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Yeast: a Problem

by Charles Kingsley · English · Gutenberg #10364 · 568,022 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Yeast: a Problem

Author: Charles Kingsley


        
Release date: December 1, 2003 [eBook #10364]
                Most recently updated: December 19, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10364

Credits: Transcribed by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YEAST: A PROBLEM ***


Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk




YEAST: A PROBLEM




PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION



This book was written nearly twelve years ago; and so many things 
have changed since then, that it is hardly fair to send it into the 
world afresh, without some notice of the improvement--if such there 
be--which has taken place meanwhile in those southern counties of 
England, with which alone this book deals.

I believe that things are improved.  Twelve years more of the new 
Poor Law have taught the labouring men greater self-help and 
independence; I hope that those virtues may not be destroyed in them 
once more, by the boundless and indiscriminate almsgiving which has 
become the fashion of the day, in most parishes where there are 
resident gentry.  If half the money which is now given away in 
different forms to the agricultural poor could be spent in making 
their dwellings fit for honest men to live in, then life, morals, 
and poor-rates, would be saved to an immense amount.  But as I do 
not see how to carry out such a plan, I have no right to complain of 
others for not seeing.

Meanwhile cottage improvement, and sanitary reform, throughout the 
country districts, are going on at a fearfully slow rate.  Here and 
there high-hearted landlords, like the Duke of Bedford, are doing 
their duty like men; but in general, the apathy of the educated 
classes is most disgraceful.

But the labourers, during the last ten years, are altogether better 
off.  Free trade has increased their food, without lessening their 
employment.  The politician who wishes to know the effect on 
agricultural life of that wise and just measure, may find it in Mr. 
Grey of Dilston's answers to the queries of the French Government.  
The country parson will not need to seek so far.  He will see it (if 
he be an observant man) in the faces and figures of his school-
children.  He will see a rosier, fatter, bigger-boned race growing 
up, which bids fair to surpass in bulk the puny and ill-fed 
generation of 1815-45, and equal, perhaps, in thew and sinew, to the 
men who saved Europe in the old French war.

If it should be so (as God grant it may), there is little fear but 
that the labouring men of England will find their aristocracy able 
to lead them in the battle-field, and to develop the agriculture of 
the land at home, even better than did their grandfathers of the old 
war time.

To a thoughtful man, no point of the social horizon is more full of 
light, than the altered temper of the young gentlemen.  They have 
their faults and follies still--for when will young blood be other 
than hot blood?  But when one finds, more and more, swearing 
banished from the hunting-field, foul songs from the universities, 
drunkenness and gambling from the barracks; when one finds 
everywhere, whether at college, in camp, or by the cover-side, more 
and more, young men desirous to learn their duty as Englishmen, and 
if possible to do it; when one hears their altered tone toward the 
middle classes, and that word 'snob' (thanks very much to Mr. 
Thackeray) used by them in its true sense, without regard of rank; 
when one watches, as at Aldershott, the care and kindness of 
officers toward their men; and over and above all this, when one 
finds in every profession (in that of the soldier as much as any) 
young men who are not only 'in the world,' but (in religious 
phraseology) 'of the world,' living God-fearing, virtuous, and 
useful lives, as Christian men should:  then indeed one looks 
forward with hope and confidence to the day when these men shall 
settle down in life, and become, as holders of the land, the leaders 
of agricultural progress, and the guides and guardians of the 
labouring man.

I am bound to speak of the farmer, as I know him in the South of 
England.  In the North he is a man of altogether higher education 
and breeding:  but he is, even in the South, a much better man than 
it is the fashion to believe him.  No doubt, he has given heavy 
cause of complaint.  He was demoralised, as surely, if not as 
deeply, as his own labourers, by the old Poor Law.  He was 
bewildered--to use the mildest term--by promises of Protection from 
men who knew better.  But his worst fault after all has been, that 
young or old, he has copied his landlord too closely, and acted on 
his maxims and example.  And now that his landlord is growing wiser, 
he is growing wiser too.  Experience of the new Poor Law, and 
experience of Free-trade, are helping him to show himself what he 
always was at heart, an honest Englishman.  All his brave 
persistence and industry, his sturdy independence and self-help, and 
last, but not least, his strong sense of justice, and his vast good-
nature, are coming out more and more, and working better and better 
upon the land and the labourer; while among his sons I see many 
growing up brave, manly, prudent young men, with a steadily 
increasing knowledge of what is required of them, both as 
manufacturers of food, and employers of human labour.

The country clergy, again, are steadily improving.  I do not mean 
merely in morality--for public opinion now demands that as a sine 
qua non--but in actual efficiency.  Every fresh appointment seems to 
me, on the whole, a better one than the last.  They are gaining more 
and more the love and respect of their flocks; they are becoming 
more and more centres of civilisation and morality to their 
parishes; they are working, for the most part, very hard, each in 
his own way; indeed their great danger is, that they should trust 
too much in that outward 'business' work which they do so heartily; 
that they should fancy that the administration of schools and 
charities is their chief business, and literally leave the Word of 
God to serve tables.  Would that we clergymen could learn (some of 
us are learning already) that influence over our people is not to be 
gained by perpetual interference in their private affairs, too often 
inquisitorial, irritating, and degrading to both parties, but by 
showing ourselves their personal friends, of like passions with 
them.  Let a priest do that.  Let us make our people feel that we 
speak to them, and feel to them, as men to men, and then the more 
cottages we enter the better.  If we go into our neighbours' houses 
only as judges, inquisitors, or at best gossips, we are best--as too 
many are--at home in our studies.  Would, too, that we would 
recollect this--that our duty is, among other things, to preach the 
Gospel; and consider firstly whether what we commonly preach be any 
Gospel or good news at all, and not rather the worst possible news; 
and secondly, whether we preach at all; whether our sermons are not 
utterly unintelligible (being delivered in an unknown tongue), and 
also of a dulness not to be surpassed; and whether, therefore, it 
might not be worth our while to spend a little time in studying the 
English tongue, and the art of touching human hearts and minds.

But to return:  this improved tone (if the truth must be told) is 
owing, far more than people themselves are aware, to the triumphs of 
those liberal principles, for which the Whigs have fought for the 
last forty years, and of that sounder natural philosophy of which 
they have been the consistent patrons.  England has become Whig; and 
the death of the Whig party is the best proof of its victory.  It 
has ceased to exist, because it has done its work; because its 
principles are accepted by its ancient enemies; because the 
political economy and the physical science, which grew up under its 
patronage, are leavening the thoughts and acts of Anglican and of 
Evangelical alike, and supplying them with methods for carrying out 
their own schemes.  Lord Shaftesbury's truly noble speech on 
Sanitary Reform at Liverpool is a striking proof of the extent to 
which the Evangelical leaders have given in their adherence to those 
scientific laws, the original preachers of which have been called by 
his Lordship's party heretics and infidels, materialists and 
rationalists.  Be it so.  Provided truth be preached, what matter 
who preaches it?  Provided the leaven of sound inductive science 
leaven the whole lump, what matter who sets it working?  Better, 
perhaps, because more likely to produce practical success, that 
these novel truths should be instilled into the minds of the 
educated classes by men who share somewhat in their prejudices and 
superstitions, and doled out to them in such measure as will not 
terrify or disgust them.  The child will take its medicine from the 
nurse's hand trustfully enough, when it would scream itself into 
convulsions at the sight of the doctor, and so do itself more harm 
than the medicine would do it good.  The doctor meanwhile (unless he 
be one of Hesiod's 'fools, who know not how much more half is than 
the whole') is content enough to see any part of his prescription 
got down, by any hands whatsoever.

But there is another cause for the improved tone of the Landlord 
class, and of the young men of what is commonly called the 
aristocracy; and that is, a growing moral earnestness; which is in 
great part owing (that justice may be done on all sides) to the 
Anglican movement.  How much soever Neo-Anglicanism may have failed 
as an Ecclesiastical or Theological system; how much soever it may 
have proved itself, both by the national dislike of it, and by the 
defection of all its master-minds, to be radically un-English, it 
has at least awakened hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cultivated men 
and women to ask themselves whether God sent them into the world 
merely to eat, drink, and be merry, and to have 'their souls saved' 
upon the Spurgeon method, after they die; and has taught them an 
answer to that question not unworthy of English Christians.

The Anglican movement, when it dies out, will leave behind at least 
a legacy of grand old authors disinterred, of art, of music; of 
churches too, schools, cottages, and charitable institutions, which 
will form so many centres of future civilisation, and will entitle 
it to the respect, if not to the allegiance, of the future 
generation.  And more than this; it has sown in the hearts of young 
gentlemen and young ladies seed which will not perish; which, though 
it may develop into forms little expected by those who sowed it, 
will develop at least into a virtue more stately and reverent, more 
chivalrous and self-sacrificing, more genial and human, than can be 
learnt from that religion of the Stock Exchange, which reigned 
triumphant--for a year and a day--in the popular pulpits.

I have said, that Neo-Anglicanism has proved a failure, as 
seventeenth-century Anglicanism did.  The causes of that failure 
this book has tried to point out:  and not one word which is spoken 
of it therein, but has been drawn from personal and too-intimate 
experience.  But now--peace to its ashes.  Is it so great a sin, to 
have been dazzled by the splendour of an impossible ideal?  Is it so 
great a sin, to have had courage and conduct enough to attempt the 
enforcing of that ideal, in the face of the prejudices of a whole 
nation?  And if that ideal was too narrow for the English nation, 
and for the modern needs of mankind, is that either so great a sin?  
Are other extant ideals, then, so very comprehensive?  Does Mr. 
Spurgeon, then, take so much broader or nobler views of the 
capacities and destinies of his race, than that great genius, John 
Henry Newman?  If the world cannot answer that question now, it will 
answer it promptly enough in another five-and-twenty years.  And 
meanwhile let not the party and the system which has conquered boast 
itself too loudly.  Let it take warning by the Whigs; and suspect 
(as many a looker-on more than suspects) that its triumph may be, as 
with the Whigs, its ruin; and that, having done the work for which 
it was sent into the world, there may only remain for it, to decay 
and die.

And die it surely will, if (as seems too probable) there succeeds to 
this late thirty years of peace a thirty years of storm.

For it has lost all hold upon the young, the active, the daring.  It 
has sunk into a compromise between originally opposite dogmas.  It 
has become a religion for Jacob the smooth man; adapted to the 
maxims of the market, and leaving him full liberty to supplant his 
brother by all methods lawful in that market.  No longer can it 
embrace and explain all known facts of God and man, in heaven and 
earth, and satisfy utterly such minds and hearts as those of 
Cromwell's Ironsides, or the Scotch Covenanters, or even of a Newton 
and a Colonel Gardiner.  Let it make the most of its Hedley Vicars 
and its Havelock, and sound its own trumpet as loudly as it can, in 
sounding theirs; for they are the last specimens of heroism which it 
is likely to beget--if indeed it did in any true sense beget them, 
and if their gallantry was really owing to their creed, and not to 
the simple fact of their being--like others--English gentlemen.  
Well may Jacob's chaplains cackle in delighted surprise over their 
noble memories, like geese who have unwittingly hatched a swan!

But on Esau in general:--on poor rough Esau, who sails Jacob's 
ships, digs Jacob's mines, founds Jacob's colonies, pours out his 
blood for him in those wars which Jacob himself has stirred up--
while his sleek brother sits at home in his counting-house, enjoying 
at once 'the means of grace' and the produce of Esau's labour--on 
him Jacob's chaplains have less and less influence; for him they 
have less and less good news.  He is afraid of them, and they of 
him; the two do not comprehend one another, sympathise with one 
another; they do not even understand one another's speech.  The same 
social and moral gulf has opened between them, as parted the 
cultivated and wealthy Pharisee of Jerusalem from the rough fishers 
of the Galilaean Lake:  and yet the Galilaean fishers (if we are to 
trust Josephus and the Gospels) were trusty, generous, affectionate-
-and it was not from among the Pharisees, it is said, that the 
Apostles were chosen.

Be that as it may, Esau has a birthright; and this book, like all 
books which I have ever written, is written to tell him so; and, I 
trust, has not been written in vain.  But it is not this book, or 
any man's book, or any man at all, who can tell Esau the whole truth 
about himself, his powers, his duty, and his God.  Woman must do it, 
and not man.  His mother, his sister, the maid whom he may love; and 
failing all these (as they often will fail him, in the wild 
wandering life which he must live), those human angels of whom it is 
written--'The barren hath many more children than she who has an 
husband.'  And such will not be wanting.  As long as England can 
produce at once two such women as Florence Nightingale and Catherine 
Marsh, there is good hope that Esau will not be defrauded of his 
birthright; and that by the time that Jacob comes crouching to him, 
to defend him against the enemies who are near at hand, Esau, 
instead of borrowing Jacob's religion, may be able to teach Jacob 
his; and the two brothers face together the superstition and anarchy 
of Europe, in the strength of a lofty and enlightened Christianity, 
which shall be thoroughly human, and therefore thoroughly divine.

C. K.
February 17th, 1859.



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION



This little tale was written between two and three years ago, in the 
hope that it might help to call the attention of wiser and better 
men than I am, to the questions which are now agitating the minds of 
the rising generation, and to the absolute necessity of solving them 
at once and earnestly, unless we would see the faith of our 
forefathers crumble away beneath the combined influence of new 
truths which are fancied to be incompatible with it, and new 
mistakes as to its real essence.  That this can be done I believe 
and know:  if I had not believed it, I would never have put pen to 
paper on the subject.

I believe that the ancient Creed, the Eternal Gospel, will stand, 
and conquer, and prove its might in this age, as it has in every 
other for eighteen hundred years, by claiming, and subduing, and 
organising those young anarchic forces, which now, unconscious of 
their parentage, rebel against Him to whom they owe their being.

But for the time being, the young men and women of our day are fast 
parting from their parents and each other; the more thoughtful are 
wandering either towards Rome, towards sheer materialism, or towards 
an unchristian and unphilosophic spiritualism.  Epicurism which, in 
my eyes, is the worst evil spirit of the three, precisely because it 
looks at first sight most like an angel of light.  The mass, again, 
are fancying that they are still adhering to the old creeds, the old 
church, to the honoured patriarchs of English Protestantism.  I wish 
I could agree with them in their belief about themselves.  To me 
they seem--with a small sprinkling of those noble and cheering 
exceptions to popular error which are to be found in every age of 
Christ's church--to be losing most fearfully and rapidly the living 
spirit of Christianity, and to be, for that very reason, clinging 
all the more convulsively--and who can blame them?--to the outward 
letter of it, whether High Church or Evangelical; unconscious, all 
the while, that they are sinking out of real living belief, into 
that dead self-deceiving belief-in-believing, which has been always 
heretofore, and is becoming in England now, the parent of the most 
blind, dishonest, and pitiless bigotry.

In the following pages I have attempted to show what some at least 
of the young in these days are really thinking and feeling.  I know 
well that my sketch is inadequate and partial:  I have every reason 
to believe, from the criticisms which I have received since its 
first publication, that it is, as far as it goes, correct.  I put it 
as a problem.  It would be the height of arrogance in me to do more 
than indicate the direction in which I think a solution may be 
found.  I fear that my elder readers may complain that I have no 
right to start doubts without answering them.  I can only answer,--
Would that I had started them! would that I was not seeing them 
daily around me, under some form or other, in just the very hearts 
for whom one would most wish the peace and strength of a fixed and 
healthy faith.  To the young, this book can do no harm; for it will 
put into their minds little but what is there already.  To the 
elder, it may do good; for it may teach some of them, as I earnestly 
hope, something of the real, but too often utterly unsuspected, 
state of their own children's minds; something of the reasons of 
that calamitous estrangement between themselves and those who will 
succeed them, which is often too painful and oppressive to be 
confessed to their own hearts!  Whatever amount of obloquy this book 
may bring upon me, I shall think that a light price to pay, if by it 
I shall have helped, even in a single case, to 'turn the hearts of 
the parents to the children, and the hearts of the children to the 
parents, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come,'--as 
come it surely will, if we persist much longer in substituting 
denunciation for sympathy, instruction for education, and Pharisaism 
for the Good News of the Kingdom of God.

1851.



CHAPTER I:  THE PHILOSOPHY OF FOX-HUNTING



As this my story will probably run counter to more than one fashion 
of the day, literary and other, it is prudent to bow to those 
fashions wherever I honestly can; and therefore to begin with a 
scrap of description.

The edge of a great fox-cover; a flat wilderness of low leafless 
oaks fortified by a long, dreary, thorn capped clay ditch, with sour 
red water oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a 
straight wood ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen 
leaves, the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs; 
some forty red coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young-
farmers, resplendent in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab 
stable-keepers, showing off horses for sale; the surgeon of the 
union, in Mackintosh and antigropelos; two holiday schoolboys with 
trousers strapped down to bursting point, like a penny steamer's 
safety-valve; a midshipman, the only merry one in the field, bumping 
about on a fretting, sweating hack, with its nose a foot above its 
ears; and Lancelot Smith, who then kept two good horses, and 'rode 
forward' as a fine young fellow of three-and-twenty who can afford 
it, and 'has nothing else to do,' has a very good right to ride.

But what is a description, without a sketch of the weather?--In 
these Pantheist days especially, when a hero or heroine's moral 
state must entirely depend on the barometer, and authors talk as if 
Christians were cabbages, and a man's soul as well as his lungs 
might be saved by sea-breezes and sunshine; or his character 
developed by wearing guano in his shoes, and training himself 
against a south wall--we must have a weather description, though, as 
I shall presently show, one in flat contradiction of the popular 
theory.  Luckily for our information, Lancelot was very much given 
to watch both the weather and himself, and had indeed, while in his 
teens, combined the two in a sort of a soul-almanack on the 
principles just mentioned--somewhat in this style:--

'Monday, 21st.--Wind S.W., bright sun, mercury at 30.5 inches.  Felt 
my heart expanded towards the universe.  Organs of veneration and 
benevolence pleasingly excited; and gave a shilling to a tramp.  An 
inexpressible joy bounded through every vein, and the soft air 
breathed purity and self-sacrifice through my soul.  As I watched 
the beetles, those children of the sun, who, as divine Shelley says, 
"laden with light and odour, pass over the gleam of the living 
grass," I gained an Eden-glimpse of the pleasures of virtue.

'N.B.  Found the tramp drunk in a ditch.  I could not have degraded 
myself on such a day--ah! how could he?

'Tuesday, 22d.--Barometer rapidly falling.  Heavy clouds in the 
south-east.  My heart sank into gloomy forebodings.  Read Manfred, 
and doubted whether I should live long.  The laden weight of destiny 
seemed to crush down my aching forehead, till the thunderstorm 
burst, and peace was restored to my troubled soul.'

This was very bad; but to do justice to Lancelot, he had grown out 
of it at the time when my story begins.  He was now in the fifth act 
of his 'Werterean' stage; that sentimental measles, which all clever 
men must catch once in their lives, and which, generally, like the 
physical measles, if taken early, settles their constitution for 
good or evil; if taken late, goes far towards killing them.  
Lancelot had found Byron and Shelley pall on his taste and commenced 
devouring Bulwer and worshipping Ernest Maltravers.  He had left 
Bulwer for old ballads and romances, and Mr. Carlyle's reviews; was 
next alternately chivalry-mad; and Germany-mad; was now reading hard 
at physical science; and on the whole, trying to become a great man, 
without any very clear notion of what a great man ought to be.  Real 
education he never had had.  Bred up at home under his father, a 
rich merchant, he had gone to college with a large stock of general 
information, and a particular mania for dried plants, fossils, 
butterflies, and sketching, and some such creed as this:--

That he was very clever.

That he ought to make his fortune.

That a great many things were very pleasant--beautiful things among 
the rest.

That it was a fine thing to be 'superior,' gentleman-like, generous, 
and courageous.

That a man ought to be religious.

And left college with a good smattering of classics and mathematics, 
picked up in the intervals of boat-racing and hunting, and much the 
same creed as he brought with him, except in regard to the last 
article.  The scenery-and-natural-history mania was now somewhat at 
a discount.  He had discovered a new natural object, including in 
itself all--more than all--yet found beauties and wonders--woman!

Draw, draw the veil and weep, guardian angel! if such there be.  
What was to be expected?  Pleasant things were pleasant--there was 
no doubt of that, whatever else might be doubtful.  He had read 
Byron by stealth; he had been flogged into reading Ovid and 
Tibullus; and commanded by his private tutor to read Martial and 
Juvenal 'for the improvement of his style.'  All conversation on the 
subject of love had been prudishly avoided, as usual, by his parents 
and teacher.  The parts of the Bible which spoke of it had been 
always kept out of his sight.  Love had been to him, practically, 
ground tabooed and 'carnal.'  What was to be expected?  Just what 
happened--if woman's beauty had nothing holy in it, why should his 
fondness for it?  Just what happens every day--that he had to sow 
his wild oats for himself, and eat the fruit thereof, and the dirt 
thereof also.

O fathers! fathers! and you, clergymen, who monopolise education! 
either tell boys the truth about love, or do not put into their 
hands, without note or comment, the foul devil's lies about it, 
which make up the mass of the Latin poets--and then go, fresh from 
teaching Juvenal and Ovid, to declaim at Exeter Hall against poor 
Peter Dens's well-meaning prurience!  Had we not better take the 
beam out of our own eye before we meddle with the mote in the 
Jesuit's?

But where is my description of the weather all this time?

I cannot, I am sorry to say, give any very cheerful account of the 
weather that day.  But what matter?  Are Englishmen hedge-gnats, who 
only take their sport when the sun shines?  Is it not, on the 
contrary, symbolical of our national character, that almost all our 
field amusements are wintry ones?  Our fowling, our hunting, our 
punt-shooting (pastime for Hymir himself and the frost giants)--our 
golf and skating,--our very cricket, and boat-racing, and jack and 
grayling fishing, carried on till we are fairly frozen out.  We are 
a stern people, and winter suits us.  Nature then retires modestly 
into the background, and spares us the obtrusive glitter of summer, 
leaving us to think and work; and therefore it happens that in 
England, it may be taken as a general rule, that whenever all the 
rest of the world is in-doors, we are out and busy, and on the 
whole, the worse the day, the better the deed.

