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The Recreations of a Country Parson

by Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd · English · Gutenberg #5407 · 769,201 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Recreations of a Country Parson

Author: Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd


        
Release date: April 1, 2004 [eBook #5407]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5407

Credits: This eBook was created by Charles Aldarondo


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This eBook was created by Charles Aldarondo (pg@aldarondo.net).



THE RECREATIONS OF A COUNTRY PARSON.

SECOND SERIES.

A. K. H. BOYD.

BOSTON:

1862.






CONTENTS.





CHAPTER I. CONCERNING THE PARSON'S CHOICE

CHAPTER II. CONCERNING DISAPPOINTMENT AND SUCCESS

CHAPTER III. CONCERNING SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

CHAPTER IV. CONCERNING CHURCHYARDS

CHAPTER V. CONCERNING SUMMER DAYS

CHAPTER VI. CONCERNING SCREWS

CHAPTER VII. CONCERNING SOLITARY DAYS

CHAPTER VIII. CONCERNING GLASGOW DOWN THE WATER

CHAPTER IX. CONCERNING MAN AND HIS DWELLING-PLACE

CHAPTER X. LIFE AT THE WATER-CURE

CHAPTER XI. CONCERNING FRIENDS IN COUNCIL

CHAPTER XII. CONCERNING THE PULPIT IN SCOTLAND

CHAPTER XIII. CONCERNING FUTURE TEARS

CHAPTER XIV. CONCLUSION





CHAPTER I.

CONCERNING THE PARSON'S CHOICE BETWEEN TOWN AND COUNTRY.




One very happy circumstance in a clergyman's lot, is that he is
saved from painful perplexity as regards his choice of the scene
in which he is to spend his days and years. I am sorry for the
man who returns from Australia with a large fortune; and with no
further end in life than to settle down somewhere and enjoy it.
For in most cases he has no special tie to any particular place;
and he must feel very much perplexed where to go. Should any person
who may read this page cherish the purpose of leaving me a hundred
thousand pounds to invest in a pretty little estate, I beg that
he will at once abandon such a design. He would be doing me no
kindness. I should be entirely bewildered in trying to make up my
mind where I should purchase the property. I should be rent asunder
by conflicting visions of rich English landscape, and heathery Scottish
hills: of seaside breezes, and inland meadows: of horse-chestnut
avenues, and dark stern pine-woods. And after the estate had been
bought, I should always be looking back and thinking I might have
done better. So, on the whole, I would prefer that my reader should
himself buy the estate, and bequeath it to me: and then I could
soon persuade myself that it was the prettiest estate and the
pleasantest neighbourhood in Britain.

Now, as a general rule, the Great Disposer says to the parson, Here
is your home, here lies your work through life: go and reconcile
your mind to it, and do your best in it. No doubt there are men in
the Church whose genius, popularity, influence, or luck is such,
that they have a bewildering variety of livings pressed upon them:
but it is not so with ordinary folk; and certainly it was not so
with me. I went where Providence bade me go, which was not where
I had wished to go, and not where I had thought to go. Many who
know me through the pages which make this and a preceding volume,
have said, written, and printed, that I was specially cut out for
a country parson, and specially adapted to relish a quiet country
life. Not more, believe me, reader, than yourself. It is in every
man who sets himself to it to attain the self-same characteristics.
It is quite true I have these now: but, a few years since, never
was mortal less like them. No cockney set down near Sydney Smith
at Foston-le-Clay: no fish, suddenly withdrawn from its native
stream: could feel more strange and cheerless than did I when I
went to my beautiful country parish, where I have spent such happy
days, and which I have come to love so much.

I have said that the parson is for the most part saved the labour
of determining where he shall pitch his tent: his place and his
path in life are marked out for him. But he has his own special
perplexity and labour: quite different from those of the man to
whom the hundred thousand pounds to invest in land are bequeathed:
still, as some perhaps would think, no less hard. His work is to
reconcile his mind to the place where God has set him. Every mortal
must, in many respects, face one of these two trials. There is all
the world before you, where to choose; and then the struggle to
make a decided choice with which you shall on reflection remain
entirely satisfied.  Or there is no choice at all: the Hand above
gives you your place and your work; and then there is the struggle
heartily and cheerfully to acquiesce in the decree as to which you
were not consulted.

And this is not always an easy thing; though I am sure that the
man who honestly and Christianly tries to do it, will never fail to
succeed at last. How curiously people are set down in the Church;
and indeed in all other callings whatsoever! You find men in the
last places they would have chosen; in the last places for which
you would say they are suited. You pass a pretty country church,
with its parsonage hard-by embosomed in trees and bright with
roses.  Perhaps the parson of that church had set his heart on an
entirely different kind of charge: perhaps he is a disappointed
man, eager to get away, and (the very worst possible policy) trying
for every vacancy of which he can hear. You think, as you pass by,
and sit down on the churchyard wall, how happy you could be in so
quiet and sweet a spot: well, if you are willing to do a thing,
it is pleasant: but if you are struggling with a chain you cannot
break, it is miserable. The pleasantest thing becomes painful,
if it is felt as a restraint. What can be cosier than the warm
environment of sheet and blanket which encircles you in your snug
bed? Yet if you awake during the night at some alarm of peril, and
by a sudden effort try at once to shake yourself clear of these
trammels, you will, for the half-minute before you succeed, feel
that soft restraint as irksome as iron fetters. 'Let your will lead
whither necessity would drive,' said Locke, 'and you will always
preserve your liberty.' No doubt, it is wise advice; but how to do
all that?

Well, it can be done: but it costs an effort. Great part of the
work of the civilized and educated man consists of that which the
savage, and even the uneducated man, would not regard as work at
all. The things which cost the greatest effort may be done, perhaps,
as you sit in an easy chair with your eyes shut. And such an effort
is that of making up our mind to many things, both in our own lot,
and in the lot of others. I mean not merely the intellectual effort
to look at the success of other men and our own failure in such a
way as that we shall be intellectually convinced that, we have no
right to complain of either: I do not mean merely the labour to
put things in the right point of view: but the moral effort to look
fairly at the facts not in any way disguised,--not tricked out by
some skilful art of putting things;--and yet to repress all wrong
feeling;--all fretfulness, envy, jealousy, dislike, hatred. I do
not mean, to persuade ourselves that the grapes are sour; but (far
nobler surely) to be well aware that they are sweet, and yet be
content that another should have them and not we. I mean the labour,
when you have run in a race and been beaten, to resign your mind
to the fact that you have been beaten, and to bear a kind feeling
towards the man who beat you. And this is labour, and hard labour;
though very different from that physical exertion which the uncivilized
man would understand by the word. Every one can understand that to
carry a heavy portmanteau a mile is work. Not every one remembers
that the owner of the portmanteau, as he walks on carrying nothing
weightier than an umbrella, may be going through exertion much
harder than that of the porter. Probably St. Paul never spent
days of harder work in all his life, than the days he spent lying
blind at Damascus, struggling to get free from the prejudices and
convictions of all his past years, and resolving--on the course he
would pursue in the years to come.

I know that in all professions and occupations to which men
can devote themselves, there is such a thing as com petition: and
wherever there is competition, there will be the temptation to envy,
jealousy, and detraction, as regards a man's competitors: and so
there will be the need of that labour and exertion which lie in
resolutely trampling that temptation down. You are quite certain,
rny friend, as you go on through life, to have to make up your
mind to failure and disappointment on your own part, and to seeing
other men preferred before you. When these tilings come, there
are two ways of meeting them. One is, to hate and vilify those who
surpass you, either in merit or in success: to detract from their
merit and under-rate their success: or, if you must admit some
merit, to bestow upon it very faint praise. Now, all this is natural
enough; but assuredly it is neither a right nor a happy course to
follow.  The other and better way is, to fight these tendencies to
the death: to struggle against them, to pray against them: to resign
yourself to God's good will: to admire and love the man who beats
you. This course is the right one, and the happy one. I believe the
greatest blessing God can send a man, is disappointment, rightly
met and used. There is no more ennobling discipline: there is no
discipline that results in a happier or kindlier temper of mind.
And in honestly fighting against the evil impulses which have been
mentioned, you will assuredly get help and strength to vanquish
them. I have seen the plain features look beautiful, when man or
woman was faithfully by God's grace resisting wrong feelings and
tendencies, such as these. It is a noble end to attain, and it
is well worth all the labour it costs, to resolutely be resigned,
cheerful, and kind, when you feel a strong inclination to be
discontented, moody, and bitter of heart. Well said a very wise
mortal, 'Better is he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh
a city.' And that ruling of the spirit which is needful to rightly
meet disappointment, brings out the best and noblest qualities that
can be found in man.

Sometimes, indeed, even in the parson's quiet life, he may know
something of the first perplexity of which we have been thinking:
the perplexity of the man who is struggling to make up his mind
where he is to settle down for the remainder of life. And it is
not long since such a perplexity came my way. For I had reached a
spot in my onward path at which I must make a decided choice. I must
go either to the right or the left: for, as Goldsmith has remarked
with great force, when the road you are pursuing parts into several
roads, you must be careful to follow only one. And I had to decide
between country and town. I had to resolve whether I was to remain
in that quiet cure of souls about which I formerly told you; or go
into the hard work and hurry of a large parish in a certain great
city.

I had been for more than five years in that sweet country place: it
seemed a very long time as the days passed over. Even slow-growing
ivy grew feet longer in that time, and climbing roses covered yards
and yards of wall. And for very many months I thought that here I
was to live and die, and never dreamt of change. Not indeed that
my tastes were always such. At the beginning of that term of years,
when I went down each Sunday morning to preach in the plain little
church to a handful of quiet rustic people, I used to think of
a grand edifice where once upon a time, at my first start in my
profession, I had preached each afternoon for many months to a very
large congregation of educated folk; and I used to wonder whether
my old friends remembered and missed me. Once there was to me
a fascination about that grand church, and all connected with it:
now it is to me no more than it is to every one else, and I pass
near it almost every day and hardly look at it. Other men have
taken my old place in it, and had the like feelings, and got over
them. Several of these men I never saw: how much I should like to
shake each man's hand! But all these fancies were long, long ago:
I was pleased to be a country parson, and to make the best of it.
Friends, who have held like stations in life, have you not felt,
now and then, a little waking up of old ideas and aspirations? All
this, you thought, was not what you once had wished, and pictured
to yourself. You vainly fancied, in your student days, that you
might reach a more eminent place and greater usefulness. I know,
indeed, that even such as have gone very unwillingly to a little
remote country parish, have come most heartily to enjoy its peaceful
life: have grown fond of that, as they never thought to do. I do
not mean that you need affectedly talk, after a few months there,
as if you had lived in the country all your life, and as if your
thoughts had from childhood run upon horses, turnips, and corn. But
in sober earnest, as weeks pass over, you gain a great interest in
little country cares; and you discover that you may be abundantly
useful, and abundantly laborious, amid a small and simple population.

Yet sometimes, my clever friend, I know you sit down on a green
bank, under the trees, and look at your little church. You think,
of your companions and competitors in College days, filling
distinguished places in life: and, more particularly, of this and
that friend in your own calling, who preaches to as many people on
one Sunday as you do in half a year. Fine fellows they were: and
though you seldom meet now, you are sure they are faithful, laborious,
able, and devoted ministers: God bless them all! You wonder how
they can do so much work; and especially how they have confidence
to preach to so large and intelligent congregations. For a certain
timidity, and distrust of his own powers, grows upon the country
parson. He is reaching the juster estimate of himself, indeed: yet
there is something not desirable in the nervous dislike to preach
in large churches and to cultivated people which is sure to come.
And little things worry him, which would not worry a mind kept more
upon the stretch. It is possible enough that among the Cumberland
hills, or in curacies like Sydney Smith's on Salisbury Plain, or
wandering sadly by the shore of Shetland fiords, there may be men
who had in them the makings of eminent preachers; but whose powers
have never been called out, and are rusting sadly away: and in whom
many petty cares are developing a pettiness of nature.

I have observed that in those advertisements which occasionally appear
in certain newspapers, offering for sale the next presentation to
some living in the Church, the advertiser, after pointing out the
various advantages of the situation, frequently sums up by stating
that the population of the parish is very small, and so the
clergyman's duty very light. I always read such a statement with
great displeasure. For it seems to imply, that a clergyman's great
object is, to enjoy his benefice and do as little duty as possible
in return for it. I suppose it need not be proved, that if such
were truly the great object of any parson, he has no business to
be in the Church at all. Failing health, or powers overdriven, may
sometimes make even the parson whose heart is in his work desire a
charge whose duty and responsibility are comparatively small: but
I firmly believe that in the case of the great majority of clergymen,
it is the interest and delight they feel in their work, and not
its worldly emolument, that mainly attach them to their sacred
profession: and thus that the more work they have to do (provided
their strength be equal to it), the more desirable and interesting
they hold their charge to be. And I believe that the earnest pastor,
settled in some light and pleasant country charge, will oftentimes,
even amid his simple enjoyment of that pleasant life, think that
perhaps he would be more in the path of duty, if, while the best
years of his life are passing on, he were placed where he might
serve his Master in a larger sphere.

And thinking now and then in this fashion, I was all of a sudden
asked to undertake a charge such as would once have been my very
ideal: and in that noble city where my work began, and so which
has always been very dear. But I felt that everything was changed.
Before these years of growing experience, I dare say I should not
have feared to set myself even to work as hard; but now I doubted
greatly whether I should prove equal to it. That time in the country
had made me sadly lose confidence. And I thought it would be very
painful and discouraging to go to preach to a large congregation,
and to see it Sunday by Sunday growing less, as people got discontented
and dropped away.

But happily, those on whom I leant for guidance and advice, were
more hopeful than myself; and so I came away from my beautiful
country parish. You know, my friends, who have passed through the
like, the sorrow to look for the last time at each kind homely
face: the sorrow to turn away from the little church where you have
often preached to very small congregations: the sorrow to leave
each tree you have planted, and the evergreens whose growth you
have watched, year by year. Soon, you are in all the worry of what
in Scotland we call a flitting: the house and all its belongings
are turned upside down. The kindness of the people comes out with
tenfold strength when they know how soon you are to part. And some,
to whom you had tried to do little favours, and who had somewhat
disappointed you by the slight sense of them they had shown, now
testify by their tears a hearty regard which you never can forget.

The Sunday comes when you enter your old pulpit for the last time.
You had prepared your sermon in a room from which the carpet had
been removed, and amid a general confusion and noise of packing.
The church is crowded in a fashion never seen before. You go through
the service, I think, with a sense of being somewhat stunned and
bewildered. And in the closing sentences of your sermon, you say
little of yourself; but in a few words, very hard to speak, you
thank your old friends for their kindness to you through the years
you have passed together; and you give them your parting advice, in
some sentence which seems to contain the essence of all you meant
to teach in all these Sundays; and you say farewell, farewell.

You are happy, indeed, if after all, though quitting your country
parsonage, and turning over a new leaf in life, you have not to make
a change so entire as that from country to town generally is: if,
like me, you live in the most beautiful city in Britain: a city
where country and town are blended together: where there are green
gardens, fields, and trees: shady places into which you may turn
from the glaring streets, into verdure as cool and quiet as ever,
and where your little children can roll upon the grass, and string
daisies as of old; streets, from every opening in which you look
out upon blue hills and blue sea. No doubt, the work is very hard,
and very constant; and each Sunday is a very exciting and exhausting
day. You will understand, my friend, when you go to such a charge,
what honour is due to those venerable men who have faithfully and
efficiently done the duty of the like for thirty or forty years.
You will look at them with much interest: you will receive their
kindly counsel with great respect. You will feel it somewhat trying
and nervous work to ascend your pulpit; and to address men and women
who in mental cultivation, and in things much more important, are
more than equal to yourself. And as you walk down; always alone,
to church each Sunday morning, you will very earnestly apply for
strength and wisdom beyond your own, in a certain Quarter where
they will never be sought in vain. Yet you will delight in all your
duty: and you will thank God you feel that were your work in life
to choose again, you would give yourself to the noblest task that
can be undertaken by mortal, with a resolute purpose firmer a
thousand times than even the enthusiastic preference of your early
youth. The attention and sympathy with which your congregation
will listen to your sermons, will be a constant encouragement and
stimulus; and you will find friends so dear and true, that yon.
will hope never to part from them while life remains. In such a
life, indeed, these Essays, which never would have been begun had
my duty been always such, must be written in little snatches of
time: and perhaps a sharp critic could tell, from internal evidence,
which of them have been written in the country and which in the
town. I look up from the table at which I write: and the roses,
honeysuckle, and the fuchsias, of a year since, are far away:
through the window I discover lofty walls, whose colour inclines
to black. Yet I have not regretted the day, and I do not believe
I ever will regret the day, when I ceased to be a Country Parson.





CHAPTER II.

CONCERNING DISAPPOINTMENT AND SUCCESS.




Russet woods of Autumn, here you are once more! I saw you, golden
and brown, in the afternoon sunshine to-day. Crisp leaves were
falling, as I went along the foot-path through the woods: crisp
leaves lie upon the green graves in the churchyard, fallen from the
ashes: and on the shrubbery walks, crisp leaves from the beeches,
accumulated where the grass bounds the gravel, make a warm edging,
irregular, but pleasant to see. It is not that one is 'tired of
summer:' but there is something soothing and pleasing about the
autumn days. There is a great clearness of the atmosphere sometimes;
sometimes a subdued, gray light is diffused everywhere. In the
country, there is often, on these afternoons, a remarkable stillness
in the air, amid which you can hear a withering leaf rustling down.
I will not think that the time of bare branches and brown grass
is so very near as yet; Nature is indeed decaying, but now we have
decay only in its beautiful stage, wherein it is pensive, but not
sad. It is but early in October; and we, who live in the country all
through the winter, please ourselves with the belief that October
is one of the finest months of the year, and that we have many
warm, bright, still days yet before us. Of course we know we are
practising upon ourselves a cheerful, transparent delusion; even
as the man of forty-eight often declares that about forty-eight
or fifty is the prime of life. I like to remember that Mrs. Hemans
was describing October, when she began her beautiful poem on The
Battle of Morgarlen, by saying that, 'The wine-month shone in its
golden prime:' and I think that in these words the picture presented
to the mind of an untravelled Briton, is not the red grapes hanging in
blushing profusion, but rather the brown, and crimson, and golden
woods, in the warm October sunshine. So, you russet woods of autumn,
you are welcome once more; welcome with all your peculiar beauty,
so gently enjoyable by all men and women who have not used up life;
and with all your lessons, so unobtrusive, so touching, that have
come home to the heart of human generations for many thousands
of years.  Yesterday was Sunday; and I was preaching to my simple
rustics an autumn sermon from the text We all do fade as a leaf.
As I read out the text, through a half-opened window near me, two
large withered oak-leaves silently floated into the little church
in the view of all the congregation. I could not but pause for a
minute till they should preach their sermon before I began mine.
How simply, how unaffectedly, with what natural pathos they seemed
to tell their story! It seemed as if they said, Ah you human beings,
something besides us is fading; here we are, the things like which
you fade!

And now, upon this evening, a little sobered by the thought that
this is the fourth October which has seen this hand writing that
which shall attain the authority of print, I sit down to begin an
essay which is to be written leisurely as recreation and not as
work. I need not finish this essay, unless I choose, for six weeks
to come: so I have plenty of time, and I shall never have to write
under pressure. That is pleasant. And I write under another feeling,
more pleasing and encouraging still. I think that in these lines
I am addressing many unknown friends, who, though knowing nothing
more of me than they can learn from pages which I have written,
have come gradually not to think of me as a stranger. I wish here
to offer my thanks to many whose letters, though they were writing
only to a shadow, have spoken in so kindly a fashion of the writer's
slight productions, that they have given me much enjoyment in the
reading, and much encouragement to go on. To all my correspondents,
whether named or nameless, I now, in a moral sense, extend a friendly
hand.  As to the question sometimes put, who the writer is, that
is of no consequence. But as to what he is, I think, intelligent
readers of his essays, you will gradually and easily see that.

