarm, because Crozer was much the heavier boy.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ye&rsquo;re feared.&nbsp; Heathercat indeed!&rsquo; said Crozer,
+for among this infantile army of spies and messengers, the fame of Crozer
+had gone forth and was resented by his rivals.&nbsp; And with that they
+separated.<br>
+<br>
+On his way home Francie was a good deal occupied with the recollection
+of this untoward incident.&nbsp; The challenge had been fairly offered
+and basely refused: the tale would be carried all over the country,
+and the lustre of the name of Heathercat be dimmed.&nbsp; But the scene
+between Curate Haddo and Janet M&rsquo;Clour had also given him much
+to think of: and he was still puzzling over the case of the curate,
+and why such ill words were said of him, and why, if he were so merry-spirited,
+he should yet preach so dry, when coming over a knowe, whom should he
+see but Janet, sitting with her back to him, minding her cattle!&nbsp;
+He was always a great child for secret, stealthy ways, having been employed
+by his mother on errands when the same was necessary; and he came behind
+the lass without her hearing.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Jennet,&rsquo; says he.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Keep me,&rsquo; cries Janet, springing up.&nbsp; &lsquo;O, it&rsquo;s
+you, Maister Francie!&nbsp; Save us, what a fricht ye gied me.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ay, it&rsquo;s me,&rsquo; said Francie.&nbsp; &lsquo;I&rsquo;ve
+been thinking, Jennet; I saw you and the curate a while back - &rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Brat!&rsquo; cried Janet, and coloured up crimson; and the one
+moment made as if she would have stricken him with a ragged stick she
+had to chase her bestial with, and the next was begging and praying
+that he would mention it to none.&nbsp; It was &lsquo;naebody&rsquo;s
+business, whatever,&rsquo; she said; &lsquo;it would just start a clash
+in the country&rsquo;; and there would be nothing left for her but to
+drown herself in Dule Water.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Why?&rsquo; says Francie.<br>
+<br>
+The girl looked at him and grew scarlet again.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And it isna that, anyway,&rsquo; continued Francie.&nbsp; &lsquo;It
+was just that he seemed so good to ye - like our Father in heaven, I
+thought; and I thought that mebbe, perhaps, we had all been wrong about
+him from the first.&nbsp; But I&rsquo;ll have to tell Mr. M&rsquo;Brair;
+I&rsquo;m under a kind of a bargain to him to tell him all.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Tell it to the divil if ye like for me!&rsquo; cried the lass.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;ve naething to be ashamed of.&nbsp; Tell M&rsquo;Brair
+to mind his ain affairs,&rsquo; she cried again: &lsquo;they&rsquo;ll
+be hot eneugh for him, if Haddie likes!&rsquo;&nbsp; And so strode off,
+shoving her beasts before her, and ever and again looking back and crying
+angry words to the boy, where he stood mystified.<br>
+<br>
+By the time he had got home his mind was made up that he would say nothing
+to his mother.&nbsp; My Lady Montroymont was in the keeping-room, reading
+a godly book; she was a wonderful frail little wife to make so much
+noise in the world and be able to steer about that patient sheep her
+husband; her eyes were like sloes, the fingers of her hands were like
+tobacco-pipe shanks, her mouth shut tight like a trap; and even when
+she was the most serious, and still more when she was angry, there hung
+about her face the terrifying semblance of a smile.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Have ye gotten the billet, Francie said she; and when he had
+handed it over, and she had read and burned it, &lsquo;Did you see anybody?&rsquo;
+she asked.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I saw the laird,&rsquo; said Francie.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;He didna see you, though?&rsquo; asked his mother.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Deil a fear,&rsquo; from Francie.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Francie!&rsquo; she cried.&nbsp; &lsquo;What&rsquo;s that I hear?