The weather that day, the first day Lancelot ever saw his beloved, 
was truly national.  A silent, dim, distanceless, steaming, rotting 
day in March.  The last brown oak-leaf which had stood out the 
winter's frost, spun and quivered plump down, and then lay; as if 
ashamed to have broken for a moment the ghastly stillness, like an 
awkward guest at a great dumb dinner-party.  A cold suck of wind 
just proved its existence, by toothaches on the north side of all 
faces.  The spiders having been weather-bewitched the night before, 
had unanimously agreed to cover every brake and brier with gossamer-
cradles, and never a fly to be caught in them; like Manchester 
cotton-spinners madly glutting the markets in the teeth of 'no 
demand.'  The steam crawled out of the dank turf, and reeked off the 
flanks and nostrils of the shivering horses, and clung with clammy 
paws to frosted hats and dripping boughs.  A soulless, skyless, 
catarrhal day, as if that bustling dowager, old mother Earth--what 
with match-making in spring, and fetes champetres in summer, and 
dinner-giving in autumn--was fairly worn out, and put to bed with 
the influenza, under wet blankets and the cold-water cure.

There sat Lancelot by the cover-side, his knees aching with cold and 
wet, thanking his stars that he was not one of the whippers-in who 
were lashing about in the dripping cover, laying up for themselves, 
in catering for the amusement of their betters, a probable old age 
of bed-ridden torture, in the form of rheumatic gout.  Not that he 
was at all happy--indeed, he had no reason to be so; for, first, the 
hounds would not find; next, he had left half-finished at home a 
review article on the Silurian System, which he had solemnly 
promised an abject and beseeching editor to send to post that night; 
next, he was on the windward side of the cover, and dare not light a 
cigar; and lastly, his mucous membrane in general was not in the 
happiest condition, seeing that he had been dining the evening 
before with Mr. Vaurien of Rottenpalings, a young gentleman of a 
convivial and melodious turn of mind, who sang--and played also--as 
singing men are wont--in more senses than one, and had 'ladies and 
gentlemen' down from town to stay with him; and they sang and played 
too; and so somehow between vingt-un and champagne-punch, Lancelot 
had not arrived at home till seven o'clock that morning, and was in 
a fit state to appreciate the feelings of our grandfathers, when, 
after the third bottle of port, they used to put the black silk 
tights into their pockets, slip on the leathers and boots, and ride 
the crop-tailed hack thirty miles on a winter's night, to meet the 
hounds in the next county by ten in the morning.  They are 'gone 
down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of heroes,' with John Warde 
of Squerries at their head--the fathers of the men who conquered at 
Waterloo; and we their degenerate grandsons are left instead, with 
puny arms, and polished leather boots, and a considerable taint of 
hereditary disease, to sit in club-houses, and celebrate the 
progress of the species.

Whether Lancelot or his horse, under these depressing circumstances, 
fell asleep; or whether thoughts pertaining to such a life, and its 
fitness for a clever and ardent young fellow in the nineteenth 
century, became gradually too painful, and had to be peremptorily 
shaken off, this deponent sayeth not; but certainly, after five-and-
thirty minutes of idleness and shivering, Lancelot opened his eyes 
with a sudden start, and struck spurs into his hunter without due 
cause shown; whereat Shiver-the-timbers, who was no Griselda in 
temper--(Lancelot had bought him out of the Pytchley for half his 
value, as unrideably vicious, when he had killed a groom, and fallen 
backwards on a rough-rider, the first season after he came up from 
Horncastle)--responded by a furious kick or two, threw his head up, 
put his foot into a drain, and sprawled down all but on his nose, 
pitching Lancelot unawares shamefully on the pommel of his saddle.  
A certain fatality, by the bye, had lately attended all Lancelot's 
efforts to shine; he never bought a new coat without tearing it 
mysteriously next day, or tried to make a joke without bursting out 
coughing in the middle . . . and now the whole field were looking on 
at his mishap; between disgust and the start he turned almost sick, 
and felt the blood rush into his cheeks and forehead as he heard a 
shout of coarse jovial laughter burst out close to him, and the old 
master of the hounds, Squire Lavington, roared aloud--

'A pretty sportsman you are, Mr. Smith, to fall asleep by the cover-
side and let your horse down--and your pockets, too!  What's that 
book on the ground?  Sapping and studying still?  I let nobody come 
out with my hounds with their pocket full of learning.  Hand it up 
here, Tom; we'll see what it is.  French, as I am no scholar!  
Translate for us, Colonel Bracebridge!'

And, amid shouts of laughter, the gay Guardsman read out,--

'St. Francis de Sales:  Introduction to a Devout Life.'

Poor Lancelot!  Wishing himself fathoms under-ground, ashamed of his 
book, still more ashamed of himself for his shame, he had to sit 
there ten physical seconds, or spiritual years, while the colonel 
solemnly returned him the book, complimenting him on the proofs of 
its purifying influence which he had given the night before, in 
helping to throw the turnpike-gate into the river.

But 'all things do end,' and so did this; and the silence of the 
hounds also; and a faint but knowing whimper drove St. Francis out 
of all heads, and Lancelot began to stalk slowly with a dozen 
horsemen up the wood-ride, to a fitful accompaniment of wandering 
hound-music, where the choristers were as invisible as nightingales 
among the thick cover.  And hark! just as the book was returned to 
his pocket, the sweet hubbub suddenly crashed out into one jubilant 
shriek, and then swept away fainter and fainter among the trees.  
The walk became a trot--the trot a canter.  Then a faint melancholy 
shout at a distance, answered by a 'Stole away!' from the fields; a 
doleful 'toot!' of the horn; the dull thunder of many horsehoofs 
rolling along the farther woodside.  Then red coats, flashing like 
sparks of fire across the gray gap of mist at the ride's-mouth, then 
a whipper-in, bringing up a belated hound, burst into the pathway, 
smashing and plunging, with shut eyes, through ash-saplings and 
hassock-grass; then a fat farmer, sedulously pounding through the 
mud, was overtaken and bespattered in spite of all his struggles;--
until the line streamed out into the wide rushy pasture, startling 
up pewits and curlews, as horsemen poured in from every side, and 
cunning old farmers rode off at inexplicable angles to some well-
known haunts of pug:  and right ahead, chiming and jangling sweet 
madness, the dappled pack glanced and wavered through the veil of 
soft grey mist.  'What's the use of this hurry?' growled Lancelot.  
'They will all be back again.  I never have the luck to see a run.'

But no; on and on--down the wind and down the vale; and the canter 
became a gallop, and the gallop a long straining stride; and a 
hundred horsehoofs crackled like flame among the stubbles, and 
thundered fetlock-deep along the heavy meadows; and every fence 
thinned the cavalcade, till the madness began to stir all bloods, 
and with grim earnest silent faces, the initiated few settled 
themselves to their work, and with the colonel and Lancelot at their 
head, 'took their pleasure sadly, after the manner of their nation,' 
as old Froissart has it.


'Thorough bush, through brier,
Thorough park, through pale;'


till the rolling grass-lands spread out into flat black open 
fallows, crossed with grassy baulks, and here and there a long 
melancholy line of tall elms, while before them the high chalk 
ranges gleamed above the mist like a vast wall of emerald enamelled 
with snow, and the winding river glittering at their feet.

'A polite fox!' observed the colonel.  'He's leading the squire 
straight home to Whitford, just in time for dinner.'

* * * * *

They were in the last meadow, with the stream before them.  A line 
of struggling heads in the swollen and milky current showed the 
hounds' opinion of Reynard's course.  The sportsmen galloped off 
towards the nearest bridge.  Bracebridge looked back at Lancelot, 
who had been keeping by his side in sulky rivalry, following him 
successfully through all manner of desperate places, and more and 
more angry with himself and the guiltless colonel, because he only 
followed, while the colonel's quicker and unembarrassed wit, which 
lived wholly in the present moment, saw long before Lancelot, 'how 
to cut out his work,' in every field.

'I shan't go round,' quietly observed the colonel.

'Do you fancy I shall?' growled Lancelot, who took for granted--poor 
thin-skinned soul! that the words were meant as a hit at himself.

'You're a brace of geese,' politely observed the old squire; 'and 
you'll find it out in rheumatic fever.  There--"one fool makes 
many!"  You'll kill Smith before you're done, colonel!' and the old 
man wheeled away up the meadow, as Bracebridge shouted after him,--

'Oh, he'll make a fine rider--in time!'

'In time!'  Lancelot could have knocked the unsuspecting colonel 
down for the word.  It just expressed the contrast, which had 
fretted him ever since he began to hunt with the Whitford Priors 
hounds.  The colonel's long practice and consummate skill in all he 
took in hand,--his experience of all society, from the prairie 
Indian to Crockford's, from the prize-ring to the continental 
courts,--his varied and ready store of information and anecdote,--
the harmony and completeness of the man,--his consistency with his 
own small ideal, and his consequent apparent superiority everywhere 
and in everything to the huge awkward Titan-cub, who, though 
immeasurably beyond Bracebridge in intellect and heart, was still in 
a state of convulsive dyspepsia, 'swallowing formulae,' and daily 
well-nigh choked; diseased throughout with that morbid self-
consciousness and lust of praise, for which God prepares, with His 
elect, a bitter cure.  Alas! poor Lancelot! an unlicked bear, 'with 
all his sorrows before him!'--

'Come along,' quoth Bracebridge, between snatches of a tune, his 
coolness maddening Lancelot.  'Old Lavington will find us dry 
clothes, a bottle of port, and a brace of charming daughters, at the 
Priory.  In with you, little Mustang of the prairie!  Neck or 
nothing!'--

And in an instant the small wiry American, and the huge Horncastle-
bred hunter, were wallowing and staggering in the yeasty stream, 
till they floated into a deep reach, and swam steadily down to a low 
place in the bank.  They crossed the stream, passed the Priory 
Shrubberies, leapt the gate into the park, and then on and upward, 
called by the unseen Ariel's music before them.--Up, into the hills; 
past white crumbling chalk-pits, fringed with feathered juniper and 
tottering ashes, their floors strewed with knolls of fallen soil and 
vegetation, like wooded islets in a sea of milk.--Up, between steep 
ridges of tuft crested with black fir-woods and silver beech, and 
here and there a huge yew standing out alone, the advanced sentry of 
the forest, with its luscious fretwork of green velvet, like a 
mountain of Gothic spires and pinnacles, all glittering and steaming 
as the sun drank up the dew-drops.  The lark sprang upward into 
song, and called merrily to the new-opened sunbeams, while the 
wreaths and flakes of mist lingered reluctantly about the hollows, 
and clung with dewy fingers to every knoll and belt of pine.--Up 
into the labyrinthine bosom of the hills,--but who can describe 
them?  Is not all nature indescribable? every leaf infinite and 
transcendental?  How much more those mighty downs, with their 
enormous sheets of spotless turf, where the dizzy eye loses all 
standard of size and distance before the awful simplicity, the 
delicate vastness, of those grand curves and swells, soft as the 
outlines of a Greek Venus, as if the great goddess-mother Hertha had 
laid herself down among the hills to sleep, her Titan limbs wrapt in 
a thin veil of silvery green.

Up, into a vast amphitheatre of sward, whose walls banked out the 
narrow sky above.  And here, in the focus of the huge ring, an 
object appeared which stirred strange melancholy in Lancelot,--a 
little chapel, ivy-grown, girded with a few yews, and elders, and 
grassy graves.  A climbing rose over the porch, and iron railings 
round the churchyard, told of human care; and from the graveyard 
itself burst up one of those noble springs known as winter-bournes 
in the chalk ranges, which, awakened in autumn from the abysses to 
which it had shrunk during the summer's drought, was hurrying down 
upon its six months' course, a broad sheet of oily silver over a 
temporary channel of smooth greensward.

The hounds had checked in the woods behind; now they poured down the 
hillside, so close together 'that you might have covered them with a 
sheet,' straight for the little chapel.

A saddened tone of feeling spread itself through Lancelot's heart.  
There were the everlasting hills around, even as they had grown and 
grown for countless ages, beneath the still depths of the primeval 
chalk ocean, in the milky youth of this great English land.  And 
here was he, the insect of a day, fox-hunting upon THEM!  He felt 
ashamed, and more ashamed when the inner voice whispered--'Fox-
hunting is not the shame--thou art the shame.  If thou art the 
insect of a day, it is thy sin that thou art one.'

And his sadness, foolish as it may seem, grew as he watched a brown 
speck fleet rapidly up the opposite hill, and heard a gay view-
halloo burst from the colonel at his side.  The chase lost its charm 
for him the moment the game was seen.  Then vanished that mysterious 
delight of pursuing an invisible object, which gives to hunting and 
fishing their unutterable and almost spiritual charm; which made 
Shakespeare a nightly poacher; Davy and Chantrey the patriarchs of 
fly-fishing; by which the twelve-foot rod is transfigured into an 
enchanter's wand, potent over the unseen wonders of the water-world, 
to 'call up spirits from the vasty deep,' which will really 'come if 
you do call for them'--at least if the conjuration be orthodox--and 
they there.  That spell was broken by the sight of poor wearied pug, 
his once gracefully-floating brush all draggled and drooping, as he 
toiled up the sheep-paths towards the open down above.

But Lancelot's sadness reached its crisis, as he met the hounds just 
outside the churchyard.  Another moment--they had leaped the rails; 
and there they swept round under the gray wall, leaping and yelling, 
like Berserk fiends among the frowning tombstones, over the cradles 
of the quiet dead.

Lancelot shuddered--the thing was not wrong--'it was no one's 
fault,'--but there was a ghastly discord in it.  Peace and strife, 
time and eternity--the mad noisy flesh, and the silent immortal 
spirit,--the frivolous game of life's outside show, and the terrible 
earnest of its inward abysses, jarred together without and within 
him.  He pulled his horse up violently, and stood as if rooted to 
the place, gazing at he knew not what.

The hounds caught sight of the fox, burst into one frantic shriek of 
joy--and then a sudden and ghastly stillness, as, mute and 
breathless, they toiled up the hillside, gaining on their victim at 
every stride.  The patter of the horsehoofs and the rattle of 
rolling flints died away above.  Lancelot looked up, startled at the 
silence; laughed aloud, he knew not why, and sat, regardless of his 
pawing and straining horse, still staring at the chapel and the 
graves.

On a sudden the chapel-door opened, and a figure, timidly yet 
loftily stepped out without observing him, and suddenly turning 
round, met him full, face to face, and stood fixed with surprise as 
completely as Lancelot himself.

That face and figure, and the spirit which spoke through them, 
entered his heart at once, never again to leave it.  Her features 
were aquiline and grand, without a shade of harshness; her eyes 
shone out like twain lakes of still azure, beneath a broad marble 
cliff of polished forehead; her rich chestnut hair rippled downward 
round the towering neck.  With her perfect masque and queenly 
figure, and earnest, upward gaze, she might have been the very model 
from which Raphael conceived his glorious St. Catherine--the ideal 
of the highest womanly genius, softened into self-forgetfulness by 
girlish devotion.  She was simply, almost coarsely dressed; but a 
glance told him that she was a lady, by the courtesy of man as well 
as by the will of God.

They gazed one moment more at each other--but what is time to 
spirits?  With them, as with their Father, 'one day is as a thousand 
years.'  But that eye-wedlock was cut short the next instant by the 
decided interference of the horse, who, thoroughly disgusted at his 
master's whole conduct, gave a significant shake of his head, and 
shamming frightened (as both women and horses will do when only 
cross), commenced a war-dance, which drove Argemone Lavington into 
the porch, and gave the bewildered Lancelot an excuse for dashing 
madly up the hill after his companions.

'What a horrible ugly face!' said Argemone to herself, 'but so 
clever, and so unhappy!'

Blest pity! true mother of that graceless scamp, young Love, who is 
ashamed of his real pedigree, and swears to this day that he is the 
child of Venus!--the coxcomb!

* * * * *

[Here, for the sake of the reader, we omit, or rather postpone a 
long dissertation on the famous Erototheogonic chorus of 
Aristophanes's Birds, with illustrations taken from all earth and 
heaven, from the Vedas and Proclus to Jacob Boehmen and Saint 
Theresa.]

'The dichotomy of Lancelot's personality,' as the Germans would call 
it, returned as he dashed on.  His understanding was trying to ride, 
while his spirit was left behind with Argemone.  Hence loose reins 
and a looser seat.  He rolled about like a tipsy man, holding on, in 
fact, far more by his spurs than by his knees, to the utter 
infuriation of Shiver-the-timbers, who kicked and snorted over the 
down like one of Mephistopheles's Demon-steeds.  They had mounted 
the hill--the deer fled before them in terror--they neared the park 
palings.  In the road beyond them the hounds were just killing their 
fox, struggling and growling in fierce groups for the red gobbets of 
fur, a panting, steaming ring of horses round them.  Half a dozen 
voices hailed him as he came up.

'Where have you been?'  'He'll tumble off!'  'He's had a fall!'  'No 
he hasn't!'  ''Ware hounds, man alive!'  'He'll break his neck!'

'He has broken it, at last!' shouted the colonel, as Shiver-the-
timbers rushed at the high pales, out of breath, and blind with 
rage.  Lancelot saw and heard nothing till he was awakened from his 
dream by the long heave of the huge brute's shoulder, and the 
maddening sensation of sweeping through the air over the fence.  He 
started, checked the curb, the horse threw up his head, fulfilling 
his name by driving his knees like a battering-ram against the 
pales--the top-bar bent like a withe, flew out into a hundred 
splinters, and man and horse rolled over headlong into the hard 
flint-road.

For one long sickening second Lancelot watched the blue sky between 
his own knees.  Then a crash as if a shell had burst in his face--a 
horrible grind--a sheet of flame--and the blackness of night.  Did 
you ever feel it, reader?

When he awoke, he found himself lying in bed, with Squire Lavington 
sitting by him.  There was real sorrow in the old man's face, 'Come 
to himself!' and a great joyful oath rolled out.  'The boldest rider 
of them all!  I wouldn't have lost him for a dozen ready-made spick 
and span Colonel Bracebridges!'

'Quite right, squire!' answered a laughing voice from behind the 
curtain.  'Smith has a clear two thousand a year, and I live by my 
wits!'



CHAPTER II:  SPRING YEARNINGS



I heard a story the other day of our most earnest and genial 
humorist, who is just now proving himself also our most earnest and 
genial novelist.  'I like your novel exceedingly,' said a lady; 'the 
characters are so natural--all but the baronet, and he surely is 
overdrawn:  it is impossible to find such coarseness in his rank of 
life!'

The artist laughed.  'And that character,' said he, 'is almost the 
only exact portrait in the whole book.'

So it is.  People do not see the strange things which pass them 
every day.  'The romance of real life' is only one to the romantic 
spirit.  And then they set up for critics, instead of pupils; as if 
the artist's business was not just to see what they cannot see--to 
open their eyes to the harmonies and the discords, the miracles and 
the absurdities, which seem to them one uniform gray fog of 
commonplaces.

Then let the reader believe, that whatsoever is commonplace in my 
story is my own invention.  Whatsoever may seem extravagant or 
startling is most likely to be historic fact, else I should not have 
dared to write it down, finding God's actual dealings here much too 
wonderful to dare to invent many fresh ones for myself.

Lancelot, who had had a severe concussion of the brain and a broken 
leg, kept his bed for a few weeks, and his room for a few more.  
Colonel Bracebridge installed himself at the Priory, and nursed him 
with indefatigable good-humour and few thanks.  He brought Lancelot 
his breakfast before hunting, described the run to him when he 
returned, read him to sleep, told him stories of grizzly bear and 
buffalo-hunts, made him laugh in spite of himself at extempore comic 
medleys, kept his tables covered with flowers from the conservatory, 
warmed his chocolate, and even his bed.  Nothing came amiss to him, 
and he to nothing.  Lancelot longed at first every hour to be rid of 
him, and eyed him about the room as a bulldog does the monkey who 
rides him.  In his dreams he was Sinbad the Sailor, and Bracebridge 
the Old Man of the Sea; but he could not hold out against the 
colonel's merry bustling kindliness, and the almost womanish 
tenderness of his nursing.  The ice thawed rapidly; and one evening 
it split up altogether, when Bracebridge, who was sitting drawing by 
Lancelot's sofa, instead of amusing himself with the ladies below, 
suddenly threw his pencil into the fire, and broke out, a propos de 
rien--

'What a strange pair we are, Smith!  I think you just the best 
fellow I ever met, and you hate me like poison--you can't deny it.'

There was something in the colonel's tone so utterly different from 
his usual courtly and measured speech, that Lancelot was taken 
completely by surprise, and stammered out,--

'I--I--I--no--no.  I know I am very foolish--ungrateful.  But I do 
hate you,' he said, with a sudden impulse, 'and I'll tell you why.'

'Give me your hand,' quoth the colonel:  'I like that.  Now we shall 
see our way with each other, at least.'

'Because,' said Lancelot slowly, 'because you are cleverer than I, 
readier than I, superior to me in every point.'

The colonel laughed, not quite merrily.  Lancelot went on, holding 
down his shaggy brows.

'I am a brute and an ass!--And yet I do not like to tell you so.  
For if I am an ass, what are you?'

'Heyday!'