It is a great thing to write leisurely, and with a general feeling
of kindliness and satisfaction with everybody; but there is a
further reason why one should set to work at once. I feel I must
write now, before my subject loses its interest; and before the
multitude of thoughts, such as they are, which have been clustering
round it since it presented itself this afternoon in that walk
through the woods, have faded away. It is an unhappy thing, but it
is the fact with many men, that if you do not seize your fancies
when they come to you, and preserve them upon the written page, you
lose them altogether. They go away, and never come back. A little
while ago I pulled out a drawer in this table whereon I write; and
I took out of it a sheet of paper, on which there are written down
various subjects for essays. Several are marked with a large cross;
these are the essays which are beyond the reach of fate: they are
written and printed. Several others have no cross; these are the
subjects of essays which are yet to be written. But upon four of
those subjects I look at once with interest and sorrow. I remember
when I wrote down their names, what a vast amount, as I fancied,
I had to say about them: and all experience failed to make me feel
that unless those thoughts were seized and chronicled at once,
they would go away and never come back again. How rich the subjects
appeared to me, I well remember! Now they are lifeless, stupid
things, of which it is impossible to make anything. Before, they
were like a hive, buzzing with millions of bees. Now they are like
the empty hive, when the life and stir and bustle of the bees are
gone. O friendly reader, what a loss it was to you, that the writer
did not at once sit down and sketch out his essays, Concerning Things
Slowly Learnt; and Concerning Growing Old! And two other subjects
of even greater value were, Concerning the Practical Effect of
Illogical Reasons, and An Estimate of the Practical Influence of
False Assertions. How the hive was buzzing when these titles were
written down: but now I really hardly remember anything of what
I meant to say, and what I remember appears wretched stuff. The
effervescence has gone from the champagne; it is flat and dead.
Still, it is possible that these subjects may recover their interest;
and the author hereby gives notice that he reserves the right of
producing an essay upon each of them. Let no one else infringe his
vested claims.

There is one respect in which I have often thought that there is
a curious absence of analogy between the moral and the material
worlds. You are in a great excitement about something or other; you
are immensely interested in reaching some aim; you are extremely
angry and ferocious at some piece of conduct; let us suppose. Well,
the result is that you cannot take a sound, clear, temperate view
of the circumstances; you cannot see the case rightly; you actually
do see it very wrongly. You wait till a week or a month passes;
till some distance, in short, intervenes between you and the matter;
and then your excitement, your fever, your wrath, have gone down,
as the matter has lost its freshness; and now you see the case
calmly, you see it very differently indeed from the fashion in
which you saw it first; you conclude that now you see it rightly.
One can think temperately now of the atrocities of the mutineers
in India, It does riot now quicken your pulse to think of them.
You have not now the burning desire you once felt, to take a Sepoy
by the throat and cut him to pieces with a cat-of-nine-tails. The
common consent of mankind has decided that you have now attained
the right view. I ask, is it certain that in all cases the second
thought is the best;--is the right thought, as well as the calmest
thought? Would it be just to say (which would be the material
analogy) that you have the best view of some great rocky island when
you have sailed away from it till it has turned to a blue cloud on
the horizon; rather than when its granite and heather are full in
view, close at hand? I am not sure that in every case the calmer
thought is the right thought, the distant view the right view. You
have come to think indifferently of the personal injury, of the
act of foul cruelty and falsehood, which once roused you to flaming
indignation.  Are you thinking rightly too? Or has not just such
an illusion been practised upon your mental view, as is played upon
your bodily eye when looking over ten miles of sea upon Staffa?
You do not see the basaltic columns now; but that is because you
see wrongly. You do not burn at the remembrance of the wicked lie,
the crafty misrepresentation, the cruel blow; but perhaps you ought
to do so.  And now (to speak of less grave matters) when all I had
to say about Growing Old seems very poor, do I see it rightly? Do
I see it as my reader would always have seen it? Or has it faded
into falsehood, as well as into distance and dimness? When I look
back, and see my thoughts as trash, is it because they are trash
and no better? When I look back, and see Ailsa as a cloud, is it
because it is a cloud and nothing more? Or is it, as I have already
suggested, that in one respect the analogy between the moral and
the material fails.

I am going to write Concerning Disappointment and Success. In the
days when I studied metaphysics, I should have objected to that
title, inasmuch as the antithesis is imperfect between the two
things named in it. Disappointment and Success are not properly
antithetic; Failure and Success are. Disappointment is the feeling
caused by failure, and caused also by other things besides failure.
Failure is the thing; disappointment is the feeling caused by the
thing; while success is the thing, and not the feeling. But such
minute points apart, the title I have chosen brings out best the
subject about which I wish to write. And a very wide subject it
is; and one of universal interest.

I suppose that no one will dispute the fact that in this world
there are such things as disappoititment and success. I do not
mean merely that each man's lot has its share of both; I mean that
there are some men whose life on the whole is a failure, and that
there are others whose life on the whole is a success. You and I,
my reader, know better than to think that life is a lottery; but
those who think it a lottery, must see that there are human beings
who draw the prizes, and others who draw the blanks. I believe in
Luck, and Ill Luck, as facts; of course I do not believe the theory
which common consent builds upon these facts. There is, of course,
no such thing as chance; this world is driven with far too tight a
rein to permit of anything whatsoever falling out in a way properly
fortuitous. But it cannot be denied that there are persona with
whom everything goes well, and other persons with whom everything
goes ill. There are people who invariably win at what are called
games of chance. There are people who invariably lose. You remember
when Sydney Smith lay on his deathbed, how he suddenly startled
the watchers by it, by breaking a long silence with a sentence from
one of his sermons, repeated in a deep, solemn voice, strange from
the dying man: His life had been successful at last; but success
had come late; and how much of disappointment he had known! And
though he had tried to bear up cheerily under his early cares, they
had sunk in deep. 'We speak of life as a journey,' he said, 'but
how differently is that journey performed! Some are borne along
their path in luxury and ease; while some must walk it with naked
feet, mangled and bleeding.'

Who is there that does not sometimes, on a quiet evening, even
before he has attained to middle age, sit down and look back upon
his college days, and his college friends; and think sadly of the
failures, the disappointments, the broken hearts, which have been
among those who all started fair and promised well? How very much
has after life changed the estimates which we, formed in those
days, of the intellectual mark and probable fate of one's friends
and acquaintances! You remember the dense, stolid dunces of that
time: you remember the men who sat next you in the lecture-room,
and never answered rightly a question that was put to them: you
remember how you used to wonder if they would always be the dunces
they were then. Well, I never knew a man who was a dunce at twenty,
to prove what might be called a brilliant or even a clever man in
after life; but we have all known such do wonderfully decently.
You did not expect much of them, you see. You did not try them by
an exacting standard. If a monkey were to write his name, you would
be so much surprised at seeing him do it at all, that you would
never think of being surprised that he did not do it very well. So,
if a man you knew as a remarkably stupid fellow preaches a decent
sermon, you hardly think of remarking that it is very common-place
and dull, you are so much pleased and surprised' to find that the
man can preach at all. And then, the dunces of college days are
often sensible, though slow and in this world, plain plodding common
sense is very likely in the long run to beat erratic brilliancy.
The tortoise passes the hare. I owe an apology to Lord Campbell
for even naming him on the same page on which stands the name of
dunce: for assuredly in shrewd, massive sense, as well as in kindness
of manner, the natural outflow of a kind and good heart, no judge
ever surpassed him. But I may fairly point to his career of unexampled
success as an instance which proves my principle. See how that
man of parts which are sound and solid, rather than brilliant or
showy, has won the Derby and the St. Ledger of the law: has filled
with high credit the places of Chief Justice of England and Lord
Chancellor. And contrast his eminently successful and useful course
with that of the fitful meteor, Lord Brougham. What a great, dazzling
genius Brougham unquestionably is; yet his greatest admirer must
admit that his life has been a brilliant failure. But while you,
thoughtful reader, in such a retrospect as I have been supposing,
sometimes wonder at the decent and reasonable success of the dunce,
do you not often lament over the fashion in which those who promised
well, and even brilliantly, have disappointed the hopes entertained
of them? What miserable failures such have not unfrequently made!
And not always through bad conduct either: not always, though
sometimes, by taking to vicious courses; but rather by a certain want
of tact and sense, or even by just somehow missing the favourable
tide. You have got a fair living and a fair standing in the Church;
you have held them for eight or ten years; when some evening as you
are sitting in your study or playing with your children, a servant
tells you, doubtfully, that a man is waiting to see you. A poor,
thin, shabbily-dressed fellow comes in, and in faltering tones begs
for the lean of five shillings. Ah, with what a start you recognise
him! It is the clever fellow whom you hardly beat at college, who
was always so lively and merry, who sang so nicely, and was so
much asked out into society. You had lost sight of him for several
years; and now here he is, shabby, dirty, smelling of whisky, with
bloated face and trembling hand: alas, alas, ruined! Oh, do not
give him up. Perhaps you can do something for him. Little kindness
he has known for very long. Give him the five shillings by all
means; but next morning see you go out, and try what may be done
to lift him out of the slough of despond, and to give him a chance
for better days! I know that it may be all in vain; and that
after years gradually darkening down you may some day, as you pass
the police-office, find a crowd at the door, and learn that they
have got the corpse of the poor suicide within. And even when the
failure is not so utter as this, you find, now and then, as life
goes onward, that this and that old acquaintance has, you cannot
say how, stepped out of the track, and is stranded. He went into the
Church: he is no worse preacher or scholar than many that succeed;
but somehow he never gets a living. You sometimes meet him in
the street, threadbare and soured: he probably passes you without
recognising you. O reader, to whom God has sent moderate success,
always be chivalrously kind and considerate to such a disappointed
man!

I have heard of an eminent man who, when well advanced in years,
was able to say that through all his life he had never set his
mind on anything which he did not succeed in attaining. Great and
little aims alike, he never had known what it was to fail. What a
curious state of feeling it would be to most men to know themselves
able to assert so much! Think of a mind in which disappointment
is a thing unknown! I think that one would be oppressed by a vague
sense of fear in regarding one's self as treated by Providence in
a fashion so different from the vast majority of the race. It cannot
be denied that there are men in this world in whose lot failure
seems to be the rule. Everything to which they put their hand breaks
down or goes amiss. But most human beings can testify that their
lot, like their abilities, their stature, is a sort of middling
thing. There is about it an equable sobriety, a sort of average
endurableness.  Some things go well: some things go ill. There is
a modicum of disappointment: there is a modicum of success. But so
much of disappointment comes to the lot of almost all, that there
is no object in nature at which we all look with so much interest
as the invariably lucky man--the man whom all this system of things
appears to favour. You knew such a one at school: you knew him at
college: you knew him at the bar, in the Church, in medicine, in
politics, in society. Somehow he pushes his way: things turn up
just at the right time for him: great people take a fancy to him:
the newspapers cry him up. Let us hope that you do not look at him
with any feeling of envy or bitterness; but you cannot help looking
at him with great interest, he is so like yourself, and at the same
time so very unlike you. Philosophers tell us that real happiness
is very equally distributed; but there is no doubt that there is a
tremendous external difference between the man who lives in a grand
house, with every appliance of elegance and luxury, with plump
servants, fine horses, many carriages, and the poor struggling
gentleman, perhaps a married curate, whose dwelling is bare, whose
dress is poor, whose fare is scanty, whose wife is careworn, whose
children are ill-fed, shabbily dressed, and scantily educated.
It is conceivable that fanciful wants, slights, and failures, may
cause the rich man as much and as real suffering as substantial
wants and failures cause the poor; but the world at large will
recognise the rich man's lot as one of success, and the poor man's
as one of failure.

This is a world of competition. It is a world full of things that
many people wish to get, and that all cannot get at once; and
to say this is much as to say that this is a world of failure and
disappointments. All things desirable, by their very existence imply
the disappointment of some. When you, my reader, being no longer
young, look with a philosophic eye at some pretty girl entering a
drawing-room, you cannot but reflect, as you survey the pleasing
picture, and more especially when you think of the twenty thousand
pounds--Ah! my gentle young friend, you will some day make one heart
very jolly, but a great many more extremely envious, wrathful, and
disappointed. So with all other desirable things; so with a large
living in the Church; so with aliy place of dignity; so with a seat
on the bench; so with the bishopric; so with the woolsack; so with
the towers of Lambeth. So with smaller matters; so with a good
business in the greengrocery line; so with a well-paying milk-walk;
so with a clerk's situation of eighty pounds a year; so with an
errand boy's place at three shillings a week, which thirty candidates
want, and only one can get. Alas for our fallen race! Is it not
part, at least, of some men's pleasure in gaining some object which
has been generally sought for, to think of the mortification of
the poor fellows that failed?

Disappointment, in short, may come and must come wherever man can
set his wishes and his hopes. The only way not to be disappointed
when a thing turns out against you, is not to have really cared how
the thing went. It is not a truism to remark that this is impossible
if you did care. Of course you are not disappointed at failing of
attaining an end which you did not care whether you attained or
not; but men seek very few such ends. If a man has worked day and
night for six weeks in canvassing his county, and then, having been
ignominiously beaten, on the following day tells you he is not in
the least degree disappointed, he might just as trulv assure you,
if you met him walking up streaming with water from a river into
which he had just fallen, that he is not the least wet. No doubt
there is an elasticity in the healthy mind which very soon tides
it over even a severe disappointment; and no doubt the grapes which
are unattainable do sometimes in actual fact turn sour. But let no
man tell us that he has not known the bitterness of disappointment
for at least a brief space, if he have ever from his birth tried
to get anything, great or small, and yet not got it. Failure is
indeed a thing of all degrees, from the most fanciful to the most
weighty: disappointment is a thing of all degrees, from the transient
feeling that worries for a minute, to the great crushing blow that
breaks the mind's spring for ever. Failure is a fact which reaches
from the poor tramp who lies down by the wayside to die, up to the
man who is only made Chief Justice when he wanted the Chancellorship,
or who dies Bishop of London when he had set his heart upon being
Archbishop of Canterbury; or to the Prime Minister, unrivalled in
eloquence, in influence, in genius, with his fair domains and his
proud descent, but whose horse is beaten after being first favourite
for the Derby. Who shall say that either disappointed man felt less
bitterness and weariness of heart than the other? Each was no more
than disappointed; and the keenness of disappointment bears no
proportion to the reality of the value of the object whose loss
caused it. And what endless crowds of human beings, children and
old men, nobles and snobs, rich men and poor, know the bitterness
of disappointment from day to day. It begins from the child shedding
many tears when the toy bought with the long-hoarded pence is broken
the first day it comes home; it goes on to the Duke expecting the
Garter, who sees in the newspaper. at breakfast that the yards of
blue ribbon have been given to another. What a hard time his servants
have that day. How loudly he roars at them, how willingly would he
kick them! Little recks he that forenoon of his magnificent castle
and his ancestral woods. It may here be mentioned that a very
pleasing opportunity is afforded to malignant people for mortifying
a clever, ambitious man, when any office is vacant to which it is
known he aspires. A judge of the Queen's Bench has died: you, Mr.
Verjuice, know how Mr. Swetter, Q. C., has been rising at the bar;
you know how well he deserves the ermine. Well, walk down to his
chambers; go in and sit down; never mind how busy he is--your time
is of no value--and talk of many different men as extremely suitable
for the vacant seat on the bench, but never in the remotest manner
hint at the claims of Swetter himself. I have often seen the like
done. And you, Mr. Verjuice, may conclude almost with certainty that
in doing all this you are vexing and mortifying a deserving man.
And such a consideration will no doubt be compensation sufficient
to your amiable nature for the fact that every generous muscular
Christian would like to take you by the neck, and swing your sneaking
carcase out of the window.

Even a slight disappointment, speedily to be repaired, has in it
something that jars painfully the mechanism of the mind. You go to
the train, expecting a friend, certainly. He does not come. Now this
worries you, even though you receive at the station a telegraphic
message that he will be by the train which follows in two hours.
Your magazine fails to come by post on the last day of the month;
you have a dull, vague sense of something wanting for an hour or
two, even though you are sure that you will have it next morning.
And indeed a very krge share of the disappointments of civilized
life are associated with the post-office. I do not suppose the
extreme case of the poor fellow who calls at the office expecting
a letter containing the money without which he cannot see how he
is to get through the day; nor of the man who finds no letter on
the day when he expects to hear how it fares with a dear relative
who is desperately sick. I am thinking merely of the lesser
disappointments which commonly attend post-time: the Times not
coming when you were counting with more than ordinary certainty
on its appearing; the letter of no great consequence, which yet
you would have liked to have had. A certain blankness--a feeling
difficult to define--attends even the slightest disappointment; and
the effect of a great one is very stunning and embittering indeed.
You remember how the nobleman in Ten Thousand a Year, who had been
refused a seat in the Cabinet, sympathized with poor Titmouse's
exclamation when, looking at the manifestations of gay life
in Hyde-park, and feeling his own absolute exclusion from it, he
consigned everything to perdition. All the ballads of Professor
Aytoun and Mr. Theodore Martin are admirable, but there is none
which strikes me as more so than the brilliant imitation of Locksley
Hall, And how true to nature the state of mind ascribed to the
vulgar snob who is the hero of the ballad, who, bethinking himself
of his great disappointment when his cousin married somebody else,
bestowed his extremest objurgations upon all who had abetted the
hateful result, and then summed up thus comprehensively:--

    Cursed be the foul apprentice, who his loathsome fees did earn;
    Cursed be the clerk and parson; CURSED BE THE WHOLE CONCERN!

It may be mentioned here as a fact to which experience will testify,
that such disappointments as that at the railway station and the
post-office are most likely to come when you are counting with
absolute certainty upon things happening as you wish; when not
a misgiving has entered your mind as to your friend's arriving or
your letter coining. A little latent fear in your soul that you
may possibly be disappointed, seems to have a certain power to fend
off disappointment, on the same principle on which taking out an
umbrella is found to prevent rain. What you are prepared for rarely
happens. The precise thing you expected comes not once in a thousand
times. A confused state of mind results from long experience of
such cases. Your real feeling often is: Such a thing seems quite
sure to happen; I may say I expect it to happen; and yet I don't
expect it, because I do: for experience has taught me that the
precise thing which I expect, which I think most likely, hardly
ever comes. I am not prepared to side with a thoughtless world,
which is ready to laugh at the confused statement of the Irishman
who had killed his pig. It is not a bull; it is a great psychological
fact that is involved in his seemingly contradictory declaration--'It
did not weigh as much as I expected, and I never thought it would!'

