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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Virginibus Puerisque, by Stevenson
+#14 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson
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+Virginibus Puerisque
+
+by Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+January, 1996 [Etext #386]
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Virginibus Puerisque, by Stevenson
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+Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers by Robert Louis Stevenson.
+Scanned and proofed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
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+
+"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+    Virginibus Puerisque
+    Crabbed Age and Youth
+    An Apology For Idlers
+    Ordered South
+    Aes Triplex
+    El Dorado
+    The English Admirals
+    Some Portraits by Raeburn
+    Child's Play
+    Walking Tours
+    Pan's Pipes
+    A Plea For Gas Lamps
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I - "VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"
+
+
+
+WITH the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare's 
+characters are what we call marrying men.  Mercutio, as he was 
+own cousin to Benedick and Biron, would have come to the same 
+end in the long run.  Even Iago had a wife, and, what is far 
+stranger, he was jealous.  People like Jacques and the Fool in 
+LEAR, although we can hardly imagine they would ever marry, 
+kept single out of a cynical humour or for a broken heart, and 
+not, as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and 
+preference for the single state.  For that matter, if you turn 
+to George Sand's French version of AS YOU LIKE IT (and I think 
+I can promise you will like it but little), you will find 
+Jacques marries Celia just as Orlando marries Rosalind.
+
+At least there seems to have been much less hesitation 
+over marriage in Shakespeare's days; and what hesitation there 
+was was of a laughing sort, and not much more serious, one way 
+or the other, than that of Panurge.  In modern comedies the 
+heroes are mostly of Benedick's way of thinking, but twice as 
+much in earnest, and not one quarter so confident.  And I take 
+this diffidence as a proof of how sincere their terror is.  
+They know they are only human after all; they know what gins 
+and pitfalls lie about their feet; and how the shadow of 
+matrimony waits, resolute and awful, at the cross-roads.  They 
+would wish to keep their liberty; but if that may not be, why, 
+God's will be done!  "What, are you afraid of marriage?" asks 
+Cecile, in MAITRE GUERIN.  "Oh, mon Dieu, non!" replies 
+Arthur; "I should take chloroform."  They look forward to 
+marriage much in the same way as they prepare themselves for 
+death: each seems inevitable; each is a great Perhaps, and a 
+leap into the dark, for which, when a man is in the blue 
+devils, he has specially to harden his heart.  That splendid 
+scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles, took the news of marriages much 
+as an old man hears the deaths of his contemporaries.  "C'est 
+desesperant," he cried, throwing himself down in the arm-chair 
+at Madame Schontz's; "c'est desesperant, nous nous marions 
+tous!"  Every marriage was like another gray hair on his head; 
+and the jolly church bells seemed to taunt him with his fifty 
+years and fair round belly.
+
+The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our 
+ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts either to marry or 
+not to marry.  Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and 
+forlorn old age.  The friendships of men are vastly agreeable, 
+but they are insecure.  You know all the time that one friend 
+will marry and put you to the door; a second accept a 
+situation in China, and become no more to you than a name, a 
+reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter, very laborious 
+to read; a third will take up with some religious crotchet and 
+treat you to sour looks thence-forward.  So, in one way or 
+another, life forces men apart and breaks up the goodly 
+fellowships for ever.  The very flexibility and ease which 
+make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make 
+them the easier to destroy and forget.  And a man who has a 
+few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so 
+wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base 
+his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate - a 
+death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's 
+bright eyes - he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.  
+Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy.  Instead of on two or 
+three, you stake your happiness on one life only.  But still, 
+as the bargain is more explicit and complete on your part, it 
+is more so on the other; and you have not to fear so many 
+contingencies; it is not every wind that can blow you from 
+your anchorage; and so long as Death withholds his sickle, you 
+will always have a friend at home.  People who share a cell in 
+the Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited isle, if 
+they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some 
+possible ground of compromise.  They will learn each other's 
+ways and humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and 
+where they may lean their whole weight.  The discretion of the 
+first years becomes the settled habit of the last; and so, 
+with wisdom and patience, two lives may grow indissolubly into 
+one.
+
+But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic.  It 
+certainly narrows and damps the spirits of generous men.  In 
+marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a 
+fatty degeneration of his moral being.  It is not only when 
+Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, but when 
+Ladislaw marries above him with Dorothea, that this may be 
+exemplified.  The air of the fireside withers out all the fine 
+wildings of the husband's heart.  He is so comfortable and 
+happy that he begins to prefer comfort and happiness to 
+everything else on earth, his wife included.  Yesterday he 
+would have shared his last shilling; to-day "his first duty is 
+to his family," and is fulfilled in large measure by laying 
+down vintages and husbanding the health of an invaluable 
+parent.  Twenty years ago this man was equally capable of 
+crime or heroism; now he is fit for neither.  His soul is 
+asleep, and you may speak without constraint; you will not 
+wake him.  It is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a 
+bachelor and Marcus Aurelius married ill.  For women, there is 
+less of this danger.  Marriage is of so much use to a woman, 
+opens out to her so much more of life, and puts her in the way 
+of so much more freedom and usefulness, that, whether she 
+marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some benefit.  It is 
+true, however, that some of the merriest and most genuine of 
+women are old maids; and that those old maids, and wives who 
+are unhappily married, have often most of the true motherly 
+touch.  And this would seem to show, even for women, some 
+narrowing influence in comfortable married life.  But the rule 
+is none the less certain: if you wish the pick of men and 
+women, take a good bachelor and a good wife.
+
+I am often filled with wonder that so many marriages are 
+passably successful, and so few come to open failure, the more 
+so as I fail to understand the principle on which people 
+regulate their choice.  I see women marrying indiscriminately 
+with staring burgesses and ferret-faced, white-eyed boys, and 
+men dwell in contentment with noisy scullions, or taking into 
+their lives acidulous vestals.  It is a common answer to say 
+the good people marry because they fall in love; and of course 
+you may use and misuse a word as much as you please, if you 
+have the world along with you.  But love is at least a 
+somewhat hyperbolical expression for such luke-warm 
+preference.  It is not here, anyway, that Love employs his 
+golden shafts; he cannot be said, with any fitness of 
+language, to reign here and revel.  Indeed, if this be love at 
+all, it is plain the poets have been fooling with mankind 
+since the foundation of the world.  And you have only to look 
+these happy couples in the face, to see they have never been 
+in love, or in hate, or in any other high passion, all their 
+days.  When you see a dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes 
+set your affections upon one particular peach or nectarine, 
+watch it with some anxiety as it comes round the table, and 
+feel quite a sensible disappointment when it is taken by some 
+one else.  I have used the phrase "high passion."  Well, I 
+should say this was about as high a passion as generally leads 
+to marriage.  One husband hears after marriage that some poor 
+fellow is dying of his wife's love.  "What a pity!" he 
+exclaims; "you know I could so easily have got another!"  And 
+yet that is a very happy union.  Or again: A young man was 
+telling me the sweet story of his loves.  "I like it well 
+enough as long as her sisters are there," said this amorous 
+swain; "but I don't know what to do when we're alone."  Once 
+more: A married lady was debating the subject with another 
+lady.  "You know, dear," said the first, "after ten years of 
+marriage, if he is nothing else, your husband is always an old 
+friend."  "I have many old friends," returned the other, "but 
+I prefer them to be nothing more."  "Oh, perhaps I might 
+PREFER that also!"  There is a common note in these three 
+illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the 
+god goes among us with a limping gait and blear eyes.  You 
+wonder whether it was so always; whether desire was always 
+equally dull and spiritless, and possession equally cold.  I 
+cannot help fancying most people make, ere they marry, some 
+such table of recommendations as Hannah Godwin wrote to her 
+brother William anent her friend, Miss Gay.  It is so 
+charmingly comical, and so pat to the occasion, that I must 
+quote a few phrases.  "The young lady is in every sense formed 
+to make one of your disposition really happy.  She has a 
+pleasing voice, with which she accompanies her musical 
+instrument with judgment.  She has an easy politeness in her 
+manners, neither free nor reserved.  She is a good housekeeper 
+and a good economist, and yet of a generous disposition.  As 
+to her internal accomplishments, I have reason to speak still 
+more highly of them: good sense without vanity, a penetrating 
+judgment without a disposition to satire, with about as much 
+religion as my William likes, struck me with a wish that she 
+was my William's wife."  That is about the tune: pleasing 
+voice, moderate good looks, unimpeachable internal 
+accomplishments after the style of the copy-book, with about 
+as much religion as my William likes; and then, with all 
+speed, to church.
+
+To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in 
+love, most people would die unwed; and among the others, there 
+would be not a few tumultuous households.  The Lion is the 
+King of Beasts, but he is scarcely suitable for a domestic 
+pet.  In the same way, I suspect love is rather too violent a 
+passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic sentiment.  
+Like other violent excitements, it throws up not only what is 
+best, but what is worst and smallest, in men's characters.  
+Just as some people are malicious in drink, or brawling and 
+virulent under the influence of religious feeling, some are 
+moody, jealous, and exacting when they are in love, who are 
+honest, downright, good-hearted fellows enough in the everyday 
+affairs and humours of the world.
+
+How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that 
+people choose in comparatively cold blood, how is it they 
+choose so well?  One is almost tempted to hint that it does 
+not much matter whom you marry; that, in fact, marriage is a 
+subjective affection, and if you have made up your mind to it, 
+and once talked yourself fairly over, you could "pull it 
+through" with anybody.  But even if we take matrimony at its 
+lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of 
+friendship recognised by the police, there must be degrees in 
+the freedom and sympathy realised, and some principle to guide 
+simple folk in their selection.  Now what should this 
+principle be?  Are there no more definite rules than are to be 
+found in the Prayer-book?  Law and religion forbid the bans on 
+the ground of propinquity or consanguinity; society steps in 
+to separate classes; and in all this most critical matter, has 
+common sense, has wisdom, never a word to say?  In the absence 
+of more magisterial teaching, let us talk it over between 
+friends: even a few guesses may be of interest to youths and 
+maidens.
+
+In all that concerns eating and drinking, company, 
+climate, and ways of life, community of taste is to be sought 
+for.  It would be trying, for instance, to keep bed and board 
+with an early riser or a vegetarian.  In matters of art and 
+intellect, I believe it is of no consequence.  Certainly it is 
+of none in the companionships of men, who will dine more 
+readily with one who has a good heart, a good cellar, and a 
+humorous tongue, than with another who shares all their 
+favourite hobbies and is melancholy withal.  If your wife 
+likes Tupper, that is no reason why you should hang your head.  
+She thinks with the majority, and has the courage of her 
+opinions.  I have always suspected public taste to be a 
+mongrel product, out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt 
+sure, if you could only find an honest man of no special 
+literary bent, he would tell you he thought much of 
+Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of him written 
+in very obscure English and wearisome to read.  And not long 
+ago I was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I found 
+the honest man.  He was a fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a 
+clever painter, and with an eye for certain poetical effects 
+of sea and ships.  I am not much of a judge of that kind of 
+thing, but a sketch of his comes before me sometimes at night.  
+How strong, supple, and living the ship seems upon the 
+billows!  With what a dip and rake she shears the flying sea!  
+I cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the 
+wing with so much force and spirit, was what you call 
+commonplace in the last recesses of the heart.  And yet he 
+thought, and was not ashamed to have it known of him, that 
+Ouida was better in every way than William Shakespeare.  If 
+there were more people of his honesty, this would be about the 
+staple of lay criticism.  It is not taste that is plentiful, 
+but courage that is rare.  And what have we in place?  How 
+many, who think no otherwise than the young painter, have we 
+not heard disbursing second-hand hyperboles?  Have you never 
+turned sick at heart, O best of critics! when some of your own 
+sweet adjectives were returned on you before a gaping 
+audience?  Enthusiasm about art is become a function of the 
+average female being, which she performs with precision and a 
+sort of haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-
+regulated machine.  Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is 
+carried away in the torrent, bandies adjectives with the best, 
+and out-Herods Herod for some shameful moments.  When you 
+remember that, you will be tempted to put things strongly, and 
+say you will marry no one who is not like George the Second, 
+and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry and painting.
+
+The word "facts" is, in some ways, crucial.  I have 
+spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and 
+poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird's-
+eye neckcloths; and each understood the word "facts" in an 
+occult sense of his own.  Try as I might, I could get no 
+nearer the principle of their division.  What was essential to 
+them, seemed to me trivial or untrue.  We could come to no 
+compromise as to what was, or what was not, important in the 
+life of man.  Turn as we pleased, we all stood back to back in 
+a big ring, and saw another quarter of the heavens, with 
+different mountain-tops along the sky-line and different 
+constellations overhead.  We had each of us some whimsy in the 
+brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which 
+discoloured all experience to its own shade.  How would you 
+have people agree, when one is deaf and the other blind?  Now 
+this is where there should be community between man and wife.  
+They should be agreed on their catchword in "FACTS OF 
+RELIGION," or "FACTS OF SCIENCE," or "SOCIETY, MY DEAR"; for 
+without such an agreement all intercourse is a painful strain 
+upon the mind.  "About as much religion as my William likes," 
+in short, that is what is necessary to make a happy couple of 
+any William and his spouse.  For there are differences which 
+no habit nor affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must 
+not intermarry with the Pharisee.  Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. 
+Samuel Budget, the wife of the successful merchant!  The best 
+of men and the best of women may sometimes live together all 
+their lives, and, for want of some consent on fundamental 
+questions, hold each other lost spirits to the end.
+
+A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for 
+people who would spend years together and not bore themselves 
+to death.  But the talent, like the agreement, must be for and 
+about life.  To dwell happily together, they should be versed 
+in the niceties of the heart, and born with a faculty for 
+willing compromise.  The woman must be talented as a woman, 
+and it will not much matter although she is talented in 
+nothing else.  She must know her METIER DE FEMME, and have a 
+fine touch for the affections.  And it is more important that 
+a person should be a good gossip, and talk pleasantly and 
+smartly of common friends and the thousand and one nothings of 
+the day and hour, than that she should speak with the tongues 
+of men and angels; for a while together by the fire, happens 
+more frequently in marriage than the presence of a 
+distinguished foreigner to dinner.  That people should laugh 
+over the same sort of jests, and have many a story of "grouse 
+in the gun-room," many an old joke between them which time 
+cannot wither nor custom stale, is a better preparation for 
+life, by your leave, than many other things higher and better 
+sounding in the world's ears.  You could read Kant by 
+yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some 
+one else.  You can forgive people who do not follow you 
+through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife 
+laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you 
+were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a 
+dissolution of the marriage.
+
+I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, 
+could never so much as understand the meaning of the word 
+POLITICS, and has given up trying to distinguish Whigs from 
+Tories; but take her on her own politics, ask her about other 
+men or women and the chicanery of everyday existence - the 
+rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns - and you 
+will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous.  Nay, 
+to make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a 
+share of the higher and more poetical understanding, frank 
+interest in things for their own sake, and enduring 
+astonishment at the most common.  She is not to be deceived by 
+custom, or made to think a mystery solved when it is repeated.  
+I have heard her say she could wonder herself crazy over the 
+human eyebrow.  Now in a world where most of us walk very 
+contentedly in the little lit circle of their own reason, and 
+have to be reminded of what lies without by specious and 
+clamant exceptions - earthquakes, eruptions of Vesuvius, 
+banjos floating in mid-air at a SEANCE, and the like - a mind 
+so fresh and unsophisticated is no despicable gift.  I will 
+own I think it a better sort of mind than goes necessarily 
+with the clearest views on public business.  It will wash.  It 
+will find something to say at an odd moment.  It has in it the 
+spring of pleasant and quaint fancies.  Whereas I can imagine 
+myself yawning all night long until my jaws ached and the 
+tears came into my eyes, although my companion on the other 
+side of the hearth held the most enlightened opinions on the 
+franchise or the ballot.
+
+The question of professions, in as far as they regard 
+marriage, was only interesting to women until of late days, 
+but it touches all of us now.  Certainly, if I could help it, 
+I would never marry a wife who wrote.  The practice of letters 
+is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an hour or two's 
+work, all the more human portion of the author is extinct; he 
+will bully, backbite, and speak daggers.  Music, I hear, is 
+not much better.  But painting, on the contrary, is often 
+highly sedative; because so much of the labour, after your 
+picture is once begun, is almost entirely manual, and of that 
+skilled sort of manual labour which offers a continual series 
+of successes, and so tickles a man, through his vanity, into 
+good humour.  Alas! in letters there is nothing of this sort. 
+You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always 
+something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your 
+loops and flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first 
+law stationer could put you to the blush.  Rousseau, indeed, 
+made some account of penmanship, even made it a source of 
+livelihood, when he copied out the HELOISE for DILETTANTE 
+ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric prudence 
+which guided him among so many thousand follies and 
+insanities.  It would be well for all of the GENUS IRRITABILE 
+thus to add something of skilled labour to intangible brain-
+work.  To find the right word is so doubtful a success and 
+lies so near to failure, that there is no satisfaction in a 
+year of it; but we all know when we have formed a letter 
+perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost 
+equally certain he has found a right tone or a right colour, 
+or made a dexterous stroke with his brush.  And, again, 
+painters may work out of doors; and the fresh air, the 
+deliberate seasons, and the "tranquillising influence" of the 
+green earth, counterbalance the fever of thought, and keep 
+them cool, placable, and prosaic.
+
+A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage 
+of love, for absences are a good influence in love and keep it 
+bright and delicate; but he is just the worst man if the 
+feeling is more pedestrian, as habit is too frequently torn 
+open and the solder has never time to set.  Men who fish, 
+botanise, work with the turning-lathe, or gather sea-weeds, 
+will make admirable husbands and a little amateur painting in 
+water-colour shows the innocent and quiet mind.  Those who 
+have a few intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim 
+loose, who have their hat in their hand all along the street, 
+who can number an infinity of acquaintances and are not 
+chargeable with any one friend, promise an easy disposition 
+and no rival to the wife's influence.  I will not say they are 
+the best of men, but they are the stuff out of which adroit 
+and capable women manufacture the best of husbands.  It is to 
+be noticed that those who have loved once or twice already are 
+so much the better educated to a woman's hand; the bright boy 
+of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shyness 
+and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilising.  Lastly (and 
+this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a 
+teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke.  It is not for 
+nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, 
+spreads over all the world.  Michelet rails against it because 
+it renders you happy apart from thought or work; to provident 
+women this will seem no evil influence in married life.  
+Whatever keeps a man in the front garden, whatever checks 
+wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever makes 
+for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for 
+domestic happiness.
+
+These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will 
+probably amuse him more when he differs than when he agrees 
+with them; at least they will do no harm, for nobody will 
+follow my advice.  But the last word is of more concern.  
+Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts 
+light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.  They have 
+been so tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so 
+often sailed for islands in the air or lain becalmed with 
+burning heart, that they will risk all for solid ground below 
+their feet.  Desperate pilots, they run their sea-sick, weary 
+bark upon the dashing rocks.  It seems as if marriage were the 
+royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we 
+have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at 
+night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living.  They 
+think it will sober and change them.  Like those who join a 
+brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the 
+coil and clamour for ever.  But this is a wile of the devil's.  
+To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces 
+leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling 
+and calling in their ears.  For marriage is like life in this 
+- that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
+
+
+II
+
+
+HOPE, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence.  
+From first to last, and in the face of smarting disillusions, 
+we continue to expect good fortune, better health, and better 
+conduct; and that so confidently, that we judge it needless to 
+deserve them.  I think it improbable that I shall ever write 
+like Shakespeare, conduct an army like Hannibal, or 
+distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths of 
+virtue; and yet I have my by-days, hope prompting, when I am 
+very ready to believe that I shall combine all these various 
+excellences in my own person, and go marching down to 
+posterity with divine honours.  There is nothing so monstrous 
+but we can believe it of ourselves.  About ourselves, about 
+our aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt by choice in 
+a delicious vagueness from our boyhood up.  No one will have 
+forgotten Tom Sawyer's aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die 
+TEMPORARILY!"  Or, perhaps, better still, the inward 
+resolution of the two pirates, that "so long as they remained 
+in that business, their piracies should not again be sullied 
+with the crime of stealing."  Here we recognise the thoughts 
+of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased - well, when? - not, I 
+think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty-five; nor 
+yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still 
+in the thick of that arcadian period.  For as the race of man, 
+after centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of 
+their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not 
+altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured, 
+and Lord Chancellor of England.  We advance in years somewhat 
+in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age 
+that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an 
+outpost, and still keep open our communications with the 
+extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.  There is our 
+true base; that is not only the beginning, but the perennial 
+spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire 
+upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.
+
+The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous 
+irrationality are nowhere better displayed than in questions 
+of conduct.  There is a character in the PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, 
+one Mr. LINGER-AFTER-LUST with whom I fancy we are all on 
+speaking terms; one famous among the famous for ingenuity of 
+hope up to and beyond the moment of defeat; one who, after 
+eighty years of contrary experience, will believe it possible 
+to continue in the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt 
+of theft.  Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a 
+remarkable turning-point in our career.  Any overt act, above 
+all, is felt to be alchemic in its power to change.  A 
+drunkard takes the pledge; it will be strange if that does not 
+help him.  For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make 
+and break his little vows?  And yet I have not heard that he 
+was discouraged in the end.  By such steps we think to fix a 
+momentary resolution; as a timid fellow hies him to the 
+dentist's while the tooth is stinging.
+
+But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you 
+can neither prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb.  There is no 
+hocus-pocus in morality; and even the "sanctimonious ceremony" 
+of marriage leaves the man unchanged.  This is a hard saying, 
+and has an air of paradox.  For there is something in marriage 
+so natural and inviting, that the step has an air of great 
+simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever many aching 
+preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar 
+company through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the 
+blest and passive kind of love, rather than the blessing and 
+active; it is approached not only through the delights of 
+courtship, but by a public performance and repeated legal 
+signatures.  A man naturally thinks it will go hard with him 
+if he cannot be good and fortunate and happy within such 
+august circumvallations.
+
+And yet there is probably no other act in a man's life so 
+hot-headed and foolhardy as this one of marriage.  For years, 
+let us suppose, you have been making the most indifferent 
+business of your career.  Your experience has not, we may dare 
+to say, been more encouraging than Paul's or Horace's; like 
+them, you have seen and desired the good that you were not 
+able to accomplish; like them, you have done the evil that you 
+loathed.  You have waked at night in a hot or a cold sweat, 
+according to your habit of body, remembering with dismal 
+surprise, your own unpardonable acts and sayings.  You have 
+been sometimes tempted to withdraw entirely from this game of 
+life; as a man who makes nothing but misses withdraws from 
+that less dangerous one of billiards.  You have fallen back 
+upon the thought that you yourself most sharply smarted for 
+your misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that you 
+were nobody's enemy but your own.  And then you have been made 
+aware of what was beautiful and amiable, wise and kind, in the 
+other part of your behaviour; and it seemed as if nothing 
+could reconcile the contradiction, as indeed nothing can.  If 
+you are a man, you have shut your mouth hard and said nothing; 
+and if you are only a man in the making, you have recognised 
+that yours was quite a special case, and you yourself not 
+guilty of your own pestiferous career.
+
+Granted, and with all my heart.  Let us accept these 
+apologies; let us agree that you are nobody's enemy but your 
+own; let us agree that you are a sort of moral cripple, 
+impotent for good; and let us regard you with the unmingled 
+pity due to such a fate.  But there is one thing to which, on 
+these terms, we can never agree: - we can never agree to have 
+you marry.  What! you have had one life to manage, and have 
+failed so strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to 
+conjoin with it the management of some one else's?  Because 
+you have been unfaithful in a very little, you propose 
+yourself to be a ruler over ten cities.  You strip yourself by 
+such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses.  You 
+are no longer content to be your own enemy; you must be your 
+wife's also.  You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern 
+attitude; dealing cruel blows about you in life, yet only half 
+responsible, since you came there by no choice or movement of 
+your own.  Now, it appears, you must take things on your own 
+authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and for all 
+that your wife suffers, no one is responsible but you.  A man 
+must be very certain of his knowledge ere he undertake to 
+guide a ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass; you have 
+eternally missed your way in life, with consequences that you 
+still deplore, and yet you masterfully seize your wife's hand, 
+and, blindfold, drag her after you to ruin.  And it is your 
+wife, you observe, whom you select.  She, whose happiness you 
+most desire, you choose to be your victim.  You would 
+earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or bad investment.  
+If she were to marry some one else, how you would tremble for 
+her fate!  If she were only your sister, and you thought half 
+as much of her, how doubtfully would you entrust her future to 
+a man no better than yourself!
+
+Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more 
+by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road 
+lies long and straight and dusty to the grave.  Idleness, 
+which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins 
+to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.  
+Suppose, after you are married, one of those little slips were 
+to befall you.  What happened last November might surely 
+happen February next.  They may have annoyed you at the time, 
+because they were not what you had meant; but how will they 
+annoy you in the future, and how will they shake the fabric of 
+your wife's confidence and peace!  A thousand things 
+unpleasing went on in the CHIAROSCURO of a life that you 
+shrank from too particularly realising; you did not care, in 
+those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would 
+recognise your failures with a nod, and so, good day.  But the 
+time for these reserves is over.  You have wilfully introduced 
+a witness into your life, the scene of these defeats, and can 
+no longer close the mind's eye upon uncomely passages, but 
+must stand up straight and put a name upon your actions.  And 
+your witness is not only the judge, but the victim of your 
+sins; not only can she condemn you to the sharpest penalties, 
+but she must herself share feelingly in their endurance.  And 
+observe, once more, with what temerity you have chosen 
+precisely HER to be your spy, whose esteem you value highest, 
+and whom you have already taught to think you better than you 
+are.  You may think you had a conscience, and believed in God; 
+but what is a conscience to a wife?  Wise men of yore erected 
+statues of their deities, and consciously performed their part 
+in life before those marble eyes.  A god watched them at the 
+board, and stood by their bedside in the morning when they 
+woke; and all about their ancient cities, where they bought 
+and sold, or where they piped and wrestled, there would stand 
+some symbol of the things that are outside of man.  These were 
+lessons, delivered in the quiet dialect of art, which told 
+their story faithfully, but gently.  It is the same lesson, if 
+you will - but how harrowingly taught! - when the woman you 
+respect shall weep from your unkindness or blush with shame at 
+your misconduct.  Poor girls in Italy turn their painted 
+Madonnas to the wall: you cannot set aside your wife.  To 
+marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel.  Once you are 
+married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but 
+to be good.
