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Library Notes

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Title: Library Notes

Author: A. P. Russell


        
Release date: June 15, 2012 [eBook #39997]

Language: English

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LIBRARY NOTES

BY

A. P. RUSSELL

_NEW EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED_

BOSTON

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1882


Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1879, by

ADDISON P. RUSSELL,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

_All rights reserved._

RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY
H. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.




CONTENTS.


                                                           PAGE

I. INSUFFICIENCY                                              1

II. EXTREMES                                                 33

III. DISGUISES                                               63

IV. STANDARDS                                                90

V. REWARDS                                                  121

VI. LIMITS                                                  157

VII. INCONGRUITY                                            187

VIII. MUTATIONS                                             214

IX. PARADOXES                                               240

X. CONTRASTS                                                270

XI. TYPES                                                   295

XII. CONDUCT                                                325

XIII. RELIGION                                              357




LIBRARY NOTES.




I.

INSUFFICIENCY.


It was well said by some one that "in every object there is an
inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of
seeing." "Each one sees what he carries in his heart," said Goethe. "You
will find poetry nowhere," said Joubert, "unless you bring some with
you." "Those who would see or feel the truth of the anatomy in the
marble must bring their knowledge with them." "Don't you think that
statue indecent?" said Boswell to Johnson. "No, sir," was the reply,
"but your remark is." Once, we are told by Hazlitt, when a pedantic
coxcomb was crying up Raphael to the skies, Northcote could not help
saying, "If there was nothing in Raphael but what you can see in him, we
should not now have been talking of him." Douglas Jerrold, it is said,
disliked the theatre behind the scenes, and seldom went there save to
witness a rehearsal. He would generally attend on the first night of the
performance of his piece, but he seldom saw the same piece twice. His
idea, as realized, generally disgusted him. He saw it with all the
delicate touches rubbed away,--a shadow, or a vulgar caricature. His
quarrels with actors were incessant, because they would take their idea
and not his idea of a part. La Rochefoucauld, in his Maxims, gives us a
picture, not of human nature, but of its selfishness. "He works," said
Sterling, "like a painter who paints the profile, and chooses the side
of the face in which the eye is blind and deformed, instead of the
other, which is unblemished. Yet the picture may be a most accurate
copy." So do we all. Those of us that see at all see but a small part of
anything at a time. Only a line upon the column is distinctly visible;
all the rest is hidden, or obscured in the glaring light or eclipsing
shadow. A man, especially, must be looked at all around, within, by a
fair light, and with a good eye, to be seen truly or judged justly. We
put a narrow and fine sight upon him naturally, and can hardly avoid
estimating him meanly. We have too much the habit of Fuseli, who
preferred beginning his sketch of the human figure at the lowest point,
and working from the foot upward. "The wisest amongst us," said the
artist and critic, Richardson, "is a fool in some things, as the lowest
amongst men has some just notions, and therein is as wise as Socrates;
so that every man resembles a statue made to stand against a wall or in
a niche; on one side it is a Plato, an Apollo, a Demosthenes; on the
other, it is a rough, unformed piece of stone." "Both," said Dr. Johnson
of the remarks of Lord Orrery and Delany on Swift, "were right,--only
Delany had seen most of the good side, Lord Orrery most of the bad."
There is a curious life of Tiberius, with two title-pages, both taken
from historical authorities; two characters--one detestable, the other
admirable--of one and the same person; made up, both, of recorded facts.
"We ought not," said La Bruyere, "to judge of men as of a picture or
statue, at the first sight; there is a mind and heart to be searched;
the veil of modesty covers merit, and the mask of hypocrisy disguises
malignity. There are but few judges that have knowledge to discern
aright to pass sentence; 'tis but by little and little, and perhaps even
by time and occasion, that complete virtue or perfect vice come at last
to show themselves." "A man," said Emerson, "is like a bit of Labrador
spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to
a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors." What you
think of him depends so much on how you look at him. As a creature of
small ways and little achievements, he seems fit only for "stopping a
bung-hole;" as an embodiment of every manly trait and of every Christian
virtue, he appears indeed "a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and
pompous in the grave." The petty tyrant of a family, he satirizes Caesar;
the canting bigot of the church, he brings reproach upon religion. Now a
gentleman, he makes you think of Sidney; now a beast, of Swift's
revolting Yahoo. When truly humble and consciously ignorant, he hath the
aspect of a child of God; when conceited, dogmatic, aggressive, all the
forgotten orthodox teachings of the fate of the hopeless come back to
you with the force of apostolic thunder. As the splendid immortal he is
destined to be, you hasten to apotheosize him; as the monster he
sometimes appears, you wonder that he exists. Burns, who was a master in
human nature, characterized woman as "great for good, or great for evil;
when not an angel, she's a devil." "There is something still more to be
dreaded than a Jesuit," said Eugene Sue, "and that is a Jesuitess." It
seems to be nearly impossible to be moderate. If we are calm or
deliberate enough to be just, we are almost sure to be indifferent. Our
ignorance, our education, our interests, our prejudices, blind our eyes,
darken our minds, or drive us to violence. There is nothing half and
half about us. The little that we see, we see so differently and so
partially, and ignorance finds its complement in feeling. Dryden said of
some of the judges of his day, that, right or wrong, they always decided
for the poor against the rich; and he quoted a saying of Charles II.,
that the crown was uniformly worsted in every case which was heard
before Sir Matthew Hale. "The eyes of critics," said Landor, "whether
in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot's."
"Truth, as Humanity knows it," said Bulwer, "is not what the schoolmen
call it, one and indivisible; it is like light, and splits not only into
elementary colors, but into innumerable tints. Truth with Raphael is not
the same as truth with Titian; truth with Shakespeare is not the same as
truth with Milton; truth with St. Xavier is not the same as truth with
Luther; truth with Pitt is not the same as truth with Fox. Each man
takes from life his favorite truth, as each man takes from light his
favorite color."

Perhaps that which astonishes us most, when we fairly open our eyes upon
the world, is the diversity in everything. Out in the forest, under the
spreading tree, looking up at the luxuriant foliage, you may not think
of the difference between the leaves; but pull down a limb, and spend an
hour comparing them; you find, much as they resemble, that no two are
precisely alike. Examine the plumage of the owl that you cruelly brought
down with your rifle; every feather of his beautiful dress differs from
every other; and, what is more remarkable, every fibre of every feather
is another feather, still more delicate, differing from every other, all
of which together yield to the pressure of your hand like floss silk. No
wonder he fell upon the mischievous mole or mouse as noiselessly as the
shadow of a cloud. Go down to the sea-shore; the tide is out; there is
an apparent waste of white sand, a dull extent of uniformity; but
stretch yourself on the beach, which the innumerable differing waves
have beaten to incomparable smoothness, and examine leisurely, with a
good glass, a few hundred of the infinite grains which you thought to be
the same, and you discover that they differ, that each is differently
shaped, each holds the light differently, and, what is more wonderful
than all, each appears to be a shell, or part of a shell, which was once
the abode of a creature, and a different creature from every other
inhabiting or that ever inhabited any other shell of the ocean. Look
into the crowded street; the men are all men; they all walk upright;
they might wear each other's clothes without serious inconvenience; but
could they exchange souls? "Clothe me as you will," said Sancho, "I
shall still be Sancho Panza." "The soul is not twin-born, but the only
begotten." "And there never was in the world," said Montaigne, "two
opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. The most universal
quality is diversity."

"The nerve-tissue," said an acute physiologist, "is never precisely the
same in two men; the blood of no two men is precisely alike; the milk of
no two women is identical in composition--they all vary (within certain
limits), and sometimes the variation is considerable. It is in this that
depends what we call the difference of 'temperament,' which makes one
twin so unlike his brother, and makes the great variety of the human
race." "Give Professor Owen part of an old bone or a tooth, and he will
on the instant draw you the whole animal, and tell you its habits and
propensities. What professor has ever yet been able to classify the
wondrous variety of human character? How very limited as yet the
nomenclature! We know there are in our moral dictionary the religious,
the irreligious, the virtuous, the vicious, the prudent, the profligate,
the liberal, the avaricious, and so on to a few names, but the
comprehended varieties under these terms--their mixtures, which, like
colors, have no names--their strange complexities and intertwining of
virtues and vices, graces and deformities, diversified and mingled, and
making individualities--yet of all the myriads of mankind that ever
were, not one the same, and scarcely alike; how little way has science
gone to their discovery, and to mark their delineation! A few sounds,
designated by a few letters, speak all thought, all literature, that
ever was or will be. The variety is infinite, and ever creating a new
infinite; and there is some such mystery in the endless variety of human
character."

Cicero gives an account of a man who could distinguish marks of
difference amongst eggs so well, that he never mistook one for another;
and, having many hens, could tell which laid a particular egg.

Socrates asked Menon what virtue was? "There is," said Menon, "the
virtue of a man and of a woman, of a magistrate and of a private person,
of an old man and of a child." "Very well," said Socrates, "we were in
quest of virtue, and thou hast brought us a whole swarm."

"What," asks the great French essayist, "have our legislators got by
culling out a hundred thousand particular cases, and annexing to these a
hundred thousand laws? The number holds no manner of proportion with the
infinite diversity of human actions; the multiplication of our
inventions will never arrive at the variety of examples; add to them a
hundred times as many more; it will not, nevertheless, ever happen,
that, of events to come, there shall any one fall out that, in this
great number of thousands of events so chosen and recorded, shall find
any one to which it can be so exactly coupled and compared, that there
will not remain some circumstance and diversity which will require a
variety of judgment."

"Some ask," says La Bruyere, "why mankind in general don't compose but
one nation, and are not contented to speak one language, to live under
the same laws, to agree amongst themselves in the same customs and
worship: for my part, seeing the contrariety of their inclinations,
tastes, and sentiments, I wonder to see seven or eight persons live
under the same roof, within the same walls, and make a single family."

Molecular philosophy shows interspaces betwixt atom and atom, differing
atoms, which can hardly be said to touch; so bodies are formed, and so
society and public opinion are compounded. "The single individual is to
collective humanity," says Alger, "as the little column of mercury in
the barometer is to the whole atmosphere. They balance each other,
although infinitely incommensurate. A quicksilver sea, two and a half
feet deep, covering the globe, would weigh five thousand million tons.
That is the heft of the air,--that transparent robe of blue gauze which
outsags the Andes and the Alps. Its pressure is unfelt, yet if that
pressure were annulled all the water on the earth would immediately fly
into vapor. Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which
the forces of the individual would collapse and all the institutions of
society fly into atoms." Common sense has been defined to be the
"average intellect and conscience of the civilized world,--that portion
of intelligence, morality, and Christianity, which has been practically
embodied in life and active power. It destroys pretense and quackery,
and tests genius and heroism. It changes with the progress of society;
persecutes in one age what it adopts in the next; its martyrs of the
sixteenth century are its precedents and exponents of the nineteenth;
and a good part of the common sense of an elder day is the common
nonsense of our own."

"The history of human opinions," said Voltaire, "is scarcely anything
more than the history of human errors."

John Foster, in one of his thoughtful essays, has this suggestive
passage: "If a reflective, aged man were to find at the bottom of an old
chest--where it had lain forgotten fifty years--a record which he had
written of himself when he was young, simply and vividly describing his
whole heart and pursuits, and reciting verbatim many passages of the
language which he sincerely uttered, would he not read it with more
wonder than almost every other writing could at his age inspire? He
would half lose the assurance of his identity, under the impression of
this immense dissimilarity. It would seem as if it must be the tale of
the juvenile days of some ancestor, with whom he had no connection but
that of name." Said Swift, "If a man would register all his opinions
upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth,
and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and
contradictions would appear at last." Says Montaigne, "Never did two men
make the same judgment of the same thing; and 'tis impossible to find
two opinions exactly alike, not only in several men, but in the same
men, at different times." Says Pope, "What is every year of a wise man's
life but a censure or critique on the past? Those whose date is the
shortest live long enough to laugh at one half of it; the boy despises
the infant; the man, the boy; the philosopher, both; and the Christian,
all." Diet, health, the weather, affairs,--a thousand things,--determine
our views. "I knew a witty physician," says Emerson, "who found the
creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease
in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound,
he became a Unitarian." Voltaire declared that the fate of a nation had
often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime minister; and
Motley holds that the gout of Charles V. changed the destinies of the
world. Our views change so often that the writer who would be consistent
would never write at all. The sentence that would express his thought at
one time would fail at another. Alteration would only confuse. An
attempt to find words to express his thoughts upon any one thing at all
times would be given up in despair. Voltaire once praised another writer
very heartily to a third person. "It is very strange," was the reply,
"that you speak so well of him, for he says you are a charlatan." "Oh,"
replied Voltaire, "I think it very likely that both of us are mistaken."
A day or two after the production of one of Sheridan's comedies, a
friend met the author, and told him he had seen Cumberland at the
theatre on its representation. "Ah, well," replied Sheridan, "What did
he say to it?" "He wasn't seen to smile from the beginning to the end of
the comedy," said the friend. "Come, now, that's very ungrateful of
him," retorted Sheridan, "for I went to see his tragedy the other
evening, and laughed through the whole of it." Smith gives an account of
a lady in weeds for her husband who came drooping like a willow to
Nollekens, the sculptor, desiring a monument, and declaring that she did
not care what money was expended on the memory of one she loved so. "Do
what you please, but, oh, do it quickly!" were her parting orders.
Nollekens went to work, made the design, finished the model, and began
to look for a block of marble to carve it from, when in dropped the
lady; she had been absent some three months. "Poor soul," said the
sculptor, when she was announced, "I thought she would come soon, but I
am ready." The lady came light of foot, and lighter of look. "Ah, how do
you do, Mr. Nollekens? Well, you have not commenced the model?" "Ay, but
I have, though," returned the sculptor, "and there it stands, finished!"
"There it is, indeed," sighed the lady, throwing herself into a chair;
they looked at each other for a minute's space or so--she spoke first;
"These, my good friend, are, I know, early days for this little
change,"--she looked at her dress, from which the early profusion of
crape had disappeared,--"but since I saw you, I have met with an old
Roman acquaintance of yours who has made me an offer, and I don't know
how he would like to see in our church a monument of such expense to my
late husband. Indeed, on second thought, it would be considered quite
enough if I got our mason to put up a mural tablet, and that, you know,
he can cut very prettily." "My charge, madam, for the model," said the
sculptor, "is one hundred guineas." "Enormous! enormous!" said the
lady, but drew out her purse, and paid it. The mutability of human
nature! Change, change is the rule. Flaxman, when he was in Rome, lived
at a sort of chocolate house kept by three girls who were so elegant as
to be called "the Graces." They lived to be so old that they were called
"the Furies." A distinguished painter has said, that often while you are
looking at a face, and though you perceive no difference in the
features, yet you find they have undergone a total alteration of
expression. "I have seen several pictures of Garrick," said Macaulay,
"none resembling another, and I have heard Hannah More speak of the
extraordinary variety of countenance by which he was distinguished." "I
wish the world, James," said Christopher North to the Ettrick Shepherd,
"would stand still for some dozen years--till I am at rest. It seems as
if the very earth itself were undergoing a vital change. Nothing is
unalterable, except the heaven above my head, and even it, James, is
hardly, methinks, at times, the same as in former days or nights. There
is not much difference in the clouds, James, but the blue sky, I must
confess, is not quite so very blue as it was sixty years since; and the
sun, although still a glorious luminary, has lost a leetle--of his
lustre." Gilbert White, in his Natural History of Selborne, says he saw
a cock-bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught in the fields after it
was come to its full colors. In about a year it began to look dingy; and
blackening each succeeding year, it became coal-black at the end of
four. Its chief food was hemp seed. Such influence has food on the color
of animals! Darwin, in his Voyage, says that the wild cattle in East
Falkland Island, originally the same stock, differ much in color; and
that in different parts of that one small island, different colors
predominate. He remarked that the difference in the prevailing colors
was so obvious, that in looking at the herds from a point near Point
Pleasant, they appeared from a long distance like black spots, whilst
south of Choiseul Sound they appeared like white spots on the
hill-sides. Round Mount Usborne, at a height of one thousand to fifteen
hundred feet above the sea, about half of some of the herds are mouse or
lead colored. "From the westward till you get to the river Adur,"
observed White, "all the flocks have horns and smooth white faces, and
white legs, and a hornless sheep is rarely to be seen; but as soon as
you pass that river eastward, and mount Beeding Hill, all the flocks at
once become hornless, or, as they call them, poll-sheep; and have,
moreover, black faces, with a white tuft of wool on their foreheads, and
speckled and spotted legs, so that you would think that the flocks of
Laban were pasturing on one side of the stream, and the variegated breed
of his son-in-law, Jacob, were cantoned along on the other." Youatt
speaks of two flocks of Leicester sheep which have been purely bred from
the original stock of Mr. Bakewell for more than fifty years. There is
not a suspicion existing in the mind of any one at all acquainted with
the subject, that the owner of either of them has deviated in any one
instance from the pure blood of Mr. Bakewell's flock, and yet the
difference between the sheep possessed by these two gentlemen is so
great that they have the appearance of being quite different varieties.
"We may, in truth," said Voltaire, "be naturally and aptly resembled to
a river, all whose waters pass away in perpetual change and flow. It is
the same river as to its bed, its banks, its source, its mouth,
everything, in short, that is not itself; but changing every moment its
water, which constitutes its very being, it has no identity; there is no
sameness belonging to the river." Said Sir Kenelm Digby, long before
Voltaire, "There is not one drop of the same water in the Thames that
ran down by Whitehall yesternight; yet no man will deny but that it is
the same river that was in Queen Elizabeth's time, as long as it is
supplied from the same common stock, the sea."