When young ladies tell us that such and such a person 'has met with
a disappointment,' we all understand what is meant. The phrase,
though it is conventionally intelligible enough, involves a fallacy:
it seems to teach that the disappointment of the youthful heart in
the matter of that which in its day is no doubt the most powerful
of all the affections, is by emphasis the greatest disappointment
which a human being can ever know. Of course that is an entire
mistake.  People get over that disappointment not but what it may
leave its trace, and possibly colour the whole of remaining life;
sometimes resulting in an unlovely bitterness and hardness of
nature; sometimes prolonging even into age a lingering thread of
old romance, and keeping a kindly corner in a heart which worldly
cares have in great measure deadened. But the disappointment
which has its seat in the affections is outgrown as the affections
themselves are outgrown, as the season of their predominance passes
away; and the disappointment which sinks the deepest and lasts the
longest of all the disappointments which are fanciful rather than
material, is that which reaches a man through his ambition and his
self-love,--principles in his nature which outlast the heyday of
the heart's supremacy, and which endure to man's latest years. The
bitter and the enduring disappointment to most human beings is that
which makes them feel, in one way or other, that they are less
wise, clever, popular, graceful, accomplished, tall, active, and in
short fine, than they had fancied themselves to be. But it is only
to a limited portion of human kind that such words as disappointment
and success are mainly suggestive of gratified or disappointed
ambition, of happy or blighted affection; to the great majority
they are suggestive rather of success or non-success in earning
bread and cheese, in finding money to pay the rent, in generally
making the ends meet. You are very young, my reader, and little
versed in the practical affairs of ordinary life, if you do not
know that such prosaic matters make to most men the great aim of
their being here, so far as that aim is bounded by this world's
horizon. The poor cabman is successful or is disappointed, according
as he sees, while the hours of the day are passing over, that he
is making up or not making up the shillings he must hand over to
his master at night, before he has a penny to get food for his wife
and children. The little tradesman is successful or the reverse,
according as he sees or does not see from week to week such a small
accumulation of petty profits as may pay his landlord, and leave a
little margin by help of which he and his family may struggle on.
And many an educated man knows the analogous feelings. The poor
barrister, as he waits for the briefs which come in so slowly--the
young doctor, hoping for patients--understand them all. Oh what
slight, fanciful things, to such men, appear such disappointments
as that of the wealthy proprietor who fails to carry his county,
or the rich mayor or provost who fails of being knighted!

There is an extraordinary arbitrariness about the way in which great
success is allotted in this world. Who shall say that in one case
out of every two, relative success is in proportion to relative
merit? Nor need this be said in anything of a grumbling or captious
spirit. It is but repeating what a very wise man said long ago,
that 'the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong.' I suppose no one will say that the bishops are the greatest
men in the Church of England, or that every Chief Justice is a
greater man than every puisne judge. Success is especially arbitrary
in cases where it goes by pure patronage: in many such cases the
patron would smile at your weakness if you fancied that the desire
to find the best man ever entered his head. In the matter of the
bench and bar, where tangible duties are to be performed, a patron
is compelled to a certain amount of decency; for, though he may
not pretend to seek for the fittest man, he must at least profess
to have sought a fit man. No prime minister dare appoint a blockhead
a judge, without at least denying loudly that he is a blockhead.
But the arbitrariness of success is frequently the result of causes
quite apart from any arbitrariness in the intention of the human
disposer of success; a Higher Hand seems to come in here. The
tide of events settles the matter: the arbitrariness is in the way
in which the tide of events sets. Think of that great lawyer and
great man, Sir Samuel Romilly.  Through years of his practice at
the bar, he himself, and all who knew him, looked to the woolsack
as his certain destination. You remember the many entries in his
diary bearing upon the matter; arid I suppose the opinion of the
most competent was clear as to his unrivalled fitness for the post.
Yet all ended in nothing. The race was not to the swift. The first
favourite was beaten, and more than one outsider has carried ofil
the prize for which he strove in vain.  Did any mortal ever dream,
during his days of mediocrity at the bar, or his time of respectability
as a Baron of the Exchequer, that Sir R. M. Rolfe was the future
Chancellor? Probably there is no sphere in which there is more of
disappointment and heartburning than the army. It must be supremely
mortifying to a grey-headed veteran, who has served his country for
forty years, to find a beardless Guardsman put over his head into
the command of his regiment, and to see honours and emoluments
showered upon that fair-weather colonel.  And I should judge that
the despatch written by a General after an important battle must
be a source of sad disappointment to many who fancied that their
names might well be mentioned there. But after all, I do not know
but that it tends to lessen disappointment, that success should
be regarded as going less by merit than by influence or good luck.
The disappointed man can always soothe himself with the fancy that
he deserved to succeed. It would be a desperately mortifying thing
to the majority of mankind, if it were distinctly ascertained
that each man gets just what he deserves. The admitted fact that
the square man, is sometimes put in the round hole, is a cause
of considerable consolation to all disappointed men, and to their
parents, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers.

No stronger proof can be adduced of the little correspondence that
often exists between success and merit, than the fact that the
self-same man, by the exercise of the self-same powers, may at one
time starve and at another drive his carriage and four. When poor
Edmund Kean was acting in barns to country bumpkins, and barely
rinding bread for his wife and child, he was just as great a genius
as when he was crowding Drury Lane. When Brougham presided in the
House of Lords, he was not a bit better or greater than when he
had hung about in the Parliament House at Edinburgh, a briefless
and suspected junior barrister. When all London crowded to see the
hippopotamus, he was just the animal that he was a couple of years
later, when no one took the trouble of looking at him. And when
George Stephenson died, amid the applause and gratitude of all the
intelligent men in Britain, he was the same man, maintaining the
same principle, as when men of science and of law regarded as a
mischievous lunatic the individual who declared that some day the
railroad would be the king's highway, and mail-coaches would be
drawn by steam.

As to the very highest prizes of human affairs, it is, I believe,
admitted on all hands, that these generally fall to second-rate
men.  Civilized nations have found it convenient entirely to give
up the hallucination that the monarch is the greatest, wisest, and
best man in his dominions. Nobody supposes that. And in the case
of hereditary dynasties, such an end is not even aimed at. But it
is curious to find how with elective sovereignties it is just the
same way. The great statesmen of America have very rarely attained
to the dignity of President of the United States. Not Clays and
Webstcrs have had their four years at the White House. And even
Cardinal Wiseman candidly tells us that the post which is regarded
by millions as the highest which can be held by mortal, is all but
systematically given to judicious mediocrity. A great genius will
never be Pope. The coach must not be trusted to too dashing a
charioteer. Give us the safe and steady man. Everybody knows that
the same usage applies to the Primacy in England. Bishops must be
sensible; but archbishops are by some regarded with suspicion if
they have ever committed themselves to sentiments more startling
than that two and two make four. Let me suppose, my reader, that you
have met with great success: I mean success which is very great in
your own especial field. The lists are just put out, and you are
senior wrangler; or you have got the gold medal in some country
grammar-school. The feeling in both cases is the same. In each case
there combines with the exultant emotion, an intellectual conception
that you are one of the greatest of the human race. Well, was
not the feeling a strange one? Did you not feel somewhat afraid?
It seemed too much. Something was sure to come, you thought, that
would take you down. Few are burdened with such a feeling; but surely
there is something alarming in great success. You were a barber's
boy: you are made a peer. Surely you must go through life with an
ever-recurring emotion of surprise at finding yourself where you
are. It must be curious to occupy a place whence you look down upon
the heads of most of your kind. A duke gets accustomed to it; but
surely even he must sometimes wonder how he comes to be placed so
many degrees above multitudes who deserve as well. Or do such come
to fancy that their merit is equal to their success; and that by
as much as they are better off than other men, they are better than
other men? Very likety they do. It is all in human nature. And I
suppose the times have been in which it would have been treasonable
to hint that a man with a hundred thousand pounds a year was not
at least two thousand times as good as one with fifty.

The writer always feels a peculiar sympathy with failure, and with
people who are suffering from disappointment, great or small. It is
not that he himself is a disappointed man. No; he has to confess,
with deep thankfulness, that his success has far, very far,
transcended his deserts. And, like many other men, he has found
that one or two events in his life, which seemed disappointments
at the time, were in truth great and signal blessings. Still, every
one has known enough of the blank, desolate feeling of disappointment,
to sympathize keenly with the disappointments of others. I feel
deeply for the poor Punch and Judy man, simulating great excitement
in the presence of a small, uninterested group, from which people
keep dropping away. I feel for the poor barn-actor, who discovers,
on his first entrance upon his rude stage, that the magnates of
the district, who promised to be present at the performance, have
not come. You have gone to see a panorama, or to hear a lecture on
phrenology. Did you not feel for the poor fellow, the lecturer or
exhibitor, when ne came in ten minutes past the hour, and found
little but empty benches? Did you not see what a chill fell upon
him: how stupified he seemed: in short, how much disappointed he
was? And if the money he had hoped to earn that evening was to pay
the lodgings in which he and his wife were staying, you may be sure
there was a heart sickness about his disappointment far beyond the
mortification of mere self-love. When a rainy day stops a pic-nic,
or mars the enjoyment of it, although the disappointment is hardly
a serious one, still it is sure to cause so much real suffering,
that only rancorous old ladies will rejoice in the fact. It is
curious how men who have known disappointment themselves, and who
describe it well, seem to like to paint lives which in the meantime are
all hope and success. There is Mr. Thackeray. With what sympathy,
with what enjoyment, he shows us the healthy, wealthy, hopeful
youths, like Clive Newcome, or young Pendennis, when it was all
sunshine around the young prince! And yet how sad a picture of
life he gives us in The Newcomes. It would not have done to make
it otherwise: it is true, though sad: that history of the good and
gallant gentleman, whose life was a long disappointment, a long
failure in all on which he had set his heart; in his early love,
in his ambitious plans for his son, even in his hopes for his son's
happiness, in his own schemes of fortune, till that life of honour
ended in the almshouse at last. How the reader wishes that the
author would make brighter days dawn upon his hero! But the author
cannot: he must hold on unflinchingly as fate. In such a story as
his, truth can no more be sacrificed to our wishes than in real
life we know it to be. Well, all disappointment is discipline; and
received in a right spirit, it may prepare us for better things
elsewhere. It has been said that heaven is a place for those who
failed on earth. The greatest hero is perhaps the man who does his
very best, and signally fails, and still is not embittered by the
failure. And looking at the fashion in which an unseen Power permits
wealth and rank and influence to go sometimes in this world, we are
possibly justified in concluding that in His judgment the prizes
of this Vanity Fair are held as of no great account. A life here,
in which you fail of every end you seek, yet which disciplines you
for a better, is assuredly not a failure.

What a blessing it would be, if men's ambition were in every case
made to keep pace with their ability. Very much disappointment
arises from a man's having an absurd over-estimate of his own
powers, which leads him, to use an expressive Scotticism, to even
himself to some position for which he is utterly unfit, and which
he has no chance at all of reaching. A lad comes to the university
who has been regarded in his own family as a great genius, and
who has even distinguished himself at some little country school.
What a rude shock to the poor fellow's estimate of himself; what
a smashing of the hopes of those at home, is sure to come when he
measures his length with his superiors; and is compelled, as is
frequently the case, to take a third or fourth-rate position. If
you ever read the lives of actors (and every one ought, for they
show you a new and curious phase of life), you must have smiled
to see the ill-spelled, ungrarnmatical letters in which some poor
fellow writes to a London manager for an engagement, and declares
that he feels within him the makings of a greater actor than Garrick
or Kean. How many young men who go into the Church fancy that they
are to surpass Melvill or Chalmers! No doubt, reader, you have
sometimes come out of a church, where you had heard a preacher
aiming at the most ambitious eloquence, who evidently had not the
slightest vocation that way; and you have thought it would be well
if no man ever wished to be eloquent who had it not in him to be
so. Would that the principle were universally true! Who has not
sometimes been amused iff passing along the fashionable street of
a great city, to see a little vulgar snob dressed out within an
inch of his life, walking along, evidently fancying that he looks
like a gentleman, and that he is the admired of all admirers?
Sometimes, in a certain street which I might name, I have witnessed
such a spectacle, sometimes with amusement, oftener with sorrow and
pity, as I thought of the fearful, dark surmises which must often
cross the poor snob's mind, that he is failing in his anxious
endeavours. Occasionally, too, I have beheld a man bestriding a
horse in that peculiar fashion which may be described as his being
on the outside of the animal, slipping away over the hot stones,
possibly at a trot, and fancying ivthough with many suspicions to
the contrary; that he is witching the world with noble horsemanship.
What a pity that such poor fellows will persist in aiming at what
they cannot achieve! What mortification and disappointment they must
often know! The horse backs on to the pavement, into a plate-glass
window, just as Maria, for whose sake the poor screw was hired, is
passing by. The boys halloo in derision; and some ostler, helpful,
but not complimentary, extricates the rider, and says, 'I see you
have never been on 'ossback before; you should not have pulled the
curb-bit that way!' And when the vulgar dandy, strutting along,
with his Brummagem jewellery, his choking collar, and his awfully
tight boots which cause him agony, meets the true gentleman; how
it rushes upon him that he himself is only a humbug! How the poor
fellow's heart sinks!

Turning from such inferior fields of ambition as these, I think
how often it happens that men come to some sphere in life with
a flourish of trumpets, as destined to do great things, and then
fail.  There is a modest, quiet self-confidence, without which
you will hardly get on in this world; but I believe, as a general
rule, that the men who have attained to very great success have
started with very moderate expectations. Their first aim was lowly;
and the way gradually opened before them. Their ambition, like
their success, went on step by step; they did not go at the top of
the tree at once. It would be easy to mention instances in which
those who started with high pretensions have been taught by stern
fact to moderate them; in which the man who came over from the
Irish bar intending to lead the Queen's Bench, and become a Chief
Justice, was glad, after thirty years of disappointment, to get
made a County Court judge. Not that this is always so; sometimes
pretension, if big enough, secures success. A man setting up as a
silk-mercer in a strange town, is much likelier to succeed if he
opens a huge shop, painted in flaring colours and puffed by enormous
bills and vast advertising vans, than if he set up in a modest
way, in something like proportion to his means. And if he succeeds,
well; if he fails, his creditors bear the loss. A great field
has been opened for the disappointment of men who start with the
flourish of trumpets already mentioned, by the growing system of
competitive examinations. By these, your own opinion of yourself,
and the home opinion of you, are brought to a severe test. I think
with sympathy of the disappointment of poor lads who hang on week
after week, hoping to hear that they have succeeded in gaining the
coveted appointment, and then learn that they have failed. I think
with sympathy of their poor parents. Even when the prize lost is
not substantial pudding, but only airy praise, it is a bitter thing
to lose it, after running the winner close. It must be a supremely
irritating and mortifying thing to be second wrangler. Look at the
rows of young fellows, sitting with their papers before them at a
Civil Service Examination, and think what interest and what hopes
are centred on every one of them. Think how many count on great
success, kept up to do so by the estimation in which they are held
at home. Their sisters and their mothers think them equal to anything.
Sometimes justly; sometimes the fact justifies the anticipation.
When Baron Alderson went to Cambridge, he tells us that he would
have spurned the offer of being second man of his year; and sure
enough, he was out of sight the first. But for one man of whom the
home estimation is no more than just, there are ten thousand in
whose case, to strangers, it appears simply preposterous.

There is one sense in which all after-life may be said to be a
disappointment. It is far different from that which it was pictured
by early anticipations and hopes. The very greatest material success
still leaves the case thus. And no doubt it seems strange to many
to look back on the fancies of youth, which experience has sobered
down. When you go back, my reader, to the village where you were
brought up, don't you remember how you used to fancy that when you
were a man you would come to it in your carriage and four? This, it
is unnecessary to add, you have not yet done. You thought likewise
that when you came back you would be arrayed in a scarlet coat,
possibly in a cuirass of steel; whereas in fact you have come to
the little inn where nobody knows you to spend the night, and you
are wandering along the bank of the river (how little changed!) in
a shooting-jacket of shepherd's plaid. You intended to marry the
village grocer's pretty daughter; and for that intention probably
you were somewhat hastily dismissed to a school a hundred miles
off; but this evening as you passed the shop you discovered her,
a plump matron, calling to her children in a voice rather shrill
than sweet; and you discovered from the altered sign above the
door that her father is dead, and that she has married the shopman,
your hated rival of former years. And yet how happily the wind is
tempered to the shorn lamb! You are not the least mortified. You
are much amused that your youthful fancies have been blighted. It
would have been fearful to have married that excellent individual;
the shooting-jacket is greatly more comfortable than the coat
of mail; and as for the carriage and four, why, even if you could
afford them, you would seldom choose to drive four horses. And it
is so with the more substantial anticipations of maturer years.
The man who, as already mentioned, intended to be a Chief Justice,
is quite happy when he is made a County Court judge. The man who
intended to eclipse Mr. Dickens in the arts of popular authorship
is content and proud to be the great writer of the London Journal.
The clergyman who would have liked a grand cathedral like York Minster
is perfectly pleased with his little country church, ivy-green and
grey. We come, if we are sensible folk, to be content with what we
can get, though we have not what we could wish.

Still, there are certain cases in which this can hardly be so. A
man of sense can bear cheerfully the frustration of the romantic
fancies of childhood and youth; but not many are so philosophical
in regard to the comparatively reasonable anticipations of more
reasonable years. When you got married at five-and-forty, your
hopes were not extravagant. You knew quite well you were not winning
the loveliest of her sex, and indeed you felt you had no right to
expect to do so.  You were well aware that in wisdom, knowledge,
accomplishment, amiability, you could not reasonably look for more
than the average of the race. But you thought you might reasonably
look for that: and now, alas, alas! you find you have not got it.
How have I pitied a worthy and sensible man, listening to his wife
making a fool of herself before a large company of people! How
have I pitied such a one, when I heard his wife talking the most
idiotical nonsense; or when I saw her flirting scandalously with
a notorious scapegrace; or learned of the large parties which she
gave in his absence, to the discredit of her own character and the
squandering of his hard-earned gains! No habit, no philosophy, will
ever reconcile a human being of right feeling to such a disappointment
as that. And even a sadder thing than this--one of the saddest
things in life--is when a man begins to feel that his whole life is
a failure; not merely a failure as compared with the vain fancies
of youth, but a failure as compared with his sobered convictions of
what he ought to have been and what he might have been. Probably,
in a desponding mood, we have all known the feeling; and even when
we half knew it was morbid and transient, it was a very painful
one. But painful it must be beyond all names of pain, where it is
the abiding, calm, sorrowful conviction of the man's whole being.
Sore must be the heart of the man of middle age, who often thinks
that he is thankful his father is in his grave, and so beyond mourning
over his son's sad loss in life. And even when the stinging sense
of guilt is absent, it is a mournful thing for one to feel that he
has, so to speak, missed stays in his earthly voyage, and run upon
a mud-bank which he can never get off: to feel one's self ingloriously
and uselessly stranded, while those who started with us pass by
with gay flag and swelling sail. And all this may be while it is
hard to know where to attach blame; it may be when there was nothing
worse to complain of than a want of promptitude, resolution, and
tact, at the one testing time. Every one knows the passage in point
in Shakspeare.

Disappointment, I have said, is almost sure to be experienced in
a greater or less degree, so long as anything remains to be wished
or sought. And a provision is made for the indefinite continuance
of disappointment in the lot of even the most successful of men,
by the fact in rerum naturu that whenever the wants felt on a lower
level are supplied, you advance to a higher platform, where a new
crop of wants is felt. Till the lower wants are supplied you never
feel the higher; and accordingly people who pass through life
barely succeeding in gaining the supply of the lower wants, will
hardly be got to believe that the higher wants are ever really felt
at all. A man who is labouring anxiously to earn food and shelter
for his children--who has no farther worldly end, and who thinks he
would be perfectly happy if he could only be assured on New Year's
day that he would never fail in earning these until the thirty-first
of December, will hardly believe you when you tell him that the
Marquis at the castle is now utterly miserable because the King would
not give him a couple of yards of blue or green ribbon. And it is
curious in how many cases worldly-successful men mount, step after
step, into a new series of wants, implying a new set of mortifications
and disappointments. A person begins as a small tradesman; all he
aims at is a maintenance for him and his. That is his first aim.
Say he succeeds in reaching it. A little ago he thought he would
have been quite content could he only do that. But from his new
level he sees afar a new peak to climb; now he aims at a fortune.
That is his next aim. Say he reaches it. Now he buys an estate;
now he aims at being received and admitted as a country gentleman;
and the remainder of his life is given to striving for social
recognition in the county. How he schemes to get the baronet to dine
with him, and the baronet's lady to call upon his homely spouse!
And every one has remarked with amusement the hive of petty
mortifications, failures, and disappointments, through which he
fights his way, till, as it may chance, he actually gains a dubious
footing in the society he seeks, or gives up the endeavour as a
final failure. Who shall say that any one of the successive wants
the man has felt is more fanciful, less real, than any other? To
Mr.  Oddbody, living in his fine house, it is just as serious an
aim to get asked to the Duke's ball, as in former days it was to
Jack Oddbody to carry home on Saturday night the shillings which
were to buy his bread and cheese.