+
+And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem than 
+mere single virtue; for in marriage there are two ideals to be 
+realised.  A girl, it is true, has always lived in a glass 
+house among reproving relatives, whose word was law; she has 
+been bred up to sacrifice her judgments and take the key 
+submissively from dear papa; and it is wonderful how swiftly 
+she can change her tune into the husband's.  Her morality has 
+been, too often, an affair of precept and conformity.  But in 
+the case of a bachelor who has enjoyed some measure both of 
+privacy and freedom, his moral judgments have been passed in 
+some accordance with his nature.  His sins were always sins in 
+his own sight; he could then only sin when he did some act 
+against his clear conviction; the light that he walked by was 
+obscure, but it was single.  Now, when two people of any grit 
+and spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this 
+comparative certainty a huge welter of competing 
+jurisdictions.  It no longer matters so much how life appears 
+to one; one must consult another: one, who may be strong, must 
+not offend the other, who is weak.  The only weak brother I am 
+willing to consider is (to make a bull for once) my wife.  For 
+her, and for her only, I must waive my righteous judgments, 
+and go crookedly about my life.  How, then, in such an 
+atmosphere of compromise, to keep honour bright and abstain 
+from base capitulations?  How are you to put aside love's 
+pleadings?  How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn 
+suddenly about into the rabbi of precision; and after these 
+years of ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who 
+has found you out?  In this temptation to mutual indulgence 
+lies the particular peril to morality in married life.  Daily 
+they drop a little lower from the first ideal, and for a while 
+continue to accept these changelings with a gross complacency.  
+At last Love wakes and looks about him; finds his hero sunk 
+into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his 
+heroine divested of her angel brightness; and in the flash of 
+that first disenchantment, flees for ever.
+
+Again, the husband, in these unions, is usually a man, 
+and the wife commonly enough a woman; and when this is the 
+case, although it makes the firmer marriage, a thick 
+additional veil of misconception hangs above the doubtful 
+business.  Women, I believe, are somewhat rarer than men; but 
+then, if I were a woman myself, I daresay I should hold the 
+reverse; and at least we all enter more or less wholly into 
+one or other of these camps.  A man who delights women by his 
+feminine perceptions will often scatter his admirers by a 
+chance explosion of the under side of man; and the most 
+masculine and direct of women will some day, to your dire 
+surprise, draw out like a telescope into successive lengths of 
+personation.  Alas! for the man, knowing her to be at heart 
+more candid than himself, who shall flounder, panting, through 
+these mazes in the quest for truth.  The proper qualities of 
+each sex are, indeed, eternally surprising to the other.  
+Between the Latin and the Teuton races there are similar 
+divergences, not to be bridged by the most liberal sympathy.  
+And in the good, plain, cut-and-dry explanations of this life, 
+which pass current among us as the wisdom of the elders, this 
+difficulty has been turned with the aid of pious lies.  Thus, 
+when a young lady has angelic features, eats nothing to speak 
+of, plays all day long on the piano, and sings ravishingly in 
+church, it requires a rough infidelity, falsely called 
+cynicism, to believe that she may be a little devil after all.  
+Yet so it is: she may be a tale-bearer, a liar, and a thief; 
+she may have a taste for brandy, and no heart.  My compliments 
+to George Eliot for her Rosamond Vincy; the ugly work of 
+satire she has transmuted to the ends of art, by the companion 
+figure of Lydgate; and the satire was much wanted for the 
+education of young men.  That doctrine of the excellence of 
+women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false.  It 
+is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you 
+take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, 
+frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than 
+yours.
+
+But it is the object of a liberal education not only to 
+obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify 
+the natural differences between the two.  Man is a creature 
+who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; 
+and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened 
+by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and 
+another to the boys.  To the first, there is shown but a very 
+small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant 
+principle for judgment and action; to the other, the world of 
+life is more largely displayed, and their rule of conduct is 
+proportionally widened.  They are taught to follow different 
+virtues, to hate different vices, to place their ideal, even 
+for each other, in different achievements.  What should be the 
+result of such a course?  When a horse has run away, and the 
+two flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves 
+of a rein, we know the end of that conveyance will be in the 
+ditch.  So, when I see a raw youth and a green girl, fluted 
+and fiddled in a dancing measure into that most serious 
+contract, and setting out upon life's journey with ideas so 
+monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that some make 
+shipwreck, but that any come to port.  What the boy does 
+almost proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder 
+at as a debasing vice; what is to her the mere common sense of 
+tactics, he will spit out of his mouth as shameful.  Through 
+such a sea of contrarieties must this green couple steer their 
+way; and contrive to love each other; and to respect, 
+forsooth; and be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the 
+little men and women who shall succeed to their places and 
+perplexities.
+
+And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold 
+back from marriage is in the same case with him who runs away 
+from battle.  To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse 
+degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a 
+fall.  It is lawful to pray God that we be not led into 
+temptation; but not lawful to skulk from those that come to 
+us.  The noblest passage in one of the noblest books of this 
+century, is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in 
+the partial fall and but imperfect triumph, of the younger 
+hero. (1)  Without some such manly note, it were perhaps 
+better to have no conscience at all.  But there is a vast 
+difference between teaching flight, and showing points of 
+peril that a man may march the more warily.  And the true 
+conclusion of this paper is to turn our back on apprehensions, 
+and embrace that shining and courageous virtue, Faith.  Hope 
+is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase 
+swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet 
+smiling man.  Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is 
+built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of 
+circumstance and the frailty of human resolution.  Hope looks 
+for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on 
+failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory.  
+Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, 
+and early learnt humility.  In the one temper, a man is 
+indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of 
+elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his 
+infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year has 
+come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags of honour.  
+In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he 
+knows that she is like himself - erring, thoughtless, and 
+untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling 
+radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective 
+qualities.  You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you 
+marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: 
+that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent 
+play-things; that hope and love address themselves to a 
+perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become the 
+salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of 
+infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet 
+you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and 
+that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy 
+condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous 
+reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble 
+spouse through life.  So thinking, you will constantly support 
+your own unworthiness, and easily forgive the failings of your 
+friend.  Nay, you will be I wisely glad that you retain the 
+sense of blemishes; for the faults of married people 
+continually spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better 
+and to meet and love upon a higher ground.  And ever, between 
+the failures, there will come glimpses of kind virtues to 
+encourage and console.
+
+(1) Browning's RING AND BOOK.
+
+
+III. - ON FALLING IN LOVE
+
+
+"Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
+
+
+THERE is only one event in life which really astonishes a 
+man and startles him out of his prepared opinions.  Everything 
+else befalls him very much as he expected.  Event succeeds to 
+event, with an agreeable variety indeed, but with little that 
+is either startling or intense; they form together no more 
+than a sort of background, or running accompaniment to the 
+man's own reflections; and he falls naturally into a cool, 
+curious, and smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a 
+conception of life which expects to-morrow to be after the 
+pattern of to-day and yesterday.  He may be accustomed to the 
+vagaries of his friends and acquaintances under the influence 
+of love.  He may sometimes look forward to it for himself with 
+an incomprehensible expectation.  But it is a subject in which 
+neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will help the 
+philosopher to the truth.  There is probably nothing rightly 
+thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not 
+a piece of the person's experience.  I remember an anecdote of 
+a well-known French theorist, who was debating a point eagerly 
+in his CENACLE.  It was objected against him that he had never 
+experienced love.  Whereupon he arose, left the society, and 
+made it a point not to return to it until he considered that 
+he had supplied the defect.  "Now," he remarked, on entering, 
+"now I am in a position to continue the discussion."  Perhaps 
+he had not penetrated very deeply into the subject after all; 
+but the story indicates right thinking, and may serve as an 
+apologue to readers of this essay.
+
+When at last the scales fall from his eyes, it is not 
+without something of the nature of dismay that the man finds 
+himself in such changed conditions.  He has to deal with 
+commanding emotions instead of the easy dislikes and 
+preferences in which he has hitherto passed his days; and he 
+recognises capabilities for pain and pleasure of which he had 
+not yet suspected the existence.  Falling in love is the one 
+illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to 
+think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.  The 
+effect is out of all proportion with the cause.  Two persons, 
+neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, 
+meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's 
+eyes.  That has been done a dozen or so of times in the 
+experience of either with no great result.  But on this 
+occasion all is different.  They fall at once into that state 
+in which another person becomes to us the very gist and 
+centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious 
+theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with 
+the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own 
+person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life 
+itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world 
+with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.  And all the 
+while their acquaintances look on in stupor, and ask each 
+other, with almost passionate emphasis, what so-and-so can see 
+in that woman, or such-an-one in that man?  I am sure, 
+gentlemen, I cannot tell you.  For my part, I cannot think 
+what the women mean.  It might be very well, if the Apollo 
+Belvedere should suddenly glow all over into life, and step 
+forward from the pedestal with that godlike air of his.  But 
+of the misbegotten changelings who call themselves men, and 
+prate intolerably over dinner-tables, I never saw one who 
+seemed worthy to inspire love - no, nor read of any, except 
+Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps Goethe in his youth.  About 
+women I entertain a somewhat different opinion; but there, I 
+have the misfortune to be a man.
+
+There are many matters in which you may waylay Destiny, 
+and bid him stand and deliver.  Hard work, high thinking, 
+adventurous excitement, and a great deal more that forms a 
+part of this or the other person's spiritual bill of fare, are 
+within the reach of almost any one who can dare a little and 
+be patient.  But it is by no means in the way of every one to 
+fall in love.  You know the difficulty Shakespeare was put 
+into when Queen Elizabeth asked him to show Falstaff in love.  
+I do not believe that Henry Fielding was ever in love.  Scott, 
+if it were not for a passage or two in ROB ROY, would give me 
+very much the same effect.  These are great names and (what is 
+more to the purpose) strong, healthy, high-strung, and 
+generous natures, of whom the reverse might have been 
+expected.  As for the innumerable army of anaemic and 
+tailorish persons who occupy the face of this planet with so 
+much propriety, it is palpably absurd to imagine them in any 
+such situation as a love-affair.  A wet rag goes safely by the 
+fire; and if a man is blind, he cannot expect to be much 
+impressed by romantic scenery.  Apart from all this, many 
+lovable people miss each other in the world, or meet under 
+some unfavourable star.  There is the nice and critical moment 
+of declaration to be got over.  From timidity or lack of 
+opportunity a good half of possible love cases never get so 
+far, and at least another quarter do there cease and 
+determine.  A very adroit person, to be sure, manages to 
+prepare the way and out with his declaration in the nick of 
+time.  And then there is a fine solid sort of man, who goes on 
+from snub to snub; and if he has to declare forty times, will 
+continue imperturbably declaring, amid the astonished 
+consideration of men and angels, until he has a favourable 
+answer.  I daresay, if one were a woman, one would like to 
+marry a man who was capable of doing this, but not quite one 
+who had done so.  It is just a little bit abject, and somehow 
+just a little bit gross; and marriages in which one of the 
+parties has been thus battered into consent scarcely form 
+agreeable subjects for meditation.  Love should run out to 
+meet love with open arms.  Indeed, the ideal story is that of 
+two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered 
+consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into 
+a dark room.  From the first moment when they see each other, 
+with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing 
+pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of 
+their own trouble in each other's eyes.  There is here no 
+declaration properly so called; the feeling is so plainly 
+shared, that as soon as the man knows what it is in his own 
+heart, he is sure of what it is in the woman's.
+
+This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial 
+as it is astonishing.  It arrests the petrifying influence of 
+years, disproves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and 
+awakens dormant sensibilities.  Hitherto the man had found it 
+a good policy to disbelieve the existence of any enjoyment 
+which was out of his reach; and thus he turned his back upon 
+the strong sunny parts of nature, and accustomed himself to 
+look exclusively on what was common and dull.  He accepted a 
+prose ideal, let himself go blind of many sympathies by 
+disuse; and if he were young and witty, or beautiful, wilfully 
+forewent these advantages.  He joined himself to the following 
+of what, in the old mythology of love, was prettily called 
+NONCHALOIR; and in an odd mixture of feelings, a fling of 
+self-respect, a preference for selfish liberty, and a great 
+dash of that fear with which honest people regard serious 
+interests, kept himself back from the straightforward course 
+of life among certain selected activities.  And now, all of a 
+sudden, he is unhorsed, like St. Paul, from his infidel 
+affectation.  His heart, which has been ticking accurate 
+seconds for the last year, gives a bound and begins to beat 
+high and irregularly in his breast.  It seems as if he had 
+never heard or felt or seen until that moment; and by the 
+report of his memory, he must have lived his past life between 
+sleep and waking, or with the preoccupied attention of a brown 
+study.  He is practically incommoded by the generosity of his 
+feelings, smiles much when he is alone, and develops a habit 
+of looking rather blankly upon the moon and stars.  But it is 
+not at all within the province of a prose essayist to give a 
+picture of this hyperbolical frame of mind; and the thing has 
+been done already, and that to admiration.  In ADELAIDE, in 
+Tennyson's MAUD, and in some of Heine's songs, you get the 
+absolute expression of this midsummer spirit.  Romeo and 
+Juliet were very much in love; although they tell me some 
+German critics are of a different opinion, probably the same 
+who would have us think Mercutio a dull fellow.  Poor Antony 
+was in love, and no mistake.  That lay figure Marius, in LES 
+MISERABLES, is also a genuine case in his own way, and worth 
+observation.  A good many of George Sand's people are 
+thoroughly in love; and so are a good many of George 
+Meredith's.  Altogether, there is plenty to read on the 
+subject.  If the root of the matter be in him, and if he has 
+the requisite chords to set in vibration, a young man may 
+occasionally enter, with the key of art, into that land of 
+Beulah which is upon the borders of Heaven and within sight of 
+the City of Love.  There let him sit awhile to hatch 
+delightful hopes and perilous illusions.
+
+One thing that accompanies the passion in its first blush 
+is certainly difficult to explain.  It comes (I do not quite 
+see how) that from having a very supreme sense of pleasure in 
+all parts of life - in lying down to sleep, in waking, in 
+motion, in breathing, in continuing to be - the lover begins 
+to regard his happiness as beneficial for the rest of the 
+world and highly meritorious in himself.  Our race has never 
+been able contentedly to suppose that the noise of its wars, 
+conducted by a few young gentlemen in a corner of an 
+inconsiderable star, does not re-echo among the courts of 
+Heaven with quite a formidable effect.  In much the same 
+taste, when people find a great to-do in their own breasts, 
+they imagine it must have some influence in their 
+neighbourhood.  The presence of the two lovers is so 
+enchanting to each other that it seems as if it must be the 
+best thing possible for everybody else.  They are half 
+inclined to fancy it is because of them and their love that 
+the sky is blue and the sun shines.  And certainly the weather 
+is usually fine while people are courting. . .  In point of 
+fact, although the happy man feels very kindly towards others 
+of his own sex, there is apt to be something too much of the 
+magnifico in his demeanour.  If people grow presuming and 
+self-important over such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, 
+they will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life 
+without some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation 
+is to love and be loved in return.  Consequently, accepted 
+lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other 
+men.  An overweening sense of the passion and importance of 
+life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner.  To women, they 
+feel very nobly, very purely, and very generously, as if they 
+were so many Joan-of-Arc's; but this does not come out in 
+their behaviour; and they treat them to Grandisonian airs 
+marked with a suspicion of fatuity.  I am not quite certain 
+that women do not like this sort of thing; but really, after 
+having bemused myself over DANIEL DERONDA, I have given up 
+trying to understand what they like.
+
+If it did nothing else, this sublime and ridiculous 
+superstition, that the pleasure of the pair is somehow blessed 
+to others, and everybody is made happier in their happiness, 
+would serve at least to keep love generous and great-hearted.  
+Nor is it quite a baseless superstition after all.  Other 
+lovers are hugely interested.  They strike the nicest balance 
+between pity and approval, when they see people aping the 
+greatness of their own sentiments.  It is an understood thing 
+in the play, that while the young gentlefolk are courting on 
+the terrace, a rough flirtation is being carried on, and a 
+light, trivial sort of love is growing up, between the footman 
+and the singing chambermaid.  As people are generally cast for 
+the leading parts in their own imaginations, the reader can 
+apply the parallel to real life without much chance of going 
+wrong.  In short, they are quite sure this other love-affair 
+is not so deep seated as their own, but they like dearly to 
+see it going forward.  And love, considered as a spectacle, 
+must have attractions for many who are not of the 
+confraternity.  The sentimental old maid is a commonplace of 
+the novelists; and he must be rather a poor sort of human 
+being, to be sure, who can look on at this pretty madness 
+without indulgence and sympathy.  For nature commends itself 
+to people with a most insinuating art; the busiest is now and 
+again arrested by a great sunset; and you may be as pacific or 
+as cold-blooded as you will, but you cannot help some emotion 
+when you read of well-disputed battles, or meet a pair of 
+lovers in the lane.
+
+Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at 
+large, this idea of beneficent pleasure is true as between the 
+sweethearts.  To do good and communicate is the lover's grand 
+intention.  It is the happiness of the other that makes his 
+own most intense gratification.  It is not possible to 
+disentangle the different emotions, the pride, humility, pity 
+and passion, which are excited by a look of happy love or an 
+unexpected caress.  To make one's self beautiful, to dress the 
+hair, to excel in talk, to do anything and all things that 
+puff out the character and attributes and make them imposing 
+in the eyes of others, is not only to magnify one's self, but 
+to offer the most delicate homage at the same time.  And it is 
+in this latter intention that they are done by lovers; for the 
+essence of love is kindness; and indeed it may be best defined 
+as passionate kindness: kindness, so to speak, run mad and 
+become importunate and violent.  Vanity in a merely personal 
+sense exists no longer.  The lover takes a perilous pleasure 
+in privately displaying his weak points and having them, one 
+after another, accepted and condoned.  He wishes to be assured 
+that he is not loved for this or that good quality, but for 
+himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive to 
+set forward.  For, although it may have been a very difficult 
+thing to paint the marriage of Cana, or write the fourth act 
+of Antony and Cleopatra, there is a more difficult piece of 
+art before every one in this world who cares to set about 
+explaining his own character to others.  Words and acts are 
+easily wrenched from their true significance; and they are all 
+the language we have to come and go upon.  A pitiful job we 
+make of it, as a rule.  For better or worse, people mistake 
+our meaning and take our emotions at a wrong valuation.  And 
+generally we rest pretty content with our failures; we are 
+content to be misapprehended by cackling flirts; but when once 
+a man is moonstruck with this affection of love, he makes it a 
+point of honour to clear such dubieties away.  He cannot have 
+the Best of her Sex misled upon a point of this importance; 
+and his pride revolts at being loved in a mistake.
+
+He discovers a great reluctance to return on former 
+periods of his life.  To all that has not been shared with 
+her, rights and duties, bygone fortunes and dispositions, he 
+can look back only by a difficult and repugnant effort of the 
+will.  That he should have wasted some years in ignorance of 
+what alone was really important, that he may have entertained 
+the thought of other women with any show of complacency, is a 
+burthen almost too heavy for his self-respect.  But it is the 
+thought of another past that rankles in his spirit like a 
+poisoned wound.  That he himself made a fashion of being alive 
+in the bald, beggarly days before a certain meeting, is 
+deplorable enough in all good conscience.  But that She should 
+have permitted herself the same liberty seems inconsistent 
+with a Divine providence.
+
+A great many people run down jealousy, on the score that 
+it is an artificial feeling, as well as practically 
+inconvenient.  This is scarcely fair; for the feeling on which 
+it merely attends, like an ill-humoured courtier, is itself 
+artificial in exactly the same sense and to the same degree.  
+I suppose what is meant by that objection is that jealousy has 
+not always been a character of man; formed no part of that 
+very modest kit of sentiments with which he is supposed to 
+have begun the world: but waited to make its appearance in 
+better days and among richer natures.  And this is equally 
+true of love, and friendship, and love of country, and delight 
+in what they call the beauties of nature, and most other 
+things worth having.  Love, in particular, will not endure any 
+historical scrutiny: to all who have fallen across it, it is 
+one of the most incontestable facts in the world; but if you 
+begin to ask what it was in other periods and countries, in 
+Greece for instance, the strangest doubts begin to spring up, 
+and everything seems so vague and changing that a dream is 
+logical in comparison.  Jealousy, at any rate, is one of the 
+consequences of love; you may like it or not, at pleasure; but 
+there it is.
+
+It is not exactly jealousy, however, that we feel when we 
+reflect on the past of those we love.  A bundle of letters 
+found after years of happy union creates no sense of 
+insecurity in the present; and yet it will pain a man sharply.  
+The two people entertain no vulgar doubt of each other: but 
+this pre-existence of both occurs to the mind as something 
+indelicate.  To be altogether right, they should have had twin 
+birth together, at the same moment with the feeling that 
+unites them.  Then indeed it would be simple and perfect and 
+without reserve or afterthought.  Then they would understand 
+each other with a fulness impossible otherwise.  There would 
+be no barrier between them of associations that cannot be 
+imparted.  They would be led into none of those comparisons 
+that send the blood back to the heart.  And they would know 
+that there had been no time lost, and they had been together 
+as much as was possible.  For besides terror for the 
+separation that must follow some time or other in the future, 
+men feel anger, and something like remorse, when they think of 
+that other separation which endured until they met.  Some one 
+has written that love makes people believe in immortality, 
+because there seems not to be room enough in life for so great 
+a tenderness, and it is inconceivable that the most masterful 
+of our emotions should have no more than the spare moments of 
+a few years.  Indeed, it seems strange; but if we call to mind 
+analogies, we can hardly regard it as impossible.
+
+"The blind bow-boy," who smiles upon us from the end of 
+terraces in old Dutch gardens, laughingly hails his bird-bolts 
+among a fleeting generation.  But for as fast as ever he 
+shoots, the game dissolves and disappears into eternity from 
+under his falling arrows; this one is gone ere he is struck; 
+the other has but time to make one gesture and give one 
+passionate cry; and they are all the things of a moment.  When 
+the generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty 
+years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage 
+of the world, we may ask what has become of these great, 
+weighty, and undying loves, and the sweet-hearts who despised 
+mortal conditions in a fine credulity; and they can only show 
+us a few songs in a bygone taste, a few actions worth 
+remembering, and a few children who have retained some happy 
+stamp from the disposition of their parents.
+
+
+IV. - TRUTH OF INTERCOURSE
+
+
+AMONG sayings that have a currency in spite of being 
+wholly false upon the face of them for the sake of a half-
+truth upon another subject which is accidentally combined with 
+the error, one of the grossest and broadest conveys the 
+monstrous proposition that it is easy to tell the truth and 
+hard to tell a lie.  I wish heartily it were.  But the truth 
+is one; it has first to be discovered, then justly and exactly 
+uttered.  Even with instruments specially contrived for such a 
+purpose - with a foot rule, a level, or a theodolite - it is 
+not easy to be exact; it is easier, alas! to be inexact.  From 
+those who mark the divisions on a scale to those who measure 
+the boundaries of empires or the distance of the heavenly 
+stars, it is by careful method and minute, unwearying 
+attention that men rise even to material exactness or to sure 
+knowledge even of external and constant things.  But it is 
+easier to draw the outline of a mountain than the changing 
+appearance of a face; and truth in human relations is of this 
+more intangible and dubious order: hard to seize, harder to 
+communicate.  Veracity to facts in a loose, colloquial sense - 
+not to say that I have been in Malabar when as a matter of 
+fact I was never out of England, not to say that I have read 
+Cervantes in the original when as a matter of fact I know not 
+one syllable of Spanish - this, indeed, is easy and to the 
+same degree unimportant in itself.  Lies of this sort, 
+according to circumstances, may or may not be important; in a 
+certain sense even they may or may not be false.  The habitual 
+liar may be a very honest fellow, and live truly with his wife 
+and friends; while another man who never told a formal 
+falsehood in his life may yet be himself one lie - heart and 
+face, from top to bottom.  This is the kind of lie which 
+poisons intimacy.  And, VICE VERSA, veracity to sentiment, 
+truth in a relation, truth to your own heart and your friends, 
+never to feign or falsify emotion - that is the truth which 
+makes love possible and mankind happy.
+
+L'ART DE BIEN DIRE is but a drawing-room accomplishment 
+unless it be pressed into the service of the truth.  The 
+difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what 
+you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him 
+precisely as you wish.  This is commonly understood in the 
+case of books or set orations; even in making your will, or 
+writing an explicit letter, some difficulty is admitted by the 
+world.  But one thing you can never make Philistine natures 
+understand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, remains 
+as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of metaphysics - 
+namely, that the business of life is mainly carried on by 
+means of this difficult art of literature, and according to a 
+man's proficiency in that art shall be the freedom and the 
+fulness of his intercourse with other men.  Anybody, it is 
+supposed, can say what he means; and, in spite of their 
+notorious experience to the contrary, people so continue to 
+suppose.  Now, I simply open the last book I have been reading 
+- Mr. Leland's captivating ENGLISH GIPSIES.  "It is said," I 
+find on p. 7, "that those who can converse with Irish peasants 
+in their own native tongue form far higher opinions of their 
+appreciation of the beautiful, and of THE ELEMENTS OF HUMOUR 
+AND PATHOS IN THEIR HEARTS, than do those who know their 
+thoughts only through the medium of English.  I know from my 
+own observations that this is quite the case with the Indians 
+of North America, and it is unquestionably so with the gipsy."  
+In short, where a man has not a full possession of the 
+language, the most important, because the most amiable, 
+qualities of his nature have to lie buried and fallow; for the 
+pleasure of comradeship, and the intellectual part of love, 
+rest upon these very "elements of humour and pathos."  Here is 
+a man opulent in both, and for lack of a medium he can put 
+none of it out to interest in the market of affection!  But 
+what is thus made plain to our apprehensions in the case of a 
+foreign language is partially true even with the tongue we 
+learned in childhood.  Indeed, we all speak different 
+dialects; one shall be copious and exact, another loose and 
+meagre; but the speech of the ideal talker shall correspond 
+and fit upon the truth of fact - not clumsily, obscuring 
+lineaments, like a mantle, but cleanly adhering, like an 
+athlete's skin.  And what is the result?  That the one can 
+open himself more clearly to his friends, and can enjoy more 
+of what makes life truly valuable - intimacy with those he 
+loves.  An orator makes a false step; he employs some trivial, 
+some absurd, some vulgar phrase; in the turn of a sentence he 
+insults, by a side wind, those whom he is labouring to charm; 
+in speaking to one sentiment he unconsciously ruffles another 
+in parenthesis; and you are not surprised, for you know his 
+task to be delicate and filled with perils.  "O frivolous mind 
+of man, light ignorance!"  As if yourself, when you seek to 
+explain some misunderstanding or excuse some apparent fault, 
+speaking swiftly and addressing a mind still recently 
+incensed, were not harnessing for a more perilous adventure; 
+as if yourself required less tact and eloquence; as if an 
+angry friend or a suspicious lover were not more easy to 
+offend than a meeting of indifferent politicians!  Nay, and 
+the orator treads in a beaten round; the matters he discusses 
+have been discussed a thousand times before; language is 
+ready-shaped to his purpose; he speaks out of a cut and dry 
+vocabulary.  But you - may it not be that your defence reposes 
+on some subtlety of feeling, not so much as touched upon in 
+Shakespeare, to express which, like a pioneer, you must 
+venture forth into zones of thought still unsurveyed, and 
+become yourself a literary innovator?  For even in love there 
+are unlovely humours; ambiguous acts, unpardonable words, may 
+yet have sprung from a kind sentiment.  If the injured one 
+could read your heart, you may be sure that he would 
+understand and pardon; but, alas! the heart cannot be shown - 
+it has to be demonstrated in words.  Do you think it is a hard 
+thing to write poetry?  Why, that is to write poetry, and of a 
+high, if not the highest, order.
