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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XI—FEBRUARY, 1863.—NO. LXIV.

SOVEREIGNS AND SONS.

The sudden death of Prince Albert caused profound regret, and the Royal Family of Britain had the sincere sympathies of the civilized world on that sad occasion. The Prince Consort was a man of brilliant talents, and those talents he had cultivated with true German thoroughness. His knowledge was extensive, various, and accurate. There was no affectation in his regard for literature, art, and science; for he felt toward them all as it was natural that an educated gentleman of decided abilities, and who had strongly pronounced intellectual tastes, should feel. Though he could not be said to hold any official position, his place in the British Empire was one of the highest that could be held by a person not born to the sceptre. His knowledge of affairs, and the confidence that was placed in him by the sovereign, made it impossible that he should not be a man of much influence, no matter whether he was recognized by the Constitution or not. As the director of the education of the princes and princesses, his children, his character and ideas are likely to be felt hereafter, when those personages shall have become the occupants of high and responsible stations. The next English sovereign will be pretty much what he was made by his father; and it is no light thing to have had the formation of a mind that may be made to act, with more or less directness, on the condition of two hundred millions of people.

We know it is the custom to speak of the Government of England as if there were no other powerful institution in that Empire than the House of Commons; and that very arrogant gentleman, Mr. John Arthur Roebuck, has told us, in his usual style, that the crown is a word, and nothing more. "The crown!" exclaimed the member for Sheffield, in 1858,—"the crown! it is the House of Commons!" Theoretically Mr. Roebuek is right, and the British practice conforms to the theory, whenever the reigning prince is content to receive the theory, and to act upon it: but all must depend upon that prince's character; and should a British sovereign resolve to rule as well as to reign, he might give the House of Commons much trouble, in which the whole Empire would share. The House of Commons was never stronger than it was in the latter part of 1760. For more than seventy years it had been the first institution in the State, and for forty-six years the interest of the sovereign had been to maintain its supremacy. The king was a cipher. Yet a new king had but to appear to change everything. George III. ascended the throne with the determination not to be the slave of any minister, himself the slave of Parliament; and from the day that he became king to the day that the decline of his faculties enforced his retirement, his personal power was everywhere felt, and his personal character everywhere impressed itself on the British world, and to no ordinary extent on other countries. George III. was not a great man, and it has been argued that his mind was never really sound; and yet of all men who then lived, and far more than either Washington or Napoleon, he gave direction and color and tone to all public events, and to not a little of private life, and much of his work will have everlasting endurance. He did not supersede the House of Commons, but he would not be the simple vizier of that many-headed sultan, which for the most part became his humble tool. Yet he was not a popular sovereign until he had long occupied the throne, and had perpetrated deeds that should have destroyed the greatest popularity that sovereign ever possessed. It was not until after the overthrow of the Fox-and-North Coalition that he found himself popular, and so he remained unto the end. The change that he wrought, and the power that he wielded in the State,—a power as arbitrary as that of Louis XV.,—were the fruits of his personal character, and that character was the consequence of the peculiar education which he had received.

Lord Brougham tells us that George III. "was impressed with a lofty feeling of his prerogative, and a firm determination to maintain, perhaps extend it. At all events, he was resolved not to be a mere name or a cipher in public affairs; and whether from a sense of the obligations imposed upon him by his station, or from a desire to enjoy all its powers and privileges, he certainly, while his reason remained entire, but especially during the earlier period of his reign, interfered in the affairs of government more than any prince who ever sat upon the throne of this country since our monarchy was distinctly admitted to be a limited one, and its executive functions were distributed among responsible ministers. The correspondence which he carried on with his confidential servants during the ten most critical years of his life lies before us, and it proves that his attention was ever awake to all the occurrences of the government. Not a step was taken in foreign, colonial, or domestic affairs, that he did not form his opinion upon it, and exercise his influence over it. The instructions to ambassadors, the orders to governors, the movements of forces, down to the marching of a single battalion, in the districts of this country, the appointment to all offices in Church and State, not only the giving away of judgeships, bishoprics, regiments, but the subordinate promotions, lay and clerical,—all these form the topics of his letters; on all his opinion is pronounced decisively; in all his will is declared peremptorily. In one letter he decides the appointment of a Scotch puisne judge; in another the march of a troop from Buckinghamshire into Yorkshire; in a third the nomination to the Deanery of Westminster; in a fourth he says, that, 'if Adam, the architect, succeeds Worsley at the Board of Works, he shall think Chambers ill used.' For the greater affairs of State it is well known how substantially he insisted upon being the king de facto as well as de jure. The American War, the long exclusion of the Liberal party, the French Revolution, the Catholic question, are all sad monuments of his real power."

This is a true picture of George III., and why it should be supposed that no descendant of that monarch will ever be able to make himself potently felt in the government of his Empire we are at a loss to understand. The exact part of that monarch would not be repeated, the world having changed so much as to render such repetition impossible; but the end at which George III. aimed, and which he largely accomplished for himself, that end being the vindication of the monarchical element in the British polity, might be undertaken by one of his great-grandsons with every reason to expect success. The means employed would have to be different from those which George III. made use of, but that would prove nothing against the project itself. The men who followed Cromwell to the Long Parliament and the men who followed Bonaparte into the Council of Five Hundred were differently clothed and armed, but the pikemen of the future Protector were engaged in the same kind of work that was afterward done by the grenadiers of the future Emperor. The one set of men had never heard of the bayonet, and the other set had faith in nothing but the bayonet, believing it to be as "holy" as M. Michelet asserts it to be. The pikemen were the most pious of men, and could have eaten an Atheist with relish, after having roasted him. The grenadiers were Atheists, and cared no more for Christianity than for Mahometanism, their chief having testified his regard for the latter, and consequently his contempt for both, only the year before, in Egypt. Yet both detachments were successfully employed in doing the same thing, and that was the clearing away of what was regarded as legislative rubbish, in order that military monarchies might be erected on the cleared ground. In each instance there was the element of violence actively at work, and it makes no possible difference that the English Commons went out because they did not care to come to push of pike, and that the French Representatives departed rather than risk the consequence of a bayonet-charge. So if the Prince of Wales should see fit to tread in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, he would have very different instruments from those "king's friends" whose existence and actions were so fatal to ministers in the early part of those days when George III. was king.

It is a common remark, that the institutions of England have been so far reformed in a democratic direction, that no monarch could ever expect to become powerful in that country. We think the observation unphilosophical; and it is because the old aristocratical system of England received a heavy blow in 1832 that we believe a king of that country could make himself a ruler in fact as well as in theory. Between a king and an aristocracy there never can be anything like a sincere attachment, unless the king be content to be recognized as the first member of the patrician order, to be primus inter pares in strict good faith, an agent of his class, but not the sovereign of his kingdom. Kings generally prefer new men to men of established position and old descent. They have a fondness for low-born favorites, who are not only cleverer than most aristocrats will condescend to be, but who recognize a chief in a monarch, and enable him to feel and to enjoy his superiority when in their company. The hostility that prevails between the peer and the parvenu is the most natural thing in the world, and is no more to be wondered at than that between the hare and the hound. In earlier times the peerage had the best of it, and could hang up the parvenus with wonderful despatch,—as witness the fate of Cochrane and his associates, favorites of the third James of Scotland, who swung in the wind over Lauder Bridge. In later times brains and intelligence tell in and on the world, and the peers, having no longer pit and gallows for the punishment of presumptuous plebeians who dare to get between them and the regal sunshine, must be content to see those plebeians basking in the royal rays, if they are not capable of outdoing them in those arts that ever have been found most useful in the advancement of the interest of courtiers. Hanging and heading have gone mostly out of date, or the peer would be in more danger than the upstart.

The Reform Bill has made it much easier for a king of Great Britain to become a ruler than it was for George III. to carry his point over the old aristocracy, for it has created a class of voters who could be easily won over to the aid of a king engaged in a project that should not injure them, while its success should reduce the power of the aristocracy. The father of the Reform Bill made a strange mistake as to the character of that measure. "I hope," said the old Tory and Pittite, Lord Sidmouth, to him, "God will forgive you on account of this bill: I don't think I can." "Mark my words," was Earl Grey's answer,—"within two years you will find that we have become unpopular for having brought forward the most aristocratic measure that ever was proposed in Parliament." The great Whig statesman was but half right. The Whigs became unpopular within the time named, but it was for very different reasons from that assigned by Earl Grey in advance for their fall in the people's favor. The Reform Bill, instead of proving an aristocratic measure, has wellnigh rendered aristocratical government impossible in England; and as a democracy in that country is as much out of the question as a well-ordered monarchy is in America, a return to a true regal government would seem to be the only course left for England, if she desires to have a strong government. When the Duke of Wellington, seeing the breaking up of the old system because of the triumph of the Whig measure, asked the question, "How is the King's government to be carried on?" he meant, "How will it be possible to maintain the old aristocratical system of party-government?"

Since the grand organic change that was effected thirty years ago, there has been no strong and stable government in England. Lord Grey went out of office because he could not keep his party together. The King, under the spurring of his wife, made an effort to play the part of his father in 1783, with Peel for Pitt, and was beaten. Peel was floored, and Lord Melbourne became Premier again; and though he held office six years, he never had a working majority in the Commons, nor a majority of any kind in the Peers. The largest majorities that he could command in the lower House would have been considered something like very weak support in the ante-Reform times, and would have caused the ministers of those times to resign themselves to resignation. When the Tories came back to power, in 1841, with about one hundred majority in the Commons, they thought they were secure for a decade at least; but in a few months they found they were not secure of even their own chief; and in five years they were compelled to abandon protection, and to consent to the death and burial of their own party, which was denied even the honor of embalmment, young Conservatism being nothing but old Toryism, and therefore it was beyond even the power of spices to prolong its decay. It had rotted of the potato-rot, and the League's powerful breath blew it over. The Whigs returned to office, but not to power, the Russell Government proving a most ridiculous concern, and living through only five years of rickety rule. A spasmodic Tory Government, that discarded Tory principles, endured for less than a year, not even the vigorous intellect of the Earl of Derby, seconded though it was by the genius of Disraeli, being sufficient to insure it a longer term of existence. Then came the Aberdeen Ministry, a regular coalition concern, a no-party government, and necessarily so, because all parties but the extreme Tories were represented in it, and were engaged in neutralizing each other. How could there be a party government, or, indeed, for long a government of any kind, by a ministry in which were such men as Aberdeen and Russell, Palmerston and Grahame, Gladstone and Clarendon, all pigging together in the same truckle-bed, to use Mr. Burke's figure concerning the mixture that was called the Chatham Ministry? The coalition went to pieces on the Russian rock, having managed the war much worse than any American Administration ever mismanaged one. The Palmerston Government followed, and has existed ever since, deducting the fifteen months that the second Derby-Disraeli Ministry lasted; but the Palmerston Ministry has seldom had a majority in Parliament, and has lived, partly through the forbearance of its foes, partly through the support of men who are neither its friends nor its enemies, and partly through the personal popularity of its vigorous old chief, who is as lively at seventy-eight as he was at forty-five, when he was a Canningite. Ministries now maintain themselves because men do not know what might happen, if they were to be dismissed; and this has been the political state of England for more than a quarter of a century, with no indications of a change so long as the government shall remain purely Parliamentary in its character, Parliament meaning the House of Commons. There is no party in the United Kingdom capable of electing a strong majority to the House of Commons, and hence a strong government is impossible so long as that body shall control the country. With the removal of Lord Palmerston something like anarchy might be expected, there being no man but him who is competent to keep the Commons in order without the aid of a predominating party. The tendency has been for some time to lean upon individuals, at the same time that the number of individuals possessed of influence of the requisite character has greatly diminished. Sir Robert Peel, had he lived, would have been all that Lord Palmerston is, and more, and would have been more acceptable to the middle class than is the Irish peer.

The state of things that is thus presented, and which must become every year of a more pronounced character, is one that would be highly favorable to the exertions of a prince who should seek to make himself felt as the wielder of the sceptre, and who should exert himself to rise from the presidency of an aristocratical corporation, which is all that a British monarch now is, to the place of king of a great and free people. A prince with talent, and with a hold on the affection of his nominal subjects, might confer the blessing of strong government on Britain, and rule over the first of empires, instead of being a mere doge, or, as Napoleon coarsely had it, a pig to fatten at the public expense. The time would appear to be near at hand when England shall be the scene of a new struggle for power, with the aristocracy on the one side, and the sovereign and most of the people on the other. A nation like England cannot exist long with weakness organized for its government, and there is nothing in the condition of Parliament or of parties that allows us to suppose that from them strength could proceed, any more than that grapes could be gathered from thorns or figs from thistles. A monarch who should effect the change indicated might be called a usurper, and certainly would be a revolutionist; but, as Mommsen says, "Any revolution or any usurpation is justified before the bar of history by exclusive ability to govern,"—and government is what most nations now stand most in need of. The reason why George III.'s conduct is generally condemned is, that he was a clumsy creature, and that he made a bad use of the power which he monopolized, or sought to monopolize, his whole course being unrelieved by a single trait of genius, or even of that tact which is the genius of small minds.

It has been charged upon the princes of the House of Hanover that they are given to quarrelling, and that between sovereign and heir-apparent there has never been good-will, while they have on several occasions disgusted the world by the vehemence of their hatred for each other. That George I. hated his heir is well known; and George II. hated his son Frederick with far more intensity than he himself had been hated by his own father. The Memoirs of Lord Hervey show the state of feeling that existed in the English royal family during the first third of the reign of George II., and the spectacle is hideous beyond parallel; and for many years longer, until Frederick's death, there was no abatement of paternal and filial hate. George III. was disgusted with his eldest son's personal conduct and political principles, as well he might be; for while the father was a model of decorum, and a bitter Tory, the son was a profligate, and a Whig,—and the King probably found it harder to forgive the Whig than the profligate. The Prince cared no more for Whig principles than he did for his marriage-vows, but affected them as a means of annoying his father, whose Toryism was of proof. He, as a man, toasted the buff and blue, when that meant support of Washington and his associates, for the same reason that, as a boy, he had cheered for Wilkes and Liberty,—because it was the readiest way of annoying his father; but he ever deserted the Whigs when his aid and countenance could have been useful to them. George IV. had no child with whom to quarrel, but while Prince Regent he did his worst to make his daughter unhappy, as we find established in Miss Knight's Memoirs. The good-natured and kind-hearted William IV. had no legitimate children, but he was strongly attached to the Fitzclarences, who were borne to him by Mrs. Jordan. Indeed, monarchs have often been as full of love for their offspring born out of wedlock as of hate for their children born in that holy state. Being men, they must love something, and what so natural as that they should love their natural children, whose helpless condition appeals so strongly to all their better feelings, and who never can become their rivals?

Queen Victoria is the first sovereign of the House of Hanover who, having children, has not pained the world by quarrelling with them. A model sovereign, she has not allowed an infirmity supposed to be peculiar to her illustrious House to control her clear and just mind, so that her career as a mother is as pleasing as her career as a sovereign is splendid. About the time of the death of Prince Albert, a leading British journal published some articles in which it was insinuated, not asserted, that there had been trouble in the Royal Family, and that that quarrelling between parent and child which had been so common in that family in former times was about to be exhibited again. It was even said that domestic peace was an impossibility in the House of Hanover, which was but an indorsement of Earl Granville's remark, in George II.'s reign. "This family," said that eccentric peer, "always has quarrelled, and always will quarrel, from generation to generation"; and he did not live to see the ill feeling that existed between George III. and his eldest son.

There is no reason for saying that the Hanover family is more quarrelsome than most other royal lines; and the domestic dissensions of great houses are more noted than those of lesser houses only because kings and nobles are so placed as to live in sight of the world. When a king falls out with his eldest son, the entertainment is one to which all men go as spectators, and historians consider it to be the first of their duties to give full details of that entertainment. Since the Hanoverians have reigned over the English, the world has been a writing and a reading world, and nothing has more interested writers and readers than the dissensions of sovereigns and their sons. If we extend our observation to those days when German sovereigns were unthought of in England, we shall find that kings and princes did not always agree; and if we go farther, and scan the histories of other royal houses, we shall learn that it is not in Britain alone that the wearers of crowns have looked with aversion upon their heirs, and have had sons who have loved them so well and truly as to wish to witness their promotion to heavenly crowns. The Hanoverian monarchs of England, and their sons, have shared only the common lot of those who reign and those who wish to reign.

The Norman kings of England did not always live on good terms with their sons. William the Conqueror had a very quarrelsome family. His children quarrelled with one another, and the King quarrelled with his wife. The oldest son of William and Matilda was Robert, afterward Duke of Normandy,—and a very trying time this young man caused his father to have; while the mother favored the son, probably out of revenge for the beatings she had received, with fists and bridles, from her royal husband, who used to swear "By the Splendor of God!"—his favorite oath, and one that has as much merit as can belong to any piece of blasphemy,—that he never would be governed by a woman. The father and son went to war, and they actually met in battle, when the son ran the old gentleman through the arm with his lance, and dropped him out of the saddle with the utmost dexterity. This was the first time that the Conqueror was ever conquered, and perhaps it was not altogether without complacency that "the governor" saw what a clever fellow his eldest son was with his tools. At the time of William's death Robert was on bad terms with him, and is believed to have been bearing arms against him. Henry I. lost his sons before he could well quarrel with them, the wreck of the White Ship causing the death of his heir-apparent, and also of his natural son Richard. He compensated for this omission by quarrelling with his daughter Matilda, and with her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou. He made war on his brother Robert, took from him the Duchy of Normandy, and shut him up for life; but the story, long believed, that he put out Robert's eyes, has been called in question by modern writers. King Stephen, who bought his breeches at so low a figure, had a falling-out with his son Eustace, when he and Henry Plantagenet sought to restore peace to England, and nothing but Eustace's death made a settlement possible. William Rufus, the Red King, who was the second of the Norman sovereigns of England, had no legitimate children, for he was never married. He was a jolly bachelor, and as such he has had the honor of having his history written by one of the ablest literary ladies of our time, Miss Agnes Strickland. He was the only king of England, who arrived at years of indiscretion, who did not marry. The other bachelor kings were Edward V. and Edward VI., whose united ages were short of thirty years. His character does not tend to make the single state of man respected. "Never did a ruler die less regretted than William Rufus," says Dr. Lappenberg, "although still young, being little above forty, not a usurper, and successful in his undertakings. He was never married, and, besides the crafty and officious tools of his power, was surrounded only by a few Normans of quality, and harlots. In his last struggle with the clergy, the most shameless rapacity is especially prominent, and so glaring, that, notwithstanding some exaggerations and errors that may be pointed out in the Chronicles, he still appears in the same light. Effeminacy, drunkenness, gluttony, dissoluteness, and unnatural crimes were the distinguishing characteristics of his court. He was himself an example of incontinence." This is a nice character to travel with down the page of history. He quarrelled with his brothers, and with his uncle, and kept up the family character in an exceedingly satisfactory manner, considering that he was unmarried. The statement that he was slain by Walter Tirel, accidentally, in the New Forest, is now disregarded. Our theory of his death is, that he fell a victim to the ambition of his brother, Henry I., who succeeded him, and who certainly had good information as to his fall, and made good use of it, like a sensible fellow.

