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BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. DLXIX.      MARCH 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. DLXIX.      MARCH 1863.      Vol. XCIII

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

By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’

PART XIV.

NO. XIX.—MOTIVE POWER (concluded).

The next day the atmosphere was much cooler, refreshed by a heavy shower that had fallen at dawn; and when, not long after noon, Percival and I, mounted on ponies bred in the neighbouring forests, were riding through the narrow lanes towards the house we had agreed to visit, we did not feel the heat oppressive. It was a long excursion; we rode slowly, and the distance was about sixteen miles.

We arrived at last at a little hamlet remote from the highroads. The cottages, though old-fashioned, were singularly neat and trim—flower-plots before them, and small gardens for kitchen use behind. A very ancient church, with its parsonage, backed the broad village-green; and opposite the green stood one of those small quaint manor-houses which satisfied the pride of our squires two hundred years ago. On a wide garden-lawn in front were old yew-trees cut into fantastic figures of pyramids and obelisks and birds and animals; beyond the lawn, on a levelled platform immediately before the house, was a small garden, with a sundial, and a summer-house or pavilion of the date of William III., when buildings of that kind, for a short time, became the fashionable appendage to country-houses, frequently decorated inside with musical trophies, as if built for a music-room; but, I suspect, more generally devoted to wine and pipes by the host and his male friends. At the rear of the house stretched an ample range of farm-buildings in very good repair and order, the whole situated on the side of a hill, sufficiently high to command an extensive prospect, bounded at the farthest distance by the sea, yet not so high as to lose the screen of hills, crested by young plantations of fir and larch; while their midmost slopes were, in part, still abandoned to sheep-walks; in part, brought (evidently of late) into cultivation; and farther down, amid the richer pastures that dipped into the valley, goodly herds of cattle indolently grazed or drowsily reposed.

We dismounted at the white garden-gate. A man ran out from the farmyard and took our ponies; evidently a familiar acquaintance of Tracey’s, for he said heartily, “that he was glad to see his honour looking so well,” and volunteered a promise that the ponies should be well rubbed down, and fed. “Master was at home; we should find him in the orchard swinging Miss Lucy.”

So, instead of entering the house, Tracey, who knew all its ways, took me round to the other side, and we came into one of those venerable orchards which carry the thought back to the early day when the orchard was, in truth, the garden.

A child’s musical laugh guided us through the lines of heavy-laden apple-trees to the spot where the once famous prizeman—the once brilliant political thinker—was now content to gratify the instinctive desire tentare aërias vias—in the pastime of an infant.

He was so absorbed in his occupation that he did not hear or observe us till we were close at his side. Then, after carefully arresting the swing, and tenderly taking out the little girl, he shook hands with Percival; and when the ceremony of mutual introduction was briefly concluded, extended the same courtesy to myself.

Gray was a man in the full force of middle life, with a complexion that seemed to have been originally fair and delicate, but had become bronzed and hardened by habitual exposure to morning breezes and noonday suns. He had a clear bright blue eye, and a countenance that only failed of being handsome by that length and straightness of line between nostril and upper lip, which is said by physiognomists to be significant of firmness and decision. The whole expression of his face, though frank and manly, was, however, rather sweet than harsh; and he had one of those rare voices which almost in themselves secure success to a public speaker—distinct and clear, even in its lowest tone, as a silvery bell.

I think much of a man’s nature is shown by the way in which he shakes hands. I doubt if any worldly student of Chesterfieldian manners can ever acquire the art of that everyday salutation, if it be not inborn in the kindness, loyalty, and warmth of his native disposition. I have known many a great man who lays himself out to be popular, who can school his smile to fascinating sweetness, his voice to persuasive melody, but who chills or steels your heart against him the moment he shakes hands with you.

But there is a cordial clasp which shows warmth of impulse, unhesitating truth, and even power of character—a clasp which recalls the classic trust in the “faith of the right hand.”

And the clasp of Hastings Gray’s hand at once propitiated me in his favour. While he and I exchanged the few words with which acquaintance commences, Percival had replaced Miss Lucy in the swing, and had taken the father’s post. Lucy, before disappointed at the cessation of her amusement, felt now that she was receiving a compliment, which she must not abuse too far; so she very soon, of her own accord, unselfishly asked to be let down, and we all walked back towards the house.

“You will dine with us, I hope,” said Gray. “I know when you come at this hour, Sir Percival, that you always meditate giving us that pleasure.” (Turning to me,) “It is now half-past three, we dine at four o’clock, and that early hour gives you time to rest, and ride back in the cool of the evening.”

“My dear Gray,” answered Percival, “I accept your invitation for myself and my friend. I foresaw you would ask us, and left word at home that we were not to be waited for. Where is Mrs Gray?”

“I suspect that she is about some of those household matters which interest a farmer’s wife. Lucy, run and tell your mamma that these gentlemen will dine with us.”

Lucy scampered off.

“The fact is,” said Tracey, “that we have a problem to submit to you. You know how frequently I come to you for a hint when something puzzles me. But we can defer that knotty subject till we adjourn, as usual, to wine and fruit in your summer-house. Your eldest boy is at home for the holidays?”

“Not at home, though it is his holidays. He is now fifteen, and he and a school friend of his are travelling on foot into Cornwall. Nothing, I think, fits boys better for life than those hardy excursions in which they must depend on themselves, shift for themselves, think for themselves.”

“I daresay you are right,” said Tracey; “the earlier each of us human beings forms himself into an individual God’s creature, distinct from the servum pecus, the better chance he has of acquiring originality of mind and dignity of character. And your other children?”

“Oh, my two younger boys I teach at home, and one little girl—I play with.” Here addressing me, Gray asked “If I farmed?”

“Yes,” said I, “but very much as les Rois Fainéants reigned. My bailiff is my Maire du Palais. I hope, therefore, that our friend Sir Percival will not wound my feelings as a lover of Nature by accusing me of wooing her for the sake of her turnips.”

“Ah!” said Gray, smiling, “Sir Percival, I know, holds to the doctrine that the only pure love of Nature is the æsthetic; and looks upon the intimate connection which the husbandman forms with her as a cold-blooded mariage de convenance.”

“I confess,” answered Percival, “that I agree with the great German philosopher, that the love of Nature is pure in proportion as the delight in her companionship is unmixed with any idea of the gain she can give us. But a pure love may be a very sterile affection; and a mariage de convenance may be prolific in very fine offspring. I concede to you, therefore, that the world is bettered by the practical uses to which Nature has been put by those who wooed her for the sake of her dower: and I no more commend to the imitation of others my abstract æsthetic affection for her abstract æsthetic beauty, than I would commend Petrarch’s poetical passion for Laura to the general adoption of lovers. I give you, then, gentlemen farmers, full permission to woo Nature for the sake of her turnips. Our mutton is all the better for it.”

“And that is no small consideration,” said Gray. “If I had gazed on my sheep-walks with the divine æsthetic eye, and without one forethought of the profit they might bring me, I should not already have converted 200 out of the 1000 acres I possess into land that would let at 30s. per acre, where formerly it let at 5s. But, with all submission to the great German philosopher, I don’t think I love Nature the less because of the benefits with which she repays the pains I have taken to conciliate her favour. If, thanks to her, I can give a better education to my boys, and secure a modest provision for my girl, is it the property of gratitude to destroy or to increase affection? But you see, sir, there is this difference between Sir Percival and myself:—He has had no motive in improving Nature for her positive uses, and therefore he has been contented with giving her a prettier robe. He loves her as a grand seigneur loves his mistress. I love her as a man loves the helpmate who assists his toils. According as in rural life my mind could find not repose, but occupation—according as that occupation was compatible with such prudent regard to fortune as a man owes to the children he brings into the world—my choice of life would be a right or a wrong one. In short, I find in the cultivation of Nature my business as well as my pleasure. I have a motive for the business which does not diminish my taste for the pleasure.”

Tracey and I exchanged looks. So, then, here was a motive for activity. But why was the motive towards activity in pursuits requiring so little of the intellect for which Gray had been characterised, and so little of the knowledge which his youth had acquired, so much stronger than the motive towards a career which proffered an incalculably larger scope for his powers? Here, there was no want of energy—here, there had been no philosophical disdain of ambition—here, no great wealth leaving no stimulant to desires—no niggard poverty paralysing the sinews of hope. The choice of retirement had been made in the full vigour of a life trained from boyhood to the exercises that discipline the wrestlers for renown.

While I was thus musing, Gray led the way towards the farmyard, and on reaching it said to me,—

“Since you do farm, if only by deputy, I must show you the sheep with which I hope to win the first prize at our agricultural show in September.”

“So you still care for prizes?” said I: “the love of fame is not dead within your breast.”

“Certainly not; ‘Pride attends us still.’ I am very proud of the prizes I have already won; last year for my wurzel—the year before, for the cow I bred on my own pastures.”

We crossed the farmyard, and arrived at the covered sheep-pens. I thought I had never seen finer sheep than those which Gray showed me with visible triumph. Then we two conversed with much animation upon the pros and cons in favour of stall-feeding versus free grazing, while Tracey amused himself, first in trying to conciliate a great dog, luckily for him chained up in the adjoining yard, and next, in favouring the escape of a mouse who had incautiously quitted the barn, and ventured within reach of a motherly hen, who seemed to regard it as a monster intent on her chicks.

Reaching the house, Gray conducted us up a flight of oak stairs—picturesque in its homely old-fashioned way—with wide landing-place, adorned by a blue china jar, filled with pot-pourri, and by a tall clock (one of Tompion’s, now rare), in walnut-wood case; consigning us each to a separate chamber, to refresh ourselves by those simple ablutions, with which, even in rustic retirements, civilised Englishmen preface the hospitable rites of Ceres and Bacchus.

The room in which I found myself was one of those never seen out of England, and only there in unpretending country-houses which have escaped the innovating tastes of fashion. A bedstead of the time of George I., with mahogany fluted columns and panels at the bedhead, dark and polished, decorated by huge watch-pockets of some great-grandmother’s embroidery, white spotless curtains, the walls in panel, also painted white, and covered in part with framed engravings a century old. A large high screen, separating the washstand from the rest of the room, made lively by old caricatures and prints, doubtless the handiwork of female hands long stilled. A sweet, not strong, odour of dried lavender escaped from a chest of drawers, polished as bright as the bedstead. The small lattice-paned window opened to the fresh air; the woodbine framing it all round from without; amongst the woodbine the low hum of bees. A room for early sleep and cheerful rising with the eastern sun, which the window faced.

Tracey came into my room while I was still looking out of the casement, gazing on the little gardenplot without, bright with stocks and pinks and heartsease, and said, “Well, you see £600 a-year can suffice to arrest a clever man’s ambition.”

“I suspect,” answered I, “that the ambition is not arrested but turned aside to the object of doubling the £600 a-year. Neither ambition nor the desire of gain is dead in that farmyard.”

“We shall cross-question our host after dinner,” answered Tracey; “meanwhile let me conduct you to the dining-room. A pretty place this, in its way, is it not?”

“Very,” said I, with enthusiasm. “Could you not live as happily here as in your own brilliant villa?”

“No, not quite, but still happily.”

“Why not quite?”

“First, because there is nothing within or without the house which one could attempt to improve, unless by destroying the whole character of what is so good in its way; secondly, where could I put my Claudes and Turners? where my statues? where, oh where, my books? where, in short, the furniture of Man’s mind?”

I made no answer, for the dinner-bell rang loud, and we went down at once into the dining-room—a quaint room, scarcely touched since the date of William III. A high and heavy dado of dark oak, the rest of the walls in Dutch stamped leather, still bright and fresh; a high mantelpiece, also of oak, with a very indifferent picture of still life let into the upper panel; arched recesses on either side, receptacles for china and tall drinking-glasses; heavy chairs, with crests inlaid on their ponderous backs, and faded needlework on their ample seats;—all, however, speaking of comfort and home, and solid though unassuming prosperity. Gray had changed his rude morning dress, and introduced me to his wife with an evident husbandlike pride. Mrs Gray was still very pretty; in her youth she must have been prettier even than Clara Thornhill, and though very plainly dressed, still it was the dress of a gentlewoman. There was intelligence, but soft timid intelligence, in her dark hazel eyes and broad candid forehead. I soon saw, however, that she was painfully shy, and not at all willing to take her share in the expense of conversation. But with Tracey she was more at her ease than with a stranger, and I thanked him inwardly for coming to my relief, as I was vainly endeavouring to extract from her lips more than a murmured monosyllable.

The dinner, however, passed off very pleasantly. Simple old English fare—plenty of it—excellent of its kind. Tracey was the chief talker, and made himself so entertaining, that at last even Mrs Gray’s shyness wore away, and I discovered that she had a well-informed graceful mind, constitutionally cheerful, as was evidenced by the blithe music of her low but happy laugh.

The dinner over, we adjourned, as Percival had proposed, to the summer-house. There we found the table spread with fruits and wine, of which last the port was superb; no better could be dragged from the bins of a college, or blush on the board of a prelate. Mrs Gray, however, deserted us, but we now and then caught sight of her in the garden without, playing gaily with her children—two fine little boys, and Lucy, who seemed to have her own way with them all, as she ought—the youngest child, the only girl—justifiably papa’s pet, for she was the one most like her mother.

“Gray,” said Tracey, “my friend and I have had some philosophical disputes, which we cannot decide to our own satisfaction, on the reasons why some men do so much more in life than other men, without having any apparent intellectual advantage over those who are contented to be obscure. We have both hit on a clue to the cause, in what we call motive power. But what this motive power really is, and why it should fail in some men and be so strong in others, is matter of perplexity, at least to me, and I fancy my friend himself is not much more enlightened therein than I am. So we have both come here to hear what you have to say—you, who certainly had motive enough for ambitious purposes when you swept away so many academical prizes—when you rushed into speech and into print, and cast your bold eye on St Stephen’s. And now, what has become of that motive power? Is it all put into prizes for root-crops and sheep?”

“As to myself,” answered Gray, passing the wine, “I can give very clear explanations. I am of a gentleman’s family, but the son of a very poor curate. Luckily for me, we lived close by an excellent grammar-school, at which I obtained a free admission. From the first day I entered, I knew that my poor father, bent on making me a scholar, counted on my exertions not only for my own livelihood, but for a provision for my mother should she survive him. Here was motive enough to supply motive power. I succeeded in competition with rivals at school, and success added to the strength of the motive power. Our county member, on whose estate I was born, took a kindly interest in me, and gave me leave, when I quitted school, as head boy, to come daily to his house and share the studies of his son, who was being prepared for the university by a private tutor, eminent as a scholar and admirable as a teacher. Thus I went up to college not only full of hope (in itself a motive power, though, of itself, an unsafe one), but of a hope so sustained that it became resolution, by the knowledge that to maintain me at the university my parents were almost literally starving themselves. This suffices to explain whatever energy and application I devoted to my academical career. At last I obtained my fellowship; the income of that I shared with my parents; but if I died before them the income would die also—a fresh motive power towards a struggle for fortune in the Great World. I took up politics, I confess it very frankly, as a profession rather than a creed; it was the shortest road to fame, and, with prudence, perhaps to pecuniary competence. If I succeeded in Parliament I might obtain a living for my father, or some public situation for myself not dependent on the fluctuations of party. A very high political ambition was denied me by the penury of circumstance. A man must have good means of his own who aspires to rank among party chiefs. I knew I was but a political adventurer, that I could only be so considered; and had it not been for my private motive power, I should have been ashamed of my public one. As it was, my scholarly pride was secretly chafed at the thought that I was carrying into the affairs of state the greed of trade. Suddenly, most unexpectedly, this estate was bequeathed to me. You large proprietors will smile when I say that we had always regarded the Grays of Oakden Hall with venerating pride; they were the head of our branch of the clan. My father had seen this place in his boyhood; the remembrance of it dwelt on his mind as the unequivocal witness of his dignity as a gentleman born. He came from the same stock as the Grays of Oakden, who had lived on the land for more than three centuries, entitled to call themselves squires. The relationship was very distant, still it existed. But a dream that so great a place as Oakden Hall, with its 1000 acres, should ever pass to his son—no, my father thought it much more likely that his son might be prime minister! John Gray of Oakden had never taken the least notice of us, except that, when I won the Pitt scholarship, he sent me a fine turkey, labelled ‘From John Gray, Esq. of Oakden.’ This present I acknowledged, but John Gray never answered my letter. Just at that time, however, as appears by the date, he re-made his will, and placed me as remainder-man in case of the deaths, without issue, of two nearer relations, both nephews. These young men died unmarried—the one of rheumatic fever, a few months before old Gray’s decease; the other, two weeks after it; poor fellow, he was thrown from his horse and killed on the spot. So, unexpectedly, I came into this property. Soon afterwards I married. The possession of land is a great tranquilliser to a restless spirit, and a happy marriage is as sedative as potent. Poverty is a spur to action. Great wealth, on the other hand, not unnaturally tends to the desire of display, and in free countries often to the rivalry for political power. The golden mean is proverbially the condition most favourable to content, and content is the antidote to ambition. Mine was the golden mean! Other influences of pride and affection contributed to keep me still. Of pride; for was I not really a greater man here, upon my ancestral acres and my few yearly hundreds, than as a political aspirant, who must commence his career by being a political dependant? How rich I felt here! how poor I should be in London! How inevitably, in the daily expenses of a metropolitan life, and in the costs of elections (should I rise beyond being a mere nominee), I must become needy and involved! So much for the influence of pride. Now for the influence of affection; my dear wife had never been out of these rural shades among which she was born. She is of a nature singularly timid, sensitive, and retiring. The idea of that society to which a political career would have led me terrified her. I loved her the better for desiring no companionship but mine. In fine, my desires halted at once on these turfs; the Attraction of the Earth, of which I had a share, prevailed; the motive power stopped here.”

“You have never regretted your choice?” said Tracey.

“Certainly not; I congratulate myself on it more and more every year. For, after all, here I have ample occupation and a creditable career. I have improved my fortune, instead of wasting it. I have a fixed, acknowledged, instead of an unsettled, equivocal position. I am an authority on many rural subjects of interest besides those of husbandry. I am an active magistrate; and, as I know a little of the law, I am the habitual arbiter upon all the disputes in the neighbourhood. I employ here with satisfaction, and not without some dignity, the energies which, in the great world, would have bought any reputation I might have gained at the price of habitual pain and frequent mortification.”

“Then,” said I, “you do not think that a saying of Dr Arnold’s, which I quoted to Tracey as no less applicable to men than to boys, is altogether a true one—viz., that the difference between boys, as regards the power of acquiring distinction, is not so much in talent as in energy; you retain the energies that once raised you to public distinction, but you no longer apply them to the same object.”