+an aith?&nbsp; The Lord forgive me, have I broughten forth a brand for
+the burning, a fagot for hell-fire?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I&rsquo;m very sorry, ma&rsquo;am,&rsquo; said Francie.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I humbly beg the Lord&rsquo;s pardon, and yours, for my wickedness.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;H&rsquo;m,&rsquo; grunted the lady.&nbsp; &lsquo;Did ye see nobody
+else?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;No, ma&rsquo;am,&rsquo; said Francie, with the face of an angel,
+&lsquo;except Jock Crozer, that gied me the billet.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Jock Crozer!&rsquo; cried the lady.&nbsp; &lsquo;I&rsquo;ll Crozer
+them!&nbsp; Crozers indeed!&nbsp; What next?&nbsp; Are we to repose
+the lives of a suffering remnant in Crozers?&nbsp; The whole clan of
+them wants hanging, and if I had my way of it, they wouldna want it
+long.&nbsp; Are you aware, sir, that these Crozers killed your forebear
+at the kirk-door?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You see, he was bigger &rsquo;n me,&rsquo; said Francie.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Jock Crozer!&rsquo; continued the lady.&nbsp; &lsquo;That&rsquo;ll
+be Clement&rsquo;s son, the biggest thief and reiver in the country-side.&nbsp;
+To trust a note to him!&nbsp; But I&rsquo;ll give the benefit of my
+opinions to Lady Whitecross when we two forgather.&nbsp; Let her look
+to herself!&nbsp; I have no patience with half-hearted carlines, that
+complies on the Lord&rsquo;s day morning with the kirk, and comes taigling
+the same night to the conventicle.&nbsp; The one or the other! is what
+I say: hell or heaven - Haddie&rsquo;s abominations or the pure word
+of God dreeping from the lips of Mr. Arnot,<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;&ldquo;Like honey from the honeycomb<br>
+That dreepeth, sweeter far.&rdquo;&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+My lady was now fairly launched, and that upon two congenial subjects:
+the deficiencies of the Lady Whitecross and the turpitudes of the whole
+Crozer race - which, indeed, had never been conspicuous for respectability.&nbsp;
+She pursued the pair of them for twenty minutes on the clock with wonderful
+animation and detail, something of the pulpit manner, and the spirit
+of one possessed.&nbsp; &lsquo;O hellish compliance!&rsquo; she exclaimed.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I would not suffer a complier to break bread with Christian folk.&nbsp;
+Of all the sins of this day there is not one so God-defying, so Christ-humiliating,
+as damnable compliance&rsquo;: the boy standing before her meanwhile,
+and brokenly pursuing other thoughts, mainly of Haddo and Janet, and
+Jock Crozer stripping off his jacket.&nbsp; And yet, with all his distraction,
+it might be argued that he heard too much: his father and himself being
+&lsquo;compliers&rsquo; - that is to say, attending the church of the
+parish as the law required.<br>
+<br>
+Presently, the lady&rsquo;s passion beginning to decline, or her flux
+of ill words to be exhausted, she dismissed her audience.&nbsp; Francie
+bowed low, left the room, closed the door behind him: and then turned
+him about in the passage-way, and with a low voice, but a prodigious
+deal of sentiment, repeated the name of the evil one twenty times over,
+to the end of which, for the greater efficacy, he tacked on &lsquo;damnable&rsquo;
+and &lsquo;hellish.&rsquo;&nbsp; <i>Fas est ab hoste doceri</i> - disrespect
+is made more pungent by quotation; and there is no doubt but he felt
+relieved, and went upstairs into his tutor&rsquo;s chamber with a quiet
+mind.&nbsp; M&rsquo;Brair sat by the cheek of the peat-fire and shivered,
+for he had a quartan ague and this was his day.&nbsp; The great night-cap
+and plaid, the dark unshaven cheeks of the man, and the white, thin
+hands that held the plaid about his chittering body, made a sorrowful
+picture.&nbsp; But Francie knew and loved him; came straight in, nestled
+close to the refugee, and told his story.&nbsp; M&rsquo;Brair had been
+at the College with Haddo; the Presbytery had licensed both on the same
+day; and at this tale, told with so much innocency by the boy, the heart
+of the tutor was commoved.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Woe upon him!&nbsp; Woe upon that man!&rsquo; he cried.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;O the unfaithful shepherd!&nbsp; O the hireling and apostate
+minister!&nbsp; Make my matters hot for me? quo&rsquo; she! the shameless
+limmer!&nbsp; And true it is, that he could repose me in that nasty,
+stinking hole, the Canongate Tolbooth, from which your mother drew me