Of all the royal races of the Middle Ages, no one stands out more boldly on the historic page than the Plantagenets, who ruled over England from 1154 to 1485, the line of descent being frequently broken, and family quarrels constantly occurring. They were a bold and an able race, and if they had possessed a closer resemblance to the Hapsburgs, they would have become masters of Western Europe; but their quarrelsome disposition more than undid all that they could effect through the exercise of their talents. On the female side they were descended from the Conqueror; and, as we have seen, the Conqueror's family was one in which sons rebelled against the fathers, and brother fought with brother. Matilda, daughter of Henry I., became the wife of Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, and from their union came Henry II., first of the royal Plantagenets. Now the Angevine Plantagenets were "a hard set," as we should say in these days. Dissensions were common enough in the family, and they descended to the offspring of Geoffrey and Matilda, being in fact intensified by the elevation of the House to a throne. Henry II. married Eleanora of Aquitaine, one of the greatest matches of those days, a marriage which has had great effect on modern history. The Aquitanian House was as little distinguished for the practice of the moral virtues as were the lines of Anjou and Normandy. One of the Countesses of Anjou was reported to be a demon, which probably meant only that her husband had caught a Tartar in marrying her; but the story was enough to satisfy the credulous people of those times, who, very naturally, considering their conduct, believed that the Devil was constant in his attention to their affairs. It was to this lady that Richard Cocur de Lion referred, when he said, speaking of the family contentions, "Is it to be wondered at, that, coming from such a source, we live ill with one another? What comes from the Devil must to the Devil return." With such an origin on his father's side, crossing the fierce character of his mother, Henry II. thought he could not do better than marry Eleanora, whose origin was almost as bad as his own. Her grandfather had been a "fast man" in his youth and middle life, and it was not until he had got nigh to seventy that he began to think that it was time to repent. He had taken Eleanora's grandmother from her husband, and a pious priest had said to them, "Nothing good will be born to you," which prediction the event justified. The old gentleman resigned his rich dominions, supposed to be the best in Europe, to his grand-daughter, and she married Louis VII., King of France, and accompanied him in the crusade that he was so foolish as to take part in. She had women-warriors, who did their cause immense mischief; and unless she has been greatly scandalized, she made her husband fit for heaven in a manner approved neither by the law nor the gospel. The Provençal ladies had no prejudices against Saracens. After her return to Europe, she got herself divorced from Louis, and married Henry Plantagenet, who was much her junior, she having previously been the mistress of his father. It was a mariage de convenance, and, as is sometimes the case with such marriages, it turned out very inconveniently for both parties to it. It was not unfruitful, but all the fruit it produced was bad, and to the husband and father that fruit became the bitterest of bitter ashes. No romancer would have dared to bring about such a scries of unions as led to the creation of Plantagenet royalty, and to so much misery as well as greatness. There is no exaggeration in Michelet's lively picture of the Plantagenets. "In this family," he says, "it was a succession of bloody wars and treacherous treaties. Once, when King Henry had met his sons in a conference, their soldiers drew upon him. This conduct was traditionary in the two Houses of Anjou and Normandy. More than once had the children of William the Conqueror and Henry II. pointed their swords against their father's breast. Fulk had placed his foot on the neck of his vanquished son. The jealous Eleanora, with the passion and vindictiveness of her Southern blood, encouraged her sons' disobedience, and trained them to parricide. These youths, in whose veins mingled the blood of so many different races,—Norman, Saxon, and Aquitanian,—seemed to entertain, over and above the violence of the Fulks of Anjou and the Williams of England, all the opposing hatreds and discords of those races. They never knew whether they were from the South or the North: they only knew that they hated one another, and their father worse than all. They could not trace back their ancestry, without finding, at each descent, or rape, or incest, or parricide." Henry II. quarrelled with all his sons, and they all did him all the mischief they could, under the advice and direction of their excellent mother, whom Henry imprisoned. A priest once sought to effect a reconciliation between Henry and his son Geoffrey. He went to the Prince with a crucifix in his hand, and entreated him not to imitate Absalom.

"What!" exclaimed the Prince, "would you have me renounce my birthright?"

"God forbid!" answered the holy man; "I wish you to do nothing to your own injury."

"You do not understand my words," said Geoffrey; "it is our family fate not to love one another. 'T is our inheritance; and not one of us will ever forego it."

That must have been a pleasant family to marry into! When the King's eldest son, Henry, died, regretting his sins against his father, that father durst not visit him, fearing treachery; and the immediate occasion of the King's death was the discovery of the hostility of his son John, who, being the worst of his children, was, of course, the best-beloved of them all. The story was, that, when Richard entered the Abbey of Fontevraud, in which his father's body lay, the corpse bled profusely, which was held to indicate that the new king was his father's murderer. Richard was very penitent, as his elder brother Henry had been, on his death-bed. They were very sorrowful, were those Plantagenet princes, when they had been guilty of atrocious acts, and when it was too late for their repentance to have any practical effect.

Richard I. had no children, and so he could not get up a perfect family-quarrel, though he and his brother John were enemies. He died at forty-two, and but a few years after his marriage with Berengaria of Navarre, an English queen who never was in England. When on his death-bed, Richard was advised by the Bishop of Rouen to repent, and to separate himself from his children. "I have no children," the King answered. But the good priest told him that he had children, and that they were avarice, luxury, and pride. "True," said Richard, who was a humorist,—"and I leave my avarice to the Cistercians, my luxury to the Gray Friars, and my pride to the Templars." History has fewer sharper sayings than this, every word of which told like a cloth-yard shaft sent against a naked bosom. Richard certainly never quarrelled with the children whom he thus left to his friends.

King John did not live long enough to illustrate the family character by fighting with his children. When he died, in 1216, his eldest son, Henry III., was but nine years old, and even a Plantagenet could not well fall out with a son of that immature age. However, John did his best to make his mark on his time. If he could not quarrel with his children, because of their tender years, he, with a sense of duty that cannot be too highly praised, devoted his venom to his wife. He was pleased to suspect her of being as regardless of marriage-vows as he had been himself, and so he hanged her supposed lover over her bed, with two others, who were suspected of being their accomplices. The Queen was imprisoned. On their being reconciled, he stinted her wardrobe, a refinement of cruelty that was aggravated by his monstrous expenditure on his own ugly person. Queen Isabella was very handsome, and perhaps John was of the opinion of some modern husbands, who think that dress extinguishes beauty as much as it inflames bills. Having no children to torment, John turned his disagreeable attentions to his nephew, Arthur, Duke of Brittany, who, according to modern ideas, was the lawful King of England. The end was the end of Arthur. How he was disposed of is not exactly known, but, judging from John's character and known actions, we incline to agree with those writers who say that the uncle slew the nephew with his own royal hand. He never could deny himself an attainable luxury, and to him the murder of a youthful relative must have been a rich treat, and have created for him a new sensation, something like the new pleasure for which the Persian king offered a great reward. Besides, all uncles are notoriously bad, and seem, indeed, to have been made only for the misery of their nephews and nieces, of whose commands they are most reprehensibly negligent. We mean to write a book, one of these days, for the express purpose of showing what a mistake it was to allow any such relationship to exist, and tracing all the evil that ever has afflicted humanity to the innate wickedness of uncles, and requiring their extirpation. We err, then, on the safe side, in supposing that John despatched Arthur himself,—not to say, that, when you require that a delicate piece of work should be done, you must do it with your own hand, or you may be disappointed. John did the utmost that he could do to keep up the discredit of the family; for, when a man has no son to whip and to curse, he should not be severely censured for having done no more than to kill his nephew. Men of large and charitable minds will take all the circumstances of John's case into the account, and not allow their judgment of his conduct to be harsh. What better can a man do than his worst?

Henry III. appears to have managed to live without quarrelling with his children; but then he was a poor creature, and even was so unkingly, and so little like what a Plantagenet should have been, that he actually disliked war! He might with absolute propriety have worn the lowly broom-corn from which his family-name was taken, while it was a sweeping satire on almost all others who bore it. His heir, Edward I., was a king of "high stomach," and as a prince he stood stoutly by his father in the baronial wars. He, too, though the father of sixteen children, dispensed with family dissensions, thus showing that "The more, the merrier," is a true saying. Edward II. came to grief from having a bad wife, Isabella of France, who made use of his son against him. That son was Edward III., who became king in his father's lifetime, and whose marriage with Philippa of Hainault is one of the best-known facts of history, not only because it was an uncommonly happy marriage, but that it had remarkable consequences. This royal couple got along very happily with their children; but the ambition of their fourth son, the Duke of Lancaster, troubled the last days of the King, and prepared the way for great woes in the next century. The King was governed by Lancaster, and the Black Prince, who was then in a dying state, was at the head of what would now be called the Opposition, as if he foresaw what evils his brother's ambition would be the means of bringing upon his son.

Richard II., son of the Black Prince, had no children, though he was twice married. He was dethroned, the rebels being headed by his cousin, Henry of Lancaster, who became Henry IV. Thus was brought about that change in the course of descent which John of Gaunt seems to have aimed at, but which he died just too soon to see effected. It was a violent change, and one which had its origin in a family quarrel, added to political dissatisfaction. Had the revolutionist wished merely to set aside a bad king, they would have called the House of Mortimer to the throne, the chief member of that House being the next heir, as descended from the Duke of Clarence, elder brother of the Duke of Lancaster; but more was meant than a political revolution, and so the line of Clarence was passed over, and its right to the crown treated with neglect, to be brought forward in bloody fashion in after-days. In fact, the Englishmen who made Henry of Lancaster king prepared the way for that long and terrible struggle which took place in the fifteenth century, and which was, its consequences as well as its course considered, the greatest civil war that has ever afflicted Christendom. The movement that led to the elevation of Henry of Holingbroke to the throne, though not precisely a palace-revolution, resembles a revolution of that kind more than anything else with which it can be compared; and it was as emphatic a departure from the principle of hereditary right as can be found in history. So much was this the case, that liberals in polities mostly place their historical sympathies with the party of the Red Rose, for no other reason, that we have ever been able to see, than that the House of Lancaster's possession of the throne testified to the triumph of revolutionary principles; for that House was jealous of its power and cruel in the exercise of it, and was so far from being friendly to the people, that it derived its main support from the aristocracy, and was the ally of the Church in the harsh work of exterminating the Lollards. The House of York, on the other hand, while it had, to use modern words, the legitimate right to the throne, was a popular House, and represented and embodied whatever there was then existing in politics that could be identified with the idea of progress.

The character of the troubles that existed between Henry IV. and his eldest son and successor, Shakspeare's Prince Hal, is involved in much obscurity. It used to be taken for granted that the poet's Prince was an historical character, but that is no longer the case,—Falstaff's royal associate being now regarded in the same light in which Falstaff himself is regarded. The one is a poetic creation, and so is the other. Prince Henry was neither a robber nor a rowdy, but from his early youth a much graver character than most men are in advanced life. He had great faults, but they were not such as are made to appear in the pages of the player. The hero of Agincourt was a mean fellow,—a tyrant, a persecutor, a false friend and a cruel enemy, and the wager of most unjust wars; but he was not the "fast" youth that he has been generally drawn. He had neither the good nor the bad qualities that belong to young gentlemen who do not live on terms with their papas. He was of a grave and sad temperament, and much more of a Puritan than a Cavalier. It is a little singular that Shakspeare should have given portraits so utterly false of the most unpopular of the kings of the York family, and of the most popular of the kings of the rival house,—of Richard III., that is, and of the fifth Henry of Lancaster. Neither portrait has any resemblance to the original, a point concerning which the poet probably never troubled himself, as his sole purpose was to make good acting plays. Had it been necessary to that end to make Richard walk on three legs, or Henry on one leg, no doubt he would have done so,—just as Monk Lewis said he would have made Lady Angela blue, in his "Castle Spectre," if by such painting he could have made the play more effective. Prince Henry was a very precocious youth, and had the management of great affairs when he was but a child, and when it would have been better for his soul's and his body's health, had he been engaged in acting as an esquire of some good knight, and subjected to rigid discipline. The jealousy that his father felt was the natural consequence of the popularity of the Prince, who was young, and had highly distinguished himself in both field and council, was not a usurper, and was not held responsible for any of the unpopular acts done by the Government of his father. They were at variance not long before Henry IV.'s death, but little is known as to the nature of their quarrels. The crown scene, in which the Prince helps himself to the crown while his father is yet alive, is taken by Shakspeare from Monstrelet, who is supposed to have invented all that he narrates in order to weaken the claim of the English monarch to the French throne. If Henry IV., when dying, could declare that he had no right to the crown of England, on what could Henry V. base his claim to that of France?

Henry V. died before his only son, Henry VI., had completed his first year; and Henry VI. was early separated from his only son, Edward of Lancaster, the same who was slain while flying from the field of Tewkesbury, at the age of eighteen. There was, therefore, no opportunity for quarrels between English kings and their sons for the sixty years that followed the death of Henry IV.; but there was much quarrelling, and some murdering, in the royal family, in those years,—brothers and other relatives being fierce rivals, even unto death, and zealous even unto slaying of one another. It would be hard to say of what crime those Plantagenets were not guilty.[A] Edward IV., with whom began the brief ascendency of the House of York, died at forty-one, after killing his brother of Clarence, his eldest son being but twelve years old. He had no opportunity to have troubles with his boys, and he loved women too well to fall out with his daughters, the eldest of whom was but just turned of seventeen. The history of Edward IV. is admirably calculated to furnish matter for a sermon on the visitation of the sins of parents on their children. He had talent enough to have made himself master of Western Europe, but he followed a life of debauchery, by which he was cut off in his prime, leaving a large number of young children to encounter the worst of fortunes. Both of his sons disappeared, whether murdered by Richard III. or Henry VII. no one can say; and his daughters had in part to depend upon that bastard slip of the Red-Rose line, Henry VII., for the means to enable them to live as gentlewomen,—all but the eldest, whom Henry took to wife as a point of policy, which her father would have considered the greatest misfortune of all those that befell his offspring. Richard III's only legitimate son died a mere boy.

[Footnote A: It has been said of the Plantagenets that they "never shed the blood of a woman." This is nonsense, as we could, time and space permitting, show by the citation of numerous facts, but we shall here mention only one. King John had a noble woman shut up with her son, and starved to death. Perhaps that was not shedding her blood, but it was something worse. Before English statesmen and orators and writers take all the harlotry of Secessia under their kind care and championship, it would be well for them to read up their own country's history, and see how abominably women have been used in England for a thousand years, from queens to queans.]

The Tudors fame to the English throne in 1485. There was no want of domestic quarrelling with them. Arthur, Henry VII.'s eldest son, died young, but left a widow, Catharine of Aragon, whom the King treated badly; and he appears to have been jealous of the Prince of Wales, afterward Henry VIII., but died too soon to allow of that jealousy's blooming into quarrels. According to some authorities, the Prince thought of seizing the crown, on the ground that it belonged to him in right of his mother, Elizabeth Plantagenet, who was unquestionably the legitimate heir. Henry VIII. himself, who would have made a splendid tyrant over a son who should have readied to man's estate,—an absolute model in that way to all after-sovereigns,—was denied by fortune an opportunity to round and perfect his character as a domestic despot. Only one of his legitimate sons lived even to boyhood, Edward VI., and Henry died when the heir-apparent was in his tenth year. Of his illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond, Henry was extravagantly fond, and at one time thought of making him heir-apparent, which might have been done, for the English dread of a succession war was then at its height. Richmond died in his seventeenth year. Having no sons of a tormentable age, Henry made his daughters as unhappy as he could make them by the harsh exercise of paternal authority, and bastardized them both, in order to clear the way to the throne for his son. Edward VI. died a bachelor, in his sixteenth year, so that we can say nothing of him as a parent; but he treated his sister Mary with much harshness, and exhibited on various occasions a disposition to have things his own way that would have delighted his father, provided it had been directed against anybody but that severe old gentleman himself. Mary I. was the best sovereign of her line, domestically considered; but then she had neither son nor daughter with whom to quarrel, and the difficulties she had with her half-sister, Elizabeth, like the differences between the Archangel Michael and the Fallen Angel, were purely political in their character. We do not think that she would have done much injustice, if she had made Elizabeth's Tower-dungeon the half-way house to the scaffold. But though political, the half-sisterly dissensions between these ladies serve to keep Mary I. within the rules of the royal houses to which she belonged. Mary, dying of the loss of Calais and the want of children, was succeeded by Elizabeth, who, being a maiden queen, had no issue with whom to make issue concerning things political or personal. But observe how basely she treated her relatives, those poor girls, the Greys, Catharine and Mary, sisters of poor Lady Jane, whose fair and clever head Mary I. had taken off. The barren Queen, too jealous to share her power with a husband, hated marriage with all "the sour malevolence of antiquated virginity," and was down upon the Lady Catharine and the Lady Mary because they chose to become wives. Then she imprisoned her cousin, Mary Stuart, for nineteen years, and finally had her butchered under an approach to the forms of law, and in total violation of its spirit. She, too, kept within the royal rules, and made herself as great a pest as possible to her relatives.

The English throne passed to the House of Stuart in 1603, and, after a lapse of six-and-fifty years, England had a sovereign with sons and daughters, the first since the death of Henry VIII. at the beginning of 1547. There was little opportunity for family dissensions in the days of most of the Stuarts, as either political troubles of the most serious nature absorbed the attention of kings and princes, or the reigning monarchs had no legitimate children. The open quarrel between Charles I. and the Parliament began before his eldest son had completed his eleventh year; and after that quarrel had increased to war, and it was evident that the sword alone could decide the issue, the King parted with his son forever. They had no opportunity to become rivals, and to fall out. There is so much that can be said against Charles I. with truth, that it is pleasing—as are most novelties—to be able to mention something to his credit. Instead of being jealous of his son, or desiring to keep him in ignorance of affairs, he early determined to train him to business. According to Clarendon, he said that he wished to "unboy him." Therefore he conferred high military offices upon him before he had completed his fifteenth year; and sent him to the West of England, to be the nominal head of the Western Association. Charles II. had no legitimate children, and so he could not have any quarrels with a Prince of Wales. He was fond of his numerous bastards, and, like an affectionate royal father, provided handsomely for them at the public-expense. What more could a father do, situated as that father was, and always in want of his people's money? Some of them were not his sons,—Monmouth, the best beloved of them all, being the son of Robert Sidney, a brother of the renowned Algernon, a fact that partially excuses the harsh conduct of James II. toward his nominal nephew. James II. had no legitimate son until the last year of his reign; but his two eldest daughters treated him far worse than any sovereign of the Hanoverian line was ever used by a son. They were most respectable women, and their deficiency in piety has worked well for the world; but it must ever be repugnant to humanity to regard the conduct of Mary and Anne with respect. No wonder that people called Mary the modern Tullia. Mary II. died young, and childless; and Queen Anne, though a most prolific wife, and but fifty-one at her death, survived all her children. Anne believed that her children's deaths were sent in punishment of her unfilial conduct; and she would have restored her nephew, the Pretender, to the British throne, but that the Jacobites were the silliest political creatures that ever triumphed in the how-not-to-do-it business, and could not even hold their mouths open for the rich and ripened fruit to drop into them.

The first of the English Stuarts, James I., is suspected of having allowed his jealousy of his eldest son, the renowned Prince Henry, to carry him to the extent of child-murder. The Stuarts are called the Fated Line, and it is certain that none of their number, from Robert II.—who got the Scottish throne in virtue of his veins containing a portion of the blood of the Bruce, and so regalized the family, which, like the Bruces, was of Norman origin, and originally Fitzalan by name—to Charles Edward, and the Cardinal York, who died but yesterday, as it were, but had a wonderful run of bad luck. They had capital cards, but they knew not how to play them. With them, to play was to lose, and the most fortunate of their number were those kings who played as little as they could, such as James I. and Charles II. Those who lost the most were those who played the hardest, as Charles I. and his second son, James II. Yet the family was a clever one, with strong traits, both of character and talent, that ought to have made it the most successful of ruling races, and would have made it so, if its chiefs could have learned to march with the times. They had to contend, in Scotland, with one of the fiercest and most unprincipled aristocracies that ever tried the patience and traversed the purposes of monarchs who really aimed at the good government of their people; and the idiosyncrasy contracted during more than two centuries of Scottish rule clung to the family after it went to England, and found itself living under altogether a different state of things. What was virtue in Scotland became vice in England; and the ultra-monarchists, who came into existence not long after James I. succeeded to Elizabeth, helped to spoil the Stuarts. Both James and his successor were dominated by Scotch traditions, and supposed that they were contending with men who had the same end in view that had been regarded by the Douglases, the Hamiltons, the Ruthvens, the Lindsays, and others of the old Scotch baronage. What helped to deceive them was this,—that their opponents in England, like the opponents of their ancestors in Scotland, were aristocrats; and they supposed, that, as aristocratical movements in their Northern kingdom had always been subversive of order and peace, the same kind of movements would produce similar results in their Southern kingdom. They could not understand that one aristocracy may differ much from another, and that, while in Scotland the interest of the people, or rather of the whole nation, required the exaltation of the kingly power, in England it was that exaltation which was most to be feared. Sufficient allowance has not been made for the Stuarts in this respect, little regard being paid to the effect of the family's long training at home, which had rendered hostility to the nobility second nature to it. Had the Stuarts been the supporters of liberal ideas in England, their conduct would have given the lie to every known principle of human action. As their distrust of aristocracy rendered them despotically disposed, because the Scotch aristocracy had been the most lawless of mankind, so did they become attached to the Church of England because of the tyranny they had seen displayed by the Church of Scotland, the most illiberal ecclesiastical body, in those times, that men had ever seen, borne with, or suffered from. James I. and his grandson Charles II. had their whole conduct colored, and dyed in the wool, too, by their recollections of the odious treatment to which they had been subjected by a harsh and intolerant clergy. They had not the magnanimity to overlook, in the day of their power, what they had suffered in the day of their weakness.

James I. undoubtedly disliked his eldest son, and was jealous of him; but it is by no means clear that he killed him, or caused him to be killed. He used to say of him, "What! will he bury me alive?" He ordered that the court should not go into mourning for Henry, a circumstance that makes in his favor, as murderers are apt to affect all kinds of hypocrisy in regard to their victims, and to weep in weeds very copiously. Yet his conduct may have been a refinement of hypocrisy, and, though a coward in the common acceptation of the word, James had much of that peculiar kind of hardihood which enables its possessor to treat commonly received ideas with contempt. His conduct in "The Great Oyer of Poisoning" was most extraordinary, it must be allowed, and is not reconcilable with innocence; but it does not follow that the guilt which the great criminals in that business could have established as against James related only to the death of Henry. It bore harder upon the King than even that crime could have borne, and must have concerned his conduct in matters that are peculiarly shocking to the ears of Northern peoples, though Southern races have ears that are less delicate. It was in Somerset's power to explain James's conduct respecting some things that puzzled his contemporaries, and which have continued to puzzle their descendants; but the explanation would have ruined the monarch in the estimation of even the most vicious portion of his subjects, and probably would have given an impetus to the growing power of the Puritans that might have led to their ascendency thirty years earlier than it came to pass in the reign of his son. James was capable of almost any crime or baseness; but in the matter of poisoning his eldest son he is entitled to the Scotch verdict of Not Proven.