+
+I should even more admire "the lifelong and heroic 
+literary labours" of my fellow-men, patiently clearing up in 
+words their loves and their contentions, and speaking their 
+autobiography daily to their wives, were it not for a 
+circumstance which lessens their difficulty and my admiration 
+by equal parts.  For life, though largely, is not entirely 
+carried on by literature.  We are subject to physical passions 
+and contortions; the voice breaks and changes, and speaks by 
+unconscious and winning inflections; we have legible 
+countenances, like an open book; things that cannot be said 
+look eloquently through the eyes; and the soul, not locked 
+into the body as a dungeon, dwells ever on the threshold with 
+appealing signals.  Groans and tears, looks and gestures, a 
+flush or a paleness, are often the most clear reporters of the 
+heart, and speak more directly to the hearts of others.  The 
+message flies by these interpreters in the least space of 
+time, and the misunderstanding is averted in the moment of its 
+birth.  To explain in words takes time and a just and patient 
+hearing; and in the critical epochs of a close relation, 
+patience and justice are not qualities on which we can rely.  
+But the look or the gesture explains things in a breath; they 
+tell their message without ambiguity; unlike speech, they 
+cannot stumble, by the way, on a reproach or an allusion that 
+should steel your friend against the truth; and then they have 
+a higher authority, for they are the direct expression of the 
+heart, not yet transmitted through the unfaithful and 
+sophisticating brain.  Not long ago I wrote a letter to a 
+friend which came near involving us in quarrel; but we met, 
+and in personal talk I repeated the worst of what I had 
+written, and added worse to that; and with the commentary of 
+the body it seemed not unfriendly either to hear or say.  
+Indeed, letters are in vain for the purposes of intimacy; an 
+absence is a dead break in the relation; yet two who know each 
+other fully and are bent on perpetuity in love, may so 
+preserve the attitude of their affections that they may meet 
+on the same terms as they had parted.
+
+Pitiful is the case of the blind, who cannot read the 
+face; pitiful that of the deaf, who cannot follow the changes 
+of the voice.  And there are others also to be pitied; for 
+there are some of an inert, uneloquent nature, who have been 
+denied all the symbols of communication, who have neither a 
+lively play of facial expression, nor speaking gestures, nor a 
+responsive voice, nor yet the gift of frank, explanatory 
+speech: people truly made of clay, people tied for life into a 
+bag which no one can undo.  They are poorer than the gipsy, 
+for their heart can speak no language under heaven.  Such 
+people we must learn slowly by the tenor of their acts, or 
+through yea and nay communications; or we take them on trust 
+on the strength of a general air, and now and again, when we 
+see the spirit breaking through in a flash, correct or change 
+our estimate.  But these will be uphill intimacies, without 
+charm or freedom, to the end; and freedom is the chief 
+ingredient in confidence.  Some minds, romantically dull, 
+despise physical endowments.  That is a doctrine for a 
+misanthrope; to those who like their fellow-creatures it must 
+always be meaningless; and, for my part, I can see few things 
+more desirable, after the possession of such radical qualities 
+as honour and humour and pathos, than to have a lively and not 
+a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with every 
+feeling; to be elegant and delightful in person, so that we 
+shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing, and may 
+never discredit speech with uncouth manners or become 
+unconsciously our own burlesques.  But of all unfortunates 
+there is one creature (for I will not call him man) 
+conspicuous in misfortune.  This is he who has forfeited his 
+birthright of expression, who has cultivated artful 
+intonations, who has taught his face tricks, like a pet 
+monkey, and on every side perverted or cut off his means of 
+communication with his fellow-men.  The body is a house of 
+many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying 
+on the passers-by to come and love us.  But this fellow has 
+filled his windows with opaque glass, elegantly coloured.  His 
+house may be admired for its design, the crowd may pause 
+before the stained windows, but meanwhile the poor proprietor 
+must lie languishing within, uncomforted, unchangeably alone.
+
+Truth of intercourse is something more difficult than to 
+refrain from open lies.  It is possible to avoid falsehood and 
+yet not tell the truth.  It is not enough to answer formal 
+questions.  To reach the truth by yea and nay communications 
+implies a questioner with a share of inspiration, such as is 
+often found in mutual love.  YEA and NAY mean nothing; the 
+meaning must have been related in the question.  Many words 
+are often necessary to convey a very simple statement; for in 
+this sort of exercise we never hit the gold; the most that we 
+can hope is by many arrows, more or less far off on different 
+sides, to indicate, in the course of time, for what target we 
+are aiming, and after an hour's talk, back and forward, to 
+convey the purport of a single principle or a single thought.  
+And yet while the curt, pithy speaker misses the point 
+entirely, a wordy, prolegomenous babbler will often add three 
+new offences in the process of excusing one.  It is really a 
+most delicate affair.  The world was made before the English 
+language, and seemingly upon a different design.  Suppose we 
+held our converse not in words, but in music; those who have a 
+bad ear would find themselves cut off from all near commerce, 
+and no better than foreigners in this big world.  But we do 
+not consider how many have "a bad ear" for words, nor how 
+often the most eloquent find nothing to reply.  I hate 
+questioners and questions; there are so few that can be spoken 
+to without a lie.  "DO YOU FORGIVE ME?"  Madam and sweetheart, 
+so far as I have gone in life I have never yet been able to 
+discover what forgiveness means.  "IS IT STILL THE SAME 
+BETWEEN US?"  Why, how can it be?  It is eternally different; 
+and yet you are still the friend of my heart.  "DO YOU 
+UNDERSTAND ME?"  God knows; I should think it highly 
+improbable.
+
+The cruellest lies are often told in silence.  A man may 
+have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet 
+come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.  
+And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or 
+spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a 
+man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical 
+point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his 
+tongue?  And, again, a lie may be told by a truth, or a truth 
+conveyed through a lie.  Truth to facts is not always truth to 
+sentiment; and part of the truth, as often happens in answer 
+to a question, may be the foulest calumny.  A fact may be an 
+exception; but the feeling is the law, and it is that which 
+you must neither garble nor belie.  The whole tenor of a 
+conversation is a part of the meaning of each separate 
+statement; the beginning and the end define and travesty the 
+intermediate conversation.  You never speak to God; you 
+address a fellow-man, full of his own tempers; and to tell 
+truth, rightly understood, is not to state the true facts, but 
+to convey a true impression; truth in spirit, not truth to 
+letter, is the true veracity.  To reconcile averted friends a 
+Jesuitical discretion is often needful, not so much to gain a 
+kind hearing as to communicate sober truth.  Women have an ill 
+name in this connection; yet they live in as true relations; 
+the lie of a good woman is the true index of her heart.
+
+"It takes," says Thoreau, in the noblest and most useful 
+passage I remember to have read in any modern author, (1) "two 
+to speak truth - one to speak and another to hear."  He must 
+be very little experienced, or have no great zeal for truth, 
+who does not recognise the fact.  A grain of anger or a grain 
+of suspicion produces strange acoustical effects, and makes 
+the ear greedy to remark offence.  Hence we find those who 
+have once quarrelled carry themselves distantly, and are ever 
+ready to break the truce.  To speak truth there must be moral 
+equality or else no respect; and hence between parent and 
+child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing 
+bout, and misapprehensions to become ingrained.  And there is 
+another side to this, for the parent begins with an imperfect 
+notion of the child's character, formed in early years or 
+during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, 
+noting only the facts which suit with his preconception; and 
+wherever a person fancies himself unjustly judged, he at once 
+and finally gives up the effort to speak truth.  With our 
+chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more between 
+lovers (for mutual understanding is love's essence), the truth 
+is easily indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the 
+other.  A hint taken, a look understood, conveys the gist of 
+long and delicate explanations; and where the life is known 
+even YEA and NAY become luminous.  In the closest of all 
+relations - that of a love well founded and equally shared - 
+speech is half discarded, like a roundabout, infantile process 
+or a ceremony of formal etiquette; and the two communicate 
+directly by their presences, and with few looks and fewer 
+words contrive to share their good and evil and uphold each 
+other's hearts in joy.  For love rests upon a physical basis; 
+it is a familiarity of nature's making and apart from 
+voluntary choice.  Understanding has in some sort outrun 
+knowledge, for the affection perhaps began with the 
+acquaintance; and as it was not made like other relations, so 
+it is not, like them, to be perturbed or clouded.  Each knows 
+more than can be uttered; each lives by faith, and believes by 
+a natural compulsion; and between man and wife the language of 
+the body is largely developed and grown strangely eloquent.  
+The thought that prompted and was conveyed in a caress would 
+only lose to be set down in words - ay, although Shakespeare 
+himself should be the scribe.
+
+(1) A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS, 
+Wednesday, p. 283.
+
+Yet it is in these dear intimacies, beyond all others, 
+that we must strive and do battle for the truth.  Let but a 
+doubt arise, and alas! all the previous intimacy and 
+confidence is but another charge against the person doubted.  
+"WHAT A MONSTROUS DISHONESTY IS THIS IF I HAVE BEEN DECEIVED 
+SO LONG AND SO COMPLETELY!"  Let but that thought gain 
+entrance, and you plead before a deaf tribunal.  Appeal to the 
+past; why, that is your crime!  Make all clear, convince the 
+reason; alas! speciousness is but a proof against you.  "IF 
+YOU CAN ABUSE ME NOW, THE MORE LIKELY THAT YOU HAVE ABUSED ME 
+FROM THE FIRST."
+
+For a strong affection such moments are worth supporting, 
+and they will end well; for your advocate is in your lover's 
+heart and speaks her own language; it is not you but she 
+herself who can defend and clear you of the charge.  But in 
+slighter intimacies, and for a less stringent union?  Indeed, 
+is it worth while?  We are all INCOMPRIS, only more or less 
+concerned for the mischance; all trying wrongly to do right; 
+all fawning at each other's feet like dumb, neglected lap-
+dogs.  Sometimes we catch an eye - this is our opportunity in 
+the ages - and we wag our tail with a poor smile.  "IS THAT 
+ALL?"  All?  If you only knew!  But how can they know?  They 
+do not love us; the more fools we to squander life on the 
+indifferent.
+
+But the morality of the thing, you will be glad to hear, 
+is excellent; for it is only by trying to understand others 
+that we can get our own hearts understood; and in matters of 
+human feeling the clement judge is the most successful 
+pleader.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II - CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH
+
+
+
+"You know my mother now and then argues very notably; 
+always very warmly at least.  I happen often to differ from 
+her; and we both think so well of our own arguments, that we 
+very seldom are so happy as to convince one another.  A pretty 
+common case, I believe, in all VEHEMENT debatings.  She says, 
+I am TOO WITTY; Anglice, TOO PERT; I, that she is TOO WISE; 
+that is to say, being likewise put into English, NOT SO YOUNG 
+AS SHE HAS BEEN." - Miss Howe to Miss Harlowe, CLARISSA, vol. 
+ii.  Letter xiii.
+
+
+THERE is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and 
+prudential proverbs.  The sentiments of a man while he is full 
+of ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed, with 
+some qualification.  But when the same person has 
+ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should 
+be listened to like an oracle.  Most of our pocket wisdom is 
+conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them 
+from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their 
+mediocrity.  And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of 
+humanity, this is no doubt very properly so.  But it does not 
+follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true than 
+the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and 
+perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the Successful 
+Merchant.  The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is 
+still in his counting-house counting out his money; and 
+doubtless this is a consideration.  But we have, on the other 
+hand, some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high races 
+and natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side, 
+and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog.  
+It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such 
+sayings with their proverbs.  According to the latter, every 
+lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your 
+umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser 
+flight of achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so 
+long as you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money 
+matters, you fulfil the whole duty of man.
+
+It is a still more difficult consideration for our 
+average men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down 
+to Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have inculcated 
+the same ideal of manners, caution, and respectability, those 
+characters in history who have most notoriously flown in the 
+face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms of 
+praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of 
+our commercial centres.  This is very bewildering to the moral 
+sense.  You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and 
+reputable livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a-
+colonelling, in the company of rowdy soldiers, against the 
+enemies of France; surely a melancholy example for one's 
+daughters!  And then you have Columbus, who may have pioneered 
+America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent 
+navigator.  His life is not the kind of thing one would like 
+to put into the hands of young people; rather, one would do 
+one's utmost to keep it from their knowledge, as a red flag of 
+adventure and disintegrating influence in life.  The time 
+would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history 
+whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to 
+the business mind.  The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine 
+it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar 
+attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national 
+life.  They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the 
+same spirit as they assist at a performance of the LYONS MAIL.  
+Persons of substance take in the TIMES and sit composedly in 
+pit or boxes according to the degree of their prosperity in 
+business.  As for the generals who go galloping up and down 
+among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats - as for the actors 
+who raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the 
+stage - they must belong, thank God! to a different order of 
+beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds careering in the 
+windy, bottomless inane, or read about like characters in 
+ancient and rather fabulous annals.  Our offspring would no 
+more think of copying their behaviour, let us hope, than of 
+doffing their clothes and painting themselves blue in 
+consequence of certain admissions in the first chapter of 
+their school history of England.
+
+Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly 
+proverbs hold their own in theory; and it is another instance 
+of the same spirit, that the opinions of old men about life 
+have been accepted as final.  All sorts of allowances are made 
+for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the 
+disenchantments of age.  It is held to be a good taunt, and 
+somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old 
+gentleman waggles his head and says: "Ah, so I thought when I 
+was your age."  It is not thought an answer at all, if the 
+young man retorts: "My venerable sir, so I shall most probably 
+think when I am yours."  And yet the one is as good as the 
+other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an Oliver.
+
+"Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is but knowledge in 
+the making."  All opinions, properly so called, are stages on 
+the road to truth.  It does not follow that a man will travel 
+any further; but if he has really considered the world and 
+drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far.  This does not 
+apply to formulae got by rote, which are stages on the road to 
+nowhere but second childhood and the grave.  To have a 
+catchword in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an 
+opinion; still less is it the same thing as to have made one 
+for yourself.  There are too many of these catchwords in the 
+world for people to rap out upon you like an oath and by way 
+of an argument.  They have a currency as intellectual 
+counters; and many respectable persons pay their way with 
+nothing else.  They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory 
+in the background.  The imputed virtue of folios full of 
+knockdown arguments is supposed to reside in them, just as 
+some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells in the 
+constable's truncheon.  They are used in pure superstition, as 
+old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exorcism.  And yet 
+they are vastly serviceable for checking unprofitable 
+discussion and stopping the mouths of babes and sucklings.  
+And when a young man comes to a certain stage of intellectual 
+growth, the examination of these counters forms a gymnastic at 
+once amusing and fortifying to the mind.
+
+Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having 
+passed through Newhaven and Dieppe.  They were very good 
+places to pass through, and I am none the less at my 
+destination.  All my old opinions were only stages on the way 
+to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to 
+something else.  I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot 
+Socialist with a panacea of my own than at having been a 
+sucking infant.  Doubtless the world is quite right in a 
+million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to 
+convince you of the fact.  And in the meanwhile you must do 
+something, be something, believe something.  It is not 
+possible to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and 
+blank; and even if you could do so, instead of coming 
+ultimately to the right conclusion, you would be very apt to 
+remain in a state of balance and blank to perpetuity.  Even in 
+quite intermediate stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing 
+to be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a 
+very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian.  
+For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist 
+with something like regret.  I have convinced myself (for the 
+moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what 
+we call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more 
+perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of 
+men.  I seem to see that my own scheme would not answer; and 
+all the other schemes I ever heard propounded would depress 
+some elements of goodness just as much as they encouraged 
+others.  Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with 
+years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and 
+travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions.  I submit to 
+this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant 
+of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not 
+acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better - I 
+daresay it is deplorably for the worse.  I have no choice in 
+the business, and can no more resist this tendency of my mind 
+than I could prevent my body from beginning to totter and 
+decay.  If I am spared (as the phrase runs) I shall doubtless 
+outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about 
+that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the 
+immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself 
+on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism.  
+Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become 
+cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious.  Whether from the growth 
+of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age 
+leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of 
+course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards 
+the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these 
+forms and sources of error.
+
+As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of 
+knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous possibilities, 
+now chilled with a glimpse of prudence, we may compare the 
+headlong course of our years to a swift torrent in which a man 
+is carried away; now he is dashed against a boulder, now he 
+grapples for a moment to a trailing spray; at the end, he is 
+hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean.  We 
+have no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from 
+our theories; we are spun round and round and shown this or 
+the other view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold to 
+their opinions.  We take a sight at a condition in life, and 
+say we have studied it; our most elaborate view is no more 
+than an impression.  If we had breathing space, we should take 
+the occasion to modify and adjust; but at this breakneck 
+hurry, we are no sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in 
+love than married or jilted, no sooner one age than we begin 
+to be another, and no sooner in the fulness of our manhood 
+than we begin to decline towards the grave.  It is in vain to 
+seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views in a 
+medium so perturbed and fleeting.  This is no cabinet science, 
+in which things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a 
+pistol to our head; we are confronted with a new set of 
+conditions on which we have not only to pass a judgment, but 
+to take action, before the hour is at an end.  And we cannot 
+even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things, 
+our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not 
+infrequently we find our own disguise the strangest in the 
+masquerade.  In the course of time, we grow to love things we 
+hated and hate things we loved.  Milton is not so dull as he 
+once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so amusing.  It is decidedly 
+harder to climb trees, and not nearly so hard to sit still.  
+There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide 
+and seek has somehow lost in zest.  All our attributes are 
+modified or chanced and it will be a poor account of us if our 
+views do not modify and change in a proportion.  To hold the 
+same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been 
+stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a 
+prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the 
+wiser.  It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from 
+the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames 
+on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no 
+other for the whole voyage.
+
+And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at 
+Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea.  SI JEUNESSE SAVAIT, SI 
+VIEILLESSE POUVAIT, is a very pretty sentiment, but not 
+necessarily right.  In five cases out of ten, it is not so 
+much that the young people do not know, as that they do not 
+choose.  There is something irreverent in the speculation, but 
+perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise 
+resolutions of age than we are always willing to admit.  It 
+would be an instructive experiment to make an old man young 
+again and leave him all his SAVOIR.  I scarcely think he would 
+put his money in the Savings Bank after all; I doubt if he 
+would be such an admirable son as we are led to expect; and as 
+for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would out-Herod 
+Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to the blush.  
+Prudence is a wooden juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin 
+walks with the portly air of a high priest, and after whom 
+dances many a successful merchant in the character of Atys.  
+But it is not a deity to cultivate in youth.  If a man lives 
+to any considerable age, it cannot be denied that he laments 
+his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a 
+deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.
+
+It is customary to say that age should be considered, 
+because it comes last.  It seems just as much to the point, 
+that youth comes first.  And the scale fairly kicks the beam, 
+if you go on to add that age, in a majority of cases, never 
+comes at all.  Disease and accident make short work of even 
+the most prosperous persons; death costs nothing, and the 
+expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the 
+happy heir.  To be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of 
+ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man 
+has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and 
+saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it 
+becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on 
+the confines of farce.  The victim is dead - and he has 
+cunningly overreached himself: a combination of calamities 
+none the less absurd for being grim.  To husband a favourite 
+claret until the batch turns sour, is not at all an artful 
+stroke of policy; and how much more with a whole cellar - a 
+whole bodily existence!  People may lay down their lives with 
+cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; 
+but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all 
+its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of 
+gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than improbable, 
+old age.  We should not compliment a hungry man, who should 
+refuse a whole dinner and reserve all his appetite for the 
+dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or 
+not.  If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we 
+surely have it here.  We sail in leaky bottoms and on great 
+and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old 
+naval ballad, we have heard the mer-maidens singing, and know 
+that we shall never see dry land any more.  Old and young, we 
+are all on our last cruise.  If there is a fill of tobacco 
+among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have 
+a pipe before we go!
+
+Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous 
+preparation for old age is only trouble thrown away.  We fall 
+on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes to meet us.  
+After the sun is down and the west faded, the heavens begin to 
+fill with shining stars.  So, as we grow old, a sort of 
+equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups 
+and downs of passion and disgust; the same influence that 
+restrains our hopes, quiets our apprehensions; if the 
+pleasures are less intense, the troubles are milder and more 
+tolerable; and in a word, this period for which we are asked 
+to hoard up everything as for a time of famine, is, in its own 
+right, the richest, easiest, and happiest of life.  Nay, by 
+managing its own work and following its own happy inspiration, 
+youth is doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age.  A 
+full, busy youth is your only prelude to a self-contained and 
+independent age; and the muff inevitably develops into the 
+bore.  There are not many Doctor Johnsons, to set forth upon 
+their first romantic voyage at sixty-four.  If we wish to 
+scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East End, 
+to go down in a diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be 
+about it while we are still young.  It will not do to delay 
+until we are clogged with prudence and limping with 
+rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: "What does Gravity out 
+of bed?"  Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the 
+world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners 
+of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see 
+sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to 
+circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a 
+mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to 
+applaud HERNANI.  There is some meaning in the old theory 
+about wild oats; and a man who has not had his green-sickness 
+and got done with it for good, is as little to be depended on 
+as an unvaccinated infant.  "It is extraordinary," says Lord 
+Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best preserved of 
+youths up to the date of his last novel, (1) "it is 
+extraordinary how hourly and how violently change the feelings 
+of an inexperienced young man."  And this mobility is a 
+special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of indestructible 
+virginity; a magic armour, with which he can pass unhurt 
+through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest 
+passages.  Let him voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do 
+all that he may; his soul has as many lives as a cat; he will 
+live in all weathers, and never be a halfpenny the worse.  
+Those who go to the devil in youth, with anything like a fair 
+chance, were probably little worth saving from the first; they 
+must have been feeble fellows - creatures made of putty and 
+pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness, 
+in their composition; we may sympathise with their parents, 
+but there is not much cause to go into mourning for 
+themselves; for to be quite honest, the weak brother is the 
+worst of mankind.
+
+(1) LOTHAIR.
+
+When the old man waggles his head and says, "Ah, so I 
+thought when I was your age," he has proved the youth's case.  
+Doubtless, whether from growth of experience or decline of 
+animal heat, he thinks so no longer; but he thought so while 
+he was young; and all men have thought so while they were 
+young, since there was dew in the morning or hawthorn in May; 
+and here is another young man adding his vote to those of 
+previous generations and rivetting another link to the chain 
+of testimony.  It is as natural and as right for a young man 
+to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and 
+circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing 
+newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers 
+to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something 
+worthier than their lives.
+
+By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more 
+than usually tempted to offer their advice, let me recommend 
+the following little tale.  A child who had been remarkably 
+fond of toys (and in particular of lead soldiers) found 
+himself growing to the level of acknowledged boyhood without 
+any abatement of this childish taste.  He was thirteen; 
+already he had been taunted for dallying overlong about the 
+playbox; he had to blush if he was found among his lead 
+soldiers; the shades of the prison-house were closing about 
+him with a vengeance.  There is nothing more difficult than to 
+put the thoughts of children into the language of their 
+elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this 
+juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my playthings, 
+in the meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure 
+myself against idle jeers.  At the same time, I am sure that 
+playthings are the very pick of life; all people give them up 
+out of the same pusillanimous respect for those who are a 
+little older; and if they do not return to them as soon as 
+they can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget.  I 
+shall be wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of 
+their foolish world; but so soon as I have made enough money, 
+I shall retire and shut myself up among my playthings until 
+the day I die."  Nay, as he was passing in the train along the 
+Esterel mountains between Cannes and Frejus, he remarked a 
+pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and 
+decided that this should be his Happy Valley.  Astrea Redux; 
+childhood was to come again!  The idea has an air of simple 
+nobility to me, not unworthy of Cincinnatus.  And yet, as the 
+reader has probably anticipated, it is never likely to be 
+carried into effect.  There was a worm i' the bud, a fatal 
+error in the premises.  Childhood must pass away, and then 
+youth, as surely as age approaches.  The true wisdom is to be 
+always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing 
+circumstances.  To love playthings well as a child, to lead an 
+adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time 
+arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist 
+in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.
+
+You need repent none of your youthful vagaries.  They may 
+have been over the score on one side, just as those of age are 
+probably over the score on the other.  But they had a point; 
+they not only befitted your age and expressed its attitude and 
+passions, but they had a relation to what was outside of you, 
+and implied criticisms on the existing state of things, which 
+you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now 
+see that they were partial.  All error, not merely verbal, is 
+a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.  
+The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as 
+much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings.  
+Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our 
+society.  When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, 
+you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised 
+if the scream is sometimes a theory.  Shelley, chafing at the 
+Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in 
+universal atheism.  Generous lads irritated at the injustices 
+of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of 
+everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy.  Shelley was a young 
+fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries.  But it is 
+better to be a fool than to be dead.  It is better to emit a 
+scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible 
+to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as 
+it comes in a forlorn stupidity.  Some people swallow the 
+universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like 
+smiling images pushed from behind.  For God's sake give me the 
+young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!  As 
+for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their 
+hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the 
+farce be over.  There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at 
+the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance 
+for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have 
+not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age.  If 
+we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, 
+and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some 
+nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves 
+to the utmost while we have the time.  To equip a dull, 
+respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of 
+an angel.
+
+In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, 
+there is a strong probability that age is not much more so.  
+Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible 
+credulity.  A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding 
+stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion 
+that he is at last entirely right.  Mankind, after centuries 
+of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly 
+constitutional millennium.  Since we have explored the maze so 
+long without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that 
+we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the 
+centre, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of ornamental 
+water.  How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley 
+after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or 
+issue?
+
+I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation, which 
+I take the liberty to reproduce.  "What I advance is true," 
+said one.  "But not the whole truth," answered the other.  
+"Sir," returned the first (and it seemed to me there was a 
+smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), "Sir, there is no such 
+thing as the whole truth!"  Indeed, there is nothing so 
+evident in life as that there are two sides to a question.  
+History is one long illustration.  The forces of nature are 
+engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it into our backward 
+intelligences.  We never pause for a moment's consideration 
+but we admit it as an axiom.  An enthusiast sways humanity 
+exactly by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into 
+our ears that this or that question has only one possible 
+solution; and your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, 
+dominates things for a while and shakes the world out of a 
+doze; but when once he is gone, an army of quiet and 
+uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other 
+side and demolish the generous imposture.  While Calvin is 
+putting everybody exactly right in his INSTITUTES, and hot-
+headed Knox is thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already 
+looking at the other side in his library in Perigord, and 
+predicting that they will find as much to quarrel about in the 
+Bible as they had found already in the Church.  Age may have 
+one side, but assuredly Youth has the other.  There is nothing 
+more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that 
+both are wrong.  Let them agree to differ; for who knows but 
+what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather 
+than a form of difference?
+
+I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a 
+bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very 
+face.  For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that 
+we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no 
+answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you 
+please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the 
+famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to 
+differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only "one 
+undisturbed song of pure concent" to which we are ever likely 
+to lend our musical voices.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III - AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
+
+
+"BOSWELL: We grow weary when idle."
