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BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. DLXVIII.      FEBRUARY 1863.      Vol. XCIII.

CONTENTS.

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET

AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed.

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. DLXVIII.      FEBRUARY 1863.      Vol. XCIII.

PROGRESS IN CHINA.

PART II.
THE TAEPINGS AND THEIR REMEDY.

It would have required many cycles of Cathay to bring to the councils of the Court of Pekin the enlightenment we have alluded to in our last Number, if the populations over which it ruled had not threatened to outstrip the Government in the adoption of European ideas. Petty sedition, which had always been acknowledged in China as the expression of the will of the people, suddenly assumed an alarming form, and threatened to subvert not only the present dynasty, but, what was of far greater importance, a much venerated constitution, the result of the collective wisdom and experience of twenty-five centuries.

The two Kwang provinces, Kwang-tung and Kwang-si, were the first affected by the leaven of European example, and were so the more readily because our violent acts, irrespective of any question of justification, were congenial to the predatory tastes of the inhabitants of that portion of China. That region, which contains from twenty-six to twenty-eight millions of Chinese, has always been the last to submit to the rule of a new dynasty, and the first to revolt. Six centuries ago, the Mongol conquerors of China had no easy task in mastering these southerners; and Arab historians, never very nice in their estimate of the value of human life, write in strong terms of the terrible means by which the subjection of Kwang-tung was accomplished. “The blood of the people flowing in sounding torrents,” was a strong metaphor applied to the Mongol conquest; yet, four centuries afterwards, the Manchous had to repeat the same frightful lesson before they could say that they ruled over the cities and plains of Kwang-si. Even then, large bodies of the disaffected fled to the mountains on the north, and to the sea on the south, and, as banditti or pirates, have never been entirely reconciled to any form of government. In the lawless seafaring population of Kwang-tung, our armed smugglers found willing allies against a weak executive, and the leaven of our example at length brought about a rebellion, which, under the name of Taepingism, has been the most appalling scourge that ever fell upon a nation. We will endeavour to trace its origin, analyse the character of its reputed leaders, and, from the testimony of impartial witnesses, show what Taepingdom has done during the fourteen years it has had existence.

The elements of revolution were, as we have said, always ready to hand in Southern China; and even before the establishment of our sovereignty at Hong-Kong, there were thousands of lawless Cantonese ready to work any wickedness, whether as land or sea pirates, it mattered little, and they were merely kept in anything like subjection by excessive severity on the part of the mandarins and the executive of China. We stepped in, destroyed the prestige of Imperial fleets and armies; and our smugglers, in armed merchantmen called opium-clippers, brought into utter contempt the police of the Empire, and showed the natives of all classes how to evade the payment of all dues or taxes. Smuggling and piracy were divided by too narrow a distinction for the appreciation of the Cantonese, and their defiance of the Government was actively supported by the opium-clippers. The visitors to our settlement of Hong-Kong might have seen fleets of heavily-armed native vessels, loading with salt, opium, and other goods, all of which were to be run in the teeth of mandarins, war-junks, or forts. Fast boats, each manned with a hundred men, flaunted their flags, and beat their gongs. They became quite as ready to fight the European as their own rulers. When these ruffians had no other work in hand, they cut off their own lawful traders, or the little coasters under European flags. Gradually increasing in numbers and audacity, they attacked outlying Chinese towns; and when their own Government offered a sufficiently high pecuniary reward, they were equally ready to assist Governor-General Yeh to exterminate us.

We do not care to pass any opinion upon the iniquity or otherwise of the opium trade. It may have been a political and commercial necessity; but we should be false to history if we failed to trace much of the evil under which China is now suffering to that melancholy source. Owing to the enormous profits made upon the drug as a contraband article, the native traders formed themselves into powerful guilds, with ramifications at Hong-Kong, Macao, and Canton, which actually guaranteed the success of smuggling ventures—a smuggling assurance company, so to speak, against the lawful tax-gatherers of China; and the writer has heard the officers and crew of more than one English opium-clipper boast of having protected these ruffians, and beaten off the Government boats. This defiance of the native authorities extended itself to the interior. Bands of armed men were led by opium-brokers through the provinces, fighting their way with smuggled goods. To this fact we have the testimony of the Roman Catholic missionaries; and indeed Monsieur Chauveau, the head of the Catholic mission in Yunnan, insists—and we believe him—that the Taeping rebellion was inaugurated by a large band of six hundred opium-smugglers forcing their way from Yunnan to Canton, and compelling some influential personages in Kwang-si to assist them. After the smugglers had retired, the authorities naturally called the gentry to account. The mob took part with their neighbours; a secret society gave its aid; sedition spread, and, like a ball of snow, gathered weight as it rolled through a turbulent province. Hither hastened, as official reports state, the soldiery and braves that had been disbanded after the first war with us; hither went the disaffected of all classes, the ruined opium-smokers and roués of Canton; in short, the rowdies of a population equal to that of the French empire in extent soon collected at the base of the Kwang-si mountain-ranges, and devastated the best part of that province. In the year 1850, these troubles assumed the distinct phase of rebellion. After shirking the difficulty for as long a time as possible, the ‘Pekin Gazette’ began to publish reports of the state of Kwang-si. It told how vast districts had been swept over by banditti, how the entire eastern circuit of the province “had been atrociously dealt with by bands, who carried banners inscribed with the information, ‘We are dealing justice on behalf of Heaven.’” These justice-dispensing robbers “fired the villages wherever they came, violated the women, murdered the well-disposed, and took care to carry off all guns, horses, and arms.”

Directly the ‘Pekin Gazette’ officially recognised the rebellion, the European residents, instead of sympathising with the Government and the well-disposed Chinese, at once testified their interest in the movement, and openly avowed a hope that by the swords of these rebels China would be reformed and converted. Each one had his reason for adopting what at first sight seemed so unfair a course. The European official was sick of mandarin arrogance; the missionary was wearied with the slowness of his progress in dealing with the stolid self-sufficiency of the Chinese character, and in trying to establish breaches in the obstinacy of his belief in Confucius and Mencius; the trader longed for extended commerce or larger profits; and our smugglers were at war, as well as the Kwang-si rebels or Canton pirates, with all law and order.

The Taepings were speciously represented as men battling for religious and political freedom; and a Swedish missionary, Mr Hamberg, claimed for our reputed converts the credit of having organised and guided the rebellion. Himself deceived by the cunning of the Asiatic, he put forth a strange fable, called the ‘Revelations of Hung-siu-tsien,’ and was thus mainly instrumental in enlisting on behalf of an organised system of land-piracy the religious sympathy of this country. Hordes of armed robbers, ravaging the interior of a distant country, because they said they believed in Heaven, were forthwith pronounced Christians, engaged in war upon heathenism. And, forgetting the first principle of our faith, that it is not to be propagated by the sword, we shut our ears and hearts against the wail of perishing multitudes, and dreamed that the light of the Gospel had dawned on Cathay. Years have elapsed since our credulity was thus imposed on, and from the experience gathered we are now able, we think, to tear the veil from the monstrous imposition.

The rebellion in Kwang-si first obtained political importance when it secured the adhesion of a few literary expectants for office, who had been rejected at the competitive examinations in Canton. By those examinations, every man in China may hope to reach the highest posts in the empire. The necessities of the Court of Pekin during the reign of the last three inefficient monarchs had compelled it to dispose of certain appointments by purchase. Every disappointed candidate at the provincial examinations traced his failure to this abuse, and a formidable body of ambitious, half-educated enemies to the State was thus formed. This was exactly the class needed by the hard-fighting brigands of Kwang-si and pirates of Kwang-tung to bind them together under a common banner, and they were not long in finding their way to a theatre where they might play at being kings, ministers, and generals to their hearts’ content.

For one of these disappointed candidates for office, named Hung-siu-tsien, and for a society of reputed converts at Hong-Kong, known as the Christian Union, Mr Hamberg claims the credit of the Taeping movement. They are perfectly welcome to the honour; but we, in the first place, impeach the testimony of the Chinaman who persuaded Mr Hamberg that the leader of the Taepings was a Christian convert; and, in the next place, we declare that the members of the “Christian Union” were as arrant knaves as ever imposed upon the good-nature of a confiding clergyman.

The Christian Union at Hong-Kong was instituted for the purpose of training Chinese in Protestant Christianity, and sending them as missionaries into the interior of the country. Mr Gutzlaff had the charge of this Union, and seems to have been utterly deceived by them; for we are assured by one who was immediately brought up amongst them as an Englishman studying the Chinese language, that they were dissolute characters, pretending to be converts for the sake of a livelihood. There was no duplicity they did not practise, and no lie they did not invent. Our informant one day entered the study of one of these missionaries, as he was poring over a long and well-written Chinese letter. His face was lit up with joy and interest, and he exclaimed, “Ah, when you are able to compose like that!” The young English student took up the letter, and found it to be from a convert named Wang-pin, giving an account of a mission upon which he had been despatched into the interior. It described his adventures and difficulties, his hopes and anxieties; how some officials had maltreated him; how he had escaped: it recounted labours amongst his brethren, and, lastly, the conversion of two women and a youth, and the joy with which he had welcomed by baptism such and such persons into the fold. The imposition was perfect; but, unfortunately, the writer had allowed himself to be seen very recently in Hong-Kong. Search was made for him. Aided by a policeman, the task of discovering Wang-pin was not difficult. He was dragged out of a brothel, where, no doubt, he had penned his interesting report.

Such profligacy was the rule rather than the exception amongst the Christian Union. At a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, Mr Lay related another instance of moral turpitude. It appears that the Union was supposed to consist of men from various provinces of China, and a number of Bibles adapted for circulation in their respective districts were regularly issued to these natives, when they were despatched upon their tours of duty. As there was reason to suppose that these Bibles were often returned to the office, and had to be paid for as new ones supplied from the Chinese publisher at Hong-Kong, a number of them were secretly marked with the names of the converts who were supposed to distribute them gratis in remote parts of the empire. Before many days, every one of these marked Bibles returned to the hands of Mr Hamberg, and it was then discovered that they had been sold to the Chinese publisher, who had again presented them as new Bibles. Of course this system of pillage was put a stop to, but we leave the reader to guess how many more frauds were daily perpetrated by such a set of scamps upon innocent-minded missionaries. We might fill a volume with further details of the tricks of the Christian Union, but we forbear.

Amongst these reputed converts to Christianity was one who can at any rate claim the credit of having so thoroughly deceived us, that even so recent a writer as Commander Lindesay Brine, of the Royal Navy, did not succeed in discovering the wolf under the skin of the oily Hung-jin. Mr Hamberg first met Hung-jin (or, as he now styles himself, Kan-wang) in 1852, at a time when the minds of our residents in China were much excited. Mr Hamberg was full of curiosity, Hung-jin all ready to gratify it. Hung-jin quite delighted the missionary “with the interest he displayed in Christianity, and his acquaintance with its precepts.” The rogue, be it known, had actually studied Christianity for two entire months, some years previously, under Mr Roberts, an American missionary in Canton. As a near connection of two out of three of the most prominent leaders in Kwang-si, Hung-jin could give information about them; and, still more to delight Mr Hamberg, he invented a fable he knew would be very palatable to the outer barbarian, and promote the fortune of himself and family. Hung-jin, having converted us to Taepingism, was much treasured by our religious societies in China, and every care and expense were lavished upon him to render him a fit instrument for keeping up the connection between us and the leaders of the Taeping movement. He and his brother, we know, were in the employ of two missionaries in Hong-Kong about the year 1853. Hung-jin was above the average of his countrymen in ability; and, under the care of the Rev. Mr Chalmers for three years, made considerable progress in secular studies. In 1854 he was baptised, and repeated unsuccessful attempts were then and subsequently made to send him back to his friends in Kwang-si and Central China. Our missionaries were almost hysterical over their treasure; they declared he had quite established himself in the confidence and esteem of the Shanghai missions; that he exhibited “much talent, evinced much sweetness of disposition, and, above all, had given undoubted proofs of the sincerity of his attachment to the Christian faith.” Early in 1859 he contrived at last to rejoin his relative in Nankin: a relative whom he had left years before as a mere conspirator in Kwang-si, he now found self-installed as an incarnation of the Deity in a yamun of Nankin. The discontented and unsuccessful candidate for literary honours of Canton was now the King of Heaven, the Tien-wang of Nankin. Hung-jin was welcomed as he deserved, for he had well served the King of Heaven by throwing dust in the eyes of the much-feared foreigner; and Hung-jin, the Christian impostor, stepped into royal robes as the “Kan-wang,” “Shield King,” or, in other words, the prop and stay of Taepingism; and, having shown such ability in bamboozling the foreigner, his especial province appears to have been to feed us with hopes of a general conversion and extension of trade, but to take care that we did not test their sincerity. Feeling that it was not yet time to throw off the cloak of piety which had hitherto served him so well, Commander Brine tells us that the Kan-wang wrote to the Rev. Mr Edkins, deploring his unfitness for the high post to which his distinguished relative had appointed him; expressing his own anxiety “to promote the diffusion of true religion;” adding, that he was more than ever impressed with the superhuman wisdom of the Tien-wang, or King of Heaven! Just after he had thus given utterance to these expressions of diffidence and zeal, our late pupil, now an assistant-king in Nankin, started on an expedition into Ngan-hwuy province, to spread the knowledge of Perfect Peace. A traveller who happened to be on the river Yang-tsze at that time, tells us that it was easy to trace the path of the mission by “the smoking and flaming villages.” Every impostor must, however, eventually be exposed, and so it was with the Kan-wang; for the missionaries, taking him and his relative at their word, thrust themselves into Nankin. Mr Roberts, the quondam instructor in divinity of the Taeping rulers, had preceded the Kan-wang, and the latter found Mr Roberts clad in regal robes, and holding some sort of office. About this time also (1860), the Rev. Mr Holmes visited Nankin; he came away shocked at what he had seen and heard. We shall avail ourselves presently of his testimony as to the character of the Taeping rebellion; but for the present we shall confine ourselves to the career of Hung-jin, or Kan-wang. In the ‘North China Herald’ of October 19, 1861, under the signature “Rusticus Expectans,” we next hear of the scamp. The anonymous writer turns out, by the evidence of Captain T. W. Blakiston, to be Mr Forrest, an interpreter in the British consular establishment.[^[1]] Mr Forrest draws a vivid picture of the homes of the different Taeping-wangs. He tells us of his Excellency Le, who was building a gorgeous yamun, “upon which upwards of a thousand workmen were engaged—some building, some carving stone and wood, and not a few standing with a bundle of rattans in their hands ready to inflict blows on any one shirking his work. A great portion of the building is already completed, and the whole will be a good specimen of a Chinese yamun of the old style, with its network of beams at the gables, its large wooden columns, and fantastic carvings. Asking what the workmen were paid, Le laughingly replied,—‘You English pay for work; we Taepings know better. Is not ours a truly great Empire?’”

In front of the Kan-wang’s palace were two orchestras, painted over with dragons, diablerie, Chinese characters, and the beatitudes from St Matthew! The Kan-wang is, it seems, a hearty fat individual, forty years of age, and very intelligent. He can shake hands like an Englishman, and say, “How do you do?” Mr Chalmers’s care in his education was evinced by his knowledge of geography especially, and the number of books of reference by which he was surrounded.

“His sanctum is quite a museum in its way; a fine cheerful room facing a garden of flowers, with a large bed of Soochow manufacture for its principal article of furniture. The bed is covered with jade ornaments, and hung with rich yellow curtains. Tables line the sides of this chamber, and they are loaded with the strangest conglomeration of articles: a telescope on a moving pedestal, a gun-box, three Colt’s revolvers useless from rust, a box of percussion-caps, ditto of vestas, Windsor soap, a Woolwich manual of fortification, and a Holy Bible; any amount of Chinese books, five clocks, broken barometers, ink-stones, and dirty rags, fans mounted in silver, jade-stone drinking-cups, gold and silver platters, chopsticks, English port-wine bottles, and Coward’s mixed pickles. About the apartment were suspended an English naval sword, some dragoon-caps, a couple of Japanese knives, two French plates, an engraving of the Holy Well in Flintshire, and lying on the bed was a mass of silver ingots tied up in a cloth.”

Amidst this collection of loot, the Kan-wang could give a neat dinner and plenty of wine, for which he had an especial dispensation. Our informant then adds that Kan-wang is “a good fellow, and merely accommodates his Christianity to his tastes and habits”—an opinion in which we agree, only substituting the words arch-knave for good fellow. Hear, for instance, what Mr Roberts says of him, in January 1862:—

“From having been the religious teacher of Hung-siu-tsuen in 1847, and hoping that good—religious, commercial, and political—would result to the nation from his elevation, I have hitherto been a friend to his revolutionary movement, sustaining it by word and deed, as far as a missionary consistently could without vitiating his higher character as an ambassador of Christ. But after living among them fifteen months, and closely observing their proceedings—political, commercial, and religious—I have turned over entirely a new leaf, and am now as much opposed to them—for good reasons, I think—as I ever was in favour of them. Not that I have aught personally against Hung-siu-tsuen; he has been exceedingly kind to me. But I believe him to be a crazy man, entirely unfit to rule without any organised government; nor is he, with his coolie kings, capable of organising a government, of equal benefit to the people, of even the old Imperial Government. He is violent in his temper, and lets his wrath fall heavily upon his people, making a man or woman ‘an offender for a word,’ and ordering such instantly to be murdered without ‘judge or jury.’ He is opposed to commerce, having had more than a dozen of his own people murdered since I have been here, for no other crime than trading in the city, and has promptly repelled every foreign effort to establish lawful commerce here among them, whether inside of the city or out. His religious toleration and multiplicity of chapels turn out to be a farce—of no avail in the spread of Christianity—worse than useless. It only amounts to a machinery for the promotion and spread of his own political religion, making himself equal with Jesus Christ, who, with God the Father, himself, and his own son, constitute one Lord over all!! Nor is any missionary who will not believe in his divine appointment to this high equality, and promulgate his political religion accordingly, safe among these rebels, in life, servants, or property. He told me soon after I arrived, that if I did not believe in him I would perish, like the Jews did for not believing in the Saviour. But little did I then think that I should ever come so near it, by the sword of one of his own miscreants, in his own capital, as I did the other day.

“Kan-wang, moved by his coolie elder brother (literally a coolie at Hong-Kong) and the devil, without the fear of God before his eyes, did, on Monday the 13th instant, come into the house in which I was living, then and there most wilfully, maliciously, and with malice aforethought, murder one of my servants with a large sword in his own hand in my presence, without a moment’s warning or any just cause. And after having slain my poor harmless, helpless boy, he jumped on his head most fiend-like, and stamped it with his foot; notwithstanding I besought him most entreatingly from the commencement of his murderous attack to spare my poor boy’s life.

“And not only so, but he insulted me myself in every possible way he could think of, to provoke me to do or say something which would give him an apology, as I then thought and think yet, to kill me, as well as my dear boy, whom I loved like a son. He stormed at me, seized the bench on which I sat with the violence of a madman, threw the dregs of a cup of tea in my face, seized hold of me personally and shook me violently, struck me on my right cheek with his open hand; then, according to the instruction of my King for whom I am ambassador, I turned the other, and he struck me quite a sounder blow on my left cheek with his right hand, making my ear ring again; and then, perceiving that he could not provoke me to offend him in word or deed, he seemed to get more outrageous, and stormed at me like a dog, to be gone out of his presence. ‘If they do these things in the green tree, what will they do in the dry?’—to a favourite of Tien-wang’s—who can trust himself among them, either as a missionary or a merchant? I then despaired of missionary success among them, or any good coming out of the movement—religious, commercial, or political—and determined to leave them, which I did on Monday, January 20, 1862.”

We may add, that subsequent to the departure of Mr Roberts, the Taeping leaders signified that they had no farther need of missionaries at Nankin.

Let us now trace the career of the head of Taepingism, Hung-siu-tsuen, from the ‘Pekin Gazette’ and other documents.