Lowell, in one of his critical essays, says that "all men are interested
in Montaigne in proportion as all men find more of themselves in him;
and all men see but one image in the glass which the greatest of poets
holds up to nature,--an image which at once startles and charms with its
familiarity." Montaigne himself says, "Nature, that we may not be
dejected with the sight of our deformities, has wisely thrust the action
of seeing outward." "Know thyself," that Apollo caused to be written on
the front of his temple at Delphi, appeared to him contradictory. We are
vain of our knowledge, vain of our virtue, vain of everything that
pertains to us. Reading La Rochefoucauld's Maxims at twenty, one is a
little surprised that the first and longest should be upon self-love; at
forty, one is not astonished at the rank and importance it has in the
philosopher's system. "In vain," says Xavier de Maistre, "are
looking-glasses multiplied around us which reflect light and truth with
geometrical exactness. As soon as the rays reach our vision and paint us
as we are, self-love slips its deceitful prism between us and our image,
and presents a divinity to us. And of all the prisms that have existed
since the first that came from the hands of the immortal Newton, none
has possessed so powerful a refractive force, or produced such pleasing
and lively colors, as the prism of self-love. Now, seeing that ordinary
looking-glasses record the truth in vain, and that they cannot make men
see their own imperfections, every one being satisfied with his face,
what would a moral mirror avail? Few people would look at it, and no one
would recognize himself." "Oh, the incomparable contrivance of Nature,"
exclaims Erasmus, "who has ordered all things in so even a method that
wherever she has been less bountiful in her gifts, there she makes it up
with a larger dose of self-love, which supplies the former defects, and
makes all even." "Could all mankind," says John Norris, "lay claim to
that estimate which they pass upon themselves, there would be little or
no difference betwixt laps'd and perfect humanity, and God might again
review his image with paternal complacency, and still pronounce it
good." "Blinded as they are as to their true character by self-love,
every man," says Plutarch, "is his own first and chiefest flatterer,
prepared therefore to welcome the flatterer from the outside, who only
comes confirming the verdict of the flatterer within." It was the habit
of Sir Godfrey Kneller to say to his sitter, "Praise me, sir, praise me:
how can I throw any animation into your face if you don't choose to
animate me?" "I have heard," says Bulwer, in one of his essays, "that
when the late Mr. Kean was performing in some city of the United States,
he came to the manager at the end of the third act and said, 'I can't go
on the stage again, sir, if the pit keeps its hands in its pockets. Such
an audience would extinguish AEtna.' The audience being notified by the
manager of the determination of the actor, proved hearty enough in its
applause. As the favor of the audience rose, so rose the genius of the
actor, and the contagion of their own applause redoubled their enjoyment
of the excellence it contributed to create." "Vanity," says Pascal, "has
taken so firm a hold on the heart of man, that a porter, a hodman, a
turnspit, can talk greatly of himself, and is for having his admirers.
Philosophers who write of the contempt of glory do yet desire the glory
of writing well; and those who read their compositions would not lose
the glory of having read them. We are so presumptuous as that we desire
to be known to all the world; and even to those who are not to come into
the world till we have left it. And, at the same time, we are so little
and vain as that the esteem of five or six persons about us is enough to
content and amuse us." "We censure others," says Sir Thomas Browne,
"but as they disagree from that humor which we fancy laudable in
ourselves, and commend others but for that wherein they seem to quadrate
and consent with us. So that in conclusion, all is but that we all
condemn, self-love." We think ourselves of great importance in the eyes
of others, when we are only so in our own. Calmly considering it, what
can be more astonishing than vanity in a middle-aged person? Know as
much as it is possible for a human being to know in this world, he
cannot know enough to justify him in being vain of his knowledge. Good
as it is possible for a human being to be, he cannot be good enough to
excuse a conceit of his goodness. Yet how common it is for full-grown
ignorance to have conceit of wisdom, and for ordinary virtue to assume
the airs of saintship. How we shall one day wonder, looking back at the
world we have left, at the nearly invisible mites, like ourselves,
tossing their heads in pride, and gathering their skirts in
self-righteousness, that we were ever as vain and shameless as they, and
that the little things of life ever so engrossed us. Alas, to learn and
unlearn is our fate; to gather as we climb the hill of life, to scatter
as we descend it: empty-handed alike at the end and at the beginning.

      "Youth's heritage is hope, but man's
      Is retrospect of shattered plans,
      And doubtful glances cast before."

"All the world, all that we are, and all that we have, our bodies and
our souls, our actions and our sufferings, our conditions at home, our
accidents abroad, our many sins, and our seldom virtues," says Jeremy
Taylor, "are as so many arguments to make our souls dwell low in the
valleys of humility." We are not what we think ourselves, nor are other
people what we think them, else this were a different world. We know not
ourselves, nor others, nor anything, so well as to avoid
misapprehending everything. Our condition is ignorance and humility,
and better it were if we kept modestly in our paths. Whatever we do or
are, we are of chief importance to ourselves. Northcote said that he
often blamed himself for uttering what might be thought harsh things;
and that on mentioning this once to Kemble, and saying it sometimes kept
him from sleep, after he had been out in company, Kemble replied, "Oh,
you need not trouble yourself so much about them; others never think of
them afterward." "I see you will not believe it," said Sydney Smith,
"but I was once very shy." "Were you, indeed, Mr. Smith? how did you
cure yourself?" "Why, it was not very long before I made two very useful
discoveries: First, that all mankind were not solely employed in
observing me (a belief that all young people have); and next, that
shamming was of no use; that the world was very clear-sighted, and soon
estimated a man at his just value. This cured me, and I determined to be
natural, and let the world find me out." "The world," says Thackeray,
"can pry out everything about us which it has a mind to know. But there
is this consolation, which men will never accept in their own cases,
that the world doesn't care. Consider the amount of scandal it has been
forced to hear in its time, and how weary it must be of that kind of
intelligence. You are taken to prison and fancy yourself indelibly
disgraced? You are bankrupt under odd circumstances? You drive a queer
bargain with your friend and are found out, and imagine the world will
punish you? Pshaw! Your shame is only vanity. Go and talk to the world
as if nothing had happened, and nothing has happened. Tumble down; brush
the mud off your clothes; appear with a smiling countenance, and
nobody cares. Do you suppose society is going to take out its
pocket-handkerchief and be inconsolable when you die? Why should it
care, very much, then, whether your worship graces yourself or disgraces
yourself? Whatever happens, it talks, meets, jokes, yawns, has its
dinner, pretty much as before." Depend upon it, the world will not hunt
you, nor concern itself much about you. If you want its favors you must
keep yourself in its eye. Cicero left Sicily extremely pleased with the
success of his administration, and flattered himself that all Rome was
celebrating his praises, and that the people would readily grant him
everything that he desired; in which imagination he landed at Puteoli, a
considerable port adjoining to Baiae, the chief seat of pleasure in
Italy, where there was a perpetual resort of all the rich and the great,
as well for the delights of its situation as for the use of its baths
and hot waters. But here, as he himself pleasantly tells the story, he
was not a little mortified by the first friend whom he met, who asked
him how long he had left Rome, and what news there, when he answered
that he came from the provinces. "From Africk, I suppose," says another;
and upon his replying, with some indignation, "No; I come from Sicily,"
a third, who stood by, and had a mind to be thought wiser, said
presently, "How? did you not know that Cicero was quaestor of Syracuse?"
Upon which, perceiving it in vain to be angry, he fell into the humor of
the place, and made himself one of the company who came to the waters.
This mortification gave some little check to his ambition, or taught him
rather how to apply it more successfully; and did him more good, he
says, than if he had received all the compliments that he expected; for
it made him reflect that the people of Rome had dull ears, but quick
eyes; and that it was his business to keep himself always in their
sight; nor to be so solicitous how to make them hear of him, as to make
them see him: so that, from this moment, he resolved to stick close to
the forum, and to live perpetually in the view of the city; nor to
suffer either his porter or his sleep to hinder any man's access to
him.

As capital in trade must be constantly turning to accumulate, so
intelligence must be constantly in use to be useful. Its value and
utility and accuracy can only be known by constantly testing it. A false
light leads straight into the bog, and misinformation is worse than no
information at all. Curiosity has need to be on tip-toe,--but cautious,
nevertheless. Southey tells a story in his Doctor which the Jesuit
Manuel de Vergara used to tell of himself. When he was a little boy he
asked a Dominican friar what was the meaning of the seventh commandment,
for he said he could not tell what committing adultery was. The friar,
not knowing how to answer, cast a perplexed look around the room, and
thinking he had found a safe reply, pointed to a kettle on the fire, and
said the commandment meant that he must never put his hand in the pot
while it was boiling. The very next day, a loud scream alarmed the
family, and behold there was little Manuel running about the room,
holding up his scalded finger, and exclaiming, "Oh dear! oh dear! I've
committed adultery! I've committed adultery! I've committed adultery!"

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand. What they are
most ready to talk upon, if they knew just a little more about, they
would be dumb; or would at least betray in some degree what John Buncle
calls "the decencies of ignorance." We are told that shortly after the
shock of the famous earthquake at Talcahuano, a great wave was seen from
the distance of three or four miles, approaching in the middle of the
bay with a smooth outline; but along the shore it tore up cottages and
trees, as it swept onward with irresistible force. At the head of the
bay it broke in a fearful line of white breakers, which rushed up to a
height of twenty-three vertical feet above the highest spring-tides. The
lower orders in Talcahuano thought that the earthquake was caused by
some old Indian women, witches, who, two years before, being offended,
stopped the volcano of Antuco!

Bishop Latimer says that "Master More was once sent in commission into
Kent, to help to try out, if it might be, what was the cause of Goodwin
Sands, and the shelf that stopped up Sandwich Haven. Among others, came
in before him an old man with a white head, and one that was thought to
be little less than one hundred years old. Quoth Master More, How say
you in this matter? What think you to be the cause of these shelves and
flats that stop up Sandwich Haven? Forsooth, quoth he, I am an old man.
I think that Tenterden-steeple is the cause of Goodwin Sands; for I am
an old man, sir, quoth he, and I may remember the building of
Tenterden-steeple, and I may remember when there was no steeple at all
there. And before that Tenterden-steeple was in building, there was no
manner of speaking of any flats or sands that stopped the haven, and
therefore I think that Tenterden-steeple is the cause of the destroying
and decay of Sandwich Haven!" (The centenarian's reply crystallized at
once into a proverb and synonym for popular ignorance; but what if the
old man had in his mind the half of the story omitted by Latimer--that
the obnoxious steeple had been built by a bishop with fifty thousand
pounds appropriated to build a breakwater!)

The fox that Darwin tells us about in his Voyage was literally lost in
the presence of wonders. "In the evening," says the naturalist, "we
reached the island of San Pedro. In doubling the point, two of the
officers landed, to take a round of angles with the theodolite. A fox of
a kind said to be peculiar on the island, and very rare in it, was
sitting on the rocks. He was so intently absorbed in watching the work
of the officers, that I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock
him on the head with my geological hammer!"

"We on this globe," said Voltaire, speaking of the slender acquaintance
of Europe with the Chinese Empire, "we on this globe are like insects in
a garden--those who live on an oak seldom meet those who pass their
short lives on an ash." "We are poor, silly animals," says Horace
Walpole; "we live for an instant upon a particle of a boundless
universe, and are much like a butterfly that should argue about the
nature of the seasons, and what creates their vicissitudes, and does not
exist itself to see an annual revolution of them." When Dr. Livingstone
returned from Africa, after a stay of sixteen years as a missionary, he
was induced to bring with him an intelligent and affectionate native,
Sekwebu, who had been of great service to him. When they parted from
their friends at Kilemane, the sea on the bar was frightful, even to the
seamen. This was the first time Sekwebu had seen the sea. As the
terrible breakers broke over them, he asked, wonderingly, "Is this the
way you go? Is this the way you go?" exclaiming, "What a strange country
is this--all water together!"

At sea, a person's eye being six feet above the surface of the water,
his horizon is only two miles and four fifths distant; yet his tongue
will as freely wag of the world as if it were all spinning under his
eye. We freely discuss the ignorance of those we believe to be less
intelligent than ourselves, never thinking that we are the cause of like
amusement to those who are more intelligent than we are. Fewer laugh
with us than at us. The grades are so many that contrast is more natural
than comparison. Unfortunately, too, it is only in the descent that we
can see, and that but a little way. We know it is up, up, that we would
go, but the rounds of the ladder are but vaguely visible. But a small
part, indeed, we perceive of the prodigious sweep from the lowest
ignorance to possible intelligence. Happily, credulity fills the empty
spaces, and, setting itself up for original wisdom, satisfies us with
ourselves and ours. Thackeray, in one of his best novels, thus
satirically screams out one of its uses: "Oh, Mr. Pendennis! if Nature
had not made that provision for each sex in the credulity of the other,
which sees good qualities where none exist, good looks in donkeys' ears,
wit in their numskulls, and music in their bray, there would not have
been near so much marrying and giving in marriage as now obtains, and as
is necessary for the due propagation and continuance of the noble race
to which we belong!" "I desire to die," said Horace Walpole, "when I
have nobody left to laugh with me. I have never yet seen, or heard,
anything serious that was not ridiculous.... Oh! we are ridiculous
animals; and if angels have any fun in them, how we must divert them."

"I had taken, when a child," says Crabb Robinson, "a great fancy to the
Book of Revelation; and I have heard that I asked our minister to preach
from that book, because it was my favorite. 'And why is it your
favorite, Henry?' 'Because it is so pretty and easy to understand!'"

Robert Robinson, a witty and distinguished clergyman in the last
century, was addressed by a grave brother, "Friend, I never heard you
preach on the Trinity." "Oh, I intend to do so," was the reply, "as soon
as ever I understand it!"

This recalls the rebuke of a clergyman to a young man, who said he would
believe nothing which he could not understand. "Then, young man, your
creed will be the shortest of any man's I know."

John Foster's observations upon an atheist you remember,--"one of the
most daring beings in the creation, a contemner of God, who explodes his
laws by denying his existence. If you were so unacquainted with mankind
that this character might be announced to you as a rare or singular
phenomenon, your conjectures, till you saw and heard the man, at the
nature and the extent of the discipline through which he must have
advanced, would be led toward something extraordinary. And you might
think that the term of that discipline must have been very long; since a
quick train of impressions, a short series of mental gradations, within
the little space of a few months and years, would not seem enough to
have matured such an awful heroism. Surely the creature that thus lifts
his voice, and defies all invisible power within the possibilities of
infinity, challenging whatever unknown being may hear him, was not as
yesterday a little child, that would tremble and cry at the approach of
a diminutive reptile. But indeed it is heroism no longer, if he knows
there is no God. The wonder then turns on the great process by which a
man could grow to the immense intelligence that can know that there is
no God. What ages and what lights are requisite for this attainment!
This intelligence involves the very attributes of the Divinity, while a
God is denied. For unless this man is omnipresent, unless he is at this
moment in every place in the universe, he cannot know but there may be
in some place manifestations of a Deity by which even he would be
overpowered. If he does not know absolutely every agent in the universe,
the one that he does not know may be God. If he is not in absolute
possession of all the propositions that constitute universal truth, the
one which he wants may be, that there is a God. If he does not know
everything that has been done in the immeasurable ages that are past,
some things may have been done by a God. Thus, unless he knows all
things, that is, precludes another Deity by being one himself, he cannot
know that the Being whose existence he rejects does not exist. And yet a
man of ordinary age and intelligence may present himself to you with the
avowal of being thus distinguished from the crowd!"

"I had one just flogging," says Coleridge. "When I was about thirteen I
went to a shoemaker and begged him to take me as his apprentice. He,
being an honest man, immediately brought me to Bowyer, [the head-master
at the charity-school] who got into a great rage, knocked me down, and
even pushed Crispin rudely out of the room. Bowyer asked me why I had
made myself such a fool? to which I answered that I had a great desire
to be a shoemaker, and that I hated the thought of being a clergyman.
'Why so?' said he. 'Because, to tell you the truth, sir,' said I, 'I am
an infidel!' For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me,--wisely, as
I think,--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have
gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I was
laughed at and got heartily ashamed of my folly." At a supper-table,
when Cottle was present, Coleridge spoke of the unutterable horror he
felt, when a son of Holcroft, (the atheist,) a boy eight years of age,
came up to him and said, "There is no God."

"It is one thing to see that a line is crooked, and another thing to be
able to draw a straight one," said Conversation Sharp. "It is not quite
so easy to do good as those may imagine who never try." Says Montaigne,
"Could my soul once take footing, I would not essay, but resolve; but it
is always leaving and making trial." "'Tis an exact and exquisite life
that contains itself in due order in private. Every one may take a part
in the farce, and assume the part of an honest man upon the stage; but
within, and in his own bosom, where all things are lawful to us, all
things concealed,--to be regular, that is the point. The next degree is
to be so in one's house, in one's ordinary actions, for which one is
accountable to none, and where there is no study or artifice." "We
chiefly, who live private lives, not exposed to any other view than our
own, ought to have settled a pattern within ourselves, by which to try
our actions." "Conscience," cries Sterne, "is not a law; no, God and
reason made the law, and have placed conscience within you to
determine."

How often our virtues and benefactions are but the effects of our vices
and our crimes; and as often do our vices disguise themselves under the
name of virtues. "We ought not," says Montaigne, "to honor with the name
of duty that peevishness and inward discontent which spring from private
interest and passion; nor call treacherous and malicious conduct
courage. People give the name of zeal to their propensity to mischief
and violence, though it is not the cause, but their interest, that
inflames them. Miserable kind of remedy, to owe a man's health to his
disease. The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but
walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but
in mediocrity." The greatest man is great in matters of self-conduct;
the wisest is wise in little matters of life; the one is never little,
the other never foolish.

"The superior man," says Confucius, "does not wait till he sees things,
to be cautious, nor till he hears things, to be apprehensive. There is
nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than
what is minute. Therefore, the superior man will watch over himself when
he is alone. He examines his heart that there may be nothing wrong
there, and that he may have no cause for dissatisfaction with himself.
That wherein he excels is simply his work which other men cannot see.
Are you free from shame in your apartment, when you are exposed only to
the light of heaven?"

"Most men," says Alger, "live blindly to repeat a routine of drudgery
and indulgence, without any deliberately chosen and maintained aims.
Many live to outstrip their rivals, pursue their enemies, gratify their
lusts, and make a display. Few live distinctly to develop the value of
their being, know the truth, love their fellows, enjoy the beauty of the
world, and aspire to God."

"Life is a series of surprises," says Emerson, "and would not be worth
taking or keeping if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day,
and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but
with grand politeness He draws down before us an impenetrable screen of
purest sky. 'You will not remember,' He seems to say, 'and you will not
expect.'"

Goldsmith, in one of his delightful Chinese Letters, gives this
illustration of the vanity and uncertainty of human judgment: "A painter
of eminence was once resolved to finish a piece which should please the
whole world. When, therefore, he had drawn a picture, in which his
utmost skill was exhausted, it was exposed in the public market-place,
with directions at the bottom for every spectator to mark with a brush,
which lay by, every limb and feature which seemed erroneous. The
spectators came, and in general applauded; but each, willing to show his
talent at criticism, marked whatever he thought proper. At evening, when
the painter came, he was mortified to find the whole picture one
universal blot; not a single stroke that was not stigmatized with marks
of disapprobation. Not satisfied with this trial, the next day he was
resolved to try them in a different manner, and, exposing his picture as
before, desired that every spectator would mark those beauties he
approved or admired. The people complied; and the artist, returning,
found his picture replete with the marks of beauty; every stroke that
had been yesterday condemned now received the character of approbation."

"Experience tells us," says La Bruyere, "if there are ten persons who
would blot a thought or an expression out of a book, there are a like
number who would oppose it." "The most accomplished piece," he thought,
"which the age has produced would fail under the hands of the critics
and censurers, if the author would hearken to all their objections, and
allow every one to throw out the passage that pleased him the least."
"To hear praise and dispraise on a sermon, a piece of music, or a
picture, and upon the very same subject to be entertained with quite
opposite sentiments, is what makes one freely conclude we may safely
publish anything, good or bad; for the good pleases some, the bad
others, and the worst has its admirers."

At a club meeting in London, a nephew of Macaulay refused to rise when
the national anthem was sung; but when he said that he did so from
principle, he was respected in it. Others when questioned as to why they
rose said, one because it was a hymn; another because of loyalty to
England; another because he loved the queen; another because it was the
custom; and they finally justified the refusal to rise because no two of
them could agree as to why they rose.

Irving, in his Knickerbocker's New York, thus refers to the habit of
criticising and complaining in the time of William the Testy: "Cobblers
abandoned their stalls to give lessons on political economy; blacksmiths
suffered their fires to go out while they stirred up the fires of
faction; and even tailors, though said to be the ninth parts of
humanity, neglected their own measures to criticise the measures of
government. Strange! that the science of government, which seems to be
so generally understood, should invariably be denied to the only ones
called upon to exercise it. Not one of the politicians in question but,
take his word for it, could have administered affairs ten times better
than William the Testy."