Whether James killed his son or not, it is certain that the Prince's death was a matter of extreme importance. Henry was one of those characters who are capable of giving history a twist that shall last forever. He had a fondness for active life, was very partial to military pursuits, and was friendly to those opinions which the bigoted chiefs of Austria and Bavaria were soon to combine to suppress. Henry would have come to the throne in 1625, had he lived, and there seems no reason to doubt that he would have anticipated the part which Gustavus Adolphus played a few years later. He would have made himself the champion of Protestantism, and not the less readily because his sister, the Electress-Palatine and Winter-Queen of Bohemia, would have been benefited by his successes in war. Bohemia might have become the permanent possession of the Palatine, and Protestantism have maintained its hold on Southern Germany, had Henry lived and reigned, and had his conduct as a king justified the hopes and expectations that were created by his conduct as a prince. The House of Austria would in that case have had a very different career from that which it has had since 1625, when Ferdinand II. was preparing so much evil for the future of Europe. Had Henry returned from Continental triumphs at the head of a great and an attached army, what could have prevented him from establishing arbitrary power in his insular dominions? His brother failed to make himself absolute, because he had no army, and was personally unpopular; but Henry would have had an army, and one, too, that would have stood high in English estimation, because of what it had done for the English name and the Protestant religion in Germany,—and Henry himself would have been popular, as a successful military man is sure to be in any country. Pym and Hampden would have found him a very different man to deal with from his foolish brother, who had all the love of despotism that man can have, but little of that kind of ability which enables a sovereign to reign despotically. Charles I. had no military capacity or taste, or he would have taken part in the Thirty Years' War, and in that way, and through the assistance of his army, have accomplished his domestic purpose. His tyranny was of a hard, iron character, unrelieved by a single ray of glory, but aggravated by much disgrace from the ill working of his foreign policy; so that it was well calculated to create the resistance which it encountered, and by which it was shivered to pieces. Henry would have gone to work in a different way, and, like Cromwell, would have given England glory, while taking from her freedom. There is nothing that the wearer of a crown cannot do, provided that crown is encircled with laurel. But the Stuarts seldom produced a man of military talent, which was a fortunate thing for their subjects, who would have lost their right to boast of their Constitutional polity, had Charles I. or James II. been a good soldier. We Americans, too, would have had a very different sort of annals to write, if the Stuarts, who have given so many names to American places, had known how to use that sword which they were so fond of handling.

The royal families of England did by no means monopolize the share of domestic dissensions set apart for kings. The House of Stuart, even before it ascended the English throne, and when it reigned over only poor, but stout Scotland, was anything but famous for the love of its fathers for their sons, or for its sons' love for their fathers; and dissensions were common in the royal family. Robert III., second king of the line, had great grief with his eldest son, the Duke of Rothsay; and the King's brother, the Duke of Albany, did much to increase the evil that had been caused by the loose life of the heir-apparent. The end was, that Rothsay was imprisoned, and then murdered by his uncle. Scott has used the details of this court-tragedy in his "Fair Maid of Perth," one of the best of his later novels, most of the incidents in which are strictly historical. James I. was murdered while he was yet young, and James II. lost his life at twenty-nine; but James III. lost both throne and life in a war that was waged against him in the name of his son, who became king in consequence of his father's defeat and death. When James IV. fell at Flodden, because he fought like a brave fool, and not like a skilful general, he left a son who was not three years old; and that son, James V., when he died, left a daughter, the hapless Mary Stuart, who was but a week old. There was not much room for quarrelling in either of these cases. Mary Stuart's son, then an infant, was made the head of the party that dethroned his mother, and forced her into that long exile that terminated in her murder by Elizabeth of England. Mary's quarrels with her husband, Darnley, were of so bitter a character as to create the belief that she caused him to be murdered,—a belief that is as common now as it was in the sixteenth century, though the Marian Controversy has been going on for wellnigh three hundred years, and it has been distinctly proved by a host of clever writers and skilful logicians that it was impossible for her to have had any thing to do with that summary act of divorce.

Several of the sovereigns of Continental Europe have had great troubles with their children, and these children have often had very disobedient fathers. In France, the Dauphin, afterward Louis XI., could not always keep on good terms with his father, Charles VII., who has the reputation of having restored the French monarchy, after the English had all but subverted it, Charles at one time being derisively called King of Bourges. Nothing annoyed Louis so much as being compelled to run away before the army which his father was leading against him. He would, he declared, have stayed and fought, but that he had not even half so many men as composed the royal force. He would have killed his father as readily as he killed his brother in after-days,—if he did kill his brother, of which there is some doubt, of which he should have the benefit. As was but natural, he was jealous of his son, though he died when that prince was thirteen. Owing to various causes, however, there have been fewer quarrels between French kings and their eldest sons than between English kings and their eldest sons. Few French monarchs have been succeeded by their sons during the last three hundred years,—but two, in fact, namely, Louis XIII., who followed his father, Henry IV., and Louis XIV., who succeeded to Louis XIII., his father. It is two hundred and twenty years since a father was succeeded by a son in France,—a circumstance that Napoleon III. should lay to heart, and not be too sure that the Prince Imperial is to become Napoleon IV. There seems to be something fatal about the French purple, which has a strange tendency to spread itself, and to settle upon shoulders that could not have counted upon experiencing its weight and its warmth. Sometimes it is hung up for the time, and becomes dusty, while republicans take a turn at governing, though seldom with success. There were troubles in the families of Louis XIV., who was too heartless, selfish, and unfeeling not to be that worst kind of king, the domestic tyrant. He tyrannized over even his mistresses.

Philip II., the greatest monarch of modern times,—perhaps the greatest of all time, the extent and diversity of his dominions considered, and the ability of the races over which he ruled taken into the account,—was under the painful necessity of putting his eldest son, Don Carlos, in close confinement, from which he never came forth until he was brought out feet foremost, the presumption being that he had been put to death by his father's orders. Carlos has been made a hero of romance, but a more worthless character never lived. On his death-bed Philip II. was compelled to see how little his son Philip, who succeeded him, cared for his feelings and wishes. Peter the Great put to death his son Alexis; and Frederick William I. of Prussia came very near taking the life of that son of his who afterward became Frederick the Great.

Jealousy is so common a feeling in Oriental royal houses, that it is hardly allowable to quote anything from their history; but we may be permitted to allude to the effect of one instance of paternal hate in the Ottoman family at the time of its utmost greatness. Solyman the Magnificent was jealous of his eldest son, Mustapha, who is represented by all writers on the Turkish history of those times as a remarkably superior man, and who, had he lived, would have been a mighty foe to Christendom. This son the Sultan caused to be put to death, and there are few incidents of a more tragical cast than those which accompanied Mustapha's murder. They might be turned to great use by an historical romancer, who would find matters all made to his hand. The effect of this murder was to substitute for the succession that miserable drunkard, Selim II., who was utterly unable to lead the Turks in those wars that were absolutely essential to their existence as a dominant people. "With him," says Ranke, "begins the series of those inactive Sultans, in whose dubious character we may trace one main cause of the decay of the Ottoman fortunes." Solyman's hatred of his able son was a good thing for Christendom; for, if Mustapha had lived, and become Sultan, the War of Cyprus—that contest in which occurred the Battle of Lepanto—might have Lad a different termination, and the Osmanlis have been successful invaders of both Spain and Italy. It was a most fortunate circumstance for Europe, that, while it was engaged in carrying on civil wars and wars of religion, the Turks should have had for their chiefs men incapable of carrying on that work of war and conquest through which alone it was possible for those Mussulmans to maintain their position in Europe; and that they were thus favored was owing to the causeless jealousy felt by Sultan Solyman for the son who most resembled himself: and Solyman was the greatest of his line, which some say ended with him.

UNDER THE PEAR-TREE.

IN TWO PARTS.

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

One Sunday morning, long ago, a girl stood in her bed-room, lingeringly occupied with the last touches of her toilet.

A string of beads, made of pure gold and as large as peas, lay before her. They had been her mother's,—given to her when the distracted state of American currency made a wedding-present of the precious metal as welcome as it was valuable. Three several times, under circumstances of great pecuniary urgency, had the beads sufficed, one by one, to restore the family to comfort,—to pay the expenses of a journey, to buy seed-grain, and to make out the payment of a yoke of oxen. Afterwards, when peace and plenty came to be housemates in the land, the gold beads were redeemed, and the necklace, dearer than ever, encircled the neck of the only daughter.

The only daughter took them up, and clasped them round her throat with a decisive snap. But the crowning graces remained in the shape of two other ornaments that lay in a small China box. It had a head on the cover, beautifully painted, of some queen,—perhaps of the Empress Josephine, the girl thought. The hat had great ostrich-feathers, that seemed proper to royalty, and it was a pretty face.

In the box lay a pin and ring. On the back of the pin was braided hair, and letters curiously intertwined. The young girl slipped the ring on her own finger once more, and smiled. Then she took it off, with a sigh that had no pain in it, and looked at the name engraved inside,—DORCAS FOX.

Whoever saw this name in the town records would naturally image to himself the town tailoress or nurse, or somebody's single sister who had been wise too long,—somebody tall, a little bent, and bony,—somebody weather-beaten and determined—looking, with a sharp, shrewd glance of a gray eye that said you could not possibly get the better of her and so need not try,—somebody who goes out unattended and fearless at night; for, as she very properly observes, "Who'd want to speak to me?"

This might have described the original owner of the pin and ring, who had died years before, and left the ornaments for her namesake and niece, when she was too young to remember or care for her, but not the niece herself. She was young, blooming, twenty-two, and the belle of the country-village where she dwelt.

The bed-room where the girl stood and meditated, after her fashion, was six feet by ten in dimensions, and the oval mirror before which she stood was six inches by ten. It was a genuine relic of the Mayflower, and had been brought over, together with the great chest in the entry, by the grand-grand-grandmother of all the Foxes. If anybody were disposed to be skeptical on this point, Colonel Fox had only to point to the iron clamp at the end, by which it had been confined to the deck; that would have produced conviction, if he had declared it came out of the Ark. This was a queer-looking little mirror, in which the young Dorcas saw her round face reflected: framed in black oak, delicately carved, and cut on the edge with a slant that gave the plate an appearance of being an inch thick.

Sixty years ago there were not many mirrors in country-towns in New England; and in Colonel Fox's house this and one more sufficed for the family-reflections. In the "square room," a modern long looking-glass, framed in mahogany, and surmounted by the American emblem of triumph, was the astonishment of the neighbors,—and in Walton those were many, though the population was small.

Dorcas looked wistfully and wishingly at the oval pin; but with no more notion of what she was looking at than the child who gazes into the heavens on a winter night. When she looked into the oval mirror, no dream of the centuries through which it had received on its surface fair and suffering faces, grave, noble, self-sacrificing men, and scenes of trial deep and agonizing,—no dream of the past disturbed the serene unconsciousness of her gaze. She looked at the large pearls that formed the long oval pin, and at the exquisite allegorical painting, which, in the quaint fashion of the time of its execution, was colored with the "ground hair" of the beloved; so materializing sentiment, and, as it were, getting as near as possible to the very heart's blood. Yet the old gold, the elaborate execution of the quaint classical device, and the fanciful arrangement of the braided hair interwoven with twisted gold letters, all told no tales to the observer, whose unwakened nature, indeed, asked no questions.

The little room, so small that in these days a College of Physicians would at once condemn it, as a cradle of disease and death, had nevertheless for twenty years been the nightly abode of as perfect a piece of health as the country produced. Whatever might be wanting in height and space was amply made up in inevitable and involuntary ventilation. Health walked in at the wide cracks around the little window-frame, peeped about in all directions with the snow-flakes in winter and the ready breezes in summer, and settled itself permanently on the fresh cheeks and lips of the light sleeper and early riser.

Beside the white-covered cot there stood a straight-backed, list-seated oaken chair, a mahogany chest of drawers that reached from floor to ceiling, and a little three-legged light-stand. Everything was covered with white, and the room was fragrant with the lavender and dried rose-leaves with which every drawer was scrupulously perfumed. There was no toilet-table, for Dorcas had use neither for perfumes nor ointment. No Kalydors and no Glycerines came within the category of her healthful experience. Alert and graceful, she neither burnt her fingers nor cut her hands, and had need therefore of no soothing salves or sirups; and as she did not totter in scrimped shoes or tight laces, and so did not fall and break her bones, she had no need even of that modern necessity in all well-regulated families, "Prepared Glue." There was no medicine-chest in Colonel Fox's house. Healthy, occupied, active, and wise—but not too wise—was Dorcas Fox.

It is no proof that Dorcas was a beauty, that she looked often in the little mirror. Ugliness is quite as anxious as beauty on that point, and is even oftener found gazing with sad solicitude at itself, if haply there may be found some mollifying or mitigating circumstance, either in outline or expression. But Dorcas's face pleased herself and everybody else.

A certain freedom and ease, the result partly of a symmetrical form, and partly of conscious good-looks, gave the grace of movement to Dorcas which attracted all eyes. Almost every one has a sense of harmony, and old and young loved to watch the musical motion of Dorcas Fox, whatever she might be doing,—whether she queened it at the "Thanksgiving Ball," and from heel-and-toe, pigeon-wing, or mazy double-shuffle, evolved the finest and subtlest intricacies of muscle, or whether, on the Sabbath, walking behind her parents to meeting, she married the movement to the solemnity of the day, and, as it were, walked in long metre.

She always was in Hallelujah metre to the Blacks, Whites, Grays, Greens, and Browns that color so largely every New-England community; and the youths who were wont to form the crowd that invariably settled at the corner of the meeting-house waited only till Dorcas Fox went up the "broad-oil" to express open-mouthed admiration. After her fashion, she was as much wondered at as the Duchess of Hamilton in her time, and with much more reason, since Dorcas was composed of real roses and lilies.

On Sunday, though the Puritanic doctrine prevailed, as far as doctrine can, of not speaking week-day thoughts, or having them, if they would keep away, yet inevitably, among the younger portion of the flock, the day of "meeting" was one of more than religious importance; and many lads and lasses who were never attracted by Father Boardman's eloquent sedatives still made it a point to be regular in their attendance at meeting twice on every Sunday. From far and near came open one-horse wagons, piled high with weekly shaven and dressed humanity,—young and old with solemn and demure faces, with brown-ribboned queues, and garments of domestic making. Fresh, strong, tall girls of five feet ten, dressed in straw bonnets of their own handiwork, and sometimes with scarlet cardinals lightly flung over their shoulders, sprang over the wagon-thills to the ground. Now and then the more remote dwellers came on horseback, each Jack with his Gill on a pillion behind, and holding him with a proper and dignified embrace.

Hard-handed youths, with bright, determined faces,—men nursed in blockhouses, born in forts,—men who had raised their corn when the loaded gun went every step with the hoe and the plough,—such men, of whom the Revolution had been made, who could say nothing, and do everything, stood in a crowd around the meeting-house door. There was some excitement in meeting each other, though there was very little, if anything, to say. There was time enough in those days. Progress wasn't in such a hurry as now. Inventions came calmly along, once in a man's life, and not, as now, each heel-trodden by that of his neighbor, tripping up and passing it, in the speed of the breathless race.

The sun itself seemed to shine with a calmer and silenter radiance over the broad, leisurely land.

Time enough, bless you! and the Sunday, any way, is so long!

This Sunday morning, at ten o'clock, Dorcas has already been up and dressed six hours. Everything having the remotest connection with domestic duties has been finished and laid aside long ago, and she has devoted the last two hours to solitary meditations, mostly of the kind already mentioned.

In the great oven, since last night, has lain the Sunday supper of baked pork-and-beans, Indian-pudding, and brown bread, all the better the longer they bake, and all unfailing in their character of excellence. In the square room, in the green arm-chair, sits the Colonel, fast asleep.

Four hours ago, he fumed and fretted about barn and cow-house, breakfasted, and had family-prayers. Since then, he has donned his Sabbath array, both mental and bodily. Mentally, having dismissed the cares of the week, he has strictly united himself with his body, and gone to sleep. Bodily, he appears in a suit of hemlock-dyed, with Matherman buttons, knee- and shoe-buckles of silver. His gray hair is neatly composed in a queue, his full cheeks rest on his portly chest, and the outward visibly harmonizes with the inward man. He sleeps soundly now, purposing faithfully to keep awake during the three-and-twenty heads of the minister's discourse. If he finds it too much for him, he means to stand, as he often does. Sometimes he partakes freely of the aromatic stimulants carried by his wife and daughter as bouquets. The southernwood wakes him, and the green seeds of the caraway get him well along through the sermon.

Mrs. Fox steps softly in, rustling in the same black taffeta she always wears, and the same black silk bonnet,—worn just fifty-two days in a year, and carefully pinned and boxed away for all the other three hundred and thirteen.

As fashions did not come to Walton oftener than once in ten years, it followed that apparel among the young people wore very much the expression of individual taste, while among the elders it was wont to assume the cast now irreverently designated by "fossil remains." And, really, it did not much matter. Whatever our country-grandmothers were admired and esteemed for, be sure it was not dress.

As the clock pointed to half-past ten, the door opened quickly, and Dorcas stood on the threshold, like a summer breeze that has stopped one moment its fluttering, and hovers fresh, sweet, and sunny in the morning air. The breath of her presence, if indeed it were not association, roused old Colonel Fox from his sleep. He glanced at her, took the ready arm of his wife, looked again at the clock, and passed out over the flat door-stone with his cocked hat and cane, as became an invalid soldier and a gentleman. Behind them, hymn-book in hand and with downcast eyes, walked Dorcas. Not a word passed between the parents and their only daughter. On Sunday, people were not to think their own thoughts. And familiarity between parents and children, never allowed even on week-days, would have been unpardonable unfitness on the Sabbath.

They reached the church-door just as the minister, with his white wig shedding powder on his venerable back, passed up the broad-aisle. A perfectly decorous throng of the loiterers followed, and the pews rapidly filled. The Colonel and his wife, being persons of consequence, took their way with suitable dignity and deliberation. In the three who turned, about half-way up the broad-aisle, into a square pew, a physiognomist would have seen at one glance the characteristic features of each mind. In the Colonel, choleric, fresh, and warm-hearted, a good lover, and not very good hater. In his wife, "a chronicler of small-beer," with a perfectly negative expression. One might guess she did no harm, and fear she did no good,—that she saved the hire of an upper servant,—that she was an inveterate sewer and cleaner, and would leave the world in time with an epitaph.

On the third figure and face the physiognomist might dwell longer,—but that rather because youth, hope, and inexperience had refused to make any of the life-marks that tell stories in faces. There was abundant room for imagination and prophecy.

A figure not too tall, but full of wavy lines,—two dark-blue eyes, whose full under-lids gave an expression of arch sweetness to the glance,—a delicate complexion of roses and lilies, as suggestive of fading as of blossoming,—features small, and not at all of the Greek pattern,—and the rather large head and slightly developed bust, typical of American rural beauty.

To this summary of youthful charms would be at once added the grace of motion before spoken of, which made Dorcas Fox a favorite with all the young men in Walton, and which gave her a reputation of beauty which in strictness she did not deserve. A little habitual ill-health, and the glamour is gone, with the roses and lilies and the music of motion. In our climate of fierce extremes, both field- and garden-flowers speedily wilt and chill. Dorcas herself had been a thousand times told she was the very picture of her mother at her age. And just to look now at Mrs. Colonel Fox!

A tall young man stood on the doorsteps of the meeting-house, as Dorcas went demurely behind her parents in at the open door. He looked at her with a quick, inquiring glance from his keen Yankee eyes, which she answered with an almost imperceptible nod of her graceful head. She dropped her eyes, and passed on. This young man was Henry Mowers, and he owned the Mowers farm. He was a very good, sensible fellow, and had "kept company," as the country-phrase is, with Dorcas Fox for the last few weeks, having, indeed, had his eye on her ever since the New-Year's sleigh-ride and ball.

After Dorcas had reached her seat in the pew, and adjusted her spotless Sunday chintz and the ribbon that confined her jaunty gypsy-hat over her sunny hair, she raised her eyes carelessly to a pew in a side-aisle. The Dorrs generally occupied it alone; but sometimes Swan Day, when he wasn't in the choir, sat there too.

Swan Day, or, as he might better have been called, Night Raven, kept the country-store in Walton. One naturally thought of afternoon rather than morning at seeing his olive complexion, dark eyes, and thick-clustering black curls. Such romance as was to be had in Walton, without the aid of a circulating library, certainly gathered about Swan Day. An orphan, born of a Creole mother and a British sergeant, he had been left early to his own resources. He had found them sufficient thus far, in a cordial neighborhood like Walton, when industry and temperance were cardinal virtues not carried to excess; and he was rather a favorite among the young women.