In the year 1837, a man twenty-three years of age, whose family resided near Canton, went up for his literary examination—a competitive examination for office under his Government. He was plucked—it was not the first time. Perfectly satisfied with his own merits, he had assumed the title Siu-tsuen, or “Elegantly perfect,” in addition to the family name of Hung. As Siu-tsuen we shall speak of him. Between 1837 and 1843, Siu-tsuen was again repeatedly unsuccessful at the examinations; disappointment brought on brain fever, and for some years he was a dangerous lunatic. Recovering from this attack, he accidentally obtained possession of a number of tracts on Christianity by a native convert called Leang-Afah. They were in style and translation enough to puzzle a stronger brain than Siu-tsuen’s. Naturally excitable, he was now seized with a religious mania, and fancied he had personal interviews with the Trinity. He had witnessed the proceedings of Western nations against the Government of his country; and our combination of civilisation, religion, and war no doubt struck him as the right means for gratifying his spleen and his ambition. From a crack-brained enthusiast, Siu-tsuen sobered down into a conspirator against his sovereign and the order of the State. From 1843 to 1846, he was, we are told, busy inoculating a small circle of his immediate friends with his views. His disciples believed that he was in direct communication with the Deity, and he appears at first to have merely contented himself with the character of a second Moses. He formed a society which he called the “Congregation of the Worshippers of God” (or “Shangti”). Hung-jin, or Kan-wang, and another relative of Siu-tsuen’s, named Fung, likewise joined it. As the society increased, Siu-tsuen bound the members by oaths “to live or die with him, and to exert all their efforts to assist him;” and in return he promised to ascertain from heaven for the members “wherein lay their respective interests and profits,”[^[2]] an essentially Chinese way of looking at Christianity. They soon worshipped Siu-tsuen as an incarnation of Shangti, or God. Both he and his relative Fung had ecstatic fits. The latter performed miracles; and like other arch-impostors, they passed unconsciously from deluding others into deceiving themselves. The disordered condition of Southern China favoured the propagation of any doctrines, however wild and bizarre; and the mountains and secluded valleys of Kwang-si afforded the necessary hiding-places for a sect whose first article of faith was disobedience to the Emperor. In either 1846 or 1847 Mr Roberts, residing in Canton, was so interested in the doings of Siu-tsuen that he invited him to stay at his house, and promised a kind welcome on the part of his brethren. Siu-tsuen, accompanied by his relative Hung-jin, accordingly went to Mr Roberts, and stayed two entire months studying Protestantism. Their conduct was exemplary, but Mr Roberts did not feel justified in baptising the worthies before they left, which is just as well, for, in “the 3d month of 1848,” Siu-tsuen announced to his flock that “our Heavenly Father had come down into the world,” and on “the 9th month he was followed by the Saviour, who wrought innumerable miracles!”

About this time the plot of sending Hung-jin to the Europeans, and intrusting him with the office of misleading us as to the real character of the intended insurrection, must have been decided upon, for we now find him in communication with Mr Hamberg. What occurred between 1850 and 1853, when Hung-jin rejoined his relative at Nankin, we will condense in a few words. Siu-tsuen and Fung, aided by another disappointed candidate for office named Tai-tsuen, or Tien-teh, raised the standard of revolution, and declared openly their intention of subverting the present dynasty. Siu-tsuen styled himself the King of Perfect Peace, or “Tae-ping-wang,” and nominated the other two as subordinate kings. They sacked several cities in Kwang-si, but finding the province getting too hot to hold them, they decamped with the loss of Tien-teh, their best leader, and crossed into Honan province, so as to strike the great water-communication which circulates through Central China. The Taeping leader, then captured, made a full confession, which, tested by the experience of to-day, is a most truthful account; and though vaunting the courage of his brother rebels, he distinctly says that, after all, Siu-tsuen was a mere profligate and winebibber, rejoicing in no less than thirty-six mistresses.

In June 1852, we find that the Taepings, ten thousand strong, had reached a large river flowing through Honan into the Yang-tsze. The water-communication once reached, they had but to embark, and the current would waft them to Nankin, and as far north as Tien-tsin.

By Christmas 1852 they had reached the commercial heart of the Empire in the great emporiums which lie about the confluence of the rivers Han and Yang-tsze. Two centuries of peaceful industry, of buying and selling, giving and taking in marriage, without one thought of a sudden and bloody awakening from a dream of luxury, were here ready for the strong-handed. The writer met a man who witnessed the destruction of the three great cities of Wuchang, Hankow, and Han-yang, the slaughter of the ill-starred inhabitants, and the conflagration of the vast fleets of junks and trading-boats there assembled. For eight days and nights the place was, he said, wrapt in flames—a perfect hell upon earth. The horrors of this scene were sufficient to frighten all the inhabitants of the lower valley of the Yang-tsze into subjection, but it did not save them from pillage and rapine. The officials were everywhere slaughtered when they dared to remain at their posts, and the Manchou garrisons, with their children and women, perished to a soul. Wherever the current of the river would float these Taepings, they conquered, unopposed. Nankin in its turn fell into their hands with frightful slaughter, and Chin-Keang, at the entrance of the Grand Canal, shared the same fate. Still aided by the water-communication, they aimed a blow at Pekin, and actually advanced to the head of the canal. Directly, however, the water-communication failed them, their progress was arrested, and they sustained a defeat that deterred them from a second attempt on the capital. There can be no greater fallacy than the notion that the stability of the dynasty has been really jeopardised, or that the raid of the Taepings towards Pekin was the result of organisation or military skill, instead of being entirely due, as we have said, to the immense water facilities at their command, from the very mountains of Kwang-si to the Tung-ting Lake, and from the lake to the Yang-tsze, and from it to Tien-tsin by the Grand Canal.

Siu-tsuen, alias Tien-wang, or King of Heaven, now sat (in 1853) in Nankin, and Taepingism was thoroughly established as an evil which it would require years to extirpate; and what was worse, damage had been done to the extension of Protestant Christianity in the minds of the better classes in China, from the artful manner in which Siu-tsuen had succeeded in dragging us in as his allies against the Government and peaceable classes of China.

That he and his emissaries did not confine themselves to converting sanguine and anxious missionaries, is well attested in the Blue-Book of 1853. There we find one of our consular body officially reporting:—

“All I have heard tends to strengthen my previously expressed conviction that the insurrectionary movement is a national one of the Chinese against the continued rule, or rather misrule, of the Manchous; and that the power of the latter is already irrevocably subverted in the southern half of the Empire. The interference of foreigners in their behalf would now only have the effect of prolonging hostilities and anarchy for an indefinite period; while, if they abstain from interference, it is highly probable that the valley of the Yang-tsze, with the southern provinces, will speedily come under the rule of a purely Chinese dynasty as one internally strong State, governed according to the old national principles of administration.”

Ten years have elapsed since that prophecy. The Manchou has had during that period two wars with Great Britain and France, and rebellions in every one of the eighteen provinces of China. Yet Pekin rules while Nankin plunders. The dynasty was not quite so sick as Mr Meadows supposed.

Following the weak example of the United States representatives in 1853, our authorities actually put themselves into official communication with the Taeping kings. The insolence of their communications was as gross as their mendacity.

Take the following extract for example, written by two subordinate rulers, Lo and Woo, who perhaps had formerly been of the Christian Union:—

“Well do we remember how, in conjunction with Bremer, Elliot, and Wanking, in the province of Canton, we together erected a church, and together worshipped Jesus, our Celestial Elder Brother; all these circumstances are as fresh as if they had happened but yesterday. We are grieved to hear that Bremer has met with a misfortune, and we can never forget the nobleness of his character. As to Elliot and Wanking, we hope they have enjoyed health since we last met—we feel an irrepressible anxiety to meet our old friends.”

So much for the dodge of Christianity, for the whole idea of building a church with Sir Charles Elliot and “Wanking” was evidently coined with the aid of one Mang, the teacher of Mr Meadows, and who, like all these teachers, was handing his master over as a sheep to be shorn by his countrymen. Then in another place a sop is held for the commercial interest:—

“Our Royal Master has received the command of Heaven to show kindness to foreigners, and harmonise them with the Chinese” [Mr Roberts’s testimony, dated ten years afterwards, to wit], “not restricting commercial intercourse, or levying transit duties upon merchandise.”

We may have done right, after all, in allowing these Taepings time to show by their acts how little they intended to fulfil their promises. In ten years they have utterly wrecked the richest portion of China. All the wonders of Chinese art and industry are levelled with the dust and destroyed. The Porcelain Pagoda—the Iron Tower—the Ming Cemetery of Nankin—the beautiful temples and valuable libraries of Golden Island, exist no longer. A district once teeming with hamlets and farms, rich in silks and teas, and all the products of the Flowery Land, is now a wilderness; and the Englishman who looked upon the wondrous scene of Asiatic civilisation and industry, as spread before him in the valley of the Yang-tsze in the year 1842, would never recognise it again in the famine-stricken desolation of to-day. Lest we should allow our indignation at such unchecked barbarism to carry us away, we will quote from two recent visitors, the one a soldier, the other a clergyman. Colonel Wolseley, in 1862, says: “Having had some little experience of the imbecility of the Imperial Government, I went to Nankin strongly prejudiced against it, and only too anxious to recognise any good which we might discover in its rival.... The Imperial Government, with all its weakness, is as far removed above that established at Nankin, as the true religion of our Saviour is above that set up by the impostor Tien-wang.” He confirms the fact that no man of worth or station in China has joined the movement; and after describing all the ruin, crime, and nastiness of the interior of the Taeping stronghold, he urges his countrymen to assist the better classes of Chinese in sweeping away the abomination, because it is the barrier to true progress in China.

Mr Holmes, whose zeal for the spiritual welfare of the Chinese subsequently led to his being slain by some rebels in Shan-tung, bears the following testimony to the hopelessness of anything good from Taepingism. After visiting Nankin in the end of 1861, he says:—

“I went to Nankin predisposed to receive a favourable impression; indeed, the favourable impressions of a previous visit to Suchau led me to undertake this journey. I came away with my views very materially changed. I had hoped that their doctrines, though crude and erroneous, might notwithstanding embrace some of the elements of Christianity. I found, to my sorrow, nothing of Christianity but its names, falsely applied—applied to a system of revolting idolatry. Whatever there may be in their books, and whatever they may have believed in times past, I could not escape the conclusion that such is the system which they now promulgate, and by which the character of their people is being moulded. Their idea of God is distorted until it is inferior, if possible, to that entertained by other Chinese idolaters. Their willingness—if indeed they are willing to receive Christian missionaries among them—is doubtless founded upon a misapprehension of their true character. They suppose that the missionary will prove an instrument which they can bend to suit their own purposes. Exceptions might, perhaps, be made in favour of individuals: it is of those who hold the reins of power that I speak.

“The city of Nankin is in a ruinous condition. It would be no exaggeration to say that half the houses have been destroyed. The country around is not half cultivated. Provisions are very scarce and expensive. Their trade is very limited. We observed instances in which workmen were compelled to labour without compensation. All indicates a policy that has little regard to the welfare of the people, or to any interests other than those immediately connected with war, and with the indulgence of their rulers.

“The present state of their political affairs would indicate that Hung-siu-tsuen’s career must close before the present dynasty can be supplanted. His horrible doctrines, which have served to break down every distinction between right and wrong in the minds of his soldiers, and send them forth to perform every enormity without remorse, have secured him the lasting hatred of the masses of the people. The scenes of internal discord which so nearly proved their destruction a few years since, would doubtless be enacted again, and upon a large scale, when, with their enemies vanquished, they came to a final division of the spoils.”

And if any farther testimony were necessary, we might, in the pages of the last Blue-Book for 1862, cull evidence enough to convince the most sceptical that the people, as well as the Government, are hostile to the robbers who pretend to be inaugurating a new rule.

This Taeping movement has never had at any time a national character. It has not been joined by any influential class. The Taepings have never organised any sort of government, and they have never held any ground but that on which their camps stood. Had they shown any disposition to gain the suffrages of the Chinese people, already dissatisfied with their mandarins, their chances of subverting the dynasty would have been great. They have not done so, and the consequence is, that the popular feeling is strongly against them. Hear, for instance, what thirty-two of the representative elders of the districts between Soochow and the Yang-tsze river say in a petition to our Minister, and then decide on which side our humanity should be enlisted:—

“Living to the east of the river, we have the misfortune to be visited by the murderously ferocious rebels, who have burnt our dwellings, carried off our people, dishonoured our wives and daughters, robbed us, and murdered innumerable of us, till the land is covered with corpses, and the roads run with tears and blood. We ourselves have suffered so in our persons, and our families overwhelmed with bitterness, refugees from our homes, that there is no name for our misery; our lives can scarcely be called our own. It seems that not one of us will escape. In desperation, therefore, we piteously implore the Minister, that in his great goodness, surpassing all things, he will pity us, and speedily rescue us, and will despatch his energetic soldiers to sweep the abomination out of the land, that our death may be turned to life, our gratitude be unimaginable; and unless his goodness does rescue us, there will be no escape for us, and the people and property on the east of the river will be destroyed, and the land left a desert, without hope of recovery. We implore him, therefore, the more earnestly, that millions of the poor people are lying, leaning on each other, in this deep snow, in misery unspeakable, waiting for his will.”

Could any words be more expressive? And it is not only the Imperialists who suffer, but there are tens of thousands who have joined the Taeping ranks from compulsion and to save their lives. These poor creatures are, if possible, more to be pitied than any other class. They stand between two fires,—the sword of the Taeping and the Imperial executioner. On their behalf we ought as soon as possible to place the Imperial Government in such a position that an amnesty could be safely granted, or arrangements made for allowing these compromised people to emigrate to Borneo, the Straits settlements, to Burmah, and elsewhere. The compromised might embark with their wives and families, and in less populated regions found colonies as creditable to their mother country as they would be profitable to European civilisation and commerce. This would be a triumphant solution of the Taeping difficulty; and we feel justified in hoping that the Court of Pekin may be persuaded to temper justice with mercy, inasmuch as one of its highest officers has recently recognised the evils of over-population, and legalised emigration from the provinces under his jurisdiction.

Our collision with the Taepings has been denounced as if it had been sought by the British authorities in China. But this is by no means the case. In 1858, when Lord Elgin ascended the Yang-tsze, the escorting squadron was deliberately attacked, although the smallest vessel was sent considerably in advance with a flag of truce flying, and a person was expressly sent in her to afford every explanation of our Ambassador’s motive in desiring to pass Nankin.

Both then and subsequently the Taeping chiefs were told that we entertained no hostile feeling towards them, and that so long as they respected British property we should be strictly neutral. In spite of these warnings and the promises of their leaders, the Taepings, not satisfied with the sack of the great cities in the districts around Shanghai and Ningpo, actually attacked our settlements. Necessity has compelled us to act upon the defensive. We had to drive them from the neighbourhood; and in order to prevent their starving out the vast numbers of Chinese who had taken shelter in Shanghai, we had to mark certain limits within which we would not suffer their presence. Such is the history of our “war” against the Taepings. Troops have been sent for from India, and Shanghai and Ningpo are virtually under the protection of the British and French forces. As a temporary measure this may answer, but it is beset with inconveniences and risks if prolonged. Temporary protection, as our Indian experience abundantly teaches us, leads to permanent occupation, and ultimate absorption of territory. The foot of a vigorous European nation, once placed firmly on the soil of an Eastern state, cannot be withdrawn.

Yet the present state of China leaves us no alternative. There are other important considerations upon which our space forbids us entering, but there is one we will allude to in passing—the evils inflicted upon the country by the influx of adventurers now swarming thither, who are amenable to no law, with no fortunes or characters to lose, but abundance of appetite to acquire. The misdeeds of these miscreants are a great obstacle to friendly intercourse with the Chinese people; and to watch and keep them within bounds, the operation of a high and powerful police is absolutely necessary. Our trade and property must be protected by some Power, or be sacrificed. How that protection shall be afforded is the problem to be solved.

This country is decidedly opposed to direct intervention, while the assumption of a protectorate over China by any other Power would be directly opposed to our interests.

It might be well, if it were possible, to leave the Chinese to work out their own regeneration; but unfortunately our commercial interests and revenue are so interwoven with the wellbeing of China, that we cannot afford to wait the time that might elapse before the restoration of order.

In respect to ourselves, were we disposed to look on and abide the issue, other Powers whose interests differ, and whose risks are by no means as great, would not refrain with such a temptation before them. We have already a glut of territory in Asia; it is quite natural that other European powers should crave an India likewise. In respect to China herself, she is fully alive to the necessity of calling in European vigour and intelligence, and has made up her mind to procure it; a step the natural consequence of contact with Europeans, and over which we have no control.

If the Governments of Europe were to agree to withhold the service of their troops, this would not prevent the employment of private individuals from Europe or America, and we have seen only recently how easy it is to evade the jurisdiction of the foreign consul by the simple process of hailing for a Chinaman, or from any State not represented on the spot. The Chinese Government can command foreign aid if so disposed, but irresponsible enlistment of foreigners is on all grounds objectionable and dangerous. It has been tried, and the results have been what might have been anticipated—waste, peculation, and danger to the State. What indeed is the experience of those European Powers who have at different times independently raised foreign legions?

The Taoutai of Shanghai long since tried the experiment upon his own responsibility of forming a European-Chinese fleet, and utterly failed, after spending millions of dollars. He bought up in 1853 a number of vessels, manned and officered them with all the dregs of our settlements; without proper status or discipline they were sent up to fight Taepings at Nankin, and of course ran away. Other mandarins hired lorchas under European flags to protect trade on the coast; these likewise turned upon their employers, and, instead of fighting pirates, frightened their employers. The last item of news from China is, that the crews of some hired lorchas had passed over in a body to the pirates, and that one of Ward’s regiments had mutinied after his death, and looted the yamun of a high official.

In our opinion, there is, in view of the interests of all European Powers, but one mode of giving aid to the Chinese Government—to wit, encouraging officers of character and respectability, subjects of those Powers, to enter the service of the Chinese Government.

We have with China an enormous and profitable trade; we want it guaranteed and developed. This duty properly devolves upon China, but she is as yet unable to discharge it. It is by the aid of men who possess both character and status, the guarantee of good behaviour, that she will acquire strength and knowledge to fulfil her obligations, and through their influence be induced to adopt the results of European science and skill—the steamship, railways, and electric telegraph—thus insuring progress profitable to herself and the world at large. This end, we take it, should be our object in giving help to China. She should not be strengthened out of hand, but by a slow process with a small force, whose action should be spread over a period sufficient to enable us to open the country, throughout its length and breadth, to Christianity and commerce.

Views in consonance with the foregoing remarks appear to have found favour at Pekin, but owing, doubtless, to the different views entertained by the Ministers of England, France, Russia, and America, the Regency has been dragged first in one direction and then in the other. Russia is evidently ready for direct intervention. In 1860 she persuaded the Emperor of China to barter square miles of territory for old rifles, and we hear that the Czar’s ships are ready to retake Nankin. The capture of that city is just now worth a province to the Court of Pekin. The French and ourselves have been flirting with the question, watching and checkmating each other, rather than promoting the real interests of China. Not, perhaps, because Sir Frederick Bruce has not been aware of what was really essential, but because he was apprehensive, probably, of compromising our Ministry in any direct line of policy. The result has been that small bodies of Imperialists have been drilled by English and French officers upon totally different systems, in spots scattered all over the sea frontier of China. Every one of these half-trained braves will be as dangerous as a Taeping, unless he be under efficient discipline and thorough control. No regular organisation has been attempted, and we cannot but fear that such trifling with a very serious question will lead to great evils.

As an instance, permission has just been given to all our military officers, of any stamp, to accept commissions in China. The officer of repute is thus placed on a footing with discharged seamen and marines now holding the rank of Colonels and Majors in the Chinese army, while the Chinese Government is unfairly left to discriminate between the good and the worthless. A surer method of bringing discredit upon ourselves, and involving us eventually in direct intervention, could scarcely be devised.

Surrounded with difficulties, Prince Kung appears to have rightly turned his first attention to the organisation of a maritime police, and given a willing ear to the counsels of the Acting Inspector-General, Mr Hart, supported by our able Minister. Instructions have been issued for a certain sum to be set aside from the customs revenue, and the chief of that department has been authorised to take such steps as would accomplish the desired object. These instructions are interesting, and evince a real desire to master the subject; whilst the admission that a departure from ancient custom is necessary, is highly significative of the dawn of progress in China. Prince Kung writes from Pekin in February last as follows:—

“The Foreign Office repeat the instructions they have already given the Inspector-General, to give effect to the arrangement for the purchase of foreign steamers with the utmost despatch. The orders to the various customhouses to get ready their quota were issued some time back; and these orders have been repeated, coupled with a caution against delay, as it is the Emperor’s particular wish that not a day should be lost. The Board understand that there are several classes of foreign steamers—the mail steamer, the merchant steamer, and the war steamer; that the first is very small, the second the reverse of handy, and that neither are available like the third for warlike purposes. They are further informed that the mail and merchant steamers are paddle-wheel steamers, while the war steamers are ‘secret wheel’ (screw) vessels. This is a point of great importance, to which they would draw the special attention of the Inspector-General. The money being now ready for transmission, there is no reason why there should be any, the slightest, delay.”