'Look here.--I am wasting my time and brains on ribaldry, but I am 
worth nothing better--at least, I think so at times; but you, who 
can do anything you put your hand to, what business have you, in the 
devil's name, to be throwing yourself away on gimcracks and fox-
hunting foolery?  Heavens!  If I had your talents, I'd be--I'd make 
a name for myself before I died, if I died to make it.'  The colonel 
griped his hand hard, rose, and looked out of the window for a few 
minutes.  There was a dead, brooding silence, till he turned to 
Lancelot,--

'Mr. Smith, I thank you for your honesty, but good advice may come 
too late.  I am no saint, and God only knows how much less of one I 
may become; but mark my words,--if you are ever tempted by passion, 
and vanity, and fine ladies, to form liaisons, as the Jezebels call 
them, snares, and nets, and labyrinths of blind ditches, to keep you 
down through life, stumbling and grovelling, hating yourself and 
hating the chain to which you cling--in that hour pray--pray as if 
the devil had you by the throat,--to Almighty God, to help you out 
of that cursed slough!  There is nothing else for it!--pray, I tell 
you!'

There was a terrible earnestness about the guardsman's face which 
could not be mistaken.  Lancelot looked at him for a moment, and 
then dropped his eyes ashamed, as if he had intruded on the 
speaker's confidence by witnessing his emotion.

In a moment the colonel had returned to his smile and his polish.

'And now, my dear invalid, I must beg your pardon for sermonising.  
What do you say to a game of ecarte?  We must play for love, or we 
shall excite ourselves, and scandalise Mrs. Lavington's piety.'  And 
the colonel pulled a pack of cards out of his pocket, and seeing 
that Lancelot was too thoughtful for play, commenced all manner of 
juggler's tricks, and chuckled over them like any schoolboy.

'Happy man!' thought Lancelot, 'to have the strength of will which 
can thrust its thoughts away once and for all.'  No, Lancelot! more 
happy are they whom God will not allow to thrust their thoughts from 
them till the bitter draught has done its work.

From that day, however, there was a cordial understanding between 
the two.  They never alluded to the subject; but they had known the 
bottom of each other's heart.  Lancelot's sick-room was now pleasant 
enough, and he drank in daily his new friend's perpetual stream of 
anecdote, till March and hunting were past, and April was half over.  
The old squire came up after dinner regularly (during March he had 
hunted every day, and slept every evening); and the trio chatted 
along merrily enough, by the help of whist and backgammon, upon the 
surface of this little island of life,--which is, like Sinbad's, 
after all only the back of a floating whale, ready to dive at any 
moment.--And then?--

But what was Argemone doing all this time?  Argemone was busy in her 
boudoir (too often a true boudoir to her) among books and 
statuettes, and dried flowers, fancying herself, and not unfairly, 
very intellectual.  She had four new manias every year; her last 
winter's one had been that bottle-and-squirt mania, miscalled 
chemistry; her spring madness was for the Greek drama.  She had 
devoured Schlegel's lectures, and thought them divine; and now she 
was hard at work on Sophocles, with a little help from translations, 
and thought she understood him every word.  Then she was somewhat 
High-Church in her notions, and used to go up every Wednesday and 
Friday to the chapel in the hills, where Lancelot had met her, for 
an hour's mystic devotion, set off by a little graceful asceticism.  
As for Lancelot, she never thought of him but as an empty-headed 
fox-hunter who had met with his deserts; and the brilliant accounts 
which the all smoothing colonel gave at dinner of Lancelot's 
physical well doing and agreeable conversation only made her set him 
down the sooner as a twin clever-do-nothing to the despised 
Bracebridge, whom she hated for keeping her father in a roar of 
laughter.

But her sister, little Honoria, had all the while been busy messing 
and cooking with her own hands for the invalid; and almost fell in 
love with the colonel for his watchful kindness.  And here a word 
about Honoria, to whom Nature, according to her wont with sisters, 
had given almost everything which Argemone wanted, and denied almost 
everything which Argemone had, except beauty.  And even in that, the 
many-sided mother had made her a perfect contrast to her sister,--
tiny and luscious, dark-eyed and dark-haired; as full of wild simple 
passion as an Italian, thinking little, except where she felt much--
which was, indeed, everywhere; for she lived in a perpetual April-
shower of exaggerated sympathy for all suffering, whether in novels 
or in life; and daily gave the lie to that shallow old calumny, that 
'fictitious sorrows harden the heart to real ones.'

Argemone was almost angry with her sometimes, when she trotted whole 
days about the village from school to sick-room:  perhaps conscience 
hinted to her that her duty, too, lay rather there than among her 
luxurious day-dreams.  But, alas! though she would have indignantly 
repelled the accusation of selfishness, yet in self and for self 
alone she lived; and while she had force of will for any so-called 
'self-denial,' and would fast herself cross and stupefied, and quite 
enjoy kneeling thinly clad and barefoot on the freezing chapel-floor 
on a winter's morning, yet her fastidious delicacy revolted at 
sitting, like Honoria, beside the bed of the ploughman's consumptive 
daughter, in a reeking, stifling, lean-to garret, in which had slept 
the night before, the father, mother, and two grown-up boys, not to 
mention a new-married couple, the sick girl, and, alas! her baby.  
And of such bedchambers there were too many in Whitford Priors.

The first evening that Lancelot came downstairs, Honoria clapped her 
hands outright for joy as he entered, and ran up and down for ten 
minutes, fetching and carrying endless unnecessary cushions and 
footstools; while Argemone greeted him with a cold distant bow, and 
a fine-lady drawl of carefully commonplace congratulations.  Her 
heart smote her though, as she saw the wan face and the wild, 
melancholy, moonstruck eyes once more glaring through and through 
her; she found a comfort in thinking his stare impertinent, drew 
herself up, and turned away; once, indeed, she could not help 
listening, as Lancelot thanked Mrs. Lavington for all the pious and 
edifying books with which the good lady had kept his room rather 
than his brain furnished for the last six weeks; he was going to say 
more, but he saw the colonel's quaint foxy eye peering at him, 
remembered St. Francis de Sales, and held his tongue.

But, as her destiny was, Argemone found herself, in the course of 
the evening, alone with Lancelot, at the open window.  It was a 
still, hot, heavy night, after long easterly drought; sheet-
lightning glimmered on the far horizon over the dark woodlands; the 
coming shower had sent forward as his herald a whispering draught of 
fragrant air.

'What a delicious shiver is creeping over those limes!' said 
Lancelot, half to himself.

The expression struck Argemone:  it was the right one, and it seemed 
to open vistas of feeling and observation in the speaker which she 
had not suspected.  There was a rich melancholy in the voice;--she 
turned to look at him.

'Ay,' he went on; 'and the same heat which crisps those thirsty 
leaves must breed the thunder-shower which cools them?  But so it is 
throughout the universe:  every yearning proves the existence of an 
object meant to satisfy it; the same law creates both the giver and 
the receiver, the longing and its home.'

'If one could but know sometimes what it is for which one is 
longing!' said Argemone, without knowing that she was speaking from 
her inmost heart:  but thus does the soul involuntarily lay bare its 
most unspoken depths in the presence of its yet unknown mate, and 
then shudders at its own ABANDON as it first tries on the wedding 
garment of Paradise.

Lancelot was not yet past the era at which young geniuses are apt to 
'talk book' at little.

'For what?' he answered, flashing up according to his fashion.  'To 
be;--to be great; to have done one mighty work before we die, and 
live, unloved or loved, upon the lips of men.  For this all long who 
are not mere apes and wall-flies.'

'So longed the founders of Babel,' answered Argemone, carelessly, to 
this tirade.  She had risen a strange fish, the cunning beauty, and 
now she was trying her fancy flies over him one by one.

'And were they so far wrong?' answered he.  'From the Babel society 
sprung our architecture, our astronomy, politics, and colonisation.  
No doubt the old Hebrew sheiks thought them impious enough, for 
daring to build brick walls instead of keeping to the good old-
fashioned tents, and gathering themselves into a nation instead of 
remaining a mere family horde; and gave their own account of the 
myth, just as the antediluvian savages gave theirs of that strange 
Eden scene, by the common interpretation of which the devil is made 
the first inventor of modesty.  Men are all conservatives; 
everything new is impious, till we get accustomed to it; and if it 
fails, the mob piously discover a divine vengeance in the mischance, 
from Babel to Catholic Emancipation.'

Lancelot had stuttered horribly during the latter part of this most 
heterodox outburst, for he had begun to think about himself, and try 
to say a fine thing, suspecting all the while that it might not be 
true.  But Argemone did not remark the stammering:  the new thoughts 
startled and pained her; but there was a daring grace about them.  
She tried, as women will, to answer him with arguments, and failed, 
as women will fail.  She was accustomed to lay down the law a la 
Madame de Stael, to savants and non-savants and be heard with 
reverence, as a woman should be.  But poor truth-seeking Lancelot 
did not see what sex had to do with logic; he flew at her as if she 
had been a very barrister, and hunted her mercilessly up and down 
through all sorts of charming sophisms, as she begged the question, 
and shifted her ground, as thoroughly right in her conclusion as she 
was wrong in her reasoning, till she grew quite confused and 
pettish.--And then Lancelot suddenly shrank into his shell, claws 
and all, like an affrighted soldier-crab, hung down his head, and 
stammered out some incoherencies,--'N-n-not accustomed to talk to 
women--ladies, I mean.  F-forgot myself.--Pray forgive me!'  And he 
looked up, and her eyes, half-amused, met his, and she saw that they 
were filled with tears.

'What have I to forgive?' she said, more gently, wondering on what 
sort of strange sportsman she had fallen.  'You treat me like an 
equal; you will deign to argue with me.  But men in general--oh, 
they hide their contempt for us, if not their own ignorance, under 
that mask of chivalrous deference!' and then in the nasal fine 
ladies' key, which was her shell, as bitter brusquerie was his, she 
added, with an Amazon queen's toss of the head,--'You must come and 
see us often.  We shall suit each other, I see, better than most 
whom we see here.'

A sneer and a blush passed together over Lancelot's ugliness.

'What, better than the glib Colonel Bracebridge yonder?'

'Oh, he is witty enough, but he lives on the surface of everything!  
He is altogether shallow and blase.  His good-nature is the fruit of 
want of feeling; between his gracefulness and his sneering 
persiflage he is a perfect Mephistopheles-Apollo.'

What a snare a decently-good nickname is!  Out it must come, though 
it carry a lie on its back.  But the truth was, Argemone thought 
herself infinitely superior to the colonel, for which simple reason 
she could not in the least understand him.

[By the bye, how subtly Mr. Tennyson has embodied all this in The 
Princess.  How he shows us the woman, when she takes her stand on 
the false masculine ground of intellect, working out her own moral 
punishment, by destroying in herself the tender heart of flesh, 
which is either woman's highest blessing or her bitterest curse; how 
she loses all feminine sensibility to the under-current of feeling 
in us poor world-worn, case-hardened men, and falls from pride to 
sternness, from sternness to sheer inhumanity.  I should have 
honoured myself by pleading guilty to stealing much of Argemone's 
character from The Princess, had not the idea been conceived, and 
fairly worked out, long before the appearance of that noble poem.]


They said no more to each other that evening.  Argemone was called 
to the piano; and Lancelot took up the Sporting Magazine, and read 
himself to sleep till the party separated for the night.

Argemone went up thoughtfully to her own room.  The shower had 
fallen, and the moon was shining bright, while every budding leaf 
and knot of mould steamed up cool perfume, borrowed from the 
treasures of the thundercloud.  All around was working the infinite 
mystery of birth and growth, of giving and taking, of beauty and 
use.  All things were harmonious--all things reciprocal without.  
Argemone felt herself needless, lonely, and out of tune with herself 
and nature.

She sat in the window, and listlessly read over to herself a 
fragment of her own poetry:--


SAPPHO

She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
Above her glared the moon; beneath, the sea.
Upon the white horizon Athos' peak
Weltered in burning haze; all airs were dead;
The sicale slept among the tamarisk's hair;
The birds sat dumb and drooping.  Far below
The lazy sea-weed glistened in the sun:
The lazy sea-fowl dried their steaming wings;
The lazy swell crept whispering up the ledge,
And sank again.  Great Pan was laid to rest;
And mother Earth watched by him as he slept,
And hushed her myriad children for awhile.

She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
And sighed for sleep, for sleep that would not hear,
But left her tossing still:  for night and day
A mighty hunger yearned within her heart,
Till all her veins ran fever, and her cheek,
Her long thin hands, and ivory-channell'd feet,
Were wasted with the wasting of her soul.
Then peevishly she flung her on her face,
And hid her eyeballs from the blinding glare,
And fingered at the grass, and tried to cool
Her crisp hot lips against the crisp hot sward:
And then she raised her head, and upward cast
Wild looks from homeless eyes, whose liquid light
Gleamed out between deep folds of blue-black hair,
As gleam twin lakes between the purple peaks
Of deep Parnassus, at the mournful moon.
Beside her lay a lyre.  She snatched the shell,
And waked wild music from its silver strings;
Then tossed it sadly by,--'Ah, hush!' she cries,
'Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine!
Why mock my discords with thine harmonies?
'Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine,
Only to echo back in every tone,
The moods of nobler natures than thine own.'


'No!' she said.  'That soft and rounded rhyme suits ill with 
Sappho's fitful and wayward agonies.  She should burst out at once 
into wild passionate life-weariness, and disgust at that universe, 
with whose beauty she has filled her eyes in vain, to find it always 
a dead picture, unsatisfying, unloving--as I have found it.'

Sweet self-deceiver! had you no other reason for choosing as your 
heroine Sappho, the victim of the idolatry of intellect--trying in 
vain to fill her heart with the friendship of her own sex, and then 
sinking into mere passion for a handsome boy, and so down into self-
contempt and suicide?

She was conscious, I do believe, of no other reason than that she 
gave; but consciousness is a dim candle--over a deep mine.

'After all,' she said pettishly, 'people will call it a mere 
imitation of Shelley's Alastor.  And what harm if it is?  Is there 
to be no female Alastor?  Has not the woman as good a right as the 
man to long after ideal beauty--to pine and die if she cannot find 
it; and regenerate herself in its light?'

'Yo-hoo-oo-oo!  Youp, youp!  Oh-hooo!' arose doleful through the 
echoing shrubbery.

Argemone started and looked out.  It was not a banshee, but a 
forgotten fox-hound puppy, sitting mournfully on the gravel-walk 
beneath, staring at the clear ghastly moon.

She laughed and blushed--there was a rebuke in it.  She turned to go 
to rest; and as she knelt and prayed at her velvet faldstool, among 
all the nicknacks which now-a-days make a luxury of devotion, was it 
strange if, after she had prayed for the fate of nations and 
churches, and for those who, as she thought, were fighting at Oxford 
the cause of universal truth and reverend antiquity, she remembered 
in her petitions the poor godless youth, with his troubled and 
troubling eloquence?  But it was strange that she blushed when she 
mentioned his name--why should she not pray for him as she prayed 
for others?

Perhaps she felt that she did not pray for him as she prayed for 
others.

She left the AEolian harp in the window, as a luxury if she should 
wake, and coiled herself up among lace pillows and eider blemos; and 
the hound coiled himself up on the gravel-walk, after a solemn 
vesper-ceremony of three turns round in his own length, looking 
vainly for a 'soft stone.'  The finest of us are animals after all, 
and live by eating and sleeping:  and, taken as animals, not so 
badly off either--unless we happen to be Dorsetshire labourers--or 
Spitalfields weavers--or colliery children--or marching soldiers--
or, I am afraid, one half of English souls this day.

And Argemone dreamed;--that she was a fox, flying for her life 
through a churchyard--and Lancelot was a hound, yelling and leaping, 
in a red coat and white buckskins, close upon her--and she felt his 
hot breath, and saw his white teeth glare. . . .  And then her 
father was there:  and he was an Italian boy, and played the organ--
and Lancelot was a dancing dog, and stood up and danced to the tune 
of 'C'est l'amour, l'amour, l'amour,' pitifully enough, in his red 
coat--and she stood up and danced too; but she found her fox-fur 
dress insufficient, and begged hard for a paper frill--which was 
denied her:  whereat she cried bitterly and woke; and saw the Night 
peeping in with her bright diamond eyes, and blushed, and hid her 
beautiful face in the pillows, and fell asleep again.

What the little imp, who managed this puppet-show on Argemone's 
brain-stage, may have intended to symbolise thereby, and whence he 
stole his actors and stage-properties, and whether he got up the 
interlude for his own private fun, or for that of a choir of brother 
Eulenspiegels, or, finally, for the edification of Argemone as to 
her own history, past, present, or future, are questions which we 
must leave unanswered, till physicians have become a little more of 
metaphysicians, and have given up their present plan of ignoring for 
nine hundred and ninety-nine pages that most awful and significant 
custom of dreaming, and then in the thousandth page talking the 
boldest materialist twaddle about it.

In the meantime, Lancelot, contrary to the colonel's express 
commands, was sitting up to indite the following letter to his 
cousin, the Tractarian curate:--

'You complain that I waste my time in field-sports:  how do you know 
that I waste my time?  I find within myself certain appetites; and I 
suppose that the God whom you say made me, made those appetites as a 
part of me.  Why are they to be crushed any more than any other part 
of me?  I am the whole of what I find in myself--am I to pick and 
choose myself out of myself?  And besides, I feel that the exercise 
of freedom, activity, foresight, daring, independent self-
determination, even in a few minutes' burst across country, 
strengthens me in mind as well as in body.  It might not do so to 
you; but you are of a different constitution, and, from all I see, 
the power of a man's muscles, the excitability of his nerves, the 
shape and balance of his brain, make him what he is.  Else what is 
the meaning of physiognomy?  Every man's destiny, as the Turks say, 
stands written on his forehead.  One does not need two glances at 
your face to know that you would not enjoy fox-hunting, that you 
would enjoy book-learning and "refined repose," as they are pleased 
to call it.  Every man carries his character in his brain.  You all 
know that, and act upon it when you have to deal with a man for 
sixpence; but your religious dogmas, which make out that everyman 
comes into the world equally brutish and fiendish, make you afraid 
to confess it.  I don't quarrel with a "douce" man like you, with a 
large organ of veneration, for following your bent.  But if I am 
fiery, with a huge cerebellum, why am I not to follow mine?--For 
that is what you do, after all--what you like best.  It is all very 
easy for a man to talk of conquering his appetites, when he has none 
to conquer.  Try and conquer your organ of veneration, or of 
benevolence, or of calculation--then I will call you an ascetic.  
Why not!--The same Power which made the front of one's head made the 
back, I suppose?

'And, I tell you, hunting does me good.  It awakens me out of my 
dreary mill-round of metaphysics.  It sweeps away that infernal web 
of self-consciousness, and absorbs me in outward objects; and my 
red-hot Perillus's bull cools in proportion as my horse warms.  I 
tell you, I never saw a man who could cut out his way across country 
who could not cut his way through better things when his turn came.  
The cleverest and noblest fellows are sure to be the best riders in 
the long run.  And as for bad company and "the world," when you take 
to going in the first-class carriages for fear of meeting a swearing 
sailor in the second-class--when those who have "renounced the 
world" give up buying and selling in the funds--when my uncle, the 
pious banker, who will only "associate" with the truly religious, 
gives up dealing with any scoundrel or heathen who can "do business" 
with him--then you may quote pious people's opinions to me.  In 
God's name, if the Stock Exchange, and railway stagging, and the 
advertisements in the Protestant Hue-and-Cry, and the frantic 
Mammon-hunting which has been for the last fifty years the peculiar 
pursuit of the majority of Quakers, Dissenters, and Religious 
Churchmen, are not The World, what is?  I don't complain of them, 
though; Puritanism has interdicted to them all art, all excitement, 
all amusement--except money-making.  It is their dernier ressort, 
poor souls!

'But you must explain to us naughty fox-hunters how all this agrees 
with the good book.  We see plainly enough, in the meantime, how it 
agrees with "poor human nature."  We see that the "religious world," 
like the "great world," and the "sporting world," and the "literary 
world,"


"Compounds for sins she is inclined to,
By damning those she has no mind to;"


and that because England is a money-making country, and money-making 
is an effeminate pursuit, therefore all sedentary and spoony sins, 
like covetousness, slander, bigotry, and self-conceit, are to be 
cockered and plastered over, while the more masculine vices, and no-
vices also, are mercilessly hunted down by your cold-blooded, soft-
handed religionists.

'This is a more quiet letter than usual from me, my dear coz, for 
many of your reproofs cut me home:  they angered me at the time; but 
I deserve them.  I am miserable, self-disgusted, self-helpless, 
craving for freedom, and yet crying aloud for some one to come and 
guide me, and teach me; and WHO IS THERE IN THESE DAYS WHO COULD 
TEACH A FAST MAN, EVEN IF HE WOULD TRY?  Be sure, that as long as 
you and yours make piety a synonym for unmanliness, you will never 
convert either me or any other good sportsman.

'By the bye, my dear fellow, was I asleep or awake when I seemed to 
read in the postscript of your last letter, something about "being 
driven to Rome after all"? . . .  Why thither, of all places in 
heaven or earth?  You know, I have no party interest in the 
question.  All creeds are very much alike to me just now.  But allow 
me to ask, in a spirit of the most tolerant curiosity, what possible 
celestial bait, either of the useful or the agreeable kind, can the 
present excellent Pope, or his adherents, hold out to you in 
compensation for the solid earthly pudding which you would have to 
desert? . . .  I daresay, though, that I shall not comprehend your 
answer when it comes.  I am, you know, utterly deficient in that 
sixth sense of the angelic or supralunar beautiful, which fills your 
soul with ecstasy.  You, I know, expect and long to become an angel 
after death:  I am under the strange hallucination that my body is 
part of me, and in spite of old Plotinus, look with horror at a 
disembodiment till the giving of that new body, the great perfection 
of which, in your eyes, and those of every one else, seems to be, 
that it will be less, and not more of a body, than our present one. 
. . .  Is this hope, to me at once inconceivable and contradictory, 
palpable and valuable enough to you to send you to that Italian 
Avernus, to get it made a little more certain?  If so, I despair of 
your making your meaning intelligible to a poor fellow wallowing, 
like me, in the Hylic Borboros--or whatever else you may choose to 
call the unfortunate fact of being flesh and blood. . . .  Still, 
write.'



