"Patient—God's life!" exclaimed the Queen, "name not the word to me: thou know'st not of what he is guilty!"

Amy, who had by this time in some degree recovered herself, and who saw her husband, as she conceived, in the utmost danger from the rage of an offended sovereign, instantly (and alas, how many women have done the same!) forgot her own wrongs and her own danger in her apprehensions for him; and throwing herself before the Queen, embraced her knees, while she exclaimed, "He is guiltless, madam, he is guiltless—no one can lay aught to the charge of the noble Leicester."

"Why, minion," answered the Queen, "didst not thou thyself say that the Earl of Leicester was privy to thy whole history?"

"Did I say so?" repeated the unhappy Amy, laying aside every consideration of consistency and of self-interest: "oh, if I did, I foully belied him. May God so judge me, as I believe he was never privy to a thought that would harm me!"

"Woman!" said Elizabeth, "I will know who has moved thee to this; or my wrath—and the wrath of kings is a flaming fire—shall wither and consume thee like a weed in the furnace."

As the Queen uttered this threat, Leicester's better angel called his pride to his aid, and reproached him with the utter extremity of meanness which would overwhelm him forever, if he stooped to take shelter under the generous interposition of his wife, and abandon her, in return for her kindness, to the resentment of the Queen. He had already raised his head, with the dignity of a man of honor, to avow his marriage and proclaim himself the protector of his countess, when Varney—born, as it appeared, to be his master's evil genius—rushed into the presence, with every mark of disorder on his face and apparel.

"What means this saucy intrusion?" said Elizabeth.

Varney, with the air of a man overwhelmed with grief and confusion, prostrated himself before her feet, exclaiming, "Pardon, my Liege, pardon! or at least let your justice avenge itself on me, where it is due; but spare my noble, my generous, my innocent patron and master!"

Amy, who was yet kneeling, started up as she saw the man whom she deemed most odious place himself so near her; and was about to fly toward Leicester, when checked at once by the uncertainty and even timidity which his looks had reassumed as soon as the appearance of his confidant seemed to open a new scene, she hung back, and uttering a faint scream, besought of her Majesty to cause her to be imprisoned in the lowest dungeon of the castle—to deal with her as the worst of criminals—"But spare," she exclaimed, "my sight and hearing what will destroy the little judgment I have left—the sight of that unutterable and most shameless villain!"

"And why, sweetheart?" said the Queen, moved by a new impulse: "what hath he, this false knight, since such thou accountest him, done to thee?"

"Oh, worse than sorrow, madam, and worse than injury—he has sown dissension where most there should be peace. I shall go mad if I look longer on him."

"Beshrew me, but I think thou are distraught already," answered the Queen. "My Lord Hunsdon, look to this poor distrest young woman, and let her be safely bestowed and in honest keeping, till we require her to be forthcoming."

Two or three of the ladies in attendance, either moved by compassion for a creature so interesting, or by some other motive, offered their service to look after her; but the Queen briefly answered, "Ladies, under favor, no. You have all (give God thanks) sharp ears and nimble tongues: our kinsman Hunsdon has ears of the dullest, and a tongue somewhat rough, but yet of the slowest. Hunsdon, look to it that none have speech of her."

"By our Lady!" said Hunsdon, taking in his strong sinewy arms the fading and almost swooning form of Amy, "she is a lovely child; and tho a rough nurse, your Grace hath given her a kind one. She is safe with me as one of my own lady-birds of daughters."

So saying, he carried her off, unresistingly and almost unconsciously; his war-worn locks and long gray beard mingling with her light-brown tresses, as her head reclined on his strong square shoulder. The Queen followed him with her eye. She had already, with that self-command which forms so necessary a part of a sovereign's accomplishments, supprest every appearance of agitation, and seemed as if she desired to banish all traces of her burst of passion from the recollection of those who had witnessed it. "My Lord of Hunsdon says well," she observed: "he is indeed but a rough nurse for so tender a babe."...

Leicester partly started; but making a strong effort, he subdued his emotion, while Elizabeth answered sharply, "You are something too hasty, Master Varney: we will have first a report of the lady's health and state of mind from Masters, our own physician, and then determine what shall be thought just. You shall have license, however, to see her, that if there be any matrimonial quarrel betwixt you—such things we have heard do occur, even betwixt a loving couple—you may make it up, without further scandal to our court or trouble to ourselves."

Varney bowed low, and made no other answer.

Elizabeth again looked toward Leicester, and said, with a degree of condescension which could only arise out of the most heartfelt interest, "Discord, as the Italian poet says, will find her way into peaceful convents, as well as into the privacy of families; and we fear our own guards and ushers will hardly exclude her from courts. My Lord of Leicester, you are offended with us, and we have right to be offended with you. We will take the lion's part upon us, and be the first to forgive."

Leicester smoothed his brow, as if by an effort; but the trouble was too deep-seated that its placidity should at once return. He said, however, that which fitted the occasion, that "he could not have the happiness of forgiving, because she who commanded him to do so could commit no injury toward him."



V

THE ILLNESS AND DEATH OF LADY SCOTT[12]

(1826)

Abbotsford, April 16, 1826.—I am now far ahead with Nap.[13] I wrote a little this morning, but this forenoon I must write letters, a task in which I am far behind. Lady Scott seems to make no way, yet can scarce be said to lose any. She suffers much occasionally, especially during the night. Sleeps a great deal when at ease; all symptoms announce water upon the chest. A sad prospect.

April 19.—Two melancholy things. Last night I left my pallet in our family apartment, to make way for a female attendant, and removed to a dressing-room adjoining, when to return, or whether ever, God only can tell. Also my servant cut my hair, which used to be poor Charlotte's personal task. I hope she will not observe it.

April 21.—Had the grief to find Lady Scott had insisted on coming down-stairs and was the worse of it. Also a letter from Lockhart, giving a poor account of the infant. God help us! earth can not.

May 2.—I wrote and read for three hours, and then walked, the day being soft and delightful; but alas! all my walks are lonely from the absence of my poor companion. She does not suffer, thank God, but strength must fail at last. Since Sunday there has been a gradual change—very gradual—but, alas! to the worse. My hopes are almost gone. But I am determined to stand this grief as I have done others.

May 4.—On visiting Lady Scott's sick-room this morning, I found her suffering, and I doubt if she knew me. Yet, after breakfast, she seemed serene and composed. The worst is, she will not speak out about the symptoms under which she labors. Sad, sad work; I am under the most melancholy apprehension, for what constitution can hold out under these continued and wasting attacks.

May 6.—The same scene of hopeless (almost) and unavailing anxiety. Still welcoming me with a smile, and asserting she is better. I fear the disease is too deeply entwined with the principles of life. Yet the increase of good weather, especially if it would turn more genial, might, I think, aid her excellent constitution. Still laboring at this Review, without heart or spirits to finish it.

May 10.—To-morrow I leave my home. To what scene I may suddenly be recalled, it wrings my heart to think.

Edinburgh, May 11.—Charlotte was unable to take leave of me, being in a sound sleep, after a very indifferent night. Perhaps it was as well. Emotion might have hurt her; and nothing I could have exprest would have been worth the risk. I have foreseen, for two years and more, that this menaced event could not be far distant. I have seen plainly, within the last two months, that recovery was hopeless. And yet to part with the companion of twenty-nine years when so very ill—that I did not, could not foresee. It withers my heart to think of it, and to recollect that I can hardly hope again to seek confidence and counsel from that ear to which all might be safely confided. But in her present lethargic state, what would my attentions have availed? and Anne has promised close and constant intelligence. I must dine with James Ballantyne to-day en famille. I can not help it; but would rather be at home and alone. However, I can go out too. I will not yield to the barren sense of hopelessness which struggles to invade me. I past a pleasant day with J. B.,[14] which was a great relief from the black dog which would have worried me at home. We were quite alone.