And another shade of disappointment which keeps pace with all material
success is that which arises, not from failing to get a thing, but
from getting it and then discovering that it is not what we had
fancied--that it will not make us happy. Is not this disappointment
ft It everywhere? When the writer was a little boy, he was promised
that on a certain birthday a donkey should be bought for his future
riding. Did not he frequently allude to it in conversation with
his companions? Did not he plague the servants for information as
to the natural history and moral idiosyncrasy of donkeys? Did not
the long-eared visage appear sometimes through his dreams? Ah,
the donkey came! Then followed the days of being pitched over his
head; the occasions on which the brute of impervious hide rushed
through hedges and left me sticking in them: happiness was no
nearer, though the donkey was there. Have you not, my philosophic
friend, had your donkey? I mean your moral donkey. Yes, and scores
of such. When you were a schoolboy, longing for the holidays,
have you not chalked upon doors the legend--OH FOR AUGUST! Vague,
delightful visions of perfect happiness were wrapped up in the
words. But the holidays came, as all holidays have done and will
do; and in a few days you were heartily wearied of them. When you
were spoony about Marjory Anne, you thought that once your donkey
came, once you were fairly married and settled, what a fine thing
it would be! I do not say a syllable against that youthful matron;
but I presume you have discovered that she falls short of perfection,
and that wedded life has its many cares. You thought you would
enjoy so much the setting-up of your carriage; your wife and you
often enjoyed it by anticipation on dusty summer days: but though
all very well, wood and iron and leather never made the vehicle
that shall realize your anticipations. The horses were often lame;
the springs would sometimes break; the paint was always getting
scratched and the lining cut. Oh, what a nuisance is a carriage!
You fancied you would be perfectly happy when you retired from
business and settled in the country. What a comment upon such
fancies is the fashion in which retired men of business haunt the
places of their former toils like unquiet ghosts! How sick they
get of the country! I do not think of grand disappointments of
the sort; of the satiety of Vathek, turning sickly away from his
earthly paradise at Cintra; nor of the graceful towers I have seen
rising from a woody cliff above a summer sea, and of the story
told me of their builder, who, after rearing them, lost interest
in them, and in sad disappointment left them to others, and went
back to the busy town wherein he had made his wealth. I think of
men, more than one or two, who rented their acre of land by the
sea-side, and built their pretty cottage, made their grassplots and
trained their roses, and then in unaccustomed idleness grew weary
of the whole and sold their place to some keen bargain-maker for
a tithe of what it cost them.

Why is it that failure in attaining ambitious ends is so painful?
When one has honestly done one's best, and is beaten after all,
conscience must be satisfied: the wound is solely to self-love;
and is it not to the discredit of our nature that that should imply
such a weary, blank, bitter feeling as it often does? Is it that
every man has within his heart a lurking belief that, notwithstanding
the world's ignorance of the fact, there never was in the world
anybody so remarkable as himself? I think that many mortals need
daily to be putting down a vague feeling which really comes to that.
You who have had experience of many men, know that you can hardly
over-estimate the extent and depth of human vanity. Never be afraid
but that nine men out of ten will swallow with avidity flattery,
however gross; especially if it ascribe to them those qualities of
which they are most manifestly deficient.

A disappointed man looks with great interest at the man who has
obtained what he himself wanted. Your mother, reader, says that
her ambition for you would be entirely gratified if you could but
reach a certain place which some one you know has held for twenty
years.  You look at him with much curiosity; he appears very much
like yourself; and, curiously, he does not appear particularly happy.
Oh, reader, whatever you do--though last week he gained without an
effort what you have been wishing for all your life--do not hate
him. Resolve that you will love and wish well to the man who fairly
succeeded where you fairly failed. Go to him and get acquainted
with him: if you and he are both true men, you will not find it a
difficult task to like him. It is perhaps asking too much of human
nature to ask you to do all this in the case of the man who has
carried off the woman you loved; but as regards anything else, do
it all. Go to your successful rival, heartily congratulate him.
Don't be Jesuitical; don't merely felicitate the man; put down the
rising feeling of envy: that is always out-and-out wrong. Don't
give it a moment's quarter. You clerks in an office, ready to be
angry with a fellow-clerk who gets the chance of a trip to Scotland
on business, don't give in to the feeling. Shake hands with him
all round, and go in a body with him to Euston Square, and give
him three cheers as he departs by the night mail. And you, greater
mortals--you, rector of a beautiful parish, who think you would have
done for a bishop as well as the clergyman next you who has got the
mitre; you, clever barrister, sure some day to be solicitor-general,
though sore to-day because a man next door has got that coveted
post before you; go and see the successful man--go forthwith,
congratulate him heartily, say frankly you wish it had been you:
it will do oreat good both to him and to yourself. Let it not be
that envy--that bitter and fast-growing fiend--shall be suffered
in your heart for one minute.  When I was at college I sat on the
same bench with a certain man. We were about the same age. Now, I
am a country parson, and he is a cabinet minister. Oh, how he has
distanced poor me in the race of life! Well, he had a tremendous
start, no doubt. Now, shall I hate him? Shall I pitch into him, rake
up all his errors of youth, tell how stupid he was (though indeed
he was not stupid), and bitterly gloat over the occasion on which
he fell on the ice and tore his inexpressibles in the presence of
a grinning throng? No, my old fellow-student, who hast now doubtless
forgotten my name, though I so well remember yours, though you got
your honours possibly in some measure from the accident of your
birth, you have nobly justified their being given you so early; and
so I look on with interest to your loftier advancement yet, and I
say--God bless you!

I think, if I were an examiner at one of the Universities, that I
should be an extremely popular one. No man should ever be plucked.
Of course it would be very wrong, and, happily, the work is in the
hands of those who are much fitter for it; but, instead of thinking
solely and severely of a man's fitness to pass, I could not help
thinking a great deal of the heartbreak it would be to the poor
fellow and his family if he were turned. It would be ruin to any
magazine to have me for its editor. I should always be printing
all sorts of rubbishing articles, which are at present consigned
to the Balaam-box. I could not bear to grieve and disappoint the
young lady who sends her gushing verses. I should be picturing to
myself the long hours of toil that resulted in the clever lad's
absurd attempt at a review, and all his fluttering hopes and fears
as to whether it was to be accepted or not. No doubt it is by this
mistaken kindness that institutions are damaged and ruined. The
weakness of a sympathetic bishop burdens the Church with a clergy-man
who for many years will be an injury to her; and it would have been
far better even for the poor fellow himself to have been decidedly
and early kept out of a vocation for which he is wholly unfit. I am
far from saying that the resolute examiner who plucks freely, and
the resolute editor who rejects firmly, are deficient in kindness
of heart, or even in vividness of imagination to picture what they
are doing: though much of the suffering and disappointment of this
world is caused by men who are almost unaware of what they do. Like
the brothers of Isabella, in Keats' beautiful poem,

    Half ignorant, they turn an easy wheel,
    That sets sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.

Yet though principle and moral decision may be in you sufficient
to prevent your weakly yielding to the feeling, be sure you always
sympathize with failure;--honest, laborious failure. And I think
all but very malicious persons generally do sympathize with it. It
is easier to sympathize with failure than with success. No trace of
envy comes in to mar your sympathy, and you have a pleasant sense
that you are looking down from a loftier elevation. The average man
likes to have some one to look down upon--even to look down upon
kindly. I remember being greatly touched by hearing of a young man
of much promise, who went to preach his first sermon in a little
church by the sea-shore in a lonely highland glen. He preached his
sermon, and got on pretty fairly; but after service he went down
to the shore of the far-sounding sea, and wept to think how sadly
he had fallen short of his ideal, how poor was his appearance
compared to what he had intended and hoped. Perhaps a foolish vanity
and self-conceit was at the foundation of his disappointment; but
though I did not know him at all, I could not but have a very kindly
sympathy for him. I heard, years afterwards, with great pleasure,
that he had attained to no small eminence and success as a pulpit
orator; and I should not have alluded to him here but for the fact
that in early youth, and amid greater expectations of him, he
passed away from this life of high aims and poor fulfilments. I
think how poor Keats, no doubt morbidly ambitious as well as morbidly
sensitive, declared in his preface to Endymion that 'there is no
fiercer hell than failure in a great attempt.'

Most thoughtful men must feel it a curious and interesting study,
to trace the history of the closing days of those persons who have
calmly and deliberately, in no sudden heat of passion, taken away
their own life. In such cases, of course, we see the sense of
failure, absolute and complete. They have quietly resolved lo give
up life as a losing game. You remember the poor man who, having
spent his last shilling, retired to a wood far from human dwellings,
and there died voluntarily by starvation. He kept a diary of those
days of gradual death, setting out his feelings both of body and
mind. No nourishment passed his lips after he had chosen his last
resting-place, save a little water, which he dragged himself to
a pond to drink. He was not discovered till he was dead; but his
melancholy chronicle appeared to have been carried down to very
near the time when he became unconscious. I remember its great
characteristic appeared to be a sense of utter failure. There
seemed to be no passion, none of the bitter desperate resolution
which prompts the energetic 'Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world;'
but merely a weary, lonely wish to creep quietly away. I have no
look but one of sorrow and pity to cast on the poor suicide's grave.
I think the common English verdict is right as well as charitable,
which supposes that in every such case reason has become unhinged,
and responsibility is gone. And what desperate misery, what a
black horrible anguish of heart, whether expressing itself calmly
or feverishly, must have laid its gripe upon a human being before
it can overcome in him the natural clinging to life, and make him
deliberately turn his back upon 'the warm precincts of the cheerful
day.' No doubt it is the saddest of all sad ends; but I do not
forget that a certain Authority, the highest of all authorities,
said to all human beings, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.' The
writer has, in the course of his duty, looked upon more than one
suicide's dead face; and the lines of Hood appeared to sketch the
fit feeling with which to do so:--

    Owning her weakness,
        Her evil behaviour;
    And leaving, with meekness,
        Her soul to her Saviour.

What I have just written recalls to me, by some link of association,
the words I once heard a simple old Scotch-woman utter by her son's
deathbed. He was a young man of twenty-two, a pious and good young
man, and I had seen him very often throughout his gradual decline.
Calling one morning, I found he was gone, and his mother begged me
to come and see his face once more; and standing for the last time
by him, I said (and I could say them honestly) some words of Christian
comfort to the poor old woman. I told her, in words far better than
any of my own, how the Best Friend of mankind had said, 'I am the
Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in Me, though he were
dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me,
shall never die.' I remember well her answer. 'Aye,' said she, 'he
gaed away trusting in that; and he'll be sorely disappointed if he
doesna' find it so.' Let me venture to express my hope, that when
my readers and I pass within the veil, we may run the risk of
no other disappointment than that these words should prove false;
and then it will be well with us. There will be no disappointment
there, in the sense of things failing to come up to our expectations.

Let it be added, that there are disappointments with which even
the kindest hearts will have no sympathy, and failures over which
we may without malignity rejoice. You do not feel very deeply for
the disappointed burglar, who retires from your dwelling at 3 A. M.,
leaving a piece of the calf of his leg in the jaws of your trusty
watch-dog; nor for the Irish bog-trotter who (poor fellow),
from behind the hedge, misses his aim at the landlord who fed him
and his family through the season of famine. You do not feel very
deeply for the disappointment of the friend, possibly the slight
acquaintance, who with elongated face retires from your study,
having failed to persuade you to attach your signature to a bill
for some hundreds of pounds 'just as a matter of form.' Very likely
he wants the money; so did the burglar: but is that any reason why
you should give it to him? Refer him to the wealthy and influential
relatives of whom he has frequently talked to you; tell him they
are the very people to assist him in such a case with their valuable
autograph. As for yourself, tell him you know what you owe to your
children and yourself; and say that the slightest recurrence to
such a subject must be the conclusion of all intercourse between
you. Ah, poor disappointed fellow! How heartless it is in you to
refuse to pay, out of your hard earnings, the money which he so
jauntily and freely spent!

How should disappointment be met? Well, that is far too large
a question to be taken up at this stage of my essay, though there
are various suggestions which I should like to make. Some disappointed
men take to gardening and farming; and capital things they are.
But when disappointment is extreme, it will paralyse you so that
you will suffer the weeds to grow up all about you, without your
having the heart to set your mind to the work of having the place
made neat. The state of a man's garden is a very delicate and
sensitive test as to whether he is keeping hopeful and well-to-do.
It is to me a very sad sight to see a parsonage getting a dilapidated
look, and the gravel walks in its garden growing weedy. The parson
must be growing old and poor. The parishioners tell you how trim
and orderly everything was when he came first to the parish. But
his affairs have become embarrassed, or his wife and children are
dead; and though still doing his duty well, and faithfully, he has
lost heart and interest in these little matters; and so things are
as you see.

I have been amused by the way in which some people meet disappointment.
They think it a great piece of worldly wisdom to deny that they
have ever been disappointed at all. Perhaps it might be so, if the
pretext were less transparent than it is. An old lady's son is
plucked at an examination for a civil appointment. She takes up
the ground that it is rather a credit to be plucked; that nearly
everybody is plucked; that all the cleverest fellows are plucked;
and that only stupid fellows are allowed to pass. When the
examiners find a clever man, they take a pleasure in plucking him.
A number of the cleverest men in England can easily put out a lad
of one-and-twenty. Then, shifting her ground, she declares the
examination was ridiculously easy: her son was rejected because he
could not tell what two and two amount to: because he did not know
the name of the river on which London is built: because he did not
(in his confusion) know his own name. She shows you the indignant
letter which the young man wrote to her, announcing the scandalous
injustice with which he was treated. You remark three words misspelt
in the first five lines; and you fancy you have fathomed the secret
of the plucking.

I have sometimes tried, but in vain, to discover the law which
regulates the attainment of extreme popularity. Extreme popularity,
in this country and age, appears a very arbitrary thing. I defy any
person to predict a priori what book, or song, or play, or picture,
is to become the rage,--to utterly transcend all competition. I
believe, indeed, that there cannot be popularity for even a short
time, without some kind or degree of merit to deserve it; and in
any case there is no other standard to which one can appeal than
the deliberate judgment of the mass of educated persons. If you
are quite convinced that a thing is bad which all such think good,
why, of course you are wrong. If you honestly think Shakspeare
a fool, you are aware you must be mistaken. And so, if a book,
or a picture, or a play, or a song, be really good, and if it be
properly brought before the public notice, you may, as a general
rule, predict that it will attain a certain measure of success.
But the inexplicable thing--the thing of which I am quite unable to
trace the law--is extreme success. How is it that one thing shoots
ahead of everything else of the same class; and without being
materially better, or even materially different, leaves everything
else out of sight behind?  Why is it that Eclipse is first and the
rest nowhere, while the legs and wind of Eclipse are no whit better
than the legs and wind of all the rest? If twenty novels of nearly
equal merit are published, it is not impossible that one shall dart
ahead of the remaining nineteen; that it shall be found in every
library; that Mr. Mudie may announce that he has 3250 copies of
it; that it shall be the talk of every circle; its incidents set to
music, its plot dramatized; that it shall count readers by thousands
while others count readers by scores; while yet one cannot really
see why any of the others might not have taken its place. Or of a
score of coarse comic songs, nineteen shall never get beyond the
walls of the Cyder Cellars (I understand there is a place of the
name), while the twentieth, no wise superior in any respect, comes to
be sung about the streets, known by everybody, turned into polkas
and quadrilles and in fact to become for the time one of the
institutions of this great and intelligent country. I remember
how, a year or two since, that contemptible Rat-catcher's Daughter,
without a thing to recommend it, with no music, no wit, no sentiment,
nothing but vulgar brutality, might be heard in every separate town
of England and Scotland, sung about the streets by every ragged
urchin; while the other songs of the vivacious Cowell fell dead
from his lips. The will of the sovereign people has decided that
so it shall be. And as likings and dislikings in most cases are
things strongly felt, but impossible to account for even by the
person who feels them, so is it ffith the enormous admiration,
regard, and success which fall to the lot of many to whom popularity
is success. Actors, statesmen, authors, preachers, have often in
England their day of quite undeserved popular ovation; and by and
bye their day of entire neglect. It is the rocket and the stick.
We are told that Bishop Butler, about the period of the great
excesses of the French Revolution, was walking in his garden with
his chaplain. After a long fit of musing, the Bishop turned to the
chaplain, and asked the question whether nations might not go mad,
as well as individuals?  Classes of society, I think, may certainly
have attacks of temporary insanity on some one point. The Jenny
Lind fever was such an attack.  Such was the popularity of the
boy-actor Betty. Such the popularity of the Small Coal Man some time
in the last century; such that of the hippopotamus at the Regent's
Park; such that of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

But this essay must have an end. It is far too long already. I am
tired of it, and a fortiori my reader must be so. Let me try the
effect of an abrupt conclusion.





CHAPTER III.

CONCERNING SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS;

SOME THOUGHTS UPON THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM.




[Footnote: For the suggestion of the subject of this essay, and
for many valuable hints as to its treatment, I am indebted to the
kindness of the Archbishop of Dublin. Indeed, in all that part of
the essay which treats of Secondary Vulgar Errwi, I have done little
more than expand and illustrate the skeleton of thought supplied
to me by Archbishop Whately.]

I have eaten up all the grounds of my tea, said, many years since,
in my hearing, in modest yet triumphant tones, a little girl of
seven years old. I have but to close my eyes, and I see all that
scene again, almost as plainly as ever. Six or seven children (I
am one of them) are sitting round a tea-table; their father and
mother are there too; and an old gentleman, who is (in his own
judgment) one of the wisest of men. I see the dining-room, large and
low-ceilinged; the cheerful glow of the autumnal fire; the little
faces in the soft candle-light, for glaring gas was there unknown.
There had been much talk about the sinfulness of waste--of the
waste of even very little things. The old gentleman, so wise (in
his own judgment, and indeed in my judgment at that period), was
instilling into the children's minds some of those lessons which
are often impressed upon children by people (I am now aware) of
no great wisdom or cleverness. He had dwelt at considerable length
upon the sinfulness of wasting anything; likewise on the sinfulness
of children being saucy or particular as to what they should eat.
He enforced, with no small solemnity, the duty of children's eating
what was set before them without minding whether it was good or not,
or at least without minding whether they liked it or not. The poor
little girl listened to all that was said, and of course received
it all as indubitably true. Waste and sauciness, she saw, were
wrong, so she judged that the very opposite of waste and sauciness
must be right. Accordingly, she thought she would turn to use
something that was very small, but still something that ought not
to be wasted.  Accordingly, she thought she would show the docility
of her taste by eating up something that was very disagreeable.
Here was an opportunity at once of acting out the great principles
to which she had been listening. And while a boy, evidently destined
to be a metaphysician, and evidently possessed of the spirit
of resistance to constituted authority whether in government or
doctrine, boldly argued that it could not be wicked in him to hate
onions, because God had made him so that he did hate onions, and
(going still deeper into things) insisted that to eat a thing when
you did not want it was wasting it much more truly than it would
be wasting it to leave it; the little girl ate up all the grounds
left in her teacup, and then announced the fact with considerable
complacency.

Very, very natural. The little girl's act was a slight straw
showing how a great current sets. It was a fair exemplification
of a tendency which is woven into the make of our being. Tell the
average mortal that it is wrong to walk on the left side of the road,
and in nine cases out of ten he will conclude that the proper thing
must be to walk on the right side of the road; whereas in actual
life, and in almost all opinions, moral, political, and religious,
the proper thing is to walk neither on the left nor the right side,
but somewhere about the middle. Say to the ship-master, You are to
sail through a perilous strait; you will have the raging Scylla on
one hand as you go. His natural reply will be, Well, I will keep as
far away from it as possible; I will keep close by the other side.
But the rejoinder must be, No, you will be quite as ill off there;
you will be in equal peril on the other side: there is Charybdis.
What you have to do is to keep at a safe distance from each. In
avoiding the one, do not run into the other.

