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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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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
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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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