The despatch gives instructions upon other points, and concludes with again urging the Inspector-General to lose no time, closing with the words, “Hasten! hasten!!”

The Inspector-General, obliged by ill-health to return to England, was the better able to work out the desires of the Emperor’s Council, and put himself in communication with Her Majesty’s Government, with a view to obtain their necessary sanction before he could legally purchase a vessel or employ a British subject. He was, above all, desirous to insure the thorough respectability and good character of the European force destined to guide as well as aid the Chinese—at the same time, to take care that the help should be granted in a way to insure real progress at Pekin, and thus guard against a return to the old policy of exclusion as soon as the officials were relieved from the fears and difficulties of their present position—and to effect this in such a manner as should not supersede, but merely supplement, the action of the Chinese themselves. This maxim should ever be borne in mind in our dealings with China. To supersede the native authority, besides humiliating him, brings about no beneficial result.

Her Majesty’s Government met the proposals of the Inspector-General on behalf of the Emperor of China in an enlightened spirit, guarding themselves, however, carefully against any risk of being charged with intervention. Mr Lay offered the post of Commander-in-Chief of the European-Chinese naval force to Captain Sherard Osborn, C. B., which office, under the sanction of Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and the Board of Admiralty, he gladly accepted. The necessary authority from Her Majesty in Council was issued, authorising the Inspector-General Horatio Lay and Captain Sherard Osborn to purchase such vessels and enter such British subjects as might be necessary, without an infringement of the Foreign Enlistment Act. With the permission of the Admiralty, Captain Osborn selected the following officers:—Captain Hugh Burgoyne, V.C., as second in command; Commander C. S. Forbes; Lieutenants Arthur Salwey, Noel Osborn, F. C. Vincent, H. M. Ommanney, Allen Young, and G. Morice; Mr Henry Collins in charge of the Paymaster’s and Storekeeper’s Departments; and Doctors John Elliot, F. Piercey, Fegan, and others, of the hospital arrangements. Officers of the highest stamp have been likewise selected from the mercantile marine, and no seamen or marines have been entered except such as could show years of good conduct.

It is, moreover, Mr Lay’s intention to enlist presently in this force the subjects of the other Treaty Powers, so as to render it a European Chinese force, in accordance with the principle successfully carried out in the customs administration.

As the funds arrived from China the vessels and stores were purchased. The Admiralty afforded the same facilities from our arsenals as would have been conceded to any other friendly Power. From the superabundant ships in our navy the Emperor of China was allowed to purchase the Mohawk, Africa, and Jasper, and they were re-named respectively the Pekin, China, and Amoy. There being no others available, and the private yards having been swept by the Federals of such vessels as could carry guns or serve for warlike purposes, it became necessary, in spite of the delay it would entail, to enter into contracts for the construction of three other vessels, which will be launched in March. The six vessels—three of them despatch-vessels fit to cope with the stormy seas of the Chinese seaboard, and the other three for river service—form as small a force as it is safe to begin with. It is intended that they shall carry about 40 guns, and be manned by 400 European officers and seamen, of the very best character. During the interval occupied in the building of some of the vessels and equipment of the others, there has been abundant occupation in arranging the details necessary for a sound organisation. A code of laws for the good order and comfort of all, based upon the customs of a European navy, has been compiled, so that Prince Kung’s seal may render it the future naval law of China. The scale of pay, rations, prize-money, and pensions for wounds, has been carefully considered, to meet the requirements of the special service. A signal-book has been adapted for intercommunication; and, strange as it may sound, even an ensign—green ground intersected by two yellow diagonal bands, and bearing the Imperial crest—had to be improvised, inasmuch as in China every armed native vessel flies her own colours according to the whim of her master,—an irregularity to which it is very necessary a stop should be put.

No one will deny that the task about to be undertaken is an arduous one; yet, after having carefully weighed all its difficulties, we cannot help feeling sanguine of a successful issue. A good maritime police is the secret of government in China. If the water-ways of China are in a state of security and order, peace will re-establish itself everywhere. The rivers, the seas, and lakes and canals, within the area of the Empire, cut it up into such sections that rebellion will be destroyed in detail, or rather starve, directly a strong executive is placed upon the Emperor’s waters. The Taepings and other banditti spread over the area they have devastated, by availing themselves of the extensive water-communication. The Government of Pekin, if it is wise, will pursue the same course in its measures of repression. The steam gunboat and the electric telegraph, by their very appearance in the disturbed districts, will re-assure those who have almost ceased to believe in any government, and frighten away the evildoers; whilst the fall of Nankin will break the neck of a scourge which is on its last legs. The fleets of piratical junks which now infest the coasts of China, and whose depredations are known only to the natives, will, we hope, disappear before the vigorous operations of a steam flotilla under the Imperial flag. These “vikings” of the East occupy every creek between Canton and the borders of Cochin-China; they have quite cut up the native trade of the whole seaboard, and occasionally pirate even European traders. It is mainly owing to these gentry that we have been unable as yet to establish relations and open a customhouse at Kiung-Chow in the island of Hainan, a point which we hope one day to see the centre of an enormous trade. Lastly, we see every reason to expect most important results from the information the officers of the European-Chinese flotilla will be able to gather of the interior of the Chinese Empire, and of the commercial advantages likely to flow therefrom. As employés, though merely temporarily so, of the Emperor, they will have access to every part of that vast county, and excite no fears or jealousy; their opportunities will be immense, and we have reason to believe that they will bear well in mind the duty they owe to their fellow-men of gathering and storing well every crumb of information, geographical and otherwise. What they may effect for the benefit of our commerce, we may estimate from the fruits that have already followed in the wake of their brethren of the navy of England who first penetrated to Shanghai in 1842, and to Hankow in 1858. There are cities as rich as the former, rivers as large as the Yang-tsze, and lakes equal to those of Canada, to be re-discovered. Those almost unknown provinces of the interior are not wastes profitable only to the geographical enthusiast, but countries equal to states of Europe, thickly dotted with cities, and densely populated, with a people second only to ourselves in commercial energy and respect for law and order. England for years has spent wealth, energy, and precious lives in opening China to Western influence and civilisation. To-day, her success is certain. The Government and people of China both ask us to aid them in their hour of trouble, and in return they will assuredly grant us that access and commercial freedom for which we have so long laboured and so often fought. The portals of ignorance and heathenism are opening. Shall we, who are in the vanguard of nations, hesitate? No—assuredly not! Our motto must ever be “Forward;” and will not all enlightened Christendom join us in wishing “God speed” to those about to put forth in this fresh enterprise to the land of Cathay?

CAXTONIANA:
A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.

By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’

PART XIII.

NO. XIX.—MOTIVE POWER (continued).

The next morning the sun shone into my windows so brightly that I rose at an earlier hour than I had been accustomed to do for months, and strolled into the gardens, interesting myself in considering the painter’s charge against dressed ground and Tracey’s ingenious reply to it. The mowers were at work upon the lawns. Perhaps among rural sounds there is none which pleases me more than that of the whetting of the scythe—I suppose less from any music in itself, than from associations of midsummer, and hay-fields, and Milton’s ‘Allegro,’ in which the low still sound is admitted among the joyous melodies of Morn. As the gardens opened upon me, with their variety of alleys and by-walks, I became yet more impressed than I had been on the day before, with the art which had planned and perfected them, and the poetry of taste with which the images of the sculptor were so placed, that at every turn they recalled some pleasing but vague reminiscence of what one had seen in a picture, or in travel; or brought more vividly before the mind some charming verse in the poets, whose busts greeted the eye from time to time in bowery nook or hospitable alcove, where the murmur of a waterfall, or the view of a distant landscape opened from out the groves, invited pause and allured to contemplation.

At last, an arched trellis overhung with vine leaves led me out into that part of the park which fronted the library, and to which the Painter had given his preference over the grounds I had just quitted. There, the wildness of the scenery came on me with the suddenness of a surprise. The table-land, on which the house stood on the other side of the building, here abruptly sloped down into a valley through which a stream wound in many a maze, sometimes amidst jagged rocklike crags, sometimes through low grassy banks, round which the deer were grouping. The view was very extensive, but not unbrokenly so; here and there thick copses, in the irregular outline of natural groves, shut out the valley, but still left towering in the background the wavy hill-tops, softly clear in the blue morning sky. Hitherto I had sided with Tracey; now I thought the Painter right. In the garden, certainly, man’s mind forms a visible link with Nature, but in those scenes of Nature not trimmed and decorated to the book-lore of man, Thought takes a less finite scope, and perhaps from its very vagueness is less inclined to find monotony and sameness in the wide expanse over which it wanders to lose itself in reverie.

Descending the hillside, I reached the stream, and came suddenly upon Henry Thornhill, who, screened behind a gnarled old pollard-tree, was dipping his line into a hollow where the waves seemed to calm themselves, and pause before they rushed, in cascade, down a flight of crags, and thence brawled loudly onward.

As I know by experience how little an angler likes to be disturbed, I contented myself with a nod and a smile to the young man, and went my own way in silence; but about an hour afterwards, as I was winding back towards the house, I heard his voice behind me. I turned; he showed me, with some pride, his basket already filled with trout; and after I had sufficiently admired and congratulated, we walked slowly up the slope together. The evening before, Captain Thornhill had prepossessed me less than the other members of the party. He had spoken very little, and appeared to me to have that air of supreme indifference to all persons and things around him, which makes so many young gentlemen like—so many young gentlemen. But this morning he was frank and communicative.

“You have known Sir Percival very long, I think?” said he.

“Very long. I knew him before I had left Cambridge. In my rambles during a summer vacation, chance brought us together; and though he was then one of the most brilliant oracles of the world of fashion, and I an unknown collegian, somehow or other we became intimate.”

“I suppose you find him greatly altered?”

“Do you mean in person or in mind?”

“Well, in both.”

“In person less altered than I could have supposed; his figure just the same—as erect, as light, and seemingly as vigorous. In mind I cannot yet judge, but there is still the same sweetness, and the same cheerfulness; the same mixture of good-tempered irony and of that peculiar vein of sentiment which is formed by the combination of poetical feeling and philosophical contemplation.”

“He is a very fine fellow,” returned Henry Thornhill, with some warmth; “but don’t you think it is a pity he should be so eccentric?”

“In what?”

“In what? Why, in that which must strike everybody; shirking his station, shutting himself up here, planning gardens which nobody sees, and filling his head with learning for which nobody is the wiser.”

“His own friends see the gardens and enjoy them; his own friends may, I suppose, hear him talk, and become the wiser for his learning.”

“His own friends—yes! a dozen or two individuals; most of them undistinguished as—as I am,” added the young man, with visible bitterness. “And, with his talents and fortune, and political influence, he might be, or at least might have been, anything; don’t you think so?”

“Anything is a bold expression; but if you mean that he might, if he so pleased, have acquired a very considerable reputation, and obtained a very large share of the rewards which ambitious men covet, I have no doubt that he could have done so, and very little doubt that he could do so still.”

“I wish you could stir him up to think it. I am vexed to see him so shelved in this out-of-the-way place. He has even given up ever going to Tracey Court now; and as for his castle in Ireland, he would as soon think of going to Kamtschatka.”

“I hope, at all events, his estates, whether in the north or in Ireland, are not ill-managed.”

“No, I must say that no estates can be better managed; and so they ought to be, for he devotes enormous sums to their improvement, as well as to all public objects in their district.”

“It seems, then, that if he shirks some of the pomps of wealth, he does not shirk its duties?”

“Certainly not, unless it be the duty which a great proprietor owes to himself.”

“What is that duty?”

The young man looked puzzled; at last he said—

“To make the most of his station.”

“Perhaps Sir Percival thinks it is better to make the most of his mind, and fancies he can do that better in the way of life which pleases him, than in that which would displease; but he is lucky in stewards if his estates thrive so well without the watch of the master’s eye.”

“Yes, but his stewards are gentlemen—one, at Tracey Court, is a Mr Aston, an old schoolfellow of Sir Percival, who was brought up to expect a fine property at the death of an uncle; but the uncle unluckily married at the age of fifty, and had a large family. Sir Percival heard he was in distress, and gave him this appointment; it just suits him. The Irish steward, Mr Gerrard, is also a capital fellow, who travelled in the East with Sir Percival. Being half Irish himself, Gerrard understands how to make the best of the population; and being half Scotch, he understands how to make the best of the property. I have no doubt that the estates are better managed in Sir Percival’s absence than if he resided on them, for you know how good-natured he is. A bad tenant has only to get at his heart with a tale of distress, in order to renew his lease for whipping the land on his own terms.”

“So then,” said I, “we have come at last to this conclusion, that your wise relation, knowing his own character, in its merits and its failings, has done well in delegating to others, in whose probity and intellect he has a just confidence, the management of those affairs which he could not administer himself with equal benefit to all the persons interested. Is not that the way in which all states are governed? The wisdom of a king in absolute governments, or of a minister in free ones, is in the selection of the right persons for the right places; thus working out a wise system through the instrumentalities of those who best understand its details.”

“Yes; but, talking of ministers, Sir Percival makes nothing of his political influence; he shuns all politics. Can you believe it?—he scarcely ever looks into the leading article of a newspaper!”

“To a man who has been long out of the way of party politics, there is not the interest in leading articles which you and I take.”

“I rather think that Sir Percival does not like to be reminded of politics, for fear he might be induced to take an interest in them.”

“Ah, indeed! Why do you think so?”

“Because, three years ago, Lady Gertrude was very anxious that he should claim the old barony of Ravenscroft, which has been in abeyance for centuries, but to which the heralds and lawyers assured him there could be no doubt of his proving his right. Lady Gertrude was so intent upon this that at one time I thought she would have prevailed. He looked into the case, invited the lawyers here, satisfied himself that the proof was clear, and then suddenly forbade all steps to be taken. Lady Gertrude told me that he said to her, ‘For my family this honour is nought, since the title, if revived, would again die with me; but for myself it is a temptation to change, to destroy the mode of life in which I am happiest, and in which, on the whole, I believe I am morally the least imperfect. If I once took my seat in the Lords, a responsible legislator, how do I know that I should not want to speak, to act, to vie with others, and become ambitious if successful—and fretful if not?’”

“So he declined. Well, after all, a life most in harmony with a man’s character is that in which he is probably not only the happiest, but the best man. Ambition is but noble in proportion as it makes men useful. But, from your own account, Tracey’s private life is useful already, though its uses are not obtrusive. And for public life, three parts of the accomplishments, and perhaps of the virtues, which make his private life beautiful, would not be needed.”

I uttered these defensive suggestions on behalf of my host somewhat in rebuke of the young relation whose criticisms had called them forth, though in my own mind I felt a sort of melancholy regret that Percival’s choice of life should be in walks so cool and sequestered, and the tenor of his way so noiseless: And did not his own fear to be tempted into more active exertions of intellect, if once brought under the influence of emulative competition, indicate that he himself also felt a regret, on looking back to the past, that he had acquired habits of mind to which the thought of distinction had become a sensation of pain?

When our party assembled at breakfast, Tracey said to me, “I had no idea you were so early a riser, or I would have given up my ride to share your rambles.”

“Are you too, then, an early riser?”

“Yes, especially in summer. I have ridden twelve miles with Bourke to show him the remains of an old Roman tower which he has promised to preserve a few ages longer—in a picture.”

Here the entrance of the letter-bag suspended conversation. The most eager for its opening was young Thornhill; and his countenance became at once overcast when he found there was no letter for him; as mine, no doubt, became overcast when I found a large packet of letters forwarded to me. I had left town long before the post closed; and two or three hours suffice to bring plenty of troublesome correspondents upon a busy Londoner. My housekeeper had forwarded them all. I think Lady Gertrude was the only other one of our party for whom the postman sped the soft intercourse from soul to soul. When I looked up from my letters, Henry Thornhill had already glanced rapidly over the panorama of the world, displayed in the ‘Times’ newspaper, and, handing it to the Librarian, said disdainfully, “No news.”

“No news!” exclaimed Caleb Danvers, after his own first peep—“no news! Why, Dr ——’s great library is to be sold by auction on the 14th of next month!”

“That is interesting news,” said Tracey. “Write at once for the catalogue.”

“Any further criticism on the Exhibition of the Royal Academy?” asked the Painter, timidly.

“Two columns,” answered Mr Danvers, laconically.

“Oh,” said the Painter, “that is interesting too.”

“I beg your pardon, Mr Danvers,” said Lady Gertrude, “but will you glance at the foreign intelligence? Look to Germany;—anything about the Court of ——?”

“The Court of ——? yes, our minister there is convalescent, and going to Carlsbad next week.”

“That’s what I wanted to know,” said Lady Gertrude. “My letter is from his dear sister, who is very anxious about him. Going to Carlsbad—I am glad to hear it.”

Meanwhile Clara, who had possessed herself of the supplementary sheet, cried out, joyously—“O dear Henry, only think—Ellen has got a baby. How pleased they will be at the Grange! A son and heir at last!”

“Tut,” growled Henry, breaking an egg-shell.

“So,” said Tracey, “you see the ‘Times’ has news for every one except my friend here, who read in London yesterday what we in the country read to-day; and Captain Thornhill, who finds nothing that threatens to break the peace of the world to the promotion of himself and the decimation of his regiment.”

Henry laughed, but not without constraint, and muttered something about civilians being unable to understand the interest a soldier takes in his profession.

After breakfast, Tracey said to me, “Doubtless you have your letters to answer, and will be glad to have your forenoon to yourself. About two o’clock we propose adjourning to a certain lake, which is well shaded from the sun. I have a rude summer pavilion on the banks; there we can dine, and shun the Dogstar. Clara, who happily does not know that I am thinking of Tyndaris, will bring her lute, Aunt Gertrude her work, Bourke his sketch-book; and the lake is large enough for a sailing excursion, if Henry will kindly exchange, for the day, military repose for nautical activity.”

All seemed pleased with the proposal except Henry, who merely shrugged his shoulders, and the party dispersed for the morning.

My letters were soon despatched, and my instincts or habits (which are, practically speaking, much the same thing) drew me into the library. Certainly it was a very noble collection of books, and exceedingly well arranged. Opening volume after volume, I found that most of those containing works of imperishable name were interleaved; and the side-pages thus formed were inscribed with critical notes and comments in my host’s handwriting.

I was greatly struck with the variety and minuteness of the knowledge in many departments, whether of art, scholarship, or philosophy, which these annotations displayed, and the exquisite critical discrimination and taste by which the knowledge was vivified and adorned. While thus gratifying my admiring curiosity, I was accosted by the Librarian, who had entered the room unobserved by me.

“Ay,” said he, glancing over my shoulder at the volume in my hand—“Shakespeare; I see you have chanced there upon one of Sir Percival’s most interesting speculations. He seeks first to prove how much more largely than is generally supposed Shakespeare borrowed, in detail, from others; and next, to show how much more patently than is generally supposed Shakespeare reveals to us his own personal nature, his religious and political beliefs, his favourite sentiments and cherished opinions. In fact, it is one of Sir Percival’s theories, that though the Drama is, of all compositions, that in which the author can least obtrude on us his personality, yet that of all dramatists Shakespeare the most frequently presents to us his own. Our subtle host seeks to do this by marking all the passages of assertion or reflection in Shakespeare’s plays which are not peculiarly appropriate to the speaker, nor called for by the situation—often, indeed, purely episodical to the action; and where in such passages the same or similar ideas are repeated, he argues that Shakespeare himself is speaking, and not the person in the dialogue. I observe in the page you have opened, that Sir Percival is treating of the metaphysical turn of mind so remarkably developed in Shakespeare, and showing how much that turn of mind was the character of the exact time in which he lived. You see how appositely he quotes from Sir John Davies, Shakespeare’s contemporary—who, though employed in active professional pursuits, a lawyer—nay, even an Attorney-General and a Serjeant; a member of Parliament, nay, even a Speaker, and in an Irish House of Commons—prepared himself for those practical paths of life by the composition of a poem the most purely and profoundly metaphysical which England, or indeed modern Europe, has ever produced: at this day it furnishes the foundation of all our immaterial schools of metaphysics. You will see, if you look on, how clearly Sir Percival shows that Shakespeare had intently studied that poem, and imbued his own mind, not so much with its doctrines, as with its manner of thought.”