“I believe that Dr Arnold, if he be quoted correctly, spoke only half the truth. One difference between boy and boy or man and man, no doubt, is energy; but for great achievements or fame there must be also application—viz., every energy concentred on one definite point, and disciplined to strain towards it by patient habit. My energy, such as it is, would not have brought my sheep-walks into profitable cultivation if the energy had not been accompanied with devoted application to the business. And it is astonishing how, when the energy is constantly applied towards one settled aim—astonishing, I say—how invention is kindled out of it. Thus, in many a quiet solitary morning’s walk round my farm, some new idea, some hint of improvement or contrivance, occurs to me; this I ponder and meditate upon till it takes the shape of experiment. I presume that it is so with poet, artist, orator, or statesman. His mind is habituated to apply itself to definite subjects of observation and reflection, and out of this habitual musing thereon, involuntarily spring the happy originalities of thinking which are called his ‘inspirations.’”

“One word more,” said I. “Do you consider, then, that which makes a man devote himself to fame or ambition is a motive power of which he himself is conscious?”

“No; not always. I imagine that most men entering on some career are originally impelled towards it by a motive which, at the time, they seldom take the trouble to analyse or even to detect. They would at once see what that motive was if early in the career it was withdrawn. In a majority of cases it is the res angusta, yet not poverty in itself, but a poverty disproportioned to the birth, or station, or tastes, or intellectual culture of the aspirant. Thus, the peasant or operative rarely feels in his poverty a motive power towards distinction out of his craft; but the younger son of a gentleman does feel that motive power. And hence a very large proportion of those who in various ways have gained fame, have been the cadets of a gentleman’s family, or the sons of poor clergymen, sometimes of farmers and tradesmen, who have given them an education beyond the average of their class. Other motive powers towards fame have been sometimes in ambition, sometimes in love; sometimes in a great sorrow, from which a strong mind sought to wrest itself; sometimes even in things that would appear frivolous to a philosopher. I knew a young man, of no great talents, but of keen vanity and great resolution and force of character, who, as a child, had been impressed with envy of the red ribbon which his uncle wore as Knight of the Bath. From his infancy he determined some day or other to win a red ribbon for himself. He did so at last, and in trying to do so became famous.

“In great commercial communities a distinction is given to successful trade, so that the motive power of youthful talent nourished in such societies is mostly concentred on gain, not through avarice, but through the love of approbation or esteem. Thus, it is noticeable that our great manufacturing towns, where energy and application abound, have not contributed their proportionate quota of men distinguished in arts or sciences (except the mechanical), or polite letters, or the learned professions. In rural districts, on the contrary, the desire of gain is not associated with the desire of honour and distinction, and therefore, in them, the youth early coveting fame strives for it in other channels than those of gain. But whatever the original motive power, if it has led to a continuous habit of the mind, and is not withdrawn before that habit becomes a second nature, the habit will continue after the motive power has either wholly ceased or become very faint, as the famous scribbling Spanish cardinal is said, in popular legends, to have continued to write on after he himself was dead. Thus, a man who has acquired the obstinate habit of labouring for the public originally from an enthusiastic estimate of the value of public applause, may, later, conceive a great contempt for the public, and, in sincere cynicism, become wholly indifferent to its praise or its censure, and yet, like Swift, go on as long as the brain can retain faithful impressions and perform its normal functions, writing for the public he so disdains. Thus many a statesman, wearied and worn, satisfied of the hollowness of political ambition, and no longer enjoying its rewards, sighing for retirement and repose, nevertheless continues to wear his harness. Habit has tyrannised over all his actions; break the habit, and the thread of his life snaps with it!

“Lastly, however, I am by no means sure that there is not in some few natures an inborn irresistible activity, a constitutional attraction between the one mind and the human species, which requires no special, separate motive power from without to set it into those movements which, perforce, lead to fame. I mean those men to whom we at once accord the faculty which escapes all satisfactory metaphysical definition—Ingenium;—viz., the inborn spirit which we call genius.

“And in these natures, whatever the motive power that in the first instance urged them on, if at any stage, however early, that motive power be withdrawn, some other one will speedily replace it. Through them Providence mysteriously acts on the whole world, and their genius while on earth is one of Its most visible ministrants. But genius is the exceptional phenomenon in human nature; and in examining the ordinary laws that influence human minds we have no measurement and no scales for portents.”

“There is, however,” said Tracey, “one motive power towards careers of public utility which you have not mentioned, but the thought of which often haunts me in rebuke of my own inertness,—I mean, quite apart from any object of vanity or ambition, the sense of our own duty to mankind; and hence the devotion to public uses of whatever talents have been given to us—not to hide under a bushel.”

“I do not think,” answered Gray, “that when a man feels he is doing good in his own way he need reproach himself that he is not doing good in some other way to which he is not urged by special duty, and from which he is repelled by constitutional temperament. I do not, for instance, see that because you have a very large fortune you are morally obliged to keep correspondent establishments, and adopt a mode of life hostile to your tastes; you sufficiently discharge the duties of wealth if the fair proportion of your income go to objects of well-considered benevolence and purposes not unproductive to the community. Nor can I think that I, who possess but a very moderate fortune, am morally called upon to strive for its increase in the many good speculations which life in a capital may offer to an eager mind, provided always that I do nevertheless remember that I have children, to whose future provision and wellbeing some modest augmentations of my fortune would be desirable. In improving my land for their benefit, I may say also that I add, however trivially, to the wealth of the country. Let me hope that the trite saying is true, that ‘he who makes two blades of corn grow where one grew before,’ is a benefactor to his race. So with mental wealth: surely it is permitted to us to invest and expend it within that sphere most suited to those idiosyncrasies, the adherence to which constitutes our moral health. I do not, with the philosopher, condemn the man who, irresistibly impelled towards the pursuit of honours and power, persuades himself that he is toiling for the public good when he is but gratifying his personal ambition;—probably he is a better man thus acting in conformity with his own nature, than he would be if placed beyond all temptation in Plato’s cave. Nor, on the other hand, can I think that a man of the highest faculties and the largest attainments, who has arrived at a sincere disdain of power or honours, would be a better man if he were tyrannically forced to pursue the objects from which his temperament recoils, upon the plea that he was thus promoting the public welfare. No doubt, in every city, town, street, and lane, there are bustling, officious, restless persons, who thrust themselves into public concerns, with a loud declaration that they are animated only by the desire of public good; they mistake their fidgetiness for philanthropy. Not a bubble company can be started, but what it is with a programme that its direct object is the public benefit, and the ten per cent promised to the shareholders is but a secondary consideration. Who believes in the sincerity of that announcement? In fine, according both to religion and to philosophy, virtue is the highest end of man’s endeavour; but virtue is wholly independent of the popular shout or the lictor’s fasces. Virtue is the same, whether with or without the laurel crown or the curule chair. Honours do not sully it, but obscurity does not degrade. He who is truthful, just, merciful, and kindly, does his duty to his race, and fulfils his great end in creation, no matter whether the rays of his life are not visibly beheld beyond the walls of his household, or whether they strike the ends of the earth; for every human soul is a world complete and integral, storing its own ultimate uses and destinies within itself; viewed only for a brief while, in its rising on the gaze of earth; pressing onward in its orbit amidst the infinite, when, snatched from our eyes, we say, ‘It has passed away!’ And as every star, however small it seem to us from the distance at which it shines, contributes to the health of our atmosphere, so every soul, pure and bright in itself, however far from our dwelling, however unremarked by our vision, contributes to the wellbeing of the social system in which it moves, and, in its privacy, is part and parcel of the public weal.”

Shading my face with my hand, I remained some moments musing after Gray’s voice had ceased. Then looking up, I saw so pleased and grateful a smile upon Percival Tracey’s countenance, that I checked the reply by which I had intended to submit a view of the subject in discussion somewhat different from that which Gray had taken from the Portico of the Stoics. Why should I attempt to mar whatever satisfaction Percival’s reason or conscience had found in our host’s argument? His tree of life was too firmly set for the bias of its stem to swerve in any new direction towards light and air. Let it continue to rejoice in such light and such air as was vouchsafed to the site on which it had taken root. Evening, too, now drew in, and we had a long ride before us. A little while after, we had bid adieu to Oakden Hall, and were once more threading our way through the green and solitary lanes.

We conversed but little for the first five or six miles. I was revolving what I had heard, and considering how each man’s reasoning moulds itself into excuse or applause for the course of life which he adopts. Percival’s mind was employed in other thoughts, as became clear when he thus spoke:—

“Do you think, my dear friend, that you could spare me a week or two longer? It would be a charity to me if you could, for I expect, after to-morrow, to lose my young artist, and, alas! also the Thornhills.”

“How! The Thornhills? So soon!”

“I count on receiving to-morrow the formal announcement of Henry’s promotion and exchange into the regiment he so desires to enter, with the orders to join it abroad at once. Clara, I know, will not stay here; she will be with her husband till he sails, and after his departure will take her abode with his widowed mother. I shall miss them much. But Thornhill feels that he is wasting his life here; and so—well—I have acted for the best. With respect to the artist, this morning I received a letter from my old friend Lord ——. He is going into Italy next week; he wishes for some views of Italian scenery for a villa he has lately bought, and will take Bourke with him, on my recommendation, leaving him ultimately at Rome. Lord ——‘s friendship and countenance will be of immense advantage to the young painter, and obtain him many orders. I have to break it to Bourke this evening, and he will, no doubt, quit me to-morrow to take leave of his family. For myself, as I always feel somewhat melancholy in remaining on the same spot after friends depart from it, I propose going to Bellevue, where I have a small yacht. It is glorious weather for sea excursions. Come with me, my dear friend! The fresh breezes will do you good; and we shall have leisure for talk on all the subjects which both of us love to explore and guess at.”

No proposition could be more alluring to me. My recent intercourse with Tracey had renewed all the affection and interest with which he had inspired my youth. My health and spirits had been already sensibly improved by my brief holiday, and an excursion at sea had been the special advice of my medical attendant. I hesitated a moment. Nothing called me back to London except public business, and, in that, I foresaw but the bare chance of a motion in Parliament which stood on the papers for the next day; but my letters had assured me that this motion was generally expected to be withdrawn or postponed.

So I accepted the invitation gladly, provided nothing unforeseen should interfere with it.

Pleased by my cordial assent, Tracey’s talk now flowed forth with genial animation. He described his villa overhanging the sea, with its covered walks to the solitary beach—the many objects of interest and landscapes of picturesque beauty within reach of easy rides, on days in which the yacht might not tempt us. I listened with the delight of a schoolboy, to whom some good-natured kinsman paints the luxuries of a home at which he invites the schoolboy to spend the vacation.

By little and little our conversation glided back to our young past, and thence to those dreams, nourished ever by the young;—love and romance, and home brightened by warmer beams than glow in the smile of sober friendship. How the talk took this direction I know not; perhaps by unconscious association, as the moon rose above the forest-hills, with the love-star by her side. And, thus conversing, Tracey for the first time alluded to that single passion which had vexed the smooth river of his life—and which, thanks to Lady Gertrude, was already, though vaguely, known to me.

“It was,” said he, “just such a summer night as this, and, though in a foreign country, amidst scenes of which these woodland hills remind me, that the world seemed to me to have changed into a Fairyland; and, looking into my heart, I said to myself, ‘This, then, is—love.’ And a little while after, on such a night, and under such a moon, and amidst such hills and groves, the world seemed blighted into a desert—life to be evermore without hope or object; and, looking again into my heart, I said, ‘This, then, is love denied!’”

“Alas!” answered I, “there are few men in whose lives there is not some secret memoir of an affection thwarted; but rarely indeed does an affection thwarted leave a permanent influence on the after-destinies of a man’s life. On that question I meditate an essay, which, if ever printed, I will send to you.”

I said this, wishing to draw him on, and expecting him to contradict my assertion as to the enduring influence of a disappointed love. He mused a moment or so in silence, and then said, “Well, perhaps so; an unhappy love may not permanently affect our after-destinies, still it colours our after-thoughts. It is strange that I should have only seen, throughout my long and various existence, one woman whom I could have wooed as my wife—one woman in whose presence I felt as if I were born for her and she for me.”

“May I ask you what was her peculiar charm in your eyes; or, if you permit me to ask, can you explain it?”

“No doubt,” answered Tracey, “much must be ascribed to the character of her beauty, which realised the type I had formed to myself from boyhood of womanly loveliness in form and face, and much also to a mind with which a man, however cultivated, could hold equal commune. But to me her predominating attraction was in a simple, unassuming nobleness of sentiment—a truthful, loyal, devoted, self-sacrificing nature. In her society I felt myself purified, exalted, as if in the presence of an angel. But enough of this. I am resigned to my loss, and have long since hung my votive tablet in the shrine of ‘Time the Consoler.’”

“Forgive me if I am intrusive; but did she know that you loved her?”

“I cannot say; probably most women discover if they are loved; but I rejoice to think that I never told her so.”

“Would she have rejected you if you had?”

“Yes, unhesitatingly; her word was plighted to another. And though she would not, for the man to whom she had betrothed herself, have left her father alone in poverty and exile, she would never have married any one else.”

“You believe, then, that she loved your rival with a heart that could not change?”

Tracey did not immediately reply. At last he said, “I believe this—that when scarcely out of girlhood, she considered herself engaged to be one man’s wife, or for ever single. And if, in the course of time, and in length of absence, she could have detected in her heart the growth of a single thought unfaithful to her troth, she would have plucked it forth and cast it from her as firmly as if already a wedded wife, with her husband’s honour in her charge. She was one of those women with whom man’s trust is for ever safe, and to whom a love at variance with plighted troth is an impossibility. So, she lives in my thoughts still, as I saw her last, five-and-twenty years ago, unalterable in her youth and beauty. And I have been as true to her hallowed remembrance as she was true to her maiden vows. May I never see her again on earth! Her or her likeness I may find amidst the stars.” “No,” he added, in a lighter and cheerier tone—“No; I do not think that my actual destinies, my ways of life here below, have been affected by her loss. Had I won her, I can scarcely conceive that I should have become more tempted to ambition or less enamoured of home. Still, whatever leaves so deep a furrow in a man’s heart cannot be meant in vain. Where the ploughshare cuts, there the seed is sown, and there later the corn will spring. In a word, I believe that everything of moment which befalls us in this life—which occasions us some great sorrow—for which, in this life, we see not the uses—has, nevertheless, its definite object, and that that object will be visible on the other side of the grave. It may seem but a barren grief in the history of a life—it may prove a fruitful joy in the history of a soul. For if nothing in this world is accident, surely all that which affects the only creature upon earth to whom immortality is announced, must have a distinct and definite purpose, often not developed till immortality begins.”

Here we had entered on the wide spaces of the park. The deer and the kine were asleep on the silvered grass, or under the shade of the quiet trees. Now, as we cleared a beech-grove, we saw the lights gleaming from the windows of the house, and the moon, at her full, resting still over the peaceful housetop! Truly had Percival said, “That there are trains of thought set in motion by the stars which are dormant in the glare of the sun”—truly had he said, too, “That without such thoughts man’s thinking is incomplete.”

We gained the house, and, entering the library, it was pleasant to see how instinctively all rose to gather round the master. They had missed Percival’s bright presence the whole day.

Some little time afterwards, when, seated next to Lady Gertrude, I was talking to her of the Grays, I observed Tracey take aside the Painter, and retire with him into the adjoining colonnade. They were not long absent. When they returned, Bourke’s face, usually serious, was joyous and elated. In a few moments, with all his Irish warmth of heart, he burst forth with the announcement of the new obligations he owed to Sir Percival Tracey. “I have always said,” exclaimed he, “that, give me an opening and I will find or make my way. I have the opening now; you shall see!” We all poured our congratulations upon the young enthusiast, except Henry Thornhill, and his brow was shaded and his lip quivered. Clara, watching him, curbed her own friendly words to the artist, and, drawing to her husband’s side, placed her hand tenderly on his shoulder. “Pish! do leave me alone,” muttered the ungracious churl.

“See,” whispered Percival to me, “what a brute that fine young fellow would become if we insisted on making him happy our own way, and saving him from the chance of being shot!”

Therewith rising, he gently led away Clara, to whose soft eyes tears had rushed; and looking back to Henry, whose head was bended over a volume of ‘The Wellington Despatches,’ said in his ear, half-fondly, half-reproachfully, “Poor young fool! how bitterly you will repent every word, every look of unkindness to her, when—when she is no more at your side to pardon you!”

That night it was long before I slept. I pleased myself with what is now grown to me a rare amusement—viz., the laying out plans for the morrow. This holiday, with Tracey all to myself; this summer sail on the seas; this interval of golden idlesse, refined by intercourse with so serene an intelligence, and on subjects so little broached in the world of cities, fascinated my imagination; and I revolved a hundred questions it would be delightful to raise, a hundred problems it would be impossible to solve. Though my life has been a busy one, I believe that constitutionally I am one of the most indolent men alive. To lie on the grass in summer noons under breathless trees, to glide over smooth waters, and watch the still shadows on tranquil shores, is happiness to me. I need then no books—then, no companion. But if to that happiness in the mere luxury of repose, I may add another happiness of a higher nature, it is in converse with some one friend, upon subjects remote from the practical work-day world,—subjects akin less to our active thoughts than to our dreamlike reveries,—subjects conjectural, speculative, fantastic, embracing not positive opinions—for opinions are things combative and disputatious—but rather those queries and guesses which start up from the farthest border-land of our reason, and lose themselves in air as we attempt to chase and seize them.

And perhaps this sort of talk, which leads to no conclusions clear enough for the uses of wisdom, is the more alluring to me, because it is very seldom to be indulged. I carefully separate from the business of life all which belong to the visionary realm of speculative conjecture. From the world of action I hold it imperatively safe to banish the ideas which exhibit the cloud-land of metaphysical doubts and mystical beliefs. In the actual world let me see by the same broad sun that gives light to all men; it is only in the world of reverie that I amuse myself with the sport of the dark lantern, letting its ray shoot before me into the gloom, and caring not if, in its illusive light, the thorn-tree in my path take the aspect of a ghost. I shall notice the thorn-tree all the better, distinguish more clearly its shape, when I pass by it the next day under the sun, for the impression it made on my fancy seen first by the gleam of the dark lantern. Now, Tracey is one of the very few highly-educated men it has been my lot to know, with whom one can safely mount in rudderless balloons, drifting wind-tossed after those ideas which are the phantoms of Reverie, and wander, ghost-like, out of castles in the air. And my mind found a playfellow in his, where, in other men’s minds, as richly cultured, it found only companions or competitors in task-work.