May 15.—Received the melancholy intelligence that all is over at Abbotsford.

Abbotsford, May 16.—She died at nine in the morning, after being very ill for two days—easy at last.

I arrived here late last night. Anne is worn out, and has had hysterics, which returned on my arrival. Her broken accents were like those of a child, the language, as well as the tones, broken, but in the most gentle voice of submission. "Poor mama—never return again—gone forever—a better place." Then, when she came to herself, she spoke with sense, freedom, and strength of mind, till her weakness returned. It would have been inexpressibly moving to me as a stranger—what was it then to the father and the husband? For myself, I scarce know how I feel, sometimes as firm as the Bass Rock, sometimes as weak as the wave that breaks on it.

I am as alert at thinking and deciding as I ever was in my life. Yet, when I contrast what this place now is, with what it has been not long since, I think my heart will break. Lonely, aged, deprived of my family—all but poor Anne, an impoverished and embarrassed man, I am deprived of the sharer of my thoughts and counsels, who could always talk down my sense of the calamitous apprehensions which break the heart that must bear them alone. Even her foibles were of service to me, by giving me things to think of beyond my weary self-reflections.

I have seen her. The figure I beheld is, and is not, my Charlotte—my thirty years' companion. There is the same symmetry of form, tho those limbs are rigid which were once so gracefully elastic—but that yellow mask, with pinched features, which seem to mock life rather than emulate it, can it be the face that was once so full of lively expression? I will not look on it again. Anne thinks her little changed, because the latest idea she had formed of her mother is as she appeared under circumstances of sickness and pain. Mine go back to a period of comparative health. If I write long in this way, I shall write down my resolution, which I should rather write up, if I could. I wonder how I shall do with the large portion of thoughts which were hers for thirty years. I suspect they will be hers yet for a long time at least. But I will not blaze cambric and crape in the public eye like a disconsolate widower, that most affected of all characters.

May 18.—Another day, and a bright one to the external world, again opens on us; the air is soft, and the flowers smiling, and the leaves glittering. They can not refresh her to whom mild weather was a natural enjoyment. Cerements of lead and of wood already hold her; cold earth must have her soon. But it is not my Charlotte, it is not the bride of my youth, the mother of my children, that will be laid among the ruins of Dryburgh, which we have so often visited in gaiety and pastime. No, no. She is sentient and conscious of my emotions somewhere—somehow; where we can not tell; how we can not tell; yet would I not at this moment renounce the mysterious yet certain hope that I shall see her in a better world, for all that this world can give me. The necessity of this separation—that necessity which rendered it even a relief—that and patience must be my comfort. I do not experience those paroxysms of grief which others do on the same occasion. I can exert myself and speak even cheerfully with the poor girls. But alone, or if anything touches me—the choking sensation. I have been to her room: there was no voice in it—no stirring; the pressure of the coffin was visible on the bed, but it had been removed elsewhere; all was neat as she loved it, but all was calm—calm as death. I remembered the last sight of her; she raised herself in bed, and tried to turn her eyes after me, and said, with a sort of smile, "You all have such melancholy faces." They were the last words I ever heard her utter, and I hurried away, for she did not seem quite conscious of what she said. When I returned, immediately (before) departing, she was in a deep sleep. It is deeper now. This was but seven days since.

They are arranging the chamber of death; that which was long the apartment of connubial happiness, and of whose arrangements (better than in richer houses) she was so proud. They are treading fast and thick. For weeks you could have heard a foot-fall. Oh, my God!

May 21.—Our sad preparations for to-morrow continue. A letter from Lockhart; doubtful if Sophia's health or his own state of business will let him be here. If things permit he comes tonight. From Charles not a word; but I think I may expect him. I wish to-morrow were over; not that I fear it, for my nerves are pretty good, but it will be a day of many recollections.

May 22.—Charles arrived last night, much affected of course. Anne had a return of her fainting-fits on seeing him, and again upon seeing Mr. Ramsay, the gentleman who performs the service. I heard him do so with the utmost propriety for my late friend, Lady Alvanley, the arrangement of whose funeral devolved upon me. How little I could guess when, where, and with respect to whom I should next hear those solemn words. Well, I am not apt to shrink from that which is my duty, merely because it is painful; but I wish this day over. A kind of cloud of stupidity hangs about me, as if all were unreal that men seem to be doing and talking about.

May 23.—About an hour before the mournful ceremony of yesterday, Walter arrived, having traveled express from Ireland on receiving the news. He was much affected, poor fellow, and no wonder. Poor Charlotte nursed him, and perhaps for that reason she was ever partial to him. The whole scene floats as a sort of dream before me—the beautiful day, the gray ruins covered and hidden among clouds of foliage and flourish, where the grave, even in the lap of beauty, lay lurking and gaped for its prey. Then the grave looks, the hasty important bustle of men with spades and mattocks—the train of carriages—the coffin containing the creature that was so long the dearest on earth to me, and whom I was to consign to the very spot which in pleasure-parties we so frequently visited. It seems still as if this could not be really so. But it is so—and duty to God and to my children must teach me patience.

May 24.—Slept wretchedly, or rather waked wretchedly, all night, and was very sick and bilious in consequence, and scarce able to hold up my head with pain. A walk, however, with my sons did me a great deal of good; indeed their society is the greatest support the world can afford me. Their ideas of everything are so just and honorable, kind toward their sisters, and affectionate to me, that I must be grateful to God for sparing them to me, and continue to battle with the world for their sakes, if not for my own.

May 26.—Were an enemy coming upon my house, would I not do my best to fight, altho opprest in spirits; and shall a similar despondency prevent me from mental exertion? It shall not, by Heaven!

May 30.—This has been a melancholy day—most melancholy. I am afraid poor Charles found me weeping. I do not know what other folks feel, but with me the hysterical passion that impels tears is a terrible violence—a sort of throttling sensation—then succeeded by a state of dreaming stupidity, in which I ask if my poor Charlotte can actually be dead.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: From Chapter XXXIII of "The Bride of Lammermoor."]

[Footnote 8: From Chapter LV of "Guy Mannering."]

[Footnote 9: From Chapter XXIII of "Rob Roy." Scott's celebrated character was a real person, his name being Robert MacGregor, or, as he chose to call himself, Robert Campbell. He was born in 1671 and died in 1734, and was a son of Donald MacGregor, a lieutenant in the army of James II, from whom after the accession of William of Orange, Robert obtained a commission. Afterward he became a freebooter. He was included in the Act of Attainder, but continued to levy blackmail on the gentry of Scotland while in the enjoyment of the protection of the Duke of Argyle.]

[Footnote 10: From "Kenilworth," which in general is founded on actual occurrences, altho there are many incongruities in the story as to time and circumstances. Queen Elizabeth's actual visit to Kenilworth took place in 1575. The castle is now one of the most picturesque ruins in England. It was dismantled under Cromwell.]

[Footnote 11: Kenilworth, which dates from 1120, was long a royal residence. Here in 1327 Edward III was imprisoned. It was afterward granted to John of Gaunt, "time-honored Lancaster," and in 1562 to the Earl of Leicester.]

[Footnote 12: From "The Journal." Lady Scott died in the midst of Scott's financial misfortunes. She was Charlotte Mary Carpenter, daughter of a French refugee, Jean Charpentier.]

[Footnote 13: The "Life of Napoleon."]