CHAPTER III:  NEW ACTORS, AND A NEW STAGE



When Argemone rose in the morning, her first thought was of 
Lancelot.  His face haunted her.  The wild brilliance of his 
intellect struggling through foul smoke-clouds, had haunted her 
still more.  She had heard of his profligacy, his bursts of fierce 
Berserk-madness; and yet now these very faults, instead of 
repelling, seemed to attract her, and intensify her longing to save 
him.  She would convert him; purify him; harmonise his discords.  
And that very wish gave her a peace she had never felt before.  She 
had formed her idea; she had now a purpose for which to live, and 
she determined to concentrate herself for the work, and longed for 
the moment when she should meet Lancelot, and begin--how, she did 
not very clearly see.

It is an old jest--the fair devotee trying to convert the young 
rake.  Men of the world laugh heartily at it; and so does the devil, 
no doubt.  If any readers wish to be fellow-jesters with that 
personage, they may; but, as sure as old Saxon women-worship remains 
for ever a blessed and healing law of life, the devotee may yet 
convert the rake--and, perhaps, herself into the bargain.

Argemone looked almost angrily round at her beloved books and 
drawings; for they spoke a message to her which they had never 
spoken before, of self-centred ambition.  'Yes,' she said aloud to 
herself, 'I have been selfish, utterly!  Art, poetry, science--I 
believe, after all, that I have only loved them for my own sake, not 
for theirs, because they would make me something, feed my conceit of 
my own talents.  How infinitely more glorious to find my work-field 
and my prize, not in dead forms and colours, or ink-and-paper 
theories, but in a living, immortal, human spirit!  I will study no 
more, except the human heart, and only that to purify and ennoble 
it.'

True, Argemone; and yet, like all resolutions, somewhat less than 
the truth.  That morning, indeed, her purpose was simple as God's 
own light.  She never dreamed of exciting Lancelot's admiration, 
even his friendship for herself.  She would have started as from a 
snake, from the issue which the reader very clearly foresees, that 
Lancelot would fall in love, not with Young Englandism, but with 
Argemone Lavington.  But yet self is not eradicated even from a 
woman's heart in one morning before breakfast.  Besides, it is not 
'benevolence,' but love--the real Cupid of flesh and blood, who can 
first


'Touch the chord of self which, trembling,
Passes in music out of sight.'


But a time for all things; and it is now time for Argemone to go 
down to breakfast, having prepared some dozen imaginary dialogues 
between herself and Lancelot, in which, of course, her eloquence 
always had the victory.  She had yet to learn, that it is better 
sometimes not to settle in one's heart what we shall speak, for the 
Everlasting Will has good works ready prepared for us to walk in, by 
what we call fortunate accident; and it shall be given us in that 
day and that hour what we shall speak.

Lancelot, in the meantime, shrank from meeting Argemone; and was 
quite glad of the weakness which kept him upstairs.  Whether he was 
afraid of her--whether he was ashamed of himself or of his crutches, 
I cannot tell, but I daresay, reader, you are getting tired of all 
this soul-dissecting.  So we will have a bit of action again, for 
the sake of variety, if for nothing better.

Of all the species of lovely scenery which England holds, none, 
perhaps, is more exquisite than the banks of the chalk-rivers--the 
perfect limpidity of the water, the gay and luxuriant vegetation of 
the banks and ditches, the masses of noble wood embosoming the 
villages, the unique beauty of the water-meadows, living sheets of 
emerald and silver, tinkling and sparkling, cool under the fiercest 
sun, brilliant under the blackest clouds.--There, if anywhere, one 
would have expected to find Arcadia among fertility, loveliness, 
industry, and wealth.  But, alas for the sad reality! the cool 
breath of those glittering water-meadows too often floats laden with 
poisonous miasma.  Those picturesque villages are generally the 
perennial hotbeds of fever and ague, of squalid penury, sottish 
profligacy, dull discontent too stale for words.  There is luxury in 
the park, wealth in the huge farm-steadings, knowledge in the 
parsonage:  but the poor? those by whose dull labour all that luxury 
and wealth, ay, even that knowledge, is made possible--what are 
they?  We shall see, please God, ere the story's end.

But of all this Lancelot as yet thought nothing.  He, too, had to be 
emancipated, as much as Argemone, from selfish dreams; to learn to 
work trustfully in the living Present, not to gloat sentimentally 
over the unreturning Past.  But his time was not yet come; and 
little he thought of all the work which lay ready for him within a 
mile of the Priory, as he watched the ladies go out for the 
afternoon, and slipped down to the Nun's-pool on his crutches to 
smoke and fish, and build castles in the air.

The Priory, with its rambling courts and gardens, stood on an island 
in the river.  The upper stream flowed in a straight artificial 
channel through the garden, still and broad, towards the Priory 
mill; while just above the Priory wall half the river fell over a 
high weir, with all its appendages of bucks and hatchways, and eel-
baskets, into the Nun's-pool, and then swept round under the ivied 
walls, with their fantastic turrets and gables, and little loopholed 
windows, peering out over the stream, as it hurried down over the 
shallows to join the race below the mill.  A postern door in the 
walls opened on an ornamental wooden bridge across the weir-head--a 
favourite haunt of all fishers and sketchers who were admitted to 
the dragon-guarded Elysium of Whitford Priors.  Thither Lancelot 
went, congratulating himself, strange to say, in having escaped the 
only human being whom he loved on earth.

He found on the weir-bridge two of the keepers.  The younger one, 
Tregarva, was a stately, thoughtful-looking Cornishman, some six 
feet three in height, with thews and sinews in proportion.  He was 
sitting on the bridge looking over a basket of eel-lines, and 
listening silently to the chat of his companion.

Old Harry Verney, the other keeper, was a character in his way, and 
a very bad character too, though he was a patriarch among all the 
gamekeepers of the vale.  He was a short, wiry, bandy-legged, 
ferret-visaged old man, with grizzled hair, and a wizened face 
tanned brown and purple by constant exposure.  Between rheumatism 
and constant handling the rod and gun, his fingers were crooked like 
a hawk's claws.  He kept his left eye always shut, apparently to 
save trouble in shooting; and squinted, and sniffed, and peered, 
with a stooping back and protruded chin, as if he were perpetually 
on the watch for fish, flesh, and fowl, vermin and Christian.  The 
friendship between himself and the Scotch terrier at his heels would 
have been easily explained by Lessing, for in the transmigration of 
souls the spirit of Harry Verney had evidently once animated a dog 
of that breed.  He was dressed in a huge thick fustian jacket, 
scratched, stained, and patched, with bulging, greasy pockets; a 
cast of flies round a battered hat, riddled with shot-holes, a dog-
whistle at his button-hole, and an old gun cut short over his arm, 
bespoke his business.

'I seed that 'ere Crawy against Ashy Down Plantations last night, 
I'll be sworn,' said he, in a squeaking, sneaking tone.

'Well, what harm was the man doing?'

'Oh, ay, that's the way you young 'uns talk.  If he warn't doing 
mischief, he'd a been glad to have been doing it, I'll warrant.  If 
I'd been as young as you, I'd have picked a quarrel with him soon 
enough, and found a cause for tackling him.  It's worth a brace of 
sovereigns with the squire to haul him up.  Eh? eh?  Ain't old Harry 
right now?'

'Humph!' growled the younger man.

'There, then, you get me a snare and a hare by to-morrow night,' 
went on old Harry, 'and see if I don't nab him.  It won't lay long 
under the plantation afore he picks it up.  You mind to snare me a 
hare to-night, now!'

'I'll do no such thing, nor help to bring fake accusations against 
any man!'

'False accusations!' answered Harry, in his cringing way.  'Look at 
that now, for a keeper to say!  Why, if he don't happen to have a 
snare just there, he has somewhere else, you know.  Eh?  Ain't old 
Harry right now, eh?'

'Maybe.'

'There, don't say I don't know nothing then.  Eh?  What matter who 
put the snare down, or the hare in, perwided he takes it up, man?  
If 'twas his'n he'd be all the better pleased.  The most 
notoriousest poacher as walks unhung!'  And old Harry lifted up his 
crooked hands in pious indignation.

'I'll have no more gamekeeping, Harry.  What with hunting down 
Christians as if they were vermin, all night, and being cursed by 
the squire all day, I'd sooner be a sheriff's runner, or a negro 
slave.'

'Ay, ay! that's the way the young dogs always bark afore they're 
broke in, and gets to like it, as the eels does skinning.  Haven't I 
bounced pretty near out of my skin many a time afore now, on this 
here very bridge, with "Harry, jump in, you stupid hound!" and 
"Harry, get out, you one-eyed tailor!"   And then, if one of the 
gentlemen lost a fish with their clumsiness--Oh, Father! to hear 'em 
let out at me and my landing-net, and curse fit to fright the devil!  
Dash their sarcy tongues!  Eh!  Don't old Harry know their ways?  
Don't he know 'em, now?'

'Ay,' said the young man, bitterly.  'We break the dogs, and we load 
the guns, and we find the game, and mark the game,--and then they 
call themselves sportsmen; we choose the flies, and we bait the 
spinning-hooks, and we show them where the fish lie, and then when 
they've hooked them, they can't get them out without us and the 
spoonnet; and then they go home to the ladies and boast of the lot 
of fish they killed--and who thinks of the keeper?'

'Oh! ah!  Then don't say old Harry knows nothing, then.  How nicely, 
now, you and I might get a living off this 'ere manor, if the 
landlords was served like the French ones was.  Eh, Paul?' chuckled 
old Harry.  'Wouldn't we pay our taxes with pheasants and grayling, 
that's all, eh?  Ain't old Harry right now, eh?'

The old fox was fishing for an assent, not for its own sake, for he 
was a fierce Tory, and would have stood up to be shot at any day, 
not only for his master's sake, but for the sake of a single 
pheasant of his master's; but he hated Tregarva for many reasons, 
and was daily on the watch to entrap him on some of his peculiar 
points, whereof he had, as we shall find, a good many.

What would have been Tregarva's answer, I cannot tell; but Lancelot, 
who had unintentionally overheard the greater part of the 
conversation, disliked being any longer a listener, and came close 
to them.

'Here's your gudgeons and minnows, sir, as you bespoke,' quoth 
Harry; 'and here's that paternoster as you gave me to rig up.  
Beautiful minnows, sir, white as a silver spoon.--They're the ones 
now, ain't they, sir, eh?'

'They'll do!'

'Well, then, don't say old Harry don't know nothing, that's all, 
eh?' and the old fellow toddled off, peering and twisting his head 
about like a starling.

'An odd old fellow that, Tregarva,' said Lancelot.

'Very, sir, considering who made him,' answered the Cornishman, 
touching his hat, and then thrusting his nose deeper than ever into 
the eel-basket.

'Beautiful stream this,' said Lancelot, who had a continual longing-
-right or wrong--to chat with his inferiors; and was proportionately 
sulky and reserved to his superiors.

'Beautiful enough, sir,' said the keeper, with an emphasis on the 
first word.

'Why, has it any other fault?'

'Not so wholesome as pretty, sir.'

'What harm does it do?'

'Fever, and ague, and rheumatism, sir.'

'Where?' asked Lancelot, a little amused by the man's laconic 
answers.

'Wherever the white fog spreads, sir.'

'Where's that?'

'Everywhere, sir.'

'And when?'

'Always, sir.'

Lancelot burst out laughing.  The man looked up at him slowly and 
seriously.

'You wouldn't laugh, sir, if you'd seen much of the inside of these 
cottages round.'

'Really,' said Lancelot, 'I was only laughing at our making such 
very short work of such a long and serious story.  Do you mean that 
the unhealthiness of this country is wholly caused by the river?'

'No, sir.  The river-damps are God's sending; and so they are not 
too bad to bear.  But there's more of man's sending, that is too bad 
to bear.'

'What do you mean?'

'Are men likely to be healthy when they are worse housed than a 
pig?'

'No.'

'And worse fed than a hound?'

'Good heavens!  No!'

'Or packed together to sleep, like pilchards in a barrel?'

'But, my good fellow, do you mean that the labourers here are in 
that state?'

'It isn't far to walk, sir.  Perhaps some day, when the May-fly is 
gone off, and the fish won't rise awhile, you could walk down and 
see.  I beg your pardon, sir, though, for thinking of such a thing.  
They are not places fit for gentlemen, that's certain.'  There was a 
staid irony in his tone, which Lancelot felt.

'But the clergyman goes?'

'Yes, sir.'

'And Miss Honoria goes?'

'Yes, God Almighty bless her!'

'And do not they see that all goes right?'

The giant twisted his huge limbs, as if trying to avoid an answer, 
and yet not daring to do so.

'Do clergymen go about among the poor much, sir, at college, before 
they are ordained?'

Lancelot smiled, and shook his head.

'I thought so, sir.  Our good vicar is like the rest hereabouts.  
God knows, he stints neither time nor money--the souls of the poor 
are well looked after, and their bodies too--as far as his purse 
will go; but that's not far.'

'Is he ill-off, then?'

'The living's worth some forty pounds a year.  The great tithes, 
they say, are worth better than twelve hundred; but Squire Lavington 
has them.'

'Oh, I see!' said Lancelot.

'I'm glad you do, sir, for I don't,' meekly answered Tregarva.  'But 
the vicar, sir, he is a kind man, and a good; but the poor don't 
understand him, nor he them.  He is too learned, sir, and, saving 
your presence, too fond of his prayer-book.'

'One can't be too fond of a good thing.'

'Not unless you make an idol of it, sir, and fancy that men's souls 
were made for the prayer-book, and not the prayer-book for them.'

'But cannot he expose and redress these evils, if they exist?'

Tregarva twisted about again.

'I do not say that I think it, sir; but this I know, that every poor 
man in the vale thinks it--that the parsons are afraid of the 
landlords.  They must see these things, for they are not blind; and 
they try to plaster them up out of their own pockets.'

'But why, in God's name, don't they strike at the root of the 
matter, and go straight to the landlords and tell them the truth?' 
asked Lancelot.

'So people say, sir.  I see no reason for it except the one which I 
gave you.  Besides, sir, you must remember, that a man can't quarrel 
with his own kin; and so many of them are their squire's brothers, 
or sons, or nephews.'

'Or good friends with him, at least.'

'Ay, sir, and, to do them justice, they had need, for the poor's 
sake, to keep good friends with the squire.  How else are they to 
get a farthing for schools, or coal-subscriptions, or lying-in 
societies, or lending libraries, or penny clubs?  If they spoke 
their minds to the great ones, sir, how could they keep the parish 
together?'

'You seem to see both sides of a question, certainly.  But what a 
miserable state of things, that the labouring man should require all 
these societies, and charities, and helps from the rich!--that an 
industrious freeman cannot live without alms!'

'So I have thought this long time,' quietly answered Tregarva.

'But Miss Honoria,--she is not afraid to tell her father the truth?'

'Suppose, sir, when Adam and Eve were in the garden, that all the 
devils had come up and played their fiends' tricks before them,--do 
you think they'd have seen any shame in it?'

'I really cannot tell,' said Lancelot, smiling.

'Then I can, sir.  They'd have seen no more harm in it than there 
was harm already in themselves; and that was none.  A man's eyes can 
only see what they've learnt to see.'

Lancelot started:  it was a favourite dictum of his in Carlyle's 
works.

'Where did you get that thought, my friend'

'By seeing, sir.'

'But what has that to do with Miss Honoria?'

'She is an angel of holiness herself, sir; and, therefore, she goes 
on without blushing or suspecting, where our blood would boil again.  
She sees people in want, and thinks it must be so, and pities them 
and relieves them.  But she don't know want herself; and, therefore, 
she don't know that it makes men beasts and devils.  She's as pure 
as God's light herself; and, therefore, she fancies every one is as 
spotless as she is.  And there's another mistake in your charitable 
great people, sir.  When they see poor folk sick or hungry before 
their eyes, they pull out their purses fast enough, God bless them; 
for they wouldn't like to be so themselves.  But the oppression that 
goes on all the year round, and the want that goes on all the year 
round, and the filth, and the lying, and the swearing, and the 
profligacy, that go on all the year round, and the sickening weight 
of debt, and the miserable grinding anxiety from rent-day to rent-
day, and Saturday night to Saturday night, that crushes a man's soul 
down, and drives every thought out of his head but how he is to fill 
his stomach and warm his back, and keep a house over his head, till 
he daren't for his life take his thoughts one moment off the meat 
that perisheth--oh, sir, they never felt this; and, therefore, they 
never dream that there are thousands who pass them in their daily 
walks who feel this, and feel nothing else!'

This outburst was uttered with an earnestness and majesty which 
astonished Lancelot.  He forgot the subject in the speaker.

'You are a very extraordinary gamekeeper!' said he.

'When the Lord shows a man a thing, he can't well help seeing it,' 
answered Tregarva, in his usual staid tone.

There was a pause.  The keeper looked at him with a glance, before 
which Lancelot's eyes fell.

'Hell is paved with hearsays, sir, and as all this talk of mine is 
hearsay, if you are in earnest, sir, go and see for yourself.  I 
know you have a kind heart, and they tell me that you are a great 
scholar, which would to God I was! so you ought not to condescend to 
take my word for anything which you can look into yourself;' with 
which sound piece of common-sense Tregarva returned busily to his 
eel-lines.

'Hand me the rod and can, and help me out along the buck-stage,' 
said Lancelot; 'I must have some more talk with you, my fine 
fellow.'

'Amen,' answered Tregarva, as he assisted our lame hero along a huge 
beam which stretched out into the pool; and having settled him 
there, returned mechanically to his work, humming a Wesleyan hymn-
tune.

Lancelot sat and tried to catch perch, but Tregarva's words haunted 
him.  He lighted his cigar, and tried to think earnestly over the 
matter, but he had got into the wrong place for thinking.  All his 
thoughts, all his sympathies, were drowned in the rush and whirl of 
the water.  He forgot everything else in the mere animal enjoyment 
of sight and sound.  Like many young men at his crisis of life, he 
had given himself up to the mere contemplation of Nature till he had 
become her slave; and now a luscious scene, a singing bird, were 
enough to allure his mind away from the most earnest and awful 
thoughts.  He tried to think, but the river would not let him.  It 
thundered and spouted out behind him from the hatches, and leapt 
madly past him, and caught his eyes in spite of him, and swept them 
away down its dancing waves, and let them go again only to sweep 
them down again and again, till his brain felt a delicious dizziness 
from the everlasting rush and the everlasting roar.  And then below, 
how it spread, and writhed, and whirled into transparent fans, 
hissing and twining snakes, polished glass-wreaths, huge crystal 
bells, which boiled up from the bottom, and dived again beneath long 
threads of creamy foam, and swung round posts and roots, and rushed 
blackening under dark weed-fringed boughs, and gnawed at the marly 
banks, and shook the ever-restless bulrushes, till it was swept away 
and down over the white pebbles and olive weeds, in one broad 
rippling sheet of molten silver, towards the distant sea.  Downwards 
it fleeted ever, and bore his thoughts floating on its oily stream; 
and the great trout, with their yellow sides and peacock backs, 
lounged among the eddies, and the silver grayling dimpled and 
wandered upon the shallows, and the may-flies flickered and rustled 
round him like water fairies, with their green gauzy wings; the coot 
clanked musically among the reeds; the frogs hummed their ceaseless 
vesper-monotone; the kingfisher darted from his hole in the bank 
like a blue spark of electric light; the swallows' bills snapped as 
they twined and hawked above the pool; the swift's wings whirred 
like musket-balls, as they rushed screaming past his head; and ever 
the river fleeted by, bearing his eyes away down the current, till 
its wild eddies began to glow with crimson beneath the setting sun.  
The complex harmony of sights and sounds slid softly over his soul, 
and he sank away into a still daydream, too passive for imagination, 
too deep for meditation, and


'Beauty born of murmuring sound,
Did pass into his face.'


Blame him not.  There are more things in a man's heart than ever get 
in through his thoughts.

On a sudden, a soft voice behind him startled him.

'Can a poor cockney artist venture himself along this timber without 
falling in?'

Lancelot turned.

'Come out to me, and if you stumble, the naiads will rise out of 
their depths, and "hold up their pearled wrists" to save their 
favourite.'

The artist walked timidly out along the beams, and sat down beside 
Lancelot, who shook him warmly by the hand.

'Welcome, Claude Mellot, and all lovely enthusiasms and symbolisms!  
Expound to me, now, the meaning of that water-lily leaf and its 
grand simple curve, as it lies sleeping there in the back eddy.'

'Oh, I am too amused to philosophise.  The fair Argemone has just 
been treating me to her three hundred and sixty-fifth philippic 
against my unoffending beard.'

'Why, what fault can she find with such a graceful and natural 
ornament?'

'Just this, my dear fellow, that it is natural.  As it is, she 
considers me only "intelligent-looking."  If the beard were away, my 
face, she says, would be "so refined!"  And, I suppose, if I was 
just a little more effeminate and pale, with a nice retreating 
under-jaw and a drooping lip, and a meek, peaking simper, like your 
starved Romish saints, I should be "so spiritual!"  And if, again, 
to complete the climax, I did but shave my head like a Chinese, I 
should be a model for St. Francis himself!'

'But really, after all, why make yourself so singular by this said 
beard?'

'I wear it for a testimony and a sign that a man has no right to be 
ashamed of the mark of manhood.  Oh, that one or two of your 
Protestant clergymen, who ought to be perfect ideal men, would have 
the courage to get up into the pulpit in a long beard, and testify 
that the very essential idea of Protestantism is the dignity and 
divinity of man as God made him!  Our forefathers were not ashamed 
of their beards; but now even the soldier is only allowed to keep 
his moustache, while our quill-driving masses shave themselves as 
close as they can; and in proportion to a man's piety he wears less 
hair, from the young curate who shaves off his whiskers, to the 
Popish priest who shaves his crown!'

'What do you say, then, to cutting off nuns' hair?'