Towards dawn, I fell asleep, and dreamt that I was a child once more, gathering bluebells and chasing dragonflies amidst murmuring water-reeds. The next day I came down late; all had done breakfast. The Painter was already gone; the Librarian had retired into his den. Henry Thornhill was walking by himself to and fro, in front of the window, with folded arms and downcast brow. Percival was seated apart, writing letters. Clara was at work, stealing every now and then a mournful glance towards Henry. Lady Gertrude, punctiliously keeping her place by the tea-urn, filled my cup, and pointed to a heap of letters formidably ranged before my plate. I glanced anxiously and rapidly over these unwelcomed epistles. Thank heaven, nothing to take me back to London! My political correspondent informed me, by a hasty line, that the dreaded motion which stood first on the parliamentary paper for that day would in all probability be postponed, agreeably to the request of the Government. The mover of it had not, however, given a positive answer; no doubt he would do so in the course of the night (last night); and there was little doubt that, as a professed supporter of the Government, he would yield to the request that had been made to him.

So, after I had finished my abstemious breakfast, I took Percival aside and told him that I considered myself free to prolong my stay, and asked him, in a whisper, if he had yet received the official letter he expected, announcing young Thornhill’s exchange and promotion.

“Yes,” said he, “and I only waited for you to announce its contents to poor Henry; for I wish you to tell me whether you think the news will make him as happy as yesterday he thought it would.”

Tracey and I then went out, and joined Henry in his walk. The young man turned round on us an impatient countenance.

“So we have lost Bourke,” said Tracey. “I hope he will return to England with the reputation he goes forth to seek.”

“Ay,” said Henry, “Bourke is a lucky dog to have found, in one who is not related to him, so warm and so true a friend.”

“Every dog, lucky or unlucky, has his day,” said Percival, gravely.

“Every dog except a house-dog,” returned Henry. “A house-dog is thought only fit for a chain and a kennel.”

“Ah, happy if his happiness he knew!” replied Tracey. “But I own that liberty compensates for the loss of a warm litter and a good dinner. Away from the kennel and off with the chain! Read this letter, and accept my congratulations—Major Thornhill!”

The young man started; the colour rushed to his cheeks; he glanced hastily over the letter held out to him; dropped it; caught his kinsman’s hand, and pressing it to his heart, exclaimed, “Oh, sir, thanks, thanks! So then, all the while I was accusing you of obstructing my career you were quietly promoting it! How can you forgive me my petulance, my ingratitude?”

“Tut,” said Percival, kindly, “the best-tempered man is sometimes cross in his cups; and nothing, perhaps, more irritates a young brain than to get drunk on the love of glory.”

At the word glory the soldier’s crest rose, his eye flashed fire, his whole aspect changed, it became lofty and noble. Suddenly his eye caught sight of Clara, who had stepped out of the window, and stood gazing on him. His head drooped, tears rushed to his eyes, and with a quivering, broken voice, he muttered, “Poor Clara—my wife, my darling! Oh, Sir Percival, truly you said how bitterly I should repent every unkind word and look. Ah, they will haunt me!”

“Put aside regrets now. Go and break the news to your wife: support, comfort her; you alone can. I have not dared to tell her.”

Henry sighed and went, no longer joyous, but with slow step and paling cheek, to the place where Clara stood. We saw him bend over the hand she held out to him, kiss it humbly, and then passing his arm round her waist, he drew her away into the farther recesses of the garden, and both disappeared from our eyes.

“No,” said I, “he is not happy; like us all, he finds that things coveted have no longer the same charm when they are things possessed. Clara is avenged already. But you have done wisely. Let him succeed or let him fail, you have removed from Clara her only rival. If you had debarred him from honour you would have estranged him from love. Now you have bound him to Clara for life. She has ceased to be an obstacle to his dreams, and henceforth she herself will be the dream which his waking life will sigh to regain.”

“Heaven grant he may come back, with both his legs and both his arms; and, perhaps, with a bit of ribbon, or five shillings’ worth of silver on his breast,” said Percival, trying hard to be lively. “Of all my kinsmen, I think I like him the best. He is rough as the east wind, but honest as the day. Heigho! they will both leave us in an hour or two. Clara’s voice is so sweet; I wonder when she will sing again! What a blank the place will seem without those two young faces! As soon as they are gone, we two will be off. Aunt Gertrude does not like Bellevue, and will pay a visit for a few days to a cousin of hers on the other side of the county. I must send on before to let the housekeeper at Bellevue prepare for our coming. Meanwhile, pardon me if I leave you—perhaps you have letters to write; if so, despatch them.”

I was in no humour for writing letters, but when Percival left me I strolled from the house into the garden, and, reclining there on a bench opposite one of the fountains, enjoyed the calm beauty of the summer morning. Time slipped by. Every now and then I caught sight of Henry and Clara among the lilacs in one of the distant walks, his arm still round her waist, her head leaning on his shoulder. At length they went into the house, doubtless to prepare for their departure.

I thought of the wild folly with which youth casts away the substance of happiness to seize at the shadow which breaks on the wave that mirrors it; wiser and happier surely the tranquil choice of Gray, though with gifts and faculties far beyond those of the young man who mistook the desire of fame for the power to win it. And then my thoughts settling back on myself, I became conscious of a certain melancholy. How poor and niggard compared with my early hopes had been my ultimate results! How questioned, grudged, and litigated, my right of title to every inch of ground that my thought had discovered or my toils had cultivated! What motive power in me had, from boyhood to the verge of age, urged me on “to scorn delight and love laborious days?” Whatever the motive power once had been, I could no longer trace it. If vanity—of which, doubtless, in youth I had my human share—I had long since grown rather too callous than too sensitive to that love of approbation in which vanity consists. I was stung by no penury of fortune, influenced by no feverish thirst for a name that should outlive my grave, fooled by no hope of the rewards which goad on ambition. I had reached the age when Hope weighs her anchor and steers forth so far that her amplest sail seems but a silvery speck on the last line of the horizon. Certainly I flattered myself that my purposes linked my toils to some slight service to mankind; that in graver efforts I was asserting opinions in the value of which to human interests I sincerely believed, and in lighter aims venting thoughts and releasing fancies which might add to the culture of the world—not, indeed, fruitful harvests, but at least some lowly flowers. But though such intent might be within my mind, could I tell how far I unconsciously exaggerated its earnestness—still less could I tell how far the intent was dignified by success? “Have I done aught for which mankind would be the worse were it swept into nothingness to-morrow?”—is a question which many a grand and fertile genius may, in its true humility, address mournfully to itself. It is but a negative praise, though it has been recorded as a high one, to leave

“No line which, dying, we would wish to blot.”

If that be all, as well leave no line at all. He has written in vain who does not bequeath lines that, if blotted, would be a loss to that treasure-house of mind which is the everlasting possession of the world. Who, yet living, can even presume to guess if he shall do this? Not till at least a century after his brain and his hand are dust can even critics begin to form a rational conjecture of an author’s or a statesman’s uses to his kind. Was it, then, as Gray had implied, merely the force of habit which kept me in movement? if so, was it a habit worth all the sacrifice it cost? Thus meditating, I forgot that if all men reasoned thus and acted according to such reasoning, the earth would have no intermediate human dwellers between the hewers and diggers, and the idlers, born to consume the fruits which they do not plant. Farewell, then, to all the embellishments and splendours by which civilised man breathes his mind and his soul into nature. For it is not only the genius of rarest intellects which adorns and aggrandises social states, but the aspirations and the efforts of thousands and millions, all towards the advance and uplifting and beautifying of the integral, universal state, by the energies native to each. Where would be the world fit for Traceys and Grays to dwell in, if all men philosophised like the Traceys and the Grays? Where all the gracious arts, all the generous rivalries of mind, that deck and animate the bright calm of peace? Where all the devotion, heroism, self-sacrifice in a common cause, that exalt humanity even amidst the rage and deformities of war, if, throughout well-ordered, close-welded states, there ran not electrically, from breast to breast, that love of honour which is a part of man’s sense of beauty, or that instinct towards utility which, even more than the genius too exceptional to be classed amongst the normal regulations of social law, creates the marvels of mortal progress? Not, however, I say, did I then address to myself these healthful and manly questions. I felt only that I repined, and looked with mournful and wearied eyes along an agitated, painful, laborious past. Rousing myself with an effort from these embittered contemplations, the charm of the external nature insensibly refreshed and gladdened me. I inhaled the balm of an air sweet with flowers, felt the joy of the summer sun, from which all life around seemed drawing visible happiness, and said to myself gaily, “At least to-day is mine—this blissful sunlit day—

‘Nimium breves

Flores amænæ ferre jube rosæ,

Dum res et ætas et sororum,

Fila trium patiuntur atra!’”

So murmuring, I rose as from a dream, and saw before me a strange figure—a figure, uncouth, sinister, ominous as the evil genius that startled Brutus on the eve of Philippi. I knew by an unmistakable instinct that that figure was an evil genius.

“Do you want me? Who and what are you?” I asked, falteringly.

“Please your honour, I come express from the N—— Station. A telegram.”

I opened the scrap of paper extended to me, and read these words,—

“O—— positively brings on his motion. Announced it last night too late for post. Division certain—probably before dinner. Every vote wanted. Come directly.”

Said the Express with a cruel glee, as I dropped the paper, “Sir, the station-master also received a telegram to send over a fly. I have brought one; only just in time to catch the half-past twelve o’clock; no other train till six. You had best be quick, sir.”

No help for it. I hurried back to the house, bade my servant follow by the next train with my portmanteau—no moments left to wait for packing; found Tracey in his quiet study—put the telegram into his hands. “You see my excuse—adieu.”

“Does this motion, then, interest you so much? Do you mean to speak on it?”

“No, but it must not be carried. Every vote against it is of consequence. Besides, I have promised to vote, and cannot stay away with honour.”

“Honour! That settles it. I must go to Bellevue alone; or shall I take Caleb and make him teach me Hebrew? But surely you will join me to-morrow, or the next day?”

“Yes, if I can. But heavens!” (glancing at the clock)—“not half an hour to reach the station—six miles off. Kindest regards to Lady Gertrude—poor Clara—Henry—and all. Heaven bless you!”

I am in the fly—I am off. I gain the station just in time for the train—arrive at the House of Commons in more than time as to a vote, for the debate not only lasted all that night, but was adjourned till the next week, and lasted the greater part of that, when it was withdrawn, and—no vote at all!

But I could not then return to Tracey. Every man accustomed to business in London knows how, once there, hour after hour, arises a something that will not allow him to depart. When at length freed, I knew Tracey would no longer need my companionship—his Swedish philosopher was then with him. They were deep in scientific mysteries, on which, as I could throw no light, I should be but a profane intruder. Besides, I was then summoned to my own country place, and had there to receive my own guests, long pre-engaged. So passed the rest of the summer; in the autumn I went abroad, and have never visited the Castle of Indolence since those golden days. In truth I resisted a frequent and a haunting desire to do so. I felt that a second and a longer sojourn in that serene but relaxing atmosphere might unnerve me for the work which I had imposed on myself, and sought to persuade my tempted conscience was an inexorable duty. Experience had taught me that in the sight of that intellectual repose, so calm and so dreamily happy, my mind became unsettled, and nourished seeds that might ripen to discontent of the lot I had chosen for myself. So then, sicut meus est mos, I seize a consolation for the loss of enjoyments that I may not act anew by living them over again, in fancy and remembrance: I give to my record the title of “Motive Power,” though it contains much episodical to that thesis, and though it rather sports around the subject so indicated than subjects it to strict analysis. But I here take for myself the excuse I have elsewhere made for Montaigne, in his loose observance of the connection between the matter and the titles of his essays.

I must leave it to the reader to blame or acquit me for having admitted so many lengthy descriptions, so many digressive turns and shifts of thought and sentiment, through which, as through a labyrinth, he winds his way, with steps often checked and often retrogressive, still, sooner or later, creeping on to the heart of the maze. There I leave him to find the way out. Labyrinths have no interest if we give the clue to them.

MRS CLIFFORD’S MARRIAGE.

PART I.

CHAPTER I.—THE LADIES’ OPINION.

“You don’t mean to say she’s going to be married—not Mary? I don’t believe a word of it. She was too fond of her poor husband who put such trust in her. No, no, child—don’t tell such nonsense to me.”

So said old Miss Harwood when the dreadful intelligence was first communicated to her. The two old sisters, who were both charitable old souls, and liked to think the best of everybody, were equally distressed about this piece of village scandal. “I don’t say anything about her poor husband—he was a fool to trust so much to a woman of her age,” said Miss Amelia; “but in my opinion Mary Clifford has sense to know when she’s well off.” The very idea made the sisters angry: a woman with five thousand a-year, with five fine children, with the handsomest house and most perfect little establishment within twenty miles of Summerhayes; a widow, with nobody to cross or contradict her, with her own way and will to her heart’s content—young enough to be still admired and paid attention to, and old enough to indulge in those female pleasures without any harm coming of it; to think of a woman in such exceptionally blessed circumstances stooping her head under the yoke, and yielding a second time to the subjection of marriage, was more than either of the Miss Harwoods could believe.

“But I believe it’s quite true—indeed, I know it’s quite true,” said the curate’s little wife. “Mr Spencer heard it first from the Miss Summerhayes, who did not know what to think—their own brother, you know; and yet they couldn’t forget that poor dear Mr Clifford was their cousin; and then they are neither of them married themselves, poor dears, which makes them harder upon her.”

“We have never been married,” said Miss Amelia; “I don’t see what difference that makes. It is amusing to see the airs you little creatures give yourselves on the strength of being married. I suppose you think it’s all right—it’s a compliment to her first husband, eh? and shows she was happy with him?—that’s what the men say when they take a second wife; that’s how you would do I suppose, if——”

“Oh, Miss Amelia, don’t be so cruel,” cried the little wife. “I should die. Do you think I could ever endure to live without Julius? I don’t understand what people’s hearts are made of that can do such things: but then,” added the little woman, wiping her bright eyes, “Mr Clifford was not like my husband. He was very good, I daresay, and all that—but he wasn’t ——. Well, I don’t think he was a taking man. He used to sit such a long time after dinner. He used to——it’s very wicked to be unkind to the dead—but he wasn’t the sort of man a woman could break her heart for, you know.”

“I should like to know who is,” said Miss Amelia. “He left her everything, without making provision for one of the children. He gave her the entire power, like a fool, at her age. He did not deserve anything better; but it appears to me that Mary Clifford has the sense to know when she’s well off.”

“Well, well!” said old Miss Harwood, “I couldn’t have believed it, but now as you go on discussing, I daresay it’ll turn out true. When a thing comes so far as to be discussed, it’s going to happen. I’ve always found it so. Well, well! love has gone out of fashion nowadays. When I was a girl things were different. We did not talk about it half so much, nor read novels. But we had the right feelings. I daresay she will just be as affectionate to Tom Summerhayes as she was to her poor dear husband. Oh, my dear, it’s very sad—I think it’s very sad—five fine children, and she can’t be content with that. It’ll turn out badly, dear, and that you’ll see.”

“He’ll swindle her out of all her money,” said Miss Amelia.

“Oh, don’t say such dreadful things,” cried the curate’s little wife, getting up hastily. “I am sure I hope they’ll be happy—that is, as happy as they can be,” she added, with a touch of candid disapproval. “I must run away to baby now; the poor dear children!—I must say I am sorry for them—to have another man brought in in their poor papa’s place; but oh, I must run away, else I shall be saying cruel things too.”

The two Miss Harwoods discussed this interesting subject largely after Mrs Spencer had gone. The Summerhayes people had been, on the whole, wonderfully merciful to Mrs Clifford during her five years’ solitary reign at Fontanel. She had been an affectionate wife—she was a good mother—she had worn the weeds of her widowhood seriously, and had not plunged into any indiscreet gaieties when she took them off; while, at the same time, she had emerged sufficiently from her seclusion to restore Fontanel to its old position as one of the pleasantest houses in the county. What could woman do more? Tom Summerhayes was her husband’s cousin; he had been brought up to the law, and naturally understood affairs in general better than she did. Everybody knew that he was an idle fellow. After old Mr Summerhayes died, everybody quite expected that Tom would settle down in the old manor, and live an agreeable useless life, instead of toiling himself to death in hopes of one day being Lord Chancellor—a very unlikely chance at the best; and events came about exactly as everybody had predicted. At the same time, the entire neighbourhood allowed that Tom had exerted himself quite beyond all precedent on behalf of his cousin’s widow. Poor Mary Clifford had a great deal too much on her hands, he was always saying. It was a selfish sort of kindness to crush down a poor little woman under all that weight of wealth and responsibility; and so, at last, here was what had come of it. The Miss Harwoods sat and talked it all over that cold day in the drawing-room of Woodbine Cottage, which had one window looking to the village-green, and another, a large, round, bright bow-window, opening to the garden. The fire was more agreeable than the garden that day. Miss Harwood sat knitting in her easy-chair, while Miss Amelia occupied herself in ticketing all that miscellaneous basket of articles destined for the bazaar of ladies’ work to be held in Summerhayes in February; but work advanced slowly under the influence of such an inducement to talk. The old ladies, as may be supposed, came to a sudden pause and looked confused and guilty when the door opened and the Miss Summerhayes were announced. Perhaps the new visitors might even have heard something of the conversation which was going on with so much animation. Certainly it came to a most abrupt conclusion, and the Miss Harwoods looked consciously into each other’s faces when the ladies of the manor-house came to the door.

These ladies were no longer young, but they were far from having reached the venerable certainty of old-maidenhood which possessed the atmosphere of Woodbine Cottage. They were still in the fidgety unsettled stage of unweddedness—women who had fallen out of their occupation, and were subject to little tempers and vapours, not from real ill-humour or sourness, but simply by reason of the vacancy and unsatisfaction of their lives. The Miss Summerhayes often enough did not know what to do with themselves; and being unphilosophical, as women naturally are, they set down this restless condition of mind, not to the account of human nature generally, and of female impatience in particular, but to their own single and unwedded condition—a matter which still seemed capable of remedy; so that the fact must be admitted, that Miss Laura and Miss Lydia were sometimes a little flighty and uncertain in their temper; sometimes a little harsh in their judgments; and, in short, in most matters, betrayed a certain unsettledness and impatience in their minds, as people generally do, in every condition of existence, when they are discontented with their lot. The chances are that nothing would have pleased them better than to have plunged into an immediate discussion of all the circumstances of this strange piece of news with which Summerhayes was ringing; but the position was complicated by the fact that they were accompanied by little Louisa Clifford, who was old enough to understand all that was said, and quick enough to guess at any allusion which might be made to her mother, however skilfully veiled; so that, on the whole, the situation was as difficult a one for the four ladies, burning to speak but yet incapable of utterance, as can well be conceived.