+"JOHNSON: That is, sir, because others being busy, we 
+want company; but if we were idle, there would be no growing 
+weary; we should all entertain one another."
+
+
+JUST now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree 
+in absence convicting them of LESE-respectability, to enter on 
+some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something 
+not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who 
+are content when they have enough, and like to look on and 
+enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little of bravado and 
+gasconade.  And yet this should not be.  Idleness so called, 
+which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great 
+deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling 
+class, has as good a right to state its position as industry 
+itself.  It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse 
+to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at 
+once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do.  A fine 
+fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination, votes for 
+the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, it "goes for" 
+them.  And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the 
+road, it is not hard to understand his resentment, when he 
+perceives cool persons in the meadows by the wayside, lying 
+with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at their 
+elbow.  Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the 
+disregard of Diogenes.  Where was the glory of having taken 
+Rome for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the 
+Senate house, and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved 
+by their success?  It is a sore thing to have laboured along 
+and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find 
+humanity indifferent to your achievement.  Hence physicists 
+condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial 
+toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary 
+persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits 
+combine to disparage those who have none.
+
+But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is 
+not the greatest.  You could not be put in prison for speaking 
+against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking 
+like a fool.  The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to 
+do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an 
+apology.  It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in 
+favour of diligence; only there is something to be said 
+against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have 
+to say.  To state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf 
+to all others, and that a man has written a book of travels in 
+Montenegro, is no reason why he should never have been to 
+Richmond.
+
+It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good 
+deal idle in youth.  For though here and there a Lord Macaulay 
+may escape from school honours with all his wits about him, 
+most boys pay so dear for their medals that they never 
+afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin the world 
+bankrupt.  And the same holds true during all the time a lad 
+is educating himself, or suffering others to educate him.  It 
+must have been a very foolish old gentleman who addressed 
+Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book 
+diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when 
+years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will 
+be but an irksome task."  The old gentleman seems to have been 
+unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, 
+and not a few become impossible, by the time a man has to use 
+spectacles and cannot walk without a stick.  Books are good 
+enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless 
+substitute for life.  It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of 
+Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all 
+the bustle and glamour of reality.  And if a man reads very 
+hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time 
+for thought.
+
+If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will 
+not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you 
+regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre periods 
+between sleep and waking in the class.  For my own part, I 
+have attended a good many lectures in my time.  I still 
+remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic 
+Stability.  I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a 
+disease, nor Stillicide a crime.  But though I would not 
+willingly part with such scraps of science, I do not set the 
+same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that I 
+came by in the open street while I was playing truant.  This 
+is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, 
+which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and 
+turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the 
+Aspects of Life.  Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not 
+learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of 
+learning.  Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he 
+prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs into the 
+country.  He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and 
+smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the 
+stones.  A bird will sing in the thicket.  And there he may 
+fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new 
+perspective.  Why, if this be not education, what is?  We may 
+conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the 
+conversation that should thereupon ensue:-
+
+"How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?"
+
+"Truly, sir, I take mine ease."
+
+"Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou 
+not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest 
+obtain knowledge?"
+
+"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your 
+leave."
+
+"Learning, quotha!  After what fashion, I pray thee?  Is 
+it mathematics?"
+
+"No, to be sure."
+
+"Is it metaphysics?"
+
+"Nor that."
+
+"Is it some language?"
+
+"Nay, it is no language."
+
+"Is it a trade?"
+
+"Nor a trade neither."
+
+"Why, then, what is't?"
+
+"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon 
+Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly done by 
+persons in my case, and where are the ugliest Sloughs and 
+Thickets on the Road; as also, what manner of Staff is of the 
+best service.  Moreover, I lie here, by this water, to learn 
+by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me to call 
+Peace, or Contentment."
+
+Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with 
+passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful 
+countenance, broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, quotha!" 
+said he; "I would have all such rogues scourged by the 
+Hangman!"
+
+And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with 
+a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spread its 
+feathers.
+
+Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion.  A 
+fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does 
+not fall into one of your scholastic categories.  An inquiry 
+must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to go by; 
+or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; and the 
+work-house is too good for you.  It is supposed that all 
+knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a 
+telescope.  Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all 
+experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few 
+years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether 
+you should read in Chapter xx., which is the differential 
+calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play 
+in the gardens.  As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, 
+looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a 
+smile on his face all the time, will get more true education 
+than many another in a life of heroic vigils.  There is 
+certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the 
+summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round 
+about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will 
+acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.  While others 
+are filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of 
+which they will forget before the week be out, your truant may 
+learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, to know a 
+good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all 
+varieties of men.  Many who have "plied their book 
+diligently," and know all about some one branch or another of 
+accepted lore, come out of the study with an ancient and owl-
+like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all 
+the better and brighter parts of life.  Many make a large 
+fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the 
+last.  And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along 
+with them - by your leave, a different picture.  He has had 
+time to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a 
+great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of all 
+things for both body and mind; and if he has never read the 
+great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into it and 
+skimmed it over to excellent purpose.  Might not the student 
+afford some Hebrew roots, and the business man some of his 
+half-crowns, for a share of the idler's knowledge of life at 
+large, and Art of Living?  Nay, and the idler has another and 
+more important quality than these.  I mean his wisdom.  He who 
+has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other 
+people in their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very 
+ironical indulgence.  He will not be heard among the 
+dogmatists.  He will have a great and cool allowance for all 
+sorts of people and opinions.  If he finds no out-of-the-way 
+truths, he will identify himself with no very burning 
+falsehood.  His way takes him along a by-road, not much 
+frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is called 
+Commonplace Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense.  
+Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no very noble 
+prospect; and while others behold the East and West, the Devil 
+and the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of 
+morning hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of 
+shadows running speedily and in many different directions into 
+the great daylight of Eternity.  The shadows and the 
+generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by 
+into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, 
+a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and 
+peaceful landscape; many firelit parlours; good people 
+laughing, drinking, and making love as they did before the 
+Flood or the French Revolution; and the old shepherd telling 
+his tale under the hawthorn.
+
+Extreme BUSYNESS, whether at school or college, kirk or 
+market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for 
+idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of 
+personal identity.  There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed 
+people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in 
+the exercise of some conventional occupation.  Bring these 
+fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you 
+will see how they pine for their desk or their study.  They 
+have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random 
+provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of 
+their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays 
+about them with a stick, they will even stand still.  It is no 
+good speaking to such folk: they CANNOT be idle, their nature 
+is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of 
+coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-
+mill.  When they do not require to go to the office, when they 
+are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing 
+world is a blank to them.  If they have to wait an hour or so 
+for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes 
+open.  To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to 
+look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were 
+paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard 
+workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in 
+a deed or a turn of the market.  They have been to school and 
+college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; 
+they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever 
+people, but all the time they were thinking of their own 
+affairs.  As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, 
+they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work 
+and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless 
+attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not 
+one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the 
+train.  Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the 
+boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; 
+but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my 
+gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable 
+eyes.  This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life.
+
+But it is not only the person himself who suffers from 
+his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and 
+relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a 
+railway carriage or an omnibus.  Perpetual devotion to what a 
+man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual 
+neglect of many other things.  And it is not by any means 
+certain that a man's business is the most important thing he 
+has to do.  To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that 
+many of the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts 
+that are to be played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by 
+gratuitous performers, and pass, among the world at large, as 
+phases of idleness.  For in that Theatre, not only the walking 
+gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and diligent fiddlers in the 
+orchestra, but those who look on and clap their hands from the 
+benches, do really play a part and fulfil important offices 
+towards the general result.  You are no doubt very dependent 
+on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and 
+signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the 
+policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is 
+there not a thought of gratitude in your heart for certain 
+other benefactors who set you smiling when they fall in your 
+way, or season your dinner with good company?  Colonel Newcome 
+helped to lose his friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly 
+trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better people to 
+fall among than Mr. Barnes.  And though Falstaff was neither 
+sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-
+faced Barabbases whom the world could better have done 
+without.  Hazlitt mentions that he was more sensible of 
+obligation to Northcote, who had never done him anything he 
+could call a service, than to his whole circle of ostentatious 
+friends; for he thought a good companion emphatically the 
+greatest benefactor.  I know there are people in the world who 
+cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done them at 
+the cost of pain and difficulty.  But this is a churlish 
+disposition.  A man may send you six sheets of letter-paper 
+covered with the most entertaining gossip, or you may pass 
+half an hour pleasantly, perhaps profitably, over an article 
+of his; do you think the service would be greater, if he had 
+made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a compact with 
+the devil?  Do you really fancy you should be more beholden to 
+your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the while 
+for your importunity?  Pleasures are more beneficial than 
+duties because, like the quality of mercy, they are not 
+strained, and they are twice blest.  There must always be two 
+to a kiss, and there may be a score in a jest; but wherever 
+there is an element of sacrifice, the favour is conferred with 
+pain, and, among generous people, received with confusion.  
+There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being 
+happy.  By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the 
+world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they 
+are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.  The 
+other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a 
+marble, with so jolly an air that he set every one he passed 
+into a good humour; one of these persons, who had been 
+delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped the 
+little fellow and gave him some money with this remark: "You 
+see what sometimes comes of looking pleased."  If he had 
+looked pleased before, he had now to look both pleased and 
+mystified.  For my part, I justify this encouragement of 
+smiling rather than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for 
+tears anywhere but upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal 
+largely in the opposite commodity.  A happy man or woman is a 
+better thing to find than a five-pound note.  He or she is a 
+radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is 
+as though another candle had been lighted.  We need not care 
+whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they 
+do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the 
+great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.  Consequently, if a 
+person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should 
+remain.  It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger 
+and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within 
+practical limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths 
+in the whole Body of Morality.  Look at one of your 
+industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you.  He sows 
+hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity 
+out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous 
+derangement in return.  Either he absents himself entirely 
+from all fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with 
+carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people 
+swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous 
+system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work.  I 
+do not care how much or how well he works, this fellow is an 
+evil feature in other people's lives.  They would be happier 
+if he were dead.  They could easier do without his services in 
+the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his 
+fractious spirits.  He poisons life at the well-head.  It is 
+better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than 
+daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.
+
+And what, in God's name, is all this pother about?  For 
+what cause do they embitter their own and other people's 
+lives?  That a man should publish three or thirty articles a 
+year, that he should finish or not finish his great 
+allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the 
+world.  The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand 
+fall, there are always some to go into the breach.  When they 
+told Joan of Arc she should be at home minding women's work, 
+she answered there were plenty to spin and wash.  And so, even 
+with your own rare gifts!  When nature is "so careless of the 
+single life," why should we coddle ourselves into the fancy 
+that our own is of exceptional importance?  Suppose 
+Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in 
+Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on 
+better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to 
+the corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the 
+wiser of the loss.  There are not many works extant, if you 
+look the alternative all over, which are worth the price of a 
+pound of tobacco to a man of limited means.  This is a 
+sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities.  
+Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great 
+cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; for although 
+tobacco is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for 
+retailing it are neither rare nor precious in themselves.  
+Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the services 
+of no single individual are indispensable.  Atlas was just a 
+gentleman with a protracted nightmare!  And yet you see 
+merchants who go and labour themselves into a great fortune 
+and thence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep 
+scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to 
+all who come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the 
+Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid: and fine young 
+men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven off in 
+a hearse with white plumes upon it.  Would you not suppose 
+these persons had been whispered, by the Master of the 
+Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny? and that 
+this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the 
+bull's-eye and centrepoint of all the universe?  And yet it is 
+not so.  The ends for which they give away their priceless 
+youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the 
+glory and riches they expect may never come, or may find them 
+indifferent; and they and the world they inhabit are so 
+inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the thought.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV - ORDERED SOUTH
+
+
+
+BY a curious irony of fate, the places to which we are 
+sent when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful.  
+Often, too, they are places we have visited in former years, 
+or seen briefly in passing by, and kept ever afterwards in 
+pious memory; and we please ourselves with the fancy that we 
+shall repeat many vivid and pleasurable sensations, and take 
+up again the thread of our enjoyment in the same spirit as we 
+let it fall.  We shall now have an opportunity of finishing 
+many pleasant excursions, interrupted of yore before our 
+curiosity was fully satisfied.  It may be that we have kept in 
+mind, during all these years, the recollection of some valley 
+into which we have just looked down for a moment before we 
+lost sight of it in the disorder of the hills; it may be that 
+we have lain awake at night, and agreeably tantalised 
+ourselves with the thought of corners we had never turned, or 
+summits we had all but climbed: we shall now be able, as we 
+tell ourselves, to complete all these unfinished pleasures, 
+and pass beyond the barriers that confined our recollections.
+
+The promise is so great, and we are all so easily led 
+away when hope and memory are both in one story, that I 
+daresay the sick man is not very inconsolable when he receives 
+sentence of banishment, and is inclined to regard his ill-
+health as not the least fortunate accident of his life.  Nor 
+is he immediately undeceived.  The stir and speed of the 
+journey, and the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he 
+tries to sleep between two days of noisy progress, fever him, 
+and stimulate his dull nerves into something of their old 
+quickness and sensibility.  And so he can enjoy the faint 
+autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and 
+plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of 
+fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will 
+transmute, as in the fable, into withered leaves.  And so too 
+he can enjoy the admirable brevity and simplicity of such 
+little glimpses of country and country ways as flash upon him 
+through the windows of the train; little glimpses that have a 
+character all their own; sights seen as a travelling swallow 
+might see them from the wing, or Iris as she went abroad over 
+the land on some Olympian errand.  Here and there, indeed, a 
+few children huzzah and wave their hands to the express; but 
+for the most part it is an interruption too brief and isolated 
+to attract much notice; the sheep do not cease from browsing; 
+a girl sits balanced on the projecting tiller of a canal boat, 
+so precariously that it seems as if a fly or the splash of a 
+leaping fish would be enough to overthrow the dainty 
+equilibrium, and yet all these hundreds of tons of coal and 
+wood and iron have been precipitated roaring past her very 
+ear, and there is not a start, not a tremor, not a turn of the 
+averted head, to indicate that she has been even conscious of 
+its passage.  Herein, I think, lies the chief attraction of 
+railway travel.  The speed is so easy, and the train disturbs 
+so little the scenes through which it takes us, that our heart 
+becomes full of the placidity and stillness of the country; 
+and while the body is borne forward in the flying chain of 
+carriages, the thoughts alight, as the humour moves them, at 
+unfrequented stations; they make haste up the poplar alley 
+that leads toward the town; they are left behind with the 
+signalman as, shading his eyes with his hand, he watches the 
+long train sweep away into the golden distance.
+
+Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of 
+wonder and delight with which he will learn that he has passed 
+the indefinable line that separates South from North.  And 
+this is an uncertain moment; for sometimes the consciousness 
+is forced upon him early, on the occasion of some slight 
+association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes not 
+until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern 
+sunshine peeping through the PERSIENNES, and the southern 
+patois confusedly audible below the windows.  Whether it come 
+early or late, however, this pleasure will not end with the 
+anticipation, as do so many others of the same family.  It 
+will leave him wider awake than it found him, and give a new 
+significance to all he may see for many days to come.  There 
+is something in the mere name of the South that carries 
+enthusiasm along with it.  At the sound of the word, he pricks 
+up his ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties and to 
+get by heart the permanent lines and character of the 
+landscape, as if he had been told that it was all his own - an 
+estate out of which he had been kept unjustly, and which he 
+was now to receive in free and full possession.  Even those 
+who have never been there before feel as if they had been; and 
+everybody goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and 
+finding it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would 
+think they were coming home after a weary absence, instead of 
+travelling hourly farther abroad.
+
+It is only after he is fairly arrived and settled down in 
+his chosen corner, that the invalid begins to understand the 
+change that has befallen him.  Everything about him is as he 
+had remembered, or as he had anticipated.  Here, at his feet, 
+under his eyes, are the olive gardens and the blue sea.  
+Nothing can change the eternal magnificence of form of the 
+naked Alps behind Mentone; nothing, not even the crude curves 
+of the railway, can utterly deform the suavity of contour of 
+one bay after another along the whole reach of the Riviera.  
+And of all this, he has only a cold head knowledge that is 
+divorced from enjoyment.  He recognises with his intelligence 
+that this thing and that thing is beautiful, while in his 
+heart of hearts he has to confess that it is not beautiful for 
+him.  It is in vain that he spurs his discouraged spirit; in 
+vain that he chooses out points of view, and stands there, 
+looking with all his eyes, and waiting for some return of the 
+pleasure that he remembers in other days, as the sick folk may 
+have awaited the coming of the angel at the pool of Bethesda.  
+He is like an enthusiast leading about with him a stolid, 
+indifferent tourist.  There is some one by who is out of 
+sympathy with the scene, and is not moved up to the measure of 
+the occasion; and that some one is himself.  The world is 
+disenchanted for him.  He seems to himself to touch things 
+with muffled hands, and to see them through a veil.  His life 
+becomes a palsied fumbling after notes that are silent when he 
+has found and struck them.  He cannot recognise that this 
+phlegmatic and unimpressionable body with which he now goes 
+burthened, is the same that he knew heretofore so quick and 
+delicate and alive.
+
+He is tempted to lay the blame on the very softness and 
+amenity of the climate, and to fancy that in the rigours of 
+the winter at home, these dead emotions would revive and 
+flourish.  A longing for the brightness and silence of fallen 
+snow seizes him at such times.  He is homesick for the hale 
+rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his window-
+panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes, 
+and the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky.  And yet 
+the stuff of which these yearnings are made, is of the 
+flimsiest: if but the thermometer fall a little below its 
+ordinary Mediterranean level, or a wind come down from the 
+snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon 
+the instant, and many a doleful vignette of the grim wintry 
+streets at home returns to him, and begins to haunt his 
+memory.  The hopeless, huddled attitude of tramps in doorways; 
+the flinching gait of barefoot children on the icy pavement; 
+the sheen of the rainy streets towards afternoon; the 
+meagreanatomy of the poor defined by the clinging of wet 
+garments; the high canorous note of the North-easter on days 
+when the very houses seem to stiffen with cold: these, and 
+such as these, crowd back upon him, and mockingly substitute 
+themselves for the fanciful winter scenes with which he had 
+pleased himself a while before.  He cannot be glad enough that 
+he is where he is.  If only the others could be there also; if 
+only those tramps could lie down for a little in the sunshine, 
+and those children warm their feet, this once, upon a kindlier 
+earth; if only there were no cold anywhere, and no nakedness, 
+and no hunger; if only it were as well with all men as it is 
+with him!
+
+For it is not altogether ill with the invalid, after all.  
+If it is only rarely that anything penetrates vividly into his 
+numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings with it a 
+joy that is all the more poignant for its very rarity.  There 
+is something pathetic in these occasional returns of a glad 
+activity of heart.  In his lowest hours he will be stirred and 
+awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps from very 
+trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the "spirit of 
+delight" comes often on small wings.  For the pleasure that we 
+take in beautiful nature is essentially capricious.  It comes 
+sometimes when we least look for it; and sometimes, when we 
+expect it most certainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for 
+days together, in the very home-land of the beautiful.  We may 
+have passed a place a thousand times and one; and on the 
+thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand forth 
+in a certain splendour of reality from the dull circle of 
+surroundings; so that we see it "with a child's first 
+pleasure," as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake side.  
+And if this falls out capriciously with the healthy, how much 
+more so with the invalid.  Some day he will find his first 
+violet, and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the 
+cold earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be 
+transmuted into colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet.  
+Or perhaps he may see a group of washerwomen relieved, on a 
+spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-
+gatherers in the tempered daylight of an olive-garden; and 
+something significant or monumental in the grouping, something 
+in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic 
+of the dress of these southern women, will come borne to him 
+unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we 
+tell ourselves that we are the richer by one more beautiful 
+experience.  Or it may be something even slighter: as when the 
+opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets lost and fails to 
+produce its effect on the large scale, is suddenly revealed to 
+him by the chance isolation - as he changes the position of 
+his sunshade - of a yard or two of roadway with its stones and 
+weeds.  And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of 
+the olive-yards themselves.  Even the colour is indeterminate 
+and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now 
+gray, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like "cloud on 
+cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, at the 
+wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up 
+with little momentary silverings and shadows.  But every one 
+sees the world in his own way.  To some the glad moment may 
+have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may 
+be most vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens 
+on their heads; of tropical effects, with canes and naked rock 
+and sunlight; of the relief of cypresses; of the troubled, 
+busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that seem always as if they 
+were being wielded and swept together by a whirlwind; of the 
+air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the myrtles and 
+the scented underwood; of the empurpled hills standing up, 
+solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at 
+evening.
+
+There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of 
+one such moment of intense perception; and it is on the happy 
+agreement of these many elements, on the harmonious vibration 
+of many nerves, that the whole delight of the moment must 
+depend.  Who can forget how, when he has chanced upon some 
+attitude of complete restfulness, after long uneasy rolling to 
+and fro on grass or heather, the whole fashion of the 
+landscape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just 
+broken forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by 
+some cunning touch, the composition of the picture?  And not 
+only a change of posture - a snatch of perfume, the sudden 
+singing of a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air from an 
+invisible sea, the light shadow of a travelling cloud, the 
+merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most 
+infinitesimal nerve of a man's body - not one of the least of 
+these but has a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings 
+some refinement of its own into the character of the pleasure 
+we feel.
+
+And if the external conditions are thus varied and 
+subtle, even more so are those within our own bodies.  No man 
+can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end, 
+because the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible for 
+any of us to understand, from beginning to end, that agreement 
+of harmonious circumstances that creates in us the highest 
+pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these 
+circumstances are hidden from us for ever in the constitution 
+of our own bodies.  After we have reckoned up all that we can 
+see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken into 
+account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the 
+nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement in the 
+architecture of the brain, which is indeed to the sense of the 
+beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or 
+sight.  We admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet 
+what is truly admirable is rather the mind within us, that 
+gathers together these scattered details for its delight, and 
+makes out of certain colours, certain distributions of 
+graduated light and darkness, that intelligible whole which 
+alone we call a picture or a view.  Hazlitt, relating in one 
+of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's house 
+to another's in search of works of art, begins suddenly to 
+triumph over these noble and wealthy owners, because he was 
+more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they 
+were; because they had paid the money and he had received the 
+pleasure.  And the occasion is a fair one for self-
+complacency.  While the one man was working to be able to buy 
+the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the 
+picture.  An inherited aptitude will have been diligently 
+improved in either case; only the one man has made for himself 
+a fortune, and the other has made for himself a living spirit.  
+It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, I repeat, when the 
+event shows a man to have chosen the better part, and laid out 
+his life more wisely, in the long run, than those who have 
+credit for most wisdom.  And yet even this is not a good 
+unmixed; and like all other possessions, although in a less 
+degree, the possession of a brain that has been thus improved 
+and cultivated, and made into the prime organ of a man's 
+enjoyment, brings with it certain inevitable cares and 
+disappointments.  The happiness of such an one comes to depend 
+greatly upon those fine shades of sensation that heighten and 
+harmonise the coarser elements of beauty.  And thus a degree 
+of nervous prostration, that to other men would be hardly 
+disagreeable, is enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric 
+of his life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his 
+pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and 
+the sense of want, and disenchantment of the world and life.
+
+It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life 
+of the invalid resembles a premature old age.  Those 
+excursions that he had promised himself to finish, prove too 
+long or too arduous for his feeble body; and the barrier-hills 
+are as impassable as ever.  Many a white town that sits far 
+out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the 
+mountain side, beckons and allures his imagination day after 
+day, and is yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and 
+gorges of the clouds.  The sense of distance grows upon him 
+wonderfully; and after some feverish efforts and the fretful 
+uneasiness of the first few days, he falls contentedly in with 
+the restrictions of his weakness.  His narrow round becomes 
+pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented 
+prisoner.  Just as he has fallen already out of the mid race 
+of active life, he now falls out of the little eddy that 
+circulates in the shallow waters of the sanatorium.  He sees 
+the country people come and go about their everyday affairs, 
+the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; the stir 
+of man's activity is all about him, as he suns himself inertly 
+in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a patriarchal 
+impersonality of interest, such as a man may feel when he 
+pictures to himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or 
+the robust old age of the oak he has planted over-night.
+
+In this falling aside, in this quietude and desertion of 
+other men, there is no inharmonious prelude to the last 
+quietude and desertion of the grave; in this dulness of the 
+senses there is a gentle preparation for the final 
+insensibility of death.  And to him the idea of mortality 
+comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, less 
+as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesimal 
+gradation, and the last step on a long decline of way.  As we 
+turn to and fro in bed, and every moment the movements grow 
+feebler and smaller and the attitude more restful and easy, 
+until sleep overtakes us at a stride and we move no more, so 
+desire after desire leaves him; day by day his strength 
+decreases, and the circle of his activity grows ever narrower; 
+and he feels, if he is to be thus tenderly weaned from the 
+passion of life, thus gradually inducted into the slumber of 
+death, that when at last the end comes, it will come quietly 
+and fitly.  If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the 
+coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a mild 
+approach as this; not to hale us forth with violence, but to 
+persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in.  It 
+is not so much, indeed, death that approaches as life that 
+withdraws and withers up from round about him.  He has 
+outlived his own usefulness, and almost his own enjoyment; and 
+if there is to be no recovery; if never again will he be young 
+and strong and passionate, if the actual present shall be to 
+him always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of 
+the far-away past; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, 
+he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight 
+that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly 
+await the perfect darkness.  He will pray for Medea: when she 
+comes, let her either rejuvenate or slay.
+
+And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are 
+many and kindly.  The sight of children has a significance for 
+him such as it may have for the aged also, but not for others.  
+If he has been used to feel humanely, and to look upon life 
+somewhat more widely than from the narrow loophole of personal 
+pleasure and advancement, it is strange how small a portion of 
+his thoughts will be changed or embittered by this proximity 
+of death.  He knows that already, in English counties, the 
+sower follows the ploughman up the face of the field, and the 
+rooks follow the sower; and he knows also that he may not live 
+to go home again and see the corn spring and ripen, and be cut 
+down at last, and brought home with gladness.  And yet the 
+future of this harvest, the continuance of drought or the 
+coming of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensibly as ever.  
+For he has long been used to wait with interest the issue of 
+events in which his own concern was nothing; and to be joyful 
+in a plenty, and sorrowful for a famine, that did not increase 
+or diminish, by one half loaf, the equable sufficiency of his 
+own supply.  Thus there remain unaltered all the disinterested 
+hopes for mankind and a better future which have been the 
+solace and inspiration of his life.  These he has set beyond 
+the reach of any fate that only menaces himself; and it makes 
+small difference whether he die five thousand years, or five 
+thousand and fifty years, before the good epoch for which he 
+faithfully labours.  He has not deceived himself; he has known 
+from the beginning that he followed the pillar of fire and 
+cloud, only to perish himself in the wilderness, and that it 
+was reserved for others to enter joyfully into possession of 
+the land.  And so, as everything grows grayer and quieter 
+about him, and slopes towards extinction, these unfaded 
+visions accompany his sad decline, and follow him, with 
+friendly voices and hopeful words, into the very vestibule of 
+death.  The desire of love or of fame scarcely moved him, in 
+his days of health, more strongly than these generous 
+aspirations move him now; and so life is carried forward 
+beyond life, and a vista kept open for the eyes of hope, even 
+when his hands grope already on the face of the impassable.