“Tracey was always fond of metaphysics, and of applying his critical acuteness to the illustration of poets. I am pleased to see he has, in the tastes of his youth, so pleasing a resource in his seclusion.”

“But it is not only in metaphysics or poetry that he occupies his mind; you might be still more forcibly struck with his information and his powers of reasoning if you opened any of the historians he has interleaved—Clarendon, for instance, or our earlier Chronicles. I cannot but think he would have been a remarkable writer, if he had ever acquired the concentration of purpose, for which, perhaps, the idea of publishing what one writes is indispensably necessary.”

“Has he never had the ambition to be an author?”

“Never since I have known him; and he never could conceive it now. You look as if you thought that a pity.”

“Well, is it not a pity?”

“Sir,” quoth the Librarian, taking snuff, “that is not a fair question to put to me, who have passed my life in reading books, and cherishing a humane compassion for those who are compelled to write them. But permit me to ask whether a very clever man, himself a voluminous writer, has not composed a popular work called the ‘Calamities of Authors’?—did you ever know any writer who has composed a work on the ‘Felicities of Authors’? Do you think, from your own experience, that you could write such a work yourself?”

“Rhetorically, yes; conscientiously, no. But let us hope that the calamities of authors lead to the felicities of readers.”

Thus talking we arrived at the Librarian’s own private sanctuary, a small study at the end of the library, looking on the wilder part of the park. Pointing to doors on the opposite side of a corridor, he said, “Those lead to Sir Percival’s private apartments—they are placed in the Belvidere Tower, the highest room of which he devotes to his scientific pursuits; and those pursuits occupy him at this moment, for he expects a visit very shortly from a celebrated Swedish philosopher, with whom he has opened a correspondence.”

I left the Librarian to his books, and took my way into the drawing-room. There I found only Clara Thornhill, seated by the window, and with a mournful shade on her countenance, which habitually was cheerful and sunny. I attributed the shade to the guilty Henry, and my conjecture proved right; for after some small-talk on various matters, I found myself suddenly admitted into her innocent confidence. Henry was unhappy! Unreasonable man! A time had been when Henry had declared that the supremest happiness of earth would be to call Clara his! Such happiness then seemed out of his reach; Clara’s parents were ambitious, and Henry had no fortune but “his honour and his sword.” Percival Tracey, Deus ex machinâ, had stepped in—propitiated Clara’s parents by handsome settlements. Henry’s happiness was apparently secured. Percival had bestowed on him an independent income, had sought to domicile him in his own neighbourhood by the offer of a charming cottage which Tracey had built by the sea-side as an occasional winter residence for himself; had proposed to find him occupation as a magistrate—nay, as a commanding officer of gallant volunteers—in vain—

“He was all for deeds of arms;

Honour called him to the field.”

The trophies of Miltiades would not suffer him to sleep.

Henry had been moving heaven and earth to get removed into a regiment which was ordered abroad, not exactly for what we call a war, but for one of those smaller sacrifices of human life which are always going on somewhere or other in distant corners of our empire, and make less figure in our annals than they do in our estimates. Such trivial enterprises might at least prepare his genius and expedite his promotion.

“Mox in reluctantes dracones,” &c.

Percival, who was in secret league with Clara against this restlessness for renown which it is to be fervently hoped the good sense of Europe will refuse to gratify, had done his best, by a pleasant irony and banter, to ridicule Henry out of his martial discontent. In vain—Henry only resented his kinsman’s disapproval of his honourable ambition, and hence his regret that Sir Percival did not “make the most of his station.” Surely, did he do so, a word from a man of such political importance in point of territory would have due effect on the War Office. Henry thought himself entitled not only to a chance of fighting, but to the dignity of Major. All this, by little and little, though in her own artless words, and in wifelike admiration of Henry’s military genius as well as ardour, I extracted from Clara, who (all women being more or less, though often unconsciously, artful in the confidences with which they voluntarily honour our sex) had her own reason for frankness; she had seen Sir Percival since breakfast, and he had sought to convince her that it would be wise to let Henry have his own way. The cunning creature wished me to reason with Tracey, and set before him all the dangers to limb and life to which even a skirmish with barbarians might expose a life so invaluable as her Henry’s. “I could see him depart without a tear, if it were to defend his country,” said she, with spirit. “But to think of all the hardships he must undergo in a savage land, and fighting for nothing I can comprehend, against a people I never heard of—that is hard! it is so reckless in him—and, poor dear, his health is delicate, though you would not think it!”

I promised all that a discreet diplomatist under such untoward circumstances could venture to promise; and on the Painter entering the room, poor Clara went up-stairs, trying her womanly best to smile away her tears.

Left alone with the artist, he drew my attention to some pictures on the wall which had been painted by Sir Percival, commended their gusto and brilliancy of execution, and then said, “If our host had begun life on fifty pounds a year, he would have been a great painter.”

“Does it require poverty in order to paint well?”

“It requires, I suppose, a motive to do anything exceedingly well; and what motive could Sir Percival Tracey have to be a professed painter?”

“I think you have hit on the truth in his painting, and perhaps in his other accomplishments: all he wants is the concentration of motive.”

“Is it not that want which makes three-fourths of the difference between the famous man and the obscure man?” asked the Painter.

“Perhaps not three-fourths; but if it make one-fourth, it would go a long way to account for the difference. One good of a positive profession is, that it supplies a definite motive for any movement which the intellect gives itself the trouble to take. He who enters a profession naturally acquires the desire to get on in it, and perhaps in the profession of art more ardently than in any other, because a man does not take to art from sheer necessity, and without any inclination for it, but with a strong inclination, to which necessity gives the patient forces of labour. I presume that I am right in this conjecture.”

“Yes,” said the Painter, ingenuously. “So far back as I can remember, I had an inclination, nay a passion, for painting; still I might not have gone through the requisite drudgery and apprenticeship; might not have studied the naked figure when I wished to get at once to some gorgeous draperies, or fagged at perspective when I wanted to deck out a sunset, if I had not had three sisters and a widowed mother to think of.”

“I comprehend; but now that you have mastered the fundamental difficulties of your art, and accustomed yourself to hope for fame in the fuller and freer developments of that art, do you think that you would gladly accept the wealth of Sir Percival Tracey, on the condition that you were never to paint for the public, and to renounce every idea of artistic distinction? or, if you did accept that offer for the sake of your sisters and mother, would it be with reluctance and the pang of self-sacrifice?”

“I don’t think I could accept such an offer on such conditions even for them. I am now, sir, utterly unknown—at best one of those promising pupils, of whom there are hundreds; but still I think there is a something in me as painter, as artist, which would break my heart if, some day or other, it did not force itself out.”

“Then you would not lose your motive for becoming a great painter, even did you succeed to the wealth and station which you say deprive Sir Percival of a motive, supposing that, in accepting such gifts of fortune, you were not required to sacrifice the inclination you take from nature?”

“No, I should not lose the motive. Better famine in a garret than obscurity in a palace!”

Our conversation was here broken off by the entrance of Lady Gertrude. “It is just time for our expedition,” said she. “I think it is about to strike two, and Percival is always punctual.”

“I am quite ready,” said I.

“And I shall be so in five minutes,” cried the Painter; “I must run up-stairs for my sketch-book.”

“Oh, I see what is keeping my nephew,” said Lady Gertrude, looking out of the window; and as I joined her she drew my attention to two figures walking slowly in the garden; in one I recognised Tracey, the other was unknown to me.

“He must have come by the early train,” said Lady Gertrude, musingly. “I wonder whether he means to stay and go with us to the lake.”

“You mean the gentleman in black?” said I; “I think not, whoever he may be, for, see, he is just shaking hands with Tracey like a man who is about to take leave. By his dress he seems a clergyman.”

“Yes, don’t betray me—Percival’s London almoner. My nephew has employed him for seven years, and it is only within the last year that I discovered by accident what the employment is. He comes here when he likes—seldom stays over a day! One of those good men who are bored if they are not always about their work; and indeed he bores Percival by constantly talking of sorrow and suffering, which Percival is always wishing to relieve, but never wishes to hear discussed. You don’t know to what a degree my nephew carries his foible!”

“What foible?”

“That of desiring everybody to be and to look happy. A year ago, his valet, who had lived with him since he came of age, died. I found him another valet, with the highest character—the best servant possible—not a fault to find with him; but he had a very melancholy expression of countenance. This fretted Percival; he complained to me. ‘Dolman is unhappy or discontented,’ he said. ‘Find out what it is; remedy it.’ I spoke to the poor man; he declared himself most satisfied, most fortunate in obtaining such a place. Still he continued to look mournful. Percival could not stand it. One day he thrust a bank-note into the man’s hand, and said, ‘Go, friend, and before sunset look miserable elsewhere.’”

I was laughing at this characteristic anecdote, when Percival entered the room with his usual beaming aspect and elastic step. “Ready?” said he; “that’s well: will you ride with me?” (this addressed to myself). “I have a capital sure-footed pony for you.”

“I thought of giving your friend a seat in my pony-chaise,” said Lady Gertrude.

Percival glanced at his aunt quickly, and replied, “So be it.” I should have preferred riding with Tracey; but before he set off he whispered in my ear, “It makes the dear woman happy to monopolise a new-comer—otherwise——” He stopped short, and I resigned myself to the pony-chaise.

“Pray,” said Lady Gertrude, when we were fairly but slowly in movement along a shady road in the park,—“pray, don’t you think it is very much to be regretted that Percival should be single—should never have married?”

“I don’t know. He seems to me very happy as he is.”

“Yes, happy, no doubt. I believe he would make himself happy in a dungeon; and——” Lady Gertrude rather spitefully whipped the ponies.

“Perhaps,” said I, as soon as I had recovered the first sensation of alarm, with which I am always seized when by the side of ladies who drive ponies and whip them—“perhaps,” said I—“take care of that ditch—perhaps Percival has never seen the woman with whom it would be felicity to share a dungeon?”

“When you knew him first, while he was yet young, did you think him a man not likely to fall very violently in love?”

“Well, ‘fall’ and ‘violently’ are two words that I should never have associated with his actions at any time of life. But I should have said that he was a man not likely to form a very passionate attachment to any woman who did not satisfy his refinement of taste, which is exquisitely truthful when applied to poems and statues, but a little too classically perfect for just appreciation of flesh and blood, at least in that sex which is so charming that every defect in it is a shock on the beau ideal.”

“Nevertheless,” said Lady Gertrude, after acknowledging, with a gracious smile, the somewhat old-fashioned gallantry conveyed in my observations—“nevertheless, Percival has loved deeply and fervently, and, what may seem to you strange, has been crossed in his affections.”

“Strange! Alas! in love nothing is strange. No one is loved for his merits any more than for his fortune or rank; but men, and women too, are married for their merits, and still more for their rank and their fortune. I can imagine, therefore, though with difficulty, a girl wooed by Percival Tracey not returning his love, but I cannot conceive her refusing his hand. How was it?”

“You see how I am confiding in you. But you are almost the only friend of his youth whom Percival has invited as his guest; and your evident appreciation of his worth at once opens my heart to you. In the course of that lengthened absence from England—on the eve of which you took leave of him nearly thirty years ago—Percival formed a close friendship with a fellow-traveller in the East: Percival considers that to the courage, presence of mind, and devotion of this gentleman, a few years younger than himself, he owed his life in some encounter with robbers. Mr Gerrard (that is this friend’s name) was poor and without a profession. When Percival was about to return to Europe, he tried in vain to persuade Mr Gerrard to accompany him—meaning, though he did not say so, to exert such interest with Ministers as he possessed, to obtain for Gerrard some honourable opening in the public service. The young man refused, and declared his intention of settling permanently at Cairo. Percival, in the course of his remonstrances, discovered that the cause of this self-exile was a hopeless attachment, which had destroyed all other objects of ambition in Gerrard’s life, and soured him with the world itself. He did not, however, mention the name of the lady, nor the reasons which had deprived his affection of hope. Well, Percival left him at Cairo, and travelled back into Europe. At a German spa he became acquainted with an Irish peer who had run out his fortune, been compelled to sell his estates, and was living upon a small annuity allowed to him either by his creditors or his relations; a man very clever, very accomplished, not of very high principle, and sanguine of bettering his own position, and regaining the luxuries to which he had been accustomed, through some brilliant marriage, which the beauty of his only daughter might enable her to make. Beauty to a very rare degree she possessed—nor beauty alone; her mind was unusually cultivated, and her manners singularly fascinating. You guess already?”

“Yes. Percival saw here one with whom he did not fall in love, but for whom he rose into love. He found his ideal.”

“Exactly so. I need not say that the father gave him all encouragement. Percival was on the point of proposing, when he received a letter from Mr Gerrard (to whom he had written, some weeks before, communicating the acquaintance he had made, and the admiration he had conceived); and the letter, written under great excitement, revealed the object of Gerrard’s hopeless attachment. Of Irish family himself, he had known this young lady from her childhood—and from her childhood loved her. He had been permitted to hope by Lord ——, who was at that time in a desperate struggle to conceal or stave off his ruin, and who did not scruple to borrow from his daughter’s suitor all that he could extract from him. Thus, when the final crash came, Lord ——’s ruin involved nearly the whole of Gerrard’s patrimony; and, of course, Lord —— declared that a marriage was impossible between two young persons who had nothing to live upon. It was thus that Edmund Gerrard had become an exile.

“This intelligence at once reversed the position of the rivals. From that moment Percival devoted himself to bless the life of the man who had saved his own. How he effected this object I scarcely know; but Lord —— gave his consent to Gerrard’s suit, and lived six years longer with much pomp and luxury in Paris. Gerrard settled with his wife in Percival’s Irish castle, and administers Percival’s Irish estates, at a salary which ranks him with the neighbouring gentry. But Percival never visits that property—I do not think he would trust himself to see the only woman he ever loved as the wife of another, though she is no longer young, and is the mother of children, whose future fortunes he has, doubtless, assured.”

“What you tell me,” said I, with emotion, “is so consistent with Tracey’s character that it gives me no surprise. That which does surprise me is, not the consent of the ruined father, but the consent of the accomplished daughter. Did Percival convince himself that she preferred his rival?”

“That is a question I can scarcely answer. My own belief is, that her first fancy had been caught by Gerrard, and that she had given him cause to believe that that first fancy was enduring love; but that, if her intimate acquaintance with Percival had continued longer, and had arrived at a stage at which his heart had been confessed to her, and her own heart frankly wooed, the first fancy would not have proved enduring love. But the acquaintance did not reach to that stage; and I have always understood that her marriage has been a very happy one.”

“In that happiness Tracey is consoled?”

“Yes, now, no doubt. But I will tell you this, that as soon as all obstacles to the marriage were removed, and Gerrard on his way from the East, Percival left Germany and reached Lausanne, to be seized with a brain fever, which threatened his life, and from the effects of which it was long before he recovered. But answer me candidly one question, Do you think it is too late in life for him to marry yet?”

Poor Lady Gertrude asked this question in so pleading a tone of voice, that I found it very difficult to answer with the candour which was insisted on as the condition of my reply. At length I said, bravely—

“My dear Lady Gertrude, if a man hard upon sixty chooses to marry, it becomes all his true friends to make the best of it, and say that he has done a wise thing. But if asked beforehand whether it be not too late in life for such an experiment, a true friend must answer, ‘Yes.’”

“Yet there have been very happy marriages with great disparity of years,” said Lady Gertrude, musingly, “and Percival is very young for his age.”

“Excellent after-reflections, if he do marry. But is he not very happy as he is? I know not why, but you all seem to conspire against his being happy in his own way. One of you wants him to turn politician, another to turn Benedict. For my part, the older I grow, the more convinced I am of the truth of one maxim—whether for public life or for private—‘Leave well alone.’”

By this time we had arrived into the heart of a forest that realised one’s dreams of Ardennes; a young man would have looked round for a Rosalind, a moralising sage for a Jacques. Many a green vista was cut through the mass of summer foliage, and in full view before us stretched a large wild lake; its sides, here and there, clothed with dipping trees or clustered brushwood. On the opposite margin, to which, in a neck of the lake, a rustic bridge gave access, there was a long and picturesque building, in the style of those quaint constructions of white plaster and black oak beams and rafters, which are still seen in Cheshire, but with ruder reliefs of logwood pilasters and balconies; a charming, old-fashioned garden stretched before it, rich in the genuine English flowers of the Elizabethan day; and scattered round, on inviting spots, were lively-coloured tents and awnings. The heron rose alarmed from the reeds as we drew near the water; but the swans, as if greeting the arrival of familiar friends, sailed slowly towards us. Tracey had already arrived at the cottage, and we saw him dismounting at the door, and talking to an old couple who came out to meet and welcome him.

“I believe,” said Lady Gertrude, “that Percival’s secret reason for building that cottage was to place in it these two old servants from Tracey Court. They had known him there when he was a boy, and are so attached to him that they implored him to let them serve him wherever he resided. But they were too old and too opinionated to suit our moderate establishment, which does not admit of supernumeraries, so he suddenly found out that it would be very pleasant to have a forest lodge for the heats of summer, built that house, and placed them in it. The old woman, who was housekeeper at Tracey Court, is, however, as I hope you will acknowledge, a very good cook on these holiday occasions; and her husband, who was butler there, is so proud and so happy to wait on us, that——. But no doubt you understand how young it makes us old folks feel, to see those who remember us in our youth, and to whom we are still young.”

Our party now assembled in front of the forest lodge, and the grooms took back the ponies, with orders to return before nightfall. Tracey carried me over the lodge, while Henry Thornhill and the Painter busied themselves with a small sailing vessel which rode at anchor in a tiny bay.

This rustic habitation was one for which two lovers might have sighed. Its furniture very simple, but picturesquely arranged, with some of those genuine relics of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps rather that of James I., which are now rarely found, though their Dutch imitations are in every curiosity-shop. As in the house we had left there was everywhere impressive the sentiment of the classic taste, so here all expressed the sentiment of that day in our own history which we associate with the poets, who are our most beloved classics. It was difficult, when one looked round, to suppose that the house could have been built and furnished by a living contemporary; it seemed a place in which Milton might have lodged when he wrote the ‘Lycidas,’ or Izaak Walton and Cotton have sought shelter in the troubled days of the Civil War, with a sigh of poetic regret as they looked around, for the yet earlier age when Sidney escaped from courts to meditate the romance of ‘Arcadia.’

“I have long thought,” said Tracey, “that if we studied the secrets of our English climate a little more carefully than most of us do, we could find, within a very small range, varieties of climate which might allow us to dispense with many a long journey. For instance, do you not observe how much cooler and fresher the atmosphere is here than in the villa yonder, though it is but five miles distant? Here, not only the sun is broken by the forest-trees, but the ground is much more elevated than it is yonder. We get the bracing air of the northern hills, to which I have opened the woods, and here, in the hot relaxing days of summer, I often come for days or weeks together. The lodge is not large enough to admit more than two, or at most three other visitors, and therefore it is only very intimate friends whom I can invite. But I always look forward to a fortnight or so here, as a time to be marked with the whitest chalk, and begin to talk of it as soon as the earliest nightingale is heard. Again, on the other extremity of my property, by the sea-side, I have made my winter residence, my Tarentum, my Naples, my Nice. There the aspect is due south—cliffs, ranged in semicircle, form an artificial screen from the winds and frosts. The cottage I have built there is a sun-trap. At Christmas I breakfast in a bower of geraniums, and walk by hedgerows of fuchsia and myrtle. All this is part of my philosophical plan, on settling down for life—viz., to collect all the enjoyments this life can give me into the smallest possible compass. Before you go, you must see my winter retreat. I should like to prove to you how many climates, with a little heed, an Englishman may find within a limit of twenty miles. I had thought of giving Bellevue (my sea-side cottage) to the Thornhills, and delighted in the thought of becoming their guest in the winter, for aunt. Gertrude does not fancy the place as I do, and wherever I go cannot live quite alone, nor quite without that humanising effect of drawing-room scenery, which the play-writers call ‘petticoat interest.’ But when a man allows himself to be selfish, he deserves to be punished. Henry Thornhill disdains Bellevue and comfort, and insists on misery and bivouacs.”