“Oh, how far on you are,” cried Miss Laura; “I have not got in half the work that has been promised to me; but you always are first with everything—first in gardening, first in working, first in——”

“All the news, I am sure,” said Miss Lydia; “we, of course, never hear anything till it has happened. Provoking! Loo, shouldn’t you like to go to Miss Harwood’s maid, and ask her to show you the chickens? She has a perfect genius for poultry, though she is such a little thing; and Miss Amelia has such loves of dorkings. We shan’t be leaving for half an hour; now go, there’s a dear!”

“Thank you, cousin Lydia, I’d rather look at the things for the bazaar,” returned Loo, lifting a pair of acute suspicious eyes; a pale-faced little creature, sharp-witted and vigilant, instinctively conscious why her amusement was thus carefully provided for—Loo did not choose to go.

“Such a nuisance!” said Miss Laura; “I say we are just far enough off at the manor to be out of reach of everything except the bores and the troubles. You always think of us when you have stupid visitors, but you keep all that’s exciting to yourselves. Loo, darling! the Miss Harwoods’ violets are always out earlier than any one else’s. I have such a passion for violets! Do run out, dear, and see if you can find one for me yonder under the hedge.”

“I will ask mamma to send you some to-morrow, cousin Laura,” said the determined little Loo.

“Did you ever hear anything like it?” said Miss Lydia, in a half whisper. “Loo!”

“Loo will carry this basket up-stairs for me to my room,” said Miss Harwood, “and ask Harriet to show you the things in my cupboard, dear. All the prettiest things are there, and such a very grand cushion that I mean to make your mamma buy. Tell Harriet to show you everything; there’s a darling! That is a very bright little girl, my dears,” said the old lady, when Loo withdrew, reluctant but dutiful. “I hope nothing will ever be done to crush her spirit. I suppose you must have both come to tell us it’s not true.”

“Oh, you mean about my brother and Mary Clifford,” cried out both sisters in a breath. “Oh, Miss Harwood, did you ever hear of such a thing! Did you ever know anything so dreadful! Tom, that might have married anybody!” cried Miss Lydia; “and Mary Clifford, that was so inconsolable, and pretended to have broken her heart!” cried the younger sister. They were both in a flutter of eagerness, neither permitting the other to speak.

“Oh dear, dear, it does come so hard upon us,” said Miss Laura, “we that have always had such a prejudice against second marriages; and a cousin’s widow—it’s almost like a brother; and if poor Harry could rise from his grave, what would he say!” concluded Miss Lydia, who took up the strain without any intervals of punctuation. “I begin to think it’s all true the gentlemen say about women’s inconstancy; that is, your common style of women,” ran on the elder without any pause; “and poor dear Tom, who might have married any one,” cried the younger, out of breath.

“Then I perceive,” said Miss Amelia Harwood, “it’s true? Well, I don’t see much harm, for my part, if they have everything properly settled first. Poor Harry was all very well, I daresay, but he was a great fool not to provide for his children. Your brother said so at the time; but I did think, for my part, that Mary Clifford had the sense to know when she was well off.”

“Oh, she shows that,” cried Lydia Summerhayes, with a little toss of her head; “widows are so designing; they know the ways of men, and how to manage them, very differently from any of us—if we could stoop to such a thing, which of course, we wouldn’t. Oh yes, Mary Clifford knows very well what she’s about. I am sure I have told Tom he was her honorary secretary for many a day. I thought she was just making use of him to serve her own purpose; I never thought how far her wiles went. If it had been her lawyer, or the curate, or any humble person; but Tom! He might have done so much better,” said Laura, chiming in at some imperceptible point, so that it was impossible to tell where one voice ended and the other began.

“Well, I must say I am disappointed in Mary Clifford,” said Miss Harwood, “she was always such an affectionate creature. That’s why it is, I daresay. These affectionate people can’t do without an object; but her five children——”

“Ah! yes, her five children,” exclaimed the Miss Summerhayes; “only imagine dear Tom making such a marriage! Why, Charley Clifford has been at Eton ever so long; he is fifteen. And dear Tom is quite a young man, and might have married anybody,” said the last of the two, taking up the chorus: “it is too dreadful to think of it—such a cutting blow to us.”

“I can’t see how it is so very bad for you,” said Miss Amelia Harwood; “of course they will live at Fontanel, and you will still keep the manor-house. I think it’s rather a good thing for you for my part. Hush! there’s the child again—clever little thing—she knows quite well what we’ve been talking of. My dear, I hope Harriet showed you all the things—and isn’t that a pretty cushion? Tell your mamma I mean to make her buy it, as she is the richest lady I know.”

“Are you going, my dears?” said the elder old lady. “I am sorry you have so little time to stay—I hope you will find things arrange themselves comfortably, and that everybody will be happy. Don’t get excited—it’s astonishing how everything settles down. You want to speak to me, Loo,” said Miss Harwood, starting a little when she had just reseated herself in her easy-chair after dismissing her visitors. “Certainly, dear; I suppose you have set your little heart on one of the pretty pincushions up-stairs.”

“No, indeed, nothing of the sort—I hope I know better than to care for such trumpery,” said Loo, with an angry glow on her little pale face. “I stopped behind to say, that whatever mamma pleases to do, we mean to stand by her,” cried poor Mary Clifford’s only champion. “I’m not sure whether I shall like it or not for myself—but we have made up our minds to stand by mamma, and so we will, as long as we live; and she shall do what she likes!” cried the little heroine. Two big tears were in those brown eyes, which looked twice as bright and as big through those great dew-drops which Loo would not for the world have allowed to fall. She opened her eyelids wider and wider to re-absorb the untimely tears, and looked full, with childish defiance, in Miss Harwood’s face.

“Loo, you are a dear!” said prompt Miss Amelia, kissing the child; “you shall have the prettiest pincushion in all my basket.” The little girl vanished suddenly after this speech, half in indignation at the promise, half because the tears would not be disposed of otherwise, and it was necessary to rush outside to conceal their dropping. “Ah! Amelia,” said kind old Miss Harwood, “I’m sorry for poor Mary in my heart—but I’d rather have that child’s love than Tom Summerhayes.”

“Poor Mary! for my part, I have no patience with her,” said the practical Miss Amelia; “a woman come to her time of life ought to have the sense to know when she’s well off.”

Such was the character of the comments made upon Mrs Clifford’s marriage when it was first talked of, in Woodbine Cottage, and generally among all the female portion of society as it existed in Summerhayes.

CHAPTER II.—WHAT THE GENTLEMEN SAID.

The Rector of Summerhayes was the Miss Harwoods’ brother, much younger however, unmarried, and rather a fine man in his way. He had a little dinner, as it happened, the same evening. His table only held six, Mr Harwood said. The rectory was an old-fashioned house, and the dining-room would have quite admitted a table which could dine twenty—but such were not the Rector’s inclinations. There are enough men in the neighbourhood of Summerhayes to make it very possible to vary your parties pleasantly when you have a table that only holds six, whereas with a large number you can only have the same people over and over again; and Mr Harwood did not like to be bored. He had a friend with him from town, as he always had on such occasions. He had his curate, and young Chesterfield from Dalton, and Major Aldborough, and Dr Gossett; rather a village party—as he explained to Mr Temple, the stranger—but not bad company. The dinner was a very good one, like all the Rector’s little dinners, and was consumed with that judicious reticence in the way of talk, and wise suspension of wit, which is only practicable in a party composed of men. By means of this sensible quietness, the dinner was done full justice to, and the company expanded into full force over their wine. Then the conversation became animated. The Rector, it is true, indulged in ten minutes’ parish talk with the Doctor, while Mr Temple and Major Aldborough opened the first parallel of a political duel, and young Chesterfield discoursed on the last Meet to poor Mr Spencer, who, reduced into curate-hood and economy, still felt his mouth water over such forbidden pleasures. Then Mr Harwood himself introduced the subject which at that time reigned paramount over all other subjects at Summerhayes.

“So Tom Summerhayes is going to marry little Mrs Clifford,” said the Rector; “hadn’t you heard of it? Yes, these grapes are from Fontanel. She has a capital gardener, and her conservatories are the finest in the county. A very pleasant little house altogether, though there are some particulars about her table which one feels to be feeble. Her dinners are always a little defective since poor Clifford’s death—too mild, you know—too sweet—want the severer taste of a man.”

“Mrs Clifford—a pretty little woman with brown eyes?” said Mr Temple. “I’ve met her somewhere. So she gives dinners, does she? When I saw her she was in the recluse line. I suppose that didn’t last.”

“It lasted quite long enough,” said Dr Gossett; “nothing could be more proper, or more ladylike, or more satisfactory in every way. If I had a wife and were unluckily to die, I should wish her just to wear her weeds and so forth like Mrs Clifford—a charming woman; what should we do without her in the parish? but as for Tom Summerhayes——”

“He’s an ass,” growled the Major. “What’s he got to do burdening himself with other people’s children. Why, there’s five of ’em, sir! They’ll hate him like poison—they’ll think he’s in no end of conspiracies to shut them out of their fortune. By Jove! if he knew as much about other people’s children as I do. I’ve had two families consigned to me from India—as if I were a reformatory, or a schoolmaster, by Jove! She’s all very well, as women go; but I wouldn’t marry that family—no, not for twenty-five thousand a-year.”

“I confess I think it’s a pity,” said Mr Spencer, playing with the Fontanel grapes. The Curate perhaps was thinking in his heart that such delicate little souvenirs might have gone quite as appropriately to his own little ménage as to the Rector’s, who lacked for nothing. “It’s like going into life at second hand, you know. I shouldn’t like it, for my part. The children are a drawback, to be sure; but that’s not the greatest, to my mind; they are nice enough children.”

“Delightful children!” cried the Doctor, “little bricks! plucky little things! I don’t care for babies, though they’re partly my business. A family ready made would just suit me.”

“Well, it ain’t much in my line to say what a fellow ought or oughtn’t to do,” said young Chesterfield. “I’m not a marrying man myself. I don’t pretend to understand that sort of thing, you know. But Summerhayes ain’t a spoon, as everybody will allow. He knows what he’s doing. Last time I was at Fontanel, I couldn’t make out for the life of me what Mrs Clifford wanted with that new set of stables. She said they were preparing against Charley’s growing up. I thought somehow Summerhayes must have a hand in it, and it’s plain enough now.”

“Well, he has done a great deal for her,” said the Rector; “he’s been a sort of unpaid steward at Fontanel. I daresay she didn’t know how to reward him otherwise. I believe that’s the handiest way of making it up to a man in a lady’s fancy. It’s a dangerous kind of business to go on long; but I don’t know that there’s anything to find fault with. She’s pretty and he’s not young;—well, not exactly a young fellow, I mean,” said the Rector, with a half apology. “I daresay they’ll do very well together. If poor Clifford had only made a sensible will—but for that nobody would have had any right to talk.”

“And what was poor Clifford’s will?” asked the stranger, with a polite yawn; “men don’t generally study their wife’s convenience in a second marriage, in that document; has the defunct been harder upon this lively lady than most husbands, or what’s wrong about his will?”

“Deuced fool, sir,” cried the Major; “left her every farthing he had in the world, without settling a penny on those deuced children, or binding her up anyhow; left her at thirty or so, I suppose, with every penny he had in her hands. Never heard of such an ass. Of course that’s what Summerhayes means, but I can tell him it won’t be a bed of roses. They’ll hate him like poison, these brats will—they’ll make parties against him—they’ll serve him so that he’ll be sick of his life. I know the whole business. He’s well enough off now, with his old father’s savings, and the manor-house, and nothing to do; but he’ll be a wretched man, mark my words, if he marries Fontanel with five children in it. It’s the maddest thing he ever did in his life.”

“The poor lady doesn’t seem to count for much,” said Mr Temple. “She’s a pretty nobody, I suppose.”

Upon which vehement disclaimers rose from all the convives. “No, she was a charming woman,” Gossett said. “A dear, kind-hearted, good little soul,” said the Rector. “Very well as women go,” the Major admitted; while the two young men added warmer, but equally vague commendations. “Yet none of you imagine she is being married for herself,” said the solitary individual who did not belong to Summerhayes, with a little laugh at the perturbation he had caused. But nobody saw the fun of it: they went on with the discussion, ignoring Mr Temple.

“When a woman is in Mrs Clifford’s position,” said the Doctor, “it is nonsense to talk of her being married. She is active, she is no longer passive in such a business. She’s richer, she’s gooder, she’s handsomer, she’s better off every way than Tom Summerhayes. How she ever came to fancy him is the wonder to me.”

“Deuced nonsense,” said the Major; “why didn’t he marry off his sisters and set up snug for himself? He’s old enough to know better, that fellow is. There’s young Chesterfield there, he’s at the time of life to make a fool of himself; but Summerhayes must be, let me see——”

“Don’t let us go into chronology,” said the Rector. “Poor little Mary, I hope she’ll be happy all the same. I married her to poor Clifford, and I daresay I’ll have this little business to do as well. I wish she had a brother, or an uncle, or some one to take that piece of duty off my hands. I think I will have one of my attacks, and go off to Malvern, and leave it, Spencer, to you.”

“I wish she had an uncle or a brother for more than that,” said the Doctor; “it ought to be seen to—the settlement and all that should be looked well into. I hope she’ll have her wits about her. Not that I mean to ascribe any mean motives to Tom Summerhayes; but still when there’s five children to be considered——”

“They’ll kill him, sir,” said the Major, with energy. “He’ll not enjoy her money for long, mark my words; they’ll kill him in a year. I have only got this to say, sir,” continued the warrior, turning round upon Mr Temple, who had ventured a remark not bearing on the present subject to the Curate, “if this income-tax is going to be kept up without any compensation, I’ll emigrate—it’s the only thing that remains for honest Englishmen. After a life spent in the service of my country, I’ll be driven to a colony, sir, in my old age. It’s more than the country can bear, and what’s better, it’s more than the country will bear. We’ll have a revolution, by Jove! that’s what will come of all this taxing and paying; it’s not to be borne, sir, in a land that calls itself free.”

Whereupon politics came into possession of the elders of the party, and young Chesterfield resumed that tantalising account of the Meet which made the poor Curate sigh.

Poor Mrs Clifford! she had but scant sympathy in those innumerable discussions, male and female, of which she was at present the subject, all in and about Summerhayes.

CHAPTER III.—WHAT THE CHILDREN HAD TO SAY.

Meanwhile little Loo, with another pair of big tears in her brown eyes, had been driven home in the wintry twilight over the frosty road, which rang to every stamp of her ponies’ heels in a way which would have excited the little thing into positive enjoyment of the exhilarating sounds and sensations of rapid motion, had things been as usual. As it was, she sat wrapped up in a fur cloak, with her little veil over her face, watching the great trees glide past in the darkening, and turning her wistful looks now and then to the young winterly moon, which had strayed like a lost child into the midst of a whole covey of clouds, still crimsoned with reflections from the sunset. Loo’s little heart ached so, and she was so steadfastly determined not to admit that it was aching, that she was almost glad to feel how chill her little feet were getting, and how benumbed the hand which was outside of the fur cloak. She kept her little stiff fingers exposed to the frosty breeze all the same, and was rather glad of that sensation of misery which gave her a little excuse to herself for feeling unhappy. As the tinges of crimson stole out of the clouds, and the sky grew so wistfully, coldly clear around the moon, Fontanel came in sight, with lights in all its windows, twinkling through the trees in the long avenue, now one gleam, now another, as the little carriage drove on. There first of all was the great nursery window blazing with firelight, where Loo meant to hold a little committee as soon as she got in, and where she could so well picture “all of them” in all their different occupations, populating all the corners of the familiar room. A little further on it was the window of mamma’s room, which lightened brightly out behind the bare branches of the great chestnut tree. What would the house be without mamma? the little girl asked herself, and the great blobs of hot dew in her eyes fell upon her cold fingers. “Aren’t you well, Miss Loo?” asked the old groom who drove her, and Loo made him a very sharp answer in the irritation of her troubled little heart. She ran into the light and comfort of the house with a perverse, childish misery which she did not understand. She would not let old William take her cloak from her, but threw it down, and stumbled over it, and stamped her little foot, and could have cried. Poor little Loo! she was sick at heart, and did not know what it meant. Instead of going to her mother, as she usually did, she hastened up to the nursery where “all of them” were in a highly riotous condition at the moment, and where the darkness of her little face was unnoted by all but nurse, who took off her boots and warmed her feet, and did away with the only physical reason Loo dared to pretend to as an excuse for looking wretched. It was not very easy to look wretched in that room. By the side of the fire where a great log blazed was Harry, aged ten, with a great book clasped in his arms, and his cheeks and hair equally scorched and crimsoned with near vicinity to the flame. Little Mary, and Alf, the baby, were playing at the other end of the room. Alf was six, though he was the baby; but Mrs Clifford was the kind of woman to love a pet, and the little fellow’s indignant manhood was still smothered in long curls and lace tuckers. He avenged himself by exercising the most odious tyranny over his next little sister, who was Baby’s slave. All this little company Loo looked round upon with mysterious looks. She herself was twelve, little and pale, with nothing particular about her but her eyes, and her temper, which had already made itself, unfortunately, felt through the house. She sat maturing her plans till she heard the clock strike, and saw that it would shortly be time to go to her mother in her dressing-room, as the Fontanel children always did before dinner. She immediately bestirred herself to her task.

“Nurse,” said Loo, “will you take these things down to mamma’s dressing-room, please, and tell her we will all come presently; and if you wish to go down-stairs, you may. I will take care of the children, and take them down to mamma.”

“Thank you, Miss Loo; but there’s nobody to be at dinner but Mr Summerhayes and Mademoiselle, and you’re all to go down,” said Nurse; “you’re too little to have the charge of Master Alf, and you’ve all got to be dressed, dears, for dessert.”

“Then you can come up when I ring. I want the children by themselves,” said little Loo, with her imperious air. “You can go away.”

“You’re a deal too forward for such a little thing. I’ll speak to your ma, Miss, I will,” said the offended nurse. “At least I would if it was any good; but as long as Missis encourages her like this;—oh children dear, there’s changed times coming! You won’t have the upper hand always; it’s a comfort to a poor servant anyhow, whatever it may be to other folks. I’m going, Miss Loo; and you’ll come up directly the very minute you leave your ma to be dressed.”