Socrates used to say that although no man undertakes a trade he has not
learned, even the meanest, yet every one thinks himself sufficiently
qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

"Whoever would aim directly at a cure of a public evil," says Montaigne,
"and would consider of it before he began, would be very willing to
withdraw his hands from meddling in it. Pacuvius Calavius, according to
Livy, corrected the vice of this proceeding by a notable example. His
fellow-citizens were in mutiny against their magistrates; he, being a
man of great authority in the city of Capua, found means one day to shut
up the senators in the palace, and calling the people together in the
market-place, he told them that the day was now come wherein, at full
liberty, they might revenge themselves on the tyrants by whom they had
been so long oppressed, and whom he had now, all alone and unarmed, at
his mercy; and advised that they should call them out one by one by lot,
and should particularly determine of every one, causing whatever should
be decreed to be immediately executed; with this caution, that they
should at the same time depute some honest man in the place of him that
was condemned, to the end that there might be no vacancy in the senate.
They had no sooner heard the name of one senator, but a great cry of
universal dislike was raised up against him. 'I see,' said Pacuvius, 'we
must get rid of him; he is a wicked fellow; let us look out a good one
in his room.' Immediately there was a profound silence, every one being
at a stand who to choose. But one, more impudent than the rest, having
named his man, there arose yet a greater consent of voices against him,
a hundred imperfections being laid to his charge, and as many just
reasons being presently given why he should not stand. These
contradictory humors growing hot, it fared worse with the second senator
and the third, there being as much disagreement in the election of the
new, as consent in the putting out of the old. In the end, growing weary
of this bustle to no purpose, they began, some one way and some another,
to steal out of the assembly; every one carrying back this resolution in
his mind, that the oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable
than one that was new and untried."

"Among all animals man is the only one who tries to pass for more than
he is, and so involves himself in the condemnation of seeming less."
"The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. But do not laugh at
the poor African," pleads Heine, "for every man is but another negro
king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which
Fate has bedaubed him."

It is even harder, when he is most barbarous and besotted in his
ignorance, to disturb his complacency and self-conceit. "It was most
ludicrous," says Darwin, "to watch through a glass the Indians, as often
as the shot struck the water, take up stones, and, as a bold defiance,
throw them toward the ship, though about a mile and a half distant! A
boat was then sent with orders to fire a few musket-shots wide of them.
The Fuegians hid themselves behind the trees, and for every discharge of
the muskets they fired their arrows; all, however, fell short of the
boat, and the officer as he pointed at them laughed. This made the
Fuegians frantic with passion, and they shook their mantles in vain
rage. At last, seeing the balls cut and strike the trees, they ran away,
and we were left in peace and quietness."

Mungo Park, while traveling in Africa, once entered a region until that
time unexplored by civilized man. His escort of Guinea negroes carried
him to witness a gala-day jollification. The sable chief was sitting on
a stump in the centre of a cleared half-acre, his face tattooed,
trinkets dangling from his nose, ears, chin, etc., and his subjects were
dancing around him. Having sold negroes, captured in war, to the
slave-traders on the coast, the chief had learned to speak a little
outlandish English. When the visitor approached His Majesty,--the dance
suspended,--he exclaimed: "English?" "Yes," said Park, "I am an
Englishman." "Way over yonder?" said the chief, pointing westward.
"Yes," answered Park; "three thousand miles off." "What folks say 'bout
me dar?" was the eager inquiry of his African Majesty.

The half-naked barbarians of Abyssinia claim descent from King Solomon
and the Queen of Sheba, and boast that all other kings are but upstarts
and pretenders compared to theirs. Reminding the reader of the "most
mighty emperor of Lilliput" (six inches in height), described in the
famous state paper as the "delight and terror of the universe, whose
dominions extend (about twelve miles in circumference) to the
extremities of the globe; monarch of all monarchs, taller than the sons
of men; whose feet press down to the centre, and whose head strikes
against the sun; at whose nod the princes of the earth shake their
knees; pleasant as the spring, comfortable as the summer, fruitful as
autumn, dreadful as winter."

You remember the famous contest of an eminent wit, in Billingsgate. He
was passing through the market, as the story goes, when he was rudely
jostled and profanely addressed by a monstrous fish-woman. "See how I
will bring her down without degrading myself," whispered he to his
companion. Looking straight at the creature, he said to her,
deliberately and emphatically, "You are a triangle!" which made her
swear louder than ever. He then called her "a rectangle! a
parallelogram!" That made her eloquent; but the great man with a big
voice again broke through her volubility, screaming fiercely, "You are a
miserable, wicked hypothenuse!" That dumfounded the brute. She had never
heard swearing like that.

Curran used to tell of a like ludicrous encounter between himself and a
fish-woman on the quay at Cork. This lady, whose tongue would have put
Billingsgate to the blush, was urged one day to assail him, which she
did with very little reluctance. "I thought myself a match for her,"
said he, "and valorously took up the gauntlet. But such a virago never
skinned an eel. My whole vocabulary made not the least impression. On
the contrary, she was manifestly becoming more vigorous every moment,
and I had nothing for it but to beat a retreat. This, however, was to be
done with dignity; so, drawing myself up disdainfully, I said, 'Madam, I
scorn all further discourse with such an individual!' She did not
understand the word, and thought it, no doubt, the very hyperbole of
opprobrium. 'Individual, you wagabone!' she screamed, 'what do you mean
by that? I'm no more an individual than your mother was?' Never was
victory more complete. The whole sisterhood did homage to me, and I left
the quay of Cork covered with glory."

The discomfiture of Miss Pinkerton, who attempted once to scold Becky
Sharp in public, is familiar to every reader of Thackeray. Rebecca hit
upon the plan of answering her in French, which quite routed the old
woman.

A wise man, who lived a long life of virtue, study, travel, society, and
reflection; who read the best books and conversed with the greatest and
best men; the companion of philosophers and scientists; familiar with
all important discoveries and experiments; after he was three-score and
ten, wrote, "It is remarkable that the more there is known, the more it
is perceived there is to be known. And the infinity of knowledge to be
acquired runs parallel with the infinite faculty of knowing, and its
development. Sometimes I feel reconciled to my extreme ignorance, by
thinking, If I know nothing, the most learned know next to nothing."
"Had I earlier known," said Goethe, "how many excellent things have been
in existence, for hundreds and thousands of years, I should have written
no line; I should have had enough else to do." Cardinal Farnese one day
found Michel Angelo, when an old man, walking alone in the Coliseum, and
expressed his surprise at finding him solitary amidst the ruins; to
which he replied, "I go yet to school, that I may continue to learn." In
his last days, he made a design of himself as a child in a go-cart, with
this motto under it, "I am yet learning." Rubens complained, that just
as he was beginning to understand his profession he was forced to quit
it. Mozart declared on his death-bed, that he began to see what may be
done in music. Buffon told a friend that, after passing fifty years at
his desk, he was every day learning to write. Macaulay, the year before
his death, after spending some hours over his own writings, wrote in his
diary: "Alas! how short life and how long art! I feel as if I had just
begun to understand how to write; and the probability is that I have
very nearly done writing." Theophrastus, one hundred and seven years
old, St. Jerome assures us, lamented that he was obliged to quit life at
a time when he just began to be wise. Mrs. Jameson once asked Mrs.
Siddons which of her great characters she preferred to play? She
replied, after a moment's consideration, "Lady Macbeth is the character
I have most studied." She afterward said that she had played the
character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once without
carefully reading over the part, and generally the whole play, in the
morning; and that she never read over the play without finding something
new in it; "something," she said, "which had not struck me so much as it
ought to have struck me." Dugald Stewart said of Bacon's Essays that in
reading them for the twentieth time he observed something which had
escaped his attention in the nineteenth. "I do not know," said Newton,
"what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only
like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and
then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while
the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Said Bossuet,
"The term of my existence will be eighty years at most, but let us allow
it an hundred. What ages have rolled before I had my being! How many
will flow after I am gone! And what a small space do I occupy in this
grand succession of years! I am as a blank; this diminutive interval is
not sufficient to distinguish me from that nothing to which I must
inevitably return. I seem only to have made my appearance for the
purpose of increasing the number; and I am even useless--for the play
would have been just as well performed, had I remained behind the
scenes." Wrote Voltaire, "I am ignorant how I was formed, and how I was
born. I was perfectly ignorant, for a quarter of my life, of the reasons
of all that I saw, heard, and felt, and was a mere parrot, talking by
rote in imitation of other parrots. When I looked about me and within
me, I conceived that something existed from all eternity. Since there
are beings actually existing, I concluded that there is some being
necessary and necessarily eternal. Thus the first step which I took to
extricate myself from my ignorance overpassed the limits of all
ages--the boundaries of time. But when I was desirous of proceeding in
this infinite career, I could neither perceive a single path, nor
clearly distinguish a single object; and from the flight which I took to
contemplate eternity, I have fallen back into the abyss of my original
ignorance." "Heads of capacity, and such as are not full with a handful,
or easy measure of knowledge, think they know nothing till they know
all; which being impossible, they fall," said Sir Thomas Browne, "upon
the opinion of Socrates, and only know they know not anything." Hiero,
tyrant of Sicily, asked old Simonides to tell him what God is. The poet
answered him that it was not a question that could be immediately
answered, and that he wanted a whole day to think upon it. When that
term was over, Hiero asked the answer; but Simonides desired two days
more to consider of it. This was not the last delay he asked; he was
often called on to give an answer, and every time he desired double the
time he had last demanded. The tyrant, wondering at it, desired to know
the reason of it. I do so, answered Simonides, because the more I
examine the matter, the more obscure it appears to me. "After reading
all that has been written," says the poet Poe, "and all that can be
thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to
say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the
conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that
which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial
sentiment." "I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me," says
Emerson.... "I am very content with knowing, if only I could know.... To
know a little, would be worth the expense of this world." "You read of
but one wise man," says Congreve, "and all that he knew was--that he
knew nothing." "The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man
for a scourge." "If God," said Lessing, "held all truth shut in his
right hand, and in his left nothing but the restless instinct for truth,
though with the condition of forever and ever erring, and should say to
me, Choose! I would bow reverently to his left hand, and say, Father,
give! Pure truth is for Thee alone!"




II.

EXTREMES.


In man, it has been said, there will be a layer of fierce hyena, or of
timid deer, running through the nature in the most uncertain and
tortuous manner. Nero is sensitive to poetry and music, but not to human
suffering: Marcus Aurelius is tolerant and good to all men but
Christians. The Tlascalans of Mexico loved, and even worshiped, flowers;
but they were cruel to excess, and sacrificed human victims with savage
delight. The body of the sacrificed captive, we are told by Prescott,
was delivered to the warrior who had taken him in battle, and by him,
after being dressed, was served up in an entertainment to his friends.
This was not the coarse repast of famished cannibals, but a banquet
teeming with delicious beverages and delicate viands, prepared with art,
and attended by both sexes, who conducted themselves with all the
decorum of civilized life. The Aztec priests were more wild and
ferocious than the soldiery, their hair was long and matted, and their
garments were stained with human blood. The good and the evil lie close
together; the virtues and the vices alternate; so is human power
accumulated; alternately the metals and the rags; a terrible Voltaic
pile. In the well-bred animal the claw is nicely cushioned; the old Adam
is presentable. Overhear a beautiful young woman swear, and meet her an
hour afterward, all smiles and loveliness, in the drawing-room. Speak
with unreserved kindness of one lady to another,--both of them very
lovely creatures, so far as you know,--and receive in reply, "Don't!
She, of all persons I know, is the only one I hate to hear praised."
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said of the Duchess of Marlborough, "We
continue to see one another like two persons who are resolved to hate
with civility." "It goes far to reconcile me to being a woman," she said
on another occasion, "when I reflect that I am thus in no danger of ever
marrying one." Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan met in
public, talked with vivacity, and, to those who judged only by
appearances, seemed excellent friends. Once when they had to make a
journey in the same carriage, Madame de Montespan said, "Let us talk as
if there were no difference between us, but on condition that we resume
our disputes when we return." Pietro Della Valle says that when the Ecce
Homo was exposed during the sermon in the Jesuit church at Goa, the
women used to beat their servants, if they did not cry enough to please
them. Saint-Simon relates of the Marechale de la Ferte and her sister,
both beautiful women, but very dissolute, that upon one occasion they
heard a sermon on penitence which terrified them. "My sister," one said
on their return, "it was all true; we must do penance or we are lost.
But, my sister, what shall we do?" After having well turned it over, "My
sister," replied the other, "This is what we must do--we must make our
servants fast." When Moore's Life of Byron first appeared, it was in two
large, quarto volumes, and the first came out alone. Murray told Leslie
that a lady said to him, "I hear it is dull;" and he told her the
scandal was all to be in the second volume. "And is the second volume to
be had separately?" asked the lady. I was once, says a writer, passing
through Moorfields, with a young girl, aged about nine or ten years,
born and educated in Portugal, but in the Protestant faith; and,
observing a large concourse of people assembled around a pile of fagots
on fire, I expressed a curiosity to know the cause. She very composedly
answered, "I suppose that it is nothing more than that they are going
to burn a Jew." Isabella the Catholic was wont to rejoice and give
thanks at the sight of a gallows with a man hanging therefrom. Charlotte
Cushman related an incident that occurred at a theatre. A man in the
gallery made such a disturbance that the play could not proceed. Cries
of "Throw him over," arose from all parts of the house, and the noise
became furious. All was tumultuous chaos until a sweet and gentle female
voice was heard in the pit, exclaiming, "No! I pray you don't throw him
over! I beg of you, dear friends, don't throw him over, but--kill him
where he is." It is recorded that after the massacre of St. Bartholomew
the ladies of the court of Paris went out to examine the long row of the
bodies of the Huguenot cavaliers who had been slain during the tumult,
and curiously turning them over, when half-stripped of their garments,
said to each other, "This must have been a charming lover; that was not
worth looking at;" and when a fanatic assassin was brought out in the
square of the Louvre to undergo during four hours the most frightful
tortures which human ingenuity or malignity could devise, or the human
frame endure, all the ladies of the court assembled to witness the
spectacle, and paid high prices for seats nearest the scene of agony. In
the Conciergerie, during the Reign of Terror, a corridor was common in
the day-time to both sexes, and here, it is stated, there was as much
dressing, talking, flirting, and love-making as in the salons of Paris.
Most of the women contrived to change their dress three times a day,
though in the interval they had often to wash or mend the garment they
were about to put on. The tone of conversation was gay and animated, and
the people seemed bent on proving that though the Reign of Terror might
imprison and kill them, it could not make them dull or disagreeable.

It is related that Della Valle, the distinguished Italian traveler, had
such an absorbing fondness for his wife that, when she died, on the
shore of the Persian Gulf, he embalmed her body, and spent one whole
year conveying it back through India to Rome, where he celebrated her
obsequies by pronouncing a funeral oration, during the delivery of which
his emotions became so violent as to choke his utterance. Not long
after, in a fit of anger, he killed his coachman, in the area before St.
Peter's, while the pope was pronouncing a benediction. "I remember,"
says Patmore, in his personal recollections of Hazlitt, "having
occasionally played at whist with a person who, on any occurrence of
extraordinary ill-luck, used to lay his cards down deliberately, and
bite a piece out of the back of his hand! This person was, under
ordinary circumstances, the very ideal of a 'gentleman'--bland,
polished, courteous, forbearing, kind, and self-possessed to an
extraordinary degree; and his personal appearance in every respect
corresponded with his manners and bearing. Hazlitt's passions sometimes
produced similar results. I have seen him more than once, at the Fives
Court in St. Martin Street, on making a bad stroke or missing his ball
at some critical point of the game, fling his racket to the other end of
the court, walk deliberately to the centre, with uplifted hands
imprecate the most fearful curses on his head, for his stupidity, and
then rush to the side wall and literally dash his head against it!"
Shortly before the Chinese Emperor's death, a gigantic image, the
goddess of small-pox, was paraded round the city of Pekin in solemn
procession, and then taken into the bedroom of the dying youth, where it
was worshiped and honored with many propitiatory offerings. As, however,
the goddess continued obdurate, she was subjected to a severe flogging,
and finally burned.

In the early history of New England the law compelled the people to
attend church, the services commencing at nine o'clock and continuing
six to eight hours. Near the church edifice stood the stocks and the
whipping-post, and a large wooden cage, in which to confine offenders
against the laws. The congregation had places assigned them upon the
rude benches, at the annual town-meeting, according to their age and
social position. A person was fined who occupied a seat assigned to
another. The boys were ordered to sit upon the gallery-stairs, and three
constables were employed to keep them in order. Prominent before the
assembly, some wretched male or female offender sat with a scarlet
letter on the breast, to denote some crime against the stern code.
Fleeing the mother-country for peace and freedom, the descendants of the
Puritans persecuted the Quakers, and burnt the incorrigible eccentrics
of society for witches.

John Howe's method of conducting public fasts was as follows: "He began
at nine o'clock with a prayer of a quarter of an hour, read and
expounded Scripture for about three quarters of an hour, prayed an hour,
preached another hour, then prayed half an hour; the people then sang
for about a quarter of an hour, during which he retired and took a
little refreshment; he then went into the pulpit again, prayed an hour
more, preached another hour, and then, with a prayer of half an hour,
concluded the services."

The clergy, too, were sometimes victims. An instance: "The rector of
Fittleworth, in Sussex, was dispossessed of his living for
Sabbath-breaking; the fact proved against him being, that as he was
stepping over a stile one Sunday, the button of his breeches came off,
and he got a tailor in the neighborhood presently to sew it on again."

We are told that at the time Ireland was called the Isle of Saints,
"when a child was immersed at baptism, it was customary not to dip the
right arm, to the intent that he might strike a more deadly and
ungracious blow therewith; and under an opinion, no doubt, that the rest
of the body would not be responsible at the resurrection for anything
which had been committed by the unbaptized hand. Thus, too, at the
baptism, the father took the wolves for his gossips, and thought by this
profanation he was forming an alliance, both for himself and the boy,
with the fiercest beasts of the woods. The son of a chief was baptized
in milk; water was not thought good enough, and whisky had not then been
invented. They used to rob in the beginning of the year as a point of
devotion, for the purpose of laying up a good stock of plunder against
Easter; and he whose spoils enabled him to furnish the best
entertainment at that time was looked upon as the best Christian; so
they robbed in emulation of each other; and reconciling their habits to
their conscience, they persuaded themselves that if robbery, murder, and
rape had been sins, Providence would never put such temptations in their
way: nay, that the sin would be, if they were so ungrateful as not to
take advantage of a good opportunity when it was offered them."

In North Wales, it is stated, when a person supposes himself highly
injured, it is not uncommon for him to go to some church dedicated to a
celebrated saint, as Llan Elian in Anglesea, and Clynog in
Carnarvonshire, and there to offer his enemy. He kneels down on his bare
knees in the church, and offering a piece of money to the saint, calls
down curses and misfortunes upon the offender and his family for
generations to come, in the most firm belief that the imprecations will
be fulfilled. Sometimes they repair to a sacred well instead of a
church.

Mrs. Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte Bronte, tells of a squire of
distinguished family and large property, who died at his house, not far
from Haworth, not many years ago. His great amusement and occupation had
been cock-fighting. When he was confined to his chamber with what he
knew would be his last illness, he had his cocks brought up there, and
watched the bloody battle from his bed. As his mortal disease increased
and it became impossible for him to turn so as to follow the combat, he
had looking-glasses arranged in such a manner around and above him, as
he lay, that he could still see the cocks fighting. And in this manner
he died.