The peculiar languor and richness of his complexion,—the dark eyes, soft as an Indian girl's,—the mouth, melting and red as the grapes where under a tropical sun his foreign mother had lain, and, gathering them ripe, had dropped them lazily into his baby mouth: these were new and strange features in the Saxon community where he had accidentally been left on the death of his father, who was shot at Saratoga. The mother lingered awhile, and then dropped away, leaving Swan to thrive in the bracing air in which she had shivered to death.

Many Sundays before this, Swan had looked at Colonel Fox's pew, and, looking, loved.

Dorcas looked occasionally.

All the time, while the minister preached, she twiddled her caraway-stems, sometimes biting a seed in two very softly between her little teeth, and keeping, on the whole, an appearance of exemplary devoutness. When Father Boardman reached "sixthly," she raised her eyes, and saw Henry Mowers looking straight at her. Then she dropped her eyelids at once, sniffed delicately at her bouquet of southernwood, and, gaining strength from its pungency, applied herself to staring once more at the great pine pulpit, where, like a very old sparrow on the house-top, Father Boardman denounced and anathematized at leisure all who did not think as he did. By degrees, all the eyes in Dorcas's neighborhood that had been any length of time in the world were dozing and closing with the full leave of the spirit. Finally, when Father Boardman entered on the "improvement," Dorcas, who had not heard a word, looked again in the direction of the Dorr pew. Henry Mowers had succumbed to Morpheus half an hour before. Still there flamed on the deep, bewitching eyes of Day; and as all the rest in her neighborhood had gone to sleep, and the young girl had really nothing specially to keep herself awake with, she looked up, too, and then down, and then rosily, and timidly, and consciously, and then at him once more. By that time she blushed again, and a smile was just beginning to wake from its sleep in the corner of her mouth, when a rush, a rising, and a general clatter and banging of pew-seats announced the blessed news of suspended instruction.

In the fashion of sixty years ago, the congregation waited reverently, until the pastor walked down the broad-aisle and out at the door, before a soul stirred. Then the men followed, and last of all the women. In the crowd, there were frequent opportunities for whispered words, all the sweeter for the stealing; and in the crowd, after he had seen Henry Mowers jump into the wagon and drive off his three sisters half a mile to their home, and after seeing Jenny Post ride off on a pillion behind her old brother, as in the gone-by days when wide roads and wagons were not, Swan sauntered carelessly towards Dorcas, and said, in a tone too low for her parents to hear, but very distinctly,—

"I must see you to-morrow night."

"I can't," was the murmured reply.

"For the last time, Dorcas! come down to the old pear-tree to-morrow, before sunset," he whispered, imploringly.

He was wise to turn suddenly away before her parents could hear him, touching on secular subjects, and before she could herself get up any new objection. Her objections, truly, were very faint and few, and, being tossed about awhile, finally settled out of sight. Henry would, she knew, come to his weekly wooing as soon as the setting sun proclaimed the Sabbath-day over. After that time she was safe. She could slip down the orchard to the pear-tree, and hear what was the important word, and what Swan meant by "the last."

Eight or ten persons, who lived at a distance from "meeting," were in the habit of partaking the hospitality of Colonel Fox, of a Sunday, as the hour's intermission gave them no opportunity to return to their distant homes. After the Puritan fashion, unlike enough to the present, families were restricted on Sunday to two meals, and those were provided with a Jewish regard to the fourth commandment. All labor was scrupulously anticipated or postponed, but such hospitality as consisted with the strict observance of the Sabbath was at the service of their friends.

On coming in at the door of the square room, with its sanded floor, its old desk, its spare bed in the corner, and its cherry table with wavy outlines, which had belonged to Colonel Fox's mother, Dorcas found the cloth already laid, and the bonnets and cardinals of half a dozen old friends on the bed.

In five minutes, early apples, old cider, and a plate of raised doughnuts, flanked by plates of mince- and apple-pie, rewarded the patience and piety of the company. Colonel Fox, solemnly, and as if he were quite accustomed to it, poured from a jug into large tumblers that held at least a pint, dropped three large lumps of loaf-sugar, filled the glass with water, grated some nutmeg on the top, and bade his guests refresh themselves with toddy, unless they preferred flip: if they did, they had only to say so: the poker was hot.

They all ate and drank, and by that time the bell rang again; and then they all went again. And if they heard Father Boardman at all, it was with utterly composed minds, when he told them it was their duty to be contented, even should their condemnation be eternally decreed, since it must, of course, be for the good of the whole, and for the glory of God. Hopkinsianism was in fashion then, and the minds of men in many parts of the country had accepted the logic of its founder, negatived as it was, in its practical application, by the sweetness of his Christian benevolence and his large humanity. Then the toddy helped them to swallow many doctrines that in our cold-water days are sharply and defiantly contested. The head is much clearer; whether hearts are better is doubtful.

After supper, and while yet the sun lingered smilingly over the Great Meadows and on the hills, behind which he sank, Dorcas, who had meanwhile adorned herself with Aunt Dorcas's bequest, broke the long silence, by whispering so low that her father's sleep should not be disturbed,—

"Mother, do you set much by this pin?"

"Of course I do, child! 'T was your Aunt Dorcas's," said Mrs. Fox, "your father's own sister."

"Yes, I know it, mother; but how did she come by it?"

All these years, and this was the first time Dorcas had asked the question! She colored a little, too, as if some secret thought or story were busy about her heart, as she looked at the ring.

"Well,—it was a man she 'xpected to 'a' bed. They was to 'a' ben merried, an' he was to 'a' gi'n up v'yagin'. But he was cast away, an' she never heerd nothin' about neither him nor the ship. He was waitin' to git means, an' he did, privateerin' an' so; but I 'xpect he was drownded," concluded Mrs. Fox, in a suitably plaintive tone.

And that was Aunt Dorcas's story.

CHAPTER II.

If anybody is curious to know why there should be mystery or secrecy connected with Swan Day's meeting with Dorcas, or why they should meet under a pear-tree, instead of her father's roof-tree, in a rational way, it might be a sufficient answer, that there never was and never will be anything direct and straightforward about Cupid or his doings. But the real and more important reason was, that Colonel Fox did not like Swan, and had said, in so many words, that "he wouldn't have Swan Day a-hangin' round, no how!—that he was a poor kind of a shote,—that he wished both him and his clutter well out o' town,—and that he needn't think to make swans out of his geese, no time!"

In the first and last sentence, Colonel Fox indicated the ground of his dislike to the handsome young store-keeper, and his dread that Swan's eyes would somehow interfere with his own cherished plans of a union between the Fox and Mower farms. Whatever Colonel Fox determined on was done or to be done. He had anticipated the French proverb; and the "impossibility" made not the slightest difference. Therefore Dorcas had no notion of disobedience in her head, permanently. She solaced herself by the occasional luxury of departure from set rules, and she intended to depart in that way to-morrow,—for just five minutes,—just to hear what that foolish fellow wanted of her; and what could it be? and why was it the last time?—would he give her up?

Dorcas pondered the matter while the sun still crowned the heights, and glanced at her sleeping father in silence. Why should Colonel Fox dislike Swan so very much because he was a Britisher? All that was done with, long ago, and why not be peaceable? Just then her father drew the breath sharply between his teeth, as if in pain. It was the old wound, that had never been healed since the Battle of Bennington. He had lain on the ground,—Dorcas had often heard him tell the tale,—and had striven to slake his deathly thirst with the blood that he scooped up in the hollow of his hand from the ground about him. So terrible was the carnage where he lay. "A d——d Britisher had shot him,—another had driven his horse over him, and afterwards, while he lay half-dead, had tried to rob him!" Would he ever forget it? He would have continued, on the contrary, to fire and hack till the present day, but for the wound in his knee, which had disabled him for life, long before a peace was patched up with the mother-country. So he had retired to Walton, and before Continental money had depreciated more than half had bought acres by the thousand, and become generalissimo of flocks and herds. Through the admiration of his townsmen for his wounds, he rapidly and easily attained the rank of Colonel, without the discomfort of fighting for it; and from his excellent sense and the executive ability induced by military habits, became, in turn, justice of the peace, deacon of the church, town-clerk, and manager-general of Walton.

Nobody—that is to say, nobody in the family—spoke, when Colonel Fox was in the house, unless first spoken to,—not even Dorcas. Such were the domestic tactics of the last century, and Colonel Fox held fast to old notions.

The social ones were far more liberal,—so very liberal, indeed, so very free and easy, in the rural districts especially, that only a knowledge of the primitive conditions under which such manners grew up could possibly reconcile with them any impressions of purity and discretion. In hearing of manners, therefore, it is always necessary to remember that the children of country Puritans are and were wholly different in the grain from Paris or London society of the same period,—as different, for example, as the Goddess of Reason from our first mother, though at first glance one might think those two similar. New-England parents had the utmost confidence in their daughters, and almost no restraint was laid on social intercourse. Their personal dignity and propriety wore presupposed, as matters of course. Religion and virtue needed only to point, not to restrain.

The Colonel, on his part, took little heed of Dorcas's movements in the way of balls and sleigh-rides. Content that her face showed health and enjoyment, he never thought or cared what passed in her mind. If only the hay-crop proved abundant, and the Davis lot yielded well,—if neither wheat got the blight, nor sheep the rot,—if it were better to buy Buckhorn for milk, or sell the Calico-Trotter,—these thoughts so filled his soul that there was very little room to let in any nonsense about Dorcas, only "to have Swan Day shet up before he begins," for, as he often said, "he wouldn't give the snap of his thumb for as many Swan Days as could stand between this and Jerusalem!"

She had met him twice before, and both times rather accidentally, as she supposed, under the pear-tree,—both times, when she went to the well for water. He had drawn the water, and had talked some with his tongue, but more, far more, with his eyes of Oriental depth and fascination. Dorcas thought and meant no harm in meeting Swan. Even if her nature had been more wakened and conscious,—even if she had had either the habit or the power of analyzing her own sensations,—even if she had seen her soul from without, as she certainly did not within,—she would have recoiled from the thought of deliberate coquetry.

In the nature even of a coquette there is not necessarily either cruelty or hardness. It cannot be a fine nature, and must be deficient in the tact which appreciates the feelings of another, and the sympathy that shrinks from injuring them. It may be called selfishness, which is another term for thoughtlessness or want of consideration or perception, but it is not deliberate selfishness. This last is often found with fine perceptions and intuitive tact. It is rather a natural obtuseness, a want of thought on the subject. Such persons remember and connect their own sensations with the object, thinking little or nothing of the feelings they may themselves excite by the heedlessness of their manner.

If Dorcas had once thought of the value of the hearts she played with, and as it were tossed from hand to hand,—if she had even weighed one against another, she might have had some sorrow in grieving either. But having no standard of delicacy and tenderness in her own nature by which to judge theirs, Dorcas cannot be accused of intentional injustice, which is generally understood by coquetry. On the contrary, if she had been able to express her emotions,—

"How happy could I be with either!"

would have done so. Dorcas was very young in experience.

In those days of freedom there was no such word as "engaged"; least of all, did the parties concerned violate all their own notions of decorum by "announcing an engagement." The lists were free to all to enter, and the bravest won the day. After weeks and months of shy "company-keeping," it was "expected it would be a match" by the keen-sighted or deeply interested. Sometimes the dissolution of an engagement was mentioned as "a shame! after keeping company so many years, and she had got all her quilts made and everything!" But best of all was for the parties to be married outright, by a justice of the peace, without a word of public warning, and then to enjoy the pleasure of outwitting the neighbors, and coming down like a thunderclap on a social sunshine unsuspicious of banns, which had been published on some three literally public days, but when nobody was hearing. That was something worth doing, and very much worth remembering!

The sun set. The Sabbath was done. The Colonel heaved a sigh of relief. The Colonel's wife took her knitting-work; and the Colonel's daughter looked up with a shy smile at Henry Mowers fastening his horse by the corn-barn. It was time Sunday was over, indeed! Such a long supper! but it must end sometime!—and then prayers, and then Dorcas had amused herself with Bel and the Dragon and Tobit awhile. All would not do, and the family had been obliged to resort to the sweet restorer for the last ten minutes. Now they could think their own thoughts in peace, and talk of what interested them,—cattle, people, and the like. Poor Dorcas! what with Father Boardman's preaching, and the Westminster Catechism, she associated religion with all that was dull and inexplicable, though she did not doubt it was good in case of dying. In the Nature and life that surrounded her she had not seen God, but a refuge from Him. In the crimson floods of sunshine, in the brilliant moonrise, or the pulsating stars of a winter night, she found a sort of guilty relief from the dulness of what she supposed was Revelation. But she never thought of questioning or doubting any teachings, in the pulpit or out. A woman cannot, like a man, fight a subject down. Her intellect shrinks from being tossed and pierced on the pricks of doctrine. She is gentle and cowardly. She sets the matter aside, and is contented to wait till she dies to find out. But the men in Walton were all theologians, and sharp at polemics. In the bar-room the spirit of liberty throve, which was crushed in the pulpit. In that small New-England town, where, like a great white sheep, Father Boardman now led his docile flock to the fold, whoever looked long enough would see many new folds and many new shepherds. Every shape of religious thinking will have its exponent, and the widest liberty be claimed and enjoyed. Though he slept through Father Boardman's sermons, it is doubtful if Henry Mowers did not in his dreams lay the corner-stone of the new meeting-house on the hill.

Monday, and the hurly-burly of washing over. Dorcas had nearly finished her "stent" on the little wheel. As she sat by the open door, diligently trotting her foot, and softly pulling the last flax from her distaff, her glance went hastily and often towards the setting sun. She could see beyond the sloping orchard, no longer loaded with fruit, the Great Meadows, extending along the banks of the Connecticut. She could see on the eastern side great white mountains, that went modestly by the name of hills, and that came in after-years to draw pilgrims from the ends of the earth. They were white-capped and solemn-looking, and girdled by majestic forests; while the Green Mountains, that lay along the horizon, not so high as "the Hills," were crowned with verdure to the very top, and flaming with autumn dyes. As far as the eye reached, beyond the immediate view rose an immense solitude of forest that had lasted through centuries.

Dorcas's eyes rested and roamed alternately over these massive natural features. She felt dimly in her heart the effect of the solemn aspect of these great wastes,—these sublime possibilities, concealed and waiting for the energy of man to discover them. A melancholy, sweet and soft, composed partly of the effect of the view, and partly of the languor of the Indian-summer weather, diffused itself over her. She accused herself of various sins,—of levity, vanity, and not knowing her own mind. Soon, however, feeling her unskilfulness to steer, she abandoned the bark, and left it to drift. She must see Swan Day.

"And as to Henry!"—here Dorcas set back the little wheel,—"and as to Henry!"—and here Dorcas threw her apron over her face,—"why, what harm is there? I'm only going to see what he wants."

Under the apron rippled and rushed a thousand warm blushes, that contradicted every word Dorcas said to herself. They made her remember how, only the evening before, Henry had said words to her, which, although she pretended not to understand him, had made her heart beat proudly and tenderly; and how she had thought whoever was chosen to be Henry's wife would be a happy woman! How many times had he said, as they stood parting on the stoop, how sorry he was to go, and she, like Juliet, had whispered, 't was "not yet day"! Yes, of course Henry Mowers would be her husband, and she would tell Swan Day so, if—if——But then, perhaps, there was no such nonsense in Swan's head, after all.

Why could not the gypsy be satisfied with her almost angelic happiness? But no. She shivered a little as the sun went down, and exchanged her working-dress of petticoat and short-gown for something warmer.

Because Cely Temple was cutting apples and pumpkins, and stringing them across the kitchen and pantry to dry, and because black Dinah was making the "bean-porridge" for supper, it came to pass that the daughter of the house was called on to lay the table. Dorcas bit her lip, as she hastily did the duty, and postponed the pleasure.

The laboring-season is nearly over, the eight hired men reduced to two, and the family-table is spread in the kitchen. How is the table spread for supper in the house of Colonel Fox, one of the richest farmers in Walton?

This is the way.

Dorcas brushes a scrap from the long table, scoured as white as snow, but puts no linen on it. On the buttery-shelves, a set of pewter rivals silver in brightness, but Dorcas does not touch them. She places a brown rye-and-Indian loaf, of the size of a half-peck, in the centre of the table,—a pan of milk, with the cream stirred in,—brown earthen bowls, with bright pewter spoons by the dozen,—a delicious cheese, whole, and the table is ready. When Dinah appears, with her bright Madras turban, and says she is ready to dish the "bean-porridge, nine days old," Dorcas tells her she is going down beyond the cider-mill, to bring up the yarn, and, throwing a handkerchief over her head, is out of sight before Dinah has finished blowing the tin horn that summons to supper.

In five minutes, she was beyond the cider-mill, beyond the well, and standing under the old pear-tree. Behind her, hiding her from the house, is the corn-barn, stuffed and laden with the heavy harvest of maize and wheat, and the cider-mill, where twenty bushels of apples lie uncrushed on the ground, ready for the morrow's fate. A long row of barrels already filled from the foaming vat stand ready to be taken to the Colonel's own cellar, for the Colonel's own drinking, and as far as one can see in one direction is the Colonel's own land. The heiress of all would still be sought for herself.

Dorcas stood in the departing light, and leaned against the pear-tree. Not yet come? A flush went up to her forehead, as, dropping her handkerchief, she raised her hand to her eyes and glanced hastily about her. Her chestnut curls were fastened with a blue ribbon on the side of her head, and the floating ends fell on her shoulder.

This was the one departure from the severe simplicity of her dress, for neither bright-hued calicoes nor muslins found their way to Walton. Once in a long while, a print, at five times the present prices, was introduced into the social circles of Walton by an occasional peddler, or possibly by the adventurous spirit of Swan Day. But these were rare instances.

Flannel of domestic manufacture, pressed till you could almost see your face in it, stood instead of the French woollen fabric of modern days. It left the jimp little waist as round and definite as the eye could ask, while the full flow of the skirt exposed the neat foot, deftly incased in stout Jefferson shoes. A plaited lawn, technically termed a "modesty-piece," was folded over the bosom, and concealed all but the upper part of the throat. Above that rose a face full of delicacy and healthy sweetness. Eyes full of sparkles, and dimples all about the cheeks, chin, and rather large mouth. Youth, and the radiance of a happy, unconscious nature, of the capabilities or possibilities of which she was as ignorant as the robin on the branch above her, whose evening song had just closed, and who has just shut his coquettish eyes.

A minute more, and Swan sprang over the stone wall, and with three steps was standing by her. He stood still and looked at her, drawing deep breaths of haste and agitation.

Dorcas spoke first.

"You wanted to see me. What is the matter?"

"Nothing,—but—you know I've got home."

"Why, yes, that is clear," answered Dorcas, mischievously, and entirely easy herself, now that she saw Swan's cheeks aflame, and his voice choking so he could not speak.

"We might as well go towards the house, if that is all," added she, gathering in her hand some skeins of yarn that had been spread out to whiten.

Swan caught the yarn and threw it away with an impatient jerk. Then he took both of Dorcas's hands in his, holding them with a fierce grasp that made her almost scream.

"You know I can't go near the house."

"Yes, I know," said Dorcas, half frightened at his manner. "When did you get back from Boston?"

"Saturday night. And I am going again to-morrow. And then—Dorcas—I shall stay."

"Stay?"

"Stay,—till you tell me to come back, maybe!"

"Why, where are you going, Swan?"

"To China, Dorcas."

"I want to know!" exclaimed she.

"Just it,—and no two ways about it. Sold out to Sawtell. Now you have it, Dorcas!"

This curt and abrupt dialogue needed no more words. The rest was made out fully by the bright color on each face, the sparkling interest on the bent brow of Dorcas, and the deep, mellow voice, full of tenderness and hope, mixed with stern decision, on the part of Swan Day.

No wonder Dorcas's eyes had a glamour over them as she listened and looked. What did she see? A slight, erect figure, with Napoleonic features, animated with admiration and sensibility; emotion glorifying the rich, deep eyes, and making them look in the twilight like stars; and over all, the indefinable ease that comes from knowledge of the world, however small that world may be.

Swan had little gift of language. The foregoing short dialogue is a specimen of his ability in that way. But looks are a refinement on speech, and say what words never can say.

"You see, Dorcas, I'm going out for the Perkinses with Orrin Tileston.
We each put in five hundred, and have our share of the profits."

"But to China! that's right under our feet! You'll never come back!" murmured the girl.

"Do you ever want I should? Dorcas, if I come back rich, shall you be glad? It will be all for you,—dear!" the last word low and timidly.

The mist went over her eyes again. A vision of Solomon in all his glory swept across her. Even to Walton had spread rumors of the immense fortunes acquired in the China and India trade, and the gold of Cathay seemed to shimmer over the form before her, so strong, so able to contend with, and compel, if need were, Fortune.

As to Swan, he looked over the river of Time that separated him from love and happiness, and saw his idol and ideal standing on the farther bank, dressed in purple and fine linen, with jewels of his own adorning. Like Bunyan's "shining ones," she seemed to him far lifted out of the range of ordinary thought and expression, into the regions of inspired song. Now that he was really going to the East, the image of Dorcas in his heart took on itself, with a graceful readiness, the gold of Ophir, the pomps of Palmyra, and the shining glories of Zion. He longed to "crown her with rose-buds, to fill her with costly wine and ointments,"—to pour over her the measureless bounty of his love, from the cornucopia of Fortune.