+out - the Lord reward her for it! - or to that cold, unbieldy, marine
+place of the Bass Rock, which, with my delicate kist, would be fair
+ruin to me.&nbsp; But I will be valiant in my Master&rsquo;s service.&nbsp;
+I have a duty here: a duty to my God, to myself, and to Haddo: in His
+strength, I will perform it.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Then he straitly discharged Francie to repeat the tale, and bade him
+in the future to avert his very eyes from the doings of the curate.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;You must go to his place of idolatry; look upon him there!&rsquo;
+says he, &lsquo;but nowhere else.&nbsp; Avert your eyes, close your
+ears, pass him by like a three days&rsquo; corp.&nbsp; He is like that
+damnable monster Basiliscus, which defiles - yea, poisons! - by the
+sight.&rsquo; - All which was hardly claratory to the boy&rsquo;s mind.<br>
+<br>
+Presently Montroymont came home, and called up the stairs to Francie.&nbsp;
+Traquair was a good shot and swordsman: and it was his pleasure to walk
+with his son over the braes of the moorfowl, or to teach him arms in
+the back court, when they made a mighty comely pair, the child being
+so lean, and light, and active, and the laird himself a man of a manly,
+pretty stature, his hair (the periwig being laid aside) showing already
+white with many anxieties, and his face of an even, flaccid red.&nbsp;
+But this day Francie&rsquo;s heart was not in the fencing.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Sir,&rsquo; says he, suddenly lowering his point, &lsquo;will
+ye tell me a thing if I was to ask it?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ask away,&rsquo; says the father.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Well, it&rsquo;s this,&rsquo; said Francie: &lsquo;Why do you
+and me comply if it&rsquo;s so wicked?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ay, ye have the cant of it too!&rsquo; cries Montroymont.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;But I&rsquo;ll tell ye for all that.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s to try
+and see if we can keep the rigging on this house, Francie.&nbsp; If
+she had her way, we would be beggar-folk, and hold our hands out by
+the wayside.&nbsp; When ye hear her - when ye hear folk,&rsquo; he corrected
+himself briskly, &lsquo;call me a coward, and one that betrayed the
+Lord, and I kenna what else, just mind it was to keep a bed to ye to
+sleep in and a bite for ye to eat. - On guard!&rsquo; he cried, and
+the lesson proceeded again till they were called to supper.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;There&rsquo;s another thing yet,&rsquo; said Francie, stopping
+his father.&nbsp; &lsquo;There&rsquo;s another thing that I am not sure
+that I am very caring for.&nbsp; She - she sends me errands.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Obey her, then, as is your bounden duty,&rsquo; said Traquair.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Ay, but wait till I tell ye,&rsquo; says the boy.&nbsp; &lsquo;If
+I was to see you I was to hide.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Montroymont sighed.&nbsp; &lsquo;Well, and that&rsquo;s good of her
+too,&rsquo; said he.&nbsp; &lsquo;The less that I ken of thir doings
+the better for me; and the best thing you can do is just to obey her,
+and see and be a good son to her, the same as ye are to me, Francie.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+At the tenderness of this expression the heart of Francie swelled within
+his bosom, and his remorse was poured out.&nbsp; &lsquo;Faither!&rsquo;
+he cried, &lsquo;I said &ldquo;deil&rdquo; to-day; many&rsquo;s the
+time I said it, and <i>damnable</i> too, and <i>hellitsh</i>.&nbsp;
+I ken they&rsquo;re all right; they&rsquo;re beeblical.&nbsp; But I
+didna say them beeblically; I said them for sweir words - that&rsquo;s
+the truth of it.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Hout, ye silly bairn!&rsquo; said the father, &lsquo;dinna do
+it nae mair, and come in by to your supper.&rsquo;&nbsp; And he took
+the boy, and drew him close to him a moment, as they went through the
+door, with something very fond and secret, like a caress between a pair
+of lovers.<br>
+<br>
+The next day M&rsquo;Brair was abroad in the afternoon, and had a long
+advising with Janet on the braes where she herded cattle.&nbsp; What
+passed was never wholly known; but the lass wept bitterly, and fell
+on her knees to him among the whins.&nbsp; The same night, as soon as
+it was dark, he took the road again for Balweary.&nbsp; In the Kirkton,
+where the dragoons quartered, he saw many lights, and heard the noise
+of a ranting song and people laughing grossly, which was highly offensive