"Qualities," says Helps, "are often inserted in a character in the most
curious and inharmonious way; and the end is that you have a man who is
the strangest mixture of generosity and meanness, of kindness and
severity, even of dishonesty and nobleness. Then the passions enter.
Sometimes these just fit in, unfortunately, with good points of
character,--so that one man may be ruined by a passion which another and
a worse man would have escaped unhurt from. Then there are the
circumstances to which a character is exposed, and which vary so much
that it hardly seems that people are living in the same world, so
different are to them the outward things they have to contend with.
Altogether, the human being becomes such a complicated creature, that
though at last you may know something about some one specimen,--what it
will say and what it will do on a given occasion,--you never know enough
about the creature to condemn it." "Neither the vices nor the virtues of
man," says Taine, "are his nature; to praise or to blame him is not to
know him; approbation or disapprobation does not define him; the names
of good or bad tell us nothing of what he is. Put the robber Cartouche
in an Italian court of the fifteenth century; he would be a great
statesman. Transport this nobleman, stingy and narrow-minded, into a
shop; he will be an exemplary tradesman. This public man, of inflexible
probity, is in his drawing-room an intolerable coxcomb. This father of a
family, so humane, is an idiotic politician. Change a virtue in its
circumstances, and it becomes a vice; change a vice in its
circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from
two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of
a man is found concealed far below these moral badges. A character is a
force, like gravity, weight, or steam, capable, as it may happen, of
pernicious or profitable effects, and which must be defined otherwise
than by the amount of weight it can lift or the havoc it can cause. It
is therefore to ignore man, to reduce him to an aggregate of virtues and
vices; it is to lose sight in him of all but the exterior and social
side; it is to neglect the inner and natural element."

"The character of the French nation," says De Tocqueville, "is so
peculiar that the study of human nature in general does not embrace it;
those even who have most studied it are continually taken by surprise;
for our nation is gifted beyond any other with capacity to appreciate
great things, and even to do them; it is equal to any single effort,
however extraordinary, but unable to remain strung up to a high pitch
for any length of time; because we act upon impulse, not on principle,
and our instincts are better than our moral qualities; we are the most
civilized people in the world, and yet, in certain respects, we have
retained more of the savage than any other nation; for the great
characteristic of the savage is, to be influenced by the sudden
impressions of the present, without recollection of the past or thought
of the future."

"Recollect that village of the Limousin," said a member of the National
Convention during the Reign of Terror, "from the top of whose steeple
the tri-color flag suddenly disappeared. A violent disturbance was
instantly raised; search was made for the daring offender, who could not
be found, and in consequence a dozen persons were instantly arrested on
suspicion. At length the fragments of the flag were discovered suspended
from the branches of a tree, and it was found that a magpie had made its
nest with the remains of the national color. Oh! the tyrannical bird!
they seized it, cut off its head, and transmitted the evidence of the
act to the Convention. We received it without bursting into laughter;
had any one ventured to indulge himself in that way, he would have run
the risk of perishing on the public scaffold."

"In all the courts of ancient philosophy this is to be found," says
Montaigne, "that the same lecturer there publishes the rules of
temperance, and at the same time discourses of love and wantonness." "I
know not," said the courtesan Lais, "what they talk of books, wisdom,
and philosophy; but these men knock as often at my door as any others."
Says Bayle, in his Critical Dictionary, "It was reported that Pericles
turned out his wife, and lodged with the famous Aspasia, and plunged
himself into lewdness, and spent a great part of his estate upon her.
She was a woman of so great parts that Socrates went to see her, and
carried his friends with him; and, to speak more clearly, she taught him
rhetoric and politics. That which is most strange is, that those who
frequented her carried their wives to her house, that they might hear
her discourses and lectures, though she kept several courtesans at home.
Pericles went to see Aspasia twice a day, and kissed her when he went in
and when he came out; which was before he married her. She was accused
of two crimes by the comedian Hermippus. He made himself a party against
her in due form, and accused her before the judges of impiety, and of
drawing women into her house to satisfy the lust of Pericles. During the
trial of Aspasia, Pericles used so many entreaties with the judges, and
shed so many tears, according to AEschines, that he obtained her
absolution. The Athenians said that Phidias, the most excellent sculptor
in the world, and surveyor-general of all the works which Pericles
ordered to be made for the ornament of the city, drew in the ladies
under pretense of showing them the works of the greatest masters; but in
truth to debauch and deliver them to Pericles." The golden statue of
Minerva, it should be remembered, was the workmanship of Phidias, and
his name was inscribed upon the pedestal. Through the friendship of
Pericles he had the direction of everything, and all the artists
received his orders. For this, said Plutarch, the one was envied, and
the other slandered.

"Good and bad men are each less so than they seem."

      "When man's first incense rose above the plain,
      Of earth's two altars, one was built by Cain."

"As there is," said Coleridge, "much beast and some devil in man, so is
there some angel and some God in man. The beast and the devil may be
conquered, but in this life never destroyed." "I have ever delighted,"
said Boswell, "in that intellectual chemistry which can separate good
qualities from evil in the same person."

"The first lesson of history," says Emerson, "is the good of evil. Good
is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better. 'Tis the oppressions of
William the Norman, savage forest-laws, and crushing despotism, that
made possible the inspirations of Magna Charta under John. Edward I.
wanted money, armies, castles, and as much as he could get. It was
necessary to call the people together by shorter, swifter ways,--and the
House of Commons arose. To obtain subsidies, he paid in privileges. In
the twenty-fourth year of his reign he decreed, 'that no tax should be
levied without consent of Lords and Commons;' which is the basis of the
English Constitution. Plutarch affirms that the cruel wars which
followed the march of Alexander, introduced the civility, language, and
arts of Greece into the savage East; introduced marriage; built seventy
cities; and united hostile nations under one government. The barbarians
who broke up the Roman empire did not arrive a day too soon. Schiller
says, the Thirty Years' War made Germany a nation. Rough, selfish
despots serve man immensely, as Henry VIII. in the contest with the
pope; as the infatuations no less than the wisdom of Cromwell; as the
ferocity of the Russian czars; as the fanaticism of the French regicides
of 1789. The frost which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests
of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires,
plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races,
and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men. There is a
tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or
bankruptcy that shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new
and natural order." "Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we
dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its
cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof, and carry
the house away. But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought
themselves, that, where was power, was not devil, but was God; that it
must be availed of, and not by any means let off and wasted. Could he
lift pots and roofs so handily? he was the workman they were in search
of."

It is related of Hart, a Baptist minister, that he was so good a
preacher and so bad a liver that it was said to him once, "Mr. Hart,
when I hear you in the pulpit, I wish you were never out of it; when I
see you out of it, I wish you were never in it." One Mr. Nicholls, a
Yorkshire clergyman in the days immediately succeeding the Reformation,
who was "much addicted to drinking and company-keeping," used to say to
his companions, "You must not heed me but when I am got three feet above
the earth," that was, into the pulpit. "I have heard of a witty parson,"
says Dr. Beattie, "who having been dismissed for irregularities, used
afterward, in conversation, to say, that he thanked God he was not
cashiered for ignorance and insufficiency, but only for vice and
immorality." Foster, in a note to one of his Essays, refers to a Spanish
story of a village where the devil, having made the people excessively
wicked, was punished by being compelled to assume the appearance and
habit of a friar, and to preach so eloquently, in spite of his internal
repugnance and rage, that the inhabitants were completely reformed.

Cotton Mather has preserved a choice specimen of invective against Dr.
Owen, by one of the primitive Quakers, whose name was Fisher. It was,
says Southey, a species of rhetoric in which they indulged freely, and
exceeded all other sectarians. Fisher addressed him thus: "Thou fiery
fighter and green-headed trumpeter; thou hedgehog and grinning dog; thou
bastard, that tumbled out of the mouth of the Babylonish bawd; thou
mole; thou tinker; thou lizard; thou bell of no metal, but the tone of a
kettle; thou wheelbarrow; thou whirlpool; thou whirligig; oh, thou
firebrand; thou adder and scorpion; thou louse; thou cow-dung; thou
moon-calf; thou ragged tatterdemalion; thou Judas: thou livest in
philosophy and logic, which are of the devil." Mather in turn was alike
severe upon the Quakers. He applied to them such language as "upstart
sect;" "sink of all heresies;" "the grossest collection of blasphemies
and confusions that ever was heard of;" "dangerous villains;"
"choke-weed of Christianity;" "the quaking which distinguished these
poor creatures was a symptom of diabolical possession;" "devil-driven
creatures;" "for pride, and hypocrisy, and hellish reviling against the
painful ministers of Christ, I know no people can match them." "He was a
wise and a good counsellor in Plymouth-colony, who propounded 'that a
law might be made for the Quakers to have their heads shaved.' I
confess," he said, "the punishment was in some sort capital; but it
would have been the best remedy for them; it would have both sham'd and
cur'd them." He quotes some choice language of Penn--"Thou gormandizing
Priest, one of the abominable tribe; thou bane of reason; thou pest, to
be spared of mankind; thou mountebank Priest"--and says, "these are the
very words (I wrong them not!) which they vomit out against the best men
in the English nation, that have been so hardy as to touch their 'light
within:' but let the quills of these porcupines fly as fast as they
will, I shall not feel them." The good Luther was a violent saint
sometimes. Hear him express himself on the Catholic divines: "The
papists are all asses, and will always remain asses. Put them in
whatever sauce you choose, boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, beat,
hashed, they are always the same asses." Hear him salute the pope: "The
pope was born out of the devil's posteriors. He is full of devils, lies,
blasphemies, and idolatries; he is Antichrist; the robber of churches;
the ravisher of virgins; the greatest of pimps; the governor of Sodom,
etc. If the Turks lay hold of us, then we shall be in the hands of the
devil; but if we remain with the pope, we shall be in hell. What a
pleasing sight would it be to see the pope and the cardinals hanging on
one gallows, in exact order, like the seals which dangle from the bulls
of the pope! What an excellent council would they hold under the
gallows!" And hear him upon Henry VIII.: "It is hard to say if folly can
be more foolish, or stupidity more stupid, than is the head of Henry. He
has not attacked me with the heart of a king, but with the impudence of
a knave. This rotten worm of the earth, having blasphemed the majesty of
my King, I have a just right to bespatter his English majesty with his
own dirt and ordure. This Henry has lied." The good Calvin was alike
violent. He hated Catholic and Lutheran. "His adversaries are never
others than knaves, lunatics, drunkards, and assassins. Sometimes they
are characterized by the familiar appellatives of bulls, asses, cats,
and hogs." Beza, the disciple of Calvin, imitated his master. Upon a
Lutheran minister, Tilleman, he bestowed these titles of honor:
"Polyphemus; an ape; a great ass who is distinguished from other asses
by wearing a hat; an ass on two feet; a monster composed of part of an
ape and wild ass; a villain who merits hanging on the first tree we
find." As to the Catholics, there is no end to the anathemas and curses
of the Fathers.

One of the old bishops called anger "the sinews of the soul." It helped
to fortify the rugged reformer in his conflicts, and illuminated the
perilous way he trod. "We oft by lightning read in darkest nights." It
is said the finest wine is pressed from vintages which grow on fields
once inundated with lava. "I never work better," said Luther, "than when
I am inspired by anger; when I am angry I can write, pray, and preach
well; for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding
sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart." "No one
can suppose," said Bulwer, "that Calvin did not deem that the angels
smiled approbation when he burned Servetus. No one can suppose that when
Torquemada devised the Inquisition, he did not conscientiously believe
that the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be best secured
by selecting a few for a roast." Burke said, "a vigorous mind is as
necessarily accompanied with violent passions as a great fire with great
heat." "It is the strong passions," said Helvetius, "which, rescuing us
from sloth, can alone impart to us that continuous and earnest attention
necessary to great intellectual efforts." "No revolution (in public
sentiment), civil or religious," said Sir Gilbert Elliot, "can be
accomplished without that degree of ardor and passion which, in a later
age, will be matter of ridicule to men who do not feel the occasion, and
enter into the spirit of the times." "The man who succeeds," said a
British reviewer, "is generally the narrow man, the man of one idea, who
works at nothing but that; sees everything only through the light of
that; sacrifices everything to that; the fanatic, in short. By fanatics,
whether military, commercial, or religious, and not by 'liberal-minded
men' at all, has the world's work been done in all ages." "Our
passions," said John Norris, "were given us to perfect and accomplish
our natures, though by accidental misapplications to unworthy objects
they may turn to our degradation and dishonor. We may, indeed, be
debased as well as ennobled by them; but then the fault is not in the
large sails, but in the ill conduct of the pilot, if our vessel miss the
haven." When one commended a certain king of Sparta for a gentle, a
good, and a meek prince, his colleague said, "How can he be good who is
not an enemy even to vicious persons?" Erasmus said of Luther that there
were two natures in him: sometimes he wrote like an apostle, sometimes
like a raving ribald. "When he was angry, invectives rushed from him
like bowlder rocks down a mountain torrent in flood." "The same man,"
said Heine, of Luther, "who could scold like a fish-wife could be as
gentle as a tender maiden. At times he was as fierce as the storm that
uproots oaks; and then again he was as mild as the zephyr caressing the
violets.... The refinement of Erasmus, the mildness of Melancthon, could
never have brought us so far as the godlike brutality of Brother
Martin." But there was no trace of vanity about him. "Do not call
yourselves Lutherans," he said; "call yourselves Christians. Who and
what is Luther? Has Luther been crucified for the world?"

"The Latin tongue," says Montaigne, "is, as it were, natural to me; I
understand it better than French, but I have not used to speak it, nor
hardly to write it, these forty years; and yet, upon an extreme and
sudden emotion, which I have fallen into twice or thrice in my life, and
once on seeing my father in perfect health, fall upon me in a swoon, I
have always uttered my first outcries and ejaculations in Latin; nature
starting up and forcibly expressing itself, in spite of so long a
discontinuation." "Nature," says Bacon, "will be buried a great time,
and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation; like as it was with
AEsop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at
the board's end till a mouse ran before her." "A frog," said Publius
Syrus, "would leap from a throne of gold into a puddle." In Froissart's
Chronicles there is an account of a reverend monk who had been a robber
in the early part of his life, and who, when he grew old, used feelingly
to lament that he had ever changed his profession. He said "it was a
goodly sight to sally out from his castle, and to see a troop of jolly
friars coming riding that way, with their mules well laden with viands
and rich stores, to advance toward them, to attack and overthrow them,
returning to the castle with a noble booty." Layard relates an incident
of the party of Arabs which for some time had been employed to assist
him in excavating amongst the ruins of Nineveh. One evening, after their
day's work, he observed them following a flock of sheep belonging to the
people of the village, shouting their war-cry, flourishing their swords,
and indulging in the most extravagant gesticulations. He asked one of
the most active of the party to explain to him the cause of such violent
proceedings. "O Bey!" they exclaimed almost together, "God be praised,
we have eaten butter and wheaten bread under your shadow, and are
content; but an Arab is an Arab. It is not for a man to carry about dirt
in baskets, and to use a spade all his life; he should be with his sword
and his mare in the desert. We are sad as we think of the days when we
plundered the Anayza, and we must have excitement or our hearts must
break. Let us then believe that these are the sheep we have taken from
the enemy, and that we are driving them to our tents." And off they ran,
raising their wild cry, and flourishing their swords, to the no small
alarm of the shepherd, who saw his sheep scampering in all directions.
Hazlitt related an Indian legend of a Brahman, who was so devoted to
abstract meditation, that in the pursuit of philosophy he quite forgot
his moral duties, and neglected ablution. For this he was degraded from
the rank of humanity, and transformed into a monkey. But even when a
monkey he retained his original propensities, for he kept apart from
other monkeys, and had no other delight than that of eating cocoanuts
and studying metaphysics. "Perhaps few narratives in history or
mythology," says Carlyle, "are more significant than that Moslem one of
Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the
shores of that same asphaltic lake; and having forgotten, as we are all
too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the
falsities and other semblances of it, were fallen into sad
conditions,--verging, indeed, toward a certain far deeper lake.
Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the prophet Moses, with an
instructive word of warning out of which might have sprung 'remedial
measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the
valet species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses;
listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or splenetic
sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that
they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory
these men of the asphalt lake formed to themselves of Moses, that
probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore. Moses withdrew;
but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the
Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all changed into apes,
sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner;
gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole
universe now a most indisputable humbug! The universe has become a
humbug to those apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to
this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath, there returns to them a
bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit with
their wizened, smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme
tragicality as apes may, looking out through those blinking,
smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky
twilight and undecipherable disordered dusk of things; wholly an
uncertainty, unintelligibility, they and it, and for commentary thereon,
here and there an unmusical chatter or mew,--truest, tragicalest humbug
conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls;
and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost
there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls."
The shark is said to have been the god the Sandwich Islanders, in their
savage state, chiefly worshiped, or sought to propitiate. In their
present semi-civilized, semi-Christianized condition, it is stated, they
pray, and sing, and moralize, in fair weather; but when they get into
trouble they are apt to call upon the shark-god of their fathers for
help or deliverance.

Sir Walter Scott used to tell a story of a placid minister, near Dundee,
who, in preaching on Jonah, said, "Ken ye, brethren, what fish it was
that swallowed him? Aiblins ye may think it was a shark; nae, nae, my
brethren, it was nae shark; or aiblins ye may think it was a sammon;
nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae sammon; or aiblins ye may think it was
a dolphin; nae, nae, my brethren, it was nae dolphin." Here an old
woman, thinking to help her master out of a dead lift, cried out,
"Aiblins, sir, it was a dunter" (the vulgar name of a species of whale
common to the Scotch coast). "Aiblins, madam, ye're an auld witch for
taking the word of God out of my mouth," was the reply of the
disappointed rhetorician. As Dr. Johnson was riding in a carriage
through London on a rainy day, he overtook a poor woman carrying a baby,
without any protection from the weather. Making the driver stop the
coach, he invited the poor woman to get in with her child, which she
did. After she had seated herself, the doctor said to her, "My good
woman, I think it most likely that the motion of the coach will wake
your child in a little while, and I wish you to understand that if you
talk any baby-talk to it, you will have to get out of the coach." As the
doctor had anticipated, the child soon awoke, and the forgetful mother
exclaimed to it: "Oh! the little dear, is he going to open his
eyesy-pysy?" "Stop the coach, driver!" shouted Johnson; and the woman
had to get out and finish her journey on foot. Frederick William, of
Prussia, father of the great Frederick, had a way of addressing,
familiarly, the people he met in the streets of Berlin, utterly
indifferent, we are told, to his own dignity and to the feelings of
others; if he could devise something that was not quite agreeable, it
was sure to be said. The fear of such encounters sometimes made nervous
people indiscreetly evade the royal presence. One Jew having fairly
taken to his heels, he was pursued by the king in hot haste. "Why did
you run away from me?" said the king, when he came up with him in
breathless dudgeon. "From fear," answered the Jew, in the most ingenuous
manner; but the rejoinder of the king was a hearty thwack with his cane,
who roared out that he wished himself to be loved and not to be feared!