"Dorcas," said he,—and his words showed how inadequately thoughts can be represented,—"Dorcas, I know your father thinks nothing at all of me now; but, supposing I come back in two years, with—with—say five thousand dollars!—then, Dorcas!"

The bright, soft eyes looked pleadingly at her.

Truly, in those days of simplicity and scant earnings, five thousand dollars did seem likely to be an overwhelming temptation to the owner of the Fox farm.

"But,—Swan!" said the blushing girl, releasing herself from his grasp, and stepping back.

"Yes, Dorcas!—yes!—once!—only once!"

He came between her and the image of Henry Mowers; he was going away; she might never see him again. A vague sentiment, composed of pleasure, pity, admiration, and ambition, but having the semblance only of timidity in her rosy face and downcast eyes, made her yield her shrinking form, for one moment, to his trembling and passionate caress, and the next, she ran as swiftly as a deer to the house.

Swan's eyes followed her. With his feet, he dared not. His bounding heart half-choked him with pleasant pain. All be had not said,—all he had meant to say to Dorcas, of his well-laid plans, his good-luck, his hopes,—all he had meant to entreat of her constancy, for in the infrequent communications between the two countries there was no hope of a correspondence,—all he had meant to say to her of his fervent love, of his anguish at separation, of the joy of reunion, and that his love would leave him only with his life,—if he could only have told her! But then he never would or could have put it all into words, if Dorcas had stayed with him under the pear-tree till the next morning.

He thought of the Colonel's pride, and how it would come down, at the sight of Swan Day returning to Walton with five thousand dollars in his coat-pocket, and mounted, perhaps, on an elephant! If he had held a foremost social position in Walton, even while selling tape and mop-sticks, molasses and rum, at the country-store, what might not be the impression on the public mind at seeing the glittering plumage of this "bird let loose from Eastern skies, when hastening fondly home"? There was much balm for wounded pride to be gathered in this Oriental project.

Swan collected his energies and his clothes, finished his remaining last words and duties, and took his seat with the mail-carrier, who had the only public conveyance at that period from the town of Walton to the town of Boston. His parents were dead; his immediate relatives were scattered already in different States; and he left Walton with his heart full of one image, that of Dorcas Fox.

CHAPTER III.

"They du say Swan Day's gun off for good!" said Cely Temple, as she returned from the store, with a Dutch-oven in her hand, which she had purchased,—"an' to th' East Injees!"

"I want to know!" rejoined Mrs. Fox.

"I know some'll be sorry!" continued Cely, while Dorcas diligently stirred a five-pail kettle of apple-sauce, that hung stewing over the low fire.

Mrs. Fox looked up quickly at her daughter, but Dorcas continued quietly stirring, and without turning round.

"Mahala Dorr, I guess," said she.

"Wall, M'hala'll be, an' so'll others," answered Cely, prudently. "But I expect likely Swan'll do well, ef he don't die. They say the atemuspere is pison there!—especially for dark-complected folks."

To this hopeful remark Mrs. Fox rejoined, that "old Miss Day come herself from a warm country, and 't was likely her son would settle there for good, and enjoy his health there better than what he would here."

"He'll look out well for Number One, anyhow!" said Cely, lifting the lid of the Dutch-oven from the fire.

Dorcas shot an angry glance at the apple-sauce.

Nothing further passed on the subject, and Dorcas somehow felt, as she stirred, as if Swan were already a long, long way off,—as if the ship had sailed, and would stay sailed, like an enchanted ship, hovering on the horizon, and never come near enough for the passengers to be distinguished,—or else, maybe, go up into the clouds, and rest there with all its masts and spars distinct against the rose-mist, as she had read of once in a book of travels,—or, perhaps, even be inverted, and stand there on its head, as it were, always: but everything must be upside down, of course, in China. Already the thought of Swan Day had mingled with the mists of the past. The outline became indefinite, and softened into a golden splendor, that belonged no more to her, but was essentially of another hemisphere. He had by this time cut loose from home and country. Whether a hundred, or a hundred thousand miles, it mattered not. Since she could not grasp the idea, the distance was as good as infinite to her.

This, you see, is not exactly coquetry. But events drifted her.

When supper was over, and Dinah had gone to sleep, and Cely to visit the neighbors, as usual, Dorcas shyly approached the subject which occupied her thoughts, by getting the little box of jewelry, and looking at it. Her mother called her from the kitchen, out of which the bed-room opened.

"Does mother want me?" asked Dorcas, turning round, with the box in her hand.

"No, no matter," answered the mother; and, possibly with an intuitive feeling of what was in her daughter's thought, she went into the bed-room, and looked with her at the pin and ring of Aunt Dorcas.

"Was it—was it a long time, mother,—I mean, before he came back?" said Dorcas.

"Who? Captain Waterhouse? Bless you! they was as good as merried for ten year, an' he was goin' all the time, an' then, jest at the last minute, to be 'racked! It's 'most always so, when people goes to sea," added she, in a plaintive tone.

Dorcas meditated; she looked wistfully at her mother.

"It's a pretty pin,—dreadful pretty round the edge."

"Yes, 't is! I expect likely them's di'mon's. 'T was made over in foreign parts. He was goin' to bring his picter, too, from there. But he's lost and gone! Your Aunt Dorcas never had no more suitors after that, and she kind o' gin in, and never had no sperits."

Dorcas's eyes filled, and she closed the box.

Henry Mowers would not come to the Fox farm till the next Sunday night. That was as much settled as the new moon. So Dorcas had the whole week to herself, to be thoroughly unhappy in,—all the more so, a thousand times more so, for being utterly incapable of saying or seeing why. An instinctive delicacy kept her from showing to any of the family that she was even depressed; and her voice was heard steadily warbling one of Wesley's hymns, or "Wolfe's Address to his Army," in clear, brilliant tones, that rang up-stairs and down. The general impression of distance and water associated her absent lover with all that was heroic and romantic in song; for of novels she knew nothing,—the Colonel's library being limited, in the imaginative line, to a torn copy of the "Iliad," which had been left at the house by a travelling cobbler.

However, romance is before all rules, and shapes its own adventures. The beauty of Swan Day, which, dark and slight as it was, gleamed with a power for Dorcas's eye and heart before which Buonarotti's would have been only pale stone forever,—that beauty dwelt in her imagination and memory, as only first romantic impressions can. Distance canonized him, enthroned him, glorified him. And when she thought of his setting forth so boldly, so bravely, to tread the wide water, to tempt the hot sun, the foreign exposure, the perpetual dangers of heathen countries, for her unworthy sake, all that was tenderest, most grateful, in her now first wakened nature, rose up in distressful tumult, and agitated the depths that are in all women's souls.

If there had been anybody to whom she could confide the sad wrenching of her spirit, any one who would have cleared her vision, and taught her to look on "this picture and on this," she might not have been so puzzled between her two Hyperions. But as it was, it was a sorrowful struggle. One had the advantage of distance and imagination,—one of presence, and of the magnetism of eye and lip.

"I am a wicked, wicked girl!" said she, as she stood before the glass, and loosened the locks that fell like sunshine over her shoulders. But this confession, with true New-England reticence, was uttered only to one listener,—herself.

Then, she recalled, for it was Monday night once more, the frank and noble nature of Henry: how he had not asked her to promise him, but seemed to take for granted her truth and faith; how he had looked so fondly, so clearly into her eyes, not for what he might find there, but to show the transparent goodness and sincerity of his own; and how he had told her of all his plans and hopes, of his wish and her father's intention that they should be married that very fall; how little he had said of his own overflowing affection, only that "he had never thought of anybody else." Dorcas only felt, without putting the sense into language, that in this life-boat there was safety. But then had she not sent her heart on a venture in the other,—that other which even now was tossing on the waves of a future, full-freighted with hope, and faith in her truth?

She opened the little box again, and looked at the ring and painted pin. How sorrowfully she looked at them now, seen through tears of conscious experience! How mournful seemed the ground hair, and the tints woven of so many broken hopes, sad thoughts, and wrecked expectations! the hair, kissed so many times in the weary years of waiting, and then wept over in the drearier desolation, when the sight could only bring thoughts of the salt waves dashing amongst it in the deep sea! What a life that had been of poor Aunt Dorcas! Then came across her busy thought the words of her mother,—"It's 'most always so!"

Swan sailed very far away, in these tearful reveries, and took hope and life with him.

When the next Sunday evening came, and the next, and the next,—and when Dorcas had ceased to say, blushing and smiling,—"Don't, Henry! you know I should make such a poor kind of a wife for you! and your mother wouldn't think anything of me!"—and when, Henry had had an offer to go to Western New York, where there were nobody knew how many beautiful girls, all waiting to pounce on the tall, fine-looking young farmer,—when Colonel Fox forgot he was a deacon, and swore that Dorcas was undeserving of such a happy lot as was offered to her,—when the tears, and the reveries, and the pictures of far-away lands, and the hopes that might wither with long years of waiting, were all merged and effaced in the healthy happiness of the present,—Dorcas dried her tears, and applied herself diligently to building up her flaxen trousseau, and smothered in her heart the image of dark and brilliant beauty that had for a time occupied it.

"She waited—a long time!—years—and years!" murmured Dorcas, sorrowfully, as she looked at the pin and ring, which in her mind were associated strongly with only one person,—and that one hereafter to be dead to her. As soon as events clearly defined her duties, Dorcas had no further questions with herself. If the box had been Pandora's, not the less resolutely would she have shut it forever, and so crushed the hope that it could never have leaped out.

So, with choking tears, and throbbing pulses, she followed many brilliant fancies and hopes to their last resting-place. Henceforth her path was open and clear, her duties defined, and with daily occupation of hand and thought she strove to displace all that had ever made her other than the cheerful and busy Dorcas. For the last time, she closed and put away the box.

* * * * *

THRENODY.

[Among the imprinted papers of the author of "Charles Auchester" and "Counterparts" was found this poem, addressed to a father on the death of a favorite son, whose noble disposition and intellectual gifts were all enlisted on the side of suffering humanity.]

O mourner by the ever-mourning deep,
Full as the sea of tears! imperial heart,
King in thy sorrow over all who weep!
O wrestler with the darkness set apart

In clouds of woe whose lightnings are the throb
Of thy fast-flashing pulses! pause to hear
The lullabies of many an alien sob,
A storm of alien sighs,—so far! so near!

Oh that our vigils with thy gentle dead
Could charm thee from thy night-long agonies,
Could steep thy brain in slumber mild, and shed
Elysian dreams upon thy closing eyes!

In vain! all vain!—'tis yet the feast of tears;
Sorrow for sorrow is the only spell;
Nor wanders yet to melt in unspent years
The wringing murmur of our fresh farewell!

Thousands bereft strew wide the ashes dim;
Rich hearts, poor hands, the lovely, the unlearned,
Bemoan the angel of the age in him,
A star unto its starlight strength returned,

The City of Delights hath lost its gem,
The Sea the changeful glance so like its own,
Genius the darling of her diadem,
Whose smile made moonlight round her awful throne.

Those elfin steps their music moves no more
Beneath light domes to tune the festal train,
Nor at the moony eves along the shore
To brim with fairy forms that wizard brain.

Cold rocks, wild winds, and ever-changing waves,
Sad rains that fret the sea and drown the day,
We hail,—well pleased that stricken Autumn raves,
Though not with Winter shall our griefs decay.

On lurid mornings, when the lustrous sea
Is violet-shadowed from the warm blue air,
When the dark grasses brighten over thee,
And the winged sunbeams flutter golden there,—

Then to the wild green slope, thy chosen rest,
The blossoms of our spirits we will bring,
(Again a babe upon thy mother's breast,
An infant seed of the eternal Spring,)—

Thoughts bright and dark as violets in their dew,
Unfading memories of a smile more sweet
Than perfume of pale roses, hopes that strew
Ethereal lilies on those silent feet

The ghost of Pain haunts not that garden-land
Where Passion's phantom is so softly laid;
But Charity beside that earth doth stand,
Most lovely left of all, thy sister-shade.

Her baby-loves like trembling snowdrops lean
Above thy calm hands and thy quiet head,
When morn is fair, or noonday's glory keen
Or the white star-fire glistens on thy bed.

Her eyes of heaven upon thy slumbers brood,
Her watch is o'er thy pillow, and her breath
Tells every breeze that stirs thy solitude
How thou didst earn that rest on earth called Death,—

Earned in such quickening youth and brilliant years!
For us too early, not too soon for thee!—
So may we rest, when Death shall dry our tears,
Till everlasting Morning makes us free!

THE UTILITY AND THE FUTILITY OF APHORISMS.

The best aphorisms are pointed expressions of the results of observation, experience, and reflection. They are portable wisdom, the quintessential extracts of thought and feeling. They furnish the largest amount of intellectual stimulus and nutriment in the smallest compass. About every weak point in human nature, or vicious spot in human life, there is deposited a crystallization of warning and protective proverbs. For instance, with what relishing force such sayings as the following touch the evil resident in indolence and delay!—"An unemployed mind is the Devil's workshop"; "The industrious tortoise wins the race from the lagging eagle"; "When God says, To-day, the Devil says, To-morrow." In like manner, another cluster of adages depict the certainty of the detection and punishment of crime:—"Murder will out"; "Justice has feet of wool, but hands of iron"; "God's mills grind slow, but they grind sure." So in relation to every marked exposure of our life, there will be found in the records of the common thought of mankind a set of deprecating aphorisms.

The laconic compactness of these utterances, their constant applicability, the pungent patness with which they hit some fact of experience, principle of human nature, or phenomenon of life, the ease with which their racy sense may be apprehended and remembered, give them a powerful charm for the popular fancy. Accordingly, a multitude of proverbs are afloat in the writings and in the mouths of every civilized people. Groups of national proverbs exist in most of the languages of the world, each family of apothegms revealing the chief traits of the people who gave them birth. In these collective expressions of national mind, we can recognize—if so incomplete a characterization may be ventured—the indrawn meditativeness of the Hindu, the fiery imagination of the Arab, the devout and prudential understanding of the Hebrew, the æsthetic subtilty of the Greek, the legal breadth and sensual recklessness of the Roman, the martial frenzy of the Goth, the chivalric and dark pride of the Spaniard, the treacherous blood of the Italian, the mercurial vanity of the Frenchman, the blunt realism of the Englishman.

It is obvious enough that the masses of moral statements or standing exhortations composing the aphorisms of a language cannot mix in the daily minds of men without deep cause and effect. It will be worth our while to inquire into the bearings of this matter; for, though many a gatherer has carried his basket through these diamond districts of the mind, we do not remember that any one has sharply examined the value of the treasures so often displayed, set forth the methods of their influence and its qualifications, and determined the respective limits of their use and their worthlessness. Undertaking this task, we must, in the outset, divide aphorisms into the two classes of proverbs and maxims, plebeian perceptions and aristocratic conclusions, moral axioms and philosophic rules. This distinction may easily be made clear, and will prove useful.

Popular proverbs are national, or cosmopolitan, and they are anonymous,—rising from among the multitude, and floating on their breath. They are generalizations of the average observation of a people. Undoubtedly, as a general thing, each one was first struck out by some superior mind. But usually this happened so early that the name of the author is lost. Proverbs—as the etymology hints—are words held before the common mind, words in front of the public. Wise maxims, on the contrary, are individual, may more commonly be traced to their origin in the writings of some renowned author, and are more limited in their audience. They are the results of comprehensive insight, the ripened products of searching meditation, the weighty utterances of weighty minds. The proverb, "A burnt child dreads the fire," flies over all climes and alights on every tongue. The maxim, "All true life begins with renunciation," appeals to comparatively few, and tarries only in prepared and thoughtful minds. Proverbs are often mere statements of facts, barren truisms, too obvious to instruct our thought, affect our feeling, or in any way change our conduct, though the accuracy with which the arrow is shot fixes our attention. Notice a few examples of this sort:—"A friend in need is a friend indeed"; "Many a little makes a mickle"; "Anger is a brief madness"; "It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good." Such affirmations are too general and obvious to be provocative awakeners of original reflection, sentiment, or will. Maxims, on the other hand, instead of being general descriptions or condensed common-places, are usually definite directions, discriminative exhortations. Notice such specimens as these:—"Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves"; "When angry, count ten before you speak"; "Do the duty nearest your hand, and the next will already have grown clearer"; "Remember that a thing begun is half done." Proverbs, then, are results of observation, often affirmations of quite evident facts, as, "Necessity is the mother of invention," or, "Who follows the river will arrive at the sea." Maxims, in distinction, are results of reflection. They are experience generalized into rules for the guidance of action, as, "Think twice before you speak once," or, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Proverbs are statical; maxims are dynamic. Those are wisdom embalmed; these wisdom vitalized. The former are literary fodder; the latter are literary pemmican.

The commonest application of proverbs is as mental economics, substitutes for thought. They are constantly employed by the ordinary sort of persons as provisions to avoid spiritual exertion, artifices to dispose of a matter with the smallest amount of intellectual trouble, as when one ends a controversy with the adage, "Least said, soonest mended." The majority of people desire to get along with the least possible expenditure of thinking. To many a hard-headed laborer, five minutes of girded and continuous thinking are more exhaustive than a whole day of muscular toil. No fact is more familiar than that illiterate minds are furnished with an abundance of trite sayings which they readily cite on all occasions. They thus hit, or at least fancy they hit, the principle which applies to the exigency, without the trouble of extemporaneously thinking it out for themselves on the spot. Such saws as, "The pot must not call the kettle black," "One swallow does not make a Spring," "Nought is never in danger," "Out of sight, out of mind," often give employment to an otherwise freightless tongue, and serve as excusing makeshifts for a mind incompetent, from ignorance, indolence, or fatigue, to discharge the duty of furnishing its own thought and expression for the occasion.

Proverbs are more frequently used as explanations than as guides of conduct, as the reason why we have acted in a certain manner than as a reason why we should act so. "Look before you leap," is usually said after we have leaped. When a miserly man refuses to give anything in behalf of some distant object, his refusal is not prompted by the remembrance of the proverb, "Charity begins at home"; but the stingy propensity first stirs in the man and actuates him, and then he expresses his motive, or evades the true issue, by quoting the selfish old saw ever ready at his hand. In such cases the axiom is not the forerunning cause of the action, but its justifying explanation. Sometimes, undeniably, an applicable proverb coming to mind does influence a man and decide his conduct. Coming at the right moment, in the wavering of his will, it suggests the principle which determines him, lends the needful balance of impulse for which he waited. An old proverb, indorsed by the usage of generations, strikes on the ear like a voice falling from the heights of antiquity; it is clothed with a kind of authority. Doubtless many a poor boy has received a sound flogging which he would have escaped, had not his father happened to recall the somewhat cruel and questionable aphorism of Solomon, currently abbreviated into "Spare the rod and spoil the child." When Charles IX. was hesitating as to the enactment of the Saint Bartholomew Massacre, his bigoted mother, infuriated with sectarian hate, whispered in his ear, "Clemency is sometimes cruelty, and cruelty clemency,"—and the fatal decree was sealed. But such instances are exceptional, and partly deceptive, too. Man is usually governed by his own passions, his own circumstances, or his own reason, not by any verbal propositions. And when an apt and timely adage seems to determine him, it is, for the most part, because it acts upon responsive feelings preëxistent in him and already struggling to express themselves. And thus, upon the whole, it is to be concluded that proverbs are the children of Epimetheus, or afterthought, rather than of Prometheus, or forethought. They are rather products than producers,—intellectual forms rather than intellectual forces. The prevalent notion of their influence is a huge and singular error. One of our wisest authors, himself a great aphorist, says,—"Proverbs are the sanctuaries of the intuitions." But the intuitions, for the very reason that they are intuitive, need no advisory guidance, and admit of no verbal help.

But when we turn from the aphoristic proverbs of the people to the aphoristic maxims of the wise, a deep distinction and contrast confront us. These, so far from being evasions of effort or substitutes for thought, are direct stimulants to thought, provocative summonses to more earnest mental application. Seneca says, "Wouldst thou subject all things to thyself? Subject thyself to reason." A modern writer says, "They are not kings who have thrones, but they who know how to govern." Now any one meeting these maxims, if they have any effect on him, will be set a-thinking to discover the principle contained in them. He will feel that there is a profound significance in them; and his curiosity will be awakened, his intellect fired, to find out the grounds and bearings of the law they denote. In this way the words of the wise are goads to prick and urge the faculties of inferior minds. Pointed expressions of the experience of the sovereign masters of life and the world impel feebler and less agile natures to follow the tracks of light and emulate the choice examples set before them, with swifter movements and with richer results than they could ever have attained, if not thus encouraged. Proverbial axioms flourish copiously in the idiomatic ground and vernacular climate of unlearned, undisciplined, unreflective minds, as thistles on the highway where every ass may gather them. But precious maxims, those "short sentences drawn from a long experience," as Cervantes calls them, are found mostly in the writings of the greatest geniuses, Solomon, Aristotle, Shakspeare, Bacon, Goethe, Richter, Emerson: and they appeal comparatively but to a select class of minds, kindred in some degree to those that originated them.