+to his mind.&nbsp; He gave it the wider berth, keeping among fields;
+and came down at last by the water-side, where the manse stands solitary
+between the river and the road.&nbsp; He tapped at the back door, and
+the old woman called upon him to come in, and guided him through the
+house to the study, as they still called it, though there was little
+enough study there in Haddo&rsquo;s days, and more song-books than theology.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Here&rsquo;s yin to speak wi&rsquo; ye, Mr. Haddie!&rsquo; cries
+the old wife.<br>
+<br>
+And M&rsquo;Brair, opening the door and entering, found the little,
+round, red man seated in one chair and his feet upon another.&nbsp;
+A clear fire and a tallow dip lighted him barely.&nbsp; He was taking
+tobacco in a pipe, and smiling to himself; and a brandy-bottle and glass,
+and his fiddle and bow, were beside him on the table.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Hech, Patey M&rsquo;Briar, is this you?&rsquo; said he, a trifle
+tipsily.&nbsp; &lsquo;Step in by, man, and have a drop brandy: for the
+stomach&rsquo;s sake!&nbsp; Even the deil can quote Scripture - eh,
+Patey?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I will neither eat nor drink with you,&rsquo; replied M&rsquo;Brair.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;I am come upon my Master&rsquo;s errand: woe be upon me if I
+should anyways mince the same.&nbsp; Hall Haddo, I summon you to quit
+this kirk which you encumber.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Muckle obleeged!&rsquo; says Haddo, winking.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;You and me have been to kirk and market together,&rsquo; pursued
+M&rsquo;Brair; &lsquo;we have had blessed seasons in the kirk, we have
+sat in the same teaching-rooms and read in the same book; and I know
+you still retain for me some carnal kindness.&nbsp; It would be my shame
+if I denied it; I live here at your mercy and by your favour, and glory
+to acknowledge it.&nbsp; You have pity on my wretched body, which is
+but grass, and must soon be trodden under: but O, Haddo! how much greater
+is the yearning with which I yearn after and pity your immortal soul!&nbsp;
+Come now, let us reason together!&nbsp; I drop all points of controversy,
+weighty though these be; I take your defaced and damnified kirk on your
+own terms; and I ask you, Are you a worthy minister?&nbsp; The communion
+season approaches; how can you pronounce thir solemn words, &ldquo;The
+elders will now bring forrit the elements,&rdquo; and not quail?&nbsp;
+A parishioner may be summoned to-night; you may have to rise from your
+miserable orgies; and I ask you, Haddo, what does your conscience tell
+you?&nbsp; Are you fit?&nbsp; Are you fit to smooth the pillow of a
+parting Christian?&nbsp; And if the summons should be for yourself,
+how then?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+Haddo was startled out of all composure and the better part of his temper.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;What&rsquo;s this of it?&rsquo; he cried.&nbsp; &lsquo;I&rsquo;m
+no waur than my neebours.&nbsp; I never set up to be speeritual; I never
+did.&nbsp; I&rsquo;m a plain, canty creature; godliness is cheerfulness,
+says I; give me my fiddle and a dram, and I wouldna hairm a flee.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And I repeat my question,&rsquo; said M&rsquo;Brair: &lsquo;Are
+you fit - fit for this great charge? fit to carry and save souls?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Fit?&nbsp; Blethers!&nbsp; As fit&rsquo;s yoursel&rsquo;,&rsquo;
+cried Haddo.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Are you so great a self-deceiver?&rsquo; said M&rsquo;Brair.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Wretched man, trampler upon God&rsquo;s covenants, crucifier
+of your Lord afresh.&nbsp; I will ding you to the earth with one word:
+How about the young woman, Janet M&rsquo;Clour?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Weel, what about her? what do I ken?&rsquo; cries Haddo.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;M&rsquo;Brair, ye daft auld wife, I tell ye as true&rsquo;s truth,
+I never meddled her.&nbsp; It was just daffing, I tell ye: daffing,
+and nae mair: a piece of fun, like!&nbsp; I&rsquo;m no denying but what
+I&rsquo;m fond of fun, sma&rsquo; blame to me!&nbsp; But for onything
+sarious - hout, man, it might come to a deposeetion!&nbsp; I&rsquo;ll
+sweir it to ye.&nbsp; Where&rsquo;s a Bible, till you hear me sweir?&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;There is nae Bible in your study,&rsquo; said M&rsquo;Brair severely.<br>
+<br>
+And Haddo, after a few distracted turns, was constrained to accept the