A writer upon Holland--its Martyrs and Heroes, gives an account of
Richard Willemson, a worthy burgess of Aspern, and an Anabaptist, who
was chased by an officer of justice. It was a winter day, and he fled
across the ice. The frozen surface, however, was so thin that the
fugitive had the utmost difficulty in crossing, and his pursuer fell
through. Perceiving his danger, Willemson returned and at the risk of
his own life saved his enemy. Touched with such generosity, the officer
would gladly have let his prisoner go; but the burgomaster, who
witnessed the occurrence, called out, "Fulfil your oath," and the good
Christian was led away to a fiery martyrdom.

Dr. Livingstone, when he first went into Africa, as a missionary,
attached himself to the tribe of Bakwains. Their chief, Sechele,
embraced Christianity, and became an assiduous reader of the Bible, the
eloquence of Isaiah being peculiarly acceptable to him, and he was wont
to say, "He was a fine man, that Isaiah: he knew how to speak." But his
people were not so ready for conversion, although he calmly proposed to
have them flogged into faith: "Do you imagine," he said, "these people
will ever believe by your merely talking to them? I can make them do
nothing except by thrashing them; and if you like I shall call my head
men, and with our litupa (whips of rhinoceros hide) we will soon make
them believe altogether." It has been stated upon authority that when a
fugitive from one of the early missions in New California was captured,
he was brought back again to the mission, where he was bastinadoed, and
an iron rod of a foot or a foot and a half long, and an inch in
diameter, was fastened to one of his feet, which had the double use of
preventing him from repeating the attempt, and of frightening others
from imitating him. Southey says that one of the missionaries whom
Virgilius, the bishop of Salzburg, sent among the Slavonic people, made
the converted serfs sit with him at table, where wine was served to them
in gilt beakers, while he ordered their unbaptized lords to sit on the
ground, out of doors, where the food and wine was thrown before them,
and they were left to serve themselves. Among our Norse forefathers,
King Olaf's mode of converting Eyvind to Christianity was to put a pan
of glowing coals on his belly, which burst asunder. "Wilt thou not,
Eyvind, believe in Christ?" asks Olaf, in excellent faith. Another
argument was an adder put into the mouth of the reluctant disciple Rand,
who refused to believe.

"Seeing a large building," relates an English gentleman, "I asked a man
who looked like a journeyman weaver what it was. He told me a
grammar-school. 'But, sir,' he added, 'I think it would become you
better on the Lord's day morning to be reading your Bible at home, than
asking about public buildings.' I very quickly answered: 'My friend, you
have given me a piece of very good advice; let me give you one, and we
may both profit by our meeting. Beware of spiritual pride.'" "In one of
the debates on the Catholic question," said Lord Byron, "when we were
either equal or within one (I forget which), I had been sent for in
great haste to a ball, which I quitted, I confess, somewhat reluctantly,
to emancipate five millions of people." Some ladies bantering Selwyn on
his want of feeling, in attending to see Lord Lovat's head cut off,
"Why," he said, "I made amends by going to the undertaker's to see it
sewn on again." "I have," says Heine, "the most peaceable disposition.
My desires are a modest cottage with thatched roof--but a good bed, good
fare, fresh milk and butter, flowers by my window, and a few fine trees
before the door. And if the Lord wished to fill my cup of happiness, He
would grant me the pleasure of seeing some six or seven of my enemies
hanged on those trees. With a heart moved to pity, I would, before their
death, forgive the injury they had done me during their lives. Yes, we
ought to forgive our enemies--but not until they are hanged." Some would
pursue them after they are hanged. "Our measure of rewards and
punishments," says Thackeray, "is most partial and incomplete, absurdly
inadequate, utterly worldly, and we wish to continue it into the next
world. Into that next and awful world we strive to pursue men, and send
after them our impotent party verdicts, of condemnation or acquittal. We
set up our paltry little rods to measure Heaven immeasurable, as if, in
comparison to that, Newton's mind, or Pascal's, or Shakespeare's, was
any loftier than mine; as if the ray which travels from the sun would
reach me sooner than the man who blacks my boots. Measured by that
altitude, the tallest and the smallest among us are so alike diminutive
and pitifully base that I say we should take no count of the
calculation, and it is a meanness to reckon the difference."

Tertullian, according to Lecky, had written a treatise dissuading the
Christians of his day from frequenting the public spectacles. He had
collected on the subject many arguments, some of them very powerful, and
others extremely grotesque; but he perceived that to make his
exhortations forcible to the majority of his readers, he must point them
to some counter-attraction. He accordingly proceeded--and his style
assumed a richer glow and a more impetuous eloquence as he rose to the
congenial theme--to tell them that a spectacle was reserved for them, so
fascinating and so attractive that the most joyous festivals of earth
faded in insignificance by the comparison. That spectacle was the
agonies of their fellow-countrymen as they writhe amid the torments of
hell. "What!" he exclaimed, "shall be the magnitude of that scene! How
shall I wonder! How shall I laugh! How shall I rejoice! How shall I
triumph, when I behold so many and such illustrious kings, who were said
to have mounted into heaven, groaning with Jupiter their god in the
lowest darkness of hell! Then shall the soldiers who had persecuted the
name of Christ burn in more cruel fire than any they had kindled for the
saints. Then shall the tragedians pour forth in their own misfortune
more piteous cries than those with which they had made the theatre to
resound, while the comedian's powers shall be better seen as he becomes
more flexible by the heat. Then shall the driver of the circus stand
forth to view, all blushing in his flaming chariot, and the gladiators
pierced, not by spears, but by darts of fire. Compared with such
spectacles, with such subjects of triumph as these, what can praetor or
consul, quaestor or pontiff, afford? And even now faith can bring them
near, imagination can depict them as present!"

Crabb Robinson says some one at a party at which he was present, abusing
Mahometanism in a commonplace way, said: "Its heaven is quite material."
He was met with the quiet remark, "So is the Christian's hell;" to which
there was no reply. In the time of Tertullian, the angel in the Last
Judgment was constantly represented weighing the souls in a literal
balance, while devils clinging to the scales endeavored to disturb the
equilibrium. The redbreast, according to one popular legend, was
commissioned by the Deity to carry a drop of water to the souls of
unbaptized infants in hell, and its breast was singed in piercing the
flames. In Wales, the robin is said to bear in its bill one drop of
water daily to the place of torment, in order to extinguish the flames.

A Calvinistic divine, of the name of Petit Pierre, was ejected from his
church at Neufchatel for preaching and publishing the doctrine that the
damned would at some future period be pardoned. A member said to him,
"My good friend, I no more believe in the eternity of hell than
yourself; but recollect that it may be no bad thing, perhaps, for your
servant, your tailor, and your lawyer, to believe in it." Whitefield was
once preaching in Haworth, and made use of some such expression, as that
he "hoped there was no need to say much to this congregation, as they
had sat under so pious and godly a minister for so many years;"
whereupon Mr. Grimshaw, the curate, stood up in his place, and said with
a loud voice, "Oh, sir! for God's sake do not speak so. I pray you do
not flatter them. I fear the greater part of them are going to hell with
their eyes open." Cowper's friend, Newton, says this in one of his
letters: "A friend of mine was desired to visit a woman in prison; he
was informed of her evil habits of life, and therefore spoke strongly of
the terrors of the Lord, and the curses of the law: she heard him a
while, and then laughed in his face; upon this he changed his note, and
spoke of the Saviour, and what he had done and suffered for sinners. He
had not talked long in this strain before he saw a tear or two in her
eyes: at length she interrupted him by saying: 'Why, sir, do you think
there can be any hope of mercy for me?' He answered, 'Yes, if you feel
your need of it, and are willing to seek it in God's appointed way. I am
sure it is as free for you as for myself.' She replied, 'Ah, if I had
thought so, I should not have been in this prison. I long since settled
it in my mind that I was utterly lost; that I had sinned beyond all
possibility of forgiveness, and that made me desperate.'" Monod relates
that the Moravian missionaries who carried the gospel to the
Greenlanders thought it best to prepare the minds of the savages to
receive it, by declaring to them at first only the general truths of
religion; the existence of God, the obedience due to his laws, and a
future retribution. Thus passed away several years, during which they
saw no fruit of their labors. At last they ventured one day to speak to
them of the Saviour, and read to them the history of his passion. They
had no sooner done so, than one of the hearers, named Kajarnak,
approached the table where the missionary Beck was sitting, and said to
him in an earnest, affecting tone: "What is that you tell us? Repeat
that once more. I too will be saved!" ("The most awfully tremendous of
all metaphysical divines," wrote an eminent Englishman, "is the American
ultra Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, whose book on Original Sin I
unhappily read when a very young man. It did me an irreparable
mischief.")

"Soon after the accession of James I. to the throne of England," writes
Lecky, in his History of Rationalism in Europe, "a law was enacted which
subjected witches to death on the first conviction, even though they
should have inflicted no injury upon their neighbors. This law was
passed when Coke was attorney general, and Bacon a member of Parliament;
and twelve bishops sat upon the commission to which it was referred. The
prosecutions were rapidly multiplied throughout the country, but
especially in Lancashire, and at the same time the general tone of
literature was strongly tinged with the superstition. Sir Thomas Browne
declared that those who denied the existence of witchcraft were not only
'infidels, but also, by implication, atheists.' In Cromwell's time there
was still greater persecution. The county of Suffolk was especially
agitated, and the famous witch-finder, Matthew Hopkins, pronounced it to
be infested with witches. A commission was accordingly issued, and two
distinguished Presbyterian divines were selected by the Parliament to
accompany it. It would have been impossible to take any measure more
calculated to stimulate the prosecutions, and we accordingly find that
in Suffolk sixty persons were hung for witchcraft in a single year. In
1664 two women were hung in Suffolk, under a sentence of Sir Matthew
Hale, who took the opportunity of declaring that the reality of
witchcraft was unquestionable; 'for, first, the Scriptures had affirmed
so much; and, secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws
against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a
crime.' Sir Thomas Browne, who was a great physician, as well as a great
writer, was called as a witness, and swore 'that he was clearly of
opinion that the persons were bewitched.'"

Here is a terrible story, perfectly well authenticated, taken from the
official report of the proceedings by an English historian: "Toward the
end of 1593 there was trouble in the family of the Earl of Orkney. His
brother laid a plot to murder him, and was said to have sought the help
of a notorious witch called Alison Balfour. When Alison Balfour's life
was looked into, no evidence could be found connecting her either with
the particular offense or with witchcraft in general; but it was enough
in these matters to be accused. She swore she was innocent; but her
guilt was only held to be aggravated by perjury. She was tortured again
and again. Her legs were put in the caschilaws,--an iron frame which was
gradually heated till it burned into the flesh,--but no confession could
be wrung from her. The caschilaws failed utterly, and something else had
to be tried. She had a husband, a son, and a daughter, a child seven
years old. As her own sufferings did not work upon her, she might be
touched, perhaps, by the suffering of those who were dear to her. They
were brought into court, and placed at her side, and the husband first
placed in the 'long irons'--some accursed instrument, I know not what.
Still the devil did not yield. She bore this; and her son was next
operated on. The boy's legs were set in 'the boot,'--the iron boot you
may have heard of. The wedges were driven in, which, when forced home,
crushed the very bone and marrow. Fifty-seven mallet strokes were
delivered upon the wedges. Yet this, too, failed. There was no
confession yet. So, last of all, the little daughter was taken. There
was a machine called the piniwinkies--a kind of thumb-screw, which
brought blood from under the finger-nails, with a pain successfully
terrible. These things were applied to the poor child's hands, and the
mother's constancy broke down, and she said she would admit anything
they wished. She confessed her witchcraft,--so tried, she would have
confessed to the seven deadly sins,--and then she was burned, recalling
her confession, and with her last breath protested her innocence."

"There was one Mary Johnson try'd at Hartford in this countrey," says
Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia Christi Americana, "upon an indictment of
'familiarity with the devil,' and was found guilty thereof, chiefly upon
her own confession.... In the time of her imprisonment, the famous Mr.
Stone was at great pains to promote her conversion from the devil to
God; and she was by the best observers judged very penitent, both before
her execution and at it; and she went out of the world with comfortable
hopes of mercy from God through the merit of our Saviour. Being asked
what she built her hopes upon, she answered, Upon these words: 'Come
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest;' and these: 'There is a fountain set open for sin and
uncleanness.' And she dy'd in a frame extreamly to the satisfaction of
them that were spectators of it."

In 1768 John Wesley prefaced an account of an apparition that had been
related by a girl named Elizabeth Hobson, by some extremely remarkable
sentences on the subject. "It is true, likewise," he wrote, "that the
English in general, and, indeed, most of the men of learning in Europe,
have given up all account of witches and apparitions as mere old wives'
fables. I am sorry for it, and I willingly take this opportunity of
entering my solemn protest against this violent compliment which so many
that believe the Bible pay to those that do not believe it. I owe them
no such service. I take knowledge that these are at the bottom of the
outcry which has been raised, and with such insolence spread through the
land, in direct opposition, not only to the Bible, but to the suffrage
of the wisest and best men in all ages and nations. They well know
(whether Christians know it or not) that the giving up of witchcraft is
in effect giving up the Bible."

"In the first year of this persecution, Cotton Mather wrote a history of
the earliest of the trials. This history was introduced to the English
public by Richard Baxter, who declared in his preface that 'that man
must be a very obdurate Sadducee who would not believe it.' Not content
with having thus given the weight of his great name to the superstition,
Baxter in the following year published his treatise on The Certainty of
the World of Spirits; in which he collected, with great industry, an
immense number of witch cases; reverted in extremely laudatory terms to
Cotton Mather and his crusade; and denounced, in unmeasured language,
all who were skeptical upon the subject. This work appeared in 1691,
when the panic in America had not yet reached its height; and being
widely circulated there, is said to have contributed much to stimulate
the persecutions. The Pilgrim Fathers had brought to America the seeds
of the persecution; and at the same time when it was rapidly fading in
England, it flourished with fearful vigor in Massachusetts. Cotton
Mather and Parris proclaimed the frequency of the crime; and, being
warmly supported by their brother divines, they succeeded in creating a
panic through the whole country. A commission was issued. A judge named
Stoughton, who appears to have been a perfect creature of the clergy,
conducted the trials. Scourgings and tortures were added to the
terrorism of the pulpit, and many confessions were obtained. The few who
ventured to oppose the prosecutions were denounced as Sadducees and
infidels. Multitudes were thrown into prison, others fled from the
country, abandoning their property, and twenty-seven persons were
executed. An old man of eighty was pressed to death--a horrible
sentence, which was never afterward executed in America. [Giles Corey
was the name of the poor victim. He refused to plead, to save his
property from confiscation. He urged the executioners, it is stated by
Upham, in his History of Witchcraft, to increase the weight which was
crushing him; he told them that it was no use to expect him to yield;
that there could be but one way of ending the matter, and that they
might as well pile on the stones. Calef says, that as his body yielded
to the pressure, his tongue protruded from his mouth, and an official
forced it back with his cane.] The ministers of Boston and Charlestown
drew up an address, warmly thanking the commissioners for their zeal,
and expressing their hope that it would never be relaxed."

There is no more painful reading than this except the trials of the
witches themselves. "These," says Lowell, "awaken, by turns, pity,
indignation, disgust, and dread,--dread, at the thought of what the
human mind may be brought to believe not only probable, but proven. But
it is well to be put upon our guard by lessons of this kind, for the
wisest man is in some respects little better than a madman in a
straight-waistcoat of habit, public opinion, prudence, or the like.
Skepticism began at length to make itself felt, but it spread slowly,
and was shy of proclaiming itself. The orthodox party was not backward
to charge with sorcery whoever doubted their facts or pitied their
victims. The mob, as it always is, was orthodox. It was dangerous to
doubt, it might be fatal to deny."

"The spirit of party," quaintly says Bayle, in his Critical Dictionary,
discoursing of Margaret, Queen of Navarre, "the attachment to a sect,
and even zeal for orthodoxy, produce a kind of ferment in the humors of
our body; and hence the medium through which reason ought to behold
these primitive ideas is clouded and obscured. These are infirmities
which will attend our reason, as long as it shall depend upon the
ministry of organs. It is the same thing to it, as the low and middle
region of the air, the seat of vapors and meteors. There are but very
few persons who can elevate themselves above these clouds, and place
themselves in a true serenity. If any one could do it, we must say of
him what Virgil did of Daphnis:--

      'Daphnis, the guest of Heaven, with wondering eyes,
      Views in the milky-way the starry skies;
      And far beneath him, from the shining sphere,
      Beholds the moving clouds and rolling year.'

And he would not have so much the appearance of a man, as of an immortal
Being, placed upon a mountain above the region of wind and clouds. There
is almost as much necessity for being above the passions to come to a
knowledge of some kind of truths, as to act virtuously." "How limited is
human reason," exclaims Disraeli, the younger, "the profoundest
inquirers are most conscious. We are not indebted to the reason of man
for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human
action and human progress. It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was
not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the
world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic orders;
it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not
reason that enacted the French Revolution. Man is only truly great when
he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the
imagination. Even Mormon counts more votaries than Bentham." "Let us not
dream," said Goethe, "that reason can ever be popular. Passions,
emotions, may be made popular; but reason remains ever the property of
an elect few." "It is not from reason and prudence that people marry,"
said Dr. Johnson, "but from inclination. A man is poor; he thinks it
cannot be worse, and so I'll e'en marry Peggy." "If people," said
Thackeray, "only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there
would be!"




III.

DISGUISES.


Man, poor fellow, would be a curious object for microscopic study. If it
were possible to view him through powerful glasses, what humiliating
resemblances and infirmities would be discovered. He would be found to
have innumerable tentacula and appendages, for protection and warning,
and especially to possess unconceived of apparatus for making his way in
the dark,--necessities to him, it would appear, when further inspection
of the creature had shown him to be--blind. At last, he finds himself
obliged to rely upon such qualities and faculties as take the place of
powers and eyes. Cowardly, he is gregarious, and will not live alone;
weak, he consorts with weakness, to acquire strength; ignorant, he
contributes the least bit to the common stock of intelligence, and
escapes responsibility. One of many, he has the protection of the mob;
embodying others' weaknesses, he is strong in the bundle of sticks;
joining his voice with the million, it is lost in the confusion of
tongues. Attacked, he is fortified by his society; down, he will rise
again with his fellows; stupid with the rest, his shame is unfelt by
being diffused. In any extremity, there is safety in counsel; in the
ranks, he cannot run; in the crowd, it were vain to think. Weary of
stagnation or tired by the eddies, he goes with the current; unable to
stand an individual, he joins with a party; a poor creature of God, he
is afraid to trust Him on his Word, and flies to a sect with a creed for
protection. In the wake of thought, he may be thoughtless; voting the
ticket, he is a patriot; a stiff bigot, there can be no doubt about his
religion. He submits to be thought for as a child; to be cared for as an
invalid; to be subordinated as an idiot. Unequal to a scheme of his own,
he falls into one already devised for him; without independent views, he
relies upon his newspaper; without implicit trust in God, he leans upon
a broken reed in preference. Thus his business, his politics, his
religion, are defined for him, and are of easy reference; indeed it may
be said he knows them by heart, so little there is of them. Of the laws
of trade, political economy, essential Christianity, he may be as
ignorant as a barbarian, at the same time be complacent and respectable
in his ignorance. Acting for himself, he would be set down as eccentric
by his banker; thinking for himself, he would be thought to be too
uncertain to be trustworthy; living virtuously, walking humbly, and
trusting his Creator to take care of his creature, he would be an object
of suspicion, even if he escaped being called an infidel. His tailor
determines the cut of his coat; the street defines his manners and
morals; custom becomes his law, and compliance his gospel.