To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius, a vital appropriating exercise of mind, closely allied to that which first created it. In order to secure genuine profit here, the disciple must for himself repeat the processes of the teacher, reach the same conclusion, see the same truth. Wisdom cannot be mechanically taken, but must be spiritually assimilated,—cannot be put on as a coat or hat, used as a hammer or a sling, but must be intelligently grasped, digested, and organized into the mental structure and habits. The truth of this is at once so palpable and so important that it has found embodiment in numerous proverbs known to almost every one: "An ounce of mother-wit is worth a pound of school-wit"; "A pennyweight of your own wit is worth a ton of other people's"; "Who cannot work out his salvation by heart will never do it by book."

For the reason just indicated, we think the common estimate of the actual influence of even the costliest preceptive sayings is monstrously exaggerated. That an aphorism should really be of use, it must virtually be reproduced by the faculties of your own soul. But the mental energy and acquirement which thus recreate it in a great degree supersede the necessity of it, render it an expression not of a guidance you need from without, but of an insight and force already working within. Your character determines what maxims you will select or create far more than the maxims you choose or make determine what your character will be. Herbart says, "Characters with ruling plans are energetic; characters with ruling maxims are virtuous." This is true, since a continuous plan subsidizes the forces that would without it run to waste, and a deliberately chosen authority girds and guides the soul from perilous dallying and dissipation. Nevertheless, it is not so much that characters are energetic or virtuous because they have ruling plans or maxims as it is that they have ruling plans or maxims because they are energetic or virtuous. Say to a penurious, hard, grumpy man, "It is more blessed to give than to receive." Will you thus make him liberal, sympathetic, affable? No, his character will neutralize your precept, as vinegar receiving the sunshine into its bosom becomes more sour. Some persons seem to imagine that a wise maxim is a sort of fairy's wand, one touch of which will transform the loaded panniers of a donkey into the fiery wings of a Pegasus. Surely, it is a great error. Trench says, with an amusing naïveté, "There is scarcely a mistake which in the course of our lives we have committed, but some proverb, had we known and attended to its lesson, might have saved us from it." The two comprehensive conditions, "had we known and attended to its lesson," are discharging conductors, that empty the sentence of all proper meaning, and leave only a rank of hollow words behind. He might as well say, "Had we never been tempted, we had never fallen,—had we possessed all wisdom, we had never committed an error," The best maxim that ever was made cannot directly impart or create knowledge or virtue or spiritual force. It can only give a voice to those qualities where they already exist, and so set in motion a strengthening interchange of action and reaction. Though a fool's mouth be stuffed with proverbs, he still remains as much a fool as before. He is past preaching to who does not care to mend. As the brave Schiller affirms, "Heaven and earth fight in vain against a dunce." Eternal contact with nutritious wisdom can teach no lesson, nor profit at all one who has not a coöperative and assimilative mind. The anchor is always in the sea, but it never learns to swim. Philosophic precepts address the reason; but the springs of motive and regeneration are in the sentiments. To attempt the reformation of a bad man by means of fine aphorisms is as hopeless as to bombard a fortress with diamonds, or to strive to exhilarate the brain by pelting the forehead with grapes.

And yet, notwithstanding these large limitations and abatements, it is not to be denied that both proverbs and maxims, when habitually recalled, generally have some effect, often are strongly influential, and may, by a faithful observance of the conditions, be made extremely efficacious. What, then, are the conditions of deriving profit from the contemplation of aphorisms? How can we make their futility end, their utility begin? The first, ever indispensable condition is fresh discrimination. There are false, cynical, mean, devilish aphorisms, as well as sound and worthy ones. Each style of character, kind and grade of experience breathes itself out in corresponding expressions. "Self is the man"; "Look out for Number One"; "Devil take the hindmost"; "One for me is as good as two for you"; "Every man has his price"; "Draw the snake from its hole by another man's hand"; "Vengeance is a feast fit for the gods." The fact that such infernal sentiments are proverbs must be no excuse for not trampling them out of sight with disgust and scorn. Discrimination is needed not only to reject bad sayings, but also to correct incomplete or extravagant ones. The maxim, "Never judge by appearances," must be modified, because in reality appearances are all that we have to judge from. Its true rendering is, "Judge cautiously, for appearances are often deceptive." A proverb is almost always partial, presenting one aspect of the matter,—or excessive, making no allowance for exceptions. Here independent insight is requisite, that we may not err. As a general thing, aphorisms are particular truths put into forms of universality, and they must be severely scrutinized, lest a mere characteristic of the individual be mistaken for a normal faculty of the race. For instance, it is said, "A reconciled friend is an enemy in disguise." Not always, by any means; it depends greatly on the character of the man, "Forewarned is forearmed." Generally this is true, but not invariably; as sometimes a man, by being forewarned of danger, is unnerved with terror, and undone. So the two maxims, "Never abandon a certainty for an uncertainty," "Nothing venture, nothing have," destroy each other. Whether you shall give up the one bird in the hand and try for the two in the bush depends on the relative worth of the one and the two, and the probabilities of success in the trial. No abstract maxim can help solve that problem: it requires living intelligence. To follow a foreign rule empirically will often be to fare as the monkey fared, who, undertaking to shave, as he had seen his master do, gashed his face and paws. Fearful incisions of the soul will he get who accepts unqualifyingly the class of impulsive proverbs with their enormously overdrawn inferences: such as that of David, when he said in his haste, "All men are liars"; or that of Moore, when he said in his song, "The world is all a fleeting show, for man's illusion given"; or that maxim of Schopenhauer, so full of deadly misanthropy and melancholy that one would gladly turn his back on a world in which he believed such a rule necessary, "Love no one, hate no one, is the first half of all worldly wisdom; say nothing, believe nothing, is the other half."

The first condition of a profitable use of maxims being a thorough mastery of the rule proposed, with its limits, the next condition is an accurate self-knowledge. Know yourself, your weaknesses, your aptitudes, your exposures, your gifts and strength, in order that you may know what to seek or avoid, what to cherish or spurn, what to spur or curb, what to fortify or assail. For example, if your head is made of butter, it is clear that it will not do for you to be a baker. If you are a coward, you must not volunteer to lead a forlorn hope. The advantage of self-knowledge is that it enables us to prescribe for ourselves the contemplation of such principles and motives as we need. If our thought is narrow and our fancy cold, we should study the maxims that instruct,—as, "Joys are wings, sorrows are spurs." If our heart is faint and our will weak, we should study the maxims that inspire,—as, "The reward of a thing well done is to have done it." The instructive maxim opens a vista of truth to the intellect, as when Goethe said, "A man need not be an architect in order to live in a house." The inspiring maxim strikes a martial chord in the soul, as when Alexander said to his Greeks, shrinking at the sight of the multitudinous host of Persians, "One butcher does not fear many sheep." The evil of self-ignorance is, that it permits men to choose as their favorite and guiding maxims those adages which express and foster their already rampant propensities, leaving their drooping deficiencies to pine and cramp in neglect. The miser pampers his avarice by repeating a hundred times a day, "A penny saved is a penny gained": as if that were the maxim he needed! The spend-thrift comforts and confirms himself in his prodigality by saying, "God loveth a cheerful giver": as if that were not precisely the saying he ought never to recall! Audacity and arrogance constantly say to themselves, "Be bold, be bold, and evermore be bold." Timidity and distrust are ever whispering, "Be not too bold." Thus what would be one man's meat proves another man's poison; whereas, were it rightly distributed, both would be nourished into healthy development. The over-reckless should restrain himself by remembering that "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." The over-cautious should animate himself with the reflection that "The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man only one." A man who, with deep self-knowledge, carefully chooses and perseveringly applies maxims adapted to check his excess and arouse his defect may derive unspeakable profit from them.

To do this with full success, however, he must have a discriminating knowledge of the circumstances as well as of the rule, and of himself. "Circumstances alter cases." What applies happily in one exigency may be perfectly absurd or ruinous in a different situation. The mule, loaded with salt, waded through a brook, and, as the salt melted, the burden grew light. The ass, loaded with wool, tried the same experiment; but the wool, saturated with water, was twice as heavy as before. So the Satyr, in Æsop's fable, asked the man coming in from the cold, "Why he blew on his fingers?" and was told, "To warm them." Soon after he asked, "Why he blew in his soup?" and was told, "To cool it." Whereupon he rushed on the man with a club and slew him as a liar. The ramifications of truth in varying emergencies are infinitely subtile and complicated, and often demand the very nicest care in distinguishing. Good advice, when empirically taken and rashly followed, is as an eye in the hand, sure to be put out the first thing on trying to use it. "Advice costs nothing and is good for nothing," it is often said. But that depends on the quality of the advice, on the circumstances, and on what kind of persons impart and receive the counsel. Advice given with earnestness and wisdom, and applied with docility and discrimination, may cost a great deal and be invaluable. Competence and aptness, or folly and heedlessness, make a world of difference. The great difficulty in regard to the fruitfulness of advice is the universal readiness to impart, the usual unwillingness to accept it. We give advice by the bucket, take it by the grain. For these reasons the world is yet surfeited with precept and starving for example: and the applicability is by no means exhausted of the fable of Brabrius, who tells how when an old crab said to her child, "Awkward one, walk not so crookedly!" he replied, "Mother, walk you straight, I will watch and follow." Verbal wisdom would direct us; exemplified wisdom draws us.

The first danger, then, from aphorisms is, that they may enable us to evade, instead of helping us to fulfil, the duty of meeting and solving for ourselves each mental exigency as it arises. In such a case, educative discipline and growth are forfeited. The other danger from them is, that they may be applied mechanically, without a just understanding of them, and thus that grievous mistakes may be made. Their genuine use is to excite our own minds to master the principles which their authors have set forth in them. Fresh honesty of personal thought, aspiration, and patience, is the spiritual talisman wherewith alone we can vivify truisms into truths, and transmute noble maxims into flesh and blood, nay, into immortal mind. The master-thinkers aid us to do this by the quickening power of their suggestions,—the great critic not only giving his readers direction, but also helping them to eyesight.

To traverse the works of some authors is like going through a carefully arranged herbarium, where every specimen is lifeless, shrivelled, dusty, crumbling to the touch. The writings of genuine men of genius are like a conservatory, where every plant of thought and sentiment, whether indigenous or exotic, is alive, full of bloom and fragrance, the sap at work in its veins. Verbal statements which are petrifactions of wisdom can neither stimulate nor nourish; but verbal statements which are vital concentrations of wisdom do both. He has learned one of the most important lessons in human life who understands adequately the difference between formal perception and organic experience, contrasting the futility of detached and deathly proverbs with the utility of nutritious and electrical maxims. A mechanical teacher crowds the ear with mummified precepts and exhortations; an inspired teacher brings surcharged examples and rules into contact with the mind. The distinction is world-wide and inexhaustible.

* * * * *

SHELLEY.

BY ONE WHO KNEW HIM.

If photography had existed during the lifetime of Shelley, it alone would have sufficed to correct many a misconception of his character founded upon imperfect portraiture; and even the most boyish recollections of him, matter-of-fact as they are, may help to solve the problem upon which many minds have been engaged without yet having finished the work. For Shelley still remains before the world misconceived because misdescribed; and if society is gradually clearing its ideas of the man, it is not only because the preconceptions of that multitudinous authority are themselves gradually drifting away, but also because substantial facts are slowly coming into view. Their development has been hindered by obstacles which will be understood when I have proceeded a little farther, and even within the compass of this brief sketch I hope that I shall be able to make readers on both sides of the Atlantic work their own way a little closer to the truth.

Shelley is still regarded by the majority, either as a victim of persecution, or a rebel against authority, or both,—his friends probably inclining to hold him up as a philosopher-patriot, whose resistance to intellectual oppression placed him in the condition of a martyr and robbed him of his fair share of life. My own earliest memory presents him very much in that aspect. I first recall him pale and slender, worn with anxiety, openly alluding to the marks of premature age in his own aspect, bursting with aspirations against tyranny of all kinds, and yielding to fits of dreadful despondency under sufferings inflicted by the dignitaries of the land at the instance of his own family. The circumstances by which he was surrounded contributed to this guise of martyrdom.

My own earliest recollections began in prison, where my father[A] was incarcerated for critical remarks which at the present day would scarcely attract attention, and which were put forth in no impulse of personal hostility, but under the strongest sense of duty, with the desire to vindicate the constitutional freedom of England against the perverted control of faction and the influences of a corrupt court. At that time my father was accounted a man prone to mutiny against "the powers that be," although his political opinions belonged to a class which would now be regarded as too moderate for popular liberalism. He has been censured for literary affectation and for personal improvidence, but only by those who do not understand the real elements of his character. The leading ideas of his mind were, first, earnest duty to his country at any cost to himself; next, the sacrifice of any ordinary consideration to personal affection and friendship; and lastly, the cultivation of "the ideal," especially as it is developed in imaginative literature. His life was passed in an absolute devotion to these three principles. A one-sided frankness has blazoned to the world the sacrifices which he accepted from friends, but has whispered nothing of the more than commensurate sacrifices made on his side; and the simplicity that rendered him the creature of the library in which he lived entered into the expression of all his thoughts and feelings.

[Footnote A: Leigh Hunt.]

Although I can remember some of the most eminent men who visited us in prison, Shelley I cannot; but I can well recall my father's description of the young stranger who came to him breathing the classic thoughts of college, ardent with aspirations for the emancipation of man from intellectual slavery, and endowed by Nature with an aspect truly "angelic."

In the interval before his next visit to us, Shelley had passed through the first serious passion of his youth, had married Harriet Westbrooke, had become the father of two children, and had thus to all appearance secured the transmission of the estates strictly entailed with the baronetcy,—but had also been exiled from his family-home, as well as from college, for his revolutionary and infidel principles, had gone through a course of domestic disappointment, had separated from his wife, and was threatened with the removal of his children, on the ground of the impious and "immoral" training to which they were destined under his guardianship. He came to our house for support and consolation; he found in it a home for his intellect as well as for his feelings, and he was as strictly a part of the family as any of our blood-relations, for he came and went at pleasure. I can remember that I performed his bidding equally with that of my father; and as to personal deference or regard, the only distinction which my memory can discover is, that I found in Shelley a companion whom I better understood, and whose country rambles I was more pleased to share. For this there were many reasons, and amongst them that Shelley entered more unreservedly into the sports and even the thoughts of children. I had probably awakened interest in him, not only because I was my father's eldest child, but still more because I had already begun to read with great avidity, and with an especial sense of imaginative wonders and horrors; and, familiarized with the conversation amongst literary men, I had really been able to understand something of his position, insomuch that no doubt he saw the intense interest I took in himself and his sufferings.

The emotions that he underwent were but too manifest in the unconcealed anxiety and the eager recital of newly awakened hopes, with intervals of the deepest depression. He suffered also from physical causes, which I then only in part understood. This suffering was traced to the attack made upon him at Tanyralt, in Wales, when, on the night of February the 26th, 1813, some man who had been prowling about the house in which he lived first fired at him through the window, and then entered the room, escaping when the man-servant was called in by the tumult and the screams of Mrs. Shelley. The whole incident has been doubted,—why, I can hardly understand, unless the reason is that some of the conjectures in which Mrs. Shelley indulged were over-imaginative. She mentions by name a political opponent who had said that "he would drive them out of the country." My own weak recollections point to reasons more personal. But what I do know is, that Shelley himself ascribed the injury from which he suffered to a pressure of the assassin's knee upon him in the struggle. The complaint was of long standing; the attacks were alarmingly severe, and the seizure very sudden. I can remember one day at Hampstead: it was soon after breakfast, and Shelley sat reading, when he suddenly threw up his book and hands, and fell back, the chair sliding sharply from under him, and he poured forth shrieks, loud and continuous, stamping his feet madly on the ground. My father rushed to him, and, while the women looked out for the usual remedies of cold water and hand-rubbing, applied a strong pressure to his side, kneading it with his hands; and the patient seemed gradually to be relieved by that process. This happened about the time when he was most anxious for the result of the trial which was to deprive him of his children. In the intervals he sought relief in reading, in conversation,—which especially turned upon classic literature,—in freedom of thought and action, and in play with the children of the house. I can remember well one day when we were both for some long time engaged in gambols, broken off by my terror at his screwing up his long and curling hair into a horn, and approaching me with rampant paws and frightful gestures as some imaginative monster.

It was at this time that the incident happened which has been mentioned by my father. A poor woman had been attending her son before a criminal court in London. As they were returning home at night, fatigue and anxiety so overcame her that she fell on the ground in convulsions, where she was found by Shelley. He appealed to a very opulent person, who lived on the top of the hill, asking admission for the woman into the house, or the use of the carriage, which had just set the family down at the door. The stranger was repulsed with the cold remark that impostors swarmed everywhere, and that his own conduct was "extraordinary." The good Samaritan, whom the Christian would not help, warned the uncharitable man that such treatment of the poor is sometimes chastised by hard treatment of the rich in days of trouble; and I heard Shelley describe the manner in which the gentleman retreated into his mansion, exclaiming, "God bless me, Sir! dear me, Sir!" In the account of the occurrence given by my father, he has omitted to mention that Shelley and the woman's son, who had already carried her a considerable way up the main hill of Hampstead, brought her on from the inhospitable mansion to our house in their arms; and I believe, that, the son's strength failing, for some way down the hill into the Vale of Health Shelley carried her on his back. I cannot help contrasting this action of the wanderer with the careful self-regard of another friend who often came to see us, though I do not remember that any of us were ever inside his doors. He was, I believe, for some time actually a pensioner on Shelley's generosity, though he ultimately rose to be comparatively wealthy. One night, when he had been visiting us, he was in trouble because no person had been sent from a tavern at the top of the hill to light him up the pathway across the heath. That same self-caring gentleman afterwards became one of the apologists who most powerfully contributed to mislead public opinion in regard to his benefactor.

Shelley often called me for a long ramble on the heath, or into regions which I then thought far distant; and I went with him rather than with my father, because he walked faster, and talked with me while he walked, instead of being lost in his own thoughts and conversing only at intervals. A love of wandering seemed to possess him in the most literal sense; his rambles appeared to be without design, or any limit but my fatigue; and when I was "done up," he carried me home in his arms, on his shoulder, or pickback. Our communion was not always concord; as I have intimated, he took a pleasure in frightening me, though I never really lost my confidence in his protection, if he would only drop the fantastic aspects that he delighted to assume. Sometimes, but much more rarely, he teased me with exasperating banter; and, inheriting from some of my progenitors a vindictive temper, I once retaliated severely. We were in the sitting-room with my father and some others, while I was tortured. The chancery-suit was just then approaching its most critical point, and, to inflict the cruellest stroke I could think of, I looked him in the face, and expressed a hope that he would be beaten in the trial and have his children taken from him. I was sitting on his knee, and as I spoke, he let himself fall listlessly back in his chair, without attempting to conceal the shock I had given him. But presently he folded his arms round me and kissed me; and I perfectly understood that he saw how sorry I was, and was as anxious as I was to be friends again. It was not very long after that we were playing with paper boats on the pond in the Vale of Health, watching the way in which the wind carried some of them over, or swamped most of them before they had surmounted many billows; and Shelley then playfully said how much he should like it, if we could get into one of the boats and be shipwrecked,—it was a death he should like better than any other.

After the death of Harriet, Shelley's life entirely changed; and I think I shall be able to show in the sequel that the change was far greater than any of his biographers, except perhaps one who was most likely to know, have acknowledged. Conventional form and Shelley are almost incompatible ideas; as his admirable wife has said of him, "He lived to idealize reality,—to ally the love of abstract truth, and adoration of abstract good, with the living sympathies. And long as he did this without injury to others, he had the reverse of any respect for the dictates of orthodoxy or convention." As soon, therefore, as the obstacle to a second marriage was removed, he and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin were regularly joined in matrimony, and retired to Great Marlow, in Buckinghamshire. A brief year Shelley passed in the position of a country-gentleman on a small scale. His abode was a rough house in the village, with a garden at the back and nothing beyond but the country. Close to the house there was a small pleasure-ground, with a mound at the farther end of the lawn slightly inclosing the view. Behind the mound there was a kitchen-garden, not unintermixed with flowers and ornamental vegetation; and farther still was a piece of ground traversed by a lane deeply excavated in the chalk soil. At that time Shelley had a thousand a year allowed to him by his father; but although he was in no respect the unreckoning, wasteful person that many have represented him to be, such a sum must have been insufficient for the mode in which he lived. His family comprised himself, Mary, William their eldest son, and Claire Claremont,—the daughter of Godwin's second wife, and therefore the half-sister of Mary Shelley,—a girl of great ability, strong feelings, lively temper, and, though not regularly handsome, of brilliant appearance. They kept three servants, if not a fourth assistant: a cook; Élise, a Swiss gouvernante for the child; and Harry, a man who did the work of gardener and man-servant in general. He kept something like open house; for while I was there with my father and mother, there also came, for a short time, several other friends, some of whom stopped for more than a passing visit. He played the Lord Bountiful among his humbler neighbors, not only helping them with money or money's-worth, but also advising them in sickness; for he had made some study of medicine, in part, I suspect, to be the more useful.