Loo watched her to the door, and, skipping off her chair, closed it behind the dethroned guardian of the nursery. “Now, children, come here, I want to speak to you all,” said the little princess. “Mary, don’t be as great a baby as Alf; you are eight—you are almost a woman. Alf, come here and stand by me like a gentleman. Harry——”

But Harry was not so easily roused. He had been lectured so long about scorching his face that he was now proof to all appeals. He had to be hunted up out of his corner, and the book skilfully tilted up and thrown out of his arms, which operation surprised Loo into a momentary laugh, of which she was much ashamed. “Harry!” she cried, with redoubled severity, “it is no nonsense I am going to talk of—it is something very serious. Oh, children!” exclaimed the elder sister, as Alf jumped upon Harry’s back, and the two had a harmless scuffle in continuation of that assault which had roused Harry. “Oh, children!” cried Loo, who had laughed in spite of herself, now bursting into quick tears of impatience and vexation. “You play and play and think of nothing else—and you won’t let me talk to you of what’s going to happen to mamma.”

“What is it?” cried Harry, opening a pair of great bright eyes, and coming hastily to his sister’s side. Alf asked “What is it?” too, and placed himself on the other hand. As for Mary, she was frightened and stood a little apart, ready to rush off to her mother, or to ring for Nurse, or to do anything else that the exigency might demand.

“Do you remember what mamma said to us when we were in the dining-room on Sunday after dinner, when Tom—I mean when Mr Summerhayes was there—when he kissed us all?” said Loo, with a little red spot suddenly glowing out upon one indignant little cheek.

“She said he was going to be a father to us,” said Harry, rather stolidly.

“And we didn’t know what it meant,” said little Mary, breaking in eagerly, “but Nurse told me afterwards. It means that mamma is going to be married to cousin Tom. Oh, won’t it be queer? Shall we have to call him papa, Loo? I shall never recollect, I am sure.”

Loo gazed with eyes growing larger and larger in the face of her insensible sister. Then seeing Mary’s arm on the top of the great nursery fender, Loo, we are sorry to say, was so far betrayed by her resentment as to thrust little Mary violently away with a sob of passion. They all looked at her with wondering eyes.

“Oh, you stupid, stupid children!” cried the poor little heroine, “don’t you know mamma, though she is so pretty, is not a young lady like other people that are going to be married; don’t you know people talk about it, and laugh at her, and say she is foolish? I have heard them do it!” cried Loo. “I heard them in Summerhayes to-day talking and scolding about our mamma. She knows best what to do—better than all of them. She will never be unkind to us, or stop loving us. Oh, only think if she knew that people said such things—it would kill her! I heard them, and I thought I should have died. And now, children,” said Loo, solemnly, “what we’ve got to do is to go down to mamma, not jumping or making a noise like great babies, but quiet and serious; and to tell her that she is to do what she thinks best, and never mind what people say; and that we—we,” sobbed the little girl, vainly trying to preserve her composure, as she brought out word after word with a gush of tears—“we’ll stand by her and trust in her, and never believe anything. That is what we must go and say.”

After she had finished her speech Loo fell into a little passion of crying, in which she partly lost the slight murmurs and remonstrances of her calmer and wondering audience; but passion as usual carried the day. When Mrs Clifford’s bell rang the children went down-stairs, looking rather scared, in a kind of procession, Loo coming last with Alf, who had to be held tightly by the hand lest he should break out into gambols, and destroy all the solemnity of the proceeding. Mrs Clifford was sitting by the fire when they went in, in an attitude of thought. The candles were not lighted, and it was very easy to suppose that mamma herself looked sad, and was quite in a state of mind to be thus addressed. Harry and Mary, rather ashamed of themselves, were already carrying on a quiet scuffle at the door when Loo came up to them. “You go first, Harry”—“No, you,” they were saying to each other. “Oh, you stupid, stupid children, you have no feeling!” cried Loo, bitterly, as she swept past them. Mrs Clifford looked up with a smile, and held out her hand, which she expected to be grasped immediately by a crowd of little fingers, but the mother’s looks were dreamy to-night, and some one else was before her children in her thoughts. She was startled when she felt Loo’s little cold hand put into hers, and woke up and pushed her chair back from the fire to look at the little things who stood huddled together before her. “What is the matter?” said Mrs Clifford.

“Oh, mamma, mamma,” cried Loo; her poor little voice grew shrill, notwithstanding all her efforts. She had to make a pause, and to preserve her dignity had to let Alf go, who immediately went off to ride on the arm of the sofa, and compromise the seriousness of the scene. “Oh, mamma, dear,” said Loo, feeling that no time was to be lost, “we have come to say that we will never believe anything; that we know you love us, and will always love us—and—and—we believe in you; oh, mamma, we believe in you, and we will always stand by you, if everybody in the world were on the other side.”

Here Loo fell, choking with tears and passion, on her mother’s footstool, and laid her poor little head, which ached with cold and crying, on Mrs Clifford’s lap. The mother’s eyes had woke up out of all their dreaming. Perhaps it was as well the candles were not lighted. That cheek which the widow screened with her hand was as crimson and as hot as Harry’s had been reading over the fire. She was glad Loo’s keen eyes were hidden upon her lap; she blushed, poor tender woman as she was, before her children. The little woman-daughter was dreadful to her mother at the moment—a little female judge, endued with all the awfulness of nature, shaming the new love in her mature heart.

“What does this all mean, children?” said Mrs Clifford, trying to be a little angry, to conceal the shock she had received.

“Oh, please mamma, it’s Loo,” cried Mary, frightened. “She made us come; it was one of her passions.”

“No, it was not one of her passions,” said Harry, who was Loo’s champion; “it was to tell mamma we would always stand by her; and so I will,” cried the boy on his own account, kindling up, “if there were any robbers or anything—for I’m the eldest son when Charley’s at school.”

Loo heard this where she lay, with her head on her mother’s lap; she was incapable of speech or motion almost, but she could not but groan with impatience over the stupidity of the children; and Alf was riding loudly on the arm of the sofa, shouting to his imaginary horse. Loo gathered herself up with a blush upon her cheeks; it did not enter into her head to imagine that her mother blushed much more hotly and violently when the little face unfolded itself slowly out of her lap.

“Hush! Loo, don’t say any more,” said Mrs Clifford; then with a little effort the mother put her arm round the child and drew her close. “I understand what you mean—but you must not say any more,” she said; then she stooped down her hot cheek upon that wet one of poor Loo’s. “We shall all be very happy, I hope,” said Mrs Clifford in the dark, in her little daughter’s ear. “I am doing it—for—for all your sakes, dear. He will stand by you and me, and all of us, Loo. I hope we shall be—very happy—happier even than we are now,” said Mrs Clifford, with a faint little tremble in her voice and quiver at her heart. When she had kissed Loo, and the child had gone away to compose herself, poor Mary, the mother, sat for a long time looking into the fire with a terrible misgiving upon her—“happier even than we are now.” Ah! just then she had been so happy—all well in the prosperous, plentiful house; not an ache or a trouble that she knew of among all her children; not a single look of love dimmed to her yet by her resolution; and the new love, sweet as any girl’s dream, restoring to her firmament all the transitory delicious lights of youth. Somehow that prospect darkened under a strange cloud of alarm and shame when the mother felt her cheeks flush at the look of her woman-child. “I am doing it for—all their sakes,” she tried to say to herself; but her innocence grew like guilt as she felt in her heart that this pretence was not true.

CHAPTER IV.—HER OWN THOUGHTS.

Mrs Clifford had not much time to think that night, and the impression went off her when she was in her lover’s company—which was very nearly always; for, long before this had been thought of, Tom Summerhayes had been the soul of everything at Fontanel. She had come so gradually to consult him about everything—to take his counsel upon small and great that happened—that it seemed only natural now that he should belong to her; but after Loo’s little scene a variety of annoyances came upon Mary—indications of the world’s opinion—evidences that it did not seem so natural to other people as to herself. Even Charley’s schoolboy letter was rather dreadful to his mother. The boy bestowed his approbation upon her match, and was to stand by her, too, in Loo’s very vein; and the mother felt more humbled by thus obtaining the consent of her children than she would have been by the sacrifice of all she had in the world. Still it never came into her head to give up her marriage—never, perhaps, till a day or two before, when things were much too far advanced for any drawing back, and when she sat alone by her fire, with her desk open before her, late at night when all the household were asleep. In her desk were various little matters which had been treasures to Mary Clifford. She took them out with trembling hands—a withered flower, given to her, oh, so long ago, when she was little more than a child, and preserved with girlish romance; a little ring made of hair, which she had worn in her days of betrothal; a little faded drawing, made by herself at the same period, of her early lover; and last and most important of all, some letters—not many, but very tender—the love-letters of her youth. How she had cried over them many a sad day after her Harry died; how she had gradually forgotten them again and left them in their safe concealment; how of late she had rather avoided the place where they were, and shrank from touching the little desk that contained them; and now, at last, upon the eve of her second wedding, here they were all spread out before her, to be disposed of somehow. Mary’s treasures! she had heard them called so—had called them so herself. What were they now?

Poor, little, soft, tender-hearted woman! There was no passion in her. She was in love with all her heart, but it was affectionately, not passionately, or else she never could have opened that desk. She took out the flower, and cried, and looked at it; then, with a hasty impulse, put it softly on the fire, and watched it blaze into sudden ashes, and cried again, and felt guilty to her heart. “I was such a child,” she said to herself in her tears, and took a kind of melancholy comfort from thinking how young she had been when she was first a bride. Then she looked at her own drawing, which was not the least like him, and thought with a compunction of her Harry. Poor Harry! All this bright house, all these dear children, were his as well as hers; but he was put away in the family vault, poor fellow, and nothing was henceforward to belong to him in this living world—not even the name he had given her, not her thoughts, not any of her heart. She cried over that too like the rest. She put up the ring in a little parcel for Loo—she laid aside the portrait for little Harry. She tried to indemnify him by making over all those little mementoes, which it troubled her to look at, to his children. Then she took up the bundle of yellow letters and timidly opened one of them, and read a few sentences. There she read of the young love that was never to die, never to know change. Poor Mary put them away again with a sob almost of terror, and hastily locked up the desk, and resolved to put it away somewhere out of sight. She could not examine any further into those “treasures” which had become ghosts. She drew her chair to the fire, and shivered in her thoughts. She was a simple-minded woman, not wise, but moved by every wind of feeling. It came to her mind just then to recollect how, in her first widowhood, she had taken comfort from the thought that Harry was near and saw her tears for him, and knew how faithful her poor heart was. Now that thought was too much for Mary’s strength. She gave a cry of helpless terror when it occurred to her. Alas, for that immortality of union which comforts the heart of grief! What if Harry met her at the very gates of heaven when she got there, and claimed her, she who was going to be another man’s bride? Sitting alone in the night, with all the household asleep, and such thoughts for companions, it was not wonderful if a panic seized upon Mrs Clifford’s heart. Poor Harry, who had loved her so well, appeared like a pursuing spectre to the soft little woman. If it was true that she belonged to him for ever and ever, how could she dare to love Tom Summerhayes? and if she did not belong to him for ever and ever—he who had loved her to the end, and had never done anything to forfeit her affection—what was the hereafter, the heaven where love, it appeared, could not be immortal? These fancies wrung poor Mary’s heart. She did not know any answer to make to them. The question put by the Sadducees nohow answered her case. She who blushed before her children, how could she ever look Harry in the face? She felt herself an infidel, trembling and crying over that everlastingness which had once given her such consolation. That Harry could ever cease to love her, nature contradicted as impossible. He was in heaven, far off, unseen, fixed in solemn unchangeableness in all the elevation of love and grief he died in, never to alter; and she?—— Step by step unconsciously that elevation of grief and love had died away from her in the changing human days, and now here she sat weeping, trembling, thinking with awe of Harry, wondering how he would claim her hereafter, how she could dare name his name when she was another man’s wife. Poor little trembling soul! She stole away to bed when she could bear it no longer, and sought refuge in sleep with the tears still in her eyes, some grand and desperate resolution of making a sacrifice of herself being in her mind, as was natural. She had troubled dreams, and woke up quite unrefreshed in the morning, which was very unlucky that day of all others, because the lawyers were coming, and all her business affairs were to be settled before her marriage. However, Mrs Clifford could not remember at her first waking what it was which had thrown such a cloud upon her; and when her thoughts of the previous night did return to her mind, they were neither so intolerable nor so urgent as they had been. In the daylight, somehow, those gates of heaven, at which Harry might be standing to claim her, looked a very far way off to the bride of Tom Summerhayes—there was no such immediate certainty of Harry’s existence anyhow, or of the kind of interest he might take in her proceedings; and the philosophy of the question did not recur to her mind with those puzzling and hopeless speculations. She was a great deal more content to accept the present and to postpone the future—to let hereafter take care of itself—than she had been at night. She put away the desk with Harry’s letters in a dark vacant upper shelf of a bookcase in her own dressing-room; there, where she could not even see it, it would no longer witness against her. It was a sunny morning, and the children came in all fresh and rosy to say their prayers, and there was a note from Mr Summerhayes on the breakfast-table, naming the hour at which the law people were to arrive. Mrs Clifford had recovered her colour and her spirits before they came; she was a little agitated, and looked very pretty in the commotion of her heart. Hers was a position very peculiar and interesting, as Mr Gateshead himself, the old family solicitor, suggested, as he read over the deed she was to sign. He was perfectly pleased with the arrangements altogether, and said that Mr Summerhayes had behaved most honourably and in the most gentlemanly way. It was very clear that his motives were not mercenary. The deed Mrs Clifford had to sign was one by which Fontanel and all its dependencies was settled upon her eldest son, she retaining the life-interest in it which her husband had meant her to have. Mr Summerhayes, who had been brought up for the bar, had himself advised Mr Gateshead in the drawing up of this important document. The new bridegroom was anxiously solicitous that the children should be portioned and the property distributed exactly as the family agent, who knew poor Clifford’s mind, would have advised him to settle it; and the deed was irrevocable and framed in the most careful manner, so that no ingenuity of the law could make it assailable hereafter. It was so rigid in all its provisions that poor Mary wavered a little over it. She thought it scarcely fair that he should be shut out entirely from every interest in all this wealth, which, at the present moment, belonged absolutely to herself. It was Mr Summerhayes himself who put, with a certain gentle force, the pen into her hands, and pointed exactly to the spot where she was to sign. “I have you, Mary,” he said in her ear, as he leant over her to keep the parchment steady; and Mary Clifford signed away all her power and secured her children’s rights, with “a smile on her lip and a tear in her eye,” feeling to her heart the delicious flattery. What she possessed was nothing to him—he had her, and a kingdom could not make him happier. So said the tone of his whisper, the glance of his eye, and the echo of her heart. This living Love which stood by her side, securing so carefully that Harry Clifford’s wealth should go to Harry Clifford’s heirs, and seeking only herself for its own, completely swallowed up poor Clifford’s ghost, if that forlorn spirit might by chance be cognisant of what was passing. Mary remembered no more her qualms and misgivings; and the prospect before her—now that the very children had got used to it, had ceased either to oppose or to stand by her, and had fallen into natural excitement about the approaching festivities, the guests who were to be at Fontanel, the new dresses, the great event about to happen—looked as bright as the glowing day.

CHAPTER V.—THE MARRIAGE.

Fontanel received a considerable party of guests for the marriage. Miss Laura and Miss Lydia, who were to be at the head of affairs while the new Mrs Summerhayes was absent on her wedding tour, arrived two days before, that they might get into the ways of the place, and know what was required of them, which was not very much, for Mary was but a languid housekeeper. Then there were two aunts, an uncle, and some cousins of Mrs Clifford, none of whom in the least approved of the match, though decorum and curiosity and kindness prompted them to countenance poor Mary in her foolishness, notwithstanding their general surprise, like Miss Harwood, that she had not the sense to know when she was well off. Then there was Charley from Eton, who had grown so much lately, that his mother blushed more than ever when he kissed her and said something kind about her marriage. These were not pleasant days for poor Mrs Clifford. She knew in her heart that nobody particularly approved of her, not even Tom’s sisters—that people were saying it was just what was to be expected, and that a woman left at her age with so much property in her hands was sure to make a fool of herself. She knew that the ladies when they got together had little conversations over her—that one wondered why she could not make herself happy with these dear children, and another with this fine place—and that a third mused what poor Mr Clifford would have said could he have known. Poor Mary was very thankful when the day dawned on her wedding-morning—she was glad, as brides seldom are, of the arrival of the fated moment which was to place things beyond the reach of censure or criticism, and relieve her from her purgatory. The Rector of Summerhayes had not been called on to do that piece of duty. The bridegroom luckily had a friend whose privilege it was; and still more luckily there was a little old disused church within the grounds of Fontanel in which the ceremony was to be performed, without the necessity of encountering the gaze and remarks of the village. It was not intended to be a pretty wedding or to put on those colours of joy which become the espousals of youth. Mingled and complicated, as are the thoughts of middle age, were the feelings of the two who stood side by side before the bare rural altar. The bridegroom was slight and tall in figure, with a careless languid air, through which occasionally a little gleam of excitement sparkled. If you watched him closely you could see that his mind was no way absorbed in the ceremonial of his marriage. The quick sudden glance here and there under his eyelids, of those cold but clear grey eyes, turned inquiringly to everything within his range. He read in the looks of the clergyman, even while he pronounced the nuptial blessing, what his opinion was of the entire transaction. He penetrated the mask of propriety in which the bride’s relations concealed their feelings—he investigated with oft-repeated momentary glances the face of Charley, who stood in his Etonian certainty of manhood, premature but not precocious, near his mother’s side. Mr Summerhayes even scanned, when all was over, the downcast countenance of Loo, who stood behind, watching with stout endurance, and resolute not to cry during the entire ceremony. What was the meaning which lay in those quick furtive darts of the bridegroom’s eye it was impossible to say; his closest friend could not have elucidated this strange secret by-play, of which nobody in the company was conscious, except, perhaps, one child; but one thing it proved at any rate, that his heart at this special moment was not engrossed, to the exclusion of everything else, by his bride.