Addison, in The Spectator, gives an account of a gentleman who
determined to live and dress according to the rules of common sense, and
was shut up in a lunatic asylum in consequence. "Custom," says Carlyle,
"doth make dotards of us all. Philosophy complains that custom has
hoodwinked us from the first; that we do everything by custom, even
believe by it; that our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we
may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard
questioned." "In this great society wide lying around us," says Emerson,
"a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is
almost all custom and gross sense." We play our parts so faithfully, not
to say conscientiously, that often we have difficulty in placing
ourselves, whether with the assumed or the natural. The little arts and
artifices we thrive by, become essentially a part of us; and in the
jostle and conflict--the greater to devour the lesser and the lesser the
least--we seem impelled to pursue the objects and ends which long habit
has somehow convinced us nature particularly suited us to pursue. When
an event occurs to attract attention to our follies or baseness, it has
not the effect to prompt repentance, but to excite our cunning, and set
us to work to find excuses, or to imagine some other course of conduct
which would have been more foolish or mischievous. "We keep on deceiving
ourselves in regard to our faults, until we, at last, come to look upon
them as virtues." Like Selwyn, the accomplished courtier and wit in the
time of George III., we get to think even our vices necessities. After a
night of elegant rioting and debauch, he tumbled out of his bed at noon
the next day, and reeling with both hands upon his head to a mirror in
his apartment, gazed at himself and soliloquized: "I look and feel most
villainously mean; but it's life--hang it, it's life!"

Lord Bacon, discoursing upon the "politic knowledge of ourselves," and
the "wisdom of business," in the Second Book of the Proficience and
Advancement of Learning, says: "The covering of defects is of no less
importance than the valuing of good parts; which may be done in three
manners, by caution, by color, and by confidence. Caution is when men do
ingeniously and discreetly avoid to be put into those things for which
they are not proper: whereas, contrariwise, bold and unquiet spirits
will thrust themselves into matters without difference, and so publish
and proclaim all their wants. Color is, when men make a way for
themselves, to have a construction made of their faults and wants, as
proceeding from a better cause, or intended for some other purpose: for
of the one it is well said, 'Vice often lurks in the likeness of
virtue,' and therefore whatsoever want a man hath, he must see that he
pretend the virtue that shadoweth it; as if he be dull, he must affect
gravity; if a coward, mildness; and so the rest: for the second, a man
must frame some probable cause why he should not do his best, and why he
should dissemble his abilities; and for that purpose must use to
dissemble those abilities which are notorious in him, to give color that
his true wants are but industries and dissimulations. For confidence, it
is the last but surest remedy; namely, to depress and seem to despise
whatsoever a man cannot attain; observing the good principle of the
merchants, who endeavor to raise the price of their own commodities, and
to beat down the price of others. But there is a confidence that passeth
this other; which is to face out a man's own defects, in seeming to
conceive that he is best in those things wherein he is failing; and, to
help that again, to seem on the other side that he hath least opinion of
himself in those things wherein he is best; like as we shall see it
commonly in poets; that if they show their verses, and you except to
any, they will say, that that line cost them more labor than any of the
rest; and presently will seem to disable and suspect rather some other
line, which they know well enough to be the best in the number."

"Few persons who talk of any virtue or quality," says Pascal, "are
inwardly acquainted or affected with it. We are all full of duplicity,
deceit, and contradiction. We love to wear a disguise, even within, and
are afraid of being detected by ourselves."

Infirmities and calamities have been made to serve important uses in the
designs of men. "It was necessary," says a writer upon Mahomet, "that
the religion he proposed to establish should have a divine sanction; and
for this purpose he turned a calamity with which he was afflicted to his
advantage. He was often subject to fits of epilepsy, a disease which
those whom it afflicts are desirous to conceal. Mahomet gave out,
therefore, that these fits were trances, into which he was miraculously
thrown by God Almighty, during which he was instructed in his will,
which he was commanded to publish to the world. By this strange story,
and by leading a retired, abstemious, and austere life, he easily
acquired a character for superior sanctity among his acquaintances and
neighbors. When he thought himself sufficiently fortified by the numbers
and enthusiasm of his followers, he boldly declared himself a prophet,
sent by God into the world, not only to teach his will, but to compel
mankind to obey it."

The world not only seems to be easily deceived, but seems to delight in
deception. "If you wish to be powerful," said Horne Tooke, "pretend to
be powerful." If you wish to be considered wise, systematically pretend
to be, and you will generally be acknowledged to be. We all know, for
instance, the influence of manner, as sometimes displayed by persons of
great assumed personal dignity. Every neighborhood is afflicted with
such pretenders. "Among those terms," says Whipple, indignantly, "which
have long ceased to have any vital meaning, the word dignity deserves a
disgraceful prominence. No word has fallen so readily into the designs
of cant, imposture, and pretense; none has played so well the part of
verbal scarecrow, to frighten children of all ages and both sexes. It is
at once the thinnest and most effective of all the coverings under which
duncedom sneaks and skulks. Most of the men of dignity, who awe or bore
their more genial brethren, are simply men who possess the art of
passing off their insensibility for wisdom, their dullness for depth,
and of concealing imbecility of intellect under haughtiness of manner.
Their success in this small game is one of the stereotyped satires upon
mankind. Once strip from these pretenders their stolen garments--once
disconnect their show of dignity from their real meanness--and they
would stand shivering and defenseless,--objects of the tears of pity,
or targets for the arrows of scorn.... Manner triumphs over matter; and
throughout society, politics, letters, and science, we are doomed to
meet a swarm of dunces and wind-bags, disguised as gentlemen, statesmen,
and scholars." When they open their mouths, it is to expand themselves
with a new inhalation of emptiness, or to depreciate or belittle what
they pretend is insignificant, when it only exceeds their capacity. They
put up their heads and expectorate with a smirky haughtiness, as if
everything worth knowing were known to them, when a single sensation of
modesty would envelop their moony faces with blushes. Every one has seen
such a character,--"an embodied tediousness, which society is apt not
only to tolerate, but to worship; a person who announces the stale
commonplaces of conversation with the awful precision of one bringing
down to the valleys of thought bright truths plucked on its summits; who
is so profoundly deep and painfully solid, on the weather, or some
nothing of the day; who is inexpressibly shocked if your eternal
gratitude does not repay him for the trite information he consumed your
hour in imparting; and who, if you insinuate that this calm, contented,
imperturbable stupidity is preying upon your patience, instantly stands
upon his dignity, and puts on a face." "A certain nobleman, some years
ago," says Bulwer, in one of his essays, "was conspicuous for his
success in the world. He had been employed in the highest situations, at
home and abroad, without one discoverable reason for his selection, and
without justifying the selection by one proof of administrative ability.
Yet at each appointment the public said, 'A great gain to the
government! Superior man!' And when from each office he passed away, or
rather passed imperceptibly onward toward offices still more exalted,
the public said, 'A great loss to the government! Superior man!' He was
the most silent person I ever met. But when the first reasoners of the
age would argue some knotty point in his presence, he would, from time
to time, slightly elevate his eyebrows, gently shake his head, or, by a
dexterous smile of significant complacency, impress on you the notion
how easily he could set those babblers right if he would but condescend
to give voice to the wisdom within him. I was very young when I first
met this superior man; and chancing on the next day to call on the late
Lord Durham, I said, in the presumption of early years, 'I passed six
mortal hours last evening in company with Lord ----. I don't think there
is much in him,' 'Good heavens!' cried Lord Durham, 'how did you find
that out? Is it possible that he could have--talked?'" Coleridge speaks
of a dignified man he once saw at a dinner-table. "He listened to me,"
says the poet, "and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his
head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, toward the end of the
dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no
sooner seen them, than he burst forth with,--'Them's the jockies for
me!' I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head." The Duke
of Somerset is described as one of these dignified gentlemen. His second
wife was one of the most beautiful women in England. She once suddenly
threw her arms around his neck, and gave him a kiss which might have
gladdened the heart of an emperor. The duke, lifting his shoulders with
an aristocratic square, slowly said, "Madam, my first wife was a Howard,
and she never would have taken such a liberty!" If it were practicable
to expose the artifice and emptiness of such characters, the exhibition
would be as amusing as the scene once presented on the stage of a
theatre. The comedian was enveloped in a great India-rubber suit,
expanded by air to give it the proper proportions to represent Falstaff:
when just in the middle of one of the inimitable speeches of that
inimitable character, some wag of the stock insinuated a sharp-pointed
instrument into the immense windful garment: immediately the great
proportions of Falstaff began to diminish, attended by an audible
hissing noise; and before the discomposed actor, overwhelmed with the
laughter of the uproarious audience, could retire from the stage, he had
shrunk to an insignificant one hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois,
with his deceptive covering hanging about his gaunt limbs in voluminous
folds! Such persons will generally be found in possession of good moral
habits--props they instinctively set up to sustain their pretenses. They
know by intuition that an affectation of wisdom and greatness would be
intolerable if attended by vicious propensities and practices; so they
cultivate with systematic carefulness all the forms of morality and
virtue. They know that their good habits will always insure the respect
of even those who detect and despise their emptiness. But they are never
heard to claim anything on the score of superior virtue; they demand to
be known as Solons--as abridgments of all that is profound and wonderful
known among men. Like the owl--that wise bird, sacred of old to
Minerva--they make their pretensions respected by the most commendable
propriety.

"Yorick had an invincible dislike and opposition in his nature to
gravity;--not to gravity as such;--for where gravity was wanted, he
would be the most grave or serious of mortal men for days and weeks
together; but he was an enemy to the affectation of it, and declared
open war against it, only as it appeared a cloak for ignorance, or
folly: and then, whenever it fell in his way, however sheltered and
protected, he seldom gave it any quarter. Sometimes, in his wild way of
talking, he would say, that gravity was an errant scoundrel, and, he
would add,--of the most dangerous kind too,--because a sly one; and that
he verily believed, more honest, well-meaning people were bubbled out of
their goods and money by it in one twelvemonth, than by pocket-picking,
and shoplifting in seven. In the naked temper which a merry heart
discovered, he would say there was no danger,--but to itself:--whereas
the very essence of gravity was design, and consequently deceit;--'twas
a taught trick, to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge
than a man was worth; and that, with all his pretensions,--it was no
better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it,
viz.: A mysterious carriage of the body, to cover the defects of the
mind:--which definition of gravity, Yorick, with great imprudence, would
say, deserved to be wrote in letters of gold."

"Men in general," says Machiavelli, in his Prince, "judge more from
appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift
of penetration. Every one sees your exterior, but few can discern what
you have in your heart; and those few dare not oppose the voice of the
multitude."

A pretension to devoutness and asceticism was one of the fashions in
Moliere's time. In his play of Le Festin de Pierre, he makes Don Juan to
say: "The profession of hypocrite has marvelous advantages. It is an act
of which the imposture is always respected; and though it may be
discovered, no one dares do anything against it. All the other vices of
man are liable to censure, and every one has the liberty of boldly
attacking them; but hypocrisy is a privileged vice, which with its hand
closes everybody's mouth, and enjoys its repose with sovereign
impunity."

The absorbing desire for wealth--"that bad thing, gold," that "buys all
things good"--like ambition, "often puts men upon doing the meanest
offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping."
Almost every act may be a lie against the thought or motive which
prompted it. The great aim of the mere money-getter--to get and get
forever--involves him in false pretense and practical falsehood. He
advises to inveigle; he condoles and sympathizes to ruin. He talks of
liberalty, and never gives. He depreciates money and the love of it, at
the same time glows and dimples with the consciousness of his
possessions. He calls life a humbug or muck, and proves it by a
hypocritical exhibit of his gains. He puts a penny in the urn of
poverty, and sees clearly how he will get a shilling out. He whines for
wretchedness, forgetting the number he has made wretched. He gives to
religion, and plunders her devotees. He hires an expensive pew near the
pulpit, and cheats his woodsawyer and washerwoman. He builds costly
churches with tall steeples, and, writing the Almighty in his list of
debtors, formally bargains admission to heaven. "He falls down and
worships the god of this world, but will have neither its pomps, its
vanities, nor its pleasures, for his trouble. He begins to accumulate
treasure as a mean to happiness, and by a common but morbid association
he continues to accumulate it as an end. He lives poor to die rich, and
is the mere jailer of his house, and the turnkey of his wealth.
Impoverished by his gold, he slaves harder to imprison it in his chest
than his brother-slave to liberate it from the mine." "Some men," says
Chrysippus, in Athenaeus, "apply themselves with such eagerness to the
pursuit of money, that it is even related, that a man once, when near
his end, swallowed a number of pieces of gold, and so died. Another
person sewed a quantity of money into a tunic, and put it on, and then
ordered his servants to bury him in that dress, neither burning his
body, nor stripping it and laying it out." Foote, in endeavoring to
express the microscopic niggardliness of a miser of his acquaintance,
expressed a belief that he would be willing to take the beam out of his
own eye if he knew he could sell the timber. Doubtless, one source of
the miser's insane covetousness and parsimony is the tormenting fear of
dying a beggar--that "fine horror of poverty," according to Lamb, "by
which he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's-length,
but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance."
("All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil,"
impatiently exclaimed Dr. Johnson, "show it to be evidently a great
evil. You never find people laboring to convince you that you may live
very happily upon a plentiful fortune. So you hear people talking how
miserable a king must be; and yet they all wish to be in his place."
"One asks," says La Bruyere, "if, in comparing the different conditions
of men together, their sufferings and advantages, we cannot observe an
equal mixture, and a like assortment of good and evil, which settles
them on an equality, or at least makes one as desirable as the other:
the rich and powerful man, who wants nothing, may put the question, but
a poor man must answer it.") The hoarding habits of the miser remind one
of a device of American boatmen, at an early day, before the steamboat
was invented, and when the forest was infested with savages and robbers.
Receiving specie at New Orleans for their produce, they deposited it in
a wet buckskin belt, of sufficient length to surround the body, which,
as it dried, contracted and shrunk round the coin, till no amount of
shaking would cause it to jingle. So may the heart and soul of the
avaricious man shrink round his little heap of gold, until all healthy
circulation ceases, and his heart never jingles with a genuine,
generous, manly impulse.

Disraeli, in his Curiosities, gives an interesting philosophical sketch
of Audley,--the great Audley, as he was called in his time,--who
concentrated all the powers of a vigorous intellect in the accumulation
of wealth. He lived in England in the beginning of the seventeenth
century, through the reigns of James I. and Charles I., and, beginning
life with almost nothing, died worth four hundred thousand pounds
sterling. He "lived to view his mortgages, his statutes, and his
judgments so numerous, that it was observed, his papers would have made
a good map of England. This philosophical usurer never pressed hard for
his debts; like the fowler, he never shook his nets lest he might
startle, satisfied to have them, without appearing to hold them. With
great fondness he compared his 'bonds to infants, which battle best by
sleeping.' To battle is to be nourished, a term still retained at the
University of Oxford. His familiar companions were all subordinate
actors in the great piece he was performing; he too had his part in the
scene. When not taken by surprise, on his table usually laid open a
great Bible, with Bishop Andrews' folio Sermons, which often gave him an
opportunity of railing at the covetousness of the clergy! declaring
their religion was a 'mere preach,' and that 'the time would never be
well till we had Queen Elizabeth's Protestants again in fashion.' He was
aware of all the evils arising out of a population beyond the means of
subsistence, and dreaded an inundation of man, spreading like the spawn
of a cod. Hence he considered marriage, with a modern political
economist, as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose
children, he said, never thrived, and whose widows were left destitute.
An apostolic life, according to Audley, required only books, meat, and
drink, to be had for fifty pounds a year! Celibacy, voluntary poverty,
and all the mortifications of a primitive Christian, were the virtues
practiced by this Puritan among his money bags. Audley's was that
worldly wisdom which derives all its strength from the weaknesses of
mankind. Everything was to be obtained by stratagem, and it was his
maxim, that to grasp our object the faster, we must go a little round
about it. His life is said to have been one of intricacies and
mysteries, using indirect means in all things; but if he walked in a
labyrinth, it was to bewilder others; for the clew was still in his own
hand; all he sought was that his designs should not be discovered in
his actions. His word, we are told, was his bond; his hour was punctual;
and his opinions were compressed and weighty; but if he was true to his
bond-word, it was only a part of the system to give facility to the
carrying on of his trade, for he was not strict to his honor; the pride
of victory, as well as the passion for acquisition, combined in the
character of Audley, as in more tremendous conquerors. In the course of
time he purchased a position in the 'court of wards,' which enabled him
to plunder the estates of deceased persons and minors. When asked the
value of this new office, he replied that 'it might be worth some
thousands of pounds to him who after his death would go instantly to
heaven; twice as much to him who would go to purgatory, and nobody knows
what to him who would adventure to go to hell.'" What he thought of a
venture to the latter place, his four hundred thousand pounds must
speak.

Many and interesting as are the disguises of avarice, it is only in rank
and ancestry that you find perfect complacency and assurance. "We have
all heard," says Thackeray, "of the dying French duchess who viewed her
coming dissolution and subsequent fate so easily, because she said she
was sure that Heaven must deal politely with a person of her quality."
You recollect that other duchess, in Saint-Simon, who, on the death of a
sinner of illustrious race, said, "They may say what they like, but no
one shall persuade me that God does not think of it twice before he
damns a man of his birth." An old lady once said to De Tocqueville, "I
have been reading with great satisfaction the genealogies which prove
that Jesus Christ descended from David. It shows that our Lord was a
gentleman." "We are somewhat ashamed in general," said Senior to De
Tocqueville, "of Jewish blood; yet the Levis boast of their descent from
the Hebrew Levi." "They are proud of it," answered De Tocqueville;
"because they make themselves out to be cousins of the blessed Virgin.
They have a picture in which a Duke de Levi stands bareheaded before the
Virgin. 'Pray put your hat on, cousin,' she says. 'I had rather keep it
off,' he answered."

"Do we not every day meet with people," says Xavier de Maistre, "who
fancy they are ill because they are unshaven, or because some one has
thought they have looked poorly, and told them so? Dress has such
influence upon men's minds that there are valetudinarians who think
themselves in better health than usual when they have on a new coat and
well powdered wig. They deceive the public and themselves by their
nicety about dress, until one finds some fine morning they have died in
full fig, and their death startles everybody."

Lord Eldon was fond of relating amusing anecdotes of the famous state
trials of Hardy, Horne Tooke, and Thelwall, which occurred while he was
attorney general. "Every evening," he said, "upon my leaving the court,
a signal was given that I was coming out, for a general hissing and
hooting of the attorney general. This went through the street in which
the court sat, from one end of it to the other, and was continued all
the way down to Ludgate Hill and by Fleet Market. One evening, at the
rising of the court, I was preparing to retire, when Mr. Garrow said,
'Do not, Mr. Attorney, pass that tall man at the end of the table.' 'And
why not?' said Mr. Law, who stood next. 'He has been here,' answered Mr.
Garrow, 'during the whole trial, with his eyes constantly fixed on the
attorney general.' 'I will pass him,' said Mr. Law. 'And so will I,' was
my rejoinder. As we passed, the man drew back. When I entered my
carriage, the mob rushed forward, crying, 'That's he, drag him out!' Mr.
Erskine, from whose carriage the mob had taken off the horses to draw
him home in triumph, stopped the people, saying, 'I will not go without
the attorney general!' I instantly addressed them: 'So you imagine,
that if you kill me, you will be without an attorney general! Before ten
o'clock to-morrow there will be a new attorney general, by no means so
favorably disposed to you as I am.' I heard a friend in the crowd
exclaim, 'Let him alone! let him alone!' They separated, and I
proceeded. When I reached my home in Gower Street, I saw, close to my
door, the tall man who stood near me in court. I had no alternative; I
instantly went up to him: 'What do you want?' I said. 'Do not be
alarmed,' he answered; 'I have attended in court during the whole of the
trial--I know my own strength, and am resolved to stand by you. You once
did an act of great kindness to my father. Thank God, you are safe at
home. May He bless and protect you!' He instantly disappeared."