“Ah, my dear Tracey,” said I, mindful of my promise to Clara, “Henry Thornhill is much too fine a young fellow to be wasted upon ignoble slaughter, and still more ignoble agues and marsh fevers. I hope you do not intend to gratify his preposterous desire to plant laurels at the other end of the world, and on soil in which it may be reasonably doubted whether any laurels will grow——”

Tracey’s brow became clouded. He threw himself on a seat niched into the recess of a lattice window, looked out at first abstractedly, and then, as the cloud left his brow, observantly.

“See, my dear friend,” said he—“see, how listlessly, for a mere holiday pleasure, that brave lad is running up the sails. Do you think that he would be thus indifferent if he were clearing decks for a fight, if responsibility, and honour, and duty, and fame were his motive powers? No. If he stayed at home inactive, he would be miserable the more Clara and I tried to make him happy in our holiday way. That which a man feels, however unphilosophically (according to other men’s philosophy), to be an essential to the object for which he deems it noble to exist—that the man must do, or at least attempt; if we prevent him, we mar the very clockwork of his existence, for we break its mainspring. Henry must have his own way. And I say that for Clara’s sake; for if he has not, he will seek excitement in something else, and become a bad man and a very bad husband.”

“Hem!” said I; “of course you know him best; but I own I do not see in him a genius equal to his restlessness or his ambition; and I think his wife very superior to himself in intellect. If, besides giving him your sea-side villa, you gave him a farm, surely he might become famous for his mangold-wurzel; and it is easier for all men, including even Henry Thornhill, to grow capital wurzel than it is to beat Hannibal or Wellington.”

“Pish!” said Tracey, smiling, “you ought to know mankind too well to think seriously what you say in sarcasm. Pray, where and what would England be if every sharp young fellow in the army did not set a Hannibal or a Wellington before his eyes; or if every young politician did not haunt his visions with a Pitt, a Fox, or a Burke? What Henry Thornhill may become, Heaven only knows; but if you could have met Arthur Wellesley before he went to India, do you think you would have guessed that he would become the hero of England? Can any of us detect beforehand the qualities of a man of action?—Of a man of letters, yes, to a certain degree, at least. We can often, though not always, foresee whether a man may become a great writer; but a great man of action—no!! Henry has no literature, no literary occupation, nor even amusement. Probably Hannibal had none, and Wellington very little. Bref—he thinks his destiny is action, and military action. Every man should have a fair chance of fulfilling what he conceives to be his destiny. Suppose Henry Thornhill fail; what then? He comes back, reconciled to what fate will still tender him—reconciled to my sea-side villa—to his charming wife—reconciled to life as it is for him. But now he is coveting a life which may be. A man only does that which fate intends him to do, in proportion as he obeys the motive which gives him his power in life. Henry Thornhill’s motive is military ambition. It is no use arguing the point—what man thinks, he is.”

I bowed my head. I felt that Tracey was right, and sighed aloud, “Poor little Clara!”

“Poor little Clara!” said Tracey, sighing also, “must, like other poor dear little loving women, take her chance. If her Henry succeed, how proud she will be to congratulate him! if he fail, how proud she will be to console him!”

“Ah, Tracey!” said I, rising, “in all you have said I recognise your acute discernment and your depth of reasoning. But when you not only concede to, but approve, the motive power which renders this young man restless, pray forgive so old a friend for wondering why you yourself have never found some motive power which might, long ere this, have rendered you renowned.”

“Hush!” said Tracey, with his winning, matchless smile—“hush, look out on yon woods and waters. Has not the life which Nature bestows on any man who devoutly loves her a serener happiness than can be found in the enjoyments that estrange us from her charms? How few understand the distinction between life artificial and life artistic! Artificial existence is a reverence for the talk of men; artistic existence is in the supreme indifference to the talk of men. You and I, in different ways, seek to complete our being on earth, not artificially, but artistically. Neither of us can be insincere mouthpieces of talk in which we have no faith. You cannot write in a book—you cannot say in a speech—that which you know to be a falsehood. But the artificial folks are the very echoes of falsehood; the noise they make is in repeating its last sounds. An artist must be true to nature, even though he add to nature something from his soul of man which nature cannot give in her representations of truth. Is it not so?”

“Certainly,” said I, with warmth. “I could neither write nor speak what I did not believe to be, in the main, truthful. A man may or may not, according to the quality of his mind, give to nature that which clearly never can be in nature—viz., the soul or the intellect of man. But soul or intellect he must give to nature—that is, to everything which external objects present to his senses as truthful—or he is in art a charlatan, and in action a knave. But then truth, as Humanity knows it, is not what the schoolmen call it, One and Indivisible; it is like light, and splits not only into elementary colours, but into numberless tints. Truth with Raffaelle is not the same as truth with Titian; truth with Shakespeare is not the same as truth with Milton; truth with St Xavier is not the same as truth with Luther; truth with Pitt is not the same as truth with Fox. Each man takes from life his favourite truth, as each man takes from light his favourite colour.”

“Bravo!” cried Tracey, clapping his hands.

“Why bravo?” said I, testily. “Can the definition I hazard be construed into a defence of what I presume to be your view of the individual allegiance which each man owes to truth as he conceives it? No; for each man is bound to support and illustrate, with all his power, truth as truth seems to him, Raffaelle as Raffaelle, Titian as Titian, Shakespeare as Shakespeare, Milton as Milton, Pitt as Pitt, Fox as Fox. And the man who says, ‘I see truth in my own way, and I do not care to serve her cause;’ who, when Nature herself, ever moving, ever active, exhorts him to bestir himself for the truth he surveys, and to animate that truth with his own life and deed, shrugs his shoulder, and cries ‘Cui bono?’—that man, my dear Tracey, may talk very finely about despising renown, but in reality he shuffles off duty. Pardon me; I am thinking of you. I would take your part against others; but as friend to friend, and to your own face, I condemn you.”

To this discourteous speech Tracey was about to reply, when Lady Gertrude and Clara Thornhill entered the room to tell us that the boat was ready, and that we had less than two hours for aquatic adventure, as we were to dine at five.

“I am not sorry to have a little time to think over my answer to those reproaches which are compliments on the lips of friends,” said Tracey to me, resting his arm on my shoulder; and in a few minutes more we were gliding over the lake, with a gentle breeze from the hills, just lively enough to fill the sail. Clara, bewitchingest of those womanliest women who unfairly enthral and subdue us, while we not only know that their whole hearts are given to another, but love and respect them the more for it,—Clara nestled herself by my side. And I had not even the satisfaction of thinking that that infamous Henry was jealous. He did indeed once or twice pause from his nautical duties to vouchsafe us a scowl; but it was sufficiently evident that the monster was only angry because he knew that Clara loved him so well, that she was seeking to enlist me on her side against his abominable ambition of learning the art of homicide.

“Well,” whispered Clara to me—“well, you have spoken to Sir Percival!”

“Alas, yes! and in vain. He thinks that for your sake Henry must fulfil that dream of heroism, which perhaps first won your heart to him. Women very naturally love heroes; but then they must pay the tax for that noble attachment. Henry must become the glory of his country, and the major of a regiment in active service. My dear child—I mean, my dear Mrs Thornhill—don’t cry; be a hero’s wife! Tracey has convinced me that Henry is right; and my firm belief is that the chief motive which makes Henry covet laurels is to lay them at your feet.”

“The darling!” murmured Clara.

“You see your parents very naturally wished you to make a better worldly marriage. That difficulty was smoothed over, not by the merits of Henry, but the money of Sir Percival Tracey. Could you respect your husband if he were not secretly chafed at that thought? He desires to lift himself up to you even in your parents’ eyes, not by a miserable pecuniary settlement effected through a kinsman, but by his own deeds. Oppose that, and you humiliate him. Never humiliate a husband. Yield to it, and you win his heart and his gratitude for ever. Man must never be put into an inferior position to his helpmate. Is not that true? Thank you, my child—(come, the word is out)—for that pressure of my hand. You understand us men. Let Henry leave you, sure that his name will be mentioned with praise in his commanding officer’s report after some gallant action, looking forward to the day when, in command himself, Parliament shall vote him its thanks, and his sovereign award him her honours; and your Henry, as you cling in pride to his breast, shall whisper in words only heard by you—‘Wife mine, your parents are not ashamed of me now! All this is your work! all results from the yearning desire to show that the man whom you had singled out from the world was not unworthy of your love!’”

“But Henry does not say those pretty things,” sighed Clara, half smiling, half weeping.

“Say them? In words, of course not. What man, and especially what Englishman, does say pretty things? It is only authors, who are the interpreters of hearts, that say what lovers and heroes feel. But a look says to the beloved one more than authors can put into words. Henry’s look will tell you what you, his own, his wife, have been to him in the bivouac, in the battle; and you will love and reverence him the more because he does not say the pretty things into which I mince and sentimentalise the calm Englishman’s grand, silent, heartfelt combination of love with duty and with honour. My dear Clara, I speak to you as I would to my own daughter. Let your young soldier go. You and I indeed—the woman and the civilian—may talk as we will of distinctions between the defence of the island and the preservation of the empire. But a soldier is with his country’s flag wherever it is placed—whether in the wilds of Caffraria or on the cliffs of Dover. Clara, am I not right? Yes! you again press my hand. After all, there is not a noble beat in the heart of man which does not vibrate more nobly still in the heart of the wife who loves him!”

Just at this time our little anchor dropped on a fairy island. There was as much bustle on board as if we had discovered a new Columbia. We landed for a few minutes to enjoy a glorious view of the lake, to which this island was the centre, and explore a curious cave, which, according to tradition, had been the dwelling of some unsocial anchorite in Gothic days. The rocky walls of this cell were now inscribed with the names or initials of summer holiday visitors from provincial towns.

“See,” said the Painter, “how instinctive to man is the desire to leave some memorial of himself wherever he has been.”

“Do you acknowledge then,” said Tracey, “that the instinct which roused Joseph Higgins to carve on the rock, for the benefit of distant ages, the fact, that in the year 1837 he visited this spot in company with ‘Martha Brown,’ is but a family branch of the same instinct which makes genius desire to write its name on the ‘flammantia mœnia mundi?’”

“Perhaps,” replied the Painter, “the instinct is the same; but if it be so, that truth would not debase and vulgarise the yearning of genius—it would rather elevate and poetise the desire of Joseph Higgins.”

“Well answered,” said I. “Has any one present a knife that he will not mind blunting? if so, I should like to carve my name under that of Joseph Higgins. It is something to leave a trace of one’s whereabout twenty years hence, even in the rock of this lonely cave.”

Henry produced the knife, and I carved my name under that of Joseph Higgins, with the date, and these words—“A Summer Holiday.” “I have not had many holidays,” said I, “since I left school; let me preserve one from oblivion.” I passed the knife to Tracey.

“Nay,” said he, laughing, “I have no motive strong enough to induce me to take the trouble. I have no special holiday to record—my life is all holiday.”

We re-entered our vessel, and drifted along the lake—the Painter jotting down hints of scenery in his sketch-book, and Percival reading to us aloud from a volume of Robert Browning’s Poems which he had brought with him. He was a great admirer of that poet, and was bent upon making Clara share his own enthusiasm. Certainly he read well, and the poems he selected seemed in harmony with the scene; for there is in Robert Browning a certain freshness and freedom of music, and a certain suggestiveness of quiet thought reflected from natural images, which fit him to be read out of doors, in English landscapes, on summer days.

When we returned from our cruise, we found our rural banquet awaiting us. We were served under an awning suspended from the trunks of two mighty elms, whose branches overhung the water. Lady Gertrude had not exaggerated the culinary skill of the ci-devant housekeeper. What with the fish from the lake, various sorts, dressed in different ways, probably from receipts as old as the monastic days in which fresh-water fishes received the honours due to them—what with some excellent poultry, which, kept in that wild place, seemed to have acquired a finer flavour than farmyard coops bestow—and what with fruits, not rendered malefic by walls of pastry—the repast would have satisfied more refined epicures than we were. Cool, light, sparkling wines, innocent as those which Horace promised to Tyndaris, circled freely. All of us became mirthful, even Clara—all of us except Henry, who still looked as if he were wasting time; and the Painter, who became somewhat too seriously obtrusive of his art, and could with difficulty be kept from merging the whole conversation into criticisms on the landscape effects of Gainsborough contrasted with those of Claude.

After dinner we quietly settled ourselves to our several amusements—Lady Gertrude to some notable piece of female work. Clara, after playing us a few airs on her lute, possessed herself of Tracey’s volume of Browning, and pretended to read. The Painter flung himself on the grass, and contemplated with an artist’s eye the curves in the bank, and the lengthening shadows that crept over the still waters. Henry, ever restless, wandered away with a rod in his hand towards a distant gravelly creek, in which the old man at the lodge assured us he had seen perch of three pounds weight.

The Librarian alone remained seated at the table, finishing very slowly his bottle of claret, and apparently preparing himself for a peaceful slumber.

Tracey and I strolled along the margin of the lake, the swans following us as we walked: they were old friends of his.

“So,” said Tracey at last, “you think that my course of life has not been a wise one.”

“If all men lived like you, it might be very well for a paradise, but very bad for the world we dwell in.”

“Possibly; but it would be very bad for the world we dwell in if the restless spirits were not in some degree kept in check by the calm ones. What a miserable, unsafe, revolutionary state of society would be that in which all the members were men of combative ambition and fidgety genius; all haranguing, fighting, scribbling; all striving, each against the other! We sober fellows are the ballast in the state vessel: without us, it would upset in the first squall! We have our uses, my friend, little as you seem disposed to own it.”

“My dear Tracey, the question is not whether a ship should carry ballast, but whether you are of the proper material for ballast. And when I wonder why a man of great intellect and knowledge should not make his intellect and knowledge more largely useful, it is a poor answer to tell me that he is as useful as—a bag of stones.”

“A motive power is as necessary to impel a man, whatever his intellect or knowledge, towards ambitious action, as it is to lift a stone from the hold of a vessel into the arch of a palace. No motive power from without urges me into action, and the property inherent in me is to keep still.”

“Well, it is true, yours is so exceptional a lot that it affords no ground for practical speculation on human life. Take a patrician of £60,000 a year, who only spends £6000: give him tastes so cultivated that he has in himself all resources; diet him on philosophy till he says, with the Greek sage, ‘Man is made to contemplate, and to gaze on the stars,’ and it seems an infantine credulity to expect that this elegant Looker-on will condescend to take part with the actors on the world’s stage. Yet without the actors, the world would be only a drop-scene for the Lookers-on. Yours, I repeat, is an exceptional case. And those who admire your mind, must regret that it has been robbed of fame by your fortune.”

“Flatterer,” said Tracey, with his imperturbable good-temper, “I am ashamed of myself to know that you have not hit on the truth. If I had been born to £200 a year, and single as I am now—that is, free to choose my own mode of life—I should have been, I was about to say as idle as I am, but idle is not the word; I should have been as busy in completing my own mind, and as reluctant to force that mind into the squabbles of that mob which you call the world: in fact, I am but a type—somewhat exaggerated by accidental circumstances, which make me more prominent than others to your friendly if critical eye—of a very common and a very numerous class in a civilisation so cultivated as that of our age. Wherever you look, you will find men whom the world has never heard of, yet who in intellect or knowledge could match themselves against those whose names are in all the newspapers. Allow me to ask, Do you not know, in the House of Commons, men who never open their lips, but for whose mere intellect, in judgment, penetration, genuine statesmanship, you have more respect than you have for that of the leading orators? Allow me to ask again, Should you say the profoundest minds and the most comprehensive scholars are to be found among the most popular authors of your time; or among men who have never published a line, and never will? Answer me frankly.”

“I will answer you frankly. I should say that, in political judgment and knowledge, there are many men in the back benches of Parliament, who are the most admirable critics of the leading statesmen. I should say that, in many educated, fastidious gentlemen, there are men who, in exquisite taste and extensive knowledge, are the most admirable critics of the popular authors. But still there is an immense difference in human value between even a first-rate critic who does not publish his criticisms, and even a second or third-rate statesman or author who does contribute his quota of thought to the intellectual riches of the world.”

“Granted; but the distinction between man and man, in relation to the public, is not mere intellect, nor mere knowledge; it is in something else. What is it?”

“Dr Arnold, the schoolmaster, said, that as between boy and boy the distinction was energy, perhaps it is so with men.”

“Energy! yes: but what puts the energy into movement? what makes one man dash into fame by a harum-scarum book full of blunders and blemishes, or a random fiery speech, of which any sound thinker would be heartily ashamed; and what keeps back the man who could write a much better book and make a much better speech?”

“Perhaps,” said I, ironically, “that extreme of elegant vanity, an over-fastidious taste; perhaps that extreme of philosophical do-nothingness, which always contemplates and never acts.”

“Possibly you are right,” answered Tracey, shaming my irony by his urbane candour. “But why has the man this extreme of elegant vanity or philosophical do-nothingness? Is it not, perhaps, after all, a physical defect? the lymphatic temperament instead of the nervous-bilious?”

“You are not lymphatic,” said I, with interest; for my hobby is—metaphysical pathology, or pathological metaphysics—“You,” said I, “are not lymphatic; you are dark-haired, lean, and sinewy; why the deuce should you not be energetic! it must be that infamous £60,000 which has paralysed all your motive power.”

“Friend,” answered Tracey, “are there not some some men in the House of Lords with more than £60,000 a year, and who could scarcely be more energetic if they lived on 4d. a day and worked for it?”

“There have been, and are, such instances in the Peerage, doubtless; but, as a general rule, the wealthiest peers are seldom the most active. Still, I am willing to give your implied argument the full benefit of the illustration you cite. Wherever legislative functions are attached to hereditary aristocracy, that aristocracy, as long as the State to which they belong is free, will never fail of mental vigour—of ambition for reputation and honours achieved in the public service. It was so with the senators of Rome as long as the Roman Republic lasted; it will be so with the members of the House of Lords as long as the English Constitution exists. And in such an order of men there will always be a degree of motive power sufficiently counteracting the indolence and epicurism which great wealth in itself engenders, to place a very large numerical proportion of the body among the most active and aspiring spirits of the time. But your misfortune, my dear Tracey, has been this (and hence I call your case exceptional)—that, immeasurably above the average of our peers, both in illustration of descent and in territorial possessions, still you have had none of the duties, none of the motive power, which actuate hereditary legislators. You have had their wealth—you have had their temptations to idleness; you have not had their responsible duties—you have not had their motives for energy and toil. That is why I call your case exceptional.”

“Still,” answered Tracey, “I say that I am but a very commonplace type of educated men who belong neither to the House of Lords nor the House of Commons, and who, in this country, despise ambition, yet in some mysterious latent way serve to influence opinion. Motive power—motive power! how is it formed? why is it so capricious? why sometimes strongest in the rich and weakest in the poor? why does knowledge sometimes impart, and sometimes destroy it? On these questions I do not think that your reasonings will satisfy me. I am sure that mine would not satisfy you. Let us call in a third party and hear what he has to say on the matter. Ride with me to-morrow to the house of a gifted friend of mine, who was all for public life once, and is all for private life now. I will tell you who and what he is. In early life my friend carried off the most envied honours of a university. Almost immediately on taking his degree, he obtained his fellowship. Thus he became an independent man. The career most suited to his prospects was that of the Church. To this he had a conscientious objection; not that he objected to the doctrines of our Church, nor that he felt in himself any consciousness of sinful propensities at variance with the profession; but simply because he did not feel that strong impulse towards the holiest of earthly vocations, without which a very clever man may be a very indifferent parson: and his ambition led him towards political distinction. His reputation for talents, and for talents adapted to public life, was so high, that he received an offer to be brought into Parliament at the first general election, from a man of great station, with whose son he had been intimate at college, and who possessed a predominant influence in a certain borough. The offer was accepted. But before it could be carried out, a critical change occurred in my friend’s life and in his temper of mind. A distant relation, whom he had never even seen, died, and left him a small estate in this county: on taking possession of the property, he naturally made acquaintance with the rector of the parish, and formed a sudden and passionate attachment for one of the rector’s daughters, resigned the fellowship he no longer needed, married the young lady, and found himself so happy with his young partner and in his new home, that before the general election took place, the idea of the parliamentary life, which he had before coveted, became intolerable to him. He excused himself to the borough and its patron, and has ever since lived as quietly in his rural village, as if he had never known the joys of academical triumph, nor nursed the hope of political renown. Let us then go and see him to-morrow (it is a very pretty ride across the country), and you will be compelled to acknowledge that his £600 or £700 a year of wood and sheepwalk, with peace and love at his fireside, have sufficed to stifle ambition in one whose youth had been intensely ambitious. So you see it does not need £60,000 a year to make a man cling to private life, and shrink from all that, in shackling him with the fetters and agitating him with the passion of public life, would lessen his personal freedom and mar his intellectual serenity.”