[Footnote 14: James Ballantyne was the printer of Scott's books and his partner in the firm of James Ballantyne & Co., which failed in 1826, in consequence of being involved in the bankruptcy of the publishing house of Constable & Co., with which also Scott was connected.]



SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Born in 1772, died in 1834; educated at Cambridge, but was not graduated; formed an unsuccessful scheme for a communistic settlement on the Susquehanna River, in Pennsylvania; married a sister of Southey's wife in 1795; published at Bristol a volume of poems in 1796; "The Ancient Mariner" in 1798; settled at Keswick with Southey and Wordsworth in 1800; lectured in London to fashionable audiences, becoming in 1816 the guest of Mr. Gillman, a London physician, at Highgate, where he spent the remainder of his life; published "Christabel" in 1816, "Aids to Reflection" in 1825, his "Literary Remains" appearing in 1836-39.



I

DOES FORTUNE FAVOR FOOLS?[15]

"Does Fortune favor fools? Or how do you explain the origin of the proverb, which, differently worded, is to be found in all the languages of Europe?"

This proverb admits of various explanations, according to the moods of mind in which it is used. It may arise from pity, and the soothing persuasion that Providence is eminently watchful over the helpless, and extends an especial care to those who are not capable of caring for themselves. So used, it breathes the same feeling as "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"—or the more sportive adage, that "the fairies take care of children and tipsy folk." The persuasion itself, in addition to the general religious feeling of mankind, and the scarcely less general love of the marvelous, may be accounted for from our tendency to exaggerate all effects that seem disproportionate to their visible cause, and all circumstances that are in any way strongly contrasted with our notions of the persons under them. Secondly, it arises from the safety and success which an ignorance of danger and difficulty sometimes actually assists in procuring; inasmuch as it precludes the despondence which might have kept the more foresighted from undertaking the enterprise, the depression which would retard its progress, and those overwhelming influences of terror in cases where the vivid perception of the danger constitutes the greater part of the danger itself. Thus men are said to have swooned and even died at the sight of a narrow bridge, over which they had ridden the night before in perfect safety, or at tracing the footmarks along the edge of a precipice which the darkness had concealed from them. A more obscure cause, yet not wholly to be omitted, is afforded by the undoubted fact that the exertion of the reasoning faculties tends to extinguish or bedim those mysterious instincts of skill, which, tho for the most part latent, we nevertheless possess in common with other animals.

Or the proverb may be used invidiously; and folly in the vocabulary of envy or baseness may signify courage and magnanimity. Hardihood and foolhardiness are indeed as different as green and yellow, yet will appear the same to the jaundiced eye. Courage multiplies the chances of success by sometimes making opportunities, and always availing itself of them: and in this sense Fortune may be said to favor fools by those who, however prudent in their own opinion, are deficient in valor and enterprise. Again, an eminently good and wise man, for whom the praises of the judicious have procured a high reputation even with the world at large, proposes to himself certain objects, and adapting the right means to the right end attains them; but his objects not being what the world calls Fortune, neither money nor artificial rank, his admitted inferiors in moral and intellectual worth, but more prosperous in their worldly concerns, are said to have been favored by Fortune and be slighted; altho the fools did the same in their line as the wise man in his; they adapted the appropriate means to the desired end, and so succeeded. In this sense the proverb is current by a misuse, or a catachresis at least of both the words, Fortune and Fools.

How seldom, friend, a good great man inherits Honor or wealth with all his worth and pains! It sounds like stories from the land of spirits, If any man obtain that which he merits, Or any merit that which he obtains.

REPLY

For shame! dear friend, renounce this canting strain! What would'st thou have a good great man obtain? Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain? Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain? Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends! Hath he not always treasures, always friends, The good great man? Three treasures, love, and light, And calm thoughts regular as infants' breath: And three firm friends, more sure than day and night, Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death?

But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached to Fortune, distinct both from prudence and from courage; and distinct too from that absence of depressing or bewildering passions, which (according to my favorite proverb, "extremes meet") the fool not seldom obtains in as great perfection by his ignorance as the wise man by the highest energies of thought and self-discipline. Luck has a real existence in human affairs, from the infinite number of powers that are in action at the same time, and from the coexistence of things contingent and accidental (such as to us at least are accidental) with the regular appearances and general laws of nature. A familiar instance will make these words intelligible. The moon waxes and wanes according to a necessary law. The clouds likewise, and all the manifold appearances connected with them, are governed by certain laws no less than the phases of the moon. But the laws which determine the latter are known and calculable, while those of the former are hidden from us.

At all events, the number and variety of their effects baffle our powers of calculation; and that the sky is clear or obscured at any particular time, we speak of, in common language, as a matter of accident. Well! at the time of the full moon, but when the sky is completely covered with black clouds, I am walking on in the dark, aware of no particular danger; a sudden gust of wind rends the clouds for a moment, and the moon emerging discloses to me a chasm or precipice, to the very brink of which I had advanced my foot. This is what is meant by luck, and according to the more or less serious mood or habit of our mind, we exclaim, how lucky, or how providential! The copresence of numberless phenomena, which from the complexity or subtlety of their determining causes are called contingencies, and the coexistence of these with any regular or necessary phenomenon (as the clouds with the moon, for instance) occasion coincidences, which, when they are attended by any advantage or injury, and are at the same time incapable of being calculated or foreseen by human prudence, form good or ill luck. On a hot sunshiny afternoon came on a sudden storm and spoiled the farmer's hay; and this is called ill luck. We will suppose the same event to take place when meteorology shall have been perfected into a science, provided with unerring instruments; but which the farmer had neglected to examine. This is no longer ill luck, but imprudence.

Now apply this to our proverb. Unforeseen coincidences may have greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for him only what possibly from his own abilities he might have effected for himself, his good luck will excite less attention and the instances be less remembered. That clever men should attain their objects seems natural, and we neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that success of themselves without the intervention of skill or foresight; but we dwell on the fact and remember it, as something strange, when the same happens to a weak or ignorant man. So, too, tho the latter should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves, in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some one great constitutive law, in the light of which dwell dominion and the power of prophecy; if these discoveries, instead of having been, as they really were, preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and founder of philosophic alchemy; if they presented themselves to Sir Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic battery; if this battery, as far as Davy was concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down material nature under the inquisition of reason, and forced from her as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived questions—yet still they would not have been talked of or described as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his neighbors, and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man below par in the general powers of his understanding; then, "Oh what a lucky fellow! Well, Fortune does favor fools—that's certain! It is always so!"—and forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar instances. Thus accumulating the one sort of facts and never collecting the other, we do, as poets in their diction and quacks of all denominations do in their reasoning, put a part for the whole, and at once soothe our envy and gratify our love of the marvelous, by the sweeping proverb, "Fortune favors fools."



II

THE DESTINY OF THE UNITED STATES[16]

The possible destiny of the United States of America—as a nation of a hundred millions of freemen—stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, living under the laws of Alfred, and speaking the language of Shakespeare and Milton, is an august conception. Why should we not wish to see it realized? America would then be England viewed through a solar microscope; Great Britain in a state of glorious magnification! How deeply to be lamented is the spirit of hostility and sneering which some of the popular books of travels have shown in treating of the Americans! They hate us, no doubt, just as brothers hate; but they respect the opinion of an Englishman concerning themselves ten times as much as that of a native of any other country on earth. A very little humoring of their prejudices, and some courtesy of language and demeanor on the part of Englishmen, would work wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans.

Capt. Basil Hall's[17] book is certainly very entertaining and instructive; but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and more especially his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable. After all, are not most of the things shown up with so much bitterness by him mere national foibles, parallels to which every people has and must of necessity have?