Mary was much less mistress of herself. She cried quietly under her veil as she stood and listened to the familiar words. She repeated those that fell to her with a little shiver. In her heart she could not but feel what a terrible act she was completing as she vowed her love and obedience over again, and separated her future from her past. But Mary, with her downcast eyes, was insensible to everybody’s opinion at that moment. Had she been standing in a wilderness she could not have felt more isolated. She was conscious only of her new husband by her side—of an indistinct figure before her—of God above and around, a kind of awful shadow looking on. Mr Summerhayes was aware of her tears, and they moved him so that his colour heightened involuntarily, and he pressed her hand with a warning pressure when it came to that part of the ceremony. But Mary herself was not aware that she was crying till she felt this touch of remonstrance, which startled her back into consciousness. Such was this marriage, at which, as at other marriages, people looked on with various shades of sympathy and criticism, and which, with all its concealed terrors and outward rejoicing, was the free act of hearts uncoerced and acting only at their own pleasure—a free act, suggested by no third party, unless, perhaps, it might happen to be a certain grim inflexible Fate who, if the reins are but yielded to her for a moment, pursues her victim through a throng of inevitable consequences. But perhaps, when a woman is being married like Mary Clifford, it is a kind of comfort to her to feel as if she could not help herself, rather than to know that she is entering all these new dangers voluntarily, and in obedience to nobody’s will but her own.

“Well, I am sure, I wish them every comfort in life,” said Miss Harwood, as she stood leaning on her brother’s arm at the hall door of Fontanel, watching the carriage drive off which contained the happy pair. “She can’t feel much like a bride, poor thing, leaving all these children behind her. I am sure I wish her every happiness. I hope she’ll never live to repent it,” said Miss Harwood, with a sigh.

“Don’t be spiteful,” said the Rector. “This is not a time for such ill-omened wishes. It’s a very suitable match, and I wish them joy.”

“Oh, Mr Harwood,” said Miss Laura, taking up her position at the Rector’s other side, thus effecting a natural separation from Mary’s relations, who were comparing sentiments a little apart from the Summerhayes party—“a suitable match! when dear Tom is well known to represent the oldest family in the county, and might have married anybody—not to say a word against dear Mary, who is our sister now, and such a sweet creature. But oh, Mr Harwood,” cried Miss Lydia, who had interposed, as usual, “to talk of a suitable match!”

“There are no suitable matches nowadays. I don’t believe in ’em, by Jove!” said Major Aldborough, who, with eyes slightly reddened by champagne, was watching the carriage just then disappearing down the avenue.

“But there might be, Major,” said Miss Lydia, so softly that her sister could not take up the meek remark.

The Major only answered “By Jove!” under his breath. He was startled by the close vicinity—the gentle look—the mild suggestion. He moved a little away in a momentary panic. There was never any telling, as he said to himself, what these women might mean.

“It is so strange to be left in charge of the house,” said Miss Laura, “it gives one such a funny feeling. I don’t know how in the world we shall do with all the responsibility; but dear Mary insisted upon it, you know—though I am sure Mrs Tansey would have been much more suitable for the head of the table than one of us, who are so inexperienced,” cried Miss Lydia; “but dear Mary thought it best for the children’s sake. I hope, dear Mrs Tansey, you don’t mind being our guest,” proceeded the sisterly duet; “dear Mary thought it of such importance that the children should get used to us—though they know us perfectly well, still things are all so different; though otherwise, of course, she would so much have preferred you.”

“Oh, pray, don’t think it necessary to apologise for my niece to me, Miss Summerhayes,” said the offended aunt. “Mary has consulted her own inclinations, and so long as she is happy, that is all we can possibly want of her. I think she is quite right to make friends, if she can, in her new family. She knows she can always calculate upon us if she ever wants any service,” added the bride’s relation, with a slight heightening of colour and the ghost of a curtsy. The Miss Summerhayes were not unequal to the emergency.

“We all know how much poor dear Mary is liked among her own friends,” cried Miss Lydia. “Your dear girls were so fond of her last year when they spent such a long time at Fontanel; and dear Mary has such a taste in presents,” said Miss Laura, coming in so eagerly that she began out of breath. “We have gone shopping with her often when she was buying her little souvenirs. I hope you don’t think it will make any difference now she is married again. She is so affectionate; but as for wanting services from anybody, that is very unlikely,” resumed the elder sister, “now she has dear Tom. Dear Tom is so very devoted,” said Miss Laura, breaking in headlong. “You would think she was only eighteen to see all the attention he pays her. It is quite sweet to see them, like two turtle-doves.”

Such being the conversation that succeeded immediately upon the departure of the bridal pair, it is not to be supposed that the dinner-table was spread with a very joyful feast, or that the evening was spent in much happiness. Mary’s relations, who had up to this time felt themselves much at ease at Fontanel, kept greatly by themselves during the remainder of the wedding-day. Their occasional minglings with the Summerhayes party called forth bursts of smart dialogue, more exciting than amiable, and the opposing sides contended much for the notice of Loo and the other children, when they came down-stairs in their new dresses after dinner. It made little Loo’s heart sick to feel herself enfolded in the embraces of Miss Lydia and Laura on one side, and then to be talked to and admonished by Aunt Tansey on the other, who hoped she would be a good girl, and a great comfort to her poor mother. The children could not tell what to make of the aspect of affairs. Mamma gone, who was the sun and centre of the domestic world, and already a new rule and vague possibilities of change in the startled house. Down-stairs among the servants, though the means of merry-making were plentiful, this threatening cloud was even more apparent. A new master, known to like “his own way,” was an alarming shadow impending over the little community hitherto mildly and liberally governed by the mistress, whom her servants could scarcely forgive for the step she had taken. “With five lovely children and every blessin’ as this world could afford,” as the housekeeper said, shaking her troubled head. The new husband by no means ranked among the blessings of Providence to the mistress of Fontanel in anybody’s judgment, and nowhere was Mary’s rash act resented more warmly than in the servants’ hall.

“But, Loo,” said Etonian Charley, next morning, when Aunt Tansey and all her belongings had left Fontanel, and everything had fallen under the restless sway of the Miss Summerhayes, “I’m not going to put up with all this. You said we were to stand up for mamma; you mean we are only to pretend to stand up for mamma, you little humbug. Now that’s not my meaning,” said the heir of Fontanel. “I’m not going to make-believe that I think she’s done right, when I don’t. I am going to swallow cousin Tom right out,” cried the boy, not without a little flush on his face. “It’s a little awkward, to be sure, to know what to call him—but look here, Loo—I mean to stand by my mother without any humbug. I mean to think she’s done the very best for us all, and for herself too; and if she don’t think the same when she comes back, I’ll try to make her; and if you look black, as you’re looking, you are not the little brick I took you for, and I won’t have anything more to do with you, Loo.”

“Oh, Charley, I am not half so good as you are,” cried the admiring little sister, looking up to him with tearful eyes. Charley’s resolution acted like a charm upon the house in general; and so, with a gradually improving temper, though much pressed and fretted by Miss Laura and Miss Lydia, the nursery and the servants’ hall, and all the dependencies of Fontanel, waited for the advent of the new master and the return of Mrs Summerhayes.

AN ENGLISH VILLAGE—IN FRENCH.[^[1]]

The old pictures of village life in England will hardly suit for these modern times. The pleasant little social circle which either existed, or more often was imagined to exist, as in Miss Austen’s charming fictions, in the large well-to-do country village, is to be found there no longer. No one condescends in these days to live in the country, unless he can either do so, or affect to do so, more or less en grand seigneur. A change has passed over ‘Our Village,’ even since Mary Russell Mitford so admirably sketched it. The half-pay naval lieutenant or army captain (if any such survive) has retired into the back street of a cheap watering-place, not to the improvement either of his position or his happiness. The village surgeon is no longer an oracle; railways have brought “the first advice” (at any rate, in the county town) within the reach of almost all his patients; and he has either disappeared altogether, or, if he still exists as the “Union Doctor,” badly paid and little respected, he is seldom now a gentleman. Village lawyers—happily or unhappily—are become things unknown: and as for any gentleman’s family of independent but moderate means condescending to that kind of rural seclusion, it is unheard of. If there is any educated resident in any country village not fixed there by some local interest or occupation, he is apt to have something suspicious about his character or antecedents—to be a refugee from his lawful creditors, or his lawful wife, or something of that sort.

So that English village life now resolves itself mainly into that of the parson; for the squire, even if he be resident, scarcely forms part of the same social circle. And as to the rest, between the university graduate, of more or less refinement and education, and the opulent farmer such as he is at present, there lies a gulf which no fancy can exaggerate, and which the best intentions on both sides fail to bridge over. Where village spires stand thick together, where the majority of the rectors or vicars are men of the same way of thinking, and where it is the fashion of the country to be social, there is a good deal of pleasant intercourse, no doubt, between the parsons’ families, and as much “society,” in the real if not in the conventional sense, as is needful to keep the higher elements of humanity from stagnating; but where parishes spread far and wide over a poor or thinly-populated district, or, worse still, where religious sectarianism reckons its clergy into “High” and “Low,” and the Rector of A. shakes his head and lifts his eyebrows when any allusion is made to the Vicar of B.—there, the man whose lot has been cast in a country parsonage had need have abundant resources within himself, and be supremely indifferent to the stir of human interests without. He will, in many cases, have almost as far to ride in search of a congenial neighbour as though he were in the bush of Australia; he will find something like the solitude of the old monastery, without the chance of its peace and quietness.

Not that such a life is dull or uninteresting, by any means, unless in the unfortunate case of the man finding no interest in his duties. One of this world’s many compensations is, that the busy man, be he what else he may, is never dull, and seldom discontented. So it is, almost always, in the country parsonage; without claiming any high standard of zeal or self-devotion for its occupants, there is probably at least as much quiet enjoyment, and as little idle melancholy or fretful discontent, to be found among them, as among any other class of educated men.

Still, it is a life which it would be very difficult for a foreigner to appreciate or understand. The relation of the English country rector to his villagers is totally unlike that of the Lutheran or Roman Catholic priest. Not claiming—or at least not being in a position to maintain—anything like the amount of spiritual authority which is exercised by the pastor under both these other systems, he wields, in point of fact, an amount of influence superior to either. He cannot command the servile and terrified obedience in externals which is often paid by the Irish and Italian peasant to his spiritual guide; but he holds a moral power over his parishioners—even over those who professedly decline his ministrations—of the extent of which neither he nor they are always conscious, but to the reality of which the enemies of the Established Church in England are beginning to awake.

The reading world has perhaps been rather over-supplied, of late years, with novelettes in which the village parson, with some of the very white or very black sheep of his flock, have been made to walk and talk more or less naturally for their amusement and edification; but the sight of a little French book on the subject struck us as something new. It is very desirable that our good friends across the Channel should know something about our ways of going on at home; and that not only in the public life of large towns, or on the highways of travel and commerce, but in our country villages and rural districts. But French attempts at English domestic sketches have not, on the whole, been successful. It is, indeed, most difficult for a foreign visitor to draw pictures of society in any country which would pass muster under the critical examination of a native. We took up this ‘Vie de Village en Angleterre’ with some notion of being amused by so familiar a subject treated by a Frenchman; but we soon found we were in very safe hands. The writer knows us well, and describes us admirably, very much as we are; the foreign element is just strong enough to be occasionally amusing, but never in any way ridiculous; and we should be as much surprised at the correctness of the writer’s observation as charmed with the candour and good taste of the little volume, if we had not heard it credibly whispered that, although written for French readers (and in undeniable French), it may be claimed as the production of an English pen.

Whatever may be the secret of the authorship, the little book will repay the reader of either nation. It is written in the person of a political refugee, who, armed with one or two good introductions, comes to pass a period of exile in England. While previously travelling in Switzerland, he has made acquaintance with a Mr Norris, an energetic country parson of the modern “muscular” type. He it is who persuades the wanderer to study in detail, by personal observation, that “inner life” of England which, he has already learnt to believe, and rightly, forms and shapes, more than anything else, her national and political character. Hitherto, as he confesses to his new acquaintance, the coldness and reserve of such English as he has met with have rather frightened him; yet he has always admired in them that solidarité—which we will not attempt to translate. The hostility between the labouring classes in France and those above them has always appeared to him the great knot of political difficulties in that country—a source of more danger to real liberty and security than any other national evil.

He determines, therefore, to see and study this domestic character of England for himself—“not in her political institutions, which we Frenchmen have been too much accused of wishing to copy, but in that social life which may very possibly explain the secret of her strength and her liberty.”—(P. 22.)

It was not his first visit to London; and, arriving in the month of March, he finds the climate as bad, and the great city as dingy and dirty, as ever. He does not appear to have noticed our painful efforts to consume our own smoke, or our ambitious designs in modern street architecture. On the other hand, he mercifully ignores—if he saw it—our Great Exhibition. The crowded gin-palaces, and the state of the Haymarket by night, disgust him, as well they might; and he escapes from the murky Babylon, as soon as he has taken a few lessons to improve his colloquial English, to pay the promised visit to his friend Mr Norris at his parsonage at Kingsford; stopping on his way to deliver a letter of introduction to an English countess, an old friend of his family, who has a seat close to Lynmere, a sort of pet village, where the ornamented cottages form a portion of the park scenery.

In his walk from the station, he makes the acquaintance of a “Madame Jones,” whose cottage, with its wooden paling and scarlet geraniums, abutting on the pleasant common, has its door invitingly open. He pauses to admire the little English picture as he passes by. Good Mrs Jones observes him, and begs him to walk in; partly, we must hope (and we trust all foreign readers will believe), out of genuine English hospitality—though we doubt if all village dames in Surrey would take kindly to a Frenchman on the tramp—partly, it must be confessed, with the British female’s natural eye to business. “Perhaps Monsieur was looking out for a ‘petit logement?’” For Mrs Jones has two rooms to let; and even a foreigner’s money, paid punctually, is not to be despised. Monsieur was looking out for nothing of the kind, but he takes the rooms forthwith; and indeed any modest-minded gentleman, French or English, who wanted country board and lodging on a breezy common in Surrey, could not have done better. Here is what our traveller gets for twenty-two shillings a-week; we only hope it will stop the mouths of all foreigners who rail at the dearness of English living, when they read here the terms on which a petit logement may be found in a pleasant situation in the home counties—two rooms, “fresh and clean,” comfortably furnished (with a picture of the Queen and a pot of musk into the bargain), and board as follows:—

“For breakfast she gave me tea with good milk, excellent bread-and-butter, accompanied either by a rasher of broiled bacon or fresh eggs. For dinner there were often ‘ragouts avec force oignons’ (Irish stew?), boiled mutton, or sometimes a beef-steak ‘très-dur,’ potatoes and boiled cabbage, with a glass of good beer and a bit of cheese. No dessert, but occasionally a pudding. On Sundays, roast-beef and plum-pudding were apparently the rule without exception, for they never failed to appear. The tea in the evening was much the same as the breakfast. If I had wished for supper, I might have had cold meat, bread, a lettuce, and a glass of beer.”

If Mrs Jones be not as entirely fictitious as Mrs Harris, and would enclose us a few cards, we think we could undertake that her lodgings (with a countess and a pet village, too, close by) should not be untenanted for a week in summertime. We feel sure, however, that the good lady is not a creature of mere imagination: when we read the description of her, we recall her as an old acquaintance, though we cannot remember her address:—

“As for this good woman’s personal appearance, she had nothing attractive about her except her scrupulous cleanliness. Her age belonged to that mysterious epoch comprised between forty and sixty. She had an intelligent countenance; but what was most marked about her was a slightly military air, and a black silk bonnet which, planted on the top of her head, tilted forward over her face, and usually concealed half of it. The two strings were carefully pinned back over the brim, and the ends fluttered on each side the bonnet, like the plume of a chasseur de Vincennes. That bonnet, she never left it off for a moment; and my indiscreet imagination went so far as to speculate what could possibly become of it at night.... Though I had begged her to consider herself absolute mistress in all domestic matters—and though, moreover, I should have found considerable difficulty in ordering my own dinner—she never failed to come in every morning at breakfast-time ‘for orders,’ as she called it. It was a little ruse of hers to secure a moment for the active exercise of her somewhat gossiping tongue. I was enabled to endure the torrent of words of which good Mrs Jones disburdened herself on such occasions the more philosophically, inasmuch as she was nowise exacting in the matter of an answer, and now and then gave me some interesting bits of information.”

The contrast which follows is drawn from a shrewd observation of national characteristics on both sides of the Channel:—

“This respectable dame possessed in a high degree the good qualities and the defects of her class of Englishwomen. In France, the manners of women of her order are full of expansion and sympathy; and a small farmer’s wife, however ignorant she may be, will always find means to interest you in her affairs, and to enter into yours. In England, on the contrary, with all her gossiping upon trifling subjects, she will maintain the strictest reserve, so far as you are concerned, upon matters of any importance. She serves you much better than a Frenchwoman would, because she looks upon you in the light of a master—a guest whose rank and character she makes the most of, because that rank and character raise her in her own estimation; but it is only in some very exceptional case that she will talk to you about anything which touches her personally, or that she will venture to confess that she is thinking about your concerns—that would be, in her eyes, a breach of proper respect.

“This is the peculiar feature in the relations between the different classes of society in England. Society there is profoundly aristocratic; there is no tradesman, be he ever so professed a Radical, who does not become a greater man in his own eyes by receiving the most commonplace act of courtesy from a lord; no servant who does not feel an additional satisfaction in waiting on a master whose manners have a touch of haughtiness, because such manners strike him as a mark of superiority. It is just as Rousseau says: ‘Clara consoles herself for being thought less of than Julia, from the consideration that, without Julia, she would be thought even less of than she is.’ The singular feature is, that this kind of humility, which would seem revolting to us in France, is met with in England amongst precisely those persons who are remarkable for their moral qualities and for their self-respect. It is because in them this deference becomes a sort of courtesy, a social tact, of which only a gentleman can understand all the niceties—which, besides, implies in their case nothing like servility—the respect paid to superiors in rank is kept within the limits of the respect due to themselves. This peculiarity in English manners struck me the more forcibly, because it offers such a remarkable contrast to what goes on among ourselves.”

There follows, at some length, a truthful and well-written exposition of the healthful influence exercised upon a nation by an aristocracy like that of England—which we must not stop to quote. ‘Revenons‘—as the author writes, asking pardon for so long a digression—‘Revenons à Madame Jones.’

That excellent landlady is careful not only of the diet and other creature-comforts of her new lodger, but of his moral and religious wellbeing also. A week of wet weather—which the foreign visitor finds sufficiently triste—is succeeded by a lovely Sunday morning. The Frenchman sallies out after breakfast for a morning walk, with his book under his arm—we are sorry to say it was a ‘Tacitus’—with the intention, we are left to suppose, of worshipping nature on the common. But Mrs Jones, though totally innocent as to her lodger’s heretical intentions, takes care to lead him in the way that he should go.