“I shall be glad to see your friend. What is his name?”

“Hastings Gray.”

“What! the Hastings Gray who, seventeen or eighteen years ago, made so remarkable a speech at some public meeting (I own I forget where it was), and wrote the political pamphlet which caused so great a sensation!”

“The same man.”

“I remember that he was said to have distinguished himself highly at the university, and that he was much talked of in London, for a few weeks, as a man likely to come into Parliament, and even to make a figure in it. Since then, never having heard more of him, I supposed he was dead. I am glad to learn that he only sleepeth.”

Here we heard behind us the muffled fall of hoofs on the sward; our party was in movement homeward, Lady Gertrude leading the van in her pony chaise. I had to retake my place by her side; Clara and the Librarian followed in a similar vehicle, driven by Henry Thornhill, who had caught none of the great perches; I suspect he had not tried for them. Percival and the Painter rode. The twilight deepened, and soon melted into a starry night, as we went through the shadowy forest-land.

Lady Gertrude talked incessantly and agreeably, but I was a very dull companion, and, being in a musing humour, would much rather have been alone. At length we saw the moon shining on the white walls of the villa. “I fear we have tired you with our childish party of pleasure,” said Lady Gertrude, with a malicious fling at my silence.

“Perhaps I am tired,” I replied, ingenuously. “Pleasures are fatiguing, especially when one is not accustomed to them.”

“Satirist!” said Lady Gertrude. “You come from the brilliant excitement of London, and what may be pleasure to us must be ennui to you.”

“Nay, Lady Gertrude, let me tell you what a very clever and learned man, a Minister of State, said the other day at one of those great public ceremonial receptions which are the customary holidays of a Minister of State. ‘Life,’ said he, pensively, ‘would be tolerably agreeable if it were not for its amusements.’ He spoke of those ‘brilliant excitements,’ as you call them, which form the amusements of capitals. He would not have spoken so of the delight which Man can extract from a holiday with Nature. But tell me, you who have played so considerable a part in the world of fashion, do you prefer the drawing-rooms of London to the log-house by the lake?”

“Why,” said Lady Gertrude, honestly, and with a half-sigh; “I own I should be glad if Percival would consent to spend six months in the year, or even three, in London. However, what he likes I like. Providence has made us women of very pliable materials.”

“Has it?” said I; “that information is new to me—one lives to learn.” And here, as the pony stopped at the porch, I descended to offer my arm to the amiable charioteer.

Nothing worth recording took place the rest of the evening. Henry and the Painter played at billiards, Lady Gertrude and the Librarian at backgammon. Clara went into the billiard-room, seating herself there with her work: by some fond instinct of her loving nature she felt as if she ought not to waste the minutes yet vouchsafed to her—she was still with him who was all in all to her!

I took down ‘The Faithful Shepherdess,’ wishing to refresh my memory of passages which the scenes we had visited that day vaguely recalled to my mind. Looking over my shoulder, Percival guided me to the lines I was hunting after. This led to comparisons between ‘The Faithful Shepherdess’ and the ‘Comus,’ and thence to that startling contrast in the way of viewing, and in the mode of describing, rural nature, between the earlier English poets and those whom Dryden formed upon Gallic models, and so on into the pleasant clueless labyrinth of metaphysical criticism on the art of poetic genius. When we had parted for the night, and I regained my own room, I opened my window and looked forth on the moonlit gardens. A few minutes later, a shadow, moving slow, passed over the silvered ground, and, descending the terrace stairs, vanished among the breathless shrubs and slumbering flowers. I recognised the man who loved to make night his companion.

(To be continued.)

HENRI LACORDAIRE.[^[3]]

There are few of the leaders or servants of the public who interest the general mind so profoundly as the great preachers, whose fame reaches the humblest as well as the most exalted, and within the reach of whose influence, more or less, an entire generation passes. Not to reckon the secondary class of preachers, whose biography is as inevitable as their decease, and whose lives are studied as a matter of religious duty by vast sections of the population who lie in a kind of underground out of the reach of ordinary literature, it is enough to instance such a life as that of Chalmers, to prove how wide a hold upon the public interest is taken by a man with whom, for once in their lives, most people of his generation have come in momentary contact in the slight but often momentous relation of hearers to a speaker. Only a very limited number can or do hear a great speaker in any other kind, compared with those who think it indispensable to hear the notable preacher of their day; and multitudes who have the most visionary conception of their rulers and statesmen, and all other public notabilities, have a certain personal knowledge of the orator whose sphere is the pulpit, which makes them as eager to hear his life as if their own history were somehow involved in it. The life which we have now to unfold to our readers is, however, one with which in this country we are unfamiliar. It is a religious existence of a fashion unknown to us. A strange atmosphere breathes out of its acts and sentiments; its strength and its feebleness are alike novel to our experience; but under all these puzzling distinctions, the life itself is very remarkable—interwoven with the entire history of its country and period—and opens to us so strange yet so instructive a glimpse of a Christianity not less fervent, pure, and true, than anything in our Protestant records, but couched in terms so different from ours, and wearing an aspect so unlike, that the mingled resemblance and dissimilarity add a charm to its own merits. The life of Henri Lacordaire, priest, preacher, and monk, told by his eloquent countryman and loving friend, M. de Montalembert, is for us not only a religious biography, but a novel study of character and life. The picture is fascinating but strange. Stranger than the eremites in the ancient wilderness, or those early followers of Benedict and Francis, with whom the same hand has lately made us familiar, is the apparition of the monk of the nineteenth century as he appears in these pages. For it is no picturesque lay figure which rises in the white Dominican tunic before our unaccustomed eyes, but a modern Frenchman, acute, brilliant, unimpassioned—full of sound sense and inexorable logic—a politician, a liberal, a man of his day, no less than a great preacher and a pious Catholic. The story of his life is without private events, for he was a priest, and debarred from any private life save that which makes a passion of friendship and finds an outlet there; but his career is that of a man strong in personal identity, who acts and thinks for himself, and throws his entire being into his occupation, whatever that may be. M. de Montalembert, always eloquent, is perhaps too rhetorical and declamatory for biography, at least in narrating a life which to a great extent he shared, and the vicissitudes of which, as he records them, naturally rouse his enthusiasm, his indignation, and grief, and tempt him into many digressions. The volume which he has dedicated to the memory of his friend is more of an eloge than a biography, and the lines of the picture are vague in consequence, and want the distinctness of portrait-painting; nevertheless the figure rounds out of its dim background into unquestionable individuality, and the English reader who has not already heard of the great French preacher will herein meet with another man well worthy the remembrance of the world.

Henri Lacordaire was born in the beginning of the present century, almost a contemporary of our own great preacher Edward Irving, in whose life one remarkable point of resemblance shows only the full force of the contrast between the French priest and the Scotch pastor. He was of moderate origin, undistinguished either in his birth or training, without any brilliant prognostics to mark the beginning of his career. It is thus that his biographer sums up the simple story of his early days:—

“Nothing could be more simple or ordinary than the life of this young priest. Those who seek romances or stormy passages in the lives of historical personages, or at least in their youth, must find them elsewhere. No adventure, no stroke of fate or of passion, troubled the course of his early years. The son of a village doctor, educated by a pious mother, he had, like almost all the young men of the time, lost his faith at college, and did not regain it either in the school of law or at the bar, where he ranked for two years among the advocates. In appearance nothing distinguished him from his contemporaries. He was a Deist, like all the youth of the time; he was, above all, liberal, like all France, but without excess. He shared the convictions and the generous delusions which we all breathed in the air which had been purified by the downfall of imperial despotism, but he desired only a liberty strong and legitimate; and without having yet been enlightened by the lights of faith, he already foresaw the supreme danger of modern society, for at twenty he wrote ‘Impiety leads to depravity,’ ‘Corrupt morals produce corrupt laws,’ and ‘Licence carries the nations on to slavery.’ He himself remained always virtuous and regular in his morals, without any other passion than for glory. Even before he became a Christian he respected himself.”

Life, however, soon quickened into warmer bloom, in the heart of this virtuous young heathen. Providence had other occupation for him than the practice of the French bar, and the excitement of those politics which present such a fantastic succession of revolution and stagnation, violence and apathy. He woke up out of his classic convictions into Christian life, and with characteristic promptitude, as soon as he believed, devoted himself to the service of religion. “Neither man nor book was the instrument of his conversion,” says his biographer. “A sudden and secret touch of grace opened his eyes to the nothingness of irreligion. In one day he became a Christian, and the next, being a Christian, determined to become a priest.” This prompt and clear spirit, swiftly logical, unimpassioned, and master of itself, pervaded his entire life. It was not argument or exhortation that convinced him. He perceived in his rapid young soul—aware as he was of forces in himself which must have work to occupy them, and of unspeakable want in the world around him—“the nothingness of irreligion”—a notable and significant discovery. That elegant, classic, unproductive blank of Pagan virtue—could anything ever come of it, even in its highest development? Swiftly the alternative presented itself to the young Frenchman. Out of this “nothingness” he did not come by halves. From the first freedom of his young manhood and accomplished education, he went back again steadily to the rules and studies of a new training. After three years at the seminary of St Sulpice he became a priest, at a time when priests had little honour and no popularity in France. The young advocate, glowing with all the inspirations of undeveloped eloquence—a man destined to play so notable a part in his generation, and no doubt aware in his heart of the genius which nobody else as yet suspected—fell, in the flush of his youth, into obscure priestly offices, such as doubtless demonstrated to him a “something” in the Christian faith enough to exercise and employ all the helpful energies of man. He became the almoner of a convent, then of a college, following the common order of the youthful priesthood. Except the fact that he had thus suddenly, by prompt exercise of will, joined himself to that unpopular class, nothing as yet appeared to distinguish him from his brethren. “The only thing singular in him was his liberalism,” says M. de Montalembert. “By a phenomenon then unheard of, this convert, this seminarist, this almoner of nuns, was steadfast in remaining a liberal, as in the days when he was only a student and advocate.” This was, to bystanders, the one remarkable feature in him—he was a priest, and yet he was a liberal—to wit, a radical, a democrat, all but a republican. From his convent he wrote like any other enthusiastic young man, in the days when men found a gospel in political privileges, of “the imprescriptible rights of the human race.” His dream was to place these imprescriptible rights under the protection of the Church—to ally the old religion with the new freedom. “Christianity is not a law of slavery,” he wrote, in youthful boldness, from his “little convent of the Visitandines,” when Paris surged with the subterranean heavings of the Revolution of July. “She has not forgot that her children were free when all the world groaned under the iron of so many horrible Cæsars; and that they created, underground, a society of men who spoke of humanity under the palace of Nero.” “In his youth and his solitude,” he who had forsaken the bar and its triumphs, the world and its ways, for the humble offices of the priesthood, arrived at this conclusion which nobody else had dreamed of. It is a conclusion which, since then, has been tried on a sufficiently large scale and found impracticable, but it is not the less an idea which must have been full of charms and of inspiration to the young priest, whom a higher call than that of political right or wrong had drawn within the bosom of an institution supposed, and with justice, to be the foe of liberty.

Across this calm and soft perspective—from which the young priest, palpitating with all the impulses of youth and genius, looked forth with hopes that seem Utopian, and warm ideal conceptions of good and glory yet to be attained—a light more brilliant suddenly streams. This path of life, as yet so humble, enveloped in profound personal obscurity, unknown to man, is suddenly crossed by a dazzling meteoric radiance, and thrown into strong illumination before the world. It is the Abbé de Lamennais, strange Quixote of French religious history, who suddenly appears upon the scene, without introduction or description, with a suddenness somewhat confusing to an English reader, who is less instructed in the notable facts and persons of Gallican ecclesiastical history in recent years, than the audience which M. de Montalembert especially addresses. The point of junction between the distinguished ecclesiastic of La Chenaie and the young almoner of the Visitandines, is this same belief common to both, that the Church, so far from being the enemy, ought to be the chief supporter of political freedom. M. de Lamennais, “then the most celebrated and the most venerated of French priests,” had started from the opposite ground of high ultramontane Papalism, but, by dint of the lofty view taken by a lofty and visionary though wilful and uncertain mind, of that unique spiritual despotism, had come to the conclusion—a conclusion falsified by all experience, but not inconceivable in theory—that the Holy Father of Christendom ought to be the guardian of all men’s liberties. It was 1830, a year of Revolution,—another violent crisis had come in the fortunes of France. The freedom, the boldness, the bewilderment of such a sudden change of affairs, excited and stirred up all questions and spirits. This new theory of the small but enthusiastic religious band, which aimed at nothing less than re-conquering for the Church the love and heart of the country, came into the field with many others. It is at this point that M. de Montalembert, who for some little time has been preluding tenderly in strains of love and lamentation, suddenly dashes into his story, and introduces us, with an affectionate abruptness, into this agitated society, to the beginning of his friendship with Lacordaire, and to the person and character of his friend.

“It was in November 1830 that I saw him for the first time in the cabinet of the Abbé de Lamennais,” he writes, “four months after a revolution which seemed for a moment to confound in a common ruin the throne and the altar, and one month after the beginning of the journal ‘L’Avenir.’ The motto of this journal was—Dieu et la liberté! It was intended by its founders to regenerate Catholic opinion in France, and to seal its union with the progress of liberalism. I hastened to take part in this work, with the ardour of my twenty years, from Ireland, where I had just seen O’Connell at the head of a people whose invincible fidelity to the Catholic faith had worn out three centuries of persecution, and whose religious emancipation had just been won by the free press and freedom of speech. A very small number of laymen shared the convictions of M. de Lamennais, with a still more limited number of priests. Among the latter, the Abbé Lacordaire, whom as yet no one knew, was named to me. Not only was he not of those who had made themselves a name by reproducing the doctrines of the celebrated author of ‘L’Essai sur l’Indifference,’ but he could not even be called his pupil.... There needed nothing less than the Revolution of July and ‘L’Avenir’ to engage in a common work two natures so profoundly distinct. I saw them both for the first time: dazzled and swayed by the one, I felt myself more sweetly and more naturally drawn towards the other. If I could but paint him such as he appeared then, in all the radiance and the charm of youth! He was twenty-eight. He was dressed as a layman, the state of Paris not then permitting priests to wear their proper costume. His graceful figure, his fine and regular features, his sculpturesque forehead, the commanding carriage of his head, his dark and sparkling eye, an indescribable something of pride and elegance, as well as of modesty, in all his person—all this was but the cover of a soul which seemed ready to pour itself forth, not only in the free encounters of public speaking, but in the overflowing of affectionate intercourse. The flash of his eye disclosed gleams at once warlike and tender; it sought not only enemies to combat and to overthrow, but hearts to fascinate and conquer. His voice, already so nervous and energetic, frequently assumed accents of an infinite sweetness. Born to fight and to love, he already bore the seal of the double royalty of the soul and talent. He appeared to me charming and terrible, as a type of the enthusiasm for good—virtue armed for the support of truth. I saw in him one of the elect, predestined to all that youth adores and desires the most—genius and glory. Yet he, still more attracted by the gentle joys of Christian friendship than the distant echoes of fame, made us understand that the greatest struggles moved us only by half—that they still left us power to dream, above all, of the life of the heart—that the days began and ended according as a loved remembrance had risen or had been silent in the soul. It was he who spoke to me thus; and he added immediately, ‘Alas! we ought to love only the infinite, and this is the reason why that which we love is so complete in our soul.’ The morning after this first meeting he took me to hear his mass, which he said in the chapel of a little convent of the Visitandines in the Pays Latin, and already we loved each other as men love in the pure and generous impulses of youth and under the fire of the enemy. He condescended to rejoice over that meeting which he had desired, and upon which he congratulated himself in terms which expressed his classic and democratic thought. He wrote, some time before, ‘My soul, like Iphigenia, awaits its brother at the foot of the altar.’ Afterwards, speaking of his new friend to an older one, he said, ‘I love him like a plebeian.’”

Such was the fervent young man with whom, in the year of the Revolution, in the warmth of their youth, the young Montalembert formed an everlasting friendship. They lived henceforward in a union close as that of the classic models of amity, and effusive as is natural to young Frenchmen. The two had hard enough work in hand in those brilliant, agitated, youthful days, over which M. de Montalembert lingers with a natural fondness. In the reign of utter prose which had begun, this Young France stood all glowing and poetic—believing in a new beginning as youth always believes—hoping everything grand, exalted, and generous from the new era and its own toils. They had their journal, choice vehicle of assault upon the world and all its wrongs; and from that little battery thundered, day by day, at all the injustice and oppression which came under their quick observation, taking summary vengeance upon the offenders. To-day it was a petty official, “lui, ce sous-préfet!” whom the young Abbé tossed in the air on the point of that dazzling spear of youthful scorn and beautiful indignation—to-morrow it was the new Government itself which felt the diamond point of their virgin weapons. Young ardour, daring hardihood, wild rushes at conclusions, grand assumption and display of wisdom, mixed with a thorough enjoyment and relish in the dangerous sport, shine through the tale. The young men were in the flush of youth and conscious power, exercising a censorship which somehow comes natural to youth, and which, in its brilliant impertinence and freshness of life, earns its own excuse almost from its victims. Lamennais, though not young, was of that character of genius—generous, susceptible, and wilful—which commends itself to the young, and leads without controlling them. He who, in the wild retirement of La Chenaie amid the Breton woods, made for himself a little family of the youths whom he had devoted himself to train for the service of the Church, and attached them to him with a kind of passion, seems to have exercised no subduing influence over the young men whom he associated with himself in the work of ‘L’Avenir.’ They tilted frankly at the world with an inexhaustible delight in their work. “Neither the old clergy nor the new Government were disposed to receive this new doctrine,” says M. de Montalembert, with unconscious humour, in explanation of this work; “but the violence and mistakes of the latter might be counted upon to enlighten, little by little, and bring back the former. It was necessary, then, at once to point out the arbitrary acts of certain functionaries against religion, and to teach Catholics to draw, from liberal institutions and ideas, arms which the fall of a dynasty could no more break in their hands. This was the double task to which the young Henri Lacordaire devoted his untried, and till then unknown, talent.”

Into this enterprise the young Abbé rushed with all his joyous youthful forces. Violent Radicalism and lofty High-Churchism, both the one and the other of a more fiery character than are known in our tamer atmosphere, here took hands together and defied the world. The young champion went to the wildest extremities in his vivid and rash eloquence. The French priest even, in the inspirations of his genius, antedated the equally fiery priests of Scotland, and loftily suggested to his brethren of the clergy—while discoursing to them of the sacrilege committed by a sous-préfet, who had forced an entrance into a country church for the corpse of a man who had been refused the rites of burial—an expedient which has only been adopted on the northern side of the Tweed. “You will make him grow pale” (to wit, the sous-préfet), cries the young orator, “if, taking your dishonoured God, with staff in hand and hat on head, you bear Him into some hut made with fir planks, swearing not to expose Him a second time to the insults of the State-temples.” “These words,” says Montalembert, “indicate the extreme, unjust, and dangerous conclusion from which ‘L’Avenir’ drew not back. It said to the clergy that they should be prepared to renounce the budget du culte, sole remnant of their ancient and legitimate patrimony, sole guarantee of their material existence, to give up even the churches of which the State assumed to be owner, to enter into full possession of the invincible powers and inexhaustible resources of modern liberty.” Nor did these bold assaults end in mere words. “A series of contests,” continues the biographer, “the details of which would encumber this narrative, but which were all designed to promote the emancipation of the priests and the Catholic citizens, took him more than once to the court of the police correctionelle, sometimes as the accused, sometimes as client, sometimes even as advocate; for until he was interdicted by a decision of the Council of Discipline, he still retained the right to plead in that capacity; and I remember the surprise of a president of the Chamber, in discovering one day at the bar, in the robe of an advocate, the priest whose name already began to be famous.”