What you say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases there is a hardship; but in the long run, the matter is fully compensated to the overtaxed class. For example, take the householders in London who complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. Is it not pretty clear that, whether such householder be a tradesman who indemnifies himself in the price of his goods; or a letter of lodgings who does so in his rent; or a stockholder who receives it back again in his dividends; or a country gentleman who has saved so much fresh levy on his land or his other property; one way or other, it comes at last pretty nearly to the same thing, tho the pressure for the time may be unjust and vexatious, and fit to be removed? But when New England, which may be considered a state in itself, taxes the admission of foreign manufactures in order to cherish manufactures of its own, and thereby forces the Carolinas, another state of itself, with which there is little inter-communion, which has no such desire or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher price, it is altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright tyranny of the worst, because of the most sordid, kind. What would you think of a law which should tax every person in Devonshire for the pecuniary benefit of every person in Yorkshire? And yet that is a feeble image of the actual usurpation of the New England deputies over the property of the Southern States.

There are two possible modes of unity in a state; one by absolute coordination of each to all, and of all to each; the other by subordination of classes and offices. Now, I maintain that there never was an instance of the first, nor can there be, without slavery as its condition and accompaniment, as in Athens. The poor Swiss cantons are no exception.

The mistake lies in confounding a state which must be based on classes and interests and unequal property, with a church, which is founded on the person, and has no qualification but personal merit. Such a community may exist, as in the case of the Quakers; but in order to exist, it must be comprest and hedged in by another society—mundus mundulus in mundo immundo.

The free class in a slave state is always, in one sense, the most patriotic class of people in an empire; for their patriotism is not simply the patriotism of other people, but an aggregate of lust of power and distinction and supremacy.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 15: From "A Sailor's Fortune."]

[Footnote 16: From the "Table Talk."]

[Footnote 17: Hall was a British naval officer, who visited the United States in 1827-28, and in 1829 published the book Coleridge refers to, "Travels in North America."]



ROBERT SOUTHEY

Born in 1774, died in 1843; educated at Oxford; traveled in Spain and Portugal in 1795-96; settled near Keswick in the lake region in 1804; became poet laureate in 1813, his "Life of Nelson" published in 1813, a small book, but to-day the best known of all his many writings.



NELSON'S DEATH AT TRAFALGAR[18]

(1805)

It had been part of Nelson's prayer, that the British fleet might be distinguished by humanity in the victory which he expected. Setting an example himself, he twice gave orders to cease firing on the Redoubtable, supposing that she had struck, because her guns were silent; for, as she carried no flag, there was no means of instantly ascertaining the fact. From this ship, which he had thus twice spared, he received his death. A ball fired from her mizzen-top, which, in the then situation of the two vessels, was not more than fifteen yards from that part of the deck where he was standing, struck the epaulet on his left shoulder, about a quarter after one, just in the heat of action. He fell upon his face, on the spot which was covered with his poor secretary's blood. Hardy,[19] who was a few steps from him, turning round, saw three men raising him up. "They have done for me at last, Hardy," said he. "I hope not," cried Hardy. "Yes," he replied; "my backbone is shot through." Yet even now, not for a moment losing his presence of mind, he observed, as they were carrying him down the ladder, that the tiller ropes, which had been shot away, were not yet replaced, and ordered that new ones should be rove immediately: then, that he might not be seen by the crew, he took out his handkerchief, and covered his face and his stars. Had he but concealed these badges of honor from the enemy, England perhaps would not have had cause to receive with sorrow the news of the battle of Trafalgar. The cockpit was crowded with wounded and dying men; over whose bodies he was with some difficulty conveyed, and laid upon a pallet in the midshipmen's berth. It was soon perceived, upon examination, that the wound was mortal. This, however, was concealed from all except Captain Hardy, the chaplain, and the medical attendants. He himself being certain, from the sensation in his back, and the gush of blood he felt momentarily within his breast, that no human care could avail him, insisted that the surgeon should leave him, and attend to those to whom he might be useful; "for," said he, "you can do nothing for me."

All that could be done was to fan him with paper, and frequently to give him lemonade to alleviate his intense thirst. He was in great pain, and exprest much anxiety, for the event of the action, which now began to declare itself. As often as a ship struck, the crew of the Victory hurrahed; and at every hurrah a visible expression of joy gleamed in the eyes, and marked the countenance of the dying hero. But he became impatient to see Hardy; and as that officer, tho often sent for, could not leave the deck, Nelson feared that some fatal cause prevented him, and repeatedly cried: "Will no one bring Hardy to me? he must be killed; he is surely dead!" An hour and ten minutes elapsed from the time when Nelson received his wound before Hardy could come to him. They shook hands in silence: Hardy in vain struggling to suppress the feelings of that most painful and yet sublimest moment. "Well, Hardy," said Nelson, "how goes the day with us?" "Very well," replied Hardy; "ten ships have struck, but five of the van have tacked, and show an intention to bear down upon the Victory. I have called two or three of our fresh ships round, and have no doubt of giving them a drubbing." "I hope," said Nelson, "none of our ships have struck?" Hardy answered, "There was no fear of that." Then, and not till then, Nelson spoke of himself. "I am a dead man, Hardy," said he; "I am going fast: it will be all over with me soon. Come nearer to me. Let my dear Lady Hamilton have my hair, and all other things belonging to me." Hardy observed, that he hoped Mr. Beatty could yet hold out some prospect of life. "O no," he replied; "it is impossible. My back is shot through. Beatty will tell you so." Hardy then, once more, shook hands with him, and with a heart almost bursting, hastened upon deck.

By this time all feeling below the breast was gone; and Nelson, having made the surgeon ascertain this, said to him: "You know I am gone. I know it. I feel something rising in my breast," putting his hand on his left side, "which tells me so." And upon Beatty's inquiring whether his pain was very great, he replied, "So great that he wished he was dead. Yet," said he, in a lower voice, "one would like to live a little longer too!" And after a few minutes, in the same undertone, he added: "What would become of poor Lady Hamilton, if she knew my situation!" Next to his country she occupied his thoughts. Captain Hardy, some fifty minutes after he had left the cockpit, returned; and, again taking the hand of his dying friend and commander, congratulated him on having gained a complete victory. How many of the enemy were taken he did not know, as it was impossible to perceive them distinctly; but fourteen or fifteen at least. "That's well," cried Nelson; "but I bargained for twenty." And then, in a stronger voice, he said: "Anchor, Hardy; anchor." Hardy, upon this, hinted that Admiral Collingwood would take upon himself the direction of affairs. "Not while I live, Hardy," said the dying Nelson, ineffectually endeavoring to raise himself from the bed: "do you anchor." His previous orders for preparing to anchor had shown clearly he foresaw the necessity of this. Presently, calling Hardy back, he said to him, in a low voice, "Don't throw me overboard"; and he desired that he might be buried by his parents, unless it should please the King to order otherwise. Then reverting to private feelings: "Take care of my dear Lady Hamilton, Hardy: take care of poor Lady Hamilton. Kiss me, Hardy," said he. Hardy knelt down and kissed his cheek; and Nelson said, "Now I am satisfied. Thank God, I have done my duty!" Hardy stood over him in silence for a moment or two, then knelt again and kissed his forehead. "Who is that?" said Nelson; and being informed, he replied, "God bless you, Hardy." And Hardy then left him—forever. Nelson now desired to be turned upon his right side, and said, "I wish I had not left the deck; for I shall soon be gone." Death was, indeed, rapidly approaching. He said to the chaplain, "Doctor, I have not been a great sinner"; and after a short pause, "Remember that I leave Lady Hamilton and my daughter Horatia as a legacy to my country." His articulation now became difficult; but he was distinctly heard to say, "Thank God, I have done my duty!" These words he repeatedly pronounced; and they were the last words which he uttered. He expired at thirty minutes after four—three hours and a quarter after he had received his wound.