+
+Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of 
+his friends; or shall we not say rather, that by their thought 
+for him, by their unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains 
+woven into the very stuff of life, beyond the power of bodily 
+dissolution to undo?  In a thousand ways will he survive and 
+be perpetuated.  Much of Etienne de la Boetie survived during 
+all the years in which Montaigne continued to converse with 
+him on the pages of the ever-delightful essays.  Much of what 
+was truly Goethe was dead already when he revisited places 
+that knew him no more, and found no better consolation than 
+the promise of his own verses, that soon he too would be at 
+rest.  Indeed, when we think of what it is that we most seek 
+and cherish, and find most pride and pleasure in calling ours, 
+it will sometimes seem to us as if our friends, at our 
+decease, would suffer loss more truly than ourselves.  As a 
+monarch who should care more for the outlying colonies he 
+knows on the map or through the report of his vicegerents, 
+than for the trunk of his empire under his eyes at home, are 
+we not more concerned about the shadowy life that we have in 
+the hearts of others, and that portion in their thoughts and 
+fancies which, in a certain far-away sense, belongs to us, 
+than about the real knot of our identity - that central 
+metropolis of self, of which alone we are immediately aware - 
+or the diligent service of arteries and veins and 
+infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which we know (as we know a 
+proposition in Euclid) to be the source and substance of the 
+whole?  At the death of every one whom we love, some fair and 
+honourable portion of our existence falls away, and we are 
+dislodged from one of these dear provinces; and they are not, 
+perhaps, the most fortunate who survive a long series of such 
+impoverishments, till their life and influence narrow 
+gradually into the meagre limit of their own spirits, and 
+death, when he comes at last, can destroy them at one blow.
+
+
+NOTE. - To this essay I must in honesty append a word or 
+two of qualification; for this is one of the points on which a 
+slightly greater age teaches us a slightly different wisdom:
+
+A youth delights in generalities, and keeps loose from 
+particular obligations; he jogs on the footpath way, himself 
+pursuing butterflies, but courteously lending his applause to 
+the advance of the human species and the coming of the kingdom 
+of justice and love.  As he grows older, he begins to think 
+more narrowly of man's action in the general, and perhaps more 
+arrogantly of his own in the particular.  He has not that same 
+unspeakable trust in what he would have done had he been 
+spared, seeing finally that that would have been little; but 
+he has a far higher notion of the blank that he will make by 
+dying.  A young man feels himself one too many in the world; 
+his is a painful situation: he has no calling; no obvious 
+utility; no ties, but to his parents. and these he is sure to 
+disregard.  I do not think that a proper allowance has been 
+made for this true cause of suffering in youth; but by the 
+mere fact of a prolonged existence, we outgrow either the fact 
+or else the feeling.  Either we become so callously accustomed 
+to our own useless figure in the world, or else - and this, 
+thank God, in the majority of cases - we so collect about us 
+the interest or the love of our fellows, so multiply our 
+effective part in the affairs of life, that we need to 
+entertain no longer the question of our right to be.
+
+And so in the majority of cases, a man who fancies 
+himself dying, will get cold comfort from the very youthful 
+view expressed in this essay.  He, as a living man, has some 
+to help, some to love, some to correct; it may be, some to 
+punish.  These duties cling, not upon humanity, but upon the 
+man himself.  It is he, not another, who is one woman's son 
+and a second woman's husband and a third woman's father.  That 
+life which began so small, has now grown, with a myriad 
+filaments, into the lives of others.  It is not indispensable; 
+another will take the place and shoulder the discharged 
+responsibility; but the better the man and the nobler his 
+purposes, the more will he be tempted to regret the extinction 
+of his powers and the deletion of his personality.  To have 
+lived a generation, is not only to have grown at home in that 
+perplexing medium, but to have assumed innumerable duties.  To 
+die at such an age, has, for all but the entirely base, 
+something of the air of a betrayal.  A man does not only 
+reflect upon what he might have done in a future that is never 
+to be his; but beholding himself so early a deserter from the 
+fight, he eats his heart for the good he might have done 
+already.  To have been so useless and now to lose all hope of 
+being useful any more - there it is that death and memory 
+assail him.  And even if mankind shall go on, founding heroic 
+cities, practising heroic virtues, rising steadily from 
+strength to strength; even if his work shall be fulfilled, his 
+friends consoled, his wife remarried by a better than he; how 
+shall this alter, in one jot, his estimation of a career which 
+was his only business in this world, which was so fitfully 
+pursued, and which is now so ineffectively to end?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V - AES TRIPLEX
+
+
+
+THE changes wrought by death are in themselves so sharp 
+and final, and so terrible and melancholy in their 
+consequences, that the thing stands alone in man's experience, 
+and has no parallel upon earth.  It outdoes all other 
+accidents because it is the last of them.  Sometimes it leaps 
+suddenly upon its victims, like a Thug; sometimes it lays a 
+regular siege and creeps upon their citadel during a score of 
+years.  And when the business is done, there is sore havoc 
+made in other people's lives, and a pin knocked out by which 
+many subsidiary friendships hung together.  There are empty 
+chairs, solitary walks, and single beds at night.  Again, in 
+taking away our friends, death does not take them away 
+utterly, but leaves behind a mocking, tragical, and soon 
+intolerable residue, which must be hurriedly concealed.  Hence 
+a whole chapter of sights and customs striking to the mind, 
+from the pyramids of Egypt to the gibbets and dule trees of 
+mediaeval Europe.  The poorest persons have a bit of pageant 
+going towards the tomb; memorial stones are set up over the 
+least memorable; and, in order to preserve some show of 
+respect for what remains of our old loves and friendships, we 
+must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and 
+the hired undertaker parades before the door.  All this, and 
+much more of the same sort, accompanied by the eloquence of 
+poets, has gone a great way to put humanity in error; nay, in 
+many philosophies the error has been embodied and laid down 
+with every circumstance of logic; although in real life the 
+bustle and swiftness, in leaving people little time to think, 
+have not left them time enough to go dangerously wrong in 
+practice.
+
+As a matter of fact, although few things are spoken of 
+with more fearful whisperings than this prospect of death, few 
+have less influence on conduct under healthy circumstances.  
+We have all heard of cities in South America built upon the 
+side of fiery mountains, and how, even in this tremendous 
+neighbourhood, the inhabitants are not a jot more impressed by 
+the solemnity of mortal conditions than if they were delving 
+gardens in the greenest corner of England.  There are 
+serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles 
+overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the 
+bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin 
+may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man and his 
+merry-making in the dust.  In the eyes of very young people, 
+and very dull old ones, there is something indescribably 
+reckless and desperate in such a picture.  It seems not 
+credible that respectable married people, with umbrellas, 
+should find appetite for a bit of supper within quite a long 
+distance of a fiery mountain; ordinary life begins to smell of 
+high-handed debauch when it is carried on so close to a 
+catastrophe; and even cheese and salad, it seems, could hardly 
+be relished in such circumstances without something like a 
+defiance of the Creator.  It should be a place for nobody but 
+hermits dwelling in prayer and maceration, or mere born-devils 
+drowning care in a perpetual carouse.
+
+And yet, when one comes to think upon it calmly, the 
+situation of these South American citizens forms only a very 
+pale figure for the state of ordinary mankind.  This world 
+itself, travelling blindly and swiftly in over-crowded space, 
+among a million other worlds travelling blindly and swiftly in 
+contrary directions, may very well come by a knock that would 
+set it into explosion like a penny squib.  And what, 
+pathologically looked at, is the human body with all its 
+organs, but a mere bagful of petards?  The least of these is 
+as dangerous to the whole economy as the ship's powder-
+magazine to the ship; and with every breath we breathe, and 
+every meal we eat, we are putting one or more of them in 
+peril.  If we clung as devotedly as some philosophers pretend 
+we do to the abstract idea of life, or were half as frightened 
+as they make out we are, for the subversive accident that ends 
+it all, the trumpets might sound by the hour and no one would 
+follow them into battle - the blue-peter might fly at the 
+truck, but who would climb into a sea-going ship?  Think (if 
+these philosophers were right) with what a preparation of 
+spirit we should affront the daily peril of the dinner-table: 
+a deadlier spot than any battle-field in history, where the 
+far greater proportion of our ancestors have miserably left 
+their bones!  What woman would ever be lured into marriage, so 
+much more dangerous than the wildest sea?  And what would it 
+be to grow old?  For, after a certain distance, every step we 
+take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, 
+and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries 
+going through.  By the time a man gets well into the 
+seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle, and when 
+he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an 
+overwhelming probability that he will never see the day.  Do 
+the old men mind it, as a matter of fact?  Why, no.  They were 
+never merrier; they have their grog at night, and tell the 
+raciest stories; they hear of the death of people about their 
+own age, or even younger, not as if it was a grisly warning, 
+but with a simple childlike pleasure at having outlived some 
+one else; and when a draught might puff them out like a 
+guttering candle, or a bit of a stumble shatter them like so 
+much glass, their old hearts keep sound and unaffrighted, and 
+they go on, bubbling with laughter, through years of man's age 
+compared to which the valley at Balaklava was as safe and 
+peaceful as a village cricket-green on Sunday.  It may fairly 
+be questioned (if we look to the peril only) whether it was a 
+much more daring feat for Curtius to plunge into the gulf, 
+than for any old gentleman of ninety to doff his clothes and 
+clamber into bed.
+
+Indeed, it is a memorable subject for consideration, with 
+what unconcern and gaiety mankind pricks on along the Valley 
+of the Shadow of Death.  The whole way is one wilderness of 
+snares, and the end of it, for those who fear the last pinch, 
+is irrevocable ruin.  And yet we go spinning through it all, 
+like a party for the Derby.  Perhaps the reader remembers one 
+of the humorous devices of the deified Caligula: how he 
+encouraged a vast concourse of holiday-makers on to his bridge 
+over Baiae bay; and when they were in the height of their 
+enjoyment, turned loose the Praetorian guards among the 
+company, and had them tossed into the sea.  This is no bad 
+miniature of the dealings of nature with the transitory race 
+of man.  Only, what a chequered picnic we have of it, even 
+while it lasts! and into what great waters, not to be crossed 
+by any swimmer, God's pale Praetorian throws us over in the 
+end!
+
+We live the time that a match flickers; we pop the cork 
+of a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the 
+instant.  Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in 
+the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should 
+think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the 
+devouring earthquake?  The love of Life and the fear of Death 
+are two famous phrases that grow harder to understand the more 
+we think about them.  It is a well-known fact that an immense 
+proportion of boat accidents would never happen if people held 
+the sheet in their hands instead of making it fast; and yet, 
+unless it be some martinet of a professional mariner or some 
+landsman with shattered nerves, every one of God's creatures 
+makes it fast.  A strange instance of man's unconcern and 
+brazen boldness in the face of death!
+
+We confound ourselves with metaphysical phrases, which we 
+import into daily talk with noble inappropriateness.  We have 
+no idea of what death is, apart from its circumstances and 
+some of its consequences to others; and although we have some 
+experience of living, there is not a man on earth who has 
+flown so high into abstraction as to have any practical guess 
+at the meaning of the word LIFE.  All literature, from Job and 
+Omar Khayam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an 
+attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of 
+view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of 
+living to the Definition of Life.  And our sages give us about 
+the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is 
+a vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with 
+dreams.  Philosophy, in its more rigid sense, has been at the 
+same work for ages; and after a myriad bald heads have wagged 
+over the problem, and piles of words have been heaped one upon 
+another into dry and cloudy volumes without end, philosophy 
+has the honour of laying before us, with modest pride, her 
+contribution towards the subject: that life is a Permanent 
+Possibility of Sensation.  Truly a fine result!  A man may 
+very well love beef, or hunting, or a woman; but surely, 
+surely, not a Permanent Possibility of Sensation!  He may be 
+afraid of a precipice, or a dentist, or a large enemy with a 
+club, or even an undertaker's man; but not certainly of 
+abstract death.  We may trick with the word life in its dozen 
+senses until we are weary of tricking; we may argue in terms 
+of all the philosophies on earth, but one fact remains true 
+throughout - that we do not love life, in the sense that we 
+are greatly preoccupied about its conservation; that we do 
+not, properly speaking, love life at all, but living.  Into 
+the views of the least careful there will enter some degree of 
+providence; no man's eyes are fixed entirely on the passing 
+hour; but although we have some anticipation of good health, 
+good weather, wine, active employment, love, and self-
+approval, the sum of these anticipations does not amount to 
+anything like a general view of life's possibilities and 
+issues; nor are those who cherish them most vividly, at all 
+the most scrupulous of their personal safety.  To be deeply 
+interested in the accidents of our existence, to enjoy keenly 
+the mixed texture of human experience, rather leads a man to 
+disregard precautions, and risk his neck against a straw.  For 
+surely the love of living is stronger in an Alpine climber 
+roping over a peril, or a hunter riding merrily at a stiff 
+fence, than in a creature who lives upon a diet and walks a 
+measured distance in the interest of his constitution.
+
+There is a great deal of very vile nonsense talked upon 
+both sides of the matter: tearing divines reducing life to the 
+dimensions of a mere funeral procession, so short as to be 
+hardly decent; and melancholy unbelievers yearning for the 
+tomb as if it were a world too far away.  Both sides must feel 
+a little ashamed of their performances now and again when they 
+draw in their chairs to dinner.  Indeed, a good meal and a 
+bottle of wine is an answer to most standard works upon the 
+question.  When a man's heart warms to his viands, he forgets 
+a great deal of sophistry, and soars into a rosy zone of 
+contemplation.  Death may be knocking at the door, like the 
+Commander's statue; we have something else in hand, thank God, 
+and let him knock.  Passing bells are ringing all the world 
+over.  All the world over, and every hour, some one is parting 
+company with all his aches and ecstasies.  For us also the 
+trap is laid.  But we are so fond of life that we have no 
+leisure to entertain the terror of death.  It is a honeymoon 
+with us all through, and none of the longest.  Small blame to 
+us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, 
+to the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the 
+mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of 
+our own nimble bodies.
+
+We all of us appreciate the sensations; but as for caring 
+about the Permanence of the Possibility, a man's head is 
+generally very bald, and his senses very dull, before he comes 
+to that.  Whether we regard life as a lane leading to a dead 
+wall - a mere bag's end, as the French say - or whether we 
+think of it as a vestibule or gymnasium, where we wait our 
+turn and prepare our faculties for some more noble destiny; 
+whether we thunder in a pulpit, or pule in little atheistic 
+poetry-books, about its vanity and brevity; whether we look 
+justly for years of health and vigour, or are about to mount 
+into a bath-chair, as a step towards the hearse; in each and 
+all of these views and situations there is but one conclusion 
+possible: that a man should stop his ears against paralysing 
+terror, and run the race that is set before him with a single 
+mind.  No one surely could have recoiled with more heartache 
+and terror from the thought of death than our respected 
+lexicographer; and yet we know how little it affected his 
+conduct, how wisely and boldly he walked, and in what a fresh 
+and lively vein he spoke of life.  Already an old man, he 
+ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with 
+triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual 
+cups of tea.  As courage and intelligence are the two 
+qualities best worth a good man's cultivation, so it is the 
+first part of intelligence to recognise our precarious estate 
+in life, and the first part of courage to be not at all 
+abashed before the fact.  A frank and somewhat headlong 
+carriage, not looking too anxiously before, not dallying in 
+maudlin regret over the past, stamps the man who is well 
+armoured for this world.
+
+And not only well armoured for himself, but a good friend 
+and a good citizen to boot.  We do not go to cowards for 
+tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man 
+who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to 
+consider others.  That eminent chemist who took his walks 
+abroad in tin shoes, and subsisted wholly upon tepid milk, had 
+all his work cut out for him in considerate dealings with his 
+own digestion.  So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in 
+the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression 
+in a paralysis of generous acts.  The victim begins to shrink 
+spiritually; he develops a fancy for parlours with a regulated 
+temperature, and takes his morality on the principle of tin 
+shoes and tepid milk.  The care of one important body or soul 
+becomes so engrossing, that all the noises of the outer world 
+begin to come thin and faint into the parlour with the 
+regulated temperature; and the tin shoes go equably forward 
+over blood and rain.  To be overwise is to ossify; and the 
+scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.  Now the man who 
+has his heart on his sleeve, and a good whirling weathercock 
+of a brain, who reckons his life as a thing to be dashingly 
+used and cheerfully hazarded, makes a very different 
+acquaintance of the world, keeps all his pulses going true and 
+fast, and gathers impetus as he runs, until, if he be running 
+towards anything better than wildfire, he may shoot up and 
+become a constellation in the end.  Lord look after his 
+health, Lord have a care of his soul, says he; and he has at 
+the key of the position, and swashes through incongruity and 
+peril towards his aim.  Death is on all sides of him with 
+pointed batteries, as he is on all sides of all of us; 
+unfortunate surprises gird him round; mim-mouthed friends and 
+relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal 
+synod about his path: and what cares he for all this?  Being a 
+true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and 
+spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in 
+any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace 
+until he touch the goal.  "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!" 
+cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner.  These are 
+great incentives; not for any of these, but for the plain 
+satisfaction of living, of being about their business in some 
+sort or other, do the brave, serviceable men of every nation 
+tread down the nettle danger, and pass flyingly over all the 
+stumbling-blocks of prudence.  Think of the heroism of 
+Johnson, think of that superb indifference to mortal 
+limitation that set him upon his dictionary, and carried him 
+through triumphantly until the end!  Who, if he were wisely 
+considerate of things at large, would ever embark upon any 
+work much more considerable than a halfpenny post card?  Who 
+would project a serial novel, after Thackeray and Dickens had 
+each fallen in mid-course?  Who would find heart enough to 
+begin to live, if he dallied with the consideration of death?
+
+And, after all, what sorry and pitiful quibbling all this 
+is!  To forego all the issues of living in a parlour with a 
+regulated temperature - as if that were not to die a hundred 
+times over, and for ten years at a stretch!  As if it were not 
+to die in one's own lifetime, and without even the sad 
+immunities of death!  As if it were not to die, and yet be the 
+patient spectators of our own pitiable change!  The Permanent 
+Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at 
+arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark 
+chamber.  It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than 
+to waste it like a miser.  It is better to live and be done 
+with it, than to die daily in the sickroom.  By all means 
+begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, 
+even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and 
+see what can be accomplished in a week.  It is not only in 
+finished undertakings that we ought to honour useful labour.  
+A spirit goes out of the man who means execution, which out-
+lives the most untimely ending.  All who have meant good work 
+with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they 
+may die before they have the time to sign it.  Every heart 
+that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse 
+behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.  
+And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in 
+mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous 
+foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of 
+boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and 
+silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a 
+termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, 
+foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably 
+straggling to an end in sandy deltas?  When the Greeks made 
+their fine saying that those whom the gods love die young, I 
+cannot help believing they had this sort of death also in 
+their eye.  For surely, at whatever age it overtake the man, 
+this is to die young.  Death has not been suffered to take so 
+much as an illusion from his heart.  In the hot-fit of life, 
+a-tip-toe on the highest point of being, he passes at a bound 
+on to the other side.  The noise of the mallet and chisel is 
+scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, 
+trailing with him clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-
+blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI - EL DORADO
+
+
+
+IT seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world 
+where there are so many marriages and decisive battles, and 
+where we all, at certain hours of the day, and with great 
+gusto and despatch, stow a portion of victuals finally and 
+irretrievably into the bag which contains us.  And it would 
+seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as 
+possible was the one goal of man's contentious life.  And yet, 
+as regards the spirit, this is but a semblance.  We live in an 
+ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to 
+another in an endless series.  There is always a new horizon 
+for onward-looking men, and although we dwell on a small 
+planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a 
+brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes 
+are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is 
+prolonged until the term of life.  To be truly happy is a 
+question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we 
+want and not of what we have.  An aspiration is a joy for 
+ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune 
+which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a 
+revenue of pleasurable activity.  To have many of these is to 
+be spiritually rich.  Life is only a very dull and ill-
+directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; 
+and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a 
+mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may 
+very well break their shins.  It is in virtue of his own 
+desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with 
+even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and 
+people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed 
+appetite for work and pleasure.  Desire and curiosity are the 
+two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted 
+colours: it is they that make women beautiful or fossils 
+interesting: and the man may squander his estate and come to 
+beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in 
+the possibilities of pleasure.  Suppose he could take one meal 
+so compact and comprehensive that he should never hunger any 
+more; suppose him, at a glance, to take in all the features of 
+the world and allay the desire for knowledge; suppose him to 
+do the like in any province of experience - would not that man 
+be in a poor way for amusement ever after?
+
+One who goes touring on foot with a single volume in his 
+knapsack reads with circumspection, pausing often to reflect, 
+and often laying the book down to contemplate the landscape or 
+the prints in the inn parlour; for he fears to come to an end 
+of his entertainment, and be left companionless on the last 
+stages of his journey.  A young fellow recently finished the 
+works of Thomas Carlyle, winding up, if we remember aright, 
+with the ten note-books upon Frederick the Great.  "What!" 
+cried the young fellow, in consternation, "is there no more 
+Carlyle?  Am I left to the daily papers?"  A more celebrated 
+instance is that of Alexander, who wept bitterly because he 
+had no more worlds to subdue.  And when Gibbon had finished 
+the DECLINE AND FALL, he had only a few moments of joy; and it 
+was with a "sober melancholy" that he parted from his labours.
+
+Happily we all shoot at the moon with ineffectual arrows; 
+our hopes are set on inaccessible El Dorado; we come to an end 
+of nothing here below.  Interests are only plucked up to sow 
+themselves again, like mustard.  You would think, when the 
+child was born, there would be an end to trouble; and yet it 
+is only the beginning of fresh anxieties; and when you have 
+seen it through its teething and its education, and at last 
+its marriage, alas! it is only to have new fears, new 
+quivering sensibilities, with every day; and the health of 
+your children's children grows as touching a concern as that 
+of your own.  Again, when you have married your wife, you 
+would think you were got upon a hilltop, and might begin to go 
+downward by an easy slope.  But you have only ended courting 
+to begin marriage.  Falling in love and winning love are often 
+difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits; but to 
+keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which 
+both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill.  The true 
+love story commences at the altar, when there lies before the 
+married pair a most beautiful contest of wisdom and 
+generosity, and a life-long struggle towards an unattainable 
+ideal.  Unattainable?  Ay, surely unattainable, from the very 
+fact that they are two instead of one.
+
+"Of making books there is no end," complained the 
+Preacher; and did not perceive how highly he was praising 
+letters as an occupation.  There is no end, indeed, to making 
+books or experiments, or to travel, or to gathering wealth.  
+Problem gives rise to problem.  We may study for ever, and we 
+are never as learned as we would.  We have never made a statue 
+worthy of our dreams.  And when we have discovered a 
+continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find 
+another ocean or another plain upon the further side.  In the 
+infinite universe there is room for our swiftest diligence and 
+to spare.  It is not like the works of Carlyle, which can be 
+read to an end.  Even in a corner of it, in a private park, or 
+in the neighbourhood of a single hamlet, the weather and the 
+seasons keep so deftly changing that although we walk there 
+for a lifetime there will be always something new to startle 
+and delight us.
+
+There is only one wish realisable on the earth; only one 
+thing that can be perfectly attained: Death.  And from a 
+variety of circumstances we have no one to tell us whether it 
+be worth attaining.
+
+A strange picture we make on our way to our chimaeras, 
+ceaselessly marching, grudging ourselves the time for rest; 
+indefatigable, adventurous pioneers.  It is true that we shall 
+never reach the goal; it is even more than probable that there 
+is no such place; and if we lived for centuries and were 
+endowed with the powers of a god, we should find ourselves not 
+much nearer what we wanted at the end.  O toiling hands of 
+mortals!  O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither!  
+Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some 
+conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the 
+setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado.  Little do ye 
+know your own blessednes; for to travel hopefully is a better 
+thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII - THE ENGLISH ADMIRALS
+
+
+
+"Whether it be wise in men to do such actions or no, I am 
+sure it is so in States to honour them." - SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE.
+
+
+THERE is one story of the wars of Rome which I have 
+always very much envied for England.  Germanicus was going 
+down at the head of the legions into a dangerous river - on 
+the opposite bank the woods were full of Germans - when there 
+flew out seven great eagles which seemed to marshal the Romans 
+on their way; they did not pause or waver, but disappeared 
+into the forest where the enemy lay concealed.  "Forward!" 
+cried Germanicus, with a fine rhetorical inspiration, 
+"Forward! and follow the Roman birds."  It would be a very 
+heavy spirit that did not give a leap at such a signal, and a 
+very timorous one that continued to have any doubt of success.  
+To appropriate the eagles as fellow-countrymen was to make 
+imaginary allies of the forces of nature; the Roman Empire and 
+its military fortunes, and along with these the prospects of 
+those individual Roman legionaries now fording a river in 
+Germany, looked altogether greater and more hopeful.  It is a 
+kind of illusion easy to produce.  A particular shape of 
+cloud, the appearance of a particular star, the holiday of 
+some particular saint, anything in short to remind the 
+combatants of patriotic legends or old successes, may be 
+enough to change the issue of a pitched battle; for it gives 
+to the one party a feeling that Right and the larger interests 
+are with them.
+
+If an Englishman wishes to have such a feeling, it must 
+be about the sea.  The lion is nothing to us; he has not been 
+taken to the hearts of the people, and naturalised as an 
+English emblem.  We know right well that a lion would fall 
+foul of us as grimly as he would of a Frenchman or a Moldavian 
+Jew, and we do not carry him before us in the smoke of battle.  
+But the sea is our approach and bulwark; it has been the scene 
+of our greatest triumphs and dangers; and we are accustomed in 
+lyrical strains to claim it as our own.  The prostrating 
+experiences of foreigners between Calais and Dover have always 
+an agreeable side to English prepossessions.  A man from 
+Bedfordshire, who does not know one end of the ship from the 
+other until she begins to move, swaggers among such persons 
+with a sense of hereditary nautical experience.  To suppose 
+yourself endowed with natural parts for the sea because you 
+are the countryman of Blake and mighty Nelson, is perhaps just 
+as unwarrantable as to imagine Scotch extraction a sufficient 
+guarantee that you will look well in a kilt.  But the feeling 
+is there, and seated beyond the reach of argument.  We should 
+consider ourselves unworthy of our descent if we did not share 
+the arrogance of our progenitors, and please ourselves with 
+the pretension that the sea is English.  Even where it is 
+looked upon by the guns and battlements of another nation we 
+regard it as a kind of English cemetery, where the bones of 
+our seafaring fathers take their rest until the last trumpet; 
+for I suppose no other nation has lost as many ships, or sent 
+as many brave fellows to the bottom.