'I say, that extremes meet, and prudish Manichaeism always ends in 
sheer indecency.  Those Papists have forgotten what woman was made 
for, and therefore, they have forgotten that a woman's hair is her 
glory, for it was given to her for a covering:  as says your friend, 
Paul the Hebrew, who, by the bye, had as fine theories of art as he 
had of society, if he had only lived fifteen hundred years later, 
and had a chance of working them out.'

'How remarkably orthodox you are!' said Lancelot, smiling.

'How do you know that I am not?  You never heard me deny the old 
creed.  But what if an artist ought to be of all creeds at once?  My 
business is to represent the beautiful, and therefore to accept it 
wherever I find it.  Yours is to be a philosopher, and find the 
true.'

'But the beautiful must be truly beautiful to be worth anything; and 
so you, too, must search for the true.'

'Yes; truth of form, colour, chiaroscuro.  They are worthy to occupy 
me a life; for they are eternal--or at least that which they 
express:  and if I am to get at the symbolised unseen, it must be 
through the beauty of the symbolising phenomenon.  If I, who live by 
art, for art, in art, or you either, who seem as much a born artist 
as myself, am to have a religion, it must be a worship of the 
fountain of art--of the


"Spirit of beauty, who doth consecrate
With his own hues whate'er he shines upon."'


'As poor Shelley has it; and much peace of mind it gave him!' 
answered Lancelot.  'I have grown sick lately of such dreary tinsel 
abstractions.  When you look through the glitter of the words, your 
"spirit of beauty" simply means certain shapes and colours which 
please you in beautiful things and in beautiful people.'

'Vile nominalist! renegade from the ideal and all its glories!' said 
Claude, laughing.

'I don't care sixpence now for the ideal!  I want not beauty, but 
some beautiful thing--a woman perhaps,' and he sighed.  'But at 
least a person--a living, loving person--all lovely itself, and 
giving loveliness to all things!  If I must have an ideal, let it 
be, for mercy's sake, a realised one.'

Claude opened his sketch-book.

'We shall get swamped in these metaphysical oceans, my dear dreamer.  
But lo, here come a couple, as near ideals as any in these 
degenerate days--the two poles of beauty:  the milieu of which would 
be Venus with us Pagans, or the Virgin Mary with the Catholics.  
Look at them!  Honoria the dark--symbolic of passionate depth; 
Argemone the fair, type of intellectual light!  Oh, that I were a 
Zeuxis to unite them instead of having to paint them in two separate 
pictures, and split perfection in half, as everything is split in 
this piecemeal world!'

'You will have the honour of a sitting this afternoon, I suppose, 
from both beauties?'

'I hope so, for my own sake.  There is no path left to immortality, 
or bread either, now for us poor artists but portrait-painting.'

'I envy you your path, when it leads through such Elysiums,' said 
Lancelot.

'Come here, gentlemen both!' cried Argemone from the bridge.

'Fairly caught!' grumbled Lancelot.  'You must go, at least; my 
lameness will excuse me, I hope.'

The two ladies were accompanied by Bracebridge, a gazelle which he 
had given Argemone, and a certain miserable cur of Honoria's 
adopting, who plays an important part in this story, and, therefore, 
deserves a little notice.  Honoria had rescued him from a watery 
death in the village pond, by means of the colonel, who had revenged 
himself for a pair of wet feet by utterly corrupting the dog's 
morals, and teaching him every week to answer to some fresh 
scandalous name.

But Lancelot was not to escape.  Instead of moving on, as he had 
hoped, the party stood looking over the bridge, and talking--he took 
for granted, poor thin-skinned fellow--of him.  And for once his 
suspicions were right; for he overheard Argemone say--

'I wonder how Mr. Smith can be so rude as to sit there in my 
presence over his stupid perch!  Smoking those horrid cigars, too!  
How selfish those field-sports do make men!'

'Thank you!' said the colonel, with a low bow.  Lancelot rose.

'If a country girl, now, had spoken in that tone,' said he to 
himself, 'it would have been called at least "saucy"--but Mammon's 
elect ones may do anything.  Well--here I come, limping to my new 
tyrant's feet, like Goethe's bear to Lili's.'

She drew him away, as women only know how, from the rest of the 
party, who were chatting and laughing with Claude.  She had shown 
off her fancied indifference to Lancelot before them, and now began 
in a softer voice--

'Why will you be so shy and lonely, Mr. Smith?'

'Because I am not fit for your society.'

'Who tells you so?  Why will you not become so?'

Lancelot hung down his head.

'As long as fish and game are your only society, you will become 
more and more morne and self-absorbed.'

'Really fish were the last things of which I was thinking when you 
came.  My whole heart was filled with the beauty of nature, and 
nothing else.'

There was an opening for one of Argemone's preconcerted orations.

'Had you no better occupation,' she said gently, 'than nature, the 
first day of returning to the open air after so frightful and 
dangerous an accident?  Were there no thanks due to One above?'

Lancelot understood her.

'How do you know that I was not even then showing my thankfulness?'

'What! with a cigar and a fishing-rod?'

'Certainly.  Why not?'

Argemone really could not tell at the moment.  The answer upset her 
scheme entirely.

'Might not that very admiration of nature have been an act of 
worship?' continued our hero.  'How can we better glorify the worker 
than by delighting in his work?'

'Ah!' sighed the lady, 'why trust to these self-willed methods, and 
neglect the noble and exquisite forms which the Church has prepared 
for us as embodiments for every feeling of our hearts?'

'EVERY feeling, Miss Lavington?'

Argemone hesitated.  She had made the good old stock assertion, as 
in duty bound; but she could not help recollecting that there were 
several Popish books of devotion at that moment on her table, which 
seemed to her to patch a gap or two in the Prayer-book.

'My temple as yet,' said Lancelot, 'is only the heaven and the 
earth; my church-music I can hear all day long, whenever I have the 
sense to be silent, and "hear my mother sing;" my priests and 
preachers are every bird and bee, every flower and cloud.  Am I not 
well enough furnished?  Do you want to reduce my circular infinite 
chapel to an oblong hundred-foot one?  My sphere harmonies to the 
Gregorian tones in four parts?  My world-wide priesthood, with their 
endless variety of costume, to one not over-educated gentleman in a 
white sheet?  And my dreams of naiads and flower-fairies, and the 
blue-bells ringing God's praises, as they do in "The story without 
an End," for the gross reality of naughty charity children, with 
their pockets full of apples, bawling out Hebrew psalms of which 
they neither feel nor understand a word?'

Argemone tried to look very much shocked at this piece of bombast.  
Lancelot evidently meant it as such, but he eyed her all the while 
as if there was solemn earnest under the surface.

'Oh, Mr. Smith!' she said, 'how can you dare talk so of a liturgy 
compiled by the wisest and holiest of all countries and ages!  You 
revile that of whose beauty you are not qualified to judge!'

'There must be a beauty in it all, or such as you are would not love 
it.'

'Oh,' she said hopefully, 'that you would but try the Church system!  
How you would find it harmonise and methodise every day, every 
thought for you!  But I cannot explain myself.  Why not go to our 
vicar and open your doubts to him?'

'Pardon, but you must excuse me.'

'Why?  He is one of the saintliest of men!'

'To tell the truth, I have been to him already.'

'You do not mean it!  And what did he tell you?'

'What the rest of the world does--hearsays.'

'But did you not find him most kind?'

'I went to him to be comforted and guided.  He received me as a 
criminal.  He told me that my first duty was penitence; that as long 
as I lived the life I did, he could not dare to cast his pearls 
before swine by answering my doubts; that I was in a state incapable 
of appreciating spiritual truths; and, therefore, he had no right to 
tell me any.'

'And what did he tell you?'

'Several spiritual lies instead, I thought.  He told me, hearing me 
quote Schiller, to beware of the Germans, for they were all 
Pantheists at heart.  I asked him whether he included Lange and 
Bunsen, and it appeared that he had never read a German book in his 
life.  He then flew furiously at Mr. Carlyle, and I found that all 
he knew of him was from a certain review in the Quarterly.  He 
called Boehmen a theosophic Atheist.  I should have burst out at 
that, had I not read the very words in a High Church review the day 
before, and hoped that he was not aware of the impudent falsehood 
which he was retailing.  Whenever I feebly interposed an objection 
to anything he said (for, after all, he talked on), he told me to 
hear the Catholic Church.  I asked him which Catholic Church?  He 
said the English.  I asked him whether it was to be the Church of 
the sixth century, or the thirteenth, or the seventeenth or the 
eighteenth?  He told me the one and eternal Church which belonged as 
much to the nineteenth century as to the first.  I begged to know 
whether, then, I was to hear the Church according to Simeon, or 
according to Newman, or according to St. Paul; for they seemed to me 
a little at variance?  He told me, austerely enough, that the mind 
of the Church was embodied in her Liturgy and Articles.  To which I 
answered, that the mind of the episcopal clergy might, perhaps, be; 
but, then, how happened it that they were always quarrelling and 
calling hard names about the sense of those very documents?  And so 
I left him, assuring him that, living in the nineteenth century, I 
wanted to hear the Church of the nineteenth century, and no other; 
and should be most happy to listen to her, as soon as she had made 
up her mind what to say.'

Argemone was angry and disappointed.  She felt she could not cope 
with Lancelot's quaint logic, which, however unsound, cut deeper 
into questions than she had yet looked for herself.  Somehow, too, 
she was tongue-tied before him just when she wanted to be most 
eloquent in behalf of her principles; and that fretted her still 
more.  But his manner puzzled her most of all.  First he would run 
on with his face turned away, as if soliloquising out into the air, 
and then suddenly look round at her with most fascinating humility; 
and, then, in a moment, a dark shade would pass over his 
countenance, and he would look like one possessed, and his lips 
wreathe in a sinister artificial smile, and his wild eyes glare 
through and through her with such cunning understanding of himself 
and her, that, for the first time in her life, she quailed and felt 
frightened, as if in the power of a madman.  She turned hastily away 
to shake off the spell.

He sprang after her, almost on his knees, and looked up into her 
beautiful face with an imploring cry.

'What, do you, too, throw me off?  Will you, too, treat the poor 
wild uneducated sportsman as a Pariah and an outcast, because he is 
not ashamed to be a man?--because he cannot stuff his soul's hunger 
with cut-and-dried hearsays, but dares to think for himself?--
because he wants to believe things, and dare not be satisfied with 
only believing that he ought to believe them?'

She paused, astonished.

'Ah, yes,' he went on, 'I hoped too much!  What right had I to 
expect that you would understand me?  What right, still more, to 
expect that you would stoop, any more than the rest of the world, to 
speak to me, as if I could become anything better than the wild hog 
I seem?  Oh yes!--the chrysalis has no butterfly in it, of course!  
Stamp on the ugly motionless thing!  And yet--you look so beautiful 
and good!--are all my dreams to perish, about the Alrunen and 
prophet-maidens, how they charmed our old fighting, hunting 
forefathers into purity and sweet obedience among their Saxon 
forests?  Has woman forgotten her mission--to look at the heart and 
have mercy, while cold man looks at the act and condemns?  Do you, 
too, like the rest of mankind, think no-belief better than 
misbelief; and smile on hypocrisy, lip-assent, practical Atheism, 
sooner than on the unpardonable sin of making a mistake?  Will you, 
like the rest of this wise world, let a man's spirit rot asleep into 
the pit, if he will only lie quiet and not disturb your smooth 
respectabilities; but if he dares, in waking, to yawn in an 
unorthodox manner, knock him on the head at once, and "break the 
bruised reed," and "quench the smoking flax"?  And yet you 
churchgoers have "renounced the world"!'

'What do you want, in Heaven's name?' asked Argemone, half 
terrified.

'I want YOU to tell me that.  Here I am, with youth, health, 
strength, money, every blessing of life but one; and I am utterly 
miserable.  I want some one to tell me what I want.'

'Is it not that you want--religion?'

'I see hundreds who have what you call religion, with whom I should 
scorn to change my irreligion.'

'But, Mr. Smith, are you not--are you not wicked?--They tell me so,' 
said Argemone, with an effort, 'And is that not the cause of your 
disease?'

Lancelot laughed.

'No, fairest prophetess, it is the disease itself.  "Why am I what I 
am, when I know more and more daily what I could be?"--That is the 
mystery; and my sins are the fruit, and not the root of it.  Who 
will explain that?'

Argemone began,--

'The Church--'

'Oh, Miss Lavington,' cried he, impatiently, 'will you, too, send me 
back to that cold abstraction?  I came to you, however presumptuous, 
for living, human advice to a living, human heart; and will you pass 
off on me that Proteus-dream the Church, which in every man's mouth 
has a different meaning?  In one book, meaning a method of 
education, only it has never been carried out; in another, a system 
of polity,--only it has never been realised;--now a set of words 
written in books, on whose meaning all are divided; now a body of 
men who are daily excommunicating each other as heretics and 
apostates; now a universal idea; now the narrowest and most 
exclusive of all parties.  Really, before you ask me to hear the 
Church, I have a right to ask you to define what the Church is.'

'Our Articles define it,' said Argemone drily.

'The "Visible Church," at least, it defines as "a company of 
faithful men, in which," etc.  But how does it define the 
"Invisible" one?  And what does "faithful" mean?  What if I thought 
Cromwell and Pierre Leroux infinitely more faithful men in their 
way, and better members of the "Invisible Church," than the 
torturer-pedant Laud, or the facing bothways Protestant-Manichee 
Taylor?'

It was lucky for the life of young Love that the discussion went no 
further:  Argemone was becoming scandalised beyond all measure.  
But, happily, the colonel interposed,--

'Look here; tell me if you know for whom this sketch is meant?'

'Tregarva, the keeper:  who can doubt?' answered they both at once.

'Has not Mellot succeeded perfectly?'

'Yes,' said Lancelot.  'But what wonder, with such a noble subject!  
What a grand benevolence is enthroned on that lofty forehead!'

'Oh, you would say so, indeed,' interposed Honoria, 'if you knew 
him!  The stories that I could tell you about him!  How he would go 
into cottages, read to sick people by the hour, dress the children, 
cook the food for them, as tenderly as any woman!  I found out, last 
winter, if you will believe it, that he lived on bread and water, to 
give out of his own wages--which are barely twelve shillings a week-
-five shillings a week for more than two months to a poor labouring 
man, to prevent his going to the workhouse, and being parted from 
his wife and children.'

'Noble, indeed!' said Lancelot.  'I do not wonder now at the effect 
his conversation just now had on me.'

'Has he been talking to you?' said Honoria eagerly.  'He seldom 
speaks to any one.'

'He has to me; and so well, that were I sure that the poor were as 
ill off as he says, and that I had the power of altering the system 
a hair, I could find it in my heart to excuse all political 
grievance-mongers, and turn one myself.'

Claude Mellot clapped his white woman-like hands.

'Bravo! bravo!  O wonderful conversion!  Lancelot has at last 
discovered that, besides the "glorious Past," there is a Present 
worthy of his sublime notice!  We may now hope, in time, that he 
will discover the existence of a Future!'

'But, Mr. Mellot,' said Honoria, 'why have you been so unfaithful to 
your original? why have you, like all artists, been trying to soften 
and refine on your model?'

'Because, my dear lady, we are bound to see everything in its ideal-
-not as it is, but as it ought to be, and will be, when the vices of 
this pitiful civilised world are exploded, and sanitary reform, and 
a variety of occupation, and harmonious education, let each man 
fulfil in body and soul the ideal which God embodied in him.'

'Fourierist!' cried Lancelot, laughing.  'But surely you never saw a 
face which had lost by wear less of the divine image?  How 
thoroughly it exemplifies your great law of Protestant art, that 
"the Ideal is best manifested in the Peculiar."  How classic, how 
independent of clime or race, is its bland, majestic self-
possession! how thoroughly Norse its massive squareness!'

'And yet, as a Cornishman, he should be no Norseman.'

'I beg your pardon!  Like all noble races, the Cornish owe their 
nobleness to the impurity of their blood--to its perpetual loans 
from foreign veins.  See how the serpentine curve of his nose, his 
long nostril, and protruding, sharp-cut lips, mark his share of 
Phoenician or Jewish blood! how Norse, again, that dome-shaped 
forehead! how Celtic those dark curls, that restless gray eye, with 
its "swinden blicken," like Von Troneg Hagen's in the Niebelungen 
Lied!'

He turned:  Honoria was devouring his words.  He saw it, for he was 
in love, and young love makes man's senses as keen as woman's.

'Look! look at him now!' said Claude, in a low voice.  'How he sits, 
with his hands on his knees, the enormous size of his limbs quite 
concealed by the careless grace, with his Egyptian face, like some 
dumb granite Memnon!'

'Only waiting,' said Lancelot, 'for the day-star to arise on him and 
awake him into voice.'

He looked at Honoria as he spoke.  She blushed angrily; and yet a 
sort of sympathy arose from that moment between Lancelot and 
herself.

Our hero feared he had gone too far, and tried to turn the subject 
off.

The smooth mill-head was alive with rising trout.

'What a huge fish leapt then!' said Lancelot carelessly; 'and close 
to the bridge, too!'

Honoria looked round, and uttered a piercing scream.

'Oh, my dog! my dog!  Mops is in the river!  That horrid gazelle has 
butted him in, and he'll be drowned!'

Alas! it was too true.  There, a yard above the one open hatchway, 
through which the whole force of the stream was rushing, was the 
unhappy Mops, alias Scratch, alias Dirty Dick, alias Jack Sheppard, 
paddling, and sneezing, and winking, his little bald muzzle turned 
piteously upward to the sky.

'He will be drowned!' quoth the colonel.

There was no doubt of it; and so Mops thought, as, shivering and 
whining, he plied every leg, while the glassy current dragged him 
back and back, and Honoria sobbed like a child.

The colonel lay down on the bridge, and caught at him:  his arm was 
a foot too short.  In a moment the huge form of Tregarva plunged 
solemnly into the water, with a splash like seven salmon, and Mops 
was jerked out over the colonel's head high and dry on to the 
bridge.

'You'll be drowned, at least!' shouted the colonel, with an oath of 
Uncle Toby's own.

Tregarva saw his danger, made one desperate bound upward, and missed 
the bridge.  The colonel caught at him, tore off a piece of his 
collar--the calm, solemn face of the keeper flashed past beneath 
him, and disappeared through the roaring gate.

They rushed to the other side of the bridge--caught one glimpse of a 
dark body fleeting and roaring down the foam-way.  The colonel leapt 
the bridge-rail like a deer, rushed out along the buck-stage, tore 
off his coat, and sprung headlong into the boiling pool, 'rejoicing 
in his might,' as old Homer would say.

Lancelot, forgetting his crutches, was dashing after him, when he 
felt a soft hand clutching at his arm.

'Lancelot!  Mr. Smith!' cried Argemone.  'You shall not go!  You are 
too ill--weak--'

'A fellow-creature's life!'

'What is his life to yours?' she cried, in a tone of deep passion.  
And then, imperiously, 'Stay here, I command you!'

The magnetic touch of her hand thrilled through his whole frame.  
She had called him Lancelot!  He shrank down, and stood spell-bound.

'Good heavens!' she cried; 'look at my sister!'

Out on the extremity of the buck-stage (how she got there neither 
they nor she ever knew) crouched Honoria, her face idiotic with 
terror, while she stared with bursting eyes into the foam.  A shriek 
of disappointment rose from her lips, as in a moment the colonel's 
weather-worn head reappeared above, looking for all the world like 
an old gray shiny-painted seal.

'Poof! tally-ho!  Poof! poof!  Heave me a piece of wood, Lancelot, 
my boy!'  And he disappeared again.

They looked round, there was not a loose bit near.  Claude ran off 
towards the house.  Lancelot, desperate, seized the bridge-rail, 
tore it off by sheer strength, and hurled it far into the pool.  
Argemone saw it, and remembered it, like a true woman.  Ay, be as 
Manichaean-sentimental as you will, fair ladies, physical prowess, 
that Eden-right of manhood, is sure to tell upon your hearts!

Again the colonel's grizzled head reappeared,--and, oh joy! beneath 
it a draggled knot of black curls.  In another instant he had hold 
of the rail, and quietly floating down to the shallow, dragged the 
lifeless giant high and dry on a patch of gravel.

Honoria never spoke.  She rose, walked quietly back along the beam, 
passed Argemone and Lancelot without seeing them, and firmly but 
hurriedly led the way round the pool-side.

Before they arrived at the bank, the colonel had carried Tregarva to 
it.  Lancelot and two or three workmen, whom his cries had 
attracted, lifted the body on to the meadow.

Honoria knelt quietly down on the grass, and watched, silent and 
motionless, the dead face, with her wide, awestruck eyes.

'God bless her for a kind soul!' whispered the wan weather-beaten 
field drudges, as they crowded round the body.

'Get out of the way, my men!' quoth the colonel.  'Too many cooks 
spoil the broth.'  And he packed off one here and another there for 
necessaries, and commenced trying every restorative means with the 
ready coolness of a practised surgeon; while Lancelot, whom he 
ordered about like a baby, gulped down a great choking lump of envy, 
and then tasted the rich delight of forgetting himself in admiring 
obedience to a real superior.

But there Tregarva lay lifeless, with folded hands, and a quiet 
satisfied smile, while Honoria watched and watched with parted lips, 
unconscious of the presence of every one.

Five minutes!--ten!

'Carry him to the house,' said the colonel, in a despairing tone, 
after another attempt.

'He moves!'  'No!'  'He does!'  'He breathes!'  'Look at his 
eyelids!'

Slowly his eyes opened.

'Where am I?  All gone?  Sweet dreams--blessed dreams!'

His eye met Honoria's.  One big deep sigh swelled to his lips and 
burst.  She seemed to recollect herself, rose, passed her arm 
through Argemone's, and walked slowly away.