The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a public calamity: men started at the intelligence, and turned pale, as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was suddenly taken from us; and it seemed as if we had never till then known how deeply we loved and reverenced him. What the country had lost in its great naval hero—the greatest of our own and of all former times—was scarcely taken into the account of grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he performed his part, that the maritime war, after the battle of Trafalgar, was considered at an end. The fleets of the enemy were not merely defeated, but destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new race of seamen reared for them, before the possibility of their invading our shores could again be contemplated. It was not, therefore, from any selfish reflection upon the magnitude of our loss that we mourned for him: the general sorrow was of a higher character. The people of England grieved that funeral ceremonies, and public monuments, and posthumous rewards, were all which they could now bestow upon him whom the King, the legislature, and the nation would have alike delighted to honor; whom every tongue would have blest; whose presence in every village through which he might have passed would have wakened the church-bells, have given schoolboys a holiday, have drawn children from their sports to gaze upon him, and "old men from the chimney-corner" to look upon Nelson ere they died. The victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, indeed, with the usual forms of rejoicing, but they were without joy; for such already was the glory of the British navy, through Nelson's surpassing genius, that it scarcely seemed to receive any addition from the most signal victory that ever was achieved upon the seas; and the destruction of this mighty fleet, by which all the maritime schemes of France were totally frustrated, hardly appeared to add to our security or strength; for, while Nelson was living to watch the combined squadrons of the enemy, we felt ourselves as secure as now, when they were no longer in existence.

There was reason to suppose, from the appearances upon opening his body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like his father, to a good old age. Yet he can not be said to have fallen prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to be lamented, who died so full of honors, and at the height of human fame. The most triumphant death is that of the martyr; the most awful, that of the martyred patriot; the most splendid, that of the hero in the hour of victory; and if the chariot and the horses of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory. He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name and an example which are at this hour inspiring thousands of the youth of England—a name which is our pride and an example which will continue to be our shield and our strength. Thus it is that the spirits of the great and the wise continue to live and to act after them.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 18: From "The Life of Nelson."]

[Footnote 19: Sir Thomas Hardy was flag captain of the Victory, Nelson's ship at Trafalgar, and acting captain of the fleet during the battle. Hardy was walking on deck with Nelson when Nelson received the shot that caused his death. He was made Vice-Admiral in 1837.]



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR

Born in 1775, died in 1864; educated at Oxford; visited Paris in 1802; joined the Spaniards at Corunna against the French in 1808; purchased Llanthony Abbey in 1809; owing to family troubles, removed to Jersey in 1814; and then to France and Italy, settling in Florence in 1821, where he remained until his return to England in 1835; his first book, a volume of poems, appeared in 1795, and his last, "Heroic Idyls," in 1863.



I

THE DEATH OF HOFER[20]

(1810)

I passed two entire months in Germany, and like the people. On my way I saw Waterloo, an ugly table for an ugly game. At Innsbruck I entered the church in which Andreas Hofer is buried. He lies under a plain slab, on the left, near the door. I admired the magnificent tomb of bronze, in the center, surmounted by heroes, real and imaginary. They did not fight, tens against thousands; they did not fight for wives and children, but for lands and plunder; therefore they are heroes! My admiration for these works of art was soon satisfied, which perhaps it would not have been in any other place. Snow, mixt with rain, was falling, and was blown by the wind upon the tomb of Hofer. I thought how often he had taken advantage of such weather for his attacks against the enemies of his country, and I seemed to hear his whistle in the wind. At the little village of Landro (I feel a whimsical satisfaction in the likeness of the name to mine), the innkeeper was the friend of this truly great man—the greatest man that Europe has produced in our days, excepting his true compeer, Kosciusko. Andreas Hofer gave him the chain and crucifix he wore three days before his death. You may imagine this man's enthusiasm, who, because I had said that Hofer was greater than king or emperor, and had made him a present of small value, as the companion and friend of that harmless and irreproachable hero, took this precious relic from his neck and offered it to me.

By the order of Bonaparte, the companions of Hofer, eighty in number, were chained, thumb-screwed, and taken out of prison in couples, to see him shot. He had about him one thousand florins, in paper currency, which he delivered to his confessor, requesting him to divide it impartially among his unfortunate countrymen. The confessor, an Italian who spoke German, kept it, and never gave relief from it to any of them, most of whom were suffering, not only from privation of wholesome air, to which, among other privations, they never had been accustomed, but also from scantiness of nourishment and clothing. Even in Mantua, where, as in the rest of Italy, sympathy is both weak and silent, the lowest of the people were indignant at the sight of so brave a defender of his country led into the public square to expiate a crime unheard of for many centuries in their nation. When they saw him walk forth, with unaltered countenance and firm step before them; when, stopping on the ground which was about to receive his blood, they heard him with unfaltering voice commend his soul and his country to the Creator; and, as if still under his own roof (a custom with him after the evening prayer), implore a blessing for his boys and his little daughter, and for the mother who had reared them up carefully and tenderly thus far through the perils of childhood; finally, when in a lower tone, but earnestly and emphatically, he besought pardon from the Fount of Mercy for her brother, his betrayer, many smote their breasts aloud; many, thinking that sorrow was shameful, lowered their heads and wept; many, knowing that it was dangerous, yet wept too. The people remained upon the spot an unusual time, and the French, fearing some commotion, pretended to have received an order from Bonaparte for the mitigation of the sentence, and publicly announced it.

Among his many falsehoods, any one of which would have excluded him forever from the society of men of honor, this is perhaps the basest; as indeed of all his atrocities the death of Hofer, which he had ordered long before, and appointed the time and circumstances, is that which the brave and virtuous will reprobate the most severely. He was urged by no necessity, he was prompted by no policy; his impatience of courage in an enemy, his hatred of patriotism and integrity in all, of which he had no idea himself, and saw no image in those about him, outstript his blind passion for fame, and left him nothing but power and celebrity.

The name of Andreas Hofer will be honored by posterity far above any of the present age, and together with the most glorious of the last, Washington and Kosciusko. For it rests on the same foundation, and indeed on a higher basis. In virtue and wisdom their coequal, he vanquished on several occasions a force greatly superior to his own in numbers and in discipline, by the courage and confidence he inspired, and by his brotherly care and anxiety for those who were fighting at his side. Differently, far differently, ought we to estimate the squanderers of human blood, and the scorners of human tears. We also may boast of our great men in a cause as great; for without it they could not be so. We may look back upon our Blake; whom the prodigies of a Nelson do not eclipse, nor would he have wished (such was his generosity) to obscure it. Blake was among the founders of freedom; Nelson was the vanquisher of its destroyers. Washington was both; Kosciusko was neither; neither was Hofer. But the aim of all three was alike; and in the armory of God are suspended the arms the two last of them bore; suspended for success more signal and for vengeance more complete.

I am writing this from Venice, which is among cities what Shakespeare is among men. He will give her immortality by his works, which neither her patron saint could do, nor her surrounding sea.



II

NAPOLEON AND PERICLES

Two powerful nations have been vitally affected by natural calamities. The former of these calamities was inevitable by human prudence, and uncontrollable by human skill; the latter was to be foreseen at any distance by the most ignorant, and to be avoided by the most unwary. I mean in the first the Plague of the Athenians; in the second the starvation of the French. The first happened under the administration of a man transcendently brave; a man cautious, temperate, eloquent, prompt, sagacious, above all that ever guided the councils and animated the energies of a state; the second under a soldier of fortune, expert and enthusiastic; but often deficient in moral courage, not seldom in personal; rude, insolent, rash, rapacious; valuing but one human life among the myriads at his disposal, and that one far from the worthiest, in the estimation of an honester and a saner mind.