+
+There is nowhere such a background for heroism as the 
+noble, terrifying, and picturesque conditions of some of our 
+sea fights.  Hawke's battle in the tempest, and Aboukir at the 
+moment when the French Admiral blew up, reach the limit of 
+what is imposing to the imagination.  And our naval annals owe 
+some of their interest to the fantastic and beautiful 
+appearance of old warships and the romance that invests the 
+sea and everything sea-going in the eyes of English lads on a 
+half-holiday at the coast.  Nay, and what we know of the 
+misery between decks enhances the bravery of what was done by 
+giving it something for contrast.  We like to know that these 
+bold and honest fellows contrived to live, and to keep bold 
+and honest, among absurd and vile surroundings.  No reader can 
+forget the description of the THUNDER in RODERICK RANDOM: the 
+disorderly tyranny; the cruelty and dirt of officers and men; 
+deck after deck, each with some new object of offence; the 
+hospital, where the hammocks were huddled together with but 
+fourteen inches space for each; the cockpit, far under water, 
+where, "in an intolerable stench," the spectacled steward kept 
+the accounts of the different messes; and the canvas 
+enclosure, six feet square, in which Morgan made flip and 
+salmagundi, smoked his pipe, sang his Welsh songs, and swore 
+his queer Welsh imprecations.  There are portions of this 
+business on board the THUNDER over which the reader passes 
+lightly and hurriedly, like a traveller in a malarious 
+country.  It is easy enough to understand the opinion of Dr. 
+Johnson: "Why, sir," he said, "no man will be a sailor who has 
+contrivance enough to get himself into a jail."  You would 
+fancy any one's spirit would die out under such an 
+accumulation of darkness, noisomeness, and injustice, above 
+all when he had not come there of his own free will, but under 
+the cutlasses and bludgeons of the press-gang.  But perhaps a 
+watch on deck in the sharp sea air put a man on his mettle 
+again; a battle must have been a capital relief; and prize-
+money, bloodily earned and grossly squandered, opened the 
+doors of the prison for a twinkling.  Somehow or other, at 
+least, this worst of possible lives could not overlie the 
+spirit and gaiety of our sailors; they did their duty as 
+though they had some interest in the fortune of that country 
+which so cruelly oppressed them, they served their guns 
+merrily when it came to fighting, and they had the readiest 
+ear for a bold, honourable sentiment, of any class of men the 
+world ever produced.
+
+Most men of high destinies have high-sounding names.  Pym 
+and Habakkuk may do pretty well, but they must not think to 
+cope with the Cromwells and Isaiahs.  And you could not find a 
+better case in point than that of the English Admirals.  Drake 
+and Rooke and Hawke are picked names for men of execution.  
+Frobisher, Rodney, Boscawen, Foul-Weather, Jack Byron, are all 
+good to catch the eye in a page of a naval history.  
+Cloudesley Shovel is a mouthful of quaint and sounding 
+syllables.  Benbow has a bulldog quality that suits the man's 
+character, and it takes us back to those English archers who 
+were his true comrades for plainness, tenacity, and pluck.  
+Raleigh is spirited and martial, and signifies an act of bold 
+conduct in the field.  It is impossible to judge of Blake or 
+Nelson, no names current among men being worthy of such 
+heroes.  But still it is odd enough, and very appropriate in 
+this connection, that the latter was greatly taken with his 
+Sicilian title.  "The signification, perhaps, pleased him," 
+says Southey; "Duke of Thunder was what in Dahomey would have 
+been called a STRONG NAME; it was to a sailor's taste, and 
+certainly to no man could it be more applicable."  Admiral in 
+itself is one of the most satisfactory of distinctions; it has 
+a noble sound and a very proud history; and Columbus thought 
+so highly of it, that he enjoined his heirs to sign themselves 
+by that title as long as the house should last.
+
+But it is the spirit of the men, and not their names, 
+that I wish to speak about in this paper.  That spirit is 
+truly English; they, and not Tennyson's cotton-spinners or Mr. 
+D'Arcy Thompson's Abstract Bagman, are the true and typical 
+Englishmen.  There may be more HEAD of bagmen in the country, 
+but human beings are reckoned by number only in political 
+constitutions.  And the Admirals are typical in the full force 
+of the word.  They are splendid examples of virtue, indeed, 
+but of a virtue in which most Englishmen can claim a moderate 
+share; and what we admire in their lives is a sort of 
+apotheosis of ourselves.  Almost everybody in our land, except 
+humanitarians and a few persons whose youth has been depressed 
+by exceptionally aesthetic surroundings, can understand and 
+sympathise with an Admiral or a prize-fighter.  I do not wish 
+to bracket Benbow and Tom Cribb; but, depend upon it, they are 
+practically bracketed for admiration in the minds of many 
+frequenters of ale-houses.  If you told them about Germanicus 
+and the eagles, or Regulus going back to Carthage, they would 
+very likely fall asleep; but tell them about Harry Pearce and 
+Jem Belcher, or about Nelson and the Nile, and they put down 
+their pipes to listen.  I have by me a copy of BOXIANA, on the 
+fly-leaves of which a youthful member of the fancy kept a 
+chronicle of remarkable events and an obituary of great men.  
+Here we find piously chronicled the demise of jockeys, 
+watermen, and pugilists - Johnny Moore, of the Liverpool Prize 
+Ring; Tom Spring, aged fifty-six; "Pierce Egan, senior, writer 
+OF BOXIANA and other sporting works" - and among all these, 
+the Duke of Wellington!  If Benbow had lived in the time of 
+this annalist, do you suppose his name would not have been 
+added to the glorious roll?  In short, we do not all feel 
+warmly towards Wesley or Laud, we cannot all take pleasure in 
+PARADISE LOST; but there are certain common sentiments and 
+touches of nature by which the whole nation is made to feel 
+kinship.  A little while ago everybody, from Hazlitt and John 
+Wilson down to the imbecile creature who scribbled his 
+register on the fly-leaves of BOXIANA, felt a more or less 
+shamefaced satisfaction in the exploits of prize-fighters.  
+And the exploits of the Admirals are popular to the same 
+degree, and tell in all ranks of society.  Their sayings and 
+doings stir English blood like the sound of a trumpet; and if 
+the Indian Empire, the trade of London, and all the outward 
+and visible ensigns of our greatness should pass away, we 
+should still leave behind us a durable monument of what we 
+were in these sayings and doings of the English Admirals.
+
+Duncan, lying off the Texel with his own flagship, the 
+VENERABLE, and only one other vessel, heard that the whole 
+Dutch fleet was putting to sea.  He told Captain Hotham to 
+anchor alongside of him in the narrowest part of the channel, 
+and fight his vessel till she sank.  "I have taken the depth 
+of the water," added he, "and when the VENERABLE goes down, my 
+flag will still fly."  And you observe this is no naked Viking 
+in a prehistoric period; but a Scotch member of Parliament, 
+with a smattering of the classics, a telescope, a cocked hat 
+of great size, and flannel underclothing.  In the same spirit, 
+Nelson went into Aboukir with six colours flying; so that even 
+if five were shot away, it should not be imagined he had 
+struck.  He too must needs wear his four stars outside his 
+Admiral's frock, to be a butt for sharp-shooters.  "In honour 
+I gained them," he said to objectors, adding with sublime 
+illogicality, "in honour I will die with them."  Captain 
+Douglas of the ROYAL OAK, when the Dutch fired his vessel in 
+the Thames, sent his men ashore, but was burned along with her 
+himself rather than desert his post without orders.  Just 
+then, perhaps the Merry Monarch was chasing a moth round the 
+supper-table with the ladies of his court.  When Raleigh 
+sailed into Cadiz, and all the forts and ships opened fire on 
+him at once, he scorned to shoot a gun, and made answer with a 
+flourish of insulting trumpets.  I like this bravado better 
+than the wisest dispositions to insure victory; it comes from 
+the heart and goes to it.  God has made nobler heroes, but he 
+never made a finer gentleman than Walter Raleigh.  And as our 
+Admirals were full of heroic superstitions, and had a 
+strutting and vainglorious style of fight, so they discovered 
+a startling eagerness for battle, and courted war like a 
+mistress.  When the news came to Essex before Cadiz that the 
+attack had been decided, he threw his hat into the sea.  It is 
+in this way that a schoolboy hears of a half-holiday; but this 
+was a bearded man of great possessions who had just been 
+allowed to risk his life.  Benbow could not lie still in his 
+bunk after he had lost his leg; he must be on deck in a basket 
+to direct and animate the fight.  I said they loved war like a 
+mistress; yet I think there are not many mistresses we should 
+continue to woo under similar circumstances.  Trowbridge went 
+ashore with the CULLODEN, and was able to take no part in the 
+battle of the Nile.  "The merits of that ship and her gallant 
+captain," wrote Nelson to the Admiralty, "are too well known 
+to benefit by anything I could say.  Her misfortune was great 
+in getting aground, WHILE HER MORE FORTUNATE COMPANIONS WERE 
+IN THE FULL TIDE OF HAPPINESS."  This is a notable expression, 
+and depicts the whole great-hearted, big-spoken stock of the 
+English Admirals to a hair.  It was to be "in the full tide of 
+happiness" for Nelson to destroy five thousand five hundred 
+and twenty-five of his fellow-creatures, and have his own 
+scalp torn open by a piece of langridge shot.  Hear him again 
+at Copenhagen: "A shot through the mainmast knocked the 
+splinters about; and he observed to one of his officers with a 
+smile, `It is warm work, and this may be the last to any of us 
+at any moment;' and then, stopping short at the gangway, 
+added, with emotion, `BUT, MARK YOU - I WOULD NOT BE ELSEWHERE 
+FOR THOUSANDS.'"
+
+I must tell one more story, which has lately been made 
+familiar to us all, and that in one of the noblest ballads in 
+the English language.  I had written my tame prose abstract, I 
+shall beg the reader to believe, when I had no notion that the 
+sacred bard designed an immortality for Greenville.  Sir 
+Richard Greenville was Vice-Admiral to Lord Thomas Howard, and 
+lay off the Azores with the English squadron in 1591.  He was 
+a noted tyrant to his crew: a dark, bullying fellow 
+apparently; and it is related of him that he would chew and 
+swallow wineglasses, by way of convivial levity, till the 
+blood ran out of his mouth.  When the Spanish fleet of fifty 
+sail came within sight of the English, his ship, the REVENGE, 
+was the last to weigh anchor, and was so far circumvented by 
+the Spaniards, that there were but two courses open - either 
+to turn her back upon the enemy or sail through one of his 
+squadrons.  The first alternative Greenville dismissed as 
+dishonourable to himself, his country, and her Majesty's ship.  
+Accordingly, he chose the latter, and steered into the Spanish 
+armament.  Several vessels he forced to luff and fall under 
+his lee; until, about three o'clock of the afternoon, a great 
+ship of three decks of ordnance took the wind out of his 
+sails, and immediately boarded.  Thence-forward, and all night 
+long, the REVENGE, held her own single-handed against the 
+Spaniards.  As one ship was beaten off, another took its 
+place.  She endured, according to Raleigh's computation, 
+"eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many assaults 
+and entries."  By morning the powder was spent, the pikes all 
+broken, not a stick was standing, "nothing left overhead 
+either for flight or defence;" six feet of water in the hold; 
+almost all the men hurt; and Greenville himself in a dying 
+condition.  To bring them to this pass, a fleet of fifty sail 
+had been mauling them for fifteen hours, the ADMIRAL OF THE 
+HULKS and the ASCENSION of Seville had both gone down 
+alongside, and two other vessels had taken refuge on shore in 
+a sinking state.  In Hawke's words, they had "taken a great 
+deal of drubbing."  The captain and crew thought they had done 
+about enough; but Greenville was not of this opinion; he gave 
+orders to the master gunner, whom he knew to be a fellow after 
+his own stamp, to scuttle the REVENGE where she lay.  The 
+others, who were not mortally wounded like the Admiral, 
+interfered with some decision, locked the master gunner in his 
+cabin, after having deprived him of his sword, for he 
+manifested an intention to kill himself if he were not to sink 
+the ship; and sent to the Spaniards to demand terms.  These 
+were granted.  The second or third day after, Greenville died 
+of his wounds aboard the Spanish flagship, leaving his 
+contempt upon the "traitors and dogs" who had not chosen to do 
+as he did, and engage fifty vessels, well found and fully 
+manned, with six inferior craft ravaged by sickness and short 
+of stores.  He at least, he said, had done his duty as he was 
+bound to do, and looked for everlasting fame.
+
+Some one said to me the other day that they considered 
+this story to be of a pestilent example.  I am not inclined to 
+imagine we shall ever be put into any practical difficulty 
+from a superfluity of Greenvilles.  And besides, I demur to 
+the opinion.  The worth of such actions is not a thing to be 
+decided in a quaver of sensibility or a flush of righteous 
+commonsense.  The man who wished to make the ballads of his 
+country, coveted a small matter compared to what Richard 
+Greenville accomplished.  I wonder how many people have been 
+inspired by this mad story, and how many battles have been 
+actually won for England in the spirit thus engendered.  It is 
+only with a measure of habitual foolhardiness that you can be 
+sure, in the common run of men, of courage on a reasonable 
+occasion.  An army or a fleet, if it is not led by quixotic 
+fancies, will not be led far by terror of the Provost Marshal.  
+Even German warfare, in addition to maps and telegraphs, is 
+not above employing the WACHT AM RHEIN.  Nor is it only in the 
+profession of arms that such stories may do good to a man.  In 
+this desperate and gleeful fighting, whether it is Greenville 
+or Benbow, Hawke or Nelson, who flies his colours in the ship, 
+we see men brought to the test and giving proof of what we 
+call heroic feeling.  Prosperous humanitarians tell me, in my 
+club smoking-room, that they are a prey to prodigious heroic 
+feelings, and that it costs them more nobility of soul to do 
+nothing in particular, than would carry on all the wars, by 
+sea or land, of bellicose humanity.  It may very well be so, 
+and yet not touch the point in question.  For what I desire is 
+to see some of this nobility brought face to face with me in 
+an inspiriting achievement.  A man may talk smoothly over a 
+cigar in my club smoking-room from now to the Day of Judgment, 
+without adding anything to mankind's treasury of illustrious 
+and encouraging examples.  It is not over the virtues of a 
+curate-and-tea-party novel, that people are abashed into high 
+resolutions.  It may be because their hearts are crass, but to 
+stir them properly they must have men entering into glory with 
+some pomp and circumstance.  And that is why these stories of 
+our sea-captains, printed, so to speak, in capitals, and full 
+of bracing moral influence, are more valuable to England than 
+any material benefit in all the books of political economy 
+between Westminster and Birmingham.  Greenville chewing 
+wineglasses at table makes no very pleasant figure, any more 
+than a thousand other artists when they are viewed in the 
+body, or met in private life; but his work of art, his 
+finished tragedy, is an eloquent performance; and I contend it 
+ought not only to enliven men of the sword as they go into 
+battle, but send back merchant clerks with more heart and 
+spirit to their book-keeping by double entry.
+
+There is another question which seems bound up in this; 
+and that is Temple's problem: whether it was wise of Douglas 
+to burn with the ROYAL OAK? and by implication, what it was 
+that made him do so?  Many will tell you it was the desire of 
+fame.
+
+"To what do Caesar and Alexander owe the infinite 
+grandeur of their renown, but to fortune?  How many men has 
+she extinguished in the beginning of their progress, of whom 
+we have no knowledge; who brought as much courage to the work 
+as they, if their adverse hap had not cut them off in the 
+first sally of their arms?  Amongst so many and so great 
+dangers, I do not remember to have anywhere read that Caesar 
+was ever wounded; a thousand have fallen in less dangers than 
+the least of these he went through.  A great many brave 
+actions must be expected to be performed without witness, for 
+one that comes to some notice.  A man is not always at the top 
+of a breach, or at the head of an army in the sight of his 
+general, as upon a platform.  He is often surprised between 
+the hedge and the ditch; he must run the hazard of his life 
+against a henroost; he must dislodge four rascally musketeers 
+out of a barn; he must prick out single from his party, as 
+necessity arises, and meet adventures alone."
+
+Thus far Montaigne, in a characteristic essay on GLORY.  
+Where death is certain, as in the cases of Douglas or 
+Greenville, it seems all one from a personal point of view.  
+The man who lost his life against a henroost, is in the same 
+pickle with him who lost his life against a fortified place of 
+the first order.  Whether he has missed a peerage or only the 
+corporal's stripes, it is all one if he has missed them and is 
+quietly in the grave.  It was by a hazard that we learned the 
+conduct of the four marines of the WAGER.  There was no room 
+for these brave fellows in the boat, and they were left behind 
+upon the island to a certain death.  They were soldiers, they 
+said, and knew well enough it was their business to die; and 
+as their comrades pulled away, they stood upon the beach, gave 
+three cheers, and cried "God bless the king!"  Now, one or two 
+of those who were in the boat escaped, against all likelihood, 
+to tell the story.  That was a great thing for us; but surely 
+it cannot, by any possible twisting of human speech, be 
+construed into anything great for the marines.  You may 
+suppose, if you like, that they died hoping their behaviour 
+would not be forgotten; or you may suppose they thought 
+nothing on the subject, which is much more likely.  What can 
+be the signification of the word "fame" to a private of 
+marines, who cannot read and knows nothing of past history 
+beyond the reminiscences of his grandmother?  But whichever 
+supposition you make, the fact is unchanged.  They died while 
+the question still hung in the balance; and I suppose their 
+bones were already white, before the winds and the waves and 
+the humour of Indian chiefs and Spanish governors had decided 
+whether they were to be unknown and useless martyrs or 
+honoured heroes.  Indeed, I believe this is the lesson: if it 
+is for fame that men do brave actions, they are only silly 
+fellows after all.
+
+It is at best but a pettifogging, pickthank business to 
+decompose actions into little personal motives, and explain 
+heroism away.  The Abstract Bagman will grow like an Admiral 
+at heart, not by ungrateful carping, but in a heat of 
+admiration.  But there is another theory of the personal 
+motive in these fine sayings and doings, which I believe to be 
+true and wholesome.  People usually do things, and suffer 
+martyrdoms, because they have an inclination that way.  The 
+best artist is not the man who fixes his eye on posterity, but 
+the one who loves the practice of his art.  And instead of 
+having a taste for being successful merchants and retiring at 
+thirty, some people have a taste for high and what we call 
+heroic forms of excitement.  If the Admirals courted war like 
+a mistress; if, as the drum beat to quarters, the sailors came 
+gaily out of the forecastle, - it is because a fight is a 
+period of multiplied and intense experiences, and, by Nelson's 
+computation, worth "thousands" to any one who has a heart 
+under his jacket.  If the marines of the WAGER gave three 
+cheers and cried "God bless the king," it was because they 
+liked to do things nobly for their own satisfaction.  They 
+were giving their lives, there was no help for that; and they 
+made it a point of self-respect to give them handsomely.  And 
+there were never four happier marines in God's world than 
+these four at that moment.  If it was worth thousands to be at 
+the Baltic, I wish a Benthamite arithmetician would calculate 
+how much it was worth to be one of these four marines; or how 
+much their story is worth to each of us who read it.  And mark 
+you, undemonstrative men would have spoiled the situation.  
+The finest action is the better for a piece of purple.  If the 
+soldiers of the BIRKENHEAD had not gone down in line, or these 
+marines of the WAGER had walked away simply into the island, 
+like plenty of other brave fellows in the like circumstances, 
+my Benthamite arithmetician would assign a far lower value to 
+the two stories.  We have to desire a grand air in our heroes; 
+and such a knowledge of the human stage as shall make them put 
+the dots on their own i's, and leave us in no suspense as to 
+when they mean to be heroic.  And hence, we should 
+congratulate ourselves upon the fact that our Admirals were 
+not only great-hearted but big-spoken.
+
+The heroes themselves say, as often as not, that fame is 
+their object; but I do not think that is much to the purpose.  
+People generally say what they have been taught to say; that 
+was the catchword they were given in youth to express the aims 
+of their way of life; and men who are gaining great battles 
+are not likely to take much trouble in reviewing their 
+sentiments and the words in which they were told to express 
+them.  Almost every person, if you will believe himself, holds 
+a quite different theory of life from the one on which he is 
+patently acting.  And the fact is, fame may be a forethought 
+and an afterthought, but it is too abstract an idea to move 
+people greatly in moments of swift and momentous decision.  It 
+is from something more immediate, some determination of blood 
+to the head, some trick of the fancy, that the breach is 
+stormed or the bold word spoken.  I am sure a fellow shooting 
+an ugly weir in a canoe has exactly as much thought about fame 
+as most commanders going into battle; and yet the action, fall 
+out how it will, is not one of those the muse delights to 
+celebrate.  Indeed it is difficult to see why the fellow does 
+a thing so nameless and yet so formidable to look at, unless 
+on the theory that he likes it.  I suspect that is why; and I 
+suspect it is at least ten per cent of why Lord Beaconsfield 
+and Mr. Gladstone have debated so much in the House of 
+Commons, and why Burnaby rode to Khiva the other day, and why 
+the Admirals courted war like a mistress.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII - SOME PORTRAITS BY RAEBURN
+
+
+
+THROUGH the initiative of a prominent citizen, Edinburgh 
+has been in possession, for some autumn weeks, of a gallery of 
+paintings of singular merit and interest.  They were exposed 
+in the apartments of the Scotch Academy; and filled those who 
+are accustomed to visit the annual spring exhibition, with 
+astonishment and a sense of incongruity.  Instead of the too 
+common purple sunsets, and pea-green fields, and distances 
+executed in putty and hog's lard, he beheld, looking down upon 
+him from the walls of room after room, a whole army of wise, 
+grave, humorous, capable, or beautiful countenances, painted 
+simply and strongly by a man of genuine instinct.  It was a 
+complete act of the Human Drawing-Room Comedy.  Lords and 
+ladies, soldiers and doctors, hanging judges, and heretical 
+divines, a whole generation of good society was resuscitated; 
+and the Scotchman of to-day walked about among the Scotchmen 
+of two generations ago.  The moment was well chosen, neither 
+too late nor too early.  The people who sat for these pictures 
+are not yet ancestors, they are still relations.  They are not 
+yet altogether a part of the dusty past, but occupy a middle 
+distance within cry of our affections.  The little child who 
+looks wonderingly on his grandfather's watch in the picture, 
+is now the veteran Sheriff EMERITIS of Perth.  And I hear a 
+story of a lady who returned the other day to Edinburgh, after 
+an absence of sixty years: "I could see none of my old 
+friends," she said, "until I went into the Raeburn Gallery, 
+and found them all there."
+
+It would be difficult to say whether the collection was 
+more interesting on the score of unity or diversity.  Where 
+the portraits were all of the same period, almost all of the 
+same race, and all from the same brush, there could not fail 
+to be many points of similarity.  And yet the similarity of 
+the handling seems to throw into more vigorous relief those 
+personal distinctions which Raeburn was so quick to seize.  He 
+was a born painter of portraits.  He looked people shrewdly 
+between the eyes, surprised their manners in their face, and 
+had possessed himself of what was essential in their character 
+before they had been many minutes in his studio.  What he was 
+so swift to perceive, he conveyed to the canvas almost in the 
+moment of conception.  He had never any difficulty, he said, 
+about either hands or faces.  About draperies or light or 
+composition, he might see room for hesitation or afterthought.  
+But a face or a hand was something plain and legible.  There 
+were no two ways about it, any more than about the person's 
+name.  And so each of his portraits are not only (in Doctor 
+Johnson's phrase, aptly quoted on the catalogue) "a piece of 
+history," but a piece of biography into the bargain.  It is 
+devoutly to be wished that all biography were equally amusing, 
+and carried its own credentials equally upon its face.  These 
+portraits are racier than many anecdotes, and more complete 
+than many a volume of sententious memoirs.  You can see 
+whether you get a stronger and clearer idea of Robertson the 
+historian from Raeburn's palette or Dugald Stewart's woolly 
+and evasive periods.  And then the portraits are both signed 
+and countersigned.  For you have, first, the authority of the 
+artist, whom you recognise as no mean critic of the looks and 
+manners of men; and next you have the tacit acquiescence of 
+the subject, who sits looking out upon you with inimitable 
+innocence, and apparently under the impression that he is in a 
+room by himself.  For Raeburn could plunge at once through all 
+the constraint and embarrassment of the sitter, and present 
+the face, clear, open, and intelligent as at the most 
+disengaged moments.  This is best seen in portraits where the 
+sitter is represented in some appropriate action: Neil Gow 
+with his fiddle, Doctor Spens shooting an arrow, or Lord 
+Bannatyne hearing a cause.  Above all, from this point of 
+view, the portrait of Lieutenant-Colonel Lyon is notable.  A 
+strange enough young man, pink, fat about the lower part of 
+the face, with a lean forehead, a narrow nose and a fine 
+nostril, sits with a drawing-board upon his knees.  He has 
+just paused to render himself account of some difficulty, to 
+disentangle some complication of line or compare neighbouring 
+values.  And there, without any perceptible wrinkling, you 
+have rendered for you exactly the fixed look in the eyes, and 
+the unconscious compression of the mouth, that befit and 
+signify an effort of the kind.  The whole pose, the whole 
+expression, is absolutely direct and simple.  You are ready to 
+take your oath to it that Colonel Lyon had no idea he was 
+sitting for his picture, and thought of nothing in the world 
+besides his own occupation of the moment.
+
+Although the collection did not embrace, I understand, 
+nearly the whole of Raeburn's works, it was too large not to 
+contain some that were indifferent, whether as works of art or 
+as portraits.  Certainly the standard was remarkably high, and 
+was wonderfully maintained, but there were one or two pictures 
+that might have been almost as well away - one or two that 
+seemed wanting in salt, and some that you can only hope were 
+not successful likenesses.  Neither of the portraits of Sir 
+Walter Scott, for instance, were very agreeable to look upon.  
+You do not care to think that Scott looked quite so rustic and 
+puffy.  And where is that peaked forehead which, according to 
+all written accounts and many portraits, was the 
+distinguishing characteristic of his face?  Again, in spite of 
+his own satisfaction and in spite of Dr. John Brown, I cannot 
+consider that Raeburn was very happy in hands.  Without doubt, 
+he could paint one if he had taken the trouble to study it; 
+but it was by no means always that he gave himself the 
+trouble.  Looking round one of these rooms hung about with his 
+portraits, you were struck with the array of expressive faces, 
+as compared with what you may have seen in looking round a 
+room full of living people.  But it was not so with the hands.  
+The portraits differed from each other in face perhaps ten 
+times as much as they differed by the hand; whereas with 
+living people the two go pretty much together; and where one 
+is remarkable, the other will almost certainly not be 
+commonplace.