CHAPTER IV:  AN 'INGLORIOUS MILTON'



Argemone, sweet prude, thought herself bound to read Honoria a 
lecture that night, on her reckless exhibition of feeling; but it 
profited little.  The most consummate cunning could not have baffled 
Argemone's suspicions more completely than her sister's utter 
simplicity.  She cried just as bitterly about Mops's danger as about 
the keeper's, and then laughed heartily at Argemone's solemnity; 
till at last, when pushed a little too hard, she broke out into 
something very like a passion, and told her sister, bitterly enough, 
that 'she was not accustomed to see men drowned every day, and 
begged to hear no more about the subject.'  Whereat Argemone 
prudently held her tongue, knowing that under all Honoria's 
tenderness lay a volcano of passionate determination, which was 
generally kept down by her affections, but was just as likely to be 
maddened by them.  And so this conversation only went to increase 
the unconscious estrangement between them, though they continued, as 
sisters will do, to lavish upon each other the most extravagant 
protestations of affection--vowing to live and die only for each 
other--and believing honestly, sweet souls, that they felt all they 
said; till real imperious Love came in, in one case of the two at 
least, shouldering all other affections right and left; and then the 
two beauties discovered, as others do, that it is not so possible or 
reasonable as they thought for a woman to sacrifice herself and her 
lover for the sake of her sister or her friend.  Next morning 
Lancelot and the colonel started out to Tregarva's cottage, on a 
mission of inquiry.  They found the giant propped up in bed with 
pillows, his magnificent features looking in their paleness more 
than ever like a granite Memnon.  Before him lay an open Pilgrim's 
Progress, and a drawer filled with feathers and furs, which he was 
busily manufacturing into trout flies, reading as he worked.  The 
room was filled with nets, guns, and keepers' tackle, while a well-
filled shelf of books hung by the wall.

'Excuse my rising, gentlemen,' he said, in his slow, staid voice, 
'but I am very weak, in spite of the Lord's goodness to me.  You are 
very kind to think of coming to my poor cottage,'

'Well, my man,' said the colonel, 'and how are you after your cold 
bath?  You are the heaviest fish I ever landed!'

'Pretty well, thank God, and you, sir.  I am in your debt, sir, for 
the dear life.  How shall I ever repay you?'

'Repay, my good fellow?  You would have done as much for me.'

'May be; but you did not think of that when you jumped in; and no 
more must I in thanking you.  God knows how a poor miner's son will 
ever reward you; but the mouse repaid the lion, says the story, and, 
at all events, I can pray for you.  By the bye, gentlemen, I hope 
you have brought up some trolling-tackle?'

'We came up to see you, and not to fish,' said Lancelot, charmed 
with the stately courtesy of the man.

'Many thanks, gentlemen; but old Harry Verney was in here just now, 
and had seen a great jack strike, at the tail of the lower reeds.  
With this fresh wind he will run till noon; and you are sure of him 
with a dace.  After that, he will not be up again on the shallows 
till sunset.  He works the works of darkness, and comes not to the 
light, because his deeds are evil.'

Lancelot laughed.  'He does but follow his kind, poor fellow.'

'No doubt, sir, no doubt; all the Lord's works are good:  but it is 
a wonder why He should have made wasps, now, and blights, and 
vermin, and jack, and such evil-featured things, that carry spite 
and cruelty in their very faces--a great wonder.  Do you think, sir, 
all those creatures were in the Garden of Eden?'

'You are getting too deep for me,' said Lancelot.  'But why trouble 
your head about fishing?'

'I beg your pardon for preaching to you, sir.  I'm sure I forgot 
myself.  If you will let me, I'll get up and get you a couple of 
bait from the stew.  You'll do us keepers a kindness, and prevent 
sin, sir, if you'll catch him.  The squire will swear sadly--the 
Lord forgive him--if he hears of a pike in the trout-runs.  I'll get 
up, if I may trouble you to go into the next room a minute.'

'Lie still, for Heaven's sake.  Why bother your head about pike 
now?'

'It is my business, sir, and I am paid for it, and I must do it 
thoroughly;--and abide in the calling wherein I am called,' he 
added, in a sadder tone.

'You seem to be fond enough of it, and to know enough about it, at 
all events,' said the colonel, 'tying flies here on a sick-bed.'

'As for being fond of it, sir--those creatures of the water teach a 
man many lessons; and when I tie flies, I earn books.'

'How then?'

'I send my flies all over the country, sir, to Salisbury and 
Hungerford, and up to Winchester, even; and the money buys me many a 
wise book--all my delight is in reading; perhaps so much the worse 
for me.'

'So much the better, say,' answered Lancelot warmly.  'I'll give you 
an order for a couple of pounds' worth of flies at once.'

'The Lord reward you, sir,' answered the giant.

'And you shall make me the same quantity,' said the colonel.  'You 
can make salmon-flies?'

'I made a lot by pattern for an Irish gent, sir.'

'Well, then, we'll send you some Norway patterns, and some golden 
pheasant and parrot feathers.  We're going to Norway this summer, 
you know, Lancelot--'

Tregarva looked up with a quaint, solemn hesitation.

'If you please, gentlemen, you'll forgive a man's conscience.'

'Well?'

'But I'd not like to be a party to the making of Norway flies.'

'Here's a Protectionist, with a vengeance!' laughed the colonel.  
'Do you want to keep all us fishermen in England? eh? to fee English 
keepers?

'No, sir.  There's pretty fishing in Norway, I hear, and poor folk 
that want money more than we keepers.  God knows we get too much--we 
that hang about great houses and serve great folks' pleasure--you 
toss the money down our throats, without our deserving it; and we 
spend it as we get it--a deal too fast--while hard-working labourers 
are starving.'

'And yet you would keep us in England?'

'Would God I could!'

'Why then, my good fellow?' asked Lancelot, who was getting 
intensely interested with the calm, self-possessed earnestness of 
the man, and longed to draw him out.

The colonel yawned.

'Well, I'll go and get myself a couple of bait.  Don't you stir, my 
good parson-keeper.  Down charge, I say!  Odd if I don't find a 
bait-net, and a rod for myself, under the verandah.'

'You will, colonel.  I remember, now, I set it there last morning; 
but the water washed many things out of my brains, and some things 
into them--and I forgot it like a goose.'

'Well, good-bye, and lie still.  I know what a drowning is, and more 
than one.  A day and a night have I been in the deep, like the man 
in the good book; and bed is the best of medicine for a ducking;' 
and the colonel shook him kindly by the hand and disappeared.

Lancelot sat down by the keeper's bed.

'You'll get those fish-hooks into your trousers, sir; and this is a 
poor place to sit down in.'

'I want you to say your say out, friend, fish-hooks or none.'

The keeper looked warily at the door, and when the colonel had 
passed the window, balancing the trolling-rod on his chin, and 
whistling merrily, he began,--

'"A day and a night have I been in the deep!"--and brought back no 
more from it!  And yet the Psalms say how they that go down to the 
sea in ships see the works of the Lord!--If the Lord has opened 
their eyes to see them, that must mean--'

Lancelot waited.

'What a gallant gentleman that is, and a valiant man of war, I'll 
warrant,--and to have seen all the wonders he has, and yet to be 
wasting his span of life like that!'

Lancelot's heart smote him.

'One would think, sir,--You'll pardon me for speaking out.'  And the 
noble face worked, as he murmured to himself, 'When ye are brought 
before kings and princes for my name's sake.--I dare not hold my 
tongue, sir.  I am as one risen from the dead,'--and his face 
flashed up into sudden enthusiasm--'and woe to me if I speak not.  
Oh, why, why are you gentlemen running off to Norway, and foreign 
parts, whither God has not called you!  Are there no graves in 
Egypt, that you must go out to die in the wilderness!'

Lancelot, quite unaccustomed to the language of the Dissenting poor, 
felt keenly the bad taste of the allusion.

'What can you mean?' he asked.

'Pardon me, sir, if I cannot speak plainly; but are there not 
temptations enough here in England that you must go to waste all 
your gifts, your scholarship, and your rank, far away there out of 
the sound of a church-going bell?  I don't deny it's a great 
temptation.  I have read of Norway wonders in a book of one Miss 
Martineau, with a strange name.'

'Feats on the Fiord?'

'That's it, sir.  Her books are grand books to set one a-thinking; 
but she don't seem to see the Lord in all things, does she, sir?'

Lancelot parried the question.

'You are wandering a little from the point.'

'So I am, and thank you for the rebuke.  There's where I find you 
scholars have the advantage of us poor fellows, who pick up 
knowledge as we can.  Your book-learning makes you stick to the 
point so much better.  You are taught how to think.  After all--God 
forgive me if I'm wrong! but I sometimes think that there must be 
more good in that human wisdom, and philosophy falsely so called, 
than we Wesleyans hold.  Oh, sir, what a blessing is a good 
education!  What you gentlemen might do with it, if you did but see 
your own power!  Are there no fish in England, sir, to be caught? 
precious fish, with immortal souls?  And is there not One who has 
said, "Come with me, and I will make you fishers of men?"'

'Would you have us all turn parsons?'

'Is no one to do God's work except the parson, sir?  Oh, the game 
that you rich folks have in your hands, if you would but play it!  
Such a man as Colonel Bracebridge now, with the tongue of the 
serpent, who can charm any living soul he likes to his will, as a 
stoat charms a rabbit.  Or you, sir, with your tongue:--you have 
charmed one precious creature already.  I can see it:  though 
neither of you know it, yet I know it.'

Lancelot started, and blushed crimson.

'Oh, that I had your tongue, sir!'  And the keeper blushed crimson, 
too, and went on hastily,--

'But why could you not charm all alike!  Do not the poor want you as 
well as the rich?'

'What can I do for the poor, my good fellow?  And what do they want?  
Have they not houses, work, a church, and schools,--and poor-rates 
to fall back on?'

The keeper smiled sadly.

'To fall back on, indeed! and down on, too.  At all events, you rich 
might help to make Christians of them, and men of them.  For I'm 
beginning to fancy strangely, in spite of all the preachers say, 
that, before ever you can make them Christians, you must make them 
men and women.'

'Are they not so already?'

'Oh, sir, go and see!  How can a man be a man in those crowded 
styes, sleeping packed together like Irish pigs in a steamer, never 
out of the fear of want, never knowing any higher amusement than the 
beer-shop?  Those old Greeks and Romans, as I read, were more like 
men than half our English labourers.  Go and see!  Ask that sweet 
heavenly angel, Miss Honoria,'--and the keeper again blushed,--'And 
she, too, will tell you.  I think sometimes if she had been born and 
bred like her father's tenants' daughters, to sleep where they 
sleep, and hear the talk they hear, and see the things they see, 
what would she have been now?  We mustn't think of it.'  And the 
keeper turned his head away, and fairly burst into tears.

Lancelot was moved.

'Are the poor very immoral, then?'

'You ask the rector, sir, how many children hereabouts are born 
within six months of the wedding-day.  None of them marry, sir, till 
the devil forces them.  There's no sadder sight than a labourer's 
wedding now-a-days.  You never see the parents come with them.  They 
just get another couple, that are keeping company, like themselves, 
and come sneaking into church, looking all over as if they were 
ashamed of it--and well they may be!'

'Is it possible?'

'I say, sir, that God makes you gentlemen, gentlemen, that you may 
see into these things.  You give away your charities kindly enough, 
but you don't know the folks you give to.  If a few of you would but 
be like the blessed Lord, and stoop to go out of the road, just 
behind the hedge, for once, among the publicans and harlots!  Were 
you ever at a country fair, sir?  Though I suppose I am rude for 
fancying that you could demean yourself to such company.'

'I should not think it demeaning myself,' said Lancelot, smiling; 
'but I never was at one, and I should like for once to see the real 
manners of the poor.'

'I'm no haunter of such places myself, God knows; but--I see you're 
in earnest now--will you come with me, sir,--for once? for God's 
sake and the poor's sake?'

'I shall be delighted.'

'Not after you've been there, I am afraid.'

'Well, it's a bargain when you are recovered.  And, in the meantime, 
the squire's orders are, that you lie by for a few days to rest; and 
Miss Honoria's, too; and she has sent you down some wine.'

'She thought of me, did she?'  And the still sad face blazed out 
radiant with pleasure, and then collapsed as suddenly into deep 
melancholy.

Lancelot saw it, but said nothing; and shaking him heartily by the 
hand, had his shake returned by an iron grasp, and slipped silently 
out of the cottage.

The keeper lay still, gazing on vacancy.  Once he murmured to 
himself,--

'Through strange ways--strange ways--and though he let them wander 
out of the road in the wilderness;--we know how that goes on--'

And then he fell into a mixed meditation--perhaps into a prayer.



CHAPTER V:  A SHAM IS WORSE THAN NOTHING



At last, after Lancelot had waited long in vain, came his cousin's 
answer to the letter which I gave in my second chapter.

'You are not fair to me, good cousin . . . but I have given up 
expecting fairness from Protestants.  I do not say that the front 
and the back of my head have different makers, any more than that 
doves and vipers have . . . and yet I kill the viper when I meet him 
. . . and so do you. . . .  And yet, are we not taught that our 
animal nature is throughout equally viperous? . . .  The Catholic 
Church, at least, so teaches. . . .  She believes in the corruption 
of human nature.  She believes in the literal meaning of Scripture.  
She has no wish to paraphrase away St. Paul's awful words, that "in 
his flesh dwelleth no good thing," by the unscientific euphemisms of 
"fallen nature" or "corrupt humanity."  The boasted discovery of 
phrenologists, that thought, feeling, and passion reside in this 
material brain and nerves of ours, has ages ago been anticipated by 
her simple faith in the letter of Scripture; a faith which puts to 
shame the irreverent vagueness and fantastic private interpretations 
of those who make an idol of that very letter which they dare not 
take literally, because it makes against their self-willed theories. 
. .

'And so you call me douce and meek? . . .  You should remember what 
I once was, Lancelot . . . I, at least, have not forgotten . . . I 
have not forgotten how that very animal nature, on the possession of 
which you seem to pride yourself, was in me only the parent of 
remorse., . .  I know it too well not to hate and fear it.  Why do 
you reproach me, if I try to abjure it, and cast away the burden 
which I am too weak to bear?  I am weak--Would you have me say that 
I am strong?  Would you have me try to be a Prometheus, while I am 
longing to be once more an infant on a mother's breast?  Let me 
alone . . .  I am a weary child, who knows nothing, can do nothing, 
except lose its way in arguings and reasonings, and "find no end, in 
wandering mazes lost."  Will you reproach me, because when I see a 
soft cradle lying open for me . . . with a Virgin Mother's face 
smiling down all woman's love about it . . .  I long to crawl into 
it, and sleep awhile?  I want loving, indulgent sympathy . . .  I 
want detailed, explicit guidance . . .  Have you, then, found so 
much of them in our former creed, that you forbid me to go to seek 
them elsewhere, in the Church which not only professes them as an 
organised system, but practises them . . . as you would find in your 
first half-hour's talk with one of Her priests . . . true priests . 
. . who know the heart of man, and pity, and console, and bear for 
their flock the burdens which they cannot bear themselves?  You ask 
me who will teach a fast young man? . . . I answer, the Jesuit.  Ay, 
start and sneer, at that delicate woman-like tenderness, that subtle 
instinctive sympathy, which you have never felt . . . which is as 
new to me, alas, as it would be to you!  For if there be none now-a-
days to teach such as you, who is there who will teach such as me?  
Do not fancy that I have not craved and searched for teachers . . .  
I went to one party long ago, and they commanded me, as the price of 
their sympathy, even of anything but their denunciations, to ignore, 
if not to abjure, all the very points on which I came for light--my 
love for the Beautiful and the Symbolic--my desire to consecrate and 
christianise it--my longing for a human voice to tell me with 
authority that I was forgiven--my desire to find some practical and 
palpable communion between myself and the saints of old.  They told 
me to cast away, as an accursed chaos, a thousand years of Christian 
history, and believe that the devil had been for ages . . . just the 
ages I thought noblest, most faithful, most interpenetrated with the 
thought of God . . . triumphant over that church with which He had 
promised to be till the end of the world.  No . . . by the bye, they 
made two exceptions--of their own choosing.  One in favour of the 
Albigenses . . . who seemed to me, from the original documents, to 
have been very profligate Infidels, of whom the world was well rid . 
. . and the Piedmontese . . . poor, simple, ill-used folk enough, 
but who certainly cannot be said to have exercised much influence on 
the destinies of mankind . . . and all the rest was chaos and the 
pit.  There never had been, never would be, a kingdom of God on 
earth, but only a few scattered individuals, each selfishly intent 
on the salvation of his own soul--without organisation, without 
unity, without common purpose, without even a masonic sign whereby 
to know one another when they chanced to meet . . . except 
Shibboleths which the hypocrite could ape, and virtues which the 
heathen have performed . . .  Would YOU have had me accept such a 
"Philosophy of History"?

'And then I went to another school . . . or rather wandered up and 
down between those whom I have just described, and those who boast 
on their side prescriptive right, and apostolic succession . . . and 
I found that their ancient charter went back--just three hundred 
years . . . and there derived its transmitted virtue, it seemed to 
me, by something very like obtaining goods on false pretences, from 
the very church which it now anathematises.  Disheartened, but not 
hopeless, I asked how it was that the priesthood, whose hands 
bestowed the grace of ordination, could not withdraw it . . . 
whether, at least, the schismatic did not forfeit it by the very act 
of schism . . . and instead of any real answer to that fearful 
spiritual dilemma, they set me down to folios of Nag's head 
controversies . . . and myths of an independent British Church, now 
represented, strangely enough, by those Saxons who, after its wicked 
refusal to communicate with them, exterminated it with fire and 
sword, and derived its own order from St. Gregory . . . and 
decisions of mythical old councils (held by bishops of a different 
faith and practice from their own), from which I was to pick the one 
point which made for them, and omit the nine which made against 
them, while I was to believe, by a stretch of imagination . . . or 
common honesty . . ., which I leave you to conceive, that the Church 
of Syria in the fourth century was, in doctrine, practice, and 
constitution, like that of England in the nineteenth? . . .  And 
what was I to gain by all this? . . .  For the sake of what was I to 
strain logic and conscience?  To believe myself a member of the same 
body with all the Christian nations of the earth?--to be able to 
hail the Frenchman, the Italian, the Spaniard, as a brother--to have 
hopes even of the German and the Swede . . . if not in this life, 
still in the life to come?  No . . . to be able still to sit apart 
from all Christendom in the exclusive pride of insular Pharisaism; 
to claim for the modern littleness of England the infallibility 
which I denied to the primaeval mother of Christendom, not to 
enlarge my communion to the Catholic, but excommunicate, to all 
practical purposes, over and above the Catholics, all other 
Protestants except my own sect . . . or rather, in practice, except 
my own party in my own sect. . . .  And this was believing in one 
Catholic and Apostolic church! . . . this was to be my share of the 
communion of saints!  And these were the theories which were to 
satisfy a soul which longed for a kingdom of God on earth, which 
felt that unless the highest of His promises are a mythic dream, 
there must be some system on the earth commissioned to fulfil those 
promises; some authority divinely appointed to regenerate, and rule, 
and guide the lives of men, and the destinies of nations; who must 
go mad, unless he finds that history is not a dreary aimless 
procession of lost spirits descending into the pit, or that the 
salvation of millions does not depend on an obscure and controverted 
hair's breadth of ecclesiastic law.

'I have tried them both, Lancelot, and found them wanting; and now 
but one road remains. . . .  Home, to the fountain-head; to the 
mother of all the churches whose fancied cruelty to her children can 
no more destroy her motherhood, than their confest rebellion can. . 
. .  Shall I not hear her voice, when she, and she alone cries to 
me, "I have authority and commission from the King of kings to 
regenerate the world.  History is a chaos, only because mankind has 
been ever rebelling against me, its lawful ruler . . . and yet not a 
chaos . . . for I still stand, and grow rooted on the rock of ages, 
and under my boughs are fowl of every wing.  I alone have been and 
am consistent, progressive, expansive, welcoming every race, and 
intellect and character into its proper place in my great organism . 
. . meeting alike the wants of the king and the beggar, the artist 
and the devotee . . . there is free room for all within my heaven-
wide bosom.  Infallibility is not the exclusive heritage of one 
proud and ignorant Island, but of a system which knows no 
distinction of language, race, or clime.  The communion of saints is 
not a bygone tale, for my saints, redeemed from every age and every 
nation under heaven, still live, and love, and help and intercede.  
The union of heaven and earth is not a barbaric myth; for I have 
still my miracles, my Host, my exorcism, my absolution.  The present 
rule of God is still, as ever, a living reality; for I rule in His 
name, and fulfil all His will."

'How can I turn away from such a voice?  What if some of her 
doctrines may startle my untutored and ignorant understanding? . . .  
If she is the appointed teacher, she will know best what truths to 
teach. . . .  The disciple is not above his master . . . or wise in 
requiring him to demonstrate the abstrusest problems . . . spiritual 
problems, too . . . before he allows his right to teach the 
elements.  Humbly I must enter the temple porch; gradually and 
trustfully proceed with my initiation. . . .  When that is past, and 
not before . . . shall I be a fit judge of the mysteries of the 
inner shrine.

'There . . .  I have written a long letter . . . with my own heart's 
blood. . . .  Think over it well, before you despise it. . . .  And 
if you can refute it for me, and sweep the whole away like a wild 
dream when one awakes, none will be more thankful--paradoxical as it 
may seem--than your unhappy Cousin.'