Into these encounters the young man entered with a certain relish and delight which sometimes amazed his friend. “I know not what attraction drew him to those combats,” says M. de Montalembert; “one would have said that he was trying the temper of his arms, and endeavouring to render his blows more sure.” “I am convinced,” he wrote, in issuing from one of his skirmishes, “that the Roman senate would not have frightened me.” And not only did he find enjoyment in the fight for itself, but occasional triumphs rewarded the young orator—triumphs of his frank and open youth over the big popular spectator that loved not the name of priest. One day, in answering an avocat du roi who had ventured to say that the priests were the ministers of a foreign power, Lacordaire cried, “We are the ministers of one who is nowhere a stranger—of God.” Upon which the audience, “composed of that people of July so hostile to the clergy,” applauded, exclaiming, “My priest, my curé, what do you call yourself? you are a brave man!” He was not less frank nor less successful when he appeared as the defendant in a Government prosecution along with Lamennais, on account of some of the plain-speaking of the ‘Avenir’ touching an appointment of bishops. In his speech before this tribunal, Lacordaire defended himself, in his capacity of priest, with a touching simplicity and dignity. “I rise,” he says, “with a recollection that will not leave me. When the priest in former days rose amid the people, something which excited a profound love rose at the same time with him. Now, accused as I am, I know that my name of priest is mute for my defence, and I am resigned to it. The people deprived the priest of that ancient love which they bore him, when the priest deprived himself of an august part of his character—when the man of God ceased to be the man of freedom.... I never knew freedom better,” he continues, with a burst of professional enthusiasm, “than the day when I received, with the sacred unction, the right of speaking of God. The universe opened before me, and I learned that there was in man something inalienable, divine, eternally free—speech! The message of the priest was confided to me, and I was told to bear it to the ends of the world without any one having the right to seal my lips a single day of my life. I went out of the temple with these grand doctrines, and I met upon the threshold, law and bondage!” After this brilliant address, M. de Montalembert comes in with a tender touch of description—a little sketch which in a word or two makes us of the party, and reveals the entire scene in all its agitation and triumph.

“The two accused were acquitted. The verdict was not given till midnight. A numerous crowd surrounded and applauded the victors of the day. When they had dispersed we returned alone, in the darkness, along the quays. Upon the threshold of his door I saluted in him the orator, of the future. He was neither intoxicated nor overwhelmed by his triumph. I saw that for him the little vanities of success were less than nothing; but I saw him eager to spread the contagion of self-devotion and of courage, and delighted by the evidences of mutual faith and disinterested tenderness, which in young and Christian hearts burn with a purer and dearer light than all the victories.”

Generous and tender dreams! but who could refuse to believe that the young companion, more intoxicated with his triumph than himself, who wandered along those dark banks of Seine in the cool midnight, in the silence, so grateful after that day’s toil, by his side, affectionate and rejoicing, gave a dearer and more flattering homage to the young orator than all the applauding crowds? This single sentence is one of the most perfectly distinct touches of human personality and affection in the book.

These pious young revolutionaries, “young and Christian hearts,” continued for some time longer to get themselves into all kinds of trouble. From freedom of speech they proceeded to contend for freedom of teaching—constituted themselves into an agency for the defence of religious liberty—and set up, at their own hand, a free school, taught by three of themselves, in Paris. A curious scene followed. The three young teachers, of whom Lacordaire was one and Montalembert another, began their volunteer labours with twenty children to each. Next morning an officer of the university appeared to stop this irregular assembly. He addressed himself first to the children. “In the name of the law, I summon you to depart,” cried this functionary to the assembled urchins. “In the name of your parents, whose authority I have, I command you to remain,” immediately answered Lacordaire. The small citizens, doubtless charmed to be able to rebel so soon against law and government, immediately gave their shrill suffrage in his favour. “We shall remain,” cried the little rebels, with one voice. The result, of course, was, that scholars and teachers had equally to succumb to the power of the law, and that once more there ensued a trial, and brilliant appearance of the eloquent Abbé, which this time was before the Chamber of Peers, the most illustrious assemblage in France, one of the culprits, M. de Montalembert himself, being a member of that august body. We have no room to quote this speech; but the prosecution, like the former, seems to have ended in nothing.

“I will be pardoned for lingering upon the events of that year, so memorable for us,” says Montalembert, with touching grace. “There is no one, however obscure and useless may have been his life, who, at the decline of his days, does not feel himself drawn by an irresistible current towards the moment when the first fires of enthusiasm were lighted in his soul and on his lips—no one who does not breathe with a sort of intoxication the perfume of these recollections, and who is not tempted to boast beyond measure their charm and their brightness,—days at once happy and sad,” he says—“days devoured by labour and by enthusiasm—days such as occur but once in a life.”

The apology is beautiful, but it is unnecessary. Few will read the history of those young days and friends, differing so totally from ourselves, yet so entirely in accord, without feeling their hearts warm to the historian, whose own youth rises so fair before him as he writes, and of whom the world is fully advised that his maturer days have well borne out the promise of that youth.

We, too, are tempted to linger, but must not, space and time preventing. ‘L’Avenir’ came at last to a sudden check, as was inevitable. After it had affronted the clergy, the bishops, and the Government, united its own little band of retainers in such bonds as unite men “under the fire of the enemy,” and fought its way for thirteen months through all manner of prosecutions and oppositions, the daring little journal came to a close in a manner as remarkable and Quixotic as had been its career. “In announcing the suspension,” says M. de Montalembert, “we announced at the same time the departure of the three principal editors for Rome, in order to submit to the Pope the questions in controversy between us and our adversaries, promising beforehand an absolute submission to the Pontifical decision.” Strange mission of the three—two of whom only had youth to excuse them in this mad embassage—to persuade wise Rome to embroil herself, and compromise her infallibility, in the decision of questions so complicated, for the satisfaction of the editors of ‘L’Avenir!’ The two young men went lightly upon their mission, not without natural excitement in the prospect of visiting the sacred city; but matters were different with Lamennais, whose genius and lofty intention seem to have been shipwrecked by that spirit of unmaturing youthfulness, always sanguine of its own triumph, expecting everything to yield to its will, absolute and petulant, and incapable of contradiction, which is as undignified as it is unnatural in a man of mature age. The confidence which led Lacordaire and Montalembert to state their difficulties to his Holiness, and beg his decision upon them, was sufficiently romantic and high-flown. “But how explain or excuse it,” says our author, “in a distinguished priest, already mature in age, as was the Abbé de Lamennais, who was then more than fifty, and who had already lived at Rome, where the Pope had received him with the greatest distinction?” The pilgrims were received with paternal kindness and unresponsive civility. They got no reply, as was natural. Lacordaire, always prompt and clear-sighted, with a native vein of good sense and practical wisdom running through all the fiery impulses of his genius, was the first to perceive how great a mistake they had made. He remained more than two months in Rome endeavouring to reconcile Lamennais to the failure of their mission, and, for his own part, refreshing his soul in that wonderful shrine of all memories and thoughts. “I can see him still,” says his affectionate biographer, “wandering for long days among the ruins and the monuments, pausing, as overpowered, to admire, with that exquisite feeling of true beauty which never forsook him, all that Rome presents of the profound and the antique—fascinated, above all, by the tranquil and incomparable charm of her horizons; then returning to the common hearth to preach reserve, resignation, submission—in a word, reason—to M. de Lamennais.” At last the young priest announced to his fretful and rebellious senior his intention of returning to France, to await there in silence, but without remaining idle, the verdict of authority. “Silence,” said he, “is, after speech, the second power in the world.” They parted so; and although they again met after an interval, the erratic and devious career of Lamennais had no further influence worth noting upon the clear, straightforward course of his young associate. ‘L’Avenir’ and such brilliant follies were over. Life, serious and grave, now awaited the young priest and orator, whose time for trying the temper of his weapons and the steadiness of his strokes was past.

After this agitating and fruitless journey, Lacordaire returned to Paris, where he lived in seclusion, in duty, and silence, for three years. Immediately after his return the cholera broke out, and he gave himself up with grave enthusiasm to the necessities of the time, attaching himself to one of the temporary hospitals. “The prejudices against the clergy were still in full force,” says M. de Montalembert; “the authorities refused the help of the Archbishop of Paris, and priests could not show themselves in the streets en soutane.” But the attendance of Lacordaire and a few of his more zealous brethren was tolerated. “Each day I make a little harvest for eternity,” he writes. “Most of the patients do not confess, and the priest is here only a deputy of the Church, coming timidly to seek, if there may happen to be some soul which belongs to the flock. Here and there one or two confess—others are dying without ear and without voice. I put my hand upon their forehead, and, trusting in divine mercy, I say the words of absolution. It is seldom that I go away without a feeling of satisfaction in having come.” But amid these unappreciated labours, and in the loneliness, deeper than actual solitude, of a great town, the young priest amused his lonely heart with dreams of the tranquil country and a secluded life. He thought of becoming a rural curé, and in imagination chose Franche Comté, the country of his friend. “I would bury myself in the depths of the country,” he writes again, with an effusion of visionary yet profound sadness. “I would live only for a little flock, and find all my Joy in God and in the fields. It should be manifest that I am a simple man and without ambition. Adieu, great works! adieu, fame and great name! I have known their vanity, and I desire nothing more than to live obscure and good. Some day when Montalembert shall have grown grey in the midst of ingratitude and celebrity, he will come to see upon my forehead the remains of our common youth. We shall weep together at the hearth of the presbyterié—he will do me justice before we die. I shall bless his children.... For me, a poor Catholic priest, I shall neither have children growing up under my eyes to survive me, nor domestic hearth, nor Church brilliant with knowledge and sanctity. Born in degenerate times, I shall pass from the earth among things unworthy of the memory of man. I shall endeavour to be good, simple, pious,—hoping disinterestedly in the future, since I shall not see it—working for those who perhaps will see it—and not accusing Providence, which might weigh down with heavier evils a life which deserves so little.”

Such were the sad thoughts of the young man thus stopped short in the beginning of his career. He was not, however, permitted to leave Paris; he returned to his little convent of the Visitandines, where he lived, strengthening himself “in prayer and labour, in charity, in solitude—in a life grave, simple, unknown, truly hidden in God;” but where that sadness and wistful uneasiness which so often tries to persuade itself into contentment, by dwelling upon the advantages of solitude, betrays itself in his utterances. “How happy are they,” he writes, “who are born and die under one roof without ever having quitted it.” Then he congratulates himself on his retirement. “I have always needed solitude, if only to say how much I loved it.... My days all resemble each other. I work regularly in the morning and afternoon. I see no one, save some country ecclesiastics, who come to see me now and then. I feel with joy the solitude which encircles me—it is my element, my life. Nothing can be done but with solitude—it is my great axiom.... A man makes himself from within and not from without!” “Nevertheless,” adds the biographer, “a certain instinct of the future which awaited him combined with this passionate inclination for solitude, and disclosed itself now and then in his soul like a gleam in the night. To speak and to write, to live solitary and in study, this is my whole desire,” he wrote. “However, the future will justify me, and still more the judgment of God. A man has always his hour; he must wait for it, and do nothing contrary to Providence.”

All this was the natural language of a young and exuberant life, whose hour had not yet come, and which was fully occupied in the endeavour to content and satisfy itself in its compulsory calm. During this interval he preached his first sermon, which, after all the brilliant orations which he had made at the bar and before the public courts, was a failure. “He is a man of talent, but he will never be a preacher,” said his disappointed friends; and he acknowledged and tried to reconcile himself to the fact. “But I may one day be called to a work which requires youth, and which will be devoted solely to youth,” says the preacher, with a sigh of disappointment, yet hope. But soon the skies opened, and the work for which he longed presented itself at last.

It was as lecturer to the pupils of the College Stanislas, “the most humble in Paris,” that he recommenced in 1834 his public work. After his second lecture the chapel could not contain the crowd of hearers who joined his young auditory. At once, without any interval, he seems to have vindicated his own gifts and flashed into immediate popularity. But the shadow of ‘L’Avenir’ and all its combats was still upon him. After two winters occupied thus, the Archbishop, who was his friend, and had sanctioned his lectures, changed his mind, and forbade him to continue them. Lacordaire obeyed without a murmur. “Obedience is hard,” he wrote, “but I have learned by experience that it is sooner or later rewarded, and that God above knows what is best for us; light comes to him who submits, as to a man who opens his eyes.”

Shortly, however, his reward came. The heart of the Archbishop melted; at the repeated petition of a deputation of law students, headed by the celebrated Ozanam, he called the preacher of the College Stanislas to the pulpit of Notre Dame, to a lectureship which had been established a year before for the students of the metropolis. Here Lacordaire rose at once to the height of fame as a preacher. His genius had been maturing in the silence and disappointment of the past. Now there were no longer two opinions on the subject. The venerable walls of Notre Dame had never seen such an audience, says M. de Montalembert; and the highest applause, the applause of his gratified diocesan, crowned the triumph. The Archbishop, “who was present at all the sermons, and who for the first time since the violences of which he had been the victim after the Revolution of July, found himself in the presence of the crowd, was transported by a success which avenged him so nobly by associating him with the popularity of this new-born glory. One day, rising from his archiepiscopal throne before that immense audience, he bestowed on his young disciple the title of the new prophet.”

Around this new prophet a circle of young and fervent souls occupied the closest place. The Society of St Vincent de Paul, newly formed, and in all the ardour of its first love, whom the preacher apostrophised as “that chivalry of youth, purity, and brotherhood,” formed the nucleus of the congregation; and, looking back upon the image of his friend triumphant amid such a surrounding, it is not wonderful that M. de Montalembert breaks sharply off with a cry of indignation over the downfall of that admirable Society, “the most beautiful work of the nineteenth century,” as he exclaims, with natural fervour, “the most pure and spontaneous fruit of Christian democracy.” “Imagine Lacordaire in his strength, and with the liberty of the press, before such an act!” says his biographer, recalling the days of ‘L’Avenir;’ “imagine the justice which he would have done with that pen which of old had stigmatised much smaller culprits by burning invectives, the echo of which still vibrated in the pulpit of Notre Dame: Lui, ce sous-préfet!”

When he had thus reached the height of popularity, and attained the sphere of labour for which he had longed, Lacordaire stopped short in a manner which cannot fail to amaze the English reader. Here terminated the first chapter in the life of the great preacher. In the midst of his triumphant success, and of this work so congenial to his mind and satisfactory to his highest ambition, he came of his own will to a sudden pause in his career. “By one of those marvellous intuitions, of which he had more than any one else the secret, he recognised,” says M. de Montalembert, “that self-examination, labour, silence, and solitude were still necessary to him.” He paused at the height of his triumph. “I leave in the hands of my bishop this pulpit of Notre Dame, founded by him and by you, by the pastor and by the people. This double suffrage has shone for a moment on my head; suffer me to remove it, and to find myself again alone for a time with my weakness and my God.” With these words he concluded his second Lent in 1836. “After he had left the pulpit, he declined, notwithstanding the repeated entreaties of the Archbishop, to re-enter it, and departed for Rome.”

No outward circumstances accounted for this sudden pause. It was an internal need to which he responded by such a simple and actual withdrawal from life as seems unprovided for, even in the conceptions of Protestant piety. The spirit of Lacordaire, says one of his closest companions, his maternal friend, Madam Swetchine, required only the power of “subduing and containing itself in obscurity,” to become sublime; a great and general necessity of all others the least easily attainable. To accomplish such a victory over ourselves, we, in our heretical pride of reason and self-command, have no external aids. What we can do towards this greatest of conquests we must do under the cover of ordinary circumstances and labour, and few and happy are the men who do not find this perennial conflict recur in their disengaged moments all through their lives. But the Catholic Church has ordained a system of helps and stimulants in the great work of ruling their own spirit, which is harder to most men than taking cities. When the young Father Lacordaire felt the reins gliding out of his hands, in whatever way that occurred—for we have no information on the subject—the expedient of flight suggested itself to him, as it would have been very unlikely to do to an Englishman in similar circumstances. The Catholic priest thought it no shame to acknowledge to himself that his spirit stood in need of discipline. All the saints and holy men of his Church had at some period of their lives fled from the attractions of the world, and used sharp methods of subduing the flesh, which they did not hesitate to acknowledge was too strong for them. Lacordaire, too, withdrew to get the mastery of his own spirit. This was his object in going to Rome. He was in the height of manhood, thirty-four years old—the very noon of life. He was no superstitious or visionary priest, but a man already versed in the ways of the world, who had acquitted himself with intuitive good sense in more than one difficult crisis. He had passed through scepticism, through criticism, to that dutiful and steadfast faith which knew both how to reason and how to obey. He was not disappointed or unfortunate, but, on the contrary, glowing with success and triumph of the kind most gratifying to such a man. He was not even of an archæological type of mind, nor romantically prejudiced in favour of the antique institutions of Christendom; he was a liberal, a man of his day, an educated modern mind—able, surely, if ever priest or Catholic was, to form his opinion freely. He had arrested himself by his own will in a career abundantly flattering to all his tastes and vanities, and now stood thoughtful in the mid-current of his life to determine how he should best perfect and utilise that existence still in its highest force and power. Wandering about Rome, among its monuments and relics, praying to God, as he himself says, in its basilicas, he pondered this great question. Nowhere could have been found a fitter scene. Amid the ruins of many a grand ambition, over the traces engraven in the earth by many a haughty and undisciplined spirit, the thoughtful priest wandered, meditating the highest uses of his own life. His thoughts came to a conclusion which, to our eyes, seems the most inconceivable and astonishing ever made by man. He decided upon becoming a monk. Aware by many a mortifying experience that the very name of priest was still suspected and disliked in his own country, where all his power and influence lay, this man, so sensible, so moderate, so dutiful, whose genius had not made him eccentric, and whose sympathies were all with his own age, decided that the best thing he could do for France and the glory of God was to clothe his own vigorous life and personality in the obsolete dress of the cloister. It was not the cloistered indolence of an Italian convent to which he looked forward. In the strength of his life and genius he felt no need of that repose, which would but have chafed him. Eager for work, conscious of his own powers, devoted to his own country, and seeking to qualify himself for renewed and advancing labour, this was the decision to which Lacordaire came; a decision altogether inexplicable and amazing, which we are unable to account for at this distance, much less to explain.

Nor was this resolution adopted by any capricious impulse, or in any flash of imaginative ardour. It was a conclusion obtained not without pain and resistance of the flesh. “I persuaded myself then,” he explains, in one of his latest productions, quoted by M. de Montalembert, “while wandering about Rome, and praying God in its basilicas, that the greatest service which could be rendered to Christendom in the times in which we live, was to do something for the restoration of the religious orders. But this persuasion, though it was for me the very light of the Gospel, left me undecided and trembling, when I came to consider how unfit I was for such a great work. My faith, thank God, was profound. I loved Jesus Christ and His Church above everything created. I had loved glory before I loved God, but nothing else. Besides, in descending into myself, I found nothing there which seemed to me to answer to the idea of a founder or even restorer of an order. When I contemplated these Colossi of Christian strength and piety my soul fell under me, like a horseman under his horse—I was struck to the ground discouraged and wounded. The mere idea of sacrificing my liberty to a rule and to superiors overwhelmed me. The son of an age which scarcely knew how to obey, independence had been my couch and my guide. How could I transform myself suddenly into a docile heart, and henceforward trust only in submission for the light of my conduct?” The question was hard to answer. Of all men the young editor of ‘L’Avenir’ might have seemed the least likely to attain such a height of virtue; but from this difficulty he escapes, after much further self-argument, by the following conclusion:—

“I encouraged myself by these thoughts, and it occurred to me that all my previous life, and even my faults, had prepared for me a certain access to the heart of my country and my time. I asked myself if I should not be guilty if I neglected these openings by a timidity which was good for nothing but repose, and if the greatness even of the sacrifice was not a reason for attempting it?... Urged by the situation, and solicited by a grace stronger than myself, I at last made up my mind; but the sacrifice was terrible. It had not cost me nothing to leave the world for the priesthood, but it cost me everything to add to the priesthood the burden of monastic life. However, in the second case as in the first, as soon as I had consented to it I knew neither weakness nor repentance, and went forward courageously to meet the trials which awaited me.”