+
+One interesting portrait was that of Duncan of 
+Camperdown.  He stands in uniform beside a table, his feet 
+slightly straddled with the balance of an old sailor, his hand 
+poised upon a chart by the finger tips.  The mouth is pursed, 
+the nostril spread and drawn up, the eyebrows very highly 
+arched.  The cheeks lie along the jaw in folds of iron, and 
+have the redness that comes from much exposure to salt sea 
+winds.  From the whole figure, attitude and countenance, there 
+breathes something precise and decisive, something alert, 
+wiry, and strong.  You can understand, from the look of him, 
+that sense, not so much of humour, as of what is grimmest and 
+driest in pleasantry, which inspired his address before the 
+fight at Camperdown.  He had just overtaken the Dutch fleet 
+under Admiral de Winter.  "Gentlemen," says he, "you see a 
+severe winter approaching; I have only to advise you to keep 
+up a good fire."  Somewhat of this same spirit of adamantine 
+drollery must have supported him in the days of the mutiny at 
+the Nore, when he lay off the Texel with his own flagship, the 
+VENERABLE, and only one other vessel, and kept up active 
+signals, as though he had a powerful fleet in the offing, to 
+intimidate the Dutch.
+
+Another portrait which irresistibly attracted the eye, 
+was the half-length of Robert M'Queen, of Braxfield, Lord 
+Justice-Clerk.  If I know gusto in painting when I see it, 
+this canvas was painted with rare enjoyment.  The tart, rosy, 
+humorous look of the man, his nose like a cudgel, his face 
+resting squarely on the jowl, has been caught and perpetuated 
+with something that looks like brotherly love.  A peculiarly 
+subtle expression haunts the lower part, sensual and 
+incredulous, like that of a man tasting good Bordeaux with 
+half a fancy it has been somewhat too long uncorked.  From 
+under the pendulous eyelids of old age the eyes look out with 
+a half-youthful, half-frosty twinkle.  Hands, with no pretence 
+to distinction, are folded on the judge's stomach.  So 
+sympathetically is the character conceived by the portrait 
+painter, that it is hardly possible to avoid some movement of 
+sympathy on the part of the spectator.  And sympathy is a 
+thing to be encouraged, apart from humane considerations, 
+because it supplies us with the materials for wisdom.  It is 
+probably more instructive to entertain a sneaking kindness for 
+any unpopular person, and, among the rest, for Lord Braxfield, 
+than to give way to perfect raptures of moral indignation 
+against his abstract vices.  He was the last judge on the 
+Scotch bench to employ the pure Scotch idiom.  His opinions, 
+thus given in Doric, and conceived in a lively, rugged, 
+conversational style, were full of point and authority.  Out 
+of the bar, or off the bench, he was a convivial man, a lover 
+of wine, and one who "shone peculiarly" at tavern meetings.  
+He has left behind him an unrivalled reputation for rough and 
+cruel speech; and to this day his name smacks of the gallows.  
+It was he who presided at the trials of Muir and Skirving in 
+1793 and 1794; and his appearance on these occasions was 
+scarcely cut to the pattern of to-day.  His summing up on Muir 
+began thus - the reader must supply for himself "the growling, 
+blacksmith's voice" and the broad Scotch accent: "Now this is 
+the question for consideration - Is the panel guilty of 
+sedition, or is he not?  Now, before this can be answered, two 
+things must be attended to that require no proof: FIRST, that 
+the British constitution is the best that ever was since the 
+creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it 
+better."  It's a pretty fair start, is it not, for a political 
+trial?  A little later, he has occasion to refer to the 
+relations of Muir with "those wretches," the French.  "I never 
+liked the French all my days," said his lordship, "but now I 
+hate them."  And yet a little further on: "A government in any 
+country should be like a corporation; and in this country it 
+is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to 
+be represented.  As for the rabble who have nothing but 
+personal property, what hold has the nation of them?  They may 
+pack up their property on their backs, and leave the country 
+in the twinkling of an eye."  After having made profession of 
+sentiments so cynically anti-popular as these, when the trials 
+were at an end, which was generally about midnight, Braxfield 
+would walk home to his house in George Square with no better 
+escort than an easy conscience.  I think I see him getting his 
+cloak about his shoulders, and, with perhaps a lantern in one 
+hand, steering his way along the streets in the mirk January 
+night.  It might have been that very day that Skirving had 
+defied him in these words: "It is altogether unavailing for 
+your lordship to menace me; for I have long learned to fear 
+not the face of man;" and I can fancy, as Braxfield reflected 
+on the number of what he called GRUMBLETONIANS in Edinburgh, 
+and of how many of them must bear special malice against so 
+upright and inflexible a judge, nay, and might at that very 
+moment be lurking in the mouth of a dark close with hostile 
+intent - I can fancy that he indulged in a sour smile, as he 
+reflected that he also was not especially afraid of men's 
+faces or men's fists, and had hitherto found no occasion to 
+embody this insensibility in heroic words.  For if he was an 
+inhumane old gentleman (and I am afraid it is a fact that he 
+was inhumane), he was also perfectly intrepid.  You may look 
+into the queer face of that portrait for as long as you will, 
+but you will not see any hole or corner for timidity to enter 
+in.
+
+Indeed, there would be no end to this paper if I were 
+even to name half of the portraits that were remarkable for 
+their execution, or interesting by association.  There was one 
+picture of Mr. Wardrop, of Torbane Hill, which you might palm 
+off upon most laymen as a Rembrandt; and close by, you saw the 
+white head of John Clerk, of Eldin, that country gentleman 
+who, playing with pieces of cork on his own dining-table, 
+invented modern naval warfare.  There was that portrait of 
+Neil Gow, to sit for which the old fiddler walked daily 
+through the streets of Edinburgh arm in arm with the Duke of 
+Athole.  There was good Harry Erskine, with his satirical nose 
+and upper lip, and his mouth just open for a witticism to pop 
+out; Hutton the geologist, in quakerish raiment, and looking 
+altogether trim and narrow, and as if he cared more about 
+fossils than young ladies; full-blown John Robieson, in 
+hyperbolical red dressing-gown, and, every inch of him, a fine 
+old man of the world; Constable the publisher, upright beside 
+a table, and bearing a corporation with commercial dignity; 
+Lord Bannatyne hearing a cause, if ever anybody heard a cause 
+since the world began; Lord Newton just awakened from 
+clandestine slumber on the bench; and the second President 
+Dundas, with every feature so fat that he reminds you, in his 
+wig, of some droll old court officer in an illustrated nursery 
+story-book, and yet all these fat features instinct with 
+meaning, the fat lips curved and compressed, the nose 
+combining somehow the dignity of a beak with the good nature 
+of a bottle, and the very double chin with an air of 
+intelligence and insight.  And all these portraits are so pat 
+and telling, and look at you so spiritedly from the walls, 
+that, compared with the sort of living people one sees about 
+the streets, they are as bright new sovereigns to fishy and 
+obliterated sixpences.  Some disparaging thoughts upon our own 
+generation could hardly fail to present themselves; but it is 
+perhaps only the SACER VATES who is wanting; and we also, 
+painted by such a man as Carolus Duran, may look in holiday 
+immortality upon our children and grandchildren.
+
+Raeburn's young women, to be frank, are by no means of 
+the same order of merit.  No one, of course, could be 
+insensible to the presence of Miss Janet Suttie or Mrs. 
+Campbell of Possil.  When things are as pretty as that, 
+criticism is out of season.  But, on the whole, it is only 
+with women of a certain age that he can be said to have 
+succeeded, in at all the same sense as we say he succeeded 
+with men.  The younger women do not seem to be made of good 
+flesh and blood.  They are not painted in rich and unctuous 
+touches.  They are dry and diaphanous.  And although young 
+ladies in Great Britain are all that can be desired of them, I 
+would fain hope they are not quite so much of that as Raeburn 
+would have us believe.  In all these pretty faces, you miss 
+character, you miss fire, you miss that spice of the devil 
+which is worth all the prettiness in the world; and what is 
+worst of all, you miss sex.  His young ladies are not womanly 
+to nearly the same degree as his men are masculine; they are 
+so in a negative sense; in short, they are the typical young 
+ladies of the male novelist.
+
+To say truth, either Raeburn was timid with young and 
+pretty sitters; or he had stupefied himself with 
+sentimentalities; or else (and here is about the truth of it) 
+Raeburn and the rest of us labour under an obstinate blindness 
+in one direction, and know very little more about women after 
+all these centuries than Adam when he first saw Eve.  This is 
+all the more likely, because we are by no means so 
+unintelligent in the matter of old women.  There are some 
+capital old women, it seems to me, in books written by men.  
+And Raeburn has some, such as Mrs. Colin Campbell, of Park, or 
+the anonymous "Old lady with a large cap," which are done in 
+the same frank, perspicacious spirit as the very best of his 
+men.  He could look into their eyes without trouble; and he 
+was not withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from 
+recognising what he saw there and unsparingly putting it down 
+upon the canvas.  But where people cannot meet without some 
+confusion and a good deal of involuntary humbug, and are 
+occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very 
+different vein of thought, there cannot be much room for 
+intelligent study nor much result in the shape of genuine 
+comprehension.  Even women, who understand men so well for 
+practical purposes, do not know them well enough for the 
+purposes of art.  Take even the very best of their male 
+creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will find 
+he has an equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he 
+has a comb at the back of his head.  Of course, no woman will 
+believe this, and many men will be so very polite as to humour 
+their incredulity.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX - CHILD'S PLAY
+
+
+
+THE regret we have for our childhood is not wholly 
+justifiable: so much a man may lay down without fear of public 
+ribaldry; for although we shake our heads over the change, we 
+are not unconscious of the manifold advantages of our new 
+state.  What we lose in generous impulse, we more than gain in 
+the habit of generously watching others; and the capacity to 
+enjoy Shakespeare may balance a lost aptitude for playing at 
+soldiers.  Terror is gone out of our lives, moreover; we no 
+longer see the devil in the bed-curtains nor lie awake to 
+listen to the wind.  We go to school no more; and if we have 
+only exchanged one drudgery for another (which is by no means 
+sure), we are set free for ever from the daily fear of 
+chastisement.  And yet a great change has overtaken us; and 
+although we do not enjoy ourselves less, at least we take our 
+pleasure differently.  We need pickles nowadays to make 
+Wednesday's cold mutton please our Friday's appetite; and I 
+can remember the time when to call it red venison, and tell 
+myself a hunter's story, would have made it more palatable 
+than the best of sauces.  To the grown person, cold mutton is 
+cold mutton all the world over; not all the mythology ever 
+invented by man will make it better or worse to him; the broad 
+fact, the clamant reality, of the mutton carries away before 
+it such seductive figments.  But for the child it is still 
+possible to weave an enchantment over eatables; and if he has 
+but read of a dish in a story-book, it will be heavenly manna 
+to him for a week.
+
+If a grown man does not like eating and drinking and 
+exercise, if he is not something positive in his tastes, it 
+means he has a feeble body and should have some medicine; but 
+children may be pure spirits, if they will, and take their 
+enjoyment in a world of moon-shine.  Sensation does not count 
+for so much in our first years as afterwards; something of the 
+swaddling numbness of infancy clings about us; we see and 
+touch and hear through a sort of golden mist.  Children, for 
+instance, are able enough to see, but they have no great 
+faculty for looking; they do not use their eyes for the 
+pleasure of using them, but for by-ends of their own; and the 
+things I call to mind seeing most vividly, were not beautiful 
+in themselves, but merely interesting or enviable to me as I 
+thought they might be turned to practical account in play.  
+Nor is the sense of touch so clean and poignant in children as 
+it is in a man.  If you will turn over your old memories, I 
+think the sensations of this sort you remember will be 
+somewhat vague, and come to not much more than a blunt, 
+general sense of heat on summer days, or a blunt, general 
+sense of wellbeing in bed.  And here, of course, you will 
+understand pleasurable sensations; for overmastering pain - 
+the most deadly and tragical element in life, and the true 
+commander of man's soul and body - alas! pain has its own way 
+with all of us; it breaks in, a rude visitant, upon the fairy 
+garden where the child wanders in a dream, no less surely than 
+it rules upon the field of battle, or sends the immortal war-
+god whimpering to his father; and innocence, no more than 
+philosophy, can protect us from this sting.  As for taste, 
+when we bear in mind the excesses of unmitigated sugar which 
+delight a youthful palate, "it is surely no very cynical 
+asperity" to think taste a character of the maturer growth.  
+Smell and hearing are perhaps more developed; I remember many 
+scents, many voices, and a great deal of spring singing in the 
+woods.  But hearing is capable of vast improvement as a means 
+of pleasure; and there is all the world between gaping 
+wonderment at the jargon of birds, and the emotion with which 
+a man listens to articulate music.
+
+At the same time, and step by step with this increase in 
+the definition and intensity of what we feel which accompanies 
+our growing age, another change takes place in the sphere of 
+intellect, by which all things are transformed and seen 
+through theories and associations as through coloured windows.  
+We make to ourselves day by day, out of history, and gossip, 
+and economical speculations, and God knows what, a medium in 
+which we walk and through which we look abroad.  We study shop 
+windows with other eyes than in our childhood, never to 
+wonder, not always to admire, but to make and modify our 
+little incongruous theories about life.  It is no longer the 
+uniform of a soldier that arrests our attention; but perhaps 
+the flowing carriage of a woman, or perhaps a countenance that 
+has been vividly stamped with passion and carries an 
+adventurous story written in its lines.  The pleasure of 
+surprise is passed away; sugar-loaves and water-carts seem 
+mighty tame to encounter; and we walk the streets to make 
+romances and to sociologise.  Nor must we deny that a good 
+many of us walk them solely for the purposes of transit or in 
+the interest of a livelier digestion.  These, indeed, may look 
+back with mingled thoughts upon their childhood, but the rest 
+are in a better case; they know more than when they were 
+children, they understand better, their desires and sympathies 
+answer more nimbly to the provocation of the senses, and their 
+minds are brimming with interest as they go about the world.
+
+According to my contention, this is a flight to which 
+children cannot rise.  They are wheeled in perambulators or 
+dragged about by nurses in a pleasing stupor.  A vague, faint, 
+abiding, wonderment possesses them.  Here and there some 
+specially remarkable circumstance, such as a water-cart or a 
+guardsman, fairly penetrates into the seat of thought and 
+calls them, for half a moment, out of themselves; and you may 
+see them, still towed forward sideways by the inexorable nurse 
+as by a sort of destiny, but still staring at the bright 
+object in their wake.  It may be some minutes before another 
+such moving spectacle reawakens them to the world in which 
+they dwell.  For other children, they almost invariably show 
+some intelligent sympathy.  "There is a fine fellow making mud 
+pies," they seem to say; "that I can understand, there is some 
+sense in mud pies."  But the doings of their elders, unless 
+where they are speakingly picturesque or recommend themselves 
+by the quality of being easily imitable, they let them go over 
+their heads (as we say) without the least regard.  If it were 
+not for this perpetual imitation, we should be tempted to 
+fancy they despised us outright, or only considered us in the 
+light of creatures brutally strong and brutally silly; among 
+whom they condescended to dwell in obedience like a 
+philosopher at a barbarous court.  At times, indeed, they 
+display an arrogance of disregard that is truly staggering.  
+Once, when I was groaning aloud with physical pain, a young 
+gentleman came into the room and nonchalantly inquired if I 
+had seen his bow and arrow.  He made no account of my groans, 
+which he accepted, as he had to accept so much else, as a 
+piece of the inexplicable conduct of his elders; and like a 
+wise young gentleman, he would waste no wonder on the subject.  
+Those elders, who care so little for rational enjoyment, and 
+are even the enemies of rational enjoyment for others, he had 
+accepted without understanding and without complaint, as the 
+rest of us accept the scheme of the universe.
+
+We grown people can tell ourselves a story, give and take 
+strokes until the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, 
+fall, and die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire or 
+lying prone in bed.  This is exactly what a child cannot do, 
+or does not do, at least, when he can find anything else.  He 
+works all with lay figures and stage properties.  When his 
+story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by 
+way of a sword and have a set-to with a piece of furniture, 
+until he is out of breath.  When he comes to ride with the 
+king's pardon, he must bestride a chair, which he will so 
+hurry and belabour and on which he will so furiously demean 
+himself, that the messenger will arrive, if not bloody with 
+spurring, at least fiery red with haste.  If his romance 
+involves an accident upon a cliff, he must clamber in person 
+about the chest of drawers and fall bodily upon the carpet, 
+before his imagination is satisfied.  Lead soldiers, dolls, 
+all toys, in short, are in the same category and answer the 
+same end.  Nothing can stagger a child's faith; he accepts the 
+clumsiest substitutes and can swallow the most staring 
+incongruities.  The chair he has just been besieging as a 
+castle, or valiantly cutting to the ground as a dragon, is 
+taken away for the accommodation of a morning visitor, and he 
+is nothing abashed; he can skirmish by the hour with a 
+stationary coal-scuttle; in the midst of the enchanted 
+pleasance, he can see, without sensible shock, the gardener 
+soberly digging potatoes for the day's dinner.  He can make 
+abstraction of whatever does not fit into his fable; and he 
+puts his eyes into his pocket, just as we hold our noses in an 
+unsavoury lane.  And so it is, that although the ways of 
+children cross with those of their elders in a hundred places 
+daily, they never go in the same direction nor so much as lie 
+in the same element.  So may the telegraph wires intersect the 
+line of the high-road, or so might a landscape painter and a 
+bagman visit the same country, and yet move in different 
+worlds.
+
+People struck with these spectacles cry aloud about the 
+power of imagination in the young.  Indeed there may be two 
+words to that.  It is, in some ways, but a pedestrian fancy 
+that the child exhibits.  It is the grown people who make the 
+nursery stories; all the children do, is jealously to preserve 
+the text.  One out of a dozen reasons why ROBINSON CRUSOE 
+should be so popular with youth, is that it hits their level 
+in this matter to a nicety; Crusoe was always at makeshifts 
+and had, in so many words, to PLAY at a great variety of 
+professions; and then the book is all about tools, and there 
+is nothing that delights a child so much.  Hammers and saws 
+belong to a province of life that positively calls for 
+imitation.  The juvenile lyrical drama, surely of the most 
+ancient Thespian model, wherein the trades of mankind are 
+successively simulated to the running burthen "On a cold and 
+frosty morning," gives a good instance of the artistic taste 
+in children.  And this need for overt action and lay figures 
+testifies to a defect in the child's imagination which 
+prevents him from carrying out his novels in the privacy of 
+his own heart.  He does not yet know enough of the world and 
+men.  His experience is incomplete.  That stage-wardrobe and 
+scene-room that we call the memory is so ill provided, that he 
+can overtake few combinations and body out few stories, to his 
+own content, without some external aid.  He is at the 
+experimental stage; he is not sure how one would feel in 
+certain circumstances; to make sure, he must come as near 
+trying it as his means permit.  And so here is young heroism 
+with a wooden sword, and mothers practice their kind vocation 
+over a bit of jointed stick.  It may be laughable enough just 
+now; but it is these same people and these same thoughts, that 
+not long hence, when they are on the theatre of life, will 
+make you weep and tremble.  For children think very much the 
+same thoughts and dream the same dreams, as bearded men and 
+marriageable women.  No one is more romantic.  Fame and 
+honour, the love of young men and the love of mothers, the 
+business man's pleasure in method, all these and others they 
+anticipate and rehearse in their play hours.  Upon us, who are 
+further advanced and fairly dealing with the threads of 
+destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a hint 
+for their own mimetic reproduction.  Two children playing at 
+soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of 
+the scarlet beings whom both are busy imitating.  This is 
+perhaps the greatest oddity of all.  "Art for art" is their 
+motto; and the doings of grown folk are only interesting as 
+the raw material for play.  Not Theophile Gautier, not 
+Flaubert, can look more callously upon life, or rate the 
+reproduction more highly over the reality; and they will 
+parody an execution, a deathbed, or the funeral of the young 
+man of Nain, with all the cheerfulness in the world.
+
+The true parallel for play is not to be found, of course, 
+in conscious art, which, though it be derived from play, is 
+itself an abstract, impersonal thing, and depends largely upon 
+philosophical interests beyond the scope of childhood.  It is 
+when we make castles in the air and personate the leading 
+character in our own romances, that we return to the spirit of 
+our first years.  Only, there are several reasons why the 
+spirit is no longer so agreeable to indulge.  Nowadays, when 
+we admit this personal element into our divagations we are apt 
+to stir up uncomfortable and sorrowful memories, and remind 
+ourselves sharply of old wounds.  Our day-dreams can no longer 
+lie all in the air like a story in the ARABIAN NIGHTS; they 
+read to us rather like the history of a period in which we 
+ourselves had taken part, where we come across many 
+unfortunate passages and find our own conduct smartly 
+reprimanded.  And then the child, mind you, acts his parts.  
+He does not merely repeat them to himself; he leaps, he runs, 
+and sets the blood agog over all his body.  And so his play 
+breathes him; and he no sooner assumes a passion than he gives 
+it vent.  Alas! when we betake ourselves to our intellectual 
+form of play, sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in 
+bed, we rouse many hot feelings for which we can find no 
+outlet.  Substitutes are not acceptable to the mature mind, 
+which desires the thing itself; and even to rehearse a 
+triumphant dialogue with one's enemy, although it is perhaps 
+the most satisfactory piece of play still left within our 
+reach, is not entirely satisfying, and is even apt to lead to 
+a visit and an interview which may be the reverse of 
+triumphant after all.
+
+In the child's world of dim sensation, play is all in 
+all.  "Making believe" is the gist of his whole life, and he 
+cannot so much as take a walk except in character.  I could 
+not learn my alphabet without some suitable MISE-EN-SCENE, and 
+had to act a business man in an office before I could sit down 
+to my book.  Will you kindly question your memory, and find 
+out how much you did, work or pleasure, in good faith and 
+soberness, and for how much you had to cheat yourself with 
+some invention?  I remember, as though it were yesterday, the 
+expansion of spirit, the dignity and self-reliance, that came 
+with a pair of mustachios in burnt cork, even when there was 
+none to see.  Children are even content to forego what we call 
+the realities, and prefer the shadow to the substance.  When 
+they might be speaking intelligibly together, they chatter 
+senseless gibberish by the hour, and are quite happy because 
+they are making believe to speak French.  I have said already 
+how even the imperious appetite of hunger suffers itself to be 
+gulled and led by the nose with the fag end of an old song.  
+And it goes deeper than this: when children are together even 
+a meal is felt as an interruption in the business of life; and 
+they must find some imaginative sanction, and tell themselves 
+some sort of story, to account for, to colour, to render 
+entertaining, the simple processes of eating and drinking.  
+What wonderful fancies I have heard evolved out of the pattern 
+upon tea-cups! - from which there followed a code of rules and 
+a whole world of excitement, until tea-drinking began to take 
+rank as a game.  When my cousin and I took our porridge of a 
+morning, we had a device to enliven the course of the meal.  
+He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country 
+continually buried under snow.  I took mine with milk, and 
+explained it to be a country suffering gradual inundation.  
+You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an 
+island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with 
+snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in 
+cabins on perches and travelled on stilts, and how mine was 
+always in boats; how the interest grew furious, as the last 
+corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew 
+smaller every moment; and how in fine, the food was of 
+altogether secondary importance, and might even have been 
+nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams.  But 
+perhaps the most exciting moments I ever had over a meal, were 
+in the case of calves' feet jelly.  It was hardly possible not 
+to believe - and you may be sure, so far from trying, I did 
+all I could to favour the illusion - that some part of it was 
+hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the 
+secret tabernacle of the golden rock.  There, might some 
+miniature RED BEARD await his hour; there, might one find the 
+treasures of the FORTY THIEVES, and bewildered Cassim beating 
+about the walls.  And so I quarried on slowly, with bated 
+breath, savouring the interest.  Believe me, I had little 
+palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste 
+when I took cream with it, I used often to go without, because 
+the cream dimmed the transparent fractures.
+
+Even with games, this spirit is authoritative with right-
+minded children.  It is thus that hide-and-seek has so pre-
+eminent a sovereignty, for it is the wellspring of romance, 
+and the actions and the excitement to which it gives rise lend 
+themselves to almost any sort of fable.  And thus cricket, 
+which is a mere matter of dexterity, palpably about nothing 
+and for no end, often fails to satisfy infantile craving.  It 
+is a game, if you like, but not a game of play.  You cannot 
+tell yourself a story about cricket; and the activity it calls 
+forth can be justified on no rational theory.  Even football, 
+although it admirably simulates the tug and the ebb and flow 
+of battle, has presented difficulties to the mind of young 
+sticklers after verisimilitude; and I knew at least one little 
+boy who was mightily exercised about the presence of the ball, 
+and had to spirit himself up, whenever he came to play, with 
+an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a 
+sort of talisman bandied about in conflict between two Arabian 
+nations.
+
+To think of such a frame of mind, is to become disquieted 
+about the bringing up of children.  Surely they dwell in a 
+mythological epoch, and are not the contemporaries of their 
+parents.  What can they think of them? what can they make of 
+these bearded or petticoated giants who look down upon their 
+games? who move upon a cloudy Olympus, following unknown 
+designs apart from rational enjoyment? who profess the 
+tenderest solicitude for children, and yet every now and again 
+reach down out of their altitude and terribly vindicate the 
+prerogatives of age?  Off goes the child, corporally smarting, 
+but morally rebellious.  Were there ever such unthinkable 
+deities as parents?  I would give a great deal to know what, 
+in nine cases out of ten, is the child's unvarnished feeling.  
+A sense of past cajolery; a sense of personal attraction, at 
+best very feeble; above all, I should imagine, a sense of 
+terror for the untried residue of mankind go to make up the 
+attraction that he feels.  No wonder, poor little heart, with 
+such a weltering world in front of him, if he clings to the 
+hand he knows!  The dread irrationality of the whole affair, 
+as it seems to children, is a thing we are all too ready to 
+forget.  "O, why," I remember passionately wondering, "why can 
+we not all be happy and devote ourselves to play?"  And when 
+children do philosophise, I believe it is usually to very much 
+the same purpose.
+
+One thing, at least, comes very clearly out of these 
+considerations; that whatever we are to expect at the hands of 
+children, it should not be any peddling exactitude about 
+matters of fact.  They walk in a vain show, and among mists 
+and rainbows; they are passionate after dreams and unconcerned 
+about realities; speech is a difficult art not wholly learned; 
+and there is nothing in their own tastes or purposes to teach 
+them what we mean by abstract truthfulness.  When a bad writer 
+is inexact, even if he can look back on half a century of 
+years, we charge him with incompetence and not with 
+dishonesty.  And why not extend the same allowance to 
+imperfect speakers?  Let a stockbroker be dead stupid about 
+poetry, or a poet inexact in the details of business, and we 
+excuse them heartily from blame.  But show us a miserable, 
+unbreeched, human entity, whose whole profession it is to take 
+a tub for a fortified town and a shaving-brush for the deadly 
+stiletto, and who passes three-fourths of his time in a dream 
+and the rest in open self-deception, and we expect him to be 
+as nice upon a matter of fact as a scientific expert bearing 
+evidence.  Upon my heart, I think it less than decent.  You do 
+not consider how little the child sees, or how swift he is to 
+weave what he has seen into bewildering fiction; and that he 
+cares no more for what you call truth, than you for a 
+gingerbread dragoon.
+
+I am reminded, as I write, that the child is very 
+inquiring as to the precise truth of stories.  But indeed this 
+is a very different matter, and one bound up with the subject 
+of play, and the precise amount of playfulness, or 
+playability, to be looked for in the world.  Many such burning 
+questions must arise in the course of nursery education.  