It seems to be a great law of the universe, that Wrong lies upon
either side of the way, and that Right is the narrow path between.
There are the two ways of doing wrong--Too Much and Too Little.
Go to the extreme right hand, and you are wrong; go to the extreme
left hand, and you are wrong too. That you may be right, you have
to keep somewhere between these two extremes: but not necessarily
in the exact middle. All this, of course, is part of the great fact
that in this world Evil has the advantage of Good. It is easier to
go wrong than right.

It is very natural to think that if one thing or course be wrong,
its reverse must be right. If it be wrong to walk towards the east,
surely it must be right to walk towards the west. If it be wrong to
dress in black, it must be right to dress in white. It is somewhat
hard to say, Dum vitant stulti vitia, in contraria currunt--to
declare, as if that were a statement of the whole truth, that
fools mistake reverse of wrong for right. Fools do so indeed, but
not fools only. The average Jiuman being, with the most honest
intentions, is prone to mistake reverse of wrong for right. We
are fond, by our natural constitution, of broad distinctions--of
classifications that put the whole interests and objects of this
world to iho Tight-hand and to the left. We long for Aye or No--for
Heads or Tails. We are impatient of limitations, qualifications,
restrictions. You remember how Mr. Micawber explained the philosophy
of income and expenditure, and urged people never to run in debt.
Income, said he, a hundred pounds a year; expenditure ninety-nine
pounds nineteen shillings: Happiness. Income, a hundred pounds a
year; expenditure a hundred pounds and one shilling: Misery. You
see the principle involved is, that if you are not happy, you must
be miserable--that if you are not miserable, you must be happy.
If you are not any particular thing, then you are its opposite. If
you are not For, then you are Against. If you are not black, many
men will jump to the conclusion that you are white: the fact probably
being that you are gray. If not a Whig, you must be a Tory: in
truth, you are a Liberal-Conservative. We desiderate in all things
the sharp decidedness of the verdict of a jury--Guilty or Not
Guilty. We like to conclude that if a man be not very good, then
he is very bad; if not very clever, then very stupid; if not very
wise, then a fool: whereas in fact, the man probably is a curious
mixture of good and evil, strength and weakness, wisdom and folly,
knowledge and ignorance, cleverness and stupidity.

Let it be here remarked, that in speaking of it as an error to
take reverse of wrong for right, I use the words in their ordinary
sense, as generally understood. In common language the reverse
of a thing is taken to mean the thing at the opposite end of
the scale from it.  Thus, black is the reverse of white, bigotry
of latitudinarianism, malevolence of benevolence, parsimony of
extravagance, and the like.  Of course, in strictness, these things
are not the reverse of one another. In strictness, the reverse of
wrong always is right; for, to speak with severe precision, the
reverse of steering upon Scylla is simply not steering upon Scylla;
the reverse of being extravagant is not being parsimonious--it is
simply not being extravagant; the reverse of walking eastward is
not walking westward--it is simply not walking eastward. And that
may include standing still, or walking to any point of the compass
except the east. But I understand the reverse of a thing as meaning
the opposite extreme from it. And you see, the Latin words quoted
above are more precise than the English. It is severely true, that
while fools think to shun error on one side, they run into the
contrary error--i. e., the error that lies equi-distant, or nearly
equi-distant, on the other side of the line of right.

One class of the errors into which men are prone to run under this
natural impulse are those which have been termed Secondary Vulgar
Errors. A vulgar error, you will understand, my reader, does not
by any means signify an error into which only the vulgar are likely
to fall. It does not by any means signify a mistaken belief which
will be taken up only by inferior and uneducated minds. A vulgar
error means an error either in conduct or belief into which man,
by the make of his being, is likely to fall. Now, people a degree
wiser and more thoughtful than the mass, discover that these vulgar
errors are errors. They conclude that their opposites (i. e., the
things at the other extremity of the scale) must be right; and by
running into the opposite extreme they run just as far wrong upon
the other side.  There is too great a reaction. The twig was bent
to the right--they bend it to the left, forgetting that the right
thing was that the twig should be straight. If convinced that waste
and sauciness are wrong, they proceed to eat the grounds of their
tea; if convinced that self-indulgence is wrong, they conclude that
hair-shirts and midnight floggings are right; if convinced that
the Church of Rome has too many ceremonies, they resolve that they
will have no ceremonies at all; if convinced that it is unworthy to
grovel in the presence of a duke, they conclude that it will be a
fine thing to refuse the duke ordinary civility; if convinced that
monarehs are not much wiser or better than other human beings, they
run off into the belief that all kings have been little more than
incarnate demons; if convinced that representative government
often works very imperfectly, they raise a cry for imperialism;
if convinced that monarchy has its abuses, they call out for
republicanism; if convinced that Britain has many things which are
not so good as they ought to be, they keep constantly extolling
the perfection of the United States.

Now, inasmuch as a rise of even one step in the scale of thought
elevates the man who has taken it above the vast host of men who
have never taken even that one step, the number of people who (at
least in matters of any moment) arrive at the Secondary Vulgar
Error is much less than the number of the people who stop at the
Primary Vulgar Error. Very great multitudes of human beings think
it a very fine thing, the very finest of all human things, to
be very rich. A much smaller number, either from the exercise of
their own reflective powers, or from the indoctrination of romantic
novels and overdrawn religious books, run to the opposite extreme:
undervalue wealth, deny that it adds anything to human comfort and
enjoyment, declare that it is an unmixed evil, profess to despise
it. I dare say that many readers of the Idylls of the King will
so misunderstand that exquisite song of 'Fortune and her Wheel,'
as to see in it only the charming and sublime embodiment of a
secondary vulgar error,--the error, to wit, that wealth and outward
circumstances are of no consequence at all. To me that song appears
rather to take the further step, and to reach the conclusion
in which is embodied the deliberate wisdom of humankind upon this
matter: the conclusion which shakes from itself on either hand
either vulgar error: the idolization of wealth on the one side,
the contempt of it on the other: and to convey the sobered judgment
that while the advantages and refinements of fortune are so great
that no thoughtful man can long despise it, the responsibilities
and temptations of it are so great that no thoughtful man will
much repine if he fail to reach it; and thus that we may genially
acquiesce in that which it pleases God to send. Midway between two
vulgar errors: steering a sure track between Scylla and Charybdis:
the grovelling multitude to the left, the romantic few to the
right; stand the words of inspired wisdom. The pendulum had probably
oscillated many times between the two errors, before it settled at
the central truth; 'Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me
with food convenient for me: Lest I be full and deny Thee, and say,
Who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name
of my God in vain.'

But although these errors of reaction are less common than the
primary vulgar errors, they are better worth noticing: inasmuch as
in many cases they are the errors of the well-intentioned. People
fall into the primary vulgar errors without ever thinking of right
or wrong: merely feeling an impulse to go there, or to think thus.
But worthy folk, for the most part, fall into the secondary vulgar
errors, while honestly endeavouring to escape what they have
discerned to be wrong. Not indeed that it is always in good faith
that men run to the opposite extreme. Sometimes they do it in pet
and perversity, being well aware that they are doing wrong. You hint
to some young friend, to whom you are nearly enough related to be
justified in doing so, that the dinner to which he has invited you,
with several others, is unnecessarily fine, is somewhat extravagant,
is beyond what he can afford. The young friend asks you back in
a week or two, and sets before you a feast of salt herrings and
potatoes. Now the fellow did not run into this extreme with the
honest intention of doing right. He knew perfectly well that this
was not what you meant. He did not go through this piece of folly
in the sincere desire to avoid the other error of extravagance. Or,
you are a country clergyman. You are annoyed, Sunday by Sunday, by
a village lad who, from enthusiasm or ostentation, sings so loud
in church as to disturb the whole congregation. You hint to him,
as kindly as you can, that there is something very pleasing about
the softer tones of his voice, and that you would like to hear
them more frequently. But the lad sees through your civil way of
putting the case. His vanity is touched. He sees you mean that you
don't like to hear him bellow: and next Sunday you will observe
that he shuts up his hymn-book in dudgeon, and will not sing at
all. Leave the blockhead to himself Do not set yourself to stroke
down his self-conceit: he knows quite well he is doing wrong:
there is neither sense nor honesty in what he does. You remark at
dinner, while staying with a silly old gentleman, that the plum-pudding,
though admirable, perhaps errs on the side of over-richness; next
day he sets before you a mass of stiff paste with no plums at
all, and says, with a look of sly stupidity, 'Well, I hope you are
satisfied now.' Politeness prevents your replying, 'No, you don't.
You know that is not what I meant. You are a fool.' You remember
the boy in Pickwick, who on his father finding fault with him for
something wrong he had done, offered to kill himself if that would
be any satisfaction to his parent. In this case you have a more
recondite instance of this peculiar folly. Here the primary course
is tacitly assumed, without being stated. The primary impulse of
the human being is to take care of himself; the opposite of that
of course is to kill himself. And the boy, being chidden for doing
something which might rank under the general head of taking care
of himself, proposed (as that course appeared unsatisfactory) to
take the opposite one. 'You don't take exercise enough,' said a
tutor to a wrong-headed boy who was under his care: 'you ought to
walk more.' Next morning the perverse fellow entered the breakfast
parlour in a fagged condition, and said, with the air of a martyr,
'Well, I trust I have taken exercise enough to-day: I have walked
twenty miles this morning.' As for all such manifestations of the
disposition to run into opposite extremes, let them be treated as
manifestations of pettedness, perversity, and dishonesty. In some
cases a high-spirited youth may be excused them; but, for the
most part, they come with doggedness, wrong-headedness, and dense
stupidity.  And any pretext that they are exhibited with an honest
intention to do right, ought to be regarded as a transparently
false pretext.

I have now before me a list (prepared by a much stronger hand
than mine) of honest cases in which men, avoiding Scylla, run into
Charybdis: in which men, thinking to bend the crooked twig straight,
bend it backwards. But before mentioning these, it may be remarked,
that there is often such a thing as a reaction from a natural
tendency, even when that natural tendency is not towards what may
be called a primary vulgar error. The law of reaction extends to
all that human beings can ever feel the disposition to think or do.
There are, doubtless, minds of great fixity of opinion and motive:
and there are certain things, in the case of almost all men, as
regards which their belief and their active bias never vary through
life: but with most human beings, with nations, with humankind,
as regards very many and very important matters, as surely and as
far as the pendulum has swung to the right, so surely and so far
will it swing to the left. I do not say that an opinion in favour
of monarchy is a primary vulgar error; or that an opinion in favour
of republicanism is a secondary: both may be equally right: but
assuredly each of these is a reaction from the other. America, for
instance, is one great reaction from Europe. The principle on which
these reactionary swings of the pendulum take place, is plain.
Whatever be your present position, you feel its evils and drawbacks
keenly. Your feeling of the present evil is much more vivid than
your imagination of the evil which is sure to be inherent in the
opposite system, whatever that may be. You live in a country where
the national Church is Presbyterian. You see, day by day, many
inconveniences and disadvantages inherent in that form of church
government. It is of the nature of evil to make its presence much
more keenly felt than the presence of good. So while keenly alive
to the drawbacks of presbytery, you are hardly conscious of its
advantages. You swing over, let us suppose, to the other end: you
swing over from Scotland into England, from presbytery to episcopacy.
For awhile you are quite delighted to find yourself free from the
little evils of which you had been wont to complain. But by and
bye the drawbacks of episcopacy begin to push themselves upon your
notice. You have escaped one set of disadvantages: you find that
you have got into the middle of another. Scylla no longer bellows
in your hearing; but Charybdis whirls you round. You begin to feel
that the country and the system yet remain to be sought, in which
some form of evil, of inconvenience, of worry, shall not press you.
Am I wrong in fancying, dear friends more than one or two, that
but for very shame the pendulum would swing back again to the point
from which it started: and you, kindly Scots, would find yourselves
more at home in kindly and homely Scotland, with her simple forms
and faith? So far as my experience has gone, I think that in all
matters not of vital moment, it is best that the pendulum should
stay at the end of the swing where it first found itself: it will
be in no more stable position at the other end: and it will somehow
feel stranger-like there. And you, my friend, though in your visits
to Anglican territory you heartily conform to the Anglican Church,
and enjoy as much as mortal san her noble cathedrals and her
stately worship; still I know that after all, you cannot shake off
the spell in which the old remembrances of your boyhood have bound
you. I know that your heart warms to the Burning Bush; [Footnote:
The scutcheon of the Church of Scotland.] and that it will, till
death chills it.

A noteworthy fact in regard to the swing of the pendulum, is that
the secondary tendency is sometimes found in the ruder state of
society, and the less reflective man. Naturalness comes last. The
pendulum started from naturalness: it swung over into artificiality:
and with thoughtful people it has swung back to naturalness again.
Thus it is natural, when in danger, to be afraid. It is natural,
when you are possessed by any strong feeling, to show it. You see
all this in children: this is the point which the pendulum starts
from. It swings over, and we find a reaction from this. The reaction
is, to maintain and exhibit perfect coolness and indifference in
danger; to pretend to be incapable of fear. This state of things
we find in the Red Indian, a rude and uncivilized being. But
it is plain that with people who are able to think, there must be
a reaction from this. The pendulum cannot long stay in a position
which flies so completely in the face of the law of gravitation. It
is pure nonsense to talk about being incapable of fear. I remember
reading somewhere about Queen Elizabeth, that 'her soul was incapable
of fear.' That statement is false and absurd. You may regard fear
as unmanly and unworthy: you may repress the manifestations of
it; but the state of mind which (in beings not properly monstrous
or defective) follows the perception of being in danger, is fear.
As surely as the perception of light is sight, so surely is the
perception of danger fear. And for a man to say that his soul is
incapable of fear, is just as absurd as to say that from a peculiarity
of constitution, when dipped in water, he does not get wet. You,
human being, whoever you may be, when you are placed in danger, and
know you are placed in danger, and reflect on the fact, you feel
afraid. Don't vapour and say no; we know how the mental machine
must work, unless it be diseased. Now, the thoughtful man admits
all this: he admits that a bullet through his brain would be a very
serious thing for himself, and like-wise for his wife and children:
he admits that he shrinks from such a prospect; he will take pains
to protect himself from the risk; but he says that if duty requires
him to run the risk he will run it. This is the courage of the
civilized man as opposed to the blind, bull-dog insensibility of
the savage. This is courage--to know the existence of danger, but
to face it nevertheless. Here, under the influence of longer thought,
the pendulum has swung into common sense, though not quite back to
the point from which it started. Of course, it still keeps swinging
about in individual minds. The other day I read in a newspaper a
speech by a youthful rifleman, in which he boasted that no matter
to what danger exposed, his corps would never take shelter behind
trees and rocks, but would stand boldly out to the aim of the enemy.
I was very glad to find this speech answered in a letter to the
Times, written by a rifleman of great experience and proved bravery.
The experienced man pointed out that the inexperienced man was
talking nonsense: that true courage appeared in manfully facing risks
which were inevitable, but not in running into needless peril: and
that the business of a soldier was to be as useful to his country
and as destructive to the enemy as possible, and not to make needless
exhibitions of personal foolhardiness. Thus swings the pendulum as
to danger and fear. The point of departure, the primary impulse,
is,

1. An impulse to avoid danger at all hazards: i. e., to run away,
and save yourself, however discreditably.

The pendulum swings to the other extremity, and we have the secondary
impulse--

2. An impulse to disregard danger, and even to run into it, as if
it were of no consequence at all; i. e., young rifleman foolhardiness,
and Red Indian insensibility.

The pendulum comes so far back, and rests at the point of wisdom:

3. A determination to avoid all danger, the running into which would
do no good, and which may be avoided consistently with honour; but
manfully to face danger, however great, that comes in the way of
duty.

But after all this deviation from the track, I return to my list of
Secondary Vulgar Errors, run into with good and honest intentions.
Here is the first--

Don't you know, my reader, that it is natural to think very bitterly
of the misconduct which affects yourself? If a man cheats your
friend, or cheats your slight acquaintance, or cheats some one who
is quite unknown to you, by selling him a lame horse, you disapprove
his conduct, indeed, but not nearly so much as if he had cheated
yourself. You learn that Miss Limejuice has been disseminating a
grossly untrue account of some remarks which you made in her hearing:
and your first impulse is to condemn her malicious falsehood, much
more severely than if she had merely told a few lies about some
one else. Yet it is quite evident that if we were to estimate the
doings of men with perfect justice, we should fix solely on the
moral element in their doings; and the accidental circumstance
of the offence or injury to ourselves would be neither here nor
there. The primary vulgar error, then, in this case is, undue and
excessive disapprobation of misconduct from which we have suffered.
No one but a very stupid person would, if it were fairly put to him,
maintain that this extreme disapprobation was right: but it cannot
be denied that this is the direction to which all human beings are
likely, at first, to feel an impulse to go. A man does you some
injury: you are much angrier than if he had done the like injury
to some one else. You are much angrier when your own servants are
guilty of little neglects and follies, than when the servants of
your next neighbour are guilty in a precisely similar degree. The
Prime Minister (or Chancellor) fails to make you a Queen's Counsel
or a Judge: you are much more angry than if he had overlooked
some other man, of precisely equal merit. And I do not mean merely
that the injury done to yourself comes more home to you, but that
positively you think it a worse thing. It seems as if there were
more of moral evil in it. The boy who steals your plums seems worse
than other boys stealing other plums. The servant who sells your
oats and starves your horses, seems worse than other servants who
do the like. It is not merely that you feel where the shoe pinches
yourself, more than where it pinches another: that is all quite
right. It is that you have a tendency to think it is a worse shoe
than another which gives an exactly equal amount of pain. You are
prone to dwell upon and brood over the misconduct which affected
yourself.

Well, you begin to see that this is unworthy, that selfishness and
mortified conceit are at the foundation of it. You determine that
you will shake yourself free from this vulgar error. What more
magnanimous, you think, than to do the opposite of the wrong thing?
Surely it will be generous, and even heroic, to wholly acquit
the wrong-doer, and even to cherish him for a bosom friend. So
the pendulum swings over to the opposite extreme, and you land in
the secondary vulgar error. I do not mean to say that in practice
many persons are likely to thus bend the twig backwards; but it is
no small evil to think that it would be a right thing, and a fine
thing, to do even that which you never intend to do. So you write
an essay, or even a book, the gist of which is that it is a grand
thing to select for a friend and guide the human being who has done
you signal injustice and harm. Over that book, if it be a prettily
written tale, many young ladies will weep: and though without the
faintest intention of imitating your hero's behaviour, they will
think that it would be a fine thing if they did so. And it is a
great mischief to pervert the moral judgment and falsely to excite
the moral feelings. You forget that wrong is wrong, though it be
done against yourself, and that you have no right to acquit the
wrong to yourself as though it were no wrong at all. That lies
beyond your province. You may forgive the personal offence, but it
does not rest with you to acquit the guilt. You have no right to
confuse moral distinctions by practically saying that wrong is not
wrong, because it is done against you. All wrong is against very
many things and very grave things, besides being against you. It
is not for you to speak in the name of God and the universe. You
may not wish to say much about the injury done to yourself, but
there it is; and as to the choosing for your friend the man who has
greatly injured you, in most cases such a choice would be a very
unwise one, because in most cases it would amount to this--that
you should select a man for a certain post mainly because he has
shown himself possessed of qualities which unfit him for that post.
That surely would be very foolish. If you had to appoint a postman,
would you choose a man because he had no legs? And what is very
foolish can never be very magnanimous.