I have already intimated that he had assisted certain of his companions; and I am convinced that these circumstances contributed to the resolution which Shelley formed to leave England for Italy in the year 1818, although he then ascribed his doing so to the score of health,—or rather, as he said, of life. He then believed himself to be laboring under a tendency to consumption, not without medical warnings to that effect, although there were strong reasons for doubting the validity of the belief, which was based upon less precise grounds before the introduction of auscultation and the careful examinations of our day. It was, however, characteristic of Shelley to rest his actions upon the dominant motive; so that, if several inducements operated to the same end, he absolutely discarded the minor considerations, and acted solely upon the grand one. I can well remember, that, when other persons urged upon him cumulative reasons for any course of action, whether in politics, or morality, or trifling personal matters of the day, he indignantly cast aside all such makeweights, and insisted upon the one sufficient motive. I mention this the more explicitly because the opposite course is the most common, and some who did not sympathize with his concentration of purpose afterwards imputed the suppression of all but one, out of several apparent motives, to reserve, or even to a want of candor. The accusation was first made by some of Shelley's false friends,—creatures who gathered round him to get what they could, and afterwards made a market of their connection, to his disadvantage. But I was shocked to find a sanction for the notion under the hand of one of Shelley's first and most faithful friends, and I discovered it, too, when death had barred me from the opportunity of controverting the mistake. It was easily accounted for. The writer to whom I allude was himself a person whose scrupulous conscience and strong mistrust of his own judgment, unless supported on every side, induced him to accumulate and to avow as many motives as possible for each single act. He could scarcely understand or believe the existence of a mind which, although powerful and comprehensive in its grasp, should nevertheless deliberately set aside all motives but one, and actually proceed upon that exclusive ground without regard to the others.

Both Shelley and his friends seem to have underrated his strength, and one little incident will illustrate my meaning. He kept no horse or carriage; but in accordance with his ruling passion he had a boat on the river of sufficient size to carry a numerous party. It was made both for sailing and rowing; and I can remember being one of an expedition which went some distance up the Thames, when Shelley himself towed the boat on the return home, while I walked, by his side. His health had very much improved with the change that had taken place in his mode of life, his more settled condition, and the abatement of anxiety, with the absolute removal of some of its causes. I am well aware that he had suffered severely, and that he continued to be haunted by certain recollections, partly real and partly imaginative, which pursued him like an Orestes. He frequently talked on such subjects; but it has always appeared to me that those who have reported what he said have been guilty of a singular confusion in their interpretations. As I proceed, you will find that certain facts in his life have never yet been distinctly related, and I have a strong reason for believing that some circumstances of which I became accidentally aware were never disclosed at all, except to Mary; while in her writings I can trace allusions to them, that remind me of passages in ancient authors,—in Ovid, for instance,—which would have been absolutely unintelligible, except for accidental references. In spite, however, of the rude trials to which his constitution had been subjected, and of new symptoms supposed to indicate pulmonary weakness, there was a marked improvement in his aspect since he had visited London. He still had that ultra-youthful figure that partook the traits of the hobbledehoy, arrived at man's stature, but not yet possessing the full manly proportions. His extremities were large, his limbs long, his face small, and his thorax very partially developed, especially in girth. An habitual eagerness of mood, thrusting forward his face, made him stoop, with sunken chest and rounded shoulders; and this was even more apparent in the easy costume of the country than in London dress. But in his countenance there was life instead of weariness; melancholy more often yielded to alternations of bright thoughts; and paleness had given way to a certain freshness of color, with something like roses in the cheeks. Notwithstanding the sense of weakness in the chest, which attacked him on any sudden effort, his power of exertion was considerable. Once, returning from a long excursion, and entering the house by the back way, up a precipitous, though not perpendicular bank, the women of the party had to be helped; and Shelley was the most active in rendering that assistance. While others were content to accomplish the feat for one, he, I think, helped three up the bank, sliding in a half-sitting posture when he returned to fetch a new charge. I well remember his shooting past me in a cloud of chalk-dust, as I was slowly climbing up. He had a fit of panting after it, but he made light of the exertion. I can also recollect, that, although he frequently preferred to steer rather than to put forth his strength, yet, if it were necessary, he would take an oar, and could stick to his seat for any time against any force of current or of wind, not only without complaining, but without being compelled to give in until the set task was accomplished, though it should involve some miles of hard pulling. These facts indicate the amount of "grit" that lay under the outward appearance of weakness and excitable nerves.

Shelley's fulness of vitality did not at that time seem to be shared by the partner of his life. Mary's intellectual powers had already been manifested. He must to some extent have known the force of her affection, and the tenderness of her nature; but it is remarkable that her youth was not the period of her greatest beauty, and certainly at that date she did not do justice to herself either in her aspect or in the tone of her conversation. She was singularly pale. With a figure that needed to be set off, she was careless in her dress; and the decision of purpose which ultimately gained her the playful title of "Wilful Woman" then appeared, at least in society, principally in the negative form,—her temper being easily crossed, and her resentments taking a somewhat querulous and peevish tone. Both of the pair were still young, and their ideas of education were adverse to the received doctrines of the day, rather than substantive; and their own principles in this matter were exemplified somewhat perversely by little William. Even at that early age the child called forth frequent and poignant remonstrances from his gouvernante, and occasionally drew perplexed exclamations or desponding looks from his father, who took the child's little perversities seriously to heart, and sometimes vented his embarrassment in generalized remarks on human nature.

Some years elapsed between the night when I saw Shelley pack up his pistols—which he allowed me to examine—for his departure for the South, and the moment when, after our own arrival in Italy, my attention was again called to his presence by the shrill sound of his voice, as he rushed into my father's arms, which he did with an impetuousness and a fervor scarcely to be imagined by any who did not know the intensity of his feelings and the deep nature of his affection for that friend. I remember his crying out that he was "so inexpressibly delighted!—you cannot think how inexpressibly happy it makes me!"

The history of Shelley's brief visit to Pisa has been related by many, and is, I believe, told in his published letters; but it appears to me that those who have recounted it have in some respects fallen short. Excepting Mary Shelley, the best-informed spoke too soon after the event. Shelley's own letters are slightly misleading, from a very intelligible cause. After he had encouraged, if he did not suggest, the enterprise of "The Liberal,"—and I believe it would be nearly impossible for any one of the three men interested in that venture to ascertain exactly who was its author,—his mind misgave him. He knew my father's necessities and his childish capacities for business. With a keen sense of the power displayed in "Don Juan," and even in more melodramatic works, Shelley had acquired a full knowledge of the singularly licentious training from which Byron had then scarcely emerged, and of the vacillating caprice which enfeebled all his actions. His own ability to grapple with practical affairs was very great; but he himself had scarcely formed a sufficient estimate of it. Determined to maintain a thorough equality and freedom with the noble bard in their social relations, he shrank from any position which might raise in Byron's jealous and unstable mind the idea that he was under pressure; yet he was anxious to prevent disappointment for Leigh Hunt. He dreaded failure, and resolved that he would do his best to prevent it; and yet again he scarcely anticipated success.

As early as the end of 1818, he described the way in which Byron spent his life, after he had been partly exiled, partly emancipated from the ordinary restraints of society. At that time, "the Italian women were the most contemptible of all who existed under the moon,—an ordinary Englishman could not approach them"; "but," writes Shelley, "Lord Byron is familiar with the lowest sort of these women,—the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets." Byron's curiosity, indeed, tempted him to learn something of vice in its most revolting aspects. "He has," writes Shelley, "a certain degree of candor, while you talk to him, but unfortunately it does not outlast your departure." I am sure that before 1821 Byron had risen in his friend's estimation, or the "Liberal" scheme would never have been contemplated; and there were excellent reasons for the change. It is only by degrees that men have learned to appreciate at once the extraordinary nature and force of Byron's genius and the equally monstrous and marvellous nature of the evil training by which he was "dragged up." In the midst of extravagant license he gained experiences which might have extinguished his mind, but which, as they did not have that effect, added to his resources. In the process some of his personal qualities as a companion suffered severely. Very few grown men have been so extravagantly sensitive to personal approbation; and he was anxious to conciliate the liking of all who approached him, however foreign to his own set, however humble, or however insignificant. He was as mistrustful as a greedy child. He could be extravagant, but he was not open-handed; and yet he would give up what he coveted for himself, if he were urged by those whose esteem he desired to win. Now, of all persons who came near him, Shelley was the one that combined the greatest number of qualities calculated to influence a creature like Byron. He was of gentle blood; he was as resolute as he was able to maintain what is popularly called an independent position; he was truly sincere; and his way of life displayed a purity which Byron admired, though he fell from it so lamentably. On the other hand, Shelley was at odds with society on the very same questions of morals; he possessed all the philosophy for understanding the complicated perplexities of aberrant genius; did actually make allowances for Byron; estimated his powers more accurately, and therefore more highly, than any other person who came near him; and thus commanded at once his sympathies, his ambition, and his confidence. Everybody knows that in the interval between 1818 and the date of his death at Missolonghi, Byron's discipline of life had undergone a marked and beneficial change, and many agencies have been mentioned as contributing to that result, but I am sure that no one was so all-sufficient as the personal association with Shelley. Nothing of this is gainsaid by the fact that the greater part of this improvement was displayed after Shelley's death. Change of scene, intercourse with others, opportunities for acting upon his new principles, all helped, together, probably, with the graver sense of counsel bequeathed by the friend whom he had lost. Certain it is that Byron never mentioned Shelley in my hearing without a peculiarly emphatic manner. I know that to more than one person he performed acts of kindness and friendly aid as tributes to the memory of Shelley; and if any action were urged upon him as worthy of his own genius and dignity, nothing clenched the appeal like the name of Shelley. But if you will for a moment compare the characters of the two men,—if you will contrast the large self-sacrifice of the one with the self-indulgence of the other, the independence of the one with the craving of the other for approval, the absolute trust in human hope and goodness of Shelley with the blasé cynicism of Byron, I think two conclusions must instantly strike you,—first, that Shelley must have possessed almost unequalled power of influence over those who surrounded him, and, secondly, that Byron himself must have been a much better man, or possessing much more in common with Shelley than society or some of his most intellectual companions at all imagined. Part of the facts bearing upon the subject have come out since the death of both. My own attention was drawn to the point by the striking discord between the way in which other people speak of their relations and the manner of Shelley and Byron towards each other, and especially Byron's way in speaking of Shelley. It is not probable that Shelley formed to himself any such idea of his own power; yet you will find hints at it in his letters, you will see, curious traces of it in the letters of others, and nothing else will fully explain the change in Byron's life. Moreover, it reconciles the apparent inconsistencies of Shelley's reservations in talking about Byron with his manifest and practical confidence in the result of their joint working.

When I met Shelley again in Italy, it was easy to see that a grand change had come over his appearance and condition. The Southern climate had suited him, and the boat which caused his death had in the mean while been instrumental in developing his life. His retirement from painful personal conflict had given him greater ease; intercourse with Mary had made his life better; and, not to overlook one important fact, he had grown since he left England. For physiologists attest the truth, that growth continues throughout human existence, even until after decay begins; and Shelley's constitution was of that kind—strong in some of its developments, slow in others—which needed longer time than many to arrive at its full proportions. For instance, in the interval since I had seen him his chest had manifestly become of a larger girth. I am speaking only upon distant recollection; but I should judge it to have been three or four inches larger round, or perhaps more. His voice was stronger, his manner more confident and downright, and, although not less emphatic, yet decidedly less impulsively changeful. I can recall his reading from an ancient author, translating as he went, a passage about the making of the first man; and I remember it from the subject and from the easy flow of his translation, but chiefly from the air of strength and cheerfulness which I noticed in his voice and manner. In nothing, however, does Shelley appear to me to have been so misdescribed as in the outward man,—partly, as usual, from overstatement of peculiarities, and partly because each artist has painted the portrait from his own favorite view. Many, through exaggeration, or imperfect knowledge, have equally misconstrued his moral character, and have omitted to report the real conduct of his understanding as he advanced towards "the middle of the way of life."

From the story of his life after I first saw him, as well as from many things that I have heard him say of his family, and the strange recollections that he had of home, it is easy to understand the general tenor of his early life. Through some caprice in genealogical chemistry, in Percy the Shelley race struck out an entirely new idea: an apparent caprice in the sequence of houses that has often been noticed. For how often may we observe that the union of the most remarkable intellects produces a tertium quid which is the reverse of an equivalent to the combined totals, representing only a fraction of their qualities, and that fraction in its negative aspect; while, on the other hand, rivulets of blood which have gained for themselves no name upon earth may combine to form a river illustrious to the whole world. In the latter case, not an unusual effect is that those who are charged with the infancy of the new type in the family are incompetent to their duty; and accordingly Shelley was regarded merely as "a strange boy," wayward, mutinous, and to be severely chastised into obedience. It has been said that he attracted no particular notice at school; but this is not true. At Eton his resentment of tyrannical authority displayed itself not only against the masters, but against the privileges of young patricians. He refused to be "fag"; and on one occasion he so braved the youthful public-opinion, that, on being dared to the act by the surrounding boys, he pinned a companion's hand to the table with a fork. According to my recollection, the immediate provocative was that he was dared to do it; but the incident arose out of his resistance to the seniors amongst the scholars and to the customs of the school. It was evident that the masters had their eye upon him. Such a youth, with a command of language that was a born faculty and not simply acquired, must have attracted very positive attention on the part of the teachers; but it was certain, that, with the tendencies of those days, they would have thought it discreet to say as little as possible about the slender mutineer. It is equally well known, that, notwithstanding his youth, religious opinions caused his expulsion from college; and when we turn to the earliest of his writings which assumed anything like a complete shape, we discover at once the nature of those powers which could not have been overlooked,—we detect the genius, the revolutionary ideas, and the extraordinary command which he had acquired over the subject-matter of much that is taught in schools and colleges. Amid the orthodox reaction that followed upon the French Revolution, he was struck with the excesses to which despotic power could be carried. He read history with sympathies for the natural impulses and aspirations of the race, as opposed to the small circles which comprise established authorities. He looked upon knowledge as the means of serving, not enslaving the race. And therefore, while he excused the crimes of the Revolution, on the score of the ignorance in which the people had been kept, their sufferings, and the natural revulsion against such painful down-treading, he regarded the counter acts of authority as a treachery to wisdom itself. He says,—

"Hath Nature's soul,
That formed this world so beautiful….
And filled the meanest worm that crawls in dust
With spirit, thought, and love, on Man alone,
Partial in causeless malice, wantonly
Heaped ruin, vice, and slavery?
Nature?—no!
Kings, priests, and statesmen blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society."

The pretension of authority to speak with a supernatural warrant provoked him to deny the warrant itself, or the sources from which it was said to emanate.

"Is there a God?—ay, an almighty God,
And vengeful as almighty? Once his voice
Was heard on earth; earth shuddered at the sound,
The fiery-visaged firmament expressed
Abhorrence, and the grave of Nature yawned
To swallow all the dauntless and the good
That dared to hurl defiance at his throne,
Girt as it was with power. None but slaves
Survived,—cold-blooded slaves, who did the work
Of tyrranous omnipotence."

To these superstitious and ambitious pretensions he traced the corruption which disorganized society, leading it down even to the very worst immoralities.

"All things are sold: the very light of heaven
Is venal….
Those duties which heart of human love
Should urge him to perform instinctively
Are bought and sold as in a public mart.

* * * * *

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe
Is turned to deadliest agony, old age
Shivers in selfish beauty's loathing arms,
And youth's corrupted impulses prepare
A life of horror from the blighting bane
Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs
From unenjoying sensualism has filled
All human life with hydra-headed woes."

"Shelley," says Mary, in her note on the poem, "was eighteen when he wrote 'Queen Mab.' He never published it. When it was written, he had come to the decision that he was too young to be a judge of controversies." The wife-editor refers to a series of articles published in the "New Monthly Magazine" for 1832 by a fellow-collegian, a warm friend of Shelley's, touching upon his school-life, and describing the state of his mind at college. The worst of all these biographical sketches of remarkable men is, that delicacy, discretion, or some other euphemistically named form of hesitancy, induces writers to suppress the incidents which supply the very angles of the form they want to delineate; and it is especially so in Shelley's case. I am sure, that, if Mary, or my father, or any of those with whom Shelley conversed most thoroughly, had related some of the more extravagant incidents of his early life exactly as they occurred, we should better understand the tenor of his thought,—and we should also have the most valuable complement to that part of his intellectual progress which stands in contrast with the earlier portion. Now, as I have said, at school Shelley was a more practical and impracticable mutineer than his friends have generally allowed. They have been anxious to soften his "faults"; and the consequence is, that we miss the force of the boy's logic and the vigor of his Catonian experiments.

Again, accident has made me aware of facts which give me to understand, that, in passing through the usual curriculum of a college life in all its paths, Shelley did not go scathless,—but that, in the tampering with venal pleasures, his health was seriously, and not transiently, injured. The effect was far greater on his mind than on his body; and the intellectual being greater than the physical power, the healthy reaction was greater. But that reaction was also, especially in early youth, principally marked by horror and antagonism. Conscientious, far beyond even the ordinary maximum amongst ordinary men, he felt bound to denounce the mischief from which he saw others suffer more severely than himself, since in them there was no such reaction. I have no doubt that he himself would have spoken even plainer language, though to me his language is perfectly transparent, if he had not been restrained by a superstitious notion of his own, that the true escape from the pestilent and abhorrent brutalities which he detected around him in "real" life is found in "the ideal" form of thought and language. Ardent and romantic, he was eager to discover beauty "beneath" every natural aspect. Of all men living, I am the one most bound to be aware of the inconsistency; but you will see it reconciled a little later.

Shelley left college prone "to fall in love,"—having already, indeed, gone through some very slight experiences of that process. In his wanderings, in a humble position which conciliated rather than repelled him, he met with Harriet Westbrooke, a very comely, pleasing, and simple type of girlhood. She was at some disadvantage, under some kind of domestic oppression; so she served at once as an object for his disengaged affection, and a subject for his liberating theories, and as a substratum for the idealizing process upon which he constructed a fictitious creation of Harriet Westbrooke. His dreams bearing but a faint and controversial resemblance to the Harriet Westbrooke of daily life, the fictitious image prevented him from knowing her, until the reality broke through the poetical vision only to shock him by its inferiority or repulsiveness. As to the poor girl herself, she never had the capacity for learning to know him. In the sequel she proved to be the not unwilling slave of a petty domestic intrigue,—oppression from which he would have rescued her. Married life enabled him to discover that she was the reverse of the being that he had fancied. They were first married in Scotland in 1811. Shelley made acquaintance with the Godwins in 1812, before his eldest child was born. I am not sure whether he was acquainted with Mary at that time; but some circumstances which I cannot verify make me doubt it. Harriet's daughter was born early in the summer of 1813, and it was before the close of that year that the couple began to disagree. The wife was evidently under the dominion of a relative whose influence was injurious to her. I do not find a hint of any imputation upon what is usually called her "fidelity"; but the relative manifestly desired to show her power over both. It is probable that at an early day Shelley's disposition to see "sermons in stones and good in everything" made him think better of that interloping lady than she deserved,—and that consequently he not only gave her encouragement, but committed himself to something which, to Harriet's mind, justified her deference for ill-considered advice. It is very likely that she was counselled to extend her power over Shelley in a manner which her own simple nature would not have suggested; but, being as foolish as it was cunning and vulgar, such conduct could no result but that of repelling a man like Shelley. That he acquired a detestation of the relative is a certain fact. He must have been expecting a second child when he formally remarried Harriet in England on the twenty-fourth of March, 1814; and that ceremony has been mentioned by several writers to prove the most opposite conclusions,—that Shelley was devoted to his first wife, and that he behaved to her with the basest hypocrisy. It proves nothing but his desire to place the hereditary rights of the second child, who might be a boy, beyond doubt; and the precaution was justified by the event. Before the close of the same year Harriet returned to her father's house, and there she gave birth to a son, Charles, who would have inherited the baronetcy, if he had not died in 1826, after his father's death. The parting took place about the twenty-fourth of June, 1814; and at the same time Shelley wrote a poem, of which fragments are given in the recently published "Relics." The verse shows, first, that Shelley was suffering severely from the chronic conflict which he had undergone, and, secondly, that he had found some novel comfort in the intercourse with Mary.

"To sit and curb the soul's mute rage,
Which preys upon itself alone;
To curse the life which is the cage
Of fettered grief that dares not groan,
Hiding from many a careless eye
The scorned load of agony.

"Upon my heart thy accents sweet
Of peace and pity fell like dew
On flowers half dead….

"We are not happy, sweet! our state
Is strange and full of doubt and fear;
More need of words that ills abate;—
Reserve or censure come not near
Our sacred friendship, lest there be
No solace left for thee and me."