+fact.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Weel, and suppose there isna?&rsquo; he cried, stamping.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;What mair can ye say of us, but just that I&rsquo;m fond of my
+joke, and so&rsquo;s she?&nbsp; I declare to God, by what I ken, she
+might be the Virgin Mary - if she would just keep clear of the dragoons.&nbsp;
+But me! na, deil haet o&rsquo; me!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;She is penitent at least,&rsquo; says M&rsquo;Brair.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Do you mean to actually up and tell me to my face that she accused
+me?&rsquo; cried the curate.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;I canna just say that,&rsquo; replied M&rsquo;Brair.&nbsp; &lsquo;But
+I rebuked her in the name of God, and she repented before me on her
+bended knees.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Weel, I daursay she&rsquo;s been ower far wi&rsquo; the dragoons,&rsquo;
+said Haddo.&nbsp; &lsquo;I never denied that.&nbsp; I ken naething by
+it.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Man, you but show your nakedness the more plainly,&rsquo; said
+M&rsquo;Brair.&nbsp; &lsquo;Poor, blind, besotted creature - and I see
+you stoytering on the brink of dissolution: your light out, and your
+hours numbered.&nbsp; Awake, man!&rsquo; he shouted with a formidable
+voice, &lsquo;awake, or it be ower late.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;Be damned if I stand this!&rsquo; exclaimed Haddo, casting his
+tobacco-pipe violently on the table, where it was smashed in pieces.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Out of my house with ye, or I&rsquo;ll call for the dragoons.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;The speerit of the Lord is upon me,&rsquo; said M&rsquo;Brair
+with solemn ecstasy.&nbsp; &lsquo;I sist you to compear before the Great
+White Throne, and I warn you the summons shall be bloody and sudden.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+And at this, with more agility than could have been expected, he got
+clear of the room and slammed the door behind him in the face of the
+pursuing curate.&nbsp; The next Lord&rsquo;s day the curate was ill,
+and the kirk closed, but for all his ill words, Mr. M&rsquo;Brair abode
+unmolested in the house of Montroymont.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III - THE HILL-END OF DRUMLOWE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+This was a bit of a steep broken hill that overlooked upon the west
+a moorish valley, full of ink-black pools.&nbsp; These presently drained
+into a burn that made off, with little noise and no celerity of pace,
+about the corner of the hill.&nbsp; On the far side the ground swelled
+into a bare heath, black with junipers, and spotted with the presence
+of the standing stones for which the place was famous.&nbsp; They were
+many in that part, shapeless, white with lichen - you would have said
+with age: and had made their abode there for untold centuries, since
+first the heathens shouted for their installation.&nbsp; The ancients
+had hallowed them to some ill religion, and their neighbourhood had
+long been avoided by the prudent before the fall of day; but of late,
+on the upspringing of new requirements, these lonely stones on the moor
+had again become a place of assembly.&nbsp; A watchful picket on the
+Hill-end commanded all the northern and eastern approaches; and such
+was the disposition of the ground, that by certain cunningly posted
+sentries the west also could be made secure against surprise: there
+was no place in the country where a conventicle could meet with more
+quiet of mind or a more certain retreat open, in the case of interference
+from the dragoons.&nbsp; The minister spoke from a knowe close to the
+edge of the ring, and poured out the words God gave him on the very
+threshold of the devils of yore.&nbsp; When they pitched a tent (which
+was often in wet weather, upon a communion occasion) it was rigged over
+the huge isolated pillar that had the name of Anes-Errand, none knew
+why.&nbsp; And the congregation sat partly clustered on the slope below,
+and partly among the idolatrous monoliths and on the turfy soil of the
+Ring itself.&nbsp; In truth the situation was well qualified to give
+a zest to Christian doctrines, had there been any wanted.&nbsp; But
+these congregations assembled under conditions at once so formidable
+and romantic as made a zealot of the most cold.&nbsp; They were the
+last of the faithful; God, who had averted His face from all other countries
+of the world, still leaned from heaven to observe, with swelling sympathy,
+the doings of His moorland remnant; Christ was by them with His eternal