It is not difficult to recognise in this second great decision of his life the same prompt and steadfast spirit which, having convinced the young advocate of the nothingness of irreligion, bore him at once, without pause or lingering, into the service of that faith in which there was something, a power owned by all human hearts. It is the same principle which again moves him. Common means and modes of working this power have been sadly unsuccessful of recent years. What is this grand, unused, obsolete instrument, the traces of which are marked all over that Roman soil among the vines and the ruins? Who can tell if perhaps that, restored to efficient working, and new-tempered and polished, might accomplish, as of old, those prodigies of labour and service, for which the usual tools seem no longer practicable? As soon as he settles in his mind the undoubted duty of trying this forgotten weapon, and restoring it to the armoury of the Church, no further pause is necessary. In the height of his fame and strength, the great preacher returns upon the new preparations and training necessary for his new life. He disappears into “the depths of an Italian cloister” for his novitiate, assured that he is thus doing his highest duty to God and his country. “I believe that this act is the dénouement of my life—the result of all that God has done before—the secret of His graces, of my trials and experiences,” he writes. “I am like a man who has gained some credit, and who can apply it to some useful and generous work. Without the past I could do nothing; by continuing only the past, it would be a life of which the effect was not proportioned to the grace which God has given me.” This was the strange result of his retirement and pondering. In Notre Dame, amid the throng of impressed and admiring hearers, the preacher felt that he was not doing enough, nor making sufficient use of God’s gifts. A noble discontent had seized him—he had to make better usury yet, and greater, of his talent. To see him, after all his questioning, disappear into that Italian cloister, is to us the strangest anticlimax—the most wonderful apparent contradiction; but it was the calm conclusion of his mind—a mind ripe and well able to judge, unimpassioned and sensible. We do not attempt to offer any explanation of the act, nor do we profess ourselves competent to understand the convictions that led to it; but strange as it is, here is the fact, let us draw what conclusions we will. According to Lacordaire’s deliberate and thoughtful decision, he could serve God best as a monk, and a monk accordingly he became.

Five years afterwards he reappeared in the pulpit of Notre Dame, “with his shaven head and his white tunic.” He preached with his usual eloquence upon La Vocation de la Nation Française, and spoke only in passing of his own monastic vocation. He made but one appearance, contenting himself apparently with “inaugurating in France,” as M. de Montalembert says, “the monastic frock, which she had not seen for fifty years.” He disappeared from Paris after this for two years more, dividing his time between the Italian cloister and the southern provinces of France, until in 1843 a new war began to rage in the French world, on that old question of liberty of teaching, for which the young ‘L’Avenir,’ years ago, had fought so stoutly, and for which its editors had made their appearance at the bar of the Chamber of Peers. Under the influence of this strife, and just as the Government awoke to alarm, and began to regard with apprehension the appearance of the Dominican frock in the pulpit and in the streets, the new Archbishop invited Lacordaire to resume his lectureship in Notre Dame. The Frère Prêcheur took his place again in the metropolitan pulpit: it was at once a defiance of the alarmed Government, and a re-proclamation of those principles of religious liberty on which the preacher had long ago taken his stand. For this question “de la liberté d’enseignement” involved also the question of liberty of association, the power of forming communities—a power nominally accorded to the French nation by its charter, but which had never been actually granted to it. The Church, wise as a serpent, seized upon this public right. She, too, had bethought herself of the long disused and valuable instrument of monasticism. Without monks no thorough hold could be got upon popular educational institutions; but without the power of forming corporations and organising bodies of men, the invasion of a new race of monks was impossible. On the other hand, alarmed statesmen and the public in general foresaw, with this power in the hands of the Church, an immediate inroad of the dreaded Jesuit and his brethren, to lay insidious hold upon the education of the people. “While the bishops and Catholic publicists,” says M. de Montalembert, “claimed the liberty promised by the charter with all its consequences, the numerous orators and writers of the University party defended its monopoly, and made use especially against the Jesuits of that unpopularity which the heirs of the perverse doctrines and cruel persecutions of the eighteenth century could everywhere re-awaken against the religious orders. We owe them nothing but expulsion! this cry of a deputy too famous for his interruptions, seemed to the world of so-called liberals the best response to the claims raised for religious associations in the name of liberty and equality.” The Church mustered her forces gallantly, and went into the conflict with might and main. With cunning boldness she placed two of the feared and suspected monks in the pulpit of Notre Dame—Lacordaire, in his white Dominican robe, and the Jesuit De Ravignan—to fire between them the new-born enthusiasm of French Catholics, and show what voices were these which the timidity of the State and the prejudices of the vulgar would banish from France. Into that pulpit politics did not enter—but an instrument more efficacious was there. “Lacordaire did not himself enter into the controversy,” says M. de Montalembert, “and not the least allusion to it is to be found in all his discourses.... But the universal popularity of his preaching, the immense audiences which everywhere collected around the pulpit in which he appeared, were arguments much more eloquent than discussions of politics or public law. It sufficed him to establish his victory by preaching in Paris and throughout France, and by assuming the right of living in a community, and attiring himself as he pleased, which no one dared to contest with him, in the different places where he lived with his brethren.” Such was the unquestionably potent line of argument set up by the Gallican Church. Here was the greatest preacher of the age, a man pure and pious, incapable of self-aggrandisement, full of ardour for God’s service, known to have hazarded his life in hospital and public pestilence, a champion of popular liberty, altogether of spotless reputation and well-deserved fame; was the order to which such a man belonged, by free will and choice, to be feared and banished? were such as he to be interrupted in their great work because they preferred to wear a certain garb and conform to certain rules? No, in the name of liberty! A more effective plea could scarcely be imagined. Lacordaire’s colleague, the Père de Ravignan, claimed for himself, as M. de Montalembert tells us, “as a citizen, and in the name of the charter, and of the liberty of conscience guaranteed to all, the right of being and of calling himself a Jesuit.” But the Frère Prêcheur does not seem to have done even so much as this. Never abandoning the idea for which others were now fighting as he had once fought, he devoted himself to his duties in the midst of the strife—made his monkish frock splendid with the eloquence of a voice worthy the old renown of the French pulpit—made it familiar to all eyes as he travelled through the country collecting crowds of eager hearers everywhere; finally, with quiet resolution, established here and there, in different quarters, houses of his order, assuming for himself, in the strength of his character and fame, the very right for which his colleagues were struggling, and giving calm intimation, as he did so, that he would defend this right, if attacked, before the tribunals of his country. Nobody ventured to attack Lacordaire. The white Dominican went all over France, leaving behind him here and there a little nucleus of monks. Public opinion melted before the great preacher. If men’s minds did not change, at least their opposition was hushed and put down by the unquestionable eminence of the man. “Henceforward,” he himself says, “in all the pulpits, and upon all the roads of France, the monastic robe has recovered the right of citizenship which it lost in 1790.” He restored the credit of the monks, and gained a certain degree of toleration for the Jesuits themselves, and thus won what is in the eyes of M. de Montalembert “the great victory which shall immortalise his name.”

This struggle, which Lacordaire himself calls “the most perilous and the most decisive of all his campaigns,” was brought to a conclusion by the renewed political agitations of 1848. In that strange hubbub and overthrow of existing affairs, the tide of public commotion, by way of demonstrating the hold he had obtained on the public mind, drew the monk from his retirement to plunge him into the newly-formed Assembly of France. His appearance there did not, in the excitement of the time, shock the sensibilities of any; his election even “charmed and reassured all religious men;” and the preacher himself was sufficiently sanguine to believe that the mild Lamartine sway was to maintain the constitution of France, and that great charter for which he had fought so long, and to introduce a new era in the history of the nation. He obeyed the voice of the people, like other great Elects, and took his seat always in his Dominican frock in the revolutionary parliament—and he assisted in founding another paper, ‘L’Ere Nouvelle,’ which was neither so long-lived nor so brilliant as ‘L’Avenir’ of his youth. But the natural good sense of the man shortly interposed. His parliamentary career lasted but ten days, and erelong he retired also from the newspaper, and withdrew to one of his new convents to recover himself and throw off the excitement of this renewed essay at politics. Then having shaken himself free of this interruption, he went back to his beloved pulpit, where he preached and laboured as before for three years. But in April 1851, when concluding his lectures, he took an unlooked-for and unintended farewell—some subtle shadow of coming events, which, however, he denies to be a presentiment, having moved him to special tenderness and pathos—of the pulpit in which, more or less, he had laboured for twenty years. “Oh, walls of Notre Dame! sacred arches which have borne my words to so many intelligences deprived of God! altars which have blessed me! I will never separate from you!” he cries, his heart moving within him as he recalls his past life, and all that has happened there, since, young and in the dawn of his fame, he made his first appearance in the metropolitan church. But he never again entered the pulpit thus endeared by the labours of a life; once more only he preached in Paris, and once again, in 1854, delivered, at the request of the Archbishop, six discourses in Toulouse. His career as a preacher had come to an abrupt and unexpected conclusion: for in the mean time that virtuous republic, which Lamartine and his brethren had begun so mildly, had fallen into desperate troubles, and the sharp and sudden stroke of the coup d’état had shocked society in France into a new mood. Freedom of speech, eloquence itself, went suddenly out of fashion. Silence was best when there was so little to say that could be anyhow consolatory to the people or satisfactory to the ruler. With a delicate but indignant reticence, M. de Montalembert indicates thus the reason of his friend’s sudden withdrawal from the pulpit:—

“I do not think that any formal interdiction emanating even from the temporal authorities had ever been pronounced against him; but there was a general sentiment that this bold and free language which he had used for twenty years, under all changes, without meeting any obstacle, without recognising any curb but that of orthodoxy, was now out of date. Evil days had come for the struggles and the triumphs of eloquence. It was universally repudiated, and made responsible for all the misfortunes of the country, for all the dangers of society, by a triumphant revenge of those who had never been able to make any man listen to them. The prince of sacred eloquence had thus to be silent. He said afterwards, ‘I left the pulpit in a spontaneous fear of my liberty before an age which was no longer free. I perceive,’ he added, ‘that in my thoughts, in my language, in my past, in what remains to me of future, I also was a kind of freedom, and that my hour had come to disappear like the others.’”

He preached no more. He was not yet fifty—still in the full vigour of his powers—but the day of discussion, of agitation, of eloquence was over, and Lacordaire, with instinctive wisdom, seems to have perceived the expediency of submission. It is a strange conclusion to a singular career. After the chivalrous pugnacity of his earlier years; after his steady struggle all his life through, by every possible means to link together democracy and Catholicism, the old unmoving Church and the new ever-varying world; after ‘L’Avenir’ of his youth, with its daring hopes and efforts—the brilliant youthful future which he and his colleagues were to work out of revolution and anarchy—and ‘L’Ere Nouvelle’ of his later years, which had less of the future, less of hope, yet was still a new beginning;—it is a strange sight to see the champion suddenly drop his arms and stand silent, arrested for ever before this new, strange, silent figure of absolutism which has suddenly erected itself against the agitated firmament. When this unlooked-for apparition rises between him and the skies, the great preacher has nothing more to say. All is over in a moment. “I have never feared but one thing—the absolute triumph of an individual,” said his friend, Madame Swetchine. And when, at last, after a world of controversy and discussion, that dreaded event arrived, the public life of the great orator came to an almost instantaneous conclusion. He retired not by compulsion, but by some internal sense of necessity. “He had no violence, no persecution to complain of,” says his biographer, “and I only render homage to truth by declaring that I have never seen in him the least trace of bitterness or of animosity against the new power. This power inspired him only with the sentiment of neutrality, dignified and a little disdainful, which existed in his nature in respect to all powers.” But whatever his sentiment might be, the fact is certain. Before all other developments of power the orator had held up bravely the banner of the Church, and kept his place. Before this new potency he gave way and yielded. It is one of the strangest acts of homage ever done to an unquestionable strength—“Le prince de la parole sacrée dût donc se taire.” He gave up that right over which he had rejoiced in the fervent days of his youth as “something inalienable, divine, eternally free”—the right of speaking of God. He made neither resistance nor public protest. The shadow of the new Empire fell over him in sudden chill and silence, and the words died upon his fervid lips. He who had spoken so freely, laboured so hard, spent himself so liberally for the service of his Church and country, was in himself, as he expresses it, “a kind of liberty”—a personified freedom; and, as with other freedoms, the day was over for him. He saw by intuition that resistance was useless. The silent despot overawed, as by a species of fascination, the eloquent priest, who, in his heart, was “a little disdainful” of all kinds of powers. This new kind of power, personal, self-concentrated, standing alone in an inexorable mute mystery over the destinies of France, silenced the preacher as if by force of instinct. His voice died out of the country, which had fallen into a sudden paralysis, half of fear, half of admiration, before this basilisk Emperor. The spell was upon Lacordaire as upon France. He never opened his lips again in public after that one series of provincial lectures, which were themselves broken off and left imperfect, because one of them contained “some outbursts of truth, of grief, and of boldness, which were no longer in season. He had to renounce public speaking definitively,” says M. de Montalembert, with significant reserve; and here, according with the beginning of the imperial power, ended his public life.

He withdrew after this to Soraye, an ancient abbey, first of the Benedictines, then of the Dominicans, to which order he himself belonged, and where there now flourished a large public school. He devoted himself to the regeneration and perfection of this institution, to “the teaching of youth, which had always been the supreme vocation of his life.” Here he consoled the sadness and disappointment of his heart, wounded as it was by the sudden overthrow of all the work of his life, and by the sad and rapid change of affairs which had taken place in France, among the children whom he loved. But though he made no public complaint, and manfully devoted himself to the favourite occupation which Providence had still left to him, the lamentable downfall of all his hopes went to the heart of the liberal monk. His country, his age, “which scarcely knew how to obey,” had become all at once eager “not only to accept but to implore a master.” His Church and religious party, “clergy and Catholics, who had so long applauded the masculine independence of his eloquence, had fallen all at once a prey to a delusion without excuse, and to a prostration without example in all the history of the Church. Names which had been honoured to appear beside his own in the memorable manifestoes by which Christian liberty had invoked the sole shelter of public freedom, appeared all at once affixed to harangues and mandiments which borrowed the forms of Byzantine adulation to salute the mad dream of an orthodox absolutism.” “Till the last day of his life,” adds M. de Montalembert, “the grief and indignation with which the sight of this great moral catastrophe inspired him was not weakened. But his affliction, his magnanimous wrath, breathed forth in his letters. This treasure remains to us, thank God! it will be preserved for posterity; and when the time shall come when all may be said, it will appear as the most brilliant and most necessary of protests against those who have so miserably divided, disarmed, and discredited Catholicism in France.”

We have no space to quote, as the biographer does, those melancholy and indignant letters. Whilst thus breathing forth to his friends the disappointment which consumed his soul, Lacordaire lived on in his southern seminary, far from the busy world which had deceived him, a life of usefulness and silence. It was a “retreat laborious and animated” in which he now found himself; and, with a true Christian philosophy, the great orator bent all his faculties to his work. “One of the consolations of my present life,” he writes, with touching sadness, “is to live only with God and children: the latter have their faults, but they have still betrayed nothing and dishonoured nothing.” He made Soraye “the most flourishing and popular scholastic establishment in the south;” he formed a tender paternal friendship with many young souls, over whom he had immense influence. With the same eloquence which he had displayed in Notre Dame he preached to his pupils in their provincial chapel. In short, he accepted his position like a true man; and, hiding his mortification, his profound disappointment, his injured heart in his own breast, devoted himself to the important but obscure position in which he was to end his life. Here another great event happened to him in his seclusion. It was from Soraye he came, in his Dominican frock, to receive from the French Academy “the noblest recompense which can, in our days, crown a glorious and independent life.” He sat one day only in that illustrious assembly, where he appeared, as he himself said, as “the symbol of freedom accepted and fortified by religion.” This last honour was the last public event which occurred in his life. He went back laureated for his dying, and ended his life in Soraye, after a painful illness—so far as we are able to make out, for M. de Montalembert is indistinct in the matter of dates—in the winter of 1861. “It is the first time that my body has resisted my will,” he said, with a half-playful melancholy, in the midst of his sufferings; and died exclaiming, “My God, open to me, open to me!” with a sublime simplicity. God opened to him, and his agitations were over. Whether on the other side of that wonderful gateway he might discover that his monkish frock was less worth fighting for than it appeared, who can inquire? He lived a life full of worthy labour and service, and doubtless found his reward.

Our space does not permit us to follow M. de Montalembert, in his quotations from the letters and sermons of his friend, though there are in these letters many snatches of brilliant and tender eloquence on which we are much tempted to linger. It is not, however, in his productions that Lacordaire is most remarkable; it is in his character and career. “The principal thing is to have a life,” he himself said, when deprecating the over-production of modern literature; and no man has more exemplified the saying. He had a life, this man of conflict and strife, of self-denial and silence, of independence and duty—a life too human to make any formal anatomical consistency over-visible in its flesh-and-blood details—broadly contradictory, yet always in a harmony with itself more true than consistency. With his heart full of the agitations and the hopes of his time, he lived in his cloister in the practice of self-mortifications and punishments as severe as those with which any antique son of Dominic had subdued the flesh. “When all the events of this generous life shall be known, the orator will disappear before the monk,” says his sympathetic and admiring biographer, “and the prestige of that eloquence which has moved, enlightened, and converted so many souls, will seem a less marvel than the formidable austerity of his life, the severity with which he chastised his flesh, and his passionate love for Jesus Christ.” This is the side of his character and existence least comprehensible to the English spectator. How he, so unimpassioned, so temperate, so sensible—he who had only loved glory, and nothing else, before he loved God—should have needed “excessive macerations” to subdue that flesh which, so far as appears, was far from exercising any despotic sway over the spirit, is a curious question, and one which perhaps never can be answered to the satisfaction of our practical understandings; but the interest, the individuality, and sincere nobleness of his life seem unquestionable. From his little convent he passes to the bar and public tribunal, where even the unwilling crowd applauds; to the pulpit, where admiring multitudes surround him; yet returns to his Visitandines and his almonry, obedient and silent, when the hour of his triumph is over. From the height of popular fame and success, driven by that noble intuition in his heart that he is not sufficiently using the talent God has given him, he withdraws to take up the monk’s frock, most despised of habits, not to hide a mortified life or wounded heart, as a sentimental bystander might suppose, but for the sake of the labour and use of which he believes it still capable. Deeply contradictory as such a proceeding is of all our convictions and theories, it is far from our thoughts to blame Lacordaire for this singular vestment in which he enwrapped all his later life. It may be that to the eyes of this languid and over-refining age, the forcible type and symbol which antedate all arguments is, after all, the thing most wanted; and that the apparition of the monk, self-denuded of all possessions, even of his own will, for the glory of God and the service of his neighbour, may startle the confused intelligence into a belief of that work and its importance, which no philosophy could give. Such at least seems to have been the conviction of Lacordaire. Like his great contemporary Irving, the French preacher felt the inefficacy of common means for the work on which his heart was set. To both the world came open-mouthed, wondering and admiring; but neither in the London modern church, nor under the noble arches of Notre Dame, was the report of the prophet believed as he felt in his heart it ought to be. This uneasiness in the passionate heart of our great countryman gave rise, by some subtle magnetic influence, to a wild dream of miraculous aid and voices from heaven; and in the self-controlled and unimpassioned soul of the French priest it wrought an issue almost as strange—the restoration, to some extent, of monasticism in his country, and the dedication of his own life to that disused and discredited vocation. No two men could be more unlike, but here both met in a strange concord and agreement. Something had to be done beyond the ordinary routine of evangelism to seize upon the dull ear and sluggish heart of the time. Supernaturalism, or monasticism, or any other martyrdom—what matter, so it did but startle that slumbering generation to some thought of its evil ways? Let us build the sepulchres of those prophets whom our fathers, by their apathy and indifference, drove into such a noble desperation. We too, doubtless, will do our share of the same work. Yet it is a kind of penitence of humanity for its ever-recurring mistakes and misconceptions, which prompts one generation to decorate the tombs into which the sins of a former generation have urged and driven the not perfect yet noble dead.

LADY MORGAN’S MEMOIRS.[^[4]]

In a small house furnished in the tawdry-brilliant style, in a small street adjoining Lowndes Square, there dwelt, between the years 1828 and 1859, a small woman, who, though very old, persisted in believing herself to be young, and dressed and spoke and acted as if she were the observed of all observers. She was not handsome; she never could have been, for there were defects both in face and form at variance with beauty; but she was bright, or rather brisk, in the expression of her countenance, and her air was jaunty, though neither graceful nor elegant. The career of this little woman had been a remarkably busy, and, on the whole, a successful one. She was a voluminous writer, and had made a good deal of money out of her publishers. By a process which is perhaps better understood on the other side of St George’s Channel than here, she succeeded in making her way into what is called “society,” and she never loosened her hold, having once made it fast, upon man or woman, whom, for any reason of rank, worth, or talent, she considered it worth while to cultivate. It is curious to observe likewise the skill with which she makes it appear that the balance of advantage in the matter of acquaintance was always on the side of her friends, especially when they happened to be gentlemen; for she laboured under the happy delusion of believing that she was not only the cleverest, but the most beautiful woman of the age, and that no man, young or old, married or single, ever approached except to fall in love with her.