And Lancelot did consider that letter, and answered it as follows:--


'It is a relief to me at least, dear Luke, that you are going to 
Rome in search of a great idea, and not merely from selfish 
superstitious terror (as I should call it) about the "salvation of 
your soul."  And it is a new and very important thought to me, that 
Rome's scheme of this world, rather than of the next, forms her 
chief allurement.  But as for that flesh and spirit question, or the 
apostolic succession one either; all you seem to me, as a looker on, 
to have logically proved, is that Protestants, orthodox and 
unorthodox, must be a little more scientific and careful in their 
use of the terms.  But as for adopting your use of them, and the 
consequences thereof--you must pardon me, and I suspect, them too.  
Not that.  Anything but that.  Whatever is right, that is wrong.  
Better to be inconsistent in truth, than consistent in a mistake.  
And your Romish idea of man is a mistake--utterly wrong and absurd--
except in the one requirement of righteousness and godliness, which 
Protestants and heathen philosophers have required and do require 
just as much as you.  My dear Luke, your ideal men and women won't 
do--for they are not men and women at all, but what you call 
"saints" . . .  Your Calendar, your historic list of the Earth's 
worthies, won't do--not they, but others, are the people who have 
brought Humanity thus far.  I don't deny that there are great souls 
among them; Beckets, and Hugh Grostetes, and Elizabeths of Hungary.  
But you are the last people to praise them, for you don't understand 
them.  Thierry honours Thomas a Becket more than all Canonisations 
and worshippers do, because he does see where the man's true 
greatness lay, and you don't.  Why, you may hunt all Surius for such 
a biography of a mediaeval worthy as Carlyle has given of your Abbot 
Samson.  I have read, or tried to read your Surius, and Alban 
Butler, and so forth--and they seemed to me bats and asses--One 
really pitied the poor saints and martyrs for having such blind 
biographers--such dunghill cocks, who overlooked the pearl of real 
human love and nobleness in them, in their greediness to snatch up 
and parade the rotten chaff of superstition, and self-torture, and 
spiritual dyspepsia, which had overlaid it.  My dear fellow, that 
Calendar ruins your cause--you are "sacres aristocrates"--kings and 
queens, bishops and virgins by the hundred at one end; a beggar or 
two at the other; and but one real human lay St. Homobonus to fill 
up the great gulf between--A pretty list to allure the English 
middle classes, or the Lancashire working-men!--Almost as charmingly 
suited to England as the present free, industrious, enlightened, and 
moral state of that Eternal City, which has been blest with the 
visible presence and peculiar rule, temporal as well as spiritual, 
too, of your Dalai Lama.  His pills do not seem to have had much 
practical effect there. . . .  My good Luke, till he can show us a 
little better specimen of the kingdom of Heaven organised and 
realised on earth, in the country which does belong to him, soil and 
people, body and soul, we must decline his assistance in realising 
that kingdom in countries which don't belong to him.  If the state 
of Rome don't show his idea of man and society to be a rotten lie, 
what proof would you have? . . . perhaps the charming results of a 
century of Jesuitocracy, as they were represented on a French stage 
in the year 1793?  I can't answer his arguments, you see, or yours 
either; I am an Englishman, and not a controversialist.  The only 
answer I give is John Bull's old dumb instinctive "Everlasting No!" 
which he will stand by, if need be, with sharp shot and cold steel--
"Not that; anything but that.  No kingdom of Heaven at all for us, 
if the kingdom of Heaven is like that.  No heroes at all for us, if 
their heroism is to consist in their being not-men.  Better no 
society at all, but only a competitive wild-beast's den, than a sham 
society.  Better no faith, no hope, no love, no God, than shams 
thereof."  I take my stand on fact and nature; you may call them 
idols and phantoms; I say they need be so no longer to any man, 
since Bacon has taught us to discover the Eternal Laws under the 
outward phenomena.  Here on blank materialism will I stand, and 
testify against all Religions and Gods whatsoever, if they must 
needs be like that Roman religion, that Roman God.  I don't believe 
they need--not I.  But if they need, they must go.  We cannot have a 
"Deus quidam deceptor."  If there be a God, these trees and stones, 
these beasts and birds must be His will, whatever else is not.  My 
body, and brain, and faculties, and appetites must be His will, 
whatever else is not.  Whatsoever I can do with them in accordance 
with the constitution of them and nature must be His will, whatever 
else is not.  Those laws of Nature must reveal Him, and be revealed 
by Him, whatever else is not.  Man's scientific conquest of nature 
must be one phase of His Kingdom on Earth, whatever else is not.  I 
don't deny that there are spiritual laws which man is meant to obey-
-How can I, who feel in my own daily and inexplicable unhappiness 
the fruits of having broken them?--But I do say, that those 
spiritual laws must be in perfect harmony with every fresh physical 
law which we discover:  that they cannot be intended to compete 
self-destructively with each other; that the spiritual cannot be 
intended to be perfected by ignoring or crushing the physical, 
unless God is a deceiver, and His universe a self-contradiction.  
And by this test alone will I try all theories, and dogmas, and 
spiritualities whatsoever--Are they in accordance with the laws of 
nature?  And therefore when your party compare sneeringly Romish 
Sanctity, and English Civilisation, I say, "Take you the Sanctity, 
and give me the Civilisation!"  The one may be a dream, for it is 
unnatural; the other cannot be, for it is natural; and not an evil 
in it at which you sneer but is discovered, day by day, to be owing 
to some infringement of the laws of nature.  When we "draw bills on 
nature," as Carlyle says, "she honours them,"--our ships do sail; 
our mills do work; our doctors do cure; our soldiers do fight.  And 
she does not honour yours; for your Jesuits have, by their own 
confession, to lie, to swindle, to get even man to accept theirs for 
them.  So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, 
the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles.  
The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the 
electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on 
some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a 
mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and 
destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating 
God.'


Which of them do you think, reader, had most right on his side?



CHAPTER VI:  VOGUE LA GALERE



Lancelot was now so far improved in health as to return to his 
little cottage ornee.  He gave himself up freely to his new passion.  
With his comfortable fortune and good connections, the future seemed 
bright and possible enough as to circumstances.  He knew that 
Argemone felt for him; how much it seemed presumptuous even to 
speculate, and as yet no golden-visaged meteor had arisen portentous 
in his amatory zodiac.  No rich man had stepped in to snatch, in 
spite of all his own flocks and herds, at the poor man's own ewe-
lamb, and set him barking at all the world, as many a poor lover has 
to do in defence of his morsel of enjoyment, now turned into a mere 
bone of contention and loadstone for all hungry kites and crows.

All that had to be done was to render himself worthy of her, and in 
doing so, to win her.  And now he began to feel more painfully his 
ignorance of society, of practical life, and the outward present.  
He blamed himself angrily for having, as he now thought, wasted his 
time on ancient histories and foreign travels, while he neglected 
the living wonderful present, which weltered daily round him, every 
face embodying a living soul.  For now he began to feel that those 
faces did hide living souls; formerly he had half believed--he had 
tried, but from laziness, to make himself wholly believe--that they 
were all empty masks, phantasies, without interest or significance 
for him.  But, somehow, in the light of his new love for Argemone, 
the whole human race seemed glorified, brought nearer, endeared to 
him.  So it must be.  He had spoken of a law wider than he thought 
in his fancy, that the angels might learn love for all by love for 
an individual.  Do we not all learn love so?  Is it not the first 
touch of the mother's bosom which awakens in the infant's heart that 
spark of affection which is hereafter to spread itself out towards 
every human being, and to lose none of its devotion for its first 
object, as it expands itself to innumerable new ones?  Is it not by 
love, too--by looking into loving human eyes, by feeling the care of 
loving hands,--that the infant first learns that there exist other 
beings beside itself?--that every body which it sees expresses a 
heart and will like its own?  Be sure of it.  Be sure that to have 
found the key to one heart is to have found the key to all; that 
truly to love is truly to know; and truly to love one, is the first 
step towards truly loving all who bear the same flesh and blood with 
the beloved.  Like children, we must dress up even our unseen future 
in stage properties borrowed from the tried and palpable present, 
ere we can look at it without horror.  We fear and hate the utterly 
unknown, and it only.  Even pain we hate only when we cannot KNOW 
it; when we can only feel it, without explaining it, and making it 
harmonise with our notions of our own deserts and destiny.  And as 
for human beings, there surely it stands true, wherever else it may 
not, that all knowledge is love, and all love knowledge; that even 
with the meanest, we cannot gain a glimpse into their inward trials 
and struggles, without an increase of sympathy and affection.

Whether he reasoned thus or not, Lancelot found that his new 
interest in the working classes was strangely quickened by his 
passion.  It seemed the shortest and clearest way toward a practical 
knowledge of the present.  'Here,' he said to himself, 'in the 
investigation of existing relations between poor and rich, I shall 
gain more real acquaintance with English society, than by dawdling 
centuries in exclusive drawing-rooms.'

The inquiry had not yet presented itself to him as a duty; perhaps 
so much the better, that it might be the more thoroughly a free-will 
offering of love.  At least it opened a new field of amusement and 
knowledge; it promised him new studies of human life; and as he lay 
on his sofa and let his thoughts flow, Tregarva's dark revelations 
began to mix themselves with dreams about the regeneration of the 
Whitford poor, and those again with dreams about the heiress of 
Whitford; and many a luscious scene and noble plan rose brightly 
detailed in his exuberant imagination.  For Lancelot, like all born 
artists, could only think in a concrete form.  He never worked out a 
subject without embodying it in some set oration, dialogue, or 
dramatic castle in the air.

But the more he dreamt, the more he felt that a material beauty of 
flesh and blood required a material house, baths, and boudoirs, 
conservatories, and carriages; a safe material purse, and fixed 
material society; law and order, and the established frame-work of 
society, gained an importance in his eyes which they had never had 
before.

'Well,' he said to himself, 'I am turning quite practical and auld-
warld.  Those old Greeks were not so far wrong when they said that 
what made men citizens, patriots, heroes, was the love of wedded 
wife and child.'

'Wedded wife and child!'--He shrank in from the daring of the 
delicious thought, as if he had intruded without invitation into a 
hidden sanctuary, and looked round for a book to drive away the 
dazzling picture.  But even there his thoughts were haunted by 
Argemone's face, and


   'When his regard
Was raised by intense pensiveness, two eyes,
Two starry eyes, hung in the gloom of thought,
And seemed, with their serene and azure smiles,
To beckon him.'


He took up, with a new interest 'Chartism,' which alone of all Mr. 
Carlyle's works he had hitherto disliked, because his own luxurious 
day-dreams had always flowed in such sad discord with the terrible 
warnings of the modern seer, and his dark vistas of starvation, 
crime, neglect, and discontent.

'Well,' he said to himself, as he closed the book, 'I suppose it is 
good for us easy-going ones now and then to face the possibility of 
a change.  Gold has grown on my back as feathers do on geese, 
without my own will or deed; but considering that gold, like 
feathers, is equally useful to those who have and those who have 
not, why, it is worth while for the goose to remember that he may 
possibly one day be plucked.  And what remains?  "Io," as Medea 
says. . . .  But Argemone?' . . .  And Lancelot felt, for the 
moment, as conservative as the tutelary genius of all special 
constables.

As the last thought passed through his brain, Bracebridge's little 
mustang slouched past the window, ridden (without a saddle) by a 
horseman whom there was no mistaking for no one but the immaculate 
colonel, the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, dared to go about 
the country 'such a figure.'  A minute afterwards he walked in, in a 
student's felt hat, a ragged heather-coloured coatee, and old white 
'regulation drills,' shrunk half-way up his legs, a pair of 
embroidered Indian mocassins, and an enormous meerschaum at his 
button-hole.

'Where have you been this last week?'

'Over head and ears in Young England, till I fled to you for a 
week's common sense.  A glass of cider, for mercy's sake, "to take 
the taste of it out of my mouth," as Bill Sykes has it.'

'Where have you been staying?'

'With young Lord Vieuxbois, among high art and painted glass, spade 
farms, and model smell-traps, rubricalities and sanitary reforms, 
and all other inventions, possible and impossible, for "stretching 
the old formula to meet the new fact," as your favourite prophet 
says.'

'Till the old formula cracks under the tension.'

'And cracks its devotees, too, I think.  Here comes the cider!'

'But, my dear fellow, you must not laugh at all this.  Young England 
or Peelite, this is all right and noble.  What a yet unspoken poetry 
there is in that very sanitary reform!  It is the great fact of the 
age.  We shall have men arise and write epics on it, when they have 
learnt that "to the pure all things are pure," and that science and 
usefulness contain a divine element, even in their lowest 
appliances.'

'Write one yourself, and call it the Chadwickiad.'

'Why not?


'Smells and the Man I sing.


There's a beginning at once.  Why don't YOU rather, with your 
practical power, turn sanitary reformer--the only true soldier--and 
conquer those real devils and "natural enemies" of Englishmen, 
carbonic acid and sulphuretted hydrogen?'

'Ce n'est pas mon metier, my dear fellow.  I am miserably behind the 
age.  People are getting so cursedly in earnest now-a-days, that I 
shall have to bolt to the backwoods to amuse myself in peace; or 
else sham dumb as the monkeys do, lest folks should find out that 
I'm rational, and set me to work.'

Lancelot laughed and sighed.

'But how on earth do you contrive to get on so well with men with 
whom you have not an idea in common!'

'Savoir faire, O infant Hercules! own daddy to savoir vivre.  I am a 
good listener; and, therefore, the most perfect, because the most 
silent, of flatterers.  When they talk Puginesquery, I stick my head 
on one side attentively, and "think the more," like the lady's 
parrot.  I have been all the morning looking over a set of drawings 
for my lord's new chapel; and every soul in the party fancies me a 
great antiquary, just because I have been retailing to B as my own 
everything that A told me the moment before.'

'I envy you your tact, at all events.'

'Why the deuce should you?  You may rise in time to something better 
than tact; to what the good book, I suppose, means by "wisdom."  
Young geniuses like you, who have been green enough to sell your 
souls to "truth," must not meddle with tact, unless you wish to fare 
as the donkey did when he tried to play lap-dog.'

'At all events, I would sooner remain cub till they run me down and 
eat me, than give up speaking my mind,' said Lancelot.  'Fool I may 
be, but the devil himself shan't make me knave.'

'Quite proper.  On two thousand a year a man can afford to be 
honest.  Kick out lustily right and left!--After all, the world is 
like a spaniel; the more you beat it, the better it likes you--if 
you have money.  Only don't kick too hard; for, after all, it has a 
hundred million pair of shins to your one.'

'Don't fear that I shall run a-muck against society just now.  I am 
too thoroughly out of my own good books.  I have been for years 
laughing at Young England, and yet its little finger is thicker than 
my whole body, for it is trying to do something; and I, alas, am 
doing utterly nothing.  I should be really glad to take a lesson of 
these men and their plans for social improvement.'

'You will have a fine opportunity this evening.  Don't you dine at 
Minchampstead?'

'Yes.  Do you?'

'Mr. Jingle dines everywhere, except at home.  Will you take me over 
in your trap?'

'Done.  But whom shall we meet there?'

'The Lavingtons, and Vieuxbois, and Vaurien, and a parson or two, I 
suppose.  But between Saint Venus and Vieuxbois you may soon learn 
enough to make you a sadder man, if not a wiser one.'

'Why not a wiser one?  Sadder than now I cannot be; or less wise, 
God knows.'

The colonel looked at Lancelot with one of those kindly thoughtful 
smiles, which came over him whenever his better child's heart could 
bubble up through the thick crust of worldliness.

'My young friend, you have been a little too much on the stilts 
heretofore.  Take care that, now you are off them, you don't lie 
down and sleep, instead of walking honestly on your legs.  Have 
faith in yourself; pick these men's brains, and all men's.  You can 
do it.  Say to yourself boldly, as the false prophet in India said 
to the missionary, "I have fire enough in my stomach to burn up" a 
dozen stucco and filigree reformers and "assimilate their ashes into 
the bargain, like one of Liebig's cabbages."'

'How can I have faith in myself, when I am playing traitor to myself 
every hour in the day?  And yet faith in something I must have:  in 
woman, perhaps.'

'Never!' said the colonel, energetically.  'In anything but woman?  
She must be led, not leader.  If you love a woman, make her have 
faith in you.  If you lean on her, you will ruin yourself, and her 
as well.'

Lancelot shook his head.  There was a pause.

'After all, colonel, I think there must be a meaning in those old 
words our mothers used to teach us about "having faith in God."'

The colonel shrugged his shoulders.

'Quien sabe? said the Spanish girl, when they asked her who was her 
child's father.  But here comes my kit on a clod's back, and it is 
time to dress for dinner.'

So to the dinner-party they went.

Lord Minchampstead was one of the few noblemen Lancelot had ever met 
who had aroused in him a thorough feeling of respect.  He was always 
and in all things a strong man.  Naturally keen, ready, business-
like, daring, he had carved out his own way through life, and opened 
his oyster--the world, neither with sword nor pen, but with steam 
and cotton.  His father was Mr. Obadiah Newbroom, of the well-known 
manufacturing firm of Newbroom, Stag, and Playforall.  A stanch 
Dissenter himself, he saw with a slight pang his son Thomas turn 
Churchman, as soon as the young man had worked his way up to be the 
real head of the firm.  But this was the only sorrow which Thomas 
Newbroom, now Lord Minchampstead, had ever given his father.  'I 
stood behind a loom myself, my boy, when I began life; and you must 
do with great means what I did with little ones.  I have made a 
gentleman of you, you must make a nobleman of yourself.'  Those were 
almost the last words of the stern, thrifty, old Puritan craftsman, 
and his son never forgot them.  From a mill-owner he grew to coal-
owner, shipowner, banker, railway director, money-lender to kings 
and princes; and last of all, as the summit of his own and his 
compeer's ambition, to land-owner.  He had half a dozen estates in 
as many different counties.  He had added house to house, and field 
to field; and at last bought Minchampstead Park and ten thousand 
acres, for two-thirds its real value, from that enthusiastic 
sportsman Lord Peu de Cervelle, whose family had come in with the 
Conqueror, and gone out with George IV.  So, at least, they always 
said; but it was remarkable that their name could never be traced 
farther back than the dissolution of the monasteries:  and 
Calumnious Dryasdusts would sometimes insolently father their title 
on James I. and one of his batches of bought peerages.  But let the 
dead bury their dead.  There was now a new lord in Minchampstead; 
and every country Caliban was finding, to his disgust, that he had 
'got a new master,' and must perforce 'be a new man.'  Oh! how the 
squires swore and the farmers chuckled, when the 'Parvenu' sold the 
Minchampstead hounds, and celebrated his 1st of September by 
exterminating every hare and pheasant on the estate!  How the 
farmers swore and the labourers chuckled when he took all the 
cottages into his own hands and rebuilt them, set up a first-rate 
industrial school, gave every man a pig and a garden, and broke up 
all the commons 'to thin the labour-market.'  Oh, how the labourers 
swore and the farmers chuckled, when he put up steam-engines on all 
his farms, refused to give away a farthing in alms, and enforced the 
new Poor-law to the very letter.  How the country tradesmen swore, 
when he called them 'a pack of dilatory jobbers,' and announced his 
intention of employing only London workmen for his improvements.  
Oh! how they all swore together (behind his back, of course, for his 
dinners were worth eating), and the very ladies said naughty words, 
when the stern political economist proclaimed at his own table that 
'he had bought Minchampstead for merely commercial purposes, as a 
profitable investment of capital, and he would see that, whatever 
else it did, it should PAY.'

But the new lord heard of all the hard words with a quiet self-
possessed smile.  He had formed his narrow theory of the universe, 
and he was methodically and conscientiously carrying it out.  True, 
too often, like poor Keats's merchant brothers,--


'Half-ignorant, he turned an easy wheel,
Which set sharp racks at work to pinch and peel.'


But of the harm which he did he was unconscious; in the good which 
he did he was consistent and indefatigable; infinitely superior, 
with all his defects, to the ignorant, extravagant do-nothing Squire 
Lavingtons around him.  At heart, however, Mammoth-blinded, he was 
kindly and upright.  A man of a stately presence; a broad, honest 
north-country face; a high square forehead, bland and unwrinkled.  I 
sketch him here once for all, because I have no part for him after 
this scene in my corps de ballet.

Lord Minchampstead had many reasons for patronising Lancelot.  In 
the first place, he had a true eye for a strong man wherever he met 
him; in the next place, Lancelot's uncle the banker, was a stanch 
Whig ally of his in the House.  'In the rotten-borough times, Mr. 
Smith,' he once said to Lancelot, 'we could have made a senator of 
you at once; but, for the sake of finality, we were forced to 
relinquish that organ of influence.  The Tories had abused it, 
really, a little too far; and now we can only make a commissioner of 
you--which, after all, is a more useful post, and a more lucrative 
one.'  But Lancelot had not as yet 'Galliolised,' as the Irish 
schoolmaster used to call it, and cared very little to play a 
political ninth fiddle.

The first thing which caught his eyes as he entered the drawing-room 
before dinner was Argemone listening in absorbed reverence to her 
favourite vicar,--a stern, prim, close-shaven, dyspeptic man, with a 
meek, cold smile, which might have become a cruel one.  He watched 
and watched in vain, hoping to catch her eye; but no--there she 
stood, and talked and listened--

'Ah,' said Bracebridge, smiling, 'it is in vain, Smith!  When did 
you know a woman leave the Church for one of us poor laymen?'

'Good heavens!' said Lancelot, impatiently, 'why will they make such 
fools of themselves with clergymen?'

'They are quite right.  They always like the strong men--the 
fighters and the workers.  In Voltaire's time they all ran after the 
philosophers.  In the middle ages, books tell us, they worshipped 
the knights errant.  They are always on the winning side, the 
cunning little beauties.  In the war-time, when the soldiers had to 
play the world's game, the ladies all caught the red-coat fever; 
now, in these talking and thinking days (and be hanged to them for 
bores), they have the black-coat fever for the same reason.  The 
parsons are the workers now-a-days--or rather, all the world expects 
them to be so.  They have the game in their own hands, if they did 
but know how to play it.'

Lancelot stood still, sulking over many thoughts.  The colonel 
lounged across the room towards Lord Vieuxbois, a quiet, truly high-
bred young man, with a sweet open countenance, and an ample 
forehead, whose size would have vouched for great talents, had not 
the promise been contradicted by the weakness of the over-delicate 
mouth and chin.

'Who is that with whom you came into the room, Bracebridge?' asked 
Lord Vieuxbois.  'I am sure I know his face.'

'Lancelot Smith, the man who has taken the shooting-box at Lower 
Whitford.'