The right course to follow lies between the two which have been
set out. The man who has done wrong to you is still a wrong-doer.
The question you have to consider is, What ought your conduct to be
towards a wrong-doer? Let there be no harbour given to any feeling
of personal revenge. But remember that it is your duty to disapprove
what is wrong, and that it is wisdom not too far to trust a man
who has proved himself unworthy to be trusted. I have no feeling of
selfish bitterness against the person who deceived me deliberately
and grossly, yet I cannot but judge that deliberate and gross
deceit is bad; and I cannot but judge that the person who deceived
me once might, if tempted, deceive me again: so he shall not have
the opportunity. I look at the horse which a friend offers me for
a short ride. I discern upon the knees of the animal a certain slight
but unmistakeable roughness of the hair. That horse has been down;
and if I mount that horse at all (which I shall not do except in
a case of necessity), I shall ride him with a tight rein, and with
a sharp look-out for rolling stones.

Another matter in regard to which Scylla and Charybdis are very
discernible, is the fashion in which human beings think and speak
of the good or bad qualities of their friends.

The primary tendency here is to blindness to the faults of a friend,
and over-estimate of his virtues and qualifications. Most people
are disposed extravagantly to over-value anything belonging to
or connected with themselves. A farmer tells you that there never
were such turnips as his turnips; a schoolboy thinks that the world
cannot show boys so clever as those with whom he is competing for
the first place in his class; a clever student at college tells
you what magnificent fellows are certain of his compeers--how sure
they are to become great men in life. Talk of Tennyson! You have
not read Smith's prize poem. Talk of Macaulay! Ah, if you could
see Brown's prize essay! A mother tells you (fathers are generally
less infatuated) how her boy was beyond comparison the most
distinguished and clever in his class--how he stood quite apart
from, any of the others. Your eye happens to fall a day or two
afterwards upon the prize-list advertised in the newspapers, and
you discover that (curiously) the most distinguished and clever
boy in that particular school is rewarded with the seventh prize.
I dare say you may have met with families in which there existed
the most absurd and preposterous belief as to their superiority,
social, intellectual, and moral, above other families which were
as good or better. And it is to be admitted, that if you are happy
enough to have a friend whose virtues and qualifications are really
high, your primary tendency will probably be to fancy him a great
deal cleverer, wiser, and better than, he really is, and to imagine
that he possesses no faults at all. The over-estimate of his good
qualities will be the result of your seeing them constantly, and
having their excellence much pressed on your attention, while from
not knowing so well other men who are quite as good, you are led to
think that those good qualities are more rare and excellent than
in fact they are. And you may possibly regard it as a duty to
shut your eyes to the faults of those who are dear to you, and to
persuade yourself, against your judgment, that they have no faults
or none worth thinking of. One can imagine a child painfully struggling
to be blind to a parent's errors, and thinking it undutiful and
wicked to admit the existence of that: which is too evident. And if
you know well a really good and able man, you will very naturally
think his goodness and his ability to be relatively much greater
than they are. For goodness and ability are in truth very noble
things: the more you look at them the more you will feel this: and
it is natural to judge that what is so noble cannot be very common;
whereas in fact there is much more good in this world than we are
ready to believe. If you find an intelligent person who believes
that some particular author is by far the best in the language, or
that some particular composer's music is by far the finest, or that
some particular preacher is by far the most eloquent and useful, or
that some particular river has by far the finest scenery, or that
some particular sea-side place has by far the most bracing and
exhilarating air, or that some particular magazine is ten thousand
miles ahead of all competitors, the simple explanation in ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred is this--that the honest individual who
holds these overstrained opinions knows a great deal better than
he knows any others, that author, that music, that preacher, that
river, that sea-side place, that magazine. He knows how good they
are: and not having much studied the merits of competing things,
he does not know that these are very nearly as good.

But I do not think that there is any subject whatever in regard to
which it is so capricious and arbitrary whether you shall run it
into Scylla or into Charybdis. It depends entirely on how it strikes
the mind, whether you shall go off a thousand miles to the right or
a thousand miles to the lefn You know, if you fire a rifle-bullet
at an iron-coated ship, the bullet, if it impinge upon the iron
plate at A, may glance away to the west, while if it impinge upon
the iron plate at B, only an inch distant from A, it may glance off
towards the directly opposite point of the compass. A very little
thing makes all the difference. You stand in the engine-room of
a steamer; you admit the steam to the cylinders, and the paddles
turn ahead; a touch of a lever, you admit the selfsame steam to the
selfsame cylinders, and the paddles turn astern. It is so oftentimes
in the moral world. The turning of a straw decides whether the
engines shall work forward or backward.

Now, given a friend, to whom you are very warmly attached: it is
a toss-up whether your affection for your friend shall make you,

1. Quite blind to his faults; or,

2. Acutely and painfully alive to his faults.

Sincere affection may impel either way. Your friend, for instance,
makes a speech at a public dinner. He makes a tremendously bad
speech. Now, your love for him may lead you either

1. To fancy that his speech is a remarkably good one; or,

2. To feel acutely how bad his speech is, and to wish you could
sink through the floor for very shame.

If you did not care for him at all, you would not mind a bit whether
he made a fool of himself or not. But if you really care for him,
and if the speech be really very bad, and if you are competent to
judge whether speeches in general be bad or not, I do not see how you
can escape falling either into Scylla or Charybdis. And accordingly,
while there are families in which there exists a preposterous
over-estimate of the talents and acquirements of their several
members, there are other families in which the rifle-bullet has
glanced off in the opposite direction, and in which there exists
a depressing and unreasonable under-estimate of the talents and
acquirements of their several members. I have known such a thing as
a family in which certain boys during their early education had it
ceaselessly drilled into them that they were the idlest, stupidest,
and most ignorant boys in the world. The poor little fellows grew
up under that gloomy belief: for conscience is a very artificial
thing, and you may bring up very good boys in the belief that
they are very bad. At length, happily, they went to a great public
school; and like rockets they went up forthwith to the top of their
classes, and never lost their places there. From school they went
to the university, and there won honours more eminent than had ever
been won before. It will not surprise people who know much of human
nature, to be told that through this brilliant career of school
and college work the home belief in their idleness and ignorance
continued unchanged, and that hardly at its end was the toil-worn
senior wrangler regarded as other than an idle and useless blockhead.
Now, the affection which prompts the under-estimate may be quite
as real and deep as that which prompts the over-estimate, but its
manifestation is certainly the less amiable and pleasing. I have
known a successful author whose relatives never believed, till the
reviews assured them of it, that his writings were anything but
contemptible and discreditable trash.

I have been speaking of an honest though erroneous estimate of the
qualities of one's friends, rather than of any expression of that
estimate. The primary tendency is to an over-estimate; the secondary
tendency is to an under-estimate. A commonplace man thinks there
never was mortal so wise and good as the friend he values; a man
who is a thousandth part of a degree less common-place resolves
that he will keep clear of that error, and accordingly he feels
bound to exaggerate the failings of his friend and to extenuate his
good qualities. He thinks that a friend's judgment is very good and
sound, and that he may well rely upon it; but for fear of showing
it too much regard, he probably shows it too little. He thinks that
in some dispute his friend is right; but for fear of being partial
he decides that his friend is wrong. It is obvious that in any
instance in which a man, seeking to avoid the primary error of
over-estimating his friend, falls into the secondary of under-estimating
him, he will (if any importance be attached to his judgment) damage
his friend's character; for most people will conclude that he is
saying of his friend the best that can be said; and that if even he
admits that there is so little to approve about his friend, there
must be very little indeed to approve: whereas the truth may be,
that he is saying the worst that can be said--that no man could
with justice give a worse picture of the friend's character.

Not very far removed from this pair of vulgar errors stand the
following:

The primary vulgar error is, to set up as an infallible oracle one
whom we regard as wise--to regard any question as settled finally
if we know what is his opinion upon it. You remember the man in the
Spectator who was always quoting the sayings of Mr. Nisby. There
was a report in London that the Grand Vizier was dead. The good
man was uncertain whether to believe the report or not. He went and
talked with Mr. Nisby and returned with his mind reassured. Now,
he enters in his diary that 'the Grand Vizier was certainly dead.'
Considering the weakness of the reasoning powers of many people,
there is something pleasing after all in this tendency to look
round for somebody stronger upon whom they may lean. It is wise
and natural in a scarlet-runner to climb up something, for it could
not grow up by itself; and for practical purposes it is well that
in each household there should be a little Pope, whose dicta on
all topics shall be unquestionable. It saves what is to many people
the painful effort of making up their mind what they are to do or
to think. It enables them to think or act with much greater decision
and confidence. Most men have always a lurking distrust of their
own judgment, unless they find it confirmed by that of somebody
else. There are very many decent commonplace people who, if they
had been reading a book or article and had been thinking it very
fine, would, if you were resolutely and loudly to declare in their
hearing that it was wretched trash, begin to think that it was
wretched trash too.

The primary vulgar error, then, is to regard as an oracle one whom
we esteem as wise; and the secondary, the Charybdis opposite to
this Scylla, is, to entertain an excessive dread of being too much
led by one whom we esteem as wise. I mean an honest candid dread.
I do not mean a petted, wrong-headed, pragmatical determination to
let him see that you can think for yourself. You see, rny friend,
I don't suppose you to be a self-conceited fool. You remember how
Presumption, in the Pilgrim's Progress, on being offered some good
advice, cut his kind adviser short by declaring that Every tub must
stand on its own bottom. We have all known men, young and old, who,
upon being advised to do something which they knew they ought to
do, would, out of pure perversity and a wrong-headed independence,
go and do just the opposite thing. The secondary error of which
I am now thinking is that of the man who honestly dreads making
too much of the judgment of any mortal: and who, acting from a
good intention, probably goes wrong in the same direction as the
wrong-headed conceited man. Now, don't you know that to such an
extent does this morbid fear of trusting too much to any mortal go
in some men, that in their practical belief you would think that
the fact of any man being very wise was a reason why his judgment
should be set aside as unworthy of consideration; and more particularly,
that the fact of any man being supposed to be a powerful reasoner,
was quite enough to show that all he says is to go for nothing? You
are quite aware how jauntily some people use this last consideration,
to sweep away at once all the reasons given by an able and ingenious
speaker or writer. And it cuts the ground effectually from under
his feet. You state an opinion, somewhat opposed to that commonly
received. An honest, stupid person meets it with a surprised stare.
You tell him (I am recording what I have myself witnessed) that
you have been reading a work on the subject by a certain prelate:
you state as well as you can the arguments which are set forth by
the distinguished prelate. These arguments seem of great weight.
They deserve at least to be carefully considered. They seem to
prove the novel opinion to be just: they assuredly call on candid
minds to ponder the whole matter well before relapsing into the
old current way of thinking. Do you expect that the honest, stupid
person will judge thus? If so, you are mistaken. He is not shaken
in the least by all these strong reasons.  The man who has set
these reasons forth is known to be a master of logic: that is good
ground why all his reasons should count for nothing. Oh, says the
stupid, honest person, we all know that the Archbishop can prove
anything! And so the whole thing is finally settled.

I have a considerable list of instances in which the reaction from
an error on one side of the line of right, lands in error equally
distant from the line of right on the other side: but it is needless
to go on to illustrate these at length; the mere mention of them
will suffice to suggest many thoughts to the intelligent reader. A
primary vulgar error, to which very powerful minds have frequently
shown a strong tendency, is bigoted intolerance: intolerance in
politics, in religion, in ecclesiastical affairs, in morals, in
anything. You may safely say that nothing but most unreasonable
bigotry would lead a Tory to say that all Whigs are scoundrels,
or a Whig to Bay that all Tories are bloated tyrants or crawling
sycophants. I must confess that, in severe reason, it is impossible
entirely to justify the Churchman who holds that all Dissenters
are extremely bad; though (so does inveterate prepossession warp
the intellect) I have also to admit that it appears to me that for
a Dissenter to hold that there is little or no good in the Church
is a great deal worse. There is something fine, however, about
a heartily intolerant man: you like him, though you disapprove of
him. Even if I were inclined to Whiggery, I should admire the downright
dictum of Dr. Johnson, that the devil was the first Whig. Even if
I were a Nonconformist, I should like Sydney Smith the better for
the singular proof of his declining strength which he once adduced:
'I do believe,' he said, 'that if you were to put a knife into my
hand, I should not have vigour enough to stick it into a Dissenter!'
The secondary error in this respect is a latitudinarian liberality
which regards truth and falsehood as matters of indifference.
Genuine liberality of sentiment is a good thing, and difficult as
it is good: but much liberality, political and religious, arises
really from the fact, that the liberal man does not care a rush
about the matter in debate. It is very easy to be tolerant in a
case in which you have no feeling whatever either way. The Churchman
who does not mind a bit whether the Church stands or falls, has no
difficulty in tolerating the enemies and assailants of the Church.
It is different with a man who holds the existence of a national
Establishment as a vital matter. And I have generally remarked
that when clergymen of the Church profess extreme catholicity of
spirit, and declare that they do not regard it as a thing of the
least consequence whether a man be Churchman or Dissenter, intelligent
Nonconformists receive such protestations with much contempt, and
(possibly with injustice) suspect their utterer of hypocrisy. If
you really care much about any principle; and if you regard it as
of essential importance; you cannot help feeling a strong impulse
to intolerance of those who decidedly and actively differ from you.

Here are some further vulgar errors, primary and secondary:

Primary--Idleness, and excessive self-indulgence;

Secondary--Penances, and self-inflicted tortures.

Primary--Swallowing whole all that is said or done by one's party;

Secondary--Dread of quite agreeing, or quite disagreeing on any
point with any one; and trying to keep at exactly an equal distance
from each.

Primary--Following the fashion with indiscriminate ardour;

Secondary--Finding a merit in singularity, as such.

Primary--Being quite captivated with thought which is striking and
showy, but not sound;

Secondary--Concluding that whatever is sparkling must be unsound.

I hardly know which tendency of the following is the primary, and
which the secondary; but I am sure that both exist. It may depend
upon the district of country, and the age of the thinker, which of
the two is the action and which the reaction:

1. Thinking a clergyman a model of perfection, because he is a stout
dashing fellow who plays at cricket and goes out fox-hunting; and,
generally, who flies in the face of all conventionalism;

2. Thinking a clergyman a model of perfection because he is of very
grave and decorous deportment; never plays at cricket, and never
goes out fox-hunting; and, generally, conforms carefully to all
the little proprieties.

1. Thinking a bishop a model prelate because he has no stiffness
or ceremony about him, but talks frankly to everybody, and puts
all who approach him at their ease;

2. Thinking a bishop a model prelate because he never descends from
his dignity; never forgets that he is a bishop, and keeps all who
approach him in their proper places.

1. Thinking the Anglican Church service the best, because it is so
decorous, solemn, and dignified;

2. Thinking the Scotch Church service the best, because it is so
simple and so capable of adaptation to all circumstances which may
arise.

1. Thinking an artisan a sensible right-minded man, knowing his
station, because he is always very respectful in his demeanour to
the squire, and great folks generally;

2. Thinking an artisan a fine, manly, independent fellow, because
he is always much less respectful in his demeanour to the squire
than he is to other people.

1. Thinking it a fine thing to be a fast, reckless, swaggering,
drinking, swearing reprobate: Being ashamed of the imputation
of being a well-behaved and (above all) a pious and conscientious
young man: Thinking it manly to do wrong, and washy to do right;

2. Thinking it a despicable thing to be a fast, reckless, swaggering,
drinking, swearing reprobate: Thinking it is manly to do right,
and shameful to do wrong.

1. That a young man should begin his letters to his father
with HONOURED SIR; and treat the old gentleman with extraordinary
deference upon all occasions:

2. That a young man should begin his remarks to his father on any
subject with, I SAY, GOVERNOR; and treat the old gentleman upon
all occasions with no deference at all.

But indeed, intelligent reader, the swing of the pendulum is the
type of the greater amount of human opinion and human feeling. In
individuals, in communities, in parishes, in little country towns,
in great nations, from hour to hour, from week to week, from century
to century, the pendulum swings to and fro. From Yes on the one
side to No on the other side of almost all conceivable questions,
the pendulum swings. Sometimes it swings over from Yes to No in a
few hours or days; sometimes it takes centuries to pass from the one
extremity to the other. In feeling, in taste, in judgment, in the
grandest matters and the least, the pendulum swings. From Popery to
Puritanism; from Puritanism back towards Popery; from Imperialism
to Republicanism, and back towards Imperialism again; from Gothic
architecture to Palladian, and from Palladian back to Gothic;
from hooped petticoats to drapery of the scantiest, and from that
backwards to the multitudinous crinoline; from crying up the science
of arms to crying it down, and back; from the schoolboy telling you
that his companion Brown is the jolliest fellow, to the schoolboy
telling you that his companion Brown is a beast, and back again;
from very high carriages to very low ones and back; from very short
horsetails to very long ones and back again--the pendulum swings.
In matters of serious judgment it is comparatively easy to discern
the rationale of this oscillation from side to side. It is that
the evils of what is present are strongly felt, while the evils of
what is absent are forgotten; and so, when the pendulum has swung
over to A, the evils of A send it flying over to B, while when it
reaches B the evils of B repel it again to A. In matters of feeling
it is less easy to discover the how and why of the process: we
can do no more than take refuge in the general belief that nature
loves the swing of the pendulum. There are people who at one time
have an excessive affection for some friend, and at another take
a violent disgust at him: and who (though sometimes permanently
remaining at the latter point) oscillate between these positive
and negative poles. You, being a sensible man, would not feel very
happy if some men were loudly crying you up: for you would be very
sure that in a little while they would be loudly crying you dovvn.
If you should ever happen to feel for one day an extraordinary
lightness and exhilaration of spirits, you will know that you must
pay for all this the price of corresponding depression--the hot fit
must be counterbalanced by the cold. Let us thank God that there
are beliefs and sentiments as to which the pendulum does not swing,
though even in these I have known it do so. I have known the young
girl who appeared thoroughly good and pious, who devoted herself
to works of charity, and (with even an over-scrupulous spirit)
eschewed vain company: and who by and bye learned to laugh at all
serious things, and ran into the utmost extremes of giddiness and
extravagant gaiety. And not merely should all of us be thankful if
we feel that in regard to the gravest sentiments and beliefs our
mind and heart remain year after year at the same fixed point:
I think we should be thankful if we find that as regards our
favourite books and authors our taste remains unchanged; that the
calm judgment of our middle age approves the preferences of ten
years since, and that these gather strength as time gives them the
witchery of old remembrances and associations. You enthusiastically
admired Byron once, you estimate him very differently now. You once
thought Festus finer than Paradise Loft, but you have swung away
from that. But for a good many years you have held by Wordsworth,
Shakspeare, and Tennyson, and this taste you are not likely to
outgrow. It is very curious to look over a volume which we once
thought magnificent, enthralling, incomparable, and to wonder
how on earth we ever cared for that stilted rubbish. No doubt the
pendulum swings quite as decidedly to your estimate of yourself
as to your estimate of any one else. It would be nothing at all to
have other people attacking and depreciating your writings, sermons,
and the like, if you yourself had entire confidence in them. The
mortifying thing is when your own taste and judgment say worse of
your former productions than could be said by the most unfriendly
critic; and the dreadful thought occurs, that if you yourself to-day
think so badly of what you wrote ten years since, it is probable
enough that on this day ten years hence (if you live to see it)
you may think as badly of what you are writing to-day. Let us hope
not. Let us trust that at length a standard of taste and judgment
is reached from which we shall not ever materially swing away. Yet
the pendulum will never be quite arrested as to your estimate of
yourself. Now and then you will think yourself a block-head: by and
bye you will think yourself very clever; and your judgment will
oscillate between these opposite poles of belief. Sometimes you
will think that your house is remarkably comfortable, sometimes
that it is unendurably uncomfortable; sometimes you will think that
your place in life is a very dignified and important one, sometimes
that it is a very poor and insignificant one; sometimes you will
think that some misfortune or disappointment which has befallen you
is a very crushing one; sometimes you will think that it is better
as it is. Ah, my brother, it is a poor, weak, wayward thing, the
human heart!