It is with reluctant shame I enter on a comparison of such a person and Pericles. On one hand we behold the richest cultivation of the most varied and extensive genius; the confidence of courage, the sedateness of wisdom, the stateliness of integrity; on the other, coarse manners, rude language, violent passions continually exploding, a bottomless void on the side of truth, and a rueful waste on that of common honesty.... So many pernicious faults were not committed by Xerxes or Darius, whom ancient historians call feeble princes, as were committed by Napoleon, whom the modern do not call feeble, because he felt nothing for others, coerced pertinaciously, promised rashly, gave indiscriminately, looked tranquilly, and spoke mysteriously. Even in his flight, signalized by nothing but despondency, Segur, his panegyrist, hath clearly shown that, had he retained any presence of mind, any sympathy, or any shame, he might have checked and crippled his adversary. One glory he shares with Trajan and with Pericles, and neither time nor malice can diminish it. He raised up and rewarded all kinds of merit, even in those arts to which he was a stranger. In this indeed he is more remarkable, perhaps more admirable, than Pericles himself, for Pericles was a stranger to none of them.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: Hofer had led the Tyrolese insurrection against Napoleon's government in 1809, gaining victories at Sterzing, Innsbruck and Isel. He became the head of the government of the Tyrol which for two months maintained her freedom.]



CHARLES LAMB

Born in The Temple, London, 1775, died in 1834; his father the clerk of a bencher in the Inner Temple; entered Christ Hospital in 1782, where he met Coleridge and remained seven years; became a clerk in the South Sea House in 1789, and in the India House in 1792; his sister, Mary Lamb, in a fit of temporary insanity, killed their mother in 1796, Charles becoming her guardian for the remainder of her life; began to publish verse in 1796; published "Rosamond Gray" in 1798, a two-act farce produced at Drury Lane in 1805, "Tales from Shakespeare," in which his sister shared the labor with him, in 1807; and essays in various magazines, first collected in 1823 as the "Essays of Elia"; went abroad with his sister in 1822; retired from the India House with a pension of L441 in 1825; published the "Last Essays of Elia" in 1833.



I

DREAM-CHILDREN—A REVERIE[21]

Children love to listen to stories about their elders, when they were children; to stretch their imagination to the conception of a traditionary great-uncle, or grandame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great house in Norfolk—a hundred times bigger than that in which they and papa lived—which had been the scene—so at least it was generally believed in that part of the country—of the tragic incidents which they had lately become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in the Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the children and their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the great hall, the whole story down to the Robin Red-breasts, till a foolish rich uncle pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern invention in its stead, with no story upon it. Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks, too tender to be called upbraiding.

Then I went on to say how religious and how good their great-grandmother Field was, how beloved and respected by everybody, tho she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but had only the charge of it—and yet in some respects she might be said to be the mistress of it too—committed to her by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in the adjoining county; but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house in a sort while she lived, which afterward came to decay, and was nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stript and carried away to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and looked as awkward as if some one were to carry away the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here John smiled, as much as to say, "That would be foolish indeed." And then I told how, when she came to die, her funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and some of the gentry too, of the neighborhood for many miles round, to show their respect for her memory, because she had been such a good and religious woman; so good, indeed, that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay, and a great part of the Testament besides. Here little Alice spread her hands.

Then I told what a tall, upright, graceful person their great-grandmother Field once was; and how in her youth she was esteemed the best dancer. Here Alice's little right foot played an involuntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it desisted—the best dancer, I was saying, in the county, till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and bowed her down with pain; but it could never bend her good spirits, or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was used to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great lone house; and how she believed that an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near where she slept; but she said "those innocents would do her no harm"; and how frightened I used to be, tho in those days I had my maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so good or religious as she—and yet I never saw the infants. Here John expanded all his eyebrows, and tried to look courageous.

Then I told how good she was to all her grandchildren, having us to the great house in the holidays, where I, in particular, used to spend many hours by myself in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve Caesars that had been emperors of Rome, till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with them; how I never could be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out—sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross me—and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then, and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries and the fir apples, which were good for nothing but to look at; or in lying about upon the fresh grass, with all the fine garden smells around me; or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening, too, along with the oranges and the limes, in that grateful warmth; or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish-pond at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings. I had more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavors of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such like common baits of children. Here John slyly deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing with her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the present as irrelevant. Then, in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how, tho their great-grandmother Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John L——, because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and a king to the rest of us; and, instead of moping about in solitary corners, like some of us, he would mount the most mettlesome horse he could get, when but an imp no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half over the county in a morning, and join the hunters when there were any out; and yet he loved the old great house and gardens too, but had too much spirit to be always pent up within their boundaries; and how their uncle grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, to the admiration of everybody, but of the great-grandmother Field most especially; and how he used to carry me upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy—for he was a good bit older than me—many a mile when I could not walk for pain; and how, in after-life, he became lame-footed too, and I did not always, I fear, make allowances enough for him when he was impatient and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate he had been to me when I was lame-footed; and how, when he died, tho he had not been dead an hour, it seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a distance there is betwixt life and death; and how I bore his death, as I thought, pretty well at first, but afterward it haunted and haunted me; and tho I did not cry or take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and knew not till then how much I had loved him.

I missed his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and wished him to be alive again, to be quarreling with him—for we quarreled sometimes—rather than not have him again; and was as uneasy without him, as he, their poor uncle, must have been when the doctor took off his limb. Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if their little mourning which they had on was not for Uncle John; and they looked up and prayed me not to go on about their uncle, but to tell them some stories about their pretty dead mother. Then I told how, for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W—n; and, as much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and denial meant in maidens; when suddenly turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of representment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely imprest upon me the effects of speech: "We are not of Alice, nor of thee; nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence and a name"; and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side—but John L. (or James Elia) was gone forever.



II

POOR RELATIONS[22]

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondency, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity, an unwelcome remembrancer, a perpetually recurring mortification, a drain on your purse, a more intolerable dun upon your pride, a drawback upon success, a rebuke to your rising, a stain in your blood, a blot on your scutcheon, a rent in your garment, a death's-head at your banquet, Agathocles' pot, a Mordecai in your gate, a Lazarus at your door, a lion in your path, a frog in your chamber, a fly in your ointment, a mote in your eye, a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends, the one thing not needful, the hail in harvest, the ounce of sour in a pound of sweet.

He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you, "That is Mr. ——." A rap between familiarity and respect, that demands, and at the same time seems to despair of entertainment. He entereth smiling and embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you to shake, and draweth it back again. He casually looketh in about dinnertime, when the table is full. He offereth to go away, seeing you have company, but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your visitor's two children are accommodated at a side-table.