Rulhiere told De Tocqueville a very different story, characteristic of a
Russian. He was a man of high rank, who had been sent to the French
head-quarters on a mission, and lived for some time on intimate terms
with the staff, particularly with Rulhiere. At the battle of Eylau
Rulhiere was taken prisoner. He caught the eye of his Russian friend,
who came to offer his services. "You can do me," said Rulhiere, "an
important service. One of your Cossacks yonder has just seized my horse
and cloak. I am dying of fatigue and cold. If you can get them for me,
you may save my life." The Russian went to the Cossack, talked to him
rather sharply, probably on the wickedness of robbing a prisoner; got
possession of the horse and cloak; put on the one, and mounted the
other, and Rulhiere never saw him again.

Incledon, the singer, related to Crabb Robinson, in a stage-coach,
anecdotes of Garrick and Foote, which show how completely they both lost
themselves in their acting. Garrick had a brother living in the country,
who was an idolatrous admirer of his genius. A rich neighbor, a grocer,
being about to visit London, this brother insisted on his taking a
letter of introduction to the actor. Not being able to make up his mind
to visit the great man the first day, the grocer went to the play in the
evening, and saw Garrick in Abel Drugger. On his return to the country,
the brother eagerly inquired respecting the visit he had been so anxious
to bring about. "Why, Mr. Garrick," said the good man, "I am sorry to
hurt your feelings, but there's your letter. I did not choose to deliver
it." "Not deliver it!" exclaimed the other, in astonishment. "I happened
to see him when he did not know me, and I saw that he was such a dirty,
low-lived fellow, that I did not like to have anything to do with him."
Foote went to Ireland, and took off a celebrated Dublin printer. The
printer stood the jest for some time, but found at last that Foote's
imitations became so popular, and drew such attention to himself, that
he could not walk the streets without being pointed at. He bethought
himself of a remedy. Collecting a number of boys, he gave them a hearty
meal and a shilling each for a place in the gallery, and promised them
another meal on the morrow if they would hiss off the scoundrel who
turned him into ridicule. The injured man learned from his friends that
Foote was received that night better than ever. Nevertheless, in the
morning, the ragged troop of boys appeared to demand their recompense,
and when the printer reproached them for their treachery, their
spokesman said: "Plase yer honor, we did all we could, for the actor-man
had heard of us, and did not come at all at all. And so we had nobody to
hiss. But when we saw yer honor's own dear self come on, we did clap,
indeed we did, and showed you all the respect and honor in our power.
And so yer honor won't forget us because yer honor's enemy was afraid to
come, and left yer honor to yer own dear self."

Immortal sermons are disguised in legends; the most familiar objects
are perpetually preaching to us. Ages ago, the Germans have it, there
went, one Sunday morning, an old man into the forest to cut wood. When
he had made a bundle, he slung it on his staff, cast it over his
shoulder, and started for home. On his way he met a minister, all in his
bands and robes, who asked him, "Don't you know, my friend, that it is
Sunday on earth, when all must rest from their labors?" "Sunday on
earth, Monday in heaven, it is all one to me," laughed the woodman.
"Then bear your burden forever," said the priest; "and as you value not
Sunday on earth, you shall have Monday in heaven till the great day."
Thereupon the speaker vanished, and the man was caught up, with cane and
fagots, into the moon, where you can see him any clear night. The
Norwegians think they see both a man and woman; and the legend is, that
the former threw branches at people going to church, and the latter made
butter on Sunday. In the clear, cold nights of winter they will point
out the man carrying his bundle of thorns, and the woman her butter-tub.
In Norway, the red-crested, black woodpecker is known under the name of
Gertrud's bird. Its origin, according to Thorpe, is as follows: When our
Lord, accompanied by St. Peter, was wandering on earth, they came to a
woman who was occupied in baking: her name was Gertrud, and on her head
she wore a red hood. Weary and hungry from their long journeying, our
Lord begged for a cake. She took a little dough and set it on to bake,
and it grew so large that it filled the whole pan. Thinking it too much
for alms, she took a smaller quantity of dough, and again began to bake,
but this cake also swelled up to the same size as the first; she then
took still less dough, and when the cake had become as large as the
preceding ones, Gertrud said: "You must go without alms; for all my
bakings are too large for you." Then was our Lord wroth, and said,
"Because thou gavest me nothing, thou shalt for punishment become a
little bird, shalt seek thy dry food between the wood and the bark, and
drink only when it rains." Hardly were these words spoken when the woman
was transformed to the Gertrud bird, and flew away through the kitchen
chimney; and at this day she is seen with a red hood and black body,
because she was blackened by the soot of the chimney. She constantly
pecks the bark of trees for sustenance, and whistles against rain; for
she always thirsts and hopes to drink. According to the legend, the
Wandering Jew is a poor shoemaker of Jerusalem. When Christ, bearing his
cross, passed before his house, and asked his leave to repose for a
moment on the stone bench at his door, the Jew replied harshly, "Go
on--go on!" and refused him. "It is thou who shalt go on till the end of
time!" was Christ's reply, in a sad but severe tone.

Lord Cockburn, in his Memorials, relates an anecdote of Dr. Henry, the
historian, as told to him by Sir Harry Moncreiff, who was the doctor's
favorite younger friend. The doctor was living at a place of his own in
his native county of Stirling. He was about seventy-two, and had been
for some time very feeble. He wrote to Sir Harry that he was dying, and
thus invited him for the last time--"Come out here directly. I have got
something to do this week, I have got to die." Sir Harry went; and found
his friend plainly sinking, but resigned and cheerful. He had no
children, and there was nobody with him except his wife. She and Sir
Harry remained alone with him for about three days, being his last
three; during a great part of which the reverend historian sat in his
easy chair, and conversed, and listened to reading, and dozed. While
engaged in this way, the hoofs of a horse were heard clattering in the
court below. Mrs. Henry looked out and exclaimed that it was "that
wearisome body," naming a neighboring minister, who was famous for never
leaving a house after he had once got into it. "Keep him out," cried
the doctor, "don't let the crater in here." But before they could secure
his exclusion, the crater's steps were heard on the stair, and he was at
the door. The doctor instantly winked significantly, and signed to them
to sit down and be quiet, and he would pretend to be sleeping. The hint
was taken; and when the intruder entered he found the patient asleep in
his cushioned chair. Sir Harry and Mrs. Henry put their fingers to their
lips, and pointing to the supposed slumberer as one not to be disturbed,
shook their heads. The man sat down near the door, like one inclined to
wait till the nap was over. Once or twice he tried to speak; but was
instantly repressed by another finger on the lip, and another shake of
the head. So he sat on, all in perfect silence for about a quarter of an
hour; during which Sir Harry occasionally detected the dying man peeping
cautiously through the fringes of his eyelids, to see how his visitor
was coming on. At last Sir Harry tired, and he and Mrs. Henry, pointing
to the poor doctor, fairly waved the visitor out of the room; on which
the doctor opened his eyes wide, and had a tolerably hearty laugh; which
was renewed when the sound of the horse's feet made them certain that
their friend was actually off the premises. Dr. Henry died that night.

Douglas Jerrold speaks of a London tradesman of great practical
benevolence. It was the happiness of his temperament to recommend to the
palates of babes and sucklings the homeliest, nay, the most disagreeable
shapes, by the lusciousness of their material. The man made semblances
of all things in sugar.

Did you ever read that remarkable paper of Lamb's, the Reminiscences of
Juke Judkins, Esq., of Birmingham? It is a nice, microscopic,
philosophic study and analysis of meanness,--as common, we dare say, in
this world, as avarice,--and will make us wonder that ordinary gifts and
traits can be so perverted and belittled by debasing uses. All that is
good of humanity was once united with Divinity, and made the best
character that ever existed on earth. Humiliating it would be, if not
impious, to imagine how much worse might be the devil if he would adopt
the bestial qualities and worse than Satanic traits that men are
constantly exposing and cultivating in their relations with one another.
"I was always," says Juke, "my father's favorite. He took a delight, to
the very last, in recounting the little sagacious tricks and innocent
artifices of my childhood. One manifestation thereof I never heard him
repeat without tears of joy trickling down his cheeks. It seems that
when I quitted the parental roof (August 27, 1788), being then six years
and not quite a month old, to proceed to the Free School at Warwick,
where my father was a sort of trustee, my mother--as mothers are usually
provident on these occasions--had stuffed the pocket of the coach, which
was to convey me and six more children of my own growth that were going
to be entered along with me at the same seminary, with a prodigious
quantity of gingerbread, which I remember my father said was more than
was needed; and so indeed it was; for, if I had been to eat it all
myself, it would have got stale and mouldy before it had been half
spent. The consideration whereof set me upon my contrivances how I might
secure to myself as much of the gingerbread as would keep good for the
next two or three days, and yet none of the rest in manner be wasted. I
had a little pair of pocket compasses, which I usually carried about me
for the purpose of making draughts and measurements, at which I was
always very ingenious, of the various engines and mechanical inventions
in which such a town as Birmingham abounded. By the means of these, and
a small penknife which my father had given me, I cut out the one half of
the cake, calculating that the remainder would reasonably serve my turn;
and subdividing it into many little slices, which were curious to see
for the neatness and niceness of their proportion, I sold it out in so
many pennyworths to my young companions as served us all the way to
Warwick, which is a distance of some twenty miles from this town; and
very merry, I assure you, we made ourselves with it, feasting all the
way. By this honest stratagem, I put double the prime cost of the
gingerbread into my purse, and secured as much as I thought would keep
good and moist for my next two or three days' eating. When I told this
to my parents on their first visit to me at Warwick, my father (good
man) patted me on the cheek, and stroked my head, and seemed as if he
could never make enough of me; but my mother unaccountably burst into
tears, and said 'it was a very niggardly action,' or some such
expression, and that 'she would rather it would please God to take
me'--meaning, God help me, that I should die--'than that she should live
to see me grow up a mean man;' which shows the difference of parent from
parent, and how some mothers are more harsh and intolerant to their
children than some fathers; when we might expect the contrary. My
father, however, loaded me with presents from that time, which made me
the envy of my school-fellows. As I felt this growing disposition in
them, I naturally sought to avert it by all the means in my power; and
from that time I used to eat my little packages of fruit, and other nice
things, in a corner, so privately that I was never found out. Once, I
remember, I had a huge apple sent me, of that sort which they call
cats'-heads. I concealed this all day under my pillow; and at night, but
not before I had ascertained that my bed-fellow was sound asleep,--which
I did by pinching him rather smartly two or three times, which he seemed
to perceive no more than a dead person, though once or twice he made a
motion as he would turn, which frightened me,--I say, when I had made
all sure, I fell to work upon my apple; and, though it was as big as an
ordinary man's two fists, I made shift to get through before it was time
to get up. And a more delicious feast I never made; thinking all night
what a good parent I had (I mean my father), to send me so many nice
things, when the poor lad that lay by me had no parent or friend in the
world to send him anything nice; and, thinking of his desolate
condition, I munched and munched as silently as I could, that I might
not set him a longing if he overheard me. And yet, for all this
considerateness and attention to other people's feelings, I was never
much a favorite with my school-fellows; which I have often wondered at,
seeing that I never defrauded any one of them of the value of a
half-penny, or told stories of them to their master, as some little
lying boys would do, but was ready to do any of them all the services in
my power that were consistent with my own well-doing. I think nobody can
be expected to go further than that." Juke, in the course of time, was
engaged to be married to a maiden named Cleora. Hear him relate the
circumstance that broke off the engagement: "I was never," he says,
"much given to theatrical entertainments; that is, at no turn of my life
was I ever what they call a regular play-goer; but on some occasion of a
benefit-night, which was expected to be very productive, and indeed
turned out so, Cleora expressing a desire to be present, I could do no
less than offer, as I did very willingly, to squire her and her mother
to the pit. At that time, it was not customary in our town for
trades-folk, except some of the very topping ones, to sit, as they now
do, in the boxes. At the time appointed, I waited upon the ladies, who
had brought with them a young man, a distant relation, whom it seems
they had invited to be of the party. This a little disconcerted me, as I
had about me barely silver enough to pay for our three selves at the
door, and did not at first know that their relation had proposed paying
for himself. However, to do the young man justice, he not only paid for
himself but for the old lady besides; leaving me only to pay for two, as
it were. In our passage to the theatre, the notice of Cleora was
attracted to some orange wenches that stood about the doors vending
their commodities. She was leaning on my arm; and I could feel her every
now and then giving me a nudge, as it is called, which I afterward
discovered were hints that I should buy some oranges. It seems it is a
custom at Birmingham, and perhaps in other places, when a gentleman
treats ladies to the play,--especially when a full night is expected,
and that the house will be inconveniently warm,--to provide them with
this kind of fruit, oranges being esteemed for their cooling property.
But how could I guess at that, never having treated ladies to a play
before, and being, as I said, quite a novice in these kind of
entertainments? At last, she spoke plain out, and begged that I would
buy some of 'those oranges,' pointing to a particular barrow. But, when
I came to examine the fruit, I did not think the quality of it was
answerable to the price. In this way, I handled several baskets of them;
but something in them all displeased me. Some had thin rinds, and some
were plainly over-ripe, which is as great a fault as not being ripe
enough; and I could not (what they call) make a bargain. While I stood
haggling with the women secretly determining to put off my purchase till
I should get within the theatre, where I expected we should have better
choice, the young man, the cousin (who, it seems, had left us without my
missing him), came running to us with his pockets stuffed out with
oranges, inside and out, as they say. It seems, not liking the look of
the barrow-fruit any more than myself, he had slipped away to an eminent
fruiterer's, about three doors distant, which I never had the sense to
think of, and had laid out a matter of two shillings in some of the best
St. Michael's, I think, I ever tasted. What a little hinge, as I said
before, the most important affairs in life may turn upon! The mere
inadvertence to the fact that there was an eminent fruiterer's within
three doors of us, though we had just passed it without the thought once
occurring to me, which he had taken advantage of, lost me the affection
of my Cleora. From that time she visibly cooled toward me, and her
partiality was as visibly transferred to this cousin. I was long unable
to account for this change in her behavior; when one day, accidentally
discoursing of oranges to my mother, alone, she let drop a sort of
reproach to me, as if I had offended Cleora by my nearness, as she
called it, that evening. Even now, when Cleora has been wedded some
years to that same officious relation, as I may call him, I can hardly
be persuaded that such a trifle could have been the motive to her
inconstancy; for could she suppose that I would sacrifice my dearest
hopes in her to the paltry sum of two shillings, when I was going to
treat her to the play, and her mother too (an expense of more than four
times that amount), if the young man had not interfered to pay for the
latter, as I mentioned? But the caprices of the sex are past finding
out; and I begin to think my mother was in the right; for doubtless
women know women better than we can pretend to know them."

Juke would have made a good tradesman under the rules laid down by De
Foe: "A tradesman behind his counter must have no flesh and blood about
him, no passions, no resentment; he must never be angry, no, not so much
as seem to be so, if a customer tumbles him five hundred pounds' worth
of goods, and scarce bids money for anything; nay, though they really
come to his shop with no intent to buy, as many do, only to see what is
to be sold, and though he knows they cannot be better pleased than they
are at some other shop where they intend to buy, 't is all one; the
tradesman must take it; he must place it to the account of his calling,
that 't is his business to be ill-used and resent nothing. I could give
you many examples, how and in what manner a shopkeeper is to behave
himself in the way of business; what impertinences, what taunts, flouts,
and ridiculous things he must bear in his trade; and must not show the
least return, or the least signal of disgust; he must have no passions,
no fire in his temper; he must be all soft and smooth; nay, if his real
temper be naturally fiery and hot, he must show none of it in his shop;
he must be a perfect, complete hypocrite, if he would be a complete
tradesman. It is true, natural tempers are not to be always
counterfeited: the man cannot easily be a lamb in his shop and a lion in
himself; but, let it be easy or hard, it must be done, and is done.
There are men who have by custom and usage brought themselves to it,
that nothing could be meeker and milder than they when behind the
counter, and yet nothing be more furious and raging in every other part
of life; nay, the provocations they have met with in their shops have so
irritated their rage, that they would go up-stairs from their shop, and
fall into frenzies, and a kind of madness, and beat their heads against
the wall, and perhaps mischief themselves, if not prevented, till the
violence of it had gotten vent; and the passions abate and cool. I heard
once of a shopkeeper that behaved himself thus to such an extreme that,
when he was provoked by the impertinence of the customers beyond what
his temper could bear, he would go up-stairs and beat his wife, kick his
children about like dogs, and be as furious for two or three minutes as
a man chained down in Bedlam; and again, when that heat was over, would
sit down and cry faster than the children he had abused; and, after the
fit, he would go down into the shop again, and be as humble, as
courteous, and as calm, as any man whatever; so absolute a government of
his passions had he in the shop, and so little out of it: in the shop, a
soulless animal that would resent nothing; and in the family, a madman:
in the shop, meek like a lamb; but in the family, outrageous, like a
Libyan lion. The sum of the matter is, it is necessary for a tradesman
to subject himself, by all the ways possible, to his business; his
customers are to be his idols: so far as he may worship idols by
allowance, he is to bow down to them, and worship them; at least, he is
not in any way to displease them, or show any disgust or distaste,
whatever they may say or do. The bottom of all is that he is intending
to get money by them; and it is not for him that gets money to offer the
least inconvenience to them by whom he gets it: he is to consider that,
as Solomon says, 'the borrower is servant to the lender;' so the seller
is servant to the buyer."

Poor George Dyer "commenced life, after a course of hard study, in the
'House of Pure Emanuel,' as usher to a knavish, fanatic school-master,
at a salary of eight pounds per annum, with board and lodging. Of this
poor stipend he never received above half in all the laborious years he
served this man. He tells a pleasant anecdote, that when poverty,
staring out at his ragged knees, sometimes compelled him, against the
modesty of his nature, to hint at arrears, the school-master would take
no immediate notice; but after supper, when the school was called
together to even-song, he would never fail to introduce some instructive
homily against riches, and the corruption of the heart occasioned
through the desire of them, ending with, 'Lord, keep thy servants, above
all things, from the heinous sin of avarice. Having food and raiment,
let us therewithal be content. Give me Agur's wish,'--and the
like,--which, to the little auditory, sounded like a doctrine full of
Christian prudence and simplicity, but to poor Dyer was a receipt in
full for that quarter's demands at least."