You know, of course, how the pendulum of public opinion swings
backwards and forwards. The truth lies somewhere about the middle
of the arc it describes, in most cases. You know how the popularity
of political men oscillates, from A, the point of greatest popularity,
to B, the point of no popularity at all. Think of Lord Brougham.
Once the pendulum swung far to the right: he was the most popular
man in Britain. Then, for many years, the pendulum swung far to
the left, into the cold regions of unpopularity, loss of influence,
and opposition benches. And now, in his last days, the pendulum
has come over to the right again. So with lesser men. When the
new clergyman comes to a country parish, how high his estimation!
Never was there preacher so impressive, pastor so diligent, man
so frank and agreeable. By and bye his sermons are middling, his
diligence middling; his manners rather stiff or rather too easy.
In a year or two the pendulum rests at its proper point: and from
that time onward the parson gets, in most cases, very nearly the
credit he deserves. The like oscillation of public opinion and feeling
exists in the case of unfavourable as of favourable judgments. A
man commits a great crime. His guilt is thought awful. There is a
general outcry for his condign punishment. He is sentenced to be
hanged. In a few days the tide begins to turn. His crime was not
so great. He had met great provocation. His education had been
neglected. He deserves pity rather than reprobation. Petitions
are got up that he should be let off; and largely signed by the
self-same folk who were loudest in the outcry against him. And
instead of this fact, that those folk were the keenest against the
criminal, being received (as it ought) as proof that their opinion
is worth nothing at all, many will receive it as proof that their
opinion is entitled to special consideration. The principle of the
pendulum in the matter of criminals is well understood by the Old
Bailey practitioners of New York and their worthy clients. When
a New Yorker is sentenced to be hanged, he remains as a cool as
cucumber; for the New York law is, that a year must pass between
the sentence and the execution. And long before the year passes,
the public sympathy has turned in the criminal's favour. Endless
petitions go up for his pardon. Of course he gets off. And indeed
it is not improbable that he may receive a public testimonial. It
cannot be denied that the natural transition in the popular feeling
is from applauding a man to hanging him, and from hanging a man to
applauding him.

Even so does the pendulum swing, and the world run away!





CHAPTER IV.

CONCERNING CHURCHYARDS.








Many persons do not like to go near a churchyard: some do not like
even to hear a churchyard mentioned. Many others feel an especial
interest in that quiet place--an interest which is quite unconnected
with any personal associations with it. A great deal depends upon
habit; and a great deals turns, too, on whether the churchyard
which we know best is a locked-up, deserted, neglected place, all
grown over with nettles; or a spot not too much retired, open to
all passers-by, with trimly-mown grass and neat gravelled walks.
I do not sympathize with the taste which converts a burying-place
into a flower-garden or a fashionable lounge for thoughtless people:
let it be the true 'country churchyard,' only with some appearance
of being remembered and cared for. For myself, though a very
commonplace person, and not at all sentimentally inclined, I have
a great liking for a churchyard. Hardly a day passes on which I do
not go and walk up and down for a little in that which surrounds
my church. Probably some people may regard me as extremely devoid
of occupation, when I confess that daily, after breakfast, and
before sitting down to my work (which is pretty hard, though they
may not think so), I walk slowly down to the churchyard, which
is a couple of hundred yards off, and there pace about for a few
minutes, looking at the old graves and the mossy stones. Nor is
this only in summer-time, when the sward is white with daisies,
when the ancient oaks around the gray wall are leafy and green,
when the passing river flashes bright through their openings and
runs chiming over the warm stones, and when the beautiful hills
that surround the quiet spot at a little distance are flecked with
summer light and shade; but in winter too, when the bare branches
look sharp against the frosty sky, and the graves look like wavelets
on a sea of snow. Now, if I were anxious to pass myself off upon
my readers as a great and thoughtful man, I might here give an
account of the profound thoughts which I think in my daily musings
in my pretty churchyard. But, being an essentially commonplace
person (as I have no doubt about nine hundred and ninety-nine out
of every thousand of my readers also are), I must here confess
that generally I walk about the churchyard, thinking and feeling
nothing very particular. I do not believe that ordinary people,
when worried by some little care, or pressed down by some little
sorrow, have only to go and muse in a churchyard in order to feel
how trivial and transient such cares and sorrows are, and how very
little they ought to vex us. To commonplace mortals, it is the
sunshine within the breast that does most to brighten; and the thing
that has most power to darken is the shadow there. And the scenes
and teachings of external nature have, practically, very little
effect indeed. And so, when musing in the churchyard, nothing grand,
heroical, philosophical, or tremendous ever suggests itself to me.
I look with pleasure at the neatly cut walks and grass. I peep in
at a window of the church, and think how I am to finish my sermon
for next Sunday. I read over the inscriptions on the stones which
mark where seven of my predecessors sleep. I look vacantly at the
lichens and moss which have overgrown certain tombstones three
or four centuries old. And occasionally I think of what and where
I shall be, when the village mason, whistling cheerfully at his
task, shall cut out my name and years on the stone which will mark
my last resting-place. But all these, of course, are commonplace
thoughts, just what would occur to anybody else, and really not
worth repeating.

And yet, although 'death, and the house appointed for all living,'
form a topic which has been treated by innumerable writers, from
the author of the book of Job to Mr. Dickens; and although the
subject might well be vulgarized by having been, for many a day,
the stock resort of every commonplace aimer at the pathetic; still
the theme is one which never can grow old. And the experience and
the heart of most men convert into touching eloquence even the
poorest formula of set phrases about the tremendous Fact. Nor are
we able to repress a strong interest in any account of the multitude
of fashions in which the mortal part of man has been disposed of,
after the great change has passed upon it. In a volume entitled
God's Acre, written by a lady, one Mrs. Stone, and published a year
or two since, you may find a great amount of curious information
upon such points: and after thinking of the various ways of burial
described, I think you will return with a feeling of home and
of relief to the quiet English country churchyard. I should think
that the shocking and revolting description of the burning of the
remains of Shelley, published by Mr. Trelawney, in his Last Days
of Shelhy and Byron, will go far to destroy any probability of
the introduction of cremation in this country, notwithstanding the
ingenuity and the eloquence of the little treatise published about
two years ago by a Member of the College of Surgeons, whose gist
you will understand from its title, which is Burning the Dead; or,
Urn-Sepulture Religiously, Socially, and Generally considered; with
Suggestions for a Revival of the Practice, as a Sanitary Measure.
The choice lies between burning and burying: and the latter being
universally accepted in Britain, it remains that it be carried
out in the way most decorous as regards the deceased, and most
soothing to the feelings of surviving friends. Every one has seen
burying-places of all conceivable kinds, and every one knows how
prominent a feature they form in the English landscape. There is
the dismal corner in the great city, surrounded by blackened walls,
where scarce a blade of grass will grow, and where the whole thing
is foul and pestilential. There is the ideal country churchyard,
like that described by Gray, where the old elms and yews keep watch
over the graves where successive generations of simple rustics have
found their last resting-place, and where in the twilight the owls
hoot from the tower of the ivy-covered church. There is the bare
enclosure, surrounded by four walls, and without a tree, far up the
lonely Highland hill-side; and more lonely still, the little gray
stone, rising above the purple heather, where rude letters, touched
up by Old Mortality's hands, tell that one, probably two or three,
rest beneath, who were done to death for what they firmly believed
was their Redeemer's cause, by Claverhouse or Dalyell. There is
the churchyard by the bleak sea-shore, where coffins have been laid
bare by the encroaching waves; and the niche in cathedral crypt,
or the vault under the church's floor. I cannot conceive anything
more irreverent than the American fashion of burying in unconsecrated
earth, each family having its own place of interment in the corner
of its own garden: unless it be the crotchet of the silly old
peer, who spent the last years of his life in erecting near his
castle-door, a preposterous building, the progress of which he
watched day by day with the interest of a man who had worn out all
other interest, occasionally lying down in the stone coffin which
he had caused to be prepared, to make sure that it would fit him.
I feel sorry, too, for the poor old Pope, who when he dies is laid
on a shelf above a door in St. Peter's, where he remains till the
next Pope dies, and then is put out of the way to make room for
him; nor do I at all envy the noble who has his family vault filled
with coffins covered with velvet and gold, occupied exclusively by
corpses of good quality. It is better surely to be laid, as Allan
Cunningham wished, where we shall 'not be built over;' where 'the
wind shall blow and the daisy grow upon our grave.' Let it be
among our kindred, indeed, in accordance with the natural desire;
but not on dignified shelves, not in aristocratic vaults, but lowly
and humbly, where the Christian dead sleep for the Resurrection.
Most people will sympathize so far with Beattie, though his lines
show that he was a Scotchman, and lived where there are not many
trees:--

    Mine be the breezy hill that skirts the down,
    Where a green grassy turf is all I crave,
    With here and there a violet bestrown,
    Fast by a brook, or fountain's murmuring wave;
    And many an evening sun shine sweetly on my grave!

But it depends entirely upon individual associations and fancies
where one would wish to rest after life's fitful fever: and I have
hardly ever been more deeply impressed than by certain lines which
I cut out of an old newspaper when I was a boy, and which set out
a choice far different from that of The Minstrel. They are written
by Mr. Westwood, a true poet, though not known as he deserves to
be.  Here they are:--

        Not there, not there!
    Not in that nook, that ye deem so fair;--
    Little reck I of the blue bright sky,
    And the stream that floweth so murmuringly,
    And the bending boughs, and the breezy air--
        Not there, good friends, not there!

    In the city churchyard, where the grass
    Groweth rank and black, and where never a ray
    Of that self-same sun doth find its way
    Through the heaped-up houses' serried mass--
    Where the only sounds are the voice of the throng,
    And the clatter of wheels as they rush along--
    Or the plash of the rain, or the wind's hoarse cry,
    Or the busy tramp of the passer-by,
    Or the toll of the bell on the heavy air--
        Good friends, let it be there!

    I am old, my friends--I am very old--
    Fourscore and five--and bitter cold
    Were that air on the hill-side far away;
    Eighty full years, content, I trow,
    Have I lived in the home where ye see me now,
    And trod those dark streets day by day,
    Till my soul doth love them; I love them all,
    Each battered pavement, and blackened wall,
    Each court and corner. Good sooth! to me
    They are all comely and fair to see--
    They have old faces--each one doth tell
    A tale of its own, that doth like me well--
    Sad or merry, as it may be,
    From the quaint old book of my history.
    And, friends, when this weary pain is past,
    Fain would I lay me to rest at last
    In their very midst;--full sure am I,
    How dark soever be earth and sky,
    I shall sleep softly--I shall know
    That the things I loved so here below
    Are about me still--so never care
    That my last home looketh all bleak and bare--
        Good friends, let it be there!

Some persons appear to think that it argues strength of mind and
freedom from unworthy prejudice, to profess great indifference as
to what becomes of their mortal part after they die. I have met with
men who talked in a vapouring manner about leaving their bodies to
be dissected; and who evidently enjoyed the sensation which such
sentiments produced among simple folk. Whenever I hear any man
talk in this way, my politeness, of course, prevents my telling him
that he is an uncommonly silly person; but it does not prevent my
thinking him one. It is a mistake to imagine that the soul is the
entire man. Human nature, alike here and hereafter, consists of
soul and body in union; and the body is therefore justly entitled to
its own degree of thought and care. But the point, indeed, is not
one to be argued; it is, as it appears to me, a matter of intuitive
judgment and instinctive feeling; and I apprehend that this feeling
and judgment have never appeared more strongly than in the noblest
of our race. I hold by Burke, who wrote, 'I should like that my dust
should mingle with kindred dust; the good old expression, "family
burying-ground," has something pleasing in it, at least to me.' Mrs.
Stone quotes Lady Murray's account of the death of her mother, the
celebrated Grissell Baillie, which shows that that strong-minded
and noble-hearted woman felt the natural desire:--

The next day she called me: gave directions about some few things:
said she wished to be carried home to lie by my father, but that
perhaps it would be too much trouble and inconvenience to us at
that season, therefore left me to do as I pleased; but that, in a
black purse in her cabinet, I would find money sufficient to do it,
which she had kept by her for that use, that whenever it happened,
it might not straiten us. She added, 'I have now no more to say or
do:' tenderly embraced me, and laid down her head upon the pillow,
and spoke little after that.

An instance, at once touching and awful, of care for the body
after the soul has gone, is furnished by certain well-known lines
written by a man not commonly regarded as weak-minded or prejudiced;
and engraved by his direction on the stone that marks his grave.
If I am wrong, I am content to go wrong with Shakspeare:

    Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear
    To dig the dust enclosed here:
    Blest be the man that spares these stones,
    And curst be he that moves my bones.

The most eloquent exposition I know of the religious aspect of the
question, is contained in the concluding sentences of Mr. Melvill's
noble sermon on the 'Dying Faith of Joseph.' I believe my readers
will thank me for quoting it:--

It is not a Christian thing to die manifesting indifference as to
what is done with the body. That body is redeemed: not a particle
of its dust but was bought with drops of Christ's precious blood.
That body is appointed to a glorious condition; not a particle of
the corruptible but what shall put on incorruption; of the mortal
that shall not assume immortality. The Christian knows this: it
is not the part of a Christian to seem unmindful of this. He may,
therefore, as he departs, speak of the place where he would wish to
be laid. 'Let me sleep,' he may say, 'with my father and my mother,
with my wife and my children; lay me not here, in this distant land,
where my dust cannot mingle with its kindred. I would he chimed to
my grave by my own village bell, and have my requiem sung where I
was baptized into Christ.' Marvel ye at such last words? Wonder ye
that one, whose spirit is just entering the separate state, should
have this care for the body which he is about to leave to the worms?
Nay, he is a believer in Jesus as 'the Resurrection and the Life:'
this belief prompts his dying words; and it shall have to be said
of him as of Joseph, that 'by faith,' yea, 'by faith,' he 'gave
commandment concerning his bones!'

If you hold this belief, my reader, you will look at a neglected
churchyard with much regret; and you will highly approve of all
endeavours to make the burying-place of the parish as sweet though
solemn a spot as can be found within it. I have lately read a little
tract, by Mr. Hill, the Rural Dean of North Frome, in the Diocese
of Hereford, entitled Thoughts on Churches and Churchyards, which
is well worthy of the attentive perusal of the country clergy. Its
purpose is to furnish practical suggestions for the maintenance
of decent propriety about the church and churchyard. I am not,
at present, concerned with that part of the tract which relates
to churches; but I may remark, in passing, that Mr. Hill's views
upon that subject appear to me distinguished by great good sense,
moderation, and taste. He does not discourage country clergymen,
who have but limited means with which to set about ordering
and beautifying their churches, by suggesting arrangements on too
grand and expensive a scale: on the contrary, he enters with hearty
sympathy into all plans for attaining a simple and inexpensive
seemliness where more cannot be accomplished. And I think he hits
with remarkable felicity the just mean between an undue and excessive
regard to the mere externalities of worship, and a puritanical
bareness and contempt for material aids, desiring, in the words
of Archbishop Bramhall, that 'all be with due moderation, so as
neither to render religion sordid and sluttish, nor yet light and
garish, but comely and venerable.'

Equally judicious, and equally practical, are Mr. Hill's hints as
to the ordering of churchyards. He laments that churchyards should
ever be found where long, rank grass, briers, and nettles abound,
and where neatly kept walks and graves are wanting. He goes on:--

And yet, how trifling an amount of care and attention would suffice
to render neat, pretty, and pleasant to look upon, that which has
oftentimes an unpleasing, desolate, and painful aspect. A few sheep
occasionally (or better still, the scythe and shears now and then
employed), with a trifling attention to the walks, once properly
formed and gravelled, will suffice, when the fences are duly kept,
to make any churchyard seemly and neat: a little more than this
will make it ornamental and instructive.

It is possible that many persons might feel that flower-beds and
shrubberies are not what they would wish to see in a churchyard;
they might think they gave too garden-like and adorned a look to
so solemn and sacred a spot; persons will not all think alike on
such a matter: and yet something may be done in this direction with
an effect which would please everybody. A few trees of the arbor
vitae, the cypress, and the Irish yew, scattered here and there, with
tirs in the hedge-rows or boundary fences, would be unobjectionable;
while wooden baskets, or boxes, placed by the sides of the walks,
and filled in summer with the fuchsia or scarlet geranium, would give
our churchyards an exceedingly pretty, and perhaps not unsuitable
appearance. Little clumps of snowdrops and primroses might also
be planted here and there; for flowers may fitly spring up, bloom,
and fade away, in a spot which so impressively tells us of death
and resurrection: and where sheep even are never admitted, all
these methods for beautifying a churchyard may be adopted.  Shrubs
and flowers on and near the graves, as is so universal in Wales;
independently of their pretty effect, show a kindly feeling for the
memory of those whose bodies rest beneath them; and how far to be
preferred to those enormous and frightful masses of brick or stone
which the country mason has, alas, so plentifully supplied!

In the case of a clergyman, a taste for keeping his churchyard
in becoming order is just like a taste for keeping his garden and
shrubbery in order: only let him begin the work, and the taste
will grow. There is latent in the mind of every man, unless he be
the most untidy and unobservant of the species, a love for well-mown
grass and for sharply outlined gravel-walks. My brethren, credite
experto. I did not know that in my soul there was a chord that
vibrated responsive to trim gravel and grass, till I tried, and
lo!  it was there. Try for yourselves: you do not know, perhaps,
the strange affinities that exist between material and immaterial
nature. If any youthful clergyman shall read these lines, who knows
in his conscience that his churchyard-walks are grown up with weeds,
and the graves covered with nettles, upon sight hereof let him summon
his man-servant, or get a labourer if he have no man-servant.  Let
him provide a reaping-hook and a large new spade. These implements
will suffice in the meantime. Proceed to the churchyard: do not
get disheartened at its neglected look, and turn away. Begin at
the entrance-gate. Let all the nettles and long grass for six feet
on. either side of the path be carefully cut down and gathered
into heaps. Then mark out with a line the boundaries of the first
ten yards of the walk. Fall to work and cut the edges with the spade;
clear away the weeds and grass that have overspread the walk, also
with the spade. In a little time you will feel the fascination
of the sharp outline of the walk against the grass on each side.
And I repeat, that to the average human being there is something
inexpressibly pleasing in that sharp outline. By the time the ten
yards of walk are cut, you will find that you have discovered a new
pleasure and a new sensation; and from that day will date a love
of tidy walks and grass;--and what more is needed to make a pretty
churchyard? The fuchsias, geraniums, and so forth, are of the nature
of luxuries, and they will follow in due time: but grass and gravel
are the foundation of rustic neatness and tidiness.

As for the treatise on Burning the Dead, it is interesting
and eloquent, though I am well convinced that its author has been
putting forih labour in vain. I remember the consternation with
which I read the advertisements announcing its publication. I made
sure that it must be the production of one of those wrong-headed
individuals who are always proposing preposterous things, without
end or meaning. Why on earth should we take to burning the dead?
What is to be gained by recurring to a heathen rite, repudiated by
the early Christians, who, as Sir Thomas Browne tells us, 'stickt
not to give their bodies to be burnt in their lives, but detested
that mode after death?' And wherefore do anything so horrible, and
so suggestive of cruelty and sacrilege, as to consign to devouring
flames even the unconscious remains of a departed friend? But after
reading the essay, I feel that the author has a great deal to say
in defence of his views. I am obliged to acknowledge that in many
cases important benefits would follow the adoption of urn-sepulture.
The question to be considered is, what is the best way to dispose
of the mortal part of man when the soul has left it? A first
suggestion might be to endeavour to preserve it in the form and
features of life; and, accordingly, in many countries and ages,
embalming in its various modifications has been resorted to. But
all attempts to prevent the human frame from obeying the Creator's
law of returning to the elements have miserably failed. And surely
it is better a thousand times to 'bury the dead from our sight,'
than to preserve a hideous and revolting mockery of the beloved
form. The Egyptian mummies every one has heard of; but the most
remarkable instance of embalming in recent times is that of the
wife of one Martin Van Butchell, who, by her husband's desire, was
embalmed in the year 1775, by Dr. William Hunter and Mr. Carpenter,
and who may be seen in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons
in London. She was a beautiful woman, and all that skill and science
could do were done to preserve her in the appearance of life; but
the result is nothing short of shocking and awful. Taking it, then,
as admitted, that the body must return to the dust from whence it
was taken, the next question is, How? How shall dissolution take
place with due respect to the dead, and with least harm to the
health and the feelings of the living?