It is obvious that considerably after the date of this poem, Harriet remained in amicable correspondence with Shelley; and not only so, but, while she altogether abstained from opposing his new connection, she was actually on friendly terms with Mary. It is easy to understand how a limited nature like Harriet's should be worn out by the exaction and impracticability of one like Shelley; for to her most impracticable would seem his lofty and ideal requirements. On the other hand, it is evident that Shelley regarded the unfortunate girl with feelings of deep commiseration; and I know that he not only pitied her, but felt strong compunctions for the share which his own mistaken conduct at the beginning, even more than at the end, had had in drawing her aside from what would have been her natural course in ordinary life. Mary, I believe, clearly understood the whole case, and felt nothing but compassion for one who was a "victim to circumstances."

The sequel has been alluded to in several publications, but so obscurely as to be more than unintelligible; for the reader is led to conclusions the reverse of the fact. In the "Memorials," at page 63, the subject is barely touched upon. I take the whole passage.

"Towards the close of 1813, estrangements, which for some time had
been slowly growing between Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, came to a crisis.
Separation ensued; and Mrs. Shelley returned to her father's house.
Here she gave birth to her second child,—a son, who died in 1826.

"The occurrences of this painful epoch in Shelley's life, and the causes which led to them, I am spared from relating. In Mary Shelley's own words:—'This is not the time to relate the truth; and I should reject any coloring of the truth.'

* * * * *

"Of those remaining who were intimate with Shelley at this time, each has given us a different version of this sad event, colored by his own views and personal feelings. Evidently, Shelley confided to none of these friends. We, who bear his name and are of his family, have in our possession papers written by his own hand, which, in after-years, may make the story of his life complete, and which few now living, except Shelley's own children, have ever perused.

"One mistake which has gone forth to the world we feel ourselves called upon positively to contradict. Harriet's death has sometimes been ascribed to Shelley. This is entirely false. There was no immediate connection whatever between her tragic end and any conduct on the part of her husband."

At the end of the "Relics" is a memorandum entitled, "Harriet Shelley and Mr. Thomas Love Peacock." Mr. Peacock had been writing in "Fraser's Magazine" a series of articles on Shelley; in "Macmillan's Magazine" for June, 1866, was an article by Mr. Richard Garnet, entitled, "Shelley in Pall-Mall"; to this Mr. Peacock replied in "Percy Bysshe Shelley: Supplementary Notice"; and Mr. Garnet rejoined in the new little volume which he ha; edited. The main purpose of this last notice is, to show that Mr. Peacock was not accurate in his chronology or in his interpretation of the severance between Shelley and Harriet. Alluding either to the discretion which prevented Shelley from making a confidant of Mr. Peacock, or to his grief occasioned by the fate of Harriet, the writer refers to "the proof which exists in a series of letters written by Shelley at this very time to one in whom he had confidence, and at present in possession of his family," and then proceeds thus:—"Nothing more beautiful or characteristic ever proceeded from his pen; and they afford the most unequivocal testimony of the grief and horror occasioned by the tragical incident to which they bear reference. Yet self-reproach formed no element of his sorrow, in the midst of which he could proudly say, '———, ———,' (mentioning two dry, unbiased men of business,) 'every one, does me full justice, bears testimony to the uprightness and liberality of my conduct to her.'"

In the "Memorials" and the "Relics" there is no further allusion to the circumstances which preceded Harriet's suicide; but it appears to me very desirable that the whole story should be brought out much more distinctly, and I can at least show why I say so. The correspondence in question took place in the middle of December, 1816. Shelley was married to Mary about a fortnight later; and in the most emphatic terms he alluded not only to the solace which he derived from the conversation of his host, but to the manner in which my father spoke of Mary. My own recollection goes back to the period, and I have already testified to the state of Shelley's mind. He was just then instituting the process to recover the children, and he caught at an opinion that had been expressed, that, in the event of his again becoming contracted in marriage, there would be no longer any pretence to deprive him of the children.

Let me for a moment pause on this incident, as it establishes two facts of some interest. In the first place, it shows some of the grounds of the very strong and unalterable friendship which subsisted between my father and Mary,—a friendship which stood the test of many vicissitudes, and even of some differences of opinion; both persons being very sensitive in feeling, quick in temper, thoroughly outspoken, and obstinately tenacious of their own convictions. Secondly, it corroborates what I have said with regard to the community of spirit that Shelley found in his real wife,—the woman who became the companion of his fortunes, of his thoughts, of his sufferings, and of his hopes. It will be seen, that, even before marriage with his second wife, he was counting upon Mary's help in preventing his separation from the two children already born to him. She was a woman uniting intellectual faculties with strong ambitions of affection as well as intellect; and esteem thus substantially shown, at that early age, by two such men as Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt, must have conveyed the deepest gratification.

Throughout these communications Shelley evinced the strong pity that he felt for the unhappy being whom he had known. Circumstances had come to his knowledge which had thrown considerable light upon his relations with Harriet. There can be no doubt that one member of the family had hoped to derive gain from the connection with himself, as a person of rank and property. There seems also reason to suppose, that, about the same time, Harriet's father, an aged man, became so ill that his death might be regarded as approaching, and he had something to leave. Poor, foolish Harriet had undoubtedly formed an attachment to Shelley, whom she had been allowed to marry; but she had then suffered herself to become a tool in the hands of others, and the fact accounted for the idle way in which she importuned him to do things repugnant to his feelings and convictions. She thus exasperated his temper, and lost her own; they quarrelled, in the ordinary conjugal sense, and, from all I have learned, I am induced to guess, that, when she left him, it was not only in the indulgence of self-will, but also in the vain hope that her retreating would induce him to follow her, perhaps in a more obedient spirit. She sought refuge in her father's house, where she might have expected kindness; but, as the old man bent towards the grave, with rapid loss of faculties, he became more severe in his treatment of the poor woman; and she was driven from the paternal roof. This Shelley did not know at the time; nor did he until afterwards learn the process by which she arrived at her fate. Too late she became aware how fatal to her interests had been the intrigues of which she had been the passive instrument; and I suspect that she was debarred from seeking forgiveness and help partly by false shame, and partly by the terrible adaptability of weak natures to the condition of the society in which they find themselves. I have said that there is not a trace of evidence or a whisper of scandal against her before her voluntary departure from Shelley, and I have indicated the most probable motives of that step; but subsequently she forfeited her claim to a return, even in the eye of the law. Shelley had information which made him believe that she fell even to the depth of actual prostitution. If she left him, it would appear that she herself was deserted in turn by a man in a very humble grade of life; and it was in consequence of this desertion that she killed herself.

The change in his personal aspect that showed itself at Marlow appeared also in his writings,—the most typical of his works for this period being naturally the most complete that issued from his pen, the "Revolt of Islam." We find there identically the same doctrine that there is in "Queen Mab,"—a systematic abhorrence of the servility which renders man captive to power, denunciation of the love of gain which blinds his insight and destroys his energy, of the prostitution of religious faith, and, above all, of the slavery of womanhood. But by this time the doctrine has more distinct in its expression, and far more powerful in its utterance.

"Man seeks for gold in mines, that he may weave
A lasting chain for his own slavery;
In fear and restless care that he may live,
He toils for others, who must ever be
The joyless thralls of like captivity;
He murders, for his chiefs delight in ruin;
He builds the altar, that its idol's fee
May be his very blood; he is pursuing,
O blind and willing wretch! his own obscure undoing.

"Woman!—she is his slave, she has become
A thing I weep to speak,—the child of scorn,
The outcast of a desolated home.
Falsehood and fear and toil, like waves, have worn
Channels upon her cheek, which smiles adorn,
As calm decks the false ocean. Well ye know
What woman is; for none of woman born
Can choose but drain the bitter dregs of woe,
Which ever from the oppressed to the oppressors flow."

The indignation against the revolting subjugation of womanhood comes out still more distinctly in the preceding canto, where Cythna relates the horrors to which she was subjected.

"One was she among the many there, the thralls
Of the cold tyrant's cruel lust; and they
Laughed mournfully in those polluted halls;
But she was calm and sad, musing alway
On loftiest enterprise, till on a day

* * * * *

She told me what a loathsome agony
Is that when selfishness mocks love's delight,
Foul as in dreams' most fearful imagery
To dally with the mowing dead;—that night
All torture, fear, or horror made seem light
Which the soul dreams or knows."

The poet bears testimony to the spiritual power which rules throughout Nature; the monster recovering his dignity while he is under the higher influence.

"Even when he saw her wondrous loveliness,
One moment to great Nature's sacred power
He bent and was no longer passionless;
But when he bade her to his secret bower
Be borne a loveless victim, and she tore
Her locks in agony, and her words of flame
And mightier looks availed not, then he bore
Again his load of slavery, and became
A king, a heartless beast, a pageant and a name.

…."When the day
Shone on her awful frenzy, from the sight,
Where like a spirit in fleshly chains she lay
Struggling, aghast and pale the tyrant fled away.

"Her madness was a beam of light, a power
Which dawned through the rent soul; and words it gave,
Gestures and looks, such as in whirlwinds bore
Which might not be withstood."

The doctrine involved in this passage is very clear, and it marks a decided progress since the days of "Queen Mab." It will be observed that Shelley's mind had become familiarized with the idea of a spirit ruling throughout Nature, obedience to which constitutes human power. Most remarkable is the passage in which the tyrant recovers his faculties through his subjection to this spirit; because it indicates Shelley's faithful adhesion to the universal, though oft obscurely formed belief, that the ability to receive influence is the most exalted faculty to which human nature can attain, while the exercise of an arbitrary power centring in self is not only debasing, but is an actual destroyer of human faculty.

There can be no doubt that he had profited greatly in his moral condition, as well as in his bodily health, by the greater tranquillity which he enjoyed in the society of Mary, and also by the sympathy which gave full play to his ideas, instead of diverting and disappointing them. She was, indeed, herself a woman of extraordinary power, of heart as well as head. Many circumstances conspired to conceal some of her natural faculties. She lost her mother very young; her father—speaking with great diffidence, from a very slight and imperfect knowledge—appeared to me a harsh and ungenial man. She inherited from him her thin voice, but not the steel-edged sharpness of his own; and she inherited, not from him, but from her mother, a largeness of heart that entered proportionately into the working of her mind. She had a masculine capacity for study; for, though I suspect her early schooling was irregular, she remained a student all her life, and by painstaking industry made herself acquainted with any subject that she had to handle. Her command of history and her imaginative power are shown in such books as "Valperga" and "Castruccio"; but the daring originality of her mind comes out most distinctly in her earliest published work, "Frankenstein." Its leading idea has been ascribed to her husband, but, I am sure, unduly; and the vividness with which she has brought out the monstrous tale in all its horror, but without coarse or revolting incidents, is a proof of the genius which she inherited alike from both her parents. It is clear, also, that the society of Shelley was to her a great school, which she did not appreciate to the full until most calamitously it was taken away; and yet, of course, she could not fail to learn the greater part of what it had become to her. This again showed itself even in her appearance, after she had spent some years in Italy; for, while she had grown far more comely than she was in her mere youth, she had acquired a deeper insight into many subjects that interested Shelley, and some others; and she had learned to express the force of natural affection, which she was born to feel, but which had somehow been stunted and suppressed in her youth. In the preface to the collected edition of his works, she says: "I have the liveliest recollection of all that was done and said during the period of my knowing him. Every impression is as clear as if stamped yesterday, and I have no apprehension of any mistake in my statements, as far as they go. In other respects I am, indeed, incompetent; but I feel the importance of the task, and regard it as my most sacred duty. I endeavor to fulfil it in a manner he would himself approve; and hope in this publication to lay the first stone of a monument due to Shelley's genius, his sufferings, and his virtues." And in the postscript, written in November, 1839, she says: "At my request, the publisher has restored the omitted passages of 'Queen Mab.' I now present this edition as a complete collection of my husband's poetical works, and I do not foresee that I can hereafter add to or take away a word or line." So writes the wife-editor; and then "The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley" begin with a dedication to Harriet, restored to its place by Mary. While the biographers of Shelley are chargeable with suppression, the most straightforward and frank of all of them is Mary, who, although not insensible to the passion of jealousy, and carrying with her the painful sense of a life-opportunity not fully used, thus writes the name of Harriet the first on her husband's monument, while she has nobly abstained from telling those things that other persons should have supplied to the narrative. I have heard her accused of an over-anxiety to be admired; and something of the sort was discernible in society: it was a weakness as venial as it was purely superficial. Away from society, she was as truthful and simple a woman as I have ever met,—was as faithful a friend as the world has produced,—using that unreserved directness towards those whom she regarded with affection which is the very crowning glory of friendly intercourse. I suspect that these qualities came out in their greatest force after her calamity; for many things which she said in her regret, and passages in Shelley's own poetry, make me doubt whether little habits of temper, and possibly of a refined and exacting coquettishness, had not prevented him from acquiring so full a knowledge of her as she had of him. This was natural for many reasons, and especially two. Shelley had not the opportunity of retrospectively studying her character, and his mind was by nature more constructed than hers was to be preoccupied. If the reader desires a portrait of Mary, he has one in the well-known antique bust sometimes called "Isis" and sometimes "Clytie": a woman's head and shoulders rising from a lotus-flower. It is most probably the portrait of a Roman lady, is in some degree more elongated and "classic" than Mary; but, on the other hand, it falls short of her, for it gives no idea of her tall and intellectual forehead, nor has it any trace of the bright, animated, and sweet expression that so often lighted up her face.

Attention has often been concentrated on the passage in "Epipsychidion" which appears to relate Shelley's experiences from earliest youth until he met with the noble and unfortunate "Lady Emilia V., now imprisoned in the convent of—," whose own words form the motto to the poem, and a key to the sympathy which the writer felt for her:—"The loving soul launches itself out of the created, and creates in the infinite a world all its own, far different from this dark and fearful abysm." The passage begins,—

"There was a being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
In the clear golden prime of my youth's
dawn."

And this being was the worshipped object of Shelley's adoring aspirations in extreme youth; but it passed by him as a vision, though—

"And as a man with mighty loss dismayed,
I would have followed, though the grave between
Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen:
When a voice said,—'O thou of hearts the weakest,
The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest.'
Then I,—'Where?' The world's echo answered, 'Where'!"

She ever remained the veiled divinity of thoughts that worshipped her, while he went forth into the world with hope and fear,—

"Into the wintry forest of our life;
And struggling through its error with vain strife,
And stumbling in my weakness and my haste,
And half bewildered by new forms, I passed
Seeking among those untaught foresters
If I could find one form resembling hers
In which she might have masked herself from me."

The passage grows more and more intelligible. Hitherto he has been simply a dreamy seeker; but now, at last, he thinks that Fate has answered his questioning exclamation, "Where?"

"There, one whose voice was venomed melody
Sat by a well, under the nightshade bowers;
The breath of her false mouth was like faint flowers;
Her touch was as electric poison; flame
Out of her looks into my vitals came;
And from her living cheeks and bosom flew
A killing air which pierced like honey-dew
Into the core of my green heart, and lay
Upon its leaves,—until, as hair grown gray
O'er a young brow, they hid its unblown prime
With ruins of unseasonable time."

This is a plain and only too intelligible reference to the college experiences to which I have alluded. The youth for the moment thought that he had encountered her whom he was seeking, but, instead of the Florimel, he found her venal, hideous, and fatal simulacrum; and he indicates even the material consequences to himself in his injured aspect and hair touched with gray. He continues his search.

"In many mortal forms I rashly sought
The shadow of that idol of my thought:
And some were fair,—but beauty dies away;
Others were wise,—but honeyed words betray;
And one was true,—oh! why not true to me?
Then, as a hunted deer that could not flee,
I turned upon my thoughts and stood at bay."

"Oh! why not true to me?" has been taken by some very few who were cognizant of the facts as constituting an imputation on the one whom he first married; but I am convinced that the interpretation is wrong, although the surmise on which that interpretation is based was partly correct. Nothing is more evident than the fact that Harriet possessed rather an unusual degree of ability, but enormously less than Shelley desired in the being whom he sought, and equally less than his idealizing estimate originally ascribed to her. It is also plain, from her own letters, that she courted his approval in a way far too common with the wives of the artist-tribe, and perhaps with most wives: not being exactly what he wished her to be, and lacking the faculties to become so, she tried to seem it. The desire was partly sincere, partly an affectation, as we discern in such little trifles as her suddenly using the word "thou" in a letter to Hookham where she had previously been using the ordinary colloquial "you." That she was not quite ingenuous we also detect in the fast-and-loose conduct which enabled her, while affecting to become what Shelley deemed her to be, also to play into the hands of very inferior people, who must sometimes have counselled her against him behind his back; and this, I am sure, is what he means by "Oh! why not true to me?" though he may include in the question a fervent regret for the fate which attended her wandering from him. "Then like a hunted deer he turned upon his thoughts and stood at bay," until

"The cold day
Trembled, for pity of my strife and pain,
When, like a noonday dawn, there shone again
Deliverance. One stood on my path who seemed
As like the glorious shape that I had dreamed
As is the Moon, whose changes ever run
Into themselves, to the eternal Sun."

"The cold chaste moon" fails to satisfy the longing of his soul. "At her silver voice came death and life"; hope and despondency, expectation from her noble qualities, disappointment at the failure of response, were feelings that sprang from the exaggerations of his ideal longings.

"What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,
Blotting that Moon whose pale and waning lips
Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse!"

The whole passage is worth perusing; and again wrong interpretation has been given to this portion of his writing. I am still more firmly convinced that in the other case, when he says, "The planet of that hour was quenched," he alludes to nothing more than the partial failure of his own ideal requirements. At length into the obscure forest came

"The vision I had sought through grief and shame.

* * * * *

I stood and felt the dawn of my long night
Was penetrating me with living light:
I knew it was the vision veiled from me
So many years,—that it was Emily."

To grasp the entire meaning of this autobiographical episode, we must remember the extent to which Shelley idealizes. "More popular poets clothe the ideal with familiar and sensible imagery; Shelley loved to idealize the real,—to gift the mechanism of the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind. Sophocles was his great master in this species of imagery." The heroine of the "Epipsychidion" is an imagination; a creature, like Raphael's Galatea, copied from no living model, but from "una certa idea"; a thing originally created by himself, and suggested only by the living portrait, as each one of the admired had previously suggested its ideal counterpart. Emilia, then, was the bride of a dream, and, in the indulgence of disappointed longing for a fuller satisfaction of his soul, Shelley mournfully contrasts this vision, who had so eloquently responded to his idealizing through her convent-bars, with Mary, whose stubborn, independent realism had checked and daunted him.

But the last year of Shelley's life had involved a very considerable progress in the formation of his intellectual character. The "Prometheus Unbound," perhaps at once the most characteristic and the most perfect of all his works, is identical in spirit and tendency even with the earliest, "Queen Mab"; but a re-perusal of it in comparison with the other writings, even the "Revolt of Islam," will show a more distinct presentment of the original ideas, coupled with a much more measured suggestion for acting on them, and a far less bitter allusion to the obstacles; while the charity and love are more all-embracing and apparent than ever. Imperfect as it is for dramatic representation, shortcoming even in the power to trace the working of emotions and ideas in utterly diverse characters, the "Cenci" does indicate a stronger aptitude for sympathy with other creatures on their own terms than any other of the poet's writings. He had, therefore, sobered in judgment, without declining in his inborn genius; but, on the contrary, with a clearer sense of the limits placed upon individual action, he had gained strength; and I feel certain that a corresponding change had taken place in his perception of the true import and value of characters unlike his own. The last few months of his life at Lerici had very materially contributed to this change. Although I cannot recall any distinct statement to that effect by Mary Shelley, her conversation had left that impression on me; it is also suggested by the way in which he himself spoke of it, and is fully confirmed by the tone of the letters addressed to her from Pisa.

All who have attempted to portray Shelley, either intellectually or physically, have done so from some appreciable, almost personal point of view. When many eyes see one object, it presents itself in as many different aspects, and the description given by each bears often a slight resemblance to that of others. So it has been with Shelley. The artistic portraits of him have happened to be particularly imperfect. I remember seeing a miniature by an amateur friend which actually suggested a form broad and square. The ordinarily received miniature is like almost all of its tribe, and resembles Shelley about as much as a lady in a book of fashions resembles real women; and it constitutes evidence all the more detrimental and misleading, since it appears to give as well as to receive a color of verisimilitude from the usual written description, which represents Shelley as "feminine," "almost girlish," "ideal," "angelic," and so forth. The accounts of him by firmer hands are still cramped by the individuality of the authorship.

His school-friend, Hogg, is a gentleman of independent property; Shelley detected the sensitiveness of his nature; and I know that the man has been capable of truly generous conduct. How is it, then, that he has written such utterly unintelligible stuff, and has descended to such evasions as to insert initials, lest people should detect amongst Shelley's correspondents a most admirable friend, who happened, it is supposed, to be of plebeian origin? Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, I surmise, was conscious, somewhat early in life, that his better qualities were not fully appreciated; and his love of ease, his wit, his perception of the ludicrous, made him take refuge in cynicism until he learned almost to forget the origin of the real meaning of the things he talked about. His account of Shelley is like a figure seen through fantastically distorting panes of glass.

Thomas Love Peacock, again, is a man to whose extraordinary powers Shelley did full justice. He has worked through a long official career without losing his very peculiar dry wit; but a dry wit was not the man exactly to discern the form of Shelley's mind, or to portray it with accuracy and distinctness.