'Oh, I remember him well enough at Cambridge!  He was one of a set 
who tried to look like blackguards, and really succeeded tolerably.  
They used to eschew gloves, and drink nothing but beer, and smoke 
disgusting short pipes; and when we established the Coverley Club in 
Trinity, they set up an opposition, and called themselves the 
Navvies.  And they used to make piratical expeditions down to Lynn 
in eight oars, to attack bargemen, and fen girls, and shoot ducks, 
and sleep under turf-stacks, and come home when they had drank all 
the public-house taps dry.  I remember the man perfectly.'

'Navvy or none,' said the colonel, 'he has just the longest head and 
the noblest heart of any man I ever met.  If he does not distinguish 
himself before he dies, I know nothing of human nature.'

'Ah yes, I believe he is clever enough!--took a good degree, a 
better one than I did--but horribly eclectic; full of mesmerism, and 
German metaphysics, and all that sort of thing.  I heard of him one 
night last spring, on which he had been seen, if you will believe 
it, going successively into a Swedenborgian chapel, the Garrick's 
Head, and one of Elliotson's magnetic soirees.  What can you expect 
after that?'

'A great deal,' said Bracebridge drily.  'With such a head as he 
carries on his shoulders the man might be another Mirabeau, if he 
held the right cards in the right rubber.  And he really ought to 
suit you, for he raves about the middle ages, and chivalry, and has 
edited a book full of old ballads.'

'Oh, all the eclectics do that sort of thing; and small thanks to 
them.  However, I will speak to him after dinner, and see what there 
is in him.'

And Lord Vieuxbois turned away, and, alas for Lancelot! sat next to 
Argemone at dinner.  Lancelot, who was cross with everybody for what 
was nobody's fault, revenged himself all dinner-time by never 
speaking a word to his next neighbour, Miss Newbroom, who was 
longing with all her heart to talk sentiment to him about the 
Exhibition; and when Argemone, in the midst of a brilliant word-
skirmish with Lord Vieuxbois, stole a glance at him, he chose to 
fancy that they were both talking of him, and looked more cross than 
ever.

After the ladies retired, Lancelot, in his sulky way, made up his 
mind that the conversation was going to be ineffably stupid; and set 
to to dream, sip claret, and count the minutes till he found himself 
in the drawing-room with Argemone.  But he soon discovered, as I 
suppose we all have, that 'it never rains but it pours,' and that 
one cannot fall in with a new fact or a new acquaintance but next 
day twenty fresh things shall spring up as if by magic, throwing 
unexpected light on one's new phenomenon.  Lancelot's head was full 
of the condition-of-the-poor question, and lo! everybody seemed 
destined to talk about it.

'Well, Lord Vieuxbois,' said the host, casually, 'my girls are 
raving about your new school.  They say it is a perfect antiquarian 
gem.'

'Yes, tolerable, I believe.  But Wales has disappointed me a little.  
That vile modernist naturalism is creeping back even into our 
painted glass.  I could have wished that the artist's designs for 
the windows had been a little more Catholic.'

'How then?' asked the host, with a puzzled face.

'Oh, he means,' said Bracebridge, 'that the figures' wrists and 
ankles were not sufficiently dislocated, and the patron saint did 
not look quite like a starved rabbit with its neck wrung.  Some of 
the faces, I am sorry to say, were positively like good-looking men 
and women.'

'Oh, I understand,' said Lord Minchampstead; 'Bracebridge's tongue 
is privileged, you know, Lord Vieuxbois, so you must not be angry.'

'I don't see my way into all this,' said Squire Lavington (which was 
very likely to be true, considering that he never looked for his 
way).  'I don't see how all these painted windows, and crosses, and 
chanting, and the deuce and the Pope only know what else, are to 
make boys any better.'

'We have it on the highest authority,' said Vieuxbois, 'that 
pictures and music are the books of the unlearned.  I do not think 
that we have any right in the nineteenth century to contest an 
opinion which the fathers of the Church gave in the fourth.'

'At all events,' said Lancelot, 'it is by pictures and music, by art 
and song, and symbolic representations, that all nations have been 
educated in their adolescence! and as the youth of the individual is 
exactly analogous to the youth of the collective race, we should 
employ the same means of instruction with our children which 
succeeded in the early ages with the whole world.'

Lancelot might as well have held his tongue--nobody understood him 
but Vieuxbois, and he had been taught to scent German neology in 
everything, as some folks are taught to scent Jesuitry, especially 
when it involved an inductive law, and not a mere red-tape 
precedent, and, therefore, could not see that Lancelot was arguing 
for him.  'All very fine, Smith,' said the squire; 'it's a pity you 
won't leave off puzzling your head with books, and stick to fox-
hunting.  All you young gentlemen will do is to turn the heads of 
the poor with your cursed education.'  The national oath followed, 
of course.  'Pictures and chanting!  Why, when I was a boy, a good 
honest labouring man wanted to see nothing better than a halfpenny 
ballad, with a wood-cut at the top, and they worked very well then, 
and wanted for nothing.'

'Oh, we shall give them the halfpenny ballads in time!' said 
Vieuxbois, smiling.

'You will do a very good deed, then,' said mine host.  'But I am 
sorry to say that, as far as I can find from my agents, when the 
upper classes write cheap publications, the lower classes will not 
read them.'

'Too true,' said Vieuxbois.

'Is not the cause,' asked Lancelot, 'just that the upper classes do 
write them?'

'The writings of working men, certainly,' said Lord Minchampstead, 
'have an enormous sale among their own class.'

'Just because they express the feelings of that class, of which I am 
beginning to fear that we know very little.  Look again, what a 
noble literature of people's songs and hymns Germany has.  Some of 
Lord Vieuxbois's friends, I know, are busy translating many of 
them.'

'As many of them, that is to say,' said Vieuxbois, 'as are 
compatible with a real Church spirit.'

'Be it so; but who wrote them?  Not the German aristocracy for the 
people, but the German people for themselves.  There is the secret 
of their power.  Why not educate the people up to such a standard 
that they should be able to write their own literature?'

'What,' said Mr. Chalklands, of Chalklands, who sat opposite, 'would 
you have working men turn ballad writers?  There would be an end of 
work, then, I think.'

'I have not heard,' said Lancelot, 'that the young women--LADIES, I 
ought to say, if the word mean anything--who wrote the "Lowell 
Offering," spun less or worse cotton than their neighbours.'

'On the contrary," said Lord Minchampstead, 'we have the most noble 
accounts of heroic industry and self-sacrifice in girls whose 
education, to judge by its fruits, might shame that of most English 
young ladies.'

Mr. Chalklands expressed certain confused notions that, in America, 
factory girls carried green silk parasols, put the legs of pianos 
into trousers, and were too prudish to make a shirt, or to call it a 
shirt after it was made, he did not quite remember which.

'It is a great pity,' said Lord Minchampstead, 'that our factory 
girls are not in the same state of civilisation.  But it is socially 
impossible.  America is in an abnormal state.  In a young country 
the laws of political economy do not make themselves fully felt.  
Here, where we have no uncleared world to drain the labour-market, 
we may pity and alleviate the condition of the working-classes, but 
we can do nothing more.  All the modern schemes for the amelioration 
which ignore the laws of competition, must end either in 
pauperisation'--(with a glance at Lord Vieuxbois),--'or in the 
destruction of property.'

Lancelot said nothing, but thought the more.  It did strike him at 
the moment that the few might, possibly, be made for the many, and 
not the many for the few; and that property was made for man, not 
man for property.  But he contented himself with asking,--

'You think, then, my lord, that in the present state of society, no 
dead-lift can be given to the condition--in plain English, the 
wages--of working men, without the destruction of property?'

Lord Minchampstead smiled, and parried the question.

'There may be other dead-lift ameliorations, my young friend, 
besides a dead-lift of wages.'

So Lancelot thought, also; but Lord Minchampstead would have been a 
little startled could he have seen Lancelot's notion of a dead-lift.  
Lord Minchampstead was thinking of cheap bread and sugar.  Do you 
think that I will tell you of what Lancelot was thinking?

But here Vieuxbois spurred in to break a last lance.  He had been 
very much disgusted with the turn the conversation was taking, for 
he considered nothing more heterodox than the notion that the poor 
were to educate themselves.  In his scheme, of course the clergy and 
the gentry were to educate the poor, who were to take down 
thankfully as much as it was thought proper to give them:  and all 
beyond was 'self-will' and 'private judgment,' the fathers of 
Dissent and Chartism, Trades'-union strikes, and French Revolutions, 
et si qua alia.

'And pray, Mr. Smith, may I ask what limit you would put to 
education?'

'The capacities of each man,' said Lancelot.  'If man living in 
civilised society has one right which he can demand it is this, that 
the State which exists by his labour shall enable him to develop, 
or, at least, not hinder his developing, his whole faculties to 
their very utmost, however lofty that may be.  While a man who might 
be an author remains a spade-drudge, or a journeyman while he has 
capacities for a master; while any man able to rise in life remains 
by social circumstances lower than he is willing to place himself, 
that man has a right to complain of the State's injustice and 
neglect.'

'Really, I do not see,' said Vieuxbois, 'why people should wish to 
rise in life.  They had no such self-willed fancy in the good old 
times.  The whole notion is a product of these modern days--'

He would have said more, but he luckily remembered at whose table he 
was sitting.

'I think, honestly,' said Lancelot, whose blood was up, 'that we 
gentlemen all run into the same fallacy.  We fancy ourselves the 
fixed and necessary element in society, to which all others are to 
accommodate themselves.  "Given the rights of the few rich, to find 
the condition of the many poor."  It seems to me that other 
postulate is quite as fair:  "Given the rights of the many poor, to 
find the condition of the few rich."'

Lord Minchampstead laughed.

'If you hit us so hard, Mr. Smith, I must really denounce you as a 
Communist.  Lord Vieuxbois, shall we join the ladies?'

In the drawing-room, poor Lancelot, after rejecting overtures of 
fraternity from several young ladies, set himself steadily again 
against the wall to sulk and watch Argemone.  But this time she 
spied in a few minutes his melancholy, moonstruck face, swam up to 
him, and said something kind and commonplace.  She spoke in the 
simplicity of her heart, but he chose to think she was patronising 
him--she had not talked commonplaces to the vicar.  He tried to say 
something smart and cutting,--stuttered, broke down, blushed, and 
shrank back again to the wall, fancying that every eye in the room 
was on him; and for one moment a flash of sheer hatred to Argemone 
swept through him.

Was Argemone patronising him?  Of course she was.  True, she was but 
three-and-twenty, and he was of the same age; but, spiritually and 
socially, the girl develops ten years earlier than the boy.  She was 
flattered and worshipped by gray-headed men, and in her simplicity 
she thought it a noble self-sacrifice to stoop to notice the poor 
awkward youth.  And yet if he could have seen the pure moonlight of 
sisterly pity which filled all her heart as she retreated, with 
something of a blush and something of a sigh, and her heart 
fluttered and fell, would he have been content?  Not he.  It was her 
love he wanted, and not her pity; it was to conquer her and possess 
her, and inform himself with her image, and her with his own; though 
as yet he did not know it; though the moment that she turned away he 
cursed himself for selfish vanity, and moroseness and conceit.

'Who am I to demand her all to myself?  Her, the glorious, the 
saintly, the unfallen!  Is not a look, a word, infinitely more than 
I deserve?  And yet I pretend to admire tales of chivalry!  Old 
knightly hearts would have fought and wandered for years to earn a 
tithe of the favours which have been bestowed on me unasked.'--

Peace! poor Lancelot!  Thy egg is by no means addle; but the chick 
is breaking the shell in somewhat a cross-grained fashion.



CHAPTER VII:  THE DRIVE HOME, AND WHAT CAME OF IT



Now it was not extraordinary that Squire Lavington had 'assimilated' 
a couple of bottles of Carbonel's best port; for however abstemious 
the new lord himself might be, he felt for the habits, and for the 
vote of an old-fashioned Whig squire.  Nor was it extraordinary that 
he fell fast asleep the moment he got into the carriage; nor, again, 
that his wife and daughters were not solicitous about waking him; 
nor, on the other hand, that the coachman and footman, who were like 
all the squire's servants, of the good old sort, honest, faithful, 
boozing, extravagant, happy-go-lucky souls, who had 'been about the 
place these forty years,' were somewhat owlish and unsteady on the 
box.  Nor was it extraordinary that there was a heavy storm of 
lightning, for that happened three times a-week in the chalk hills 
the summer through; nor, again, that under these circumstances the 
horses, who were of the squire's own breeding, and never thoroughly 
broke (nothing was done thoroughly at Whitford), went rather wildly 
home, and that the carriage swung alarmingly down the steep hills, 
and the boughs brushed the windows rather too often.  But it was 
extraordinary that Mrs. Lavington had cast off her usual primness, 
and seemed to-night, for the first time in her life, in an exuberant 
good humour, which she evinced by snubbing her usual favourite 
Honoria, and lavishing caresses on Argemone, whose vagaries she 
usually regarded with a sort of puzzled terror, like a hen who has 
hatched a duckling.

'Honoria, take your feet off my dress.  Argemone, my child, I hope 
you spent a pleasant evening?'

Argemone answered by some tossy commonplace.

A pause--and then Mrs. Lavington recommenced,--

'How very pleasing that poor young Lord Vieuxbois is, after all!'

'I thought you disliked him so much.'

'His opinions, my child; but we must hope for the best.  He seems 
moral and well inclined, and really desirous of doing good in his 
way; and so successful in the House, too, I hear.'

'To me,' said Argemone, 'he seems to want life, originality, depth, 
everything that makes a great man.  He knows nothing but what he has 
picked up ready-made from books.  After all, his opinions are the 
one redeeming point in him.'

'Ah, my dear, when it pleases Heaven to open your eyes, you will see 
as I do!'

Poor Mrs. Lavington!  Unconscious spokeswoman for the ninety-nine 
hundredths of the human race!  What are we all doing from morning to 
night, but setting up our own fancies as the measure of all heaven 
and earth, and saying, each in his own dialect, Whig, Radical, or 
Tory, Papist or Protestant, 'When it pleases Heaven to open your 
eyes you will see as I do'?

'It is a great pity,' went on Mrs. Lavington, meditatively, 'to see 
a young man so benighted and thrown away.  With his vast fortune, 
too--such a means of good!  Really we ought to have seen a little 
more of him.  I think Mr. O'Blareaway's conversation might be a 
blessing to him.  I think of asking him over to stay a week at 
Whitford, to meet that sainted young man.'

Now Argemone did not think the Reverend Panurgus O'Blareaway, 
incumbent of Lower Whitford, at all a sainted young man, but, on the 
contrary, a very vulgar, slippery Irishman; and she had, somehow, 
tired of her late favourite, Lord Vieuxbois; so she answered tossily 
enough,--

'Really, mamma, a week of Lord Vieuxbois will be too much.  We shall 
be bored to death with the Cambridge Camden Society, and ballads for 
the people.'

'I think, my dear,' said Mrs. Lavington (who had, half unconsciously 
to herself, more reasons than one for bringing the young lord to 
Whitford), 'I think, my dear, that his conversation, with all its 
faults, will be a very improving change for your father.  I hope 
he's asleep.'

The squire's nose answered for itself.

'Really, what between Mr. Smith, and Colonel Bracebridge, and their 
very ineligible friend, Mr. Mellot, whom I should never have allowed 
to enter my house if I had suspected his religious views, the place 
has become a hotbed of false doctrine and heresy.  I have been quite 
frightened when I have heard their conversation at dinner, lest the 
footmen should turn infidels!'

'Perhaps, mamma,' said Honoria, slyly, 'Lord Vieuxbois might convert 
them to something quite as bad.  How shocking if old Giles, the 
butler, should turn Papist!'

'Honoria, you are very silly.  Lord Vieuxbois, at least can be 
trusted.  He has no liking for low companions.  HE is above joking 
with grooms, and taking country walks with gamekeepers.'

It was lucky that it was dark, for Honoria and Argemone both blushed 
crimson.

'Your poor father's mind has been quite unsettled by all their 
ribaldry.  They have kept him so continually amused, that all my 
efforts to bring him to a sense of his awful state have been more 
unavailing than ever.'

Poor Mrs. Lavington!  She had married, at eighteen, a man far her 
inferior in intellect; and had become--as often happens in such 
cases--a prude and a devotee.  The squire, who really admired and 
respected her, confined his disgust to sly curses at the Methodists 
(under which name he used to include every species of religious 
earnestness, from Quakerism to that of Mr. Newman).  Mrs. Lavington 
used at first to dignify these disagreeables by the name of 
persecution, and now she was trying to convert the old man by 
coldness, severity, and long curtain-lectures, utterly 
unintelligible to their victim, because couched in the peculiar 
conventional phraseology of a certain school.  She forgot, poor 
earnest soul, that the same form of religion which had captivated a 
disappointed girl of twenty, might not be the most attractive one 
for a jovial old man of sixty.

Argemone, who a fortnight before would have chimed in with all her 
mother's lamentations, now felt a little nettled and jealous.  She 
could not bear to hear Lancelot classed with the colonel.

'Indeed,' she said, 'if amusement is bad for my father, he is not 
likely to get much of it during Lord Vieuxbois's stay.  But, of 
course, mamma, you will do as you please.'

'Of course I shall, my dear,' answered the good lady, in a tragedy-
queen tone.  'I shall only take the liberty of adding, that it is 
very painful to me to find you adding to the anxiety which your 
unfortunate opinions give me, by throwing every possible obstacle in 
the way of my plans for your good.'

Argemone burst into proud tears (she often did so after a 
conversation with her mother).  'Plans for my good!'--And an 
unworthy suspicion about her mother crossed her mind, and was 
peremptorily expelled again.  What turn the conversation would have 
taken next, I know not, but at that moment Honoria and her mother 
uttered a fearful shriek, as their side of the carriage jolted half-
way up the bank, and stuck still in that pleasant position.

The squire awoke, and the ladies simultaneously clapped their hands 
to their ears, knowing what was coming.  He thrust his head out of 
the window, and discharged a broadside of at least ten pounds' worth 
of oaths (Bow Street valuation) at the servants, who were examining 
the broken wheel, with a side volley or two at Mrs. Lavington for 
being frightened.  He often treated her and Honoria to that style of 
oratory.  At Argemone he had never sworn but once since she left the 
nursery, and was so frightened at the consequences, that he took 
care never to do it again.

But there they were fast, with a broken wheel, plunging horses, and 
a drunken coachman.  Luckily for them, the colonel and Lancelot were 
following close behind, and came to their assistance.

The colonel, as usual, solved the problem.

'Your dog-cart will carry four, Smith?'

'It will.'

'Then let the ladies get in, and Mr. Lavington drive them home.'

'What?' said the squire, 'with both my hands red-hot with the gout?  
You must drive three of us, colonel, and one of us must walk.'

'I will walk,' said Argemone, in her determined way.

Mrs. Lavington began something about propriety, but was stopped with 
another pound's worth of oaths by the squire, who, however, had 
tolerably recovered his good humour, and hurried Mrs. Lavington and 
Honoria, laughingly, into the dog-cart, saying--

'Argemone's safe enough with Smith; the servants will lead the 
horses behind them.  It's only three miles home, and I should like 
to see any one speak to her twice while Smith's fists are in the 
way.'

Lancelot thought so too.

'You can trust yourself to me, Miss Lavington?'

'By all means.  I shall enjoy the walk after--:' and she stopped.  
In a moment the dog-cart had rattled off, with a parting curse from 
the squire to the servants, who were unharnessing the horses.

Argemone took Lancelot's arm; the soft touch thrilled through and 
through him; and Argemone felt, she knew not why, a new sensation 
run through her frame.  She shuddered--not with pain.

'You are cold, Miss Lavington?'

'Oh, not in the least.'  Cold! when every vein was boiling so 
strangely!  A soft luscious melancholy crept over her.  She had 
always had a terror of darkness; but now she felt quite safe in his 
strength.  The thought of her own unprotected girlhood drew her 
heart closer to him.  She remembered with pleasure the stories of 
his personal prowess, which had once made her think him coarse and 
brutal.  For the first time in her life she knew the delight of 
dependence--the holy charm of weakness.  And as they paced on 
silently together, through the black awful night, while the servants 
lingered, far out of sight, about the horses, she found out how 
utterly she trusted to him.

'Listen!' she said.  A nightingale was close to them, pouring out 
his whole soul in song.

'Is it not very late in the year for a nightingale?'

'He is waiting for his mate.  She is rearing a late brood, I 
suppose.'

'What do you think it is which can stir him up to such an ecstasy of 
joy, and transfigure his whole heart into melody?'

'What but love, the fulness of all joy, the evoker of all song?'

'All song?--The angels sing in heaven.'

'So they say:  but the angels must love if they sing.'

'They love God!'

'And no one else?'

'Oh yes:  but that is universal, spiritual love; not earthly love--a 
narrow passion for an individual.'

'How do we know that they do not learn to love all by first loving 
one?'

'Oh, the angelic life is single!'

'Who told you so, Miss Lavington?'

She quoted the stock text, of course:--'"In heaven they neither 
marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels."'

'"As the tree falls, so it lies."  And God forbid that those who 
have been true lovers on earth should contract new marriages in the 
next world.  Love is eternal.  Death may part lovers, but not love.  
And how do we know that these angels, as they call them, if they be 
really persons, may not be united in pairs by some marriage bond, 
infinitely more perfect than any we can dream of on earth?'

'That is a very wild view, Mr. Smith, and not sanctioned by the 
Church,' said Argemone, severely.  (Curious and significant it is, 
how severe ladies are apt to be whenever they talk of the Church.)

'In plain historic fact, the early fathers and the middle-age monks 
did not sanction it:  and are not they the very last persons to whom 
one would go to be taught about marriage?  Strange! that people 
should take their notions of love from the very men who prided 
themselves on being bound, by their own vows, to know nothing about 
it!'

'They were very holy men.'

'But still men, as I take it.  And do you not see that Love is, like 
all spiritual thi

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