+wounds, with dropping tears; the Holy Ghost (never perfectly realised
+nor firmly adopted by Protestant imaginations) was dimly supposed to
+be in the heart of each and on the lips of the minister.&nbsp; And over
+against them was the army of the hierarchies, from the men Charles and
+James Stuart, on to King Lewie and the Emperor; and the scarlet Pope,
+and the muckle black devil himself, peering out the red mouth of hell
+in an ecstasy of hate and hope.&nbsp; &lsquo;One pull more!&rsquo; he
+seemed to cry; &lsquo;one pull more, and it&rsquo;s done.&nbsp; There&rsquo;s
+only Clydesdale and the Stewartry, and the three Bailiaries of Ayr,
+left for God.&rsquo;&nbsp; And with such an august assistance of powers
+and principalities looking on at the last conflict of good and evil,
+it was scarce possible to spare a thought to those old, infirm, debile,
+<i>ab agendo</i> devils whose holy place they were now violating.<br>
+<br>
+There might have been three hundred to four hundred present.&nbsp; At
+least there were three hundred horses tethered for the most part in
+the ring; though some of the hearers on the outskirts of the crowd stood
+with their bridles in their hand, ready to mount at the first signal.&nbsp;
+The circle of faces was strangely characteristic; long, serious, strongly
+marked, the tackle standing out in the lean brown cheeks, the mouth
+set and the eyes shining with a fierce enthusiasm; the shepherd, the
+labouring man, and the rarer laird, stood there in their broad blue
+bonnets or laced hats, and presenting an essential identity of type.&nbsp;
+From time to time a long-drawn groan of adhesion rose in this audience,
+and was propagated like a wave to the outskirts, and died away among
+the keepers of the horses.&nbsp; It had a name; it was called &lsquo;a
+holy groan.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+A squall came up; a great volley of flying mist went out before it and
+whelmed the scene; the wind stormed with a sudden fierceness that carried
+away the minister&rsquo;s voice and twitched his tails and made him
+stagger, and turned the congregation for a moment into a mere pother
+of blowing plaid-ends and prancing horses; and the rain followed and
+was dashed straight into their faces.&nbsp; Men and women panted aloud
+in the shock of that violent shower-bath; the teeth were bared along
+all the line in an involuntary grimace; plaids, mantles, and riding-coats
+were proved vain, and the worshippers felt the water stream on their
+naked flesh.&nbsp; The minister, reinforcing his great and shrill voice,
+continued to contend against and triumph over the rising of the squall
+and the dashing of the rain.<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;In that day ye may go thirty mile and not hear a crawing cock,&rsquo;
+he said; &lsquo;and fifty mile and not get a light to your pipe; and
+an hundred mile and not see a smoking house.&nbsp; For there&rsquo;ll
+be naething in all Scotland but deid men&rsquo;s banes and blackness,
+and the living anger of the Lord.&nbsp; O, where to find a bield - O
+sirs, where to find a bield from the wind of the Lord&rsquo;s anger?&nbsp;
+Do ye call <i>this</i> a wind?&nbsp; Bethankit!&nbsp; Sirs, this is
+but a temporary dispensation; this is but a puff of wind, this is but
+a spit of rain and by with it.&nbsp; Already there&rsquo;s a blue bow
+in the west, and the sun will take the crown of the causeway again,
+and your things&rsquo;ll be dried upon ye, and your flesh will be warm
+upon your bones.&nbsp; But O, sirs, sirs! for the day of the Lord&rsquo;s
+anger!&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+His rhetoric was set forth with an ear-piercing elocution, and a voice
+that sometimes crashed like cannon.&nbsp; Such as it was, it was the
+gift of all hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or identity.&nbsp;
+Their images scarce ranged beyond the red horizon of the moor and the
+rainy hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-piece, a spade,
+a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of
+the sun.&nbsp; An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent
+patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue.&nbsp; It
+was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, and redolent of the
+soil.<br>
+<br>
+A little before the coming of the squall there was a different scene
+enacting at the outposts.&nbsp; For the most part, the sentinels were
+faithful to their important duty; the Hill-end of Drumlowe was known
+to be a safe meeting-place; and the out-pickets on this particular day
+had been somewhat lax from the beginning, and grew laxer during the
+inordinate length of the discourse.&nbsp; Francie lay there in his appointed