“‘Church is at eleven,’ Mrs Jones called out to me, not doubting for an instant that I should go there. I went out; she followed me close, locked all the doors, and, stopping for a moment at the cottage next door to call for a neighbour, continued her way. I was taking another path, but was very soon arrested by the hurried approach of Mrs Jones, who, fancying I had mistaken my way, came after me to show me the road to church. Such perseverance on her part made it evident that I should risk the loss of her good opinion if I did not profit by her instructions; so I walked down the hill with her by a road which wound between broad verges of green turf overshadowed by lofty trees.”

Thus fairly captured and led to church in triumph, his behaviour there was on the whole very decorous. The impression likely to be made on the mind of an intelligent and well-disposed foreigner by the simple and yet impressive service in a well-ordered village church is very nicely described. It is true that Mrs Jones’s prisoner, according to his own account, mingles with the very proper reflections natural to such a place “those inspired by the volume of Tacitus which he held open before him for decency’s sake” (and which, we fear, must have imposed itself upon the good lady as a French prayer-book); a little touch which, whether written by a Frenchman or not, and whether meant for truth or satire, is very French indeed. He finds time also to notice the features of the building itself, and its arrangements. The “tribune” in the gallery where the Countess performs her devotions, and the high enclosure with drawn curtains—“a sort of petit salon”—which protects the family of Mr Mason, the squire, from the more vulgar worshippers, do not strike the visitor, we rejoice to say, as happy illustrations of the aristocratic feeling in Englishmen; and it is evidently with a quiet satisfaction that he learns subsequently that “puséisme” is trying to do away with such distinctions.

An invitation to dinner from the Countess gives him at once the entrée to the best society in Lynmere and its neighbourhood. He finds his first English dinner-party a very dull affair; but he was surely peculiarly unfortunate in his company, if we are to take his account of the after-dinner conversation amongst the gentlemen: “At the end of a short time, two of the guests were asleep, and I would willingly have followed their example.” The remarks which follow, however, touch with more truth upon one of the defects in our social intercourse:—

“These dinners of ceremony (and there are scarcely any other kind of entertainments in the country amongst the higher classes) take place between neighbours, usually about twice in the year: scarcely any one except the clergyman enjoys the privilege of being received with less of etiquette. It follows that it is very possible to pass one’s life for ten years in the same spot, without having any really intimate association with any one of one’s neighbours. There are very few English people who do not regret it. Yet such is the despotism of custom, that it is rare to find any family which dreams of freeing itself from the trammels of this etiquette.”

Here and there, of late, the links of this social despotism, under which we have groaned so long, show symptoms of giving way. The advance of fashion has done good service in one respect, that the modern service à la Russe, adopted in all good houses, has struck a decisive blow at the old English heavy dinner; and just as the fashion has long died out of pressing one’s guests to eat more than they wish, so the fashion is coming in of not thinking it necessary to put upon the table three times more than can by any possibility be eaten. When small dinners become “the thing” even amongst the great people, there is hope that their lesser imitators will follow the example. And whenever the mistresses of small families will learn that good and careful cookery is quite as cheap as bad, and much more wholesome, and will condescend to go back not only to their great-grandmothers’ hoops, but to their household receipt-books, they may venture to invite their personal friends without compunction to a pleasant family-dinner, to the great furtherance of real sociability, and get rid for ever of those annual or biennial festivals which are a burden to the weary souls of guests and entertainers.

The foreign visitor becomes, in a very short time, established on a footing of intimacy with the family of Mr Mason, a magistrate and landed proprietor residing in the parish, in whose household Mrs Jones has formerly lived as nurse. The introduction through the Countess on the one part, and on the other the warm eulogies of good Mrs Jones (who is never tired of sounding the praises of her old master and the young ladies whom she has brought up), may serve in some degree to explain the somewhat rapid adoption of “Monsieur” as a family friend into the thrice-guarded circle of an English household. On his part, indeed, we soon discover quite a sufficient attraction. There is a pale pensive sentimental “Miss Mary,” quite the sort of young lady, we should say, to take the fancy of a romantic Frenchman in exile; but as she does not happen to take ours especially, we confess to have found no particular interest in this new version of ‘Love in a Village,’ and shall leave our younger readers to enjoy the romance of the little book for themselves, without forestalling, even by a single hint, its course or its conclusion. So far as relates to Monsieur himself, we repeat, we can quite understand how readily he responded to the warm adoption of his new English friends.

“Mr Mason consulted me about his son’s studies, Mrs Mason confided to me her anxieties as the mother of a family; and Mary—whose ardent and poetic soul felt the need of an intellectual sympathy which failed her in her own family—threw into her conversation with me an openness and vivacity which surprised her relatives.”

Nothing of the sort surprises us. What we were rather surprised at was, that Mr Mason père, a grave county dignitary and practical man of business, should have taken to his bosom, in this ardent and gushing fashion, the most agreeable, most intellectual, and most amiable foreigner that ever lived. At first we thought it a mistake—a patent defect and improbability in an otherwise sensible and natural book. The author’s casual attempt to account for it by the fact that Mr Mason was fond of billiards and of backgammon, and found in his new acquaintance an idle man generally ready to play a game, does not in the least harmonise with the usual character and habits of country gentlemen past sixty, or of Mr Mason in particular. But when we read that this excellent individual, like so many others of his class, has gone largely into turnips—and that his French visitor, wishing to know all about English country life, and knowing that such a life is nothing without turnips, determined, amongst his other travelling studies, to study an English model farm, and, when his host proposed a visit to that beloved establishment, accepted the invitation with “empressement,” and listened for hours to bucolic talk with “un grand interest,”—then we no longer wonder for an instant at the eternal friendship which the English member of the “Royal Agricultural” suddenly and silently vowed to his guest. Long and painful experience of visits paid to these excellent people in the country—reminiscences of the inevitable walk over ploughed fields—the plunging into long dark galleries where unfortunate beasts were immured for life to be turned into beef, a process which should be mercifully hidden from the eyes of every good Christian—the yawns unsuccessfully stifled—the remarks answered at random—the senseless questions desperately volunteered out of politeness on the visitor’s part, betraying the depth of his incapacity and ignorance;—these must rise before many a reader’s mind as well as our own, and make them feel what a treasure the scientific agriculturist had found in the inquiring Frenchman, who walked and talked and listened, not only without a complaint or a yawn, but positively because he liked it. Enterprising foreigners have been said to have tried to make their way into English country society, before now, through the introduction of the hunting-field, not always with success; perhaps they may be inclined to take a hint from this little book, and, in quiet family cases, try the turnips.

The visits to Mr Mason’s farm-cottages give the traveller the opportunity of drawing a contrast between the habits and aspirations of agricultural labourers in the two countries:—

“That passion for becoming proprietors, so widely spread in our own country districts, is unknown, and probably will long continue so, amongst the agricultural classes in England. The example of Ireland [it might have been added, of Wales], where the land has been very much subdivided, and where the population which maintains itself on it has become excessive, has strengthened the opinion amongst large landed proprietors in England as to the evil effects of small holdings. I think I scarcely exaggerate when I say that certainly, in the southern counties of England, a peasant possessing an acre of land would be a rarity. Probably it is to this impossibility of becoming small proprietors that we must attribute the taste which the labouring classes in England show for ornamenting their houses. If a working man has saved any money, he will employ it in buying a set of furniture, and making his cottage look gay; whereas, in France, he would have laid it aside in the hope of acquiring a bit of land; so that nothing can be more different than the wretched cabins of our own rural districts and the cottage of an English labourer, with its many little appliances of comfort and even luxury. In general the English peasant lives much less sparingly, and spends upon his meal twice as much as the French: it is true that the climate requires a more substantial style of diet.”

These observations would have been more strictly true if they had been made a few years ago. Within that time the passion for property has sprung up not only amongst those who call themselves “operatives” (journeymen weavers, shoemakers, &c.), but even, to a certain extent, amongst farm-labourers. Recent alterations in the laws of partnership have encouraged what are called “co-operative societies,” who not only open “stores” for the sale of all the necessaries of life, on the joint-stock principle of division of profits, but build cottages which, by certain arrangements, may become the property of the tenant. A whole village has just been built in Yorkshire, on this principle of the tenants becoming eventually the landlords. Not only this, but the same desire for independence—an excellent feeling in itself—is leading the same class to purchase cottage property whenever it comes into the market. If this ambition to become a purchaser were confined to a desire upon every man’s part to feel himself absolute master of the home he lived in, then, whatever large proprietors or able political economists might have to say, it would be an object which would deserve the very highest respect. But, unfortunately, the feeling is not altogether that of desiring to live in peace under one’s own vine and fig-tree: it is the wish to have a tenement to let out to others. It is comparatively seldom that a small piece of land, suited to the sum at such a purchaser’s command, is thrown into the market. Cottages, on the other hand, are continually advertised for sale; the working-man, eager to secure his bit of real property, gives for them a sum far beyond their value—a sum which the capitalist or large proprietor will not give; and in order to make his purchase pay, he either proceeds at once to divide a comfortable dwelling into two, or raises the rent upon his more needy tenant. The evil consequences are twofold; the neighbouring landowner, who ought to have the cottages for his own labourers, who would keep them in good repair, and let them at moderate rents, has been driven out of the market; and either a lower class of tenant, continually changing and being “sold up,” is introduced; or the honest labourer is compelled to pay to this new landlord of his own class a rent out of all proportion to the accommodation supplied him.

It is to be hoped that this growing evil (for evil it is) may be met by the increased liberality of landed proprietors in building good and sufficient cottages for the labourers on their own estates. In the case of the humbler artisans, in towns especially, one does not see the remedy except in the questionable shape of legislative restrictions.

But we have almost forgotten our foreign exile’s travelling acquaintance, Mr Norris, the hearty and genial English clergyman at whose invitation he first set himself to study English life. Before finally taking up his quarters at Lynmere, he has paid the promised visit to his friend in his parsonage at Kingsford; “a pretty Gothic chateau,” furnished with the taste of a gentleman and a scholar; a residence whose somewhat luxurious belongings, its ample library, and the well-chosen prints which grace its walls, when contrasted in the writer’s mind with the humble abode of the French village curé, give rise to reflections “not wholly to the disadvantage of the latter.” We, on the other hand, must warn any foreign reader who may draw the contrast for himself, that Kingsford Parsonage is a very exceptional case indeed. Mr Norris is discovered, somewhat to his French visitor’s surprise, clad in “a strange costume of white flannel,” not altogether sacerdotal; “Je suis habillé en cricketer,” is the parson’s explanation. The fact is, he has just been playing cricket with his pupils, half-a-dozen young men in preparation for the Universities. The simple and orderly habits of the household, the breakfast at eight, the dinner at one, the kindly intercourse between the tutor and his pupils, and the prosperity of a well-ordered village under an energetic pastor, are well described, and will give our French neighbours a very fair idea of such a life. A little, a very little “triste,” our visitor finds it, this English rural life, with its rich green meadows and grey sky, and slowly-winding river, half hidden by its banks. One needs, he considers, in order to find happiness in such scenes, a hearty love for simple nature, and a heart “warmed with the sentiment of duty fulfilled;” in short, he is of Dr Johnson’s opinion, though he puts it into much more complimentary language—that “those who are fond of the country are fit to live in the country.”

But if we cannot allow our French friends to imagine that all English country clergymen have their lot cast in the pleasant places of Kingsford and Lynmere, still less, we fear, must they consider them (or their wives) such wonderful economists as, like Mr Norris, to maintain all the quiet elegancies of a gentleman’s establishment in a handsome Gothic chateau (and to travel in Switzerland besides), upon an ecclesiastical income scarcely exceeding, after all necessary deductions, two hundred pounds a-year. True, Mr Norris takes pupils and writes for reviews—highly respectable vocations, and profitable enough in some hands, but scarcely open to the majority of his brethren, and not safe to be depended upon, as a supplementary income, by young clergymen on small preferments who may feel no vocation for celibacy. Mr Norris, indeed, is peculiarly favoured in many respects as regards money matters; for he has been fortunate enough to have enjoyed an exhibition at Oxford in days when the word “exhibition” (as we are informed in a note) meant “a gratuitous admission to the University.” Here we are certainly stepping out of the ground of real English life, where the writer has so pleasantly guided us, into a highly imaginative state of things. It would have been a noble boast, indeed, for us to have made to foreigners, if it could have been made truly, that Oxford, out of her splendid endowments, offered, even occasionally, “gratuitous admissions” to poor and deserving scholars. It was what the best of her founders and benefactors intended and desired—what they thought they had secured for ever by the most stringent and solemn enactments; but what, unhappily, the calm wisdom of the University itself has been as far from carrying out as the busy sweeping of a Reform Commission.

The foreign visitor is naturally very much impressed by an English cricket-match. The puzzled admiration which possesses him on the occasion of his “assisting” at a “fête du cricket” is very amusingly expressed. Throughout all his honest admiration of the English character, there peeps out a confession that this one peculiar habit of the animal is what he has failed to account for or comprehend. He tries to philosophise on the thing; and, like other philosophical inquirers when they get hold of facts which puzzle them, he feels bound to present his readers with a theory of cause and effect which is evidently as unsatisfactory to himself as to them. He falls back for an explanation on that tendency to “solidarity” in the English temperament which he has admired before.

“The explanation of the great popularity of the game of cricket is that, being always a challenge between two rival bodies, it produces emulation and excites that spirit of party which, say what we will, is one of the essential stimulants of public life, since in order to identify one’s self with one’s party one must make a sacrifice to a certain extent of one’s individuality. The game of cricket requires eleven persons on each side, and each of the players feels that he is consolidated (solidaire) with his comrades, in defeat as well as in victory.... That which makes the charm of the game is, above all, the solidarity which exists between the players.”

This is a very pretty theory, but scarcely the true one. In the public-school matches, no doubt, and in some matches between neighbouring villages, the esprit de corps goes for much; but, as a rule, we fear the cricketer is a much more selfish animal. His ambition is above all things to make a good score, and to appear in ‘Bell’s Life’ with a double figure to his name. Just as the hunting man, so that he himself can get “a good place,” cares exceedingly little for the general result of the day’s sport; so the batsman at Lord’s, so long as he makes a good innings, or the bowler so long as he “takes wickets” enough to make a respectable figure on the score, thinks extremely little, we are sorry to say, of “solidarity.” Whether the match is won or lost is of as little comparative importance as whether the fox is killed or gets away. We notice the difference, because it is a great pity it should be so. The Frenchman’s principle is by far the finer one; and the gradual increase of this intense self-interest in the cricket-field is going far to nullify the other good effects of the game as a national amusement. One reason why the matches between the public schools are watched with such interest by all spectators is, that the boys do really feel and show that identification of one’s self with one’s party which the author so much respects; the Harrow captain is really much more anxious that Harrow should beat Eton, than that he himself should get a higher score than Jones or Thompson of his own eleven; and the enthusiastic chairing of the hero of the day is not, as he knows, a personal ovation to the player, as to a mere exhibition of personal skill, but to his having maintained the honour of the school.

Our national ardour for this game seems always incomprehensible to a Frenchman. There is a little trashy, conceited book now before us, in which a French writer, professing to enlighten his countrymen upon English life, dismisses this mysterious amusement in a definition, the point and elegance of which it would be a pity to spoil by translation—“un exercice consistant à se fatiguer et à donner d’autant plus de plaisir qu’il avait fait répandre d’autant plus de sueur.”[^[2]] He is careful, at the same time, to suggest that even cricket is probably borrowed from his own nation—the “jeu de paume” of the days of the Grand Monarque. But the inability of so shrewd and intelligent an observer, as the foreign spectator with whom we have to do at present, to comprehend the real points of the game, is an additional testimony to its entirely English character. The Etonian’s mamma, who, as he relates with a sort of quiet wonder, sat for five hours on two days successively on a bench under a hot sun, to watch the match between her son’s eleven and Harrow, would have given a much better account of the game. The admiring visitor does not pretend, as he observes, to go into the details of a game which has thirty-eight rules; but he endeavours to give his French readers some general idea of the thing, which may suffice for unprofessional lookers-on. It is unnecessary to say that the idea is very general indeed. The “consecrated” ground on which the “barrières” are erected, and where the “courses” take place, are a thoroughly French version of the affair. The “ten fieldsmen precipitating themselves in pursuit of the ball when struck” would be ludicrous enough to a cricketer’s imagination, if the thought of the probable consequences were not too horrible. Even such headlong zeal on the part of two fieldsmen only, with their eye on the same ball, has resulted, before now, in a collision entailing the loss of half-a-dozen front teeth and other disfigurements. It was unnecessary to exaggerate the perils of a game which, as our author observes, has its dangers; and if the fieldsmen at Lynmere conducted themselves after this headlong fashion when he was watching them, we can quite understand his surprise that, when the day concludes with the inevitable English dinner, men who had spent the whole day “in running, striking, and receiving blows from the ball to the bruising of their limbs” (and precipitating themselves against each other) should still show themselves disposed to drink toasts and make speeches for the rest of the evening. The conversation which he has with the parish schoolmaster, an enthusiastic cricketer, is good in its way:—

“‘I hope you have enjoyed the day?’ said he to me. ‘You have had an opportunity of seeing what cricket is. It’s a noble game, is it not?’

“‘Yes,’ said I, ‘it is a fine exercise; and I think highly of those amusements which bring all classes together under the influence of a common feeling.’

“‘It is not only that,’ replied the excellent man: ‘but nothing moralises men like cricket.’

“‘How?’ said I, rather astonished to hear him take such high ground.

“‘Look here,’ he replied; ‘a good cricketer is bound to be sober and not frequent the public-house, to accustom himself to obey, to exercise restraint upon himself; besides, he is obliged to have a great deal of patience, a great deal of activity; and to receive those blows of the ball without shrinking, requires, I assure you, some degree of courage.’”

We suspect that these remarks belong of right at least as much to the French philosopher as to the English national schoolmaster; but they bring forward in an amusing way the tendency of one-ideaed philanthropists, which the author elsewhere notices, to attribute to their own favourite hobby the only possible moral regeneration of society:

“Every Englishman who is enthusiastic in any particular cause never fails to see in that the greatness and the glory of his country; and in this he is quite serious. In this way I have heard the game of cricket held up to admiration as one of the noblest institutions of England, an institution which insures to the country not only an athletic, but an orderly and moral population. I have seen the time when the same honour was ascribed to horse-racing; but since this sport has crossed the Channel, and it has been found by experience that it does not always preserve a country from revolutions and coups d’état, it has lost something of its prestige in England.”