+Among the fauna of this planet, which already embraces the 
+pretty soldier and the terrifying Irish beggarman, is, or is 
+not, the child to expect a Bluebeard or a Cormoran?  Is he, or 
+is he not, to look out for magicians, kindly and potent?  May 
+he, or may he not, reasonably hope to be cast away upon a 
+desert island, or turned to such diminutive proportions that 
+he can live on equal terms with his lead soldiery, and go a 
+cruise in his own toy schooner?  Surely all these are 
+practical questions to a neophyte entering upon life with a 
+view to play.  Precision upon such a point, the child can 
+understand.  But if you merely ask him of his past behaviour, 
+as to who threw such a stone, for instance, or struck such and 
+such a match; or whether he had looked into a parcel or gone 
+by a forbidden path, - why, he can see no moment in the 
+inquiry, and it is ten to one, he has already half forgotten 
+and half bemused himself with subsequent imaginings.
+
+It would be easy to leave them in their native cloudland, 
+where they figure so prettily - pretty like flowers and 
+innocent like dogs.  They will come out of their gardens soon 
+enough, and have to go into offices and the witness-box.  
+Spare them yet a while, O conscientious parent!  Let them doze 
+among their playthings yet a little! for who knows what a 
+rough, warfaring existence lies before them in the future?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X - WALKING TOURS
+
+
+
+IT must not be imagined that a walking tour, as some 
+would have us fancy, is merely a better or worse way of seeing 
+the country.  There are many ways of seeing landscape quite as 
+good; and none more vivid, in spite of canting dilettantes, 
+than from a railway train.  But landscape on a walking tour is 
+quite accessory.  He who is indeed of the brotherhood does not 
+voyage in quest of the picturesque, but of certain jolly 
+humours - of the hope and spirit with which the march begins 
+at morning, and the peace and spiritual repletion of the 
+evening's rest.  He cannot tell whether he puts his knapsack 
+on, or takes it off, with more delight.  The excitement of the 
+departure puts him in key for that of the arrival.  Whatever 
+he does is not only a reward in itself, but will be further 
+rewarded in the sequel; and so pleasure leads on to pleasure 
+in an endless chain.  It is this that so few can understand; 
+they will either be always lounging or always at five miles an 
+hour; they do not play off the one against the other, prepare 
+all day for the evening, and all evening for the next day.  
+And, above all, it is here that your overwalker fails of 
+comprehension.  His heart rises against those who drink their 
+curacoa in liqueur glasses, when he himself can swill it in a 
+brown john.  He will not believe that the flavour is more 
+delicate in the smaller dose.  He will not believe that to 
+walk this unconscionable distance is merely to stupefy and 
+brutalise himself, and come to his inn, at night, with a sort 
+of frost on his five wits, and a starless night of darkness in 
+his spirit.  Not for him the mild luminous evening of the 
+temperate walker!  He has nothing left of man but a physical 
+need for bedtime and a double nightcap; and even his pipe, if 
+he be a smoker, will be savourless and disenchanted.  It is 
+the fate of such an one to take twice as much trouble as is 
+needed to obtain happiness, and miss the happiness in the end; 
+he is the man of the proverb, in short, who goes further and 
+fares worse.
+
+Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be 
+gone upon alone.  If you go in a company, or even in pairs, it 
+is no longer a walking tour in anything but name; it is 
+something else and more in the nature of a picnic.  A walking 
+tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the 
+essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and 
+follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because 
+you must have your own pace, and neither trot alongside a 
+champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl.  And then you 
+must be open to all impressions and let your thoughts take 
+colour from what you see.  You should be as a pipe for any 
+wind to play upon.  "I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of 
+walking and talking at the same time.  When I am in the 
+country I wish to vegetate like the country," - which is the 
+gist of all that can be said upon the matter.  There should be 
+no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative 
+silence of the morning.  And so long as a man is reasoning he 
+cannot surrender himself to that fine intoxication that comes 
+of much motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of 
+dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that 
+passes comprehension.
+
+During the first day or so of any tour there are moments 
+of bitterness, when the traveller feels more than coldly 
+towards his knapsack, when he is half in a mind to throw it 
+bodily over the hedge and, like Christian on a similar 
+occasion, "give three leaps and go on singing."  And yet it 
+soon acquires a property of easiness.  It becomes magnetic; 
+the spirit of the journey enters into it.  And no sooner have 
+you passed the straps over your shoulder than the lees of 
+sleep are cleared from you, you pull yourself together with a 
+shake, and fall at once into your stride.  And surely, of all 
+possible moods, this, in which a man takes the road, is the 
+best.  Of course, if he WILL keep thinking of his anxieties, 
+if he WILL open the merchant Abudah's chest and walk arm-in-
+arm with the hag - why, wherever he is, and whether he walk 
+fast or slow, the chances are that he will not be happy.  And 
+so much the more shame to himself!  There are perhaps thirty 
+men setting forth at that same hour, and I would lay a large 
+wager there is not another dull face among the thirty.  It 
+would be a fine thing to follow, in a coat of darkness, one 
+after another of these wayfarers, some summer morning, for the 
+first few miles upon the road.  This one, who walks fast, with 
+a keen look in his eyes, is all concentrated in his own mind; 
+he is up at his loom, weaving and weaving, to set the 
+landscape to words.  This one peers about, as he goes, among 
+the grasses; he waits by the canal to watch the dragon-flies; 
+he leans on the gate of the pasture, and cannot look enough 
+upon the complacent kine.  And here comes another, talking, 
+laughing, and gesticulating to himself.  His face changes from 
+time to time, as indignation flashes from his eyes or anger 
+clouds his forehead.  He is composing articles, delivering 
+orations, and conducting the most impassioned interviews, by 
+the way.  A little farther on, and it is as like as not he 
+will begin to sing.  And well for him, supposing him to be no 
+great master in that art, if he stumble across no stolid 
+peasant at a corner; for on such an occasion, I scarcely know 
+which is the more troubled, or whether it is worse to suffer 
+the confusion of your troubadour, or the unfeigned alarm of 
+your clown.  A sedentary population, accustomed, besides, to 
+the strange mechanical bearing of the common tramp, can in no 
+wise explain to itself the gaiety of these passers-by.  I knew 
+one man who was arrested as a runaway lunatic, because, 
+although a full-grown person with a red beard, he skipped as 
+he went like a child.  And you would be astonished if I were 
+to tell you all the grave and learned heads who have confessed 
+to me that, when on walking tours, they sang - and sang very 
+ill - and had a pair of red ears when, as described above, the 
+inauspicious peasant plumped into their arms from round a 
+corner.  And here, lest you should think I am exaggerating, is 
+Hazlitt's own confession, from his essay ON GOING A JOURNEY, 
+which is so good that there should be a tax levied on all who 
+have not read it:-
+
+"Give me the clear blue sky over my head," says he, "and 
+the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and 
+a three hours' march to dinner - and then to thinking!  It is 
+hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths.  I 
+laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy."
+
+Bravo!  After that adventure of my friend with the 
+policeman, you would not have cared, would you, to publish 
+that in the first person?  But we have no bravery nowadays, 
+and, even in books, must all pretend to be as dull and foolish 
+as our neighbours.  It was not so with Hazlitt.  And notice 
+how learned he is (as, indeed, throughout the essay) in the 
+theory of walking tours.  He is none of your athletic men in 
+purple stockings, who walk their fifty miles a day: three 
+hours' march is his ideal.  And then he must have a winding 
+road, the epicure!
+
+Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, 
+one thing in the great master's practice that seems to me not 
+wholly wise.  I do not approve of that leaping and running.  
+Both of these hurry the respiration; they both shake up the 
+brain out of its glorious open-air confusion; and they both 
+break the pace.  Uneven walking is not so agreeable to the 
+body, and it distracts and irritates the mind.  Whereas, when 
+once you have fallen into an equable stride, it requires no 
+conscious thought from you to keep it up, and yet it prevents 
+you from thinking earnestly of anything else.  Like knitting, 
+like the work of a copying clerk, it gradually neutralises and 
+sets to sleep the serious activity of the mind.  We can think 
+of this or that, lightly and laughingly, as a child thinks, or 
+as we think in a morning dose; we can make puns or puzzle out 
+acrostics, and trifle in a thousand ways with words and 
+rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to 
+gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the 
+trumpet as loud and long as we please; the great barons of the 
+mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one, at 
+home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on his 
+own private thought!
+
+In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much 
+variance in the mood.  From the exhilaration of the start, to 
+the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly 
+great.  As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one 
+extreme towards the other.  He becomes more and more 
+incorporated with the material landscape, and the open-air 
+drunkenness grows upon him with great strides, until he posts 
+along the road, and sees everything about him, as in a 
+cheerful dream.  The first is certainly brighter, but the 
+second stage is the more peaceful.  A man does not make so 
+many articles towards the end, nor does he laugh aloud; but 
+the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical wellbeing, 
+the delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles 
+tighten down the thigh, console him for the absence of the 
+others, and bring him to his destination still content.
+
+Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs.  You come to 
+a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep ways meet 
+under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit to 
+smoke a pipe in the shade.  You sink into yourself, and the 
+birds come round and look at you; and your smoke dissipates 
+upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun 
+lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck 
+and turns aside your open shirt.  If you are not happy, you 
+must have an evil conscience.  You may dally as long as you 
+like by the roadside.  It is almost as if the millennium were 
+arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the 
+housetop, and remember time and seasons no more.  Not to keep 
+hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for ever.  
+You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long 
+is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and 
+bring to an end only when you are drowsy.  I know a village 
+where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of 
+the days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the fete 
+on Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of 
+the month, and she is generally wrong; and if people were 
+aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what 
+armfuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, 
+to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede 
+out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, 
+where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out 
+each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a 
+wager.  And all these foolish pilgrims would each bring his 
+own misery along with him, in a watch-pocket!  It is to be 
+noticed, there were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted 
+days before the flood.  It follows, of course, there were no 
+appointments, and punctuality was not yet thought upon.  
+"Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says 
+Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of 
+his covetousness."  And so I would say of a modern man of 
+business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, 
+give him the elixir of life - he has still a flaw at heart, he 
+still has his business habits.  Now, there is no time when 
+business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour.  
+And so during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost 
+free.
+
+But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour 
+comes.  There are no such pipes to be smoked as those that 
+follow a good day's march; the flavour of the tobacco is a 
+thing to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full and 
+so fine.  If you wind up the evening with grog, you will own 
+there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity 
+spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart.  If 
+you read a book - and you will never do so save by fits and 
+starts - you find the language strangely racy and harmonious; 
+words take a new meaning; single sentences possess the ear for 
+half an hour together; and the writer endears himself to you, 
+at every page, by the nicest coincidence of sentiment.  It 
+seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a 
+dream.  To all we have read on such occasions we look back 
+with special favour.  "It was on the 10th of April, 1798," 
+says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, "that I sat down to a 
+volume of the new HELOISE, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a 
+bottle of sherry and a cold chicken."  I should wish to quote 
+more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we 
+cannot write like Hazlitt.  And, talking of that, a volume of 
+Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a 
+journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs; and for TRISTRAM 
+SHANDY I can pledge a fair experience.
+
+If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better 
+in life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or 
+lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and 
+the quick fishes.  It is then, if ever, that you taste 
+Joviality to the full significance of that audacious word.  
+Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so 
+strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, 
+whatever you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of 
+pleasure.  You fall in talk with any one, wise or foolish, 
+drunk or sober.  And it seems as if a hot walk purged you, 
+more than of anything else, of all narrowness and pride, and 
+left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man 
+of science.  You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch 
+provincial humours develop themselves before you, now as a 
+laughable farce, and now grave and beautiful like an old tale.
+
+Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the 
+night, and surly weather imprisons you by the fire.  You may 
+remember how Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the 
+hours when he has been "happy thinking."  It is a phrase that 
+may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by 
+clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming 
+dial-plates.  For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off 
+projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into 
+solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no 
+time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the 
+Hills of Vanity.  Changed times, indeed, when we must sit all 
+night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed world 
+for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours without 
+discontent and be happy thinking.  We are in such haste to be 
+doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice 
+audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we 
+forget that one thing, of which these are but the parts - 
+namely, to live.  We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to 
+and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep.  And now you are 
+to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been 
+better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking.  To 
+sit still and contemplate, - to remember the faces of women 
+without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men 
+without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy, and 
+yet content to remain where and what you are - is not this to 
+know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness?  
+After all, it is not they who carry flags, but they who look 
+upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun of the 
+procession.  And once you are at that, you are in the very 
+humour of all social heresy.  It is no time for shuffling, or 
+for big, empty words.  If you ask yourself what you mean by 
+fame, riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you 
+go back into that kingdom of light imaginations, which seem so 
+vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth, and 
+so momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions 
+of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, cannot 
+stop to split differences between two degrees of the 
+infinitesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman 
+Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick's end.
+
+You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely 
+into the darkness, your body full of delicious pains, your 
+mind enthroned in the seventh circle of content; when suddenly 
+the mood changes, the weather-cock goes about, and you ask 
+yourself one question more: whether, for the interval, you 
+have been the wisest philosopher or the most egregious of 
+donkeys?  Human experience is not yet able to reply; but at 
+least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the 
+kingdoms of the earth.  And whether it was wise or foolish, 
+to-morrow's travel will carry you, body and mind, into some 
+different parish of the infinite.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI - PAN'S PIPES
+
+
+
+THE world in which we live has been variously said and 
+sung by the most ingenious poets and philosophers: these 
+reducing it to formulae and chemical ingredients, those 
+striking the lyre in high-sounding measures for the handiwork 
+of God.  What experience supplies is of a mingled tissue, and 
+the choosing mind has much to reject before it can get 
+together the materials of a theory.  Dew and thunder, 
+destroying Atilla and the Spring lambkins, belong to an order 
+of contrasts which no repetition can assimilate.  There is an 
+uncouth, outlandish strain throughout the web of the world, as 
+from a vexatious planet in the house of life.  Things are not 
+congruous and wear strange disguises: the consummate flower is 
+fostered out of dung, and after nourishing itself awhile with 
+heaven's delicate distillations, decays again into 
+indistinguishable soil; and with Caesar's ashes, Hamlet tells 
+us, the urchins make dirt pies and filthily besmear their 
+countenance.  Nay, the kindly shine of summer, when tracked 
+home with the scientific spyglass, is found to issue from the 
+most portentous nightmare of the universe - the great, 
+conflagrant sun: a world of hell's squibs, tumultuary, roaring 
+aloud, inimical to life.  The sun itself is enough to disgust 
+a human being of the scene which he inhabits; and you would 
+not fancy there was a green or habitable spot in a universe 
+thus awfully lighted up.  And yet it is by the blaze of such a 
+conflagration, to which the fire of Rome was but a spark, that 
+we do all our fiddling, and hold domestic tea-parties at the 
+arbour door.
+
+The Greeks figured Pan, the god of Nature, now terribly 
+stamping his foot, so that armies were dispersed; now by the 
+woodside on a summer noon trolling on his pipe until he 
+charmed the hearts of upland ploughmen.  And the Greeks, in so 
+figuring, uttered the last word of human experience.  To 
+certain smoke-dried spirits matter and motion and elastic 
+aethers, and the hypothesis of this or that other spectacled 
+professor, tell a speaking story; but for youth and all 
+ductile and congenial minds, Pan is not dead, but of all the 
+classic hierarchy alone survives in triumph; goat-footed, with 
+a gleeful and an angry look, the type of the shaggy world: and 
+in every wood, if you go with a spirit properly prepared, you 
+shall hear the note of his pipe.
+
+For it is a shaggy world, and yet studded with gardens; 
+where the salt and tumbling sea receives clear rivers running 
+from among reeds and lilies; fruitful and austere; a rustic 
+world; sunshiny, lewd, and cruel.  What is it the birds sing 
+among the trees in pairing-time?  What means the sound of the 
+rain falling far and wide upon the leafy forest?  To what tune 
+does the fisherman whistle, as he hauls in his net at morning, 
+and the bright fish are heaped inside the boat?  These are all 
+airs upon Pan's pipe; he it was who gave them breath in the 
+exultation of his heart, and gleefully modulated their outflow 
+with his lips and fingers.  The coarse mirth of herdsmen, 
+shaking the dells with laughter and striking out high echoes 
+from the rock; the tune of moving feet in the lamplit city, or 
+on the smooth ballroom floor; the hooves of many horses, 
+beating the wide pastures in alarm; the song of hurrying 
+rivers; the colour of clear skies; and smiles and the live 
+touch of hands; and the voice of things, and their significant 
+look, and the renovating influence they breathe forth - these 
+are his joyful measures, to which the whole earth treads in 
+choral harmony.  To this music the young lambs bound as to a 
+tabor, and the London shop-girl skips rudely in the dance.  
+For it puts a spirit of gladness in all hearts; and to look on 
+the happy side of nature is common, in their hours, to all 
+created things.  Some are vocal under a good influence, are 
+pleasing whenever they are pleased, and hand on their 
+happiness to others, as a child who, looking upon lovely 
+things, looks lovely.  Some leap to the strains with unapt 
+foot, and make a halting figure in the universal dance.  And 
+some, like sour spectators at the play, receive the music into 
+their hearts with an unmoved countenance, and walk like 
+strangers through the general rejoicing.  But let him feign 
+never so carefully, there is not a man but has his pulses 
+shaken when Pan trolls out a stave of ecstasy and sets the 
+world a-singing.
+
+Alas if that were all!  But oftentimes the air is 
+changed; and in the screech of the night wind, chasing navies, 
+subverting the tall ships and the rooted cedar of the hills; 
+in the random deadly levin or the fury of headlong floods, we 
+recognise the "dread foundation" of life and the anger in 
+Pan's heart.  Earth wages open war against her children, and 
+under her softest touch hides treacherous claws.  The cool 
+waters invite us in to drown; the domestic hearth burns up in 
+the hour of sleep, and makes an end of all.  Everything is 
+good or bad, helpful or deadly, not in itself, but by its 
+circumstances.  For a few bright days in England the hurricane 
+must break forth and the North Sea pay a toll of populous 
+ships.  And when the universal music has led lovers into the 
+paths of dalliance, confident of Nature's sympathy, suddenly 
+the air shifts into a minor, and death makes a clutch from his 
+ambuscade below the bed of marriage.  For death is given in a 
+kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, 
+where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes 
+its entrance from the mother's corpse.  It is no wonder, with 
+so traitorous a scheme of things, if the wise people who 
+created for us the idea of Pan thought that of all fears the 
+fear of him was the most terrible, since it embraces all.  And 
+still we preserve the phrase: a panic terror.  To reckon 
+dangers too curiously, to hearken too intently for the threat 
+that runs through all the winning music of the world, to hold 
+back the hand from the rose because of the thorn, and from 
+life because of death: this it is to be afraid of Pan.  Highly 
+respectable citizens who flee life's pleasures and 
+responsibilities and keep, with upright hat, upon the midway 
+of custom, avoiding the right hand and the left, the ecstasies 
+and the agonies, how surprised they would be if they could 
+hear their attitude mythologically expressed, and knew 
+themselves as tooth-chattering ones, who flee from Nature 
+because they fear the hand of Nature's God!  Shrilly sound 
+Pan's pipes; and behold the banker instantly concealed in the 
+bank parlour!  For to distrust one's impulses is to be 
+recreant to Pan.
+
+There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied 
+with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum 
+of man's experience.  Sometimes the mood is brought about by 
+laughter at the humorous side of life, as when, abstracting 
+ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, or 
+seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet all the 
+while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all 
+their hurry, they travel back-foremost through the universe of 
+space.  Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and 
+sometimes by the spirit of terror.  At least, there will 
+always be hours when we refuse to be put off by the feint of 
+explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead some 
+palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the 
+troubled and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy 
+reason by the means of art.  Science writes of the world as if 
+with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what 
+is it when compared to the reality of which it discourses? 
+where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills 
+totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the 
+objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and 
+Romance herself has made her dwelling among men?  So we come 
+back to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making 
+the music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and 
+when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan 
+leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our hearts 
+quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he 
+has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII - A PLEA FOR GAS LAMPS
+
+
+
+CITIES given, the problem was to light them.  How to 
+conduct individual citizens about the burgess-warren, when 
+once heaven had withdrawn its leading luminary? or - since we 
+live in a scientific age - when once our spinning planet has 
+turned its back upon the sun?  The moon, from time to time, 
+was doubtless very helpful; the stars had a cheery look among 
+the chimney-pots; and a cresset here and there, on church or 
+citadel, produced a fine pictorial effect, and, in places 
+where the ground lay unevenly, held out the right hand of 
+conduct to the benighted.  But sun, moon, and stars abstracted 
+or concealed, the night-faring inhabitant had to fall back - 
+we speak on the authority of old prints - upon stable 
+lanthorns two stories in height.  Many holes, drilled in the 
+conical turret-roof of this vagabond Pharos, let up spouts of 
+dazzlement into the bearer's eyes; and as he paced forth in 
+the ghostly darkness, carrying his own sun by a ring about his 
+finger, day and night swung to and fro and up and down about 
+his footsteps.  Blackness haunted his path; he was beleaguered 
+by goblins as he went; and, curfew being struck, he found no 
+light but that he travelled in throughout the township.
+
+Closely following on this epoch of migratory lanthorns in 
+a world of extinction, came the era of oil-lights, hard to 
+kindle, easy to extinguish, pale and wavering in the hour of 
+their endurance.  Rudely puffed the winds of heaven; roguishly 
+clomb up the all-destructive urchin; and, lo! in a moment 
+night re-established her void empire, and the cit groped along 
+the wall, suppered but bedless, occult from guidance, and 
+sorrily wading in the kennels.  As if gamesome winds and 
+gamesome youths were not sufficient, it was the habit to sling 
+these feeble luminaries from house to house above the fairway.  
+There, on invisible cordage, let them swing!  And suppose some 
+crane-necked general to go speeding by on a tall charger, 
+spurring the destiny of nations, red-hot in expedition, there 
+would indubitably be some effusion of military blood, and 
+oaths, and a certain crash of glass; and while the chieftain 
+rode forward with a purple coxcomb, the street would be left 
+to original darkness, unpiloted, unvoyageable, a province of 
+the desert night.
+
+The conservative, looking before and after, draws from 
+each contemplation the matter for content.  Out of the age of 
+gas lamps he glances back slightingly at the mirk and glimmer 
+in which his ancestors wandered; his heart waxes jocund at the 
+contrast; nor do his lips refrain from a stave, in the highest 
+style of poetry, lauding progress and the golden mean.  When 
+gas first spread along a city, mapping it forth about evenfall 
+for the eye of observant birds, a new age had begun for 
+sociality and corporate pleasure-seeking, and begun with 
+proper circumstance, becoming its own birthright.  The work of 
+Prometheus had advanced by another stride.  Mankind and its 
+supper parties were no longer at the mercy of a few miles of 
+sea-fog; sundown no longer emptied the promenade; and the day 
+was lengthened out to every man's fancy.  The city-folk had 
+stars of their own; biddable, domesticated stars.
+
+It is true that these were not so steady, nor yet so 
+clear, as their originals; nor indeed was their lustre so 
+elegant as that of the best wax candles.  But then the gas 
+stars, being nearer at hand, were more practically efficacious 
+than Jupiter himself.  It is true, again, that they did not 
+unfold their rays with the appropriate spontaneity of the 
+planets, coming out along the firmament one after another, as 
+the need arises. But the lamplighters took to their heels 
+every evening, and ran with a good heart. It was pretty to see 
+man thus emulating the punctuality of heaven's orbs; and 
+though perfection was not absolutely reached, and now and then 
+an individual may have been knocked on the head by the ladder 
+of the flying functionary, yet people commended his zeal in a 
+proverb, and taught their children to say, "God bless the 
+lamplighter!"  And since his passage was a piece of the day's 
+programme, the children were well pleased to repeat the 
+benediction, not, of course, in so many words, which would 
+have been improper, but in some chaste circumlocution, 
+suitable for infant lips.
+
+God bless him, indeed!  For the term of his twilight 
+diligence is near at hand; and for not much longer shall we 
+watch him speeding up the street and, at measured intervals, 
+knocking another luminous hole into the dusk.  The Greeks 
+would have made a noble myth of such an one; how he 
+distributed starlight, and, as soon as the need was over, re-
+collected it; and the little bull's-eye, which was his 
+instrument, and held enough fire to kindle a whole parish, 
+would have been fitly commemorated in the legend.  Now, like 
+all heroic tasks, his labours draw towards apotheosis, and in 
+the light of victory himself shall disappear.  For another 
+advance has been effected.  Our tame stars are to come out in 
+future, not one by one, but all in a body and at once.  A 
+sedate electrician somewhere in a back office touches a spring 
+- and behold! from one end to another of the city, from east 
+to west, from the Alexandra to the Crystal Palace, there is 
+light!  FIAT LUX, says the sedate electrician.  What a 
+spectacle, on some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of 
+Hampstead Hill, when in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, 
+the design of the monstrous city flashes into vision - a 
+glittering hieroglyph many square miles in extent; and when, 
+to borrow and debase an image, all the evening street-lamps 
+burst together into song!  Such is the spectacle of the 
+future, preluded the other day by the experiment in Pall Mall.  
+Star-rise by electricity, the most romantic flight of 
+civilisation; the compensatory benefit for an innumerable 
+array of factories and bankers' clerks.  To the artistic 
+spirit exercised about Thirlmere, here is a crumb of 
+consolation; consolatory, at least, to such of them as look 
+out upon the world through seeing eyes, and contentedly accept 
+beauty where it comes.
+
+But the conservative, while lauding progress, is ever 
+timid of innovation; his is the hand upheld to counsel pause; 
+his is the signal advising slow advance.  The word ELECTRICITY 
+now sounds the note of danger.  In Paris, at the mouth of the 
+Passage des Princes, in the place before the Opera portico, 
+and in the Rue Drouot at the FIGARO office, a new sort of 
+urban star now shines out nightly, horrible, unearthly, 
+obnoxious to the human eye; a lamp for a nightmare!  Such a 
+light as this should shine only on murders and public crime, 
+or along the corridors of lunatic asylums, a horror to 
+heighten horror.  To look at it only once is to fall in love 
+with gas, which gives a warm domestic radiance fit to eat by.  
+Mankind, you would have thought, might have remained content 
+with what Prometheus stole for them and not gone fishing the 
+profound heaven with kites to catch and domesticate the 
+wildfire of the storm.  Yet here we have the levin brand at 
+our doors, and it is proposed that we should henceforward take 
+our walks abroad in the glare of permanent lightning.  A man 
+need not be very superstitious if he scruple to follow his 
+pleasures by the light of the Terror that Flieth, nor very 
+epicurean if he prefer to see the face of beauty more 
+becomingly displayed.  That ugly blinding glare may not 
+improperly advertise the home of slanderous FIGARO, which is a 
+backshop to the infernal regions; but where soft joys prevail, 
+where people are convoked to pleasure and the philosopher 
+looks on smiling and silent, where love and laughter and 
+deifying wine abound, there, at least, let the old mild lustre 
+shine upon the ways of man.
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg eText Virginibus Puerisque
+
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