+hiding-hole, looking abroad between two whin-bushes.&nbsp; His view
+was across the course of the burn, then over a piece of plain moorland,
+to a gap between two hills; nothing moved but grouse, and some cattle
+who slowly traversed his field of view, heading northward: he heard
+the psalms, and sang words of his own to the savage and melancholy music;
+for he had his own design in hand, and terror and cowardice prevailed
+in his bosom alternately, like the hot and the cold fit of an ague.&nbsp;
+Courage was uppermost during the singing, which he accompanied through
+all its length with this impromptu strain:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&lsquo;And I will ding Jock Crozer down<br>
+No later than the day.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Presently the voice of the preacher came to him in wafts, at the wind&rsquo;s
+will, as by the opening and shutting of a door; wild spasms of screaming,
+as of some undiscerned gigantic hill-bird stirred with inordinate passion,
+succeeded to intervals of silence; and Francie heard them with a critical
+ear.&nbsp; &lsquo;Ay,&rsquo; he thought at last, &lsquo;he&rsquo;ll
+do; he has the bit in his mou&rsquo; fairly.&rsquo;<br>
+<br>
+He had observed that his friend, or rather his enemy, Jock Crozer, had
+been established at a very critical part of the line of outposts; namely,
+where the burn issues by an abrupt gorge from the semicircle of high
+moors.&nbsp; If anything was calculated to nerve him to battle it was
+this.&nbsp; The post was important; next to the Hill-end itself, it
+might be called the key to the position; and it was where the cover
+was bad, and in which it was most natural to place a child.&nbsp; It
+should have been Heathercat&rsquo;s; why had it been given to Crozer?&nbsp;
+An exquisite fear of what should be the answer passed through his marrow
+every time he faced the question.&nbsp; Was it possible that Crozer
+could have boasted? that there were rumours abroad to his - Heathercat&rsquo;s
+- discredit? that his honour was publicly sullied?&nbsp; All the world
+went dark about him at the thought; he sank without a struggle into
+the midnight pool of despair; and every time he so sank, he brought
+back with him - not drowned heroism indeed, but half-drowned courage
+by the locks.&nbsp; His heart beat very slowly as he deserted his station,
+and began to crawl towards that of Crozer.&nbsp; Something pulled him
+back, and it was not the sense of duty, but a remembrance of Crozer&rsquo;s
+build and hateful readiness of fist.&nbsp; Duty, as he conceived it,
+pointed him forward on the rueful path that he was travelling.&nbsp;
+Duty bade him redeem his name if he were able, at the risk of broken
+bones; and his bones and every tooth in his head ached by anticipation.&nbsp;
+An awful subsidiary fear whispered him that if he were hurt, he should
+disgrace himself by weeping.&nbsp; He consoled himself, boy-like, with
+the consideration that he was not yet committed; he could easily steal
+over unseen to Crozer&rsquo;s post, and he had a continuous private
+idea that he would very probably steal back again.&nbsp; His course
+took him so near the minister that he could hear some of his words:
+&lsquo;What news, minister, of Claver&rsquo;se?&nbsp; He&rsquo;s going
+round like a roaring rampaging lion. . . .<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Footnotes:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote1"></a><a href="#citation1">{1}</a> From the Sydney
+<i>Presbyterian</i>, October 26, 1889.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote2a"></a><a href="#citation2a">{2a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Theater</i>
+of <i>Mortality</i>, p. 10; Edin. 1713.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote2b"></a><a href="#citation2b">{2b}</a>&nbsp; <i>History
+of My Own Times</i>, beginning 1660, by Bishop Gilbert Burnet, p. 158.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote2c"></a><a href="#citation2c">{2c}</a>&nbsp; Wodrow&rsquo;s
+<i>Church History</i>, Book II. chap. i. sect. I.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote2d"></a><a href="#citation2d">{2d}</a>&nbsp; Crookshank&rsquo;s
+<i>Church History</i>, 1751, second ed. p. 202.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote2e"></a><a href="#citation2e">{2e}</a>&nbsp; Burnet,
+p. 348.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote3a"></a><a href="#citation3a">{3a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Fuller&rsquo;s
+Historie of the Holy Warre</i>, fourth ed. 1651.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote3b"></a><a href="#citation3b">{3b}</a>&nbsp; Wodrow,
+vol. ii. p. 17.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote3c"></a><a href="#citation3c">{3c}</a>&nbsp; Sir J.