He never cometh upon open days, when your wife says with some complacency: "My dear, perhaps Mr. —— will drop in to-day." He remembereth birthdays, and professeth he is fortunate to have stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the turbot being small, yet suffereth himself to be importuned into a slice against his first resolution. He sticketh by the port, yet will be prevailed up to empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being too obsequious, or not civil enough to him. The guests think "they have seen him before." Every one speculateth upon his condition; and the most part take him to be a tide-waiter. He calleth you by your Christian name, to imply that his other is the same with your own. He is too familiar by half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. With half the familiarity, he might pass for a casual dependent; with more boldness, he would be in no danger of being taken for what he is. He is too humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent; yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanor, that your guests take him for one. He is asked to make one at the whist-table; refuseth on the score of poverty, and resents being left out. When the company break up, he proferreth to go for a coach, and lets the servant go. He recollects your grandfather; and will thrust in some mean and quite unimportant anecdote of the family. He knew it when it was not quite so flourishing as "he is blest in seeing it now." He reviveth past situations, to institute what he calleth favorable comparisons. With a reflecting sort of congratulation he will inquire the price of your furniture; and insult you with a special commendation of your window-curtains. He is of opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape; but, after all, there was something more comfortable about the old tea-kettle, which you must remember. He dare say you must find a great convenience in having a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms done on vellum yet; and did not know till lately that such and such had been the crest of the family. His memory is unseasonable, his compliments perverse, his talk a trouble, his stay pertinacious; and when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a corner as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid of two nuisances.

There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is a female poor relation. You may do something with the other; you may pass him off tolerably well; but your indigent she-relative is hopeless. "He is an old humorist," you may say, "and affects to go threadbare. His circumstances are better than folks would take them to be. You are fond of having a character at your table, and truly he is one." But in the indications of female poverty there can be no disguise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice. The truth must out without shuffling. "She is plainly related to the L——s, or what does she at their house?" She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. Nine times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her garb is something between a gentlewoman and a beggar, yet the former evidently predominates. She is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously sensible to her inferiority. He may require to be represt sometimes—aliquando sufflaminandus erat—but there is no raising her. You send her soup at dinner, and she begs to be helped after the gentlemen. Mr. —— requests the honor of taking wine with her; she hesitates between port and Madeira, and chooses the former because he does. She calls the servant sir, and insists on not troubling him to hold her plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The children's governess takes upon her to correct her when she has mistaken the piano for a harpsichord.



III

THE ORIGIN OF ROAST PIG[23]

Mankind, says a Chinese manuscript, which my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to-day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swineherd Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son, Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian makeshift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished.

China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East, from the remotest periods that we read of. Bo-bo was in the utmost consternation, as you may think, not so much for the sake of the tenement, which his father and he could easily build up again with a few dry branches, and the labor of an hour or two, at any time, as for the loss of the pigs. While he was thinking what he should say to his father, and wringing his hands over the smoking remnants of one of those untimely sufferers, an odor assailed his nostrils, unlike any scent which he had before experienced. What could it proceed from?—not from the burned cottage—he had smelt that smell before—indeed this was by no means the first accident of the kind which had occurred through the negligence of this unlucky young firebrand. Much less did it resemble that of any known herb, weed or flower. A premonitory moistening at the same time overflowed his nether lip. He knew not what to think. He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burned his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth. Some of the crumbs of the scorched skin had come away with his fingers, and for the first time in his life (in the world's life, indeed, for before him no man had known it) he tasted—crackling! Again he felt and fumbled at the pig. It did not burn him so much now, still he licked his fingers from a sort of habit.

The truth at length broke into his slow understanding that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion, when his sire entered amid the smoking rafters, armed with retributory cudgel, and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure which he experienced in his lower regions had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something like the following dialog ensued.

"You graceless whelp, what have you got there devouring? Is it not enough that you have burned me down three houses with your dog's tricks, and be hanged to you! but you must be eating fire, and I know not what—what have you got there, I say?"

"O father, the pig, the pig! do come and taste how nice the burned pig eats."

The ears of Ho-ti tingled with horror. He curst his son, and he curst himself that ever he should beget a son that should eat burned pig.

Bo-bo, whose scent was wonderfully sharpened since morning, soon raked out another pig, and fairly rending it asunder, thrust the lesser half by main force into the fists of Ho-ti, still shouting out, "Eat, eat, eat the burned pig, father, only taste—O Lord"—with such like barbarous ejaculations, cramming all the while as if he would choke.

Ho-ti trembled in every joint while he grasped the abominable thing, wavering whether he should not put his son to death for an unnatural young monster, when the crackling scorching his fingers, as it had done his son's, and applying the same remedy to them, he in his turn tasted some of its flavor, which, make what sour mouths he would for pretense, proved not altogether displeasing to him. In conclusion (for the manuscript here is a little tedious) both father and son fairly sat down to the mess, and never left off till they had dispatched all that remained of the litter.

Bo-bo was strictly enjoined not to let the secret escape, for the neighbors would certainly have stoned them for a couple of abominable wretches, who could think of improving upon the good meat which God had sent them. Nevertheless strange stories got about. It was observed that Ho-ti's cottage was burned down now more frequently than ever. Nothing but fires from this time forward. Some would break out in broad day, others in the night-time. As often as the sow farrowed, so sure was the house of Ho-ti to be in a blaze; and Ho-ti himself, which was the more remarkable, instead of chastising his son, seemed to grow more indulgent to him than ever. At length they were watched, the terrible mystery discovered, and father and son summoned to take their trial at Peking, then an inconsiderable assize town. Evidence was given, the obnoxious food itself produced in court, and verdict about to be pronounced, when the foreman of the jury begged that some of the burned pig, of which the culprits stood accused, might be handed into the box. He handled it, and they all handled it; and burning their fingers, as Bo-bo and his father had done before them, and nature prompting each of them the same remedy, against the faces of all the facts, and the clearest charge which judge had ever given—to the surprize of the whole court, townsfolk, strangers, reporters, and all present—without leaving the box, or any manner of consultation whatever, they brought in a simultaneous verdict of Not Guilty.

The judge, who was a shrewd fellow, winked at the manifest iniquity of the decision; and when the court was dismissed, went privily, and bought up all the pigs that could be had for love or money. In a few days his lordship's town-house was observed to be on fire. The thing took wing, and now there was nothing to be seen but fire in every direction. Fuel and pigs grew enormously dear all over the district. The insurance offices one and all shut up shop. People built slighter and slighter every day, until it was feared that the very science of architecture would in no long time be lost to the world. Thus this custom of firing houses continued, till in process of time, says my manuscript, a sage arose, like our Locke, who made a discovery, that the flesh of swine, or indeed of any other animal, might be cooked (burned, as they call it) without the necessity of consuming a whole house to dress it. Then first began the rude form of a gridiron. Roasting by the string or spit came in a century or two later, I forget in whose dynasty. By such slow degrees, concludes the manuscript, do the most useful and seemingly the most obvious arts, make their way among mankind.

Without placing too implicit faith in the account above given, it must be agreed, that if a worthy pretext for so dangerous an experiment as setting houses on fire (especially in these days) could be assigned in favor of any culinary object, that pretext and excuse might be found in ROAST PIG.

Of all the delicacies in the whole mundus edibilis, I will maintain it to be the most delicate—princeps obsoniorum.



IV

THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK[24]

At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs his night gear, and prepares to tune up his unseasonable matins, we are not naturalists enough to determine. But for a mere human gentleman—that has no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed to such preposterous exercise—we take ten, or half after ten (eleven, of course, during this Christmas solstice), to be the very earliest hour at which he can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To think of it, we say; for to do it in earnest requires another half hour's good consideration. Not but there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and such like gauds abroad in the world in summer-time especially, some hours before what we have assigned, which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for getting up. But having been tempted once or twice, in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess our curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of being the sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too sacred to waste them upon such observances; which have in them, besides, something pagan and Persic. To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or got up with the sun (as 'tis called), to go a journey, or upon a foolish whole day's pleasuring, but we suffered for it all the long hours after in listlessness and headaches; Nature herself sufficiently declaring her sense of our presumption in aspiring to regulate our frail waking courses by the measures of that celestial and sleepless traveler. We deny not that there is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset especially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is flattering to get the start of a lazy world, to conquer death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep and mortality are in us; and we pay usually, in strange qualms before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural inversion.