The two fashions which have been universally used are, burial and
burning. It has so happened that burial has been associated with
Christianity, and burning with heathenism; but I shall admit at once
that the association is not essential, though it would be hard,
without very weighty reason indeed, to deviate from the long-remembered
'earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' But such weighty
reason the author of this treatise declares to exist.  The system
of burial, he says, is productive of fearful and numberless evils
and dangers to the living. In the neighbourhood of any large
burying-place, the air which the living breathe, and the water
which they drink, are impregnated with poisons the most destructive
of health and life. Even where the damage done to air and water
is inappreciable by our senses, it is a predisposing cause of
headache, dysentery, sore throat, and low fever;' and it keeps all
the population around in a condition in which they are the ready prey
of all forms of disease. I shall not shock my readers by relating
a host of horrible facts, proved by indisputable evidence, which
are adduced by the surgeon to show the evils of burial: and all
these evils, he maintains, may be escaped by the revival of burning.
Four thousand human beings die every hour; and only by that swift
and certain method can the vast mass of decaying matter which,
while decaying, gives off the most subtle and searching poisons,
be resolved with the elements without injury or risk to any one. So
convinced has the French Government become of the evils of burial
that it has patronized and encouraged one M. Bonneau, who proposes
that instead of a great city having its neighbouring cemeteries,
it should be provided with a building called The Sarcophagus,
occupying an elevated situation, to which the bodies of rich and
poor should be conveyed, and there reduced to ashes by a powerful
furnace. And then M. Bonneau, Frenchman all over, suggests that
the ashes of our friends might be preserved in a tasteful manner;
the funeral urn, containing these ashes, 'replacing on our consoles
and mantelpieces the ornaments of bronze clocks and china vases now
found there.' Our author, having shown that burning would save us
from the dangers of burying, concludes his treatise by a careful
description of the manner in which he would carry out the burning
process. And certainly his plan contains as little to shock one as
may be, in carrying out a system necessarily suggestive of violence
and cruelty. There is nothing like the repulsiveness of the Hindoo
burning, only half carried out, or even of Mr. Trelawney's furnace
for burning poor Shelley. I do not remember to have lately read
anything more ghastly and revolting than the entire account of
Shelley's cremation. It says much for Mr. Trelawney's nerves, that
he was able to look on at it; and it was no wonder that it turned
Byron sick, and that Mr. Leigh Hunt kept beyond the sight of it.
I intended to have quoted the passage from Mr. Trelawney's book,
but I really cannot venture to do so. But it is right to say that
there were very good reasons for resorting to that melancholy mode
of disposing of the poet's remains, and that Mr. Trelawney did all
he could to accomplish the burning with efficiency and decency:
though the whole story makes one feel the great physical difficulties
that stand in the way of carrying out cremation successfully. The
advocate of urn-sepulture, however, is quite aware of this, and
he proposes to use an apparatus by which they would be entirely
overcome. It is only fair to let him speak for himself; and I think
the following passage will be read with interest:--

On a gentle eminence, surrounded by pleasant grounds, stands a
convenient, well-ventilated chapel, with a high spire or steeple.
At the entrance, where some of the mourners might prefer to take
leave of the body, are chambers for their accommodation. Within
the edifice are seats for those who follow the remains to the last:
there is also an organ, and a gallery for choristers. In the centre
of the chapel, embellished with appropriate emblems and devices,
is erected a shrine of marble, somewhat like those which cover the
ashes of the great and mighty in our old cathedrals, the openings
being filled with prepared plate glass. Within this--a sufficient
space intervening--is an inner shrine covered with bright non-radiating
metal, and within this again is a covered sarcophagus of tempered
fire-clay, with one or more longitudinal slits near the top, extending
its whole length. As soon as the body is deposited therein, sheets
of flame at an immensely high temperature rush through the long
apertures from end to end, and acting as a combination of a modified
oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, with the reverberatory furnace, utterly
and completely consume and decompose the body, in an incredibly
short space of time. Even the large quantity of water it contains
is decomposed by the extreme heat, and its elements, instead of
retarding, aid combustion, as is the case in fierce conflagrations.
The gaseous products of combustion are conveyed away by flues; and
means being adopted to consume anything like smoke, all that is
observed from the outside is occasionally a quivering transparent
ether floating away from the high steeple to mingle vith the
atmosphere.

At either end of the sarcophagus is a closely-fitting fire-proof
door, that farthest from the chapel entrance communicating with a
chamber which projects into the chapel and adjoins the end of the
shrine. Here are the attendants, who, unseen, conduct the operation.
The door at the other end of the sarcophagus, with a corresponding
opening in the inner and outer shrine, is exactly opposite a slab
of marble on which the coffin is deposited when brought into the
chapel. The funeral service then commences according; to any form
decided on. At an appointed signal the end of the coffin, which is
placed just within the opening in the shrine, is removed, and the
body is drawn rapidly but gently and without exposure into the
sarcophagus: the sides of the coffin, constructed for the purpose,
collapse; and the wooden box is removed to be burned elsewhere.

Meantime the body is committed to the flames to be consumed, and
the words 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' may be appropriately used.
The organ peals forth a solemn strain, and a hymn or requiem for
the dead is sung. In a few minutes, or even seconds, and without
any perceptible noise or commotion, all is over, and nothing but a
few pounds or ounces of light ash remains. This is carefully collected
by the attendants of the adjoining chamber: a door communicating
with the chapel is thrown open; and the relic, enclosed in a vase
of glass or other material, is brought in and placed before the
mourners, to be finally enshrined in the funeral urn of marble,
alabaster, stone, or metal.

Speaking for myself, I must say that I think it would cause a strange
feeling in most people to part at the chapel-door with the corpse
of one who had been very dear, and, after a few minutes of horrible
suspense, during which they should know that it was burning in a
fierce furnace, to see the vessel of white ashes brought back, and
be told that there was all that was mortal of the departed friend.
No doubt it may be weakness and prejudice, but I think that few
could divest themselves of the feeling of sacrilegious violence.
Better far to lay the brother or sister, tenderly as though still
they felt, in the last resting-place, so soft and trim. It soothes
us, if it does no good to them, and the sad change which we know
is soon to follow is wrought only by the gentle hand of Nature.
And only think of a man pointing to half-a-dozen vases on his
mantelpiece, and as many more on his cheffonier, and saying, 'There
the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest!'

No, no; the thing will never do!

One of the latest examples of burning, in the case of a Christian,
is that of Henry Laurens, the first President of the American
Congress. In his will he solemnly enjoined upon his children that
they should cause his body to be given to the flames. The Emperor
Napoleon, when at St. Helena, expressed a similar desire; and said,
truly enough, that as for the Resurrection, that would be miraculous
at all events, and it would be just as easy for the Almighty
to accomplish that great end in the case of burning as in that of
burial. And, indeed, the doctrine of the Resurrection is one that
it is not wise to scrutinize too minutely--I mean as regards its
rationale. It is best to simply hold by the great truth, that 'this
corruptible shall put on incorruption, and this mortal shall put on
immortality.' I presume that it has been shown beyond doubt that
the material particles which make up our bodies are in a state
of constant flux, the entire physical nature being changed every
seven years, so that if all the particles which once entered into
the structure of a man of fourscore were reassembled, they would
suffice to make seven or eight bodies. And the manner in which it
is certain that the mortal part of man is dispersed and assimilated
to all the elements furnishes a very striking thought. Bryant has
said, truly and beautifully,

        All that tread
    The globe, are but a handful to the tribes
    That slumber in its bosom.

And James Montgomery, in a poem of his which is little known,
and which is amplified and spoiled in the latest editions of his
works, has suggested to us whither the mortal vestiges of these
untold millions have gone. It is entitled Lines to a Molehill in
a Churchyard.

    Tell me, thou dust beneath my feet,--
        Thou dust that once hadst breath,--
    Tell me, how many mortals meet
        In this small hill of death.

    The mole, that scoops with curious toil
        Her subterranean bed,
    Thinks not she plows a human soil,
        And mines among the dead.

    Yet, whereso'er she turns the ground,
        My kindred earth I see:
    Once every atom of this mound
        Lived, breathed, and felt, like me.

    Through all this hillock's crumbling mould
        Once the warm lifeblood ran:
    Here thine original behold,
        And here thy ruins, man!

    By wafting winds and flooding rains,
        From ocean, earth, and sky,
    Collected here, the frail remains
        Of slumbering millions lie.

    The towers and temples crushed by time,
        Stupendous wrecks, appear
    To me less mournfully sublime
        Than this poor molehill here.

    Methinks this dust yet heaves with breath--
        Ten thousand pulses beat;--
    Tell me, in this small hill of death,
        How many mortals meet!

One idea, you see, beaten out rather thin, and expressed in a great
many words, as was the good man's wont. And in these days of the
misty and spasmodic school, I owe my readers an apology for presenting
them with poetry which they will have no difficulty in understanding.

Amid a great number of particulars as to the burial customs of
various nations, we find mention made of an odd way in which the
natives of Thibet dignify their great people. They do not desecrate
such by giving them to the earth, but retain a number of sacred dogs
to devour them. Not less strange was the fancy of that Englishwoman,
a century or two back, who had her husband burnt to ashes, and
these ashes reduced to powder, of which she mixed some with all the
water she drank, thinking, poor heart-broken creature, that, thus
she was burying the dear form within her own.

In rare cases I have known of the parson or the churchwarden turning
his cow to pasture in the churchyard, to the sad desecration of the
place. It appears, however, that worse than this has been done, if
we may judge from the following passage quoted by Mrs. Stone:--

1540. Proceedings in the Court of Archdeaconry of Colchester, Colne
Wake. Notatur per iconimos dicte ecclesie yt the parson mysusithe
the churche-yard, for hogis do wrote up graves, and besse lie in
the porche, and ther the pavements he broke up and soyle the porche;
and ther is so mych catell yt usithe the church-yarde, yt is more
liker a pasture than a halowed place.

It is usual, it appears, in the southern parts of France, to erect
in the churchyard a lofty pillar, bearing a large lamp, which throws
its light upon the cemetery during the night. The custom began in
the twelfth or thirteenth century. Sometimes the lanterne des marts
was a highly ornamented chapel, built in a circular form, like the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, in which the dead lay
exposed to view in the days which preceded their interment: sometimes
it was merely a hollow column, ascended by a winding stair inside,
or by projections left for the purpose within. It must have been
a striking sight when the traveller, through the dark night, saw
far away the lonely flame that marked the spot where so many of
his fellow-men had completed their journey.

One of the oddest things ever introduced into Materia Medica was
the celebrated Mummy Powder. Egyptian mummies, being broken up
and ground into dust, were held of great value as medicine both
for external and internal application. Boyle and Bacon unite in
commending its virtues: the latter, indeed, venturing to suggest
that 'the mixture of balms that are glutinous' was the foundation
of its power, though common belief held that the virtue was 'more
in the Egyptian than in the spice.' Even in the seventeenth century
mummy was an important article of commerce, and was sold at a great
price. One Eastern traveller brought to the Turkey Company six
hundred weight of mummy broken into pieces. Adulteration came into
play in a manner which would have gratified the Lancet commission:
the Jews collecting the bodies of executed criminals, filling them
with common asphaltum, which cost little, and then drying them in
the sun, when they became undistinguishable from the genuine article.
And the maladies which mummy was held to cure are set forth in a
list which we commend to the notice of Professor Holloway. It was
'to be taken in decoctions of marjoram, thyme, elder-flower, barley,
roses, lentils, jujubes, cummin-seed, carraway, saffron, cassia,
parsley, with oxymel, wine, milk, butter, castor, and mulberries.'
Sir Thomas Browne, who was a good deal before his age, did not
approve of the use of mummy. He says:

Were the efficacy thereof more clearly made out, we scarce conceive
the use thereof allowable in physic: exceeding the barbarities
of Cambyses, and turning old heroes into unworthy potions. Shall
Egypt lend out her ancients unto chirurgeons and apothecaries, and
Cheops and Psammeticus be weighed unto us for drugs? Shall we eat
of Chamnes and Amasis in electuaries and pills, and be cured by
cannibal mixtures? Surely such diet is miserable vampirism; and
exceeds in horror the black banquet of Domitian, not to be paralleled
except in those Arabian feasts wherein ghouls feed horribly.

I need hardly add that the world has come round to the great
physician's way of thinking, and that mummy is not included in the
pharmacopoeia of modern days.

The monumental inscriptions of this country, as a general rule, furnish
lamentable proof of the national bad taste. Somehow our peculiar
genius seems not to lie in that direction; and very eminent men,
who did most other things well, have signally failed when they tried
to produce an epitaph. What with stilted extravagance and bombast
on the one side, and profane and irreverent jesting on the other,
our epitaphs, for the most part, would be better away. It was well
said by Addison of the inscriptions in Westminster Abbey,--'Some
epitaphs are so extravagant that the dead person would blush;
and others so excessively modest that they deliver the character
of the person departed in Greek and Hebrew, and by that means are
not understood once in a twelve-month.' And Fuller has hit the
characteristics of a fitting epitaph when he said that 'the shortest,
plainest, and truest epitaphs are the best.' In most cases the safe
plan is to give no more than the name and age, and some brief text
of Scripture.

Every one knows that epitaphs generally are expressed in such
complimentary terms as quite explain the question of the child, who
wonderingly inquired where they buried the bad people. Mrs. Stone,
however, quotes a remarkably out-spoken one, from a monument in
Horselydown Church, in Cumberland. It runs as follows:--

            Here lie the bodies
        Of Thomas Bond and Mary his wife.
    She was temperate, chaste, and charitable;
            But
        She was proud, peevish, and passionate.
    She was an affectionate wife and a tender mother;
            But
        Her husband and child, whom she loved,
    Seldom saw her countenance without a disgusting frown;
While she received visitors whom she despised with an endearing smile.
        Her behaviour was discreet towards strangers;
            But
        Imprudent in her family.
    Abroad her conduct was influenced by good breeding;
            But
        At home by ill temper.

And so the epitaph runs on to considerable length, acknowledging
the good qualities of the poor woman, but killing each by setting
against it some peculiarly unamiable trait. I confess that my
feeling is quite turned in her favour by the unmanly assault which
her brother (the author of the inscription) has thus made upon the
poor dead woman. If you cannot honestly say good of a human being
on his grave-stone, then say nothing at all. There are some cases
in which an exception may justly be made; and such a one, I think,
was that of the infamous Francis Chartres, who died in 1731. He was
buried in Scotland, and at his funeral the populace raised a riot,
almost tore his body from the coffin, and threw dead dogs into the
grave along with it. Dr. Arbuthnot wrote his epitaph, and here it
is:--

    Here continueth to rot
    The body of Francis Chartres:
    Who, with an inflexible constancy,
    and
    Inimitable uniformity of life,
    Persisted,
    In spite of age and infirmities,
    In the practice of every human vice,
    Excepting prodigality and hypocrisy:
    His insatiable avarice exempted him
    from the first,
    His matchless impudence from the
    second.
    Nor was he more singular
    In the undeviating pravity of his
    manners,
    Than successful
    In accumulating wealth:
    For without trade or profession,
    Without trust of public money,
    And without bribeworthy service,
    He acquired, or more properly created,
    A Ministerial Estate:
    He was the only person of his time
    Who could cheat without the mask of
    honesty,
    Retain his primeval meanness
    When possessed of ten thousand a year:
    And having daily deserved the gibbet for
    what he did,
    Was at last condemned for what he
    could not do.
    Oh! indignant reader!
    Think not his life useless to mankind!
    Providence connived at his execrable designs,
    To give to after ages
    A conspicuous proof and example
    Of how small estimation is exorbitant
    wealth
    In the sight of God,
    By his bestowing it on the most
    unworthy of all
    mortals.

If one does intend to make a verbal assault upon any man, it
is well to do so in words which will sting and cut; and assuredly
Arbuthnot has succeeded in his laudable intention. The character
is justly drawn; and with the change of a very few words, it might
correctly be inscribed on the monument of at least one Scotch and
one English peer, who have died within the last half-century.

There are one or two extreme cases in which it is in good taste,
and the effect not without sublimity, to leave a monument with no
inscription at all. Of course this can only be when the monument
is that of a very great and illustrious man. The pillar erected
by Bernadotte at Frederickshall, in memory of Charles the Twelfth,
bears not a word; and I believe most people who visit the spot feel
that Bernadotte judged well. The rude mass of masonry, standing
in the solitary waste, that marks where Howard the philanthropist
sleeps, is likewise nameless. And when John Kyrle died in 1724, he
was buried in the chancel of the church of Ross in Herefordshire,
'without so much as an inscription.' But the Man of Ross had his
best monument in the lifted head and beaming eye of those he left
behind him at the mention of his name. He never knew, of course, that
the bitter little satirist of Twickenham would melt into unwonted
tenderness in telling of all he did, and apologize nobly for his
nameless grave:--

    And what! no monument, inscription, stone?
    His race, his form, his name almost, unknown?
    Who builds a church to God, and not to fame,
    Will never mark the marble with his name:
    Go, search it there, where to be born and die,
    Of rich and poor make all the history:
    Enough, that virtue filled the space between,
    Proved, by the ends of being, to have been!

[Footnote: Pope's Moral Essays. Epistle III.]

The two fine epitaphs written by Ben Jonson are well known. One is
on the Countess of Pembroke:--

    Underneath this marble hearse,
    Lies the subject of all verse:
    Sidney's sister, Pembroke's'mother;
    Death! ere thou hast slain another,
    Learned and fair, and good as she,
    Time shall throw a dart at thee.

And the other is the epitaph of a certain unknown Elizabeth:--

    Wouldst thou hear what man can say
    In a little?--reader, stay.
    Underneath this stone doth lie
    As much beauty as could die;
    Which in life did harbour give,
    To more virtue than doth live.
    If at all she had a fault,
    Leave it buried in this vault:
    One name was Elizabeth,
    The other let it sleep with death:
    Fitter, where it died, to tell,
    Than that it lived at all. Farewell!

Most people have heard of the brief epitaph inscribed on a tombstone
in the floor of Hereford Cathedral, which inspired one of the
sonnets of Wordsworth. There is no name, no date, but the single
word MISERRIMUS. The lines, written by herself, which are inscribed
on the gravestone of Mrs. Hemans, in St. Anne's Church at Dublin,
are very beautiful, but too well known to need quotation. And
Longfellow, in his charming little poem of Nuremburg, has preserved
the characteristic word in the epitaph of Albert Durer:--

    Emigravit is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies;
    Dead he is not,--but departed,--for the artist never dies.

Perhaps some readers may be interested by the following epitaph,
written by no less a man than Sir Walter Scott, and inscribed on
the stone which covers the grave of a humble heroine whose name his
genius has made known over the world. The grave is in the churchyard
of Kirkpatrick-Irongray, a few miles from Dumfries:--

    This stone was erected
    By the Author of Waverley
    To the memory of
    Helen Walker
    Who died in the year of God 1791.
    This humble individual
    practised in real life
    the virtues
    with which fiction has invested
    the imaginary character
    of
    Jeanie Deans.
    Refusing the slightest departure
    from veracity
    even to save the life of a sister,
    she neverthless showed her
    kindness and for

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