+Turner&rsquo;s <i>Memoirs</i>, pp. 148-50.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4a"></a><a href="#citation4a">{4a}</a>&nbsp; <i>A Cloud
+of Witnesses</i>, p. 376.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4b"></a><a href="#citation4b">{4b}</a>&nbsp; Wodrow,
+pp. 19, 20.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4c"></a><a href="#citation4c">{4c}</a>&nbsp; <i>A Hind
+Let Loose</i>, p. 123.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4d"></a><a href="#citation4d">{4d}</a>&nbsp; Turner,
+p. 163.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4e"></a><a href="#citation4e">{4e}</a>&nbsp; Turner,
+p. 198.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4f"></a><a href="#citation4f">{4f}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid</i>.
+p. 167.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4g"></a><a href="#citation4g">{4g}</a>&nbsp; Wodrow,
+p. 29.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote4h"></a><a href="#citation4h">{4h}</a>&nbsp; Turner,
+Wodrow, and <i>Church History</i> by James Kirkton, an outed minister
+of the period.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote5a"></a><a href="#citation5a">{5a}</a>&nbsp; Kirkton,
+p. 244.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote5b"></a><a href="#citation5b">{5b}</a>&nbsp; Kirkton.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote5c"></a><a href="#citation5c">{5c}</a>&nbsp; Turner.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote5d"></a><a href="#citation5d">{5d}</a>&nbsp; Kirkton.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote5e"></a><a href="#citation5e">{5e}</a>&nbsp; Kirkton.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6a"></a><a href="#citation6a">{6a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Cloud
+of Witnesses</i>, p. 389; Edin. 1765.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6b"></a><a href="#citation6b">{6b}</a>&nbsp; Kirkton,
+p. 247.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6c"></a><a href="#citation6c">{6c}</a>&nbsp; Ibid.
+p. 254.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6d"></a><a href="#citation6d">{6d}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid</i>.
+p. 247.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6e"></a><a href="#citation6e">{6e}</a>&nbsp; <i>Ibid</i>.
+pp. 247, 248.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6f"></a><a href="#citation6f">{6f}</a>&nbsp; Kirkton,
+p. 248.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6g"></a><a href="#citation6g">{6g}</a>&nbsp; Kirkton,
+p. 249.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6h"></a><a href="#citation6h">{6h}</a>&nbsp; <i>Naphtali</i>,
+p. 205; Glasgow, 1721.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6i"></a><a href="#citation6i">{6i}</a>&nbsp; Wodrow,
+p. 59.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6j"></a><a href="#citation6j">{6j}</a>&nbsp; Kirkton,
+p. 246.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote6k"></a><a href="#citation6k">{6k}</a>&nbsp; Defoe&rsquo;s
+<i>History of the Church of Scotland.<br>
+<br>
+</i><a name="footnote7"></a><a href="#citation7">{7}</a>&nbsp; &lsquo;This
+paper was written in collaboration with James Waiter Ferrier, and if
+reprinted this is to be stated, though his principal collaboration was
+to lie back in an easy-chair and laugh.&rsquo; - [R.L.S., Oct. 25, 1894.]<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote8"></a><a href="#citation8">{8}</a>&nbsp; See a short
+essay of De Quincey&rsquo;s.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote9a"></a><a href="#citation9a">{9a}</a>&nbsp; <i>Religio
+Medici</i>, Part ii.<br>
+<br>
+<a name="footnote9b"></a><a href="#citation9b">{9b}</a>&nbsp; <i>Duchess</i>
+<i>of Malfi</i>.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, LAY MORALS ***<br>
+<pre>
+
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