Therefore, while the busy part of mankind are fast huddling on their clothes, or are already up and about their occupations, content to have swallowed their sleep by wholesale, we choose to linger abed, and digest our dreams. It is the very time to recombine the wandering images which night in a confused mass presented; to snatch them from forgetfulness; to shape and mold them. Some people have no good of their dreams. Like fast feeders, they gulp them too grossly to taste them curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone vision; to collect the scattered rays of a brighter phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the sadder nocturnal tragedies; to drag into daylight a struggling and half-vanishing nightmare; to handle and examine the terrors or the airy solaces. We have too much respect for these spiritual communications to let them go so lightly. We are not so stupid or so careless as that imperial forgetter of his dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the form of them. They seem to us to have as much significance as our waking concerns; or rather to import us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years to the shadowy world whither we are hastening. We have shaken hands with the world's business; we have done with it; we have discharged ourselves of it.

Why should we get up? We have neither suit to solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut in upon us at the fourth act. We have nothing here to expect but in a short time a sick-bed and a dismissal. We delight to anticipate death by such shadows as night affords. We are already half acquainted with ghosts. We were never much in the world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil between us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits showed gray before our hairs. The mighty changes of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out of which dramas are composed. We have asked no more of life than what the mimic images in playhouses present us with. Even those types have waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. We are superannuated. In this dearth of mundane satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with shadows. It is good to have friends at court. The abstracted media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time, we expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little of the usages of that colony; to learn the language, and the faces we shall meet with there, that we may be the less awkward at our first coming among them. We willingly call a fantom our fellow, as knowing we shall soon be of their dark companionship. Therefore we cherish dreams. We try to spell in them the alphabet of the invisible world, and think we know already how it shall be with us. Those uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. We feel attached into their meager essences, and have given the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal being. We once thought life to be something, but it has unaccountably fallen from us before its time. Therefore we choose to dally with visions. The sun has no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we get up?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 21: From the "Essays of Elia."]

[Footnote 22: From the "Essays of Elia."]

[Footnote 23: From the "Essays of Elia."]

[Footnote 24: From the "Essays of Elia."]



WILLIAM HAZLITT

Born in 1778, died in 1880; an early friend of Lamb, Coleridge, Southey, Moore and Leigh Hunt, with whom he afterward quarreled, owing to differing political views and his own peculiar temper; his writings mainly essays and criticisms; wrote also a notable "Life of Napoleon," published in 1828.



HAMLET[25]

It is the one of Shakespeare's plays that we think of the oftenest, because it sounds most in striking reflections on human life, and because the distresses of Hamlet are transferred, by the turn of his mind, to the general account of humanity. Whatever happens to him, we apply to ourselves, because he applies it to himself as a means of general reasoning. He is a great moralizer; and what makes him worth attending to is that he moralizes on his own feelings and experience. He is not a commonplace pedant. If Lear is distinguished by the greatest depth of passion, Hamlet is the most remarkable for the ingenuity, originality, and unstudied development of character. Shakespeare had more magnanimity than any other poet, and he has shown more of it in this play than in any other. There is no attempt to force an interest: everything is left for time and circumstances to unfold. The attention is excited without effort; the incidents succeed each other as matters of course; the characters think, and speak, and act just as they might do if left entirely to themselves. There is no set purpose, no straining at a point. The observations are suggested by the passing scene—the gusts of passion come and go like sounds of music borne on the wind. The whole play is an exact transcript of what might be supposed to have taken place at the court of Denmark at the remote period of time fixt upon, before the modern refinements in morals and manners were heard of. It would have been interesting enough to have been admitted as a bystander in such a scene, at such a time, to have heard and witnessed something of what was going on. But here we are more than spectators. We have not only "the outward pageants and the signs of grief," but "we have that within which passes show." We read the thoughts of the heart, we catch the passions living as they rise. Other dramatic writers give us very fine versions and paraphrases of nature; but Shakespeare, together with his own comments, gives us the original text, that we may judge for ourselves. This is a very great advantage.

The character of Hamlet stands quite by itself. It is not a character marked by strength of will or even of passion, but by refinement of thought and sentiment. Hamlet is as little of the hero as a man can well be; but he is a young and princely novice, full of high enthusiasm and quick sensibility—the sport of circumstances, questioning with fortune, and refining on his own feelings, and forced from the natural bias of his disposition by the strangeness of his situation. He seems incapable of deliberate action, and is only hurried into extremities on the spur of the occasion, when he has no time to reflect—as in the scene where he kills Polonius; and, again, where he alters the letters which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are taking with them to England, purporting his death. At other times, when he is most bound to act, he remains puzzled, undecided, and skeptical; dallies with his purposes till the occasion is lost, and finds out some pretense to relapse into indolence and thoughtfulness again. For this reason he refuses to kill the king when he is at his prayers; and, by a refinement in malice, which is in truth only an excuse for his own want of resolution, defers his revenge to a more fatal opportunity....

The moral perfection of this character has been called in question, we think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules; amiable tho not faultless. The ethical delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist"—as Shakespeare has been well called—do not exhibit the drab-colored Quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from "The Whole Duty of Man" or from "The Academy of Compliments!" We confess we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in Hamlet. The neglect of punctilious exactness in his behavior either partakes of the "license of the time," or else belongs to the very excess of intellectual refinement in the character, which makes the common rules of life, as well as his own purposes, sit loose upon him. He may be said to be amenable only to the tribunal of his own thoughts, and is too much taken up with the airy world of contemplation, to lay as much stress as he ought on the practical consequences of things. His habitual principles of action are unhinged and out of joint with the time. His conduct to Ophelia is quite natural in his circumstances. It is that of assumed severity only. It is the effect of disappointed hope, of bitter regrets, of affection suspended, not obliterated, by the distractions of the scene around him! Amidst the natural and preternatural horrors of his situation, he might be excused in delicacy from carrying on a regular courtship. When "his father's spirit was in arms," it was not a time for the son to make love in. He could neither marry Ophelia, nor wound her mind by explaining the cause of his alienation, which he durst hardly trust himself to think of. It would have taken him years to have come to a direct explanation on the point. In the harassed state of his mind, he could not have done much otherwise than he did. His conduct does not contradict what he says when he sees her funeral:

I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 25: From the "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays."]



THOMAS DE QUINCEY

Born in 1785, died in 1859; son of a wealthy merchant; studied at Oxford without taking a degree; settled at Grasmere, near Coleridge and Wordsworth, about 1808; losing his fortune, sought literary work in London in 1821; contracted at Oxford the opium habit, under which at one time he took 340 grains daily; made his opium experiences the basis of an essay entitled "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," published in 1821; wrote for many periodicals and eventually settled in Edinburgh; his collected works comprize many volumes.



I

DREAMS OF AN OPIUM-EATER[26]

May 18.—The Malay has been a fearful enemy for months. Every night, through his means, I have been transported into Asiatic scenery. I know not whether others share in my feelings on this point, but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and among Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, I should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must be common to others. Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful images and associations. As the cradle of the human race, it would have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are other reasons. No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate religions of Hindustan, etc. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, history, modes of faith, etc., is so impressive that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed. Even Englishmen, tho not bred in any knowledge of such institutions, can not but shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial tracts of time; nor can any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings, that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life; the great officina gentium. Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires, also, into which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyze. I could sooner live with lunatics or brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say, or have time to say, the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological tortures imprest upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are to be found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China or Hindustan. From kindred feelings I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by parrakeets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas, and was fixt for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshiped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brahma, through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hated me; Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris; I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers, at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.