There is always some moral panacea in the course of advertisement, like a quack medicine, to cure all diseases: mechanics’ institutes, cheap literature, itinerant lecturers, monster music-classes, have all had their turn; and just at present the ‘Saturday Review’ seems to consider that the salvation of England depends upon the revival of prize-fighting.

We cannot follow the writer into all the details of village institutions and village politics, which are sketched with excellent taste and great correctness. It will be quite worth while for the foreigner who wants to get a fair notion of what goes on here in the country—or indeed for the English reader who likes to see what he knows already put into a pleasant form, all the more amusing because the familiar terms look odd in French—to go with our French friend to the annual dinner of “Le Club des Odd-Fellows,” with its accompaniment “de speechs, de hurrahs, et de toasts”—without which, he observes, no English festival can take place; to accompany him in his “Visite au Workhouse,” subscribe with him to the “Club de Charbon,” or, better still, sit with him in the village Sunday-school, even if we cannot take the special interest which he did (for his own private reasons) in “le classe de Miss Mary.” Very pleasant is the picture—not overdrawn, though certainly taken in its most sunshiny aspect—of the charitable intercourse in a well-ordered country village between rich and poor. One form, indeed, there is of modern educational philanthropy which the writer notices, of the success of which we confess to have our doubts. The good ladies of Lynmere set up an “Ecole managère”—a school of domestic management, we suppose we may call it—where the village girls were to learn cooking and other good works. Now a school of cookery, admirable as it is in theory—the amount of ignorance on that subject throughout every county in England being blacker than ever was figured in educational maps—presents considerable difficulties in actual working. To learn to cook, it is necessary to have food upon which to practise. Final success, in that art as in others, can only be the result of a series of experimental failures. And here was the grand stumbling-block which presented itself, in the case of a cooking-school set up with the very best intentions, under distinguished patronage, in a country village within our own knowledge. Some half-dozen girls, who had left school and were candidates for domestic service, were caught and committed to the care and instruction of an experienced matron; not without some murmuring on the part of village mothers, who considered such apprenticeship a waste of time,—all girls, in their opinion, being born cooks. From this culinary college the neighbouring families were to be in course of time supplied with graduates. Great were the expectations formed by the managers, and by the credulous portion of the public. There were to be no more tough beef-steaks, no more grumbling masters and scolding mistresses, no more indigestion. But this admirable undertaking split upon a rock which its originators had not foreseen. It had been proposed that the village families should in turn send dishes to be operated upon by the pupils; but the English village mind is not given to experiments, culinary or other, and preferred boiling its mutton one day and eating it cold the next. Then the bachelor curate, who had a semi-official connection with the new establishment, reading prayers there as “chaplain and visitor,” who was presumed to have a healthy appetite, and was known to have complained of the eternal mutton-chops provided by his landlady, was requested to undergo a series of little dinners cooked for him gratis. The bashful Oxonian found it impossible to resist the lady patronesses’ invitation, and consented—for the good of the institution. But it ended in the loss to the parish of a very excellent working parson. For a few weeks, the experimental ragouts and curries sent in to his lodgings had at least the advantage of being a change: but as the presiding matron gradually struck out a bolder line, and fed him with the more ambitious efforts of her scholars, it became too much even for clerical patience, and he resigned his cure. Out of delicacy to the ladies’ committee, he gave out that it was “the Dissenters;” but all his intimate friends knew that it was the cooking-school.

The Rector of Lynmere is a Mr Leslie—a clergyman of the refined and intellectual type, intended, probably, as an artistic contrast to Mr Norris in his cricket flannels. He is, we are expressly told, “an aristocrat”—indeed, a nephew of the Countess aforesaid. He is reserved, nervous, and diffident, although earnest and single-hearted. The vulgar insolence of the Baptists at the vestry-meetings is gall and wormwood to him; and he suffers scarcely less under the fussy interference of a Madam Woodlands, one of the parish notables, of Low-Church views and energetic benevolence, who patronises the church and the rector, and holds him virtually responsible for all the petty offences and indecorums which disturb the propriety of the village. This lady is very slightly sketched, but the outline can be filled up from many a parish clergyman’s mental notebook. We do not wonder that Mr Leslie, with his shrinking sensibilities, had as great a horror of her as of Mr Say, the Nonconformist agitator, who led the attack at the church-rate meetings. Only we would remark, that if the author thinks that the unfitness of the Rector of Lynmere to contend with a body of political Dissenters, or his want of tact in dealing with so very excellent and troublesome a parishioner as Mrs Woodlands, is at all explained by his being “an aristocrat,” he is encouraging them in a very common and very unfortunate mistake. It is true that it is not pleasant for a man of cultivated mind and refined tastes, be he priest or layman, to be brought into contact with opponents whose nature and feelings, and the manner in which they express those feelings, are rude and vulgar; but if he possess, in addition to his refinement and cultivation, good sound sense, a moderate amount of tact, and, above all, good temper, he will find, in the fact of his being “a gentleman,” an immense weight of advantage over his antagonists. We remember to have seen protests, in the writings of a modern school of English Churchmen, against what they are pleased to term “the gentleman heresy;” representing it as dangerous to the best interests of both priests and people, that the former should attempt to combine with their sacred office the manners, the habits, and the social position of the gentleman. Without entering here into the serious question whether a special clerical caste, as it were, standing between the lower ranks and the higher of the laity, distinct from both, and having its separate habits and position, is a desirable institution to recommend; without discussing the other equally important question, whether the aristocracy of a Christian nation have not also their religious needs, and whether these also have not a right to be consulted, and whether they will bear to be handed over to a priesthood which, if not plebeian itself, is to have at least no common interests or feelings with the higher classes—a question, this latter, to which history will give us a pretty decided answer;—it is quite enough to say that the working-classes themselves would be the foremost to demand—if the case were put before them fairly—that the ministers of religion should be “gentlemen” in every sense of the word. They will listen, no doubt, with gaping mouths and open ears, to a flow of rhodomontade declamation from an uneducated preacher: an inspired tinker will fill a chapel or a village-green, while the quiet rector goes through the service to a half-empty church. But inspired tinkers are rare in any age; and it is not excitement or declamation which go to form the really religious life of England. This—which we must not be supposed to confine within the limits of any Church establishment—depends for its support on sources that lie deeper and quieter than these. In trouble, in sickness, in temptation, these things miserably fail. And the dealing of “a gentleman” with these cases—a gentleman in manners, in thoughts, in feeling, in respect for the feelings of others—is as distinct in kind and in effect, as the firm but delicate handling of the educated surgeon (who goes to the bottom of the matter nevertheless) differs from the well-meant but bungling axe-and-cautery system of our forefathers. The poor understand this well. They know a gentleman, and respect him; and they will excuse in their parish minister the absence of some other very desirable qualities sooner than this. The structure of English society must change—its gentry must forfeit their character as a body, as they never have done yet—before this feeling can change. When you officer your regiments from any other class than their natural superiors, then you may begin to officer your national Church with a plebeian clergy.

There is another point connected with the legitimate influence of the higher classes on which the writer speaks, we fear, either from a theory of what ought to be, or from some very exceptional cases:—

“The offices of magistrate, of poor-law guardian, or even of churchwarden, are so many modes of honourable employment offered to those who feel in themselves some capacity for business and some wish to be useful. It will be understood that a considerable number of gentlemen of independent income, retired tradesmen, and officers not employed on service, having thus before them the prospect of a useful and active life, gather round an English village, instead of remaining buried in the great towns, as too often is the case in our own country.”

We fear the foreign reader will be mistaken if he understands anything of the sort. The county magistracy offers, without doubt, a position both honourable and useful; but it is seldom open to the classes mentioned. We do not say that the offices of parish guardian and churchwarden are highly attractive objects of ambition; but we do think that in good hands they might become very different from what they are; immense benefit would result in every way to many country parishes, if men of the class whom the writer represents as filling them would more often be induced to do so, instead of avoiding them as troublesome and ungrateful offices, and leaving them to be claimed by the demagogues and busybodies of the district. It may not be pleasant for a gentleman to put himself in competition for an office of this kind; but it may be his duty to do so. The reproach which the writer addresses to the higher classes in France is only too applicable to those in England also:—

“If all those whose education, whose intelligence, whose habits of more elevated life, give them that authority which constitutes a true aristocracy, would but make use of their high position to exercise an influence for good upon public matters—if only the honest and sensible party in our country would shake off its apathy and fulfil all the duties of citizens—our institutions would have a life and power which at present are too often wanting.”

True words for the conservative spirit both in the English Church and in the English nation to lay to heart; for, so long as education and refinement are too nice to stain themselves with the public dust of the arena, they have no right to complain if candidates, less able but less scrupulous, parade themselves as victors.

If our neighbours over the water read (as we hope many of them will) these little sketches of an English village, drawn in their own language, if not by one of themselves, yet by one who is evidently no stranger to their national sympathies, and who writes manifestly with the kindest feelings towards both, it is well, perhaps, that they should bear in mind that it is a picture purposely taken under a sunny aspect. Rural England is not all Arcadia. All English landladies, even in the country, are not Mrs Joneses, nor are all English families as hospitable as the Masons. There are villages where there is no “Miss Mary” to teach the children or to talk sentiment. There are less fascinating “strangers’ guides” which could take him into the public-houses and the dancing-rooms as well as to rural fêtes and lectures, and show him what goes on there. But while we are far from claiming to be judged by our bright side only, we are glad that foreigners should see our bright side sometimes. It has not been too often painted in French colours; and we trust they will give the present artist’s work a fair hanging in their National Gallery.

LORD MACKENZIE’S ROMAN LAW.[^[3]]

It has sometimes been suspected that, in the noble delineation of the Roman character ascribed to Anchises in the sixth book of the ‘Æneid,’ Virgil was induced, by unworthy motives, to depreciate unduly the oratory of his countrymen as compared with that of the Greeks; and undoubtedly the inferiority of Cicero to Demosthenes, as a mere forensic pleader, is not so clear or decided as to demand imperatively from a Latin poet the admission there unreservedly made by the blunt and almost prosaic expression, “Orabunt causas melius.” Possibly, however, it was the poet’s true object, by yielding the most liberal concessions on other points, to enforce the more strongly his emphatic assertion, not merely of the superiority of the Romans in the arts of ordinary government, but of their exclusive or peculiar possession of the powers and faculties fitted for attaining and preserving a mighty empire. It is certain that he has justly and vividly described the great characteristic of that people, and the chief source and secret of their influence in the history of the world, when he makes the patriarch exclaim,—

“Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;

Hæ tibi erunt artes.”

In aid of the high moral and intellectual qualities which led to their success as the conquerors and rulers of the world, it is most material to notice the structure and genius of the language in which the Roman people expressed and embodied their political, legislative, and judicial determinations. Every national language is more or less the reflex of the national mind; and in no instance is this correspondence more conspicuous than in the case we are now considering.

The Latin language is inferior to the Greek in subtlety and refinement of expression, and is therefore far less adapted for metaphysical speculation or poetical grace—for analysing the nicer diversities of thought, or distinguishing the minuter shades of passion; but in the enunciation of ethical truths and of judicial maxims, it possesses a clearness, force, and majesty, to which no other form of speech can approach. The great foundations of law are good morals and good sense, and these, however simple and plain in their elements, are not mean or common things. On the contrary, they are susceptible of the greatest dignity of expression when embodied in words; and the language in which their principles shall be clothed may be of the utmost importance in rendering them both more portable in the memory and more impressive on the heart. The Roman jurists of the later period of the Republic were not careless students of the Greek philosophy; but they used it in their juridical writings with a wise discretion, and in special reference to the object of law, which is to lay down the broad rules of human conduct and personal rights in a form easily understood, and capable of being easily followed and faithfully observed by the mass of mankind.

The unequalled talent of the Roman people for political organisation is evinced by the manner in which the imperial authority was maintained, after the personal character of the nominal sovereigns had degenerated to the very lowest point of profligacy and imbecility. Our Teutonic ancestors had the wisdom to appreciate and adopt much of the machinery which they thus found in operation; and the municipal governments, as well as the judicial constitutions of Europe, are at this day influenced by the models which were thus left. The Popedom itself, on whose probable endurance for the future it would be hazardous to speculate, but whose marvellous ascendancy in time past is beyond dispute, was little else than an adaptation of the imperial organisation to ecclesiastical objects. But the influence of the Roman law on other nations was pre-eminently seen in the wide adoption of its general scheme, as well as of its special rules and maxims. Even the law of England—of all European systems perhaps the least indebted to the civil law—is deeply imbued with the Roman spirit in some of the most important departments of jurisprudence; and where the authority of the Roman law cannot claim a submissive allegiance, it is yet listened to as the best manifestation of the Recta Ratio that can anywhere be found. The vast experience of human transactions, and the endless complexities of social relations, which the Roman empire presented, afforded the best materials for maturing a science which was cultivated for noble objects by minds of the highest order, and embodied in propositions of unrivalled power and precision.

Independently of its influence on individual municipal systems, the Roman law deserves to be carefully studied, as affording the easiest transition, and the best introduction, from classical and philosophical pursuits to the technical rules and scientific principles of general jurisprudence. From Aristotle’s Ethics, or from Cicero De Officiis, the passage is plain and the ascent gentle to the Institutes of Gaius and Justinian; and these, again, are the best preparation for the perusal of Blackstone or Erskine. It ought, indeed, to be considered as a great privilege of the law-student that his path lies for so great a portion of its early way through a region which has been rendered so pleasing and attractive by the labours of the eminent men whom we have now named, and who combine so much charm of style and correctness of taste with so much practical wisdom and useful philosophy.

Hitherto, we think, there has been a great, or rather an utter, want in this country of any good Institute of the civil law, that could safely and efficiently guide the student in his early labours, or assist him in his more advanced progress. The elegant and admirable summary given by Gibbon in his History, cannot, without much comment and expansion, be made a book of instruction; but we feel assured that this want which we have noticed is supplied by the work now before us. Lord Mackenzie’s book, though bearing the popular and modest title of ‘Studies in Roman Law,’ is truly an Institute, or didactic Exposition, of that system, where its elements and leading principles are laid down and illustrated as fully as a student could require, while a reference is made at every step to texts and authorities, which will enable him to extend and confirm his views by a full examination of original sources. The enunciation of the legal principles is everywhere given with great brevity, but with remarkable clearness and precision, and in a manner equally pleasing and unpretending. The comparison which is at the same time presented between the Roman system and the laws of France, England, and Scotland, add greatly to the attraction as well as to the usefulness of the work.

At the risk of appearing to resemble the man in Hierocles who carried a brick about with him as a sample of his house, we shall here offer a few extracts in illustration of the character of the work and its style of execution, premising that the passages we have selected have reference to topics more of a popular than of a scientific kind.

The interest attaching at present to questions of international law, and to the rights of belligerents, will recommend the passages on those subjects which here follow:—

“If all the states of Europe were to concur in framing a general code of international law, which should be binding on them all, and form themselves into a confederacy to enforce it, this might be regarded as a positive law of nations for Europe. But nothing of this sort has ever been attempted. The nearest approach to such international legislation is the general regulations introduced into treaties by the great Powers of Europe, which are binding on the contracting parties, but not on the states that decline to accede to them.

“To settle disputes between nations on the principles of justice, rather than leave them to the blind arbitrament of war, is the primary object of the European law of nations. When war has broken out, it regulates the rights and duties of belligerents, and the conduct of neutrals.

“As the weak side of the law of nations is the want of a supreme executive power to enforce it, small states are exposed to great disadvantages in disputes with their more powerful neighbours. But the modern political system of Europe for the preservation of the balance of power forms a strong barrier against unjust aggression. When the power of one great state can be balanced, or kept in check, by that of another, the independence of smaller states is in some degree secured against both; for neither of the great Powers will allow its rival to add to its strength by the conquest of the smaller states....

“By the declaration of 16th April 1856, the Congress of Paris, held after the Crimean war, adopted four principles of international law. 1. Privateering is and remains abolished. 2. The neutral flag covers the enemy’s merchandise, with the exception of contraband of war. 3. Neutral merchandise, with the exception of contraband of war, is not liable to seizure under an enemy’s flag. 4. Blockades, in order to be binding, must be effective; that is to say, must be maintained by a force really sufficient to prevent approach to an enemy’s coast. This declaration was signed by the plenipotentiaries of the seven Powers who attended the Congress, and it was accepted by nearly all the states of the world. But the United States of America, Spain, and Mexico, refused their assent, because they objected to the abolition of privateering. So far as these Powers are concerned, therefore, privateering—that is, the employment of private cruisers commissioned by the state—still remains a perfectly legitimate mode of warfare. Britain and the other Powers who acceded to the declaration, are bound to discontinue the practice in hostilities with each other. But if we should have the misfortune to go to war with the United States, we should not be bound to abstain from privateering, unless the United States should enter into a similar and corresponding engagement with us....

“The freedom of commerce, to which neutral states are entitled, does not extend to contraband of war; but, according to the principles laid down in the declaration of Paris of April 1856, it may now be said that ‘a ship at sea is part of the soil of the country to which it belongs,’ with the single exception implied in the right of a belligerent to search for contraband. What constitutes contraband is not precisely settled; the limits are not absolutely the same for all Powers, and variations occur in particular treaties; but, speaking generally, belligerents have a right to treat as contraband, and to capture, all munitions of war and other articles directly auxiliary to warlike purposes. The neutral carrier engages in a contraband trade when he conveys official despatches from a person in the service of the enemy to the enemy’s possessions; but it has been decided that it is not illegal for a neutral vessel to carry despatches from the enemy to his Ambassador or his Consul in a neutral country. The penalty of carrying contraband is confiscation of the illegal cargo, and sometimes condemnation of the ship itself.

“The affair of the Trent, West Indian mail, gave rise to an important question of maritime law deeply affecting the rights of neutrals. In November 1861, Captain Wilkes, of the American war-steamer San Jacinto, after firing a roundshot and a shell, boarded the English mail-packet Trent, in Old Bahama Channel, on its passage from Havannah to Southampton, and carried off by force Messrs Mason and Slidell, two Commissioners from the Confederate States, who were taken on board as passengers bound for England. The Commissioners were conveyed to America, and committed to prison; but, after a formal requisition by Britain, declaring the capture to be illegal, they were surrendered by the Federal Government.

“The seizure of the Commissioners was attempted to be justified by American writers on two grounds: 1st, That the Commissioners were contraband of war, and that in carrying them the Trent was liable to condemnation for having committed a breach of neutrality; 2d, That, at all events, Captain Wilkes was entitled to seize the Commissioners either as enemies or rebels. Both these propositions are plainly untenable....