Southey wrote to Cottle from Lisbon: "The English here unite the spirit
of commerce with the frivolous amusement of high life. One of them, who
plays every night (Sundays are not excepted here), will tell you how
closely he attends to profit. 'I never pay a porter for bringing a
burden till the next day,' says he, 'for while the fellow feels his back
ache with the weight, he charges high; but when he comes the next day
the feeling is gone, and he asks only half the money.' And the author of
this philosophical scheme is worth two hundred thousand dollars!"

"The late grand duke," said Goethe to Eckermann, "was very partial to
Merck, so much so that he once became his security for a debt of four
thousand dollars. Very soon Merck, to our surprise, gave him back his
bond. As Merck's circumstances were not improved, we could not divine
how he had been able to do this. When I saw him again, he explained the
enigma thus: 'The duke,' said he, 'is an excellent, generous man, who
trusts and helps men whenever he can. So I thought to myself, Now if you
cozen him out of his money, that will prejudice a thousand others; for
he will lose his precious trustfulness, and many unfortunate but worthy
men will suffer, because one was worthless. So I made a speculation, and
borrowed the money from a scoundrel, whom it will be no matter if I do
cheat; but if I had not paid our good lord, the duke, it would have been
a pity.'"

"The greatest pleasure I know," said Lamb, "is to do a good action by
stealth, and to have it found out by accident."




IV.

STANDARDS.


At a glance, it would appear that, as a rule, all men think all men
imperfect but themselves. It follows, therefore, that all would reform
all but themselves. But if every man's standard of excellence could be
accounted for, what a melancholy history of human frailties and follies
might be had. What sad curiosities, perhaps, would be our pet
virtues--offspring, alas, too often, of sated appetites, spent passions,
hair-breadth escapes, and disappointed hopes. Knowing all, with what
wondrous pity must God hear our poor prayers. To seek perfect virtue or
contentment "is as hopeless as to try to recover a lost limb. Those only
have it who never have thought about it. The moment we feel that we wish
for it, we may be certain that it is gone forever." "To know how
cherries and strawberries taste, you must ask the children and the
birds."

"All things," says Emerson, "work exactly according to their quality,
and according to their quantity; attempt nothing they cannot do, except
man." He ventures "to say that what is bad is bad," and finds himself
"at war with all the world." "Do not be so vain of your one objection.
Do you think there is only one? Alas, my good friend, there is no part
of society or of life better than any other part. All our things are
right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all alike." "Probably
there never was," says De Quincey, "one thought, from the foundation of
the earth, that has passed through the mind of man, which did not offer
some blemish, some sorrowful shadow of pollution, when it came up for
review before a heavenly tribunal; that is, supposing it a thought
entangled at all with human interests or human passions." "All the
progress which we have really made," says a writer in Blackwood, "and
all the additional and fictitious progress which exists in our
imagination, prompts us to the false idea that there is a remedy for
everything, and that no pain is inevitable. But there are pains which
are inevitable in spite of philosophy, and conflicting claims to which
Solomon himself could do no justice. We are not complete syllogisms, to
be kept in balance by intellectual regulations, we human creatures. We
are of all things and creatures in the world the most incomplete; and
there are conditions of our warfare, for the redress of which, in spite
of all the expedients of social economy, every man and woman, thrown by
whatever accident out of the course of nature, must be content to wait
perhaps for years, perhaps for a life long, perhaps till the
consummation of all things." "All the speculations and schemes of the
sanguine projectors of all ages," says John Foster, "have left the world
still a prey to infinite legions of vices and miseries, an immortal
band, which has trampled in scorn on the monuments and the dust of the
self-idolizing men who dreamed, each in his day, that they were born to
chase these evils out of the earth. If these vain demi-gods of an hour,
who trusted to change the world, and who perhaps wished to change it
only to make it a temple to their fame, could be awaked from the
unmarked graves into which they sunk, to look a little while round on
the world for some traces of the success of their projects, would they
not be eager to retire again into the chambers of death, to hide the
shame of their remembered presumption?" "It is not given to reason,"
said Vauvenargues, "to cure all the vices of nature." "For a reasonable,
voluntary being," says Sterling, "learning as he only can learn by
experience, there will always be errors behind to mourn over, and a
vista of unattainable good before, which inevitably lengthens as we
advance." If we only could "grieve without affectation or imbecility,
and journey on without turning aside or stopping."

Leslie says, in his Recollections: "I remember seeing at Howard Payne's
lodgings, at a breakfast which he gave to a large party, the then
celebrated Robert Owen, who was at that time filling the papers with his
scheme for remodeling society on a plan that was to transcend Utopia. I
remember Payne telling me that when Wilberforce, on being urged to bring
this plan before Parliament, replied that it was too late in the season,
Owen exclaimed, "What, sir! put off the happiness of mankind till
another session of Parliament!""

"I overheard Jove one day," said Silenus, "talking of destroying the
earth; he said it had failed; they were all rogues and vixens, who went
from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded each other. Minerva
said she hoped not; they were only ridiculous little creatures, with
this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect,
seen far or near; if you called them bad, they would appear so; and
there was no one person or action among them which would not puzzle her
owl, much more all Olympus, to know whether it was fundamentally bad or
good."

"It is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and
man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion
in some faculty. Each seems to have some compensation yielded to him by
his infirmity, and every hinderance operates as a concentration of his
force." "Everything we do has its results. But the right and prudent
does not always lead to good, or contrary measures to bad; frequently
the reverse takes place. Some time since," said Goethe, "I made a
mistake in one of these transactions with booksellers, and was disturbed
that I had done so. But, as circumstances turned out, it would have
been very unfortunate if I had not made that very mistake. Such
instances occur frequently in life, and it is the observation of them
which enables men of the world to go to work with such freedom and
boldness."

"When we see a special reformer, we feel like asking him," says Emerson,
"What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?"
"Your mode of happiness," said Coleridge, talking to such an one, "would
make me miserable. To go about doing as much good as possible, to as
many men as possible, is, indeed, an excellent object for a man to
propose to himself; but then, in order that you may not sacrifice the
real good and happiness of others to your particular views, which may be
quite different from your neighbors', you must do that good to others
which the reason, common to all, pronounces to be good for all." "What I
object," said Sydney Smith, "to Scotch philosophers in general is, that
they reason upon man as they would upon a divinity; they pursue truth
without caring if it be useful truth." Michel Angelo's great picture of
the Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel, narrowly escaped from
destruction by the monastic views of Paul IV. In the commencement of his
reign, we are told, he conceived a notion of reforming that picture, in
which so many academical figures offended his sense of propriety. This
was communicated to Michel Angelo, who desired that the pope might be
told "that what he wished was very little, and might be easily effected;
for if his holiness would only reform the opinions of mankind, the
picture would be reformed of itself." "You must have a genius for
charity as well as for anything else. As for doing good," says Thoreau,
"that is one of the professions which are full. What good I do, in the
common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the
most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are
and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and
with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at
all in this strain, I should say, rather, Set about being good. As if
the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of
a moon, or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin
Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and
tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily
increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness
that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile
too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather,
as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him, getting
good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his
beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the
beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of
heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried up every
spring, and made the great Desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter
hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun,
through grief at his death, did not shine for a year."

"There is no odor so bad," continues the same defiant radical, "as that
which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion.
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the
conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from
that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom,
which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are
suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to
me,--some of its virus mingled with my blood. No; in this case I would
rather suffer evil the natural way."

An officer of the government called one day at the White House, and
introduced a clerical friend to Lincoln. "Mr. President," said he,
"allow me to present to you my friend, the Rev. Mr. F., of ----. Mr. F.
has expressed a desire to see you and have some conversation with you,
and I am happy to be the means of introducing him." The president shook
hands with Mr. F., and, desiring him to be seated, took a seat himself.
Then, his countenance having assumed an air of patient waiting, he said,
"I am now ready to hear what you have to say." "Oh, bless you, sir,"
said Mr. F., "I have nothing special to say; I merely called to pay my
respects to you, and, as one of the million, to assure you of my hearty
sympathy and support." "My dear sir," said the president, rising
promptly, his face showing instant relief, and with both hands grasping
that of his visitor, "I am very glad to see you, indeed. I thought you
had come to preach to me!"

"My father," said the Attic Philosopher, "feared everything that had the
appearance of a lesson. He used to say that virtue could make herself
devoted friends, but she did not take pupils; therefore he was not
anxious to teach goodness; he contented himself with sowing the seeds of
it, certain that experience would make them grow." "The disease of men,"
said Mencius, "is this: that they neglect their own fields, and go to
weed the fields of others, and that what they require from others is
great, while what they lay upon themselves is light."

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil," says Thoreau,
again, "to one who is striking at the root; and it may be that he who
bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the
most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain
to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every
tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest.... The
philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his
own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should
impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not
our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.... If
anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he
have a pain in his bowels even, for that is the seat of sympathy, he
forthwith sets about reforming--the world. Being a microcosm himself, he
discovers--and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make
it--that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact,
the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to
think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and
straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the
Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and
thus, by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the
meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of
his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its
cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity
and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any
enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall
know, a worse man than myself.... My excuse for not lecturing against
the use of tobacco is that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which
reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I
have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you should ever be
betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand
know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the
drowning, and tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set about some
free labor."

It has been observed that persons who are themselves very pure are
sometimes on that account blunt in their moral feelings. "Right, too
rigid, hardens into wrong"--even into cruelty sometimes. A friend of one
of these malicious philanthropists dined with him one day, and
afterward related an anecdote illustrative of his character. While at
the table, the children of the refining humanitarian, playing about the
open door, were noisy and intractable, which caused him to speak to them
impatiently. The disturbance, however, did not cease, and hearing one of
the children cry out, he jumped spasmodically from the table, and
demanded to know what was the matter. Upon being informed that one of
them had accidentally pinched the finger of another, he immediately
seized the hand of the innocent offender, and placing the forefinger at
the hinge of the door, deliberately closed it--crushing the poor child's
finger as a punishment. There is another equally authentic story of a
reformer who hired his children to go to bed without their supper as a
means of preserving their health, and then stole their money back again
to pay them for the next abstinence.

"I have never known a trader in philanthropy," says Coleridge, "who was
not wrong in head or heart somewhere or other. Individuals so
distinguished are usually unhappy in their family relations: men not
benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost hostile to them; yet
lavishing money and labor and time on the race, the abstract notion."
"This is always true of those men," says Hawthorne, in his analysis of
Hollingsworth, "who have surrendered themselves to an overruling power.
It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a
motive power from within, but grows incorporate in all they think and
feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one
principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is not cowardice,
but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart, no sympathy, no
reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself
the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample
your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first
step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every
other step of their terribly straight path. They have an idol, to which
they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer
sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to
suspect--so cunning has the devil been with them--that this false deity,
in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see
only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself,
projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the
original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the
slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the
process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring
egotism."

The same writer, in one of his minor productions, says, "When a good man
has long devoted himself to a particular kind of beneficence, to one
species of reform, he is apt to become narrowed into the limits of the
path wherein he treads, and to fancy that there is no other good to be
done on earth but that self-same good to which he has put his hand, and
in the very mode that best suits his own conceptions. All else is
worthless. His scheme must be wrought out by the united strength of the
whole world's stock of love, or the world is no longer worthy of a
position in the universe. Moreover, powerful Truth, being the rich
grape-juice expressed from the vineyard of the ages, has an intoxicating
quality when imbibed by any save a powerful intellect, and often, as it
were, impels the quaffer to quarrel in his cups."

At a dinner-party one day, Madame de Stael said to Lady Mackintosh,
after Godwin was gone, "I am glad to have seen this man,--it is curious
to see how naturally Jacobins become the advocates of tyrants."

"I have often blamed myself," said Boswell, "for not feeling for others
as sensibly as many say they do." "Sir," replied Johnson, "don't be
duped by them any more. You will find these very feeling people are not
very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling."

A very large proportion of the men who during the French Revolution
proved themselves most absolutely indifferent to human suffering, were
deeply attached to animals. Fournier was devoted to a squirrel, Couthon
to a spaniel, Panis to two gold pheasants, Chaumette to an aviary, Marat
kept doves. Bacon has noticed that the Turks, who are a most cruel
people, are nevertheless conspicuous for their kindness to animals, and
he mentions the instance of a Christian boy who was nearly stoned to
death for gagging a long-billed fowl. Abbas, the viceroy, when a boy,
had his pastry-cook bastinadoed to death. Mehemet Ali mildly reproved
him for it, as a European would correct a child for killing a butterfly.
He explained to his little grandson that such things ought not to be
done without a motive. Abbe Migne tells how one old Roman fed his
oysters on his slaves; how another put a slave to death that a curious
friend might see what dying was like; how Galen's mother tore and bit
her waiting-women when she was in a passion with them. Caligula
conferred the honor of priesthood upon his horse. "The day before the
Circensian games," says Suetonius, "he used to send his soldiers to
enjoin silence in the neighborhood, that the repose of the animal might
not be disturbed. For this favorite, besides a marble stable, an ivory
manger, purple housings, and a jeweled frontlet, he appointed a house,
with a retinue of slaves, and fine furniture, for the reception of such
as were invited in the horse's name to sup with him. It is even said
that he intended to make him consul." In Egypt there are hospitals for
superannuated cats, and the most loathsome insects are regarded with
tenderness; but human life is treated as if it were of no account, and
human suffering scarcely elicits a care.

Sydney Smith advised the bishop of New Zealand, previous to his
departure, to have regard to the minor as well as to the more grave
duties of his station--to be given to hospitality, and, in order to
meet the tastes of his native guests, never to be without a smoked
little boy in the bacon-rack, and a cold clergyman on the sideboard.
"And as for myself, my lord," he concluded, "all I can say is, that when
your new parishioners do eat you, I sincerely hope you will disagree
with them."

Lamb once told a droll story of an India-house clerk accused of eating
man's flesh, and remarked that "among cannibals those who rejected the
favorite dish would be called misanthropists."

The eternal barbarisms must not be forgotten by the reformer while he is
reforming the barbarians. The pagan Frisians, that illustrious northern
German tribe, afterward known as the "free Frisians," "whose name is
synonymous with liberty,--nearest blood-relations of the Anglo-Saxon
race,"--struggled for centuries against the dominion of the Franks, and
were only eventually subjugated by Charlemagne, who left them their name
of free Frisians. "The Frisians," says their statute-book, "shall be
free as long as the wind blows out of the clouds and the world stands."
Radbod, their chief, was first overcome by Pepin the younger, and
Pepin's bastard, Charles the Hammer, with his "tremendous blows,
completed his father's work;" he "drove the Frisian chief into
submission, and even into Christianity. A bishop's indiscretion,
however, neutralized the apostolic blows" of the Christian conqueror.
"The pagan Radbod had already immersed one of his royal legs in the
baptismal font, when a thought struck him. 'Where are my dead
forefathers at present?' he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfran.
'In hell, with all other unbelievers,' was the imprudent answer. 'Mighty
well,' replied Radbod, removing his leg, 'then will I rather feast with
my ancestors in the halls of Woden, than dwell with your little
starveling band of Christians in heaven.' Entreaties and threats were
unavailing. The Frisian declined positively a rite which was to cause
an eternal separation from his buried kindred, and he died as he had
lived, a heathen."

Tomochichi, chief of the Chickasaws, said to Wesley, "I will go up and
speak to the wise men of the nation, and I hope they will hear. But we
would not be made Christians as the Spaniards make Christians; we would
be taught before we are baptised." He felt the want unconsciously
acknowledged by the King of Siam, spoken of by John Locke in his chapter
on Probability. A Dutch ambassador, when entertaining the king with the
peculiarities of Holland, amongst other things told the sovereign that
the water in Holland would sometimes in cold weather be so hard that men
walked upon it, and that it would bear an elephant if he were there. To
which the king replied, "Hitherto I have believed the strange things you
have told me, because I looked upon you as a sober, fair man, but now I
am sure you lie." But Tomochichi had an eye that saw the faults of the
colonists, if he did not understand their religion. When urged to listen
to the doctrines of Christianity he keenly replied, "Why, these are
Christians at Savannah! these are Christians at Frederica! Christian
much drunk! Christian beat men! Christian tell lies! Devil Christian! Me
no Christian!" This recalls the pathetic story of the West Indian
cazique, who, at the stake, refused life, temporal or eternal, at the
price of conversion, asking where he should go to live so happily. He
was told--in heaven; and then he at once refused, on the ground that the
whites would be there; and he had rather live anywhere, or nowhere, than
dwell with such people as he had found the white Christians to be.
Almost the first word, says Dr. Medhurst, uttered by a Chinese, when
anything is said concerning the excellence of Christianity, is, "Why do
Christians bring us opium, and bring it directly in defiance of our
laws? The vile drug has destroyed my son, has ruined my brother, and
well-nigh led me to beggar my wife and children. Surely those who
import such a deleterious substance, and injure me for the sake of gain,
cannot wish me well, or be in possession of a religion better than my
own. Go first and persuade your own countrymen to relinquish their
nefarious traffic; and give me a prescription to correct this vile
habit, and then I will listen to your exhortations on the subject of
Christianity!" Dr. Livingstone says he found a tribe of men in the
interior of Africa so pure and simple that they seemed to have no idea
of untruthfulness and dishonesty until they were brought into contact
with Asiatics and Europeans. Some of Dr. Kane's men, "while resting at
Kalutunah's tent, had appropriated certain fox-skins, boots, and
sledges, which their condition seemed to require. The Esquimaux
complained of the theft, and Dr. Kane, after a careful inquiry into the
case, decided in their favor. He gave each five needles, a file, and a
stick of wood, and knives and other extras to Kalutunah and Shanghu, and
after regaling them with a hearty supper, he returned the stolen goods,
and tried to make them believe that his people did not steal, but only
took the articles to save their lives! In imitation of this Arctic
morality the natives, on their departure, carried off a few knives and
forks, which they deemed as essential to their happiness as the
fox-dresses were to the white men."

Among the airy visions which had been generated in the teeming brain of
Coleridge, says a writer in The London Quarterly, was the project of
pantisocracy--a republic to be founded in the wilds of America, of which
the fundamental principles were an equality of rank and property, and
where all who composed it were to be under the perpetual dominion of
reason, virtue, and love. Southey was inflamed by it and converted.
Through it he saw a way out of all his troubles. There he would enjoy
the felicity of living in a pure democracy, where he could sit unelbowed
by kings and aristocrats. "You," he wrote to his brother Tom, "are
unpleasantly situated, so is my mother, so were we all till this grand
scheme of pantisocracy flashed upon our minds, and now all is perfectly
delightful." Coleridge, contented to have delivered a glowing
description of Utopia, did nothing further, and departed on a pedestrian
tour through Wales, where, as the ridiculous will sometimes mingle
itself with the sublime, he feared he had caught the itch from an
admiring democratical auditor at an inn, who insisted upon shaking hands
with him. Some time after, Southey, having tried his panacea upon a few
select pantisocratic friends, wrote, "There was a time when I believed
in the persuadability of man, and had the mania of man-mending.
Experience has taught me better. The ablest physician can do little in
the great lazar-house of society. He acts the wisest part who retires
from the contagion."

"Nature goes her own way," said Goethe, "and all that to us seems an
exception is really according to order." He quoted the saying of
Rousseau, that you cannot hinder an earthquake by building a city near a
burning mountain. Peter the Great, he said, repeated Amsterdam so dear
to his youth, in locating St. Petersburg at the mouth of the Neva. The
ground rises in the neighborhood, and the emperor could have had a city
quite free from all the trouble arising from overflow if he had but gone
a li

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