"Brother," said Mr Caxton, "I will walk with you to the Roman
encampment."
The Captain felt that this proposal was meant as the greatest
peace-offering my father could think of; for, 1st, it was a very long
walk, and my father detested long walks; 2dly, it was the sacrifice of
a whole day's labour at the great work. And yet, with that quick
sensibility, which only the generous possess, Uncle Roland accepted at
once the proposal. If he had not done so, my father would have had a
heavier heart for a month to come. And how could the great work have
got on while the author was every now and then disturbed by a twinge
of remorse?
Half-an-hour after breakfast, the brothers set off arm in arm; and I
followed, a little apart, admiring how steadily the old soldier got
over the ground, in spite of the cork leg. It was pleasant enough to
listen to their conversation, and notice the contrasts between these
two eccentric stamps from Dame Nature's ever-variable mould,--Nature
who casts nothing in stereotype, for I do believe that not even two
fleas can be found identically the same.
My father was not a quick or minute observer of rural beauties. He had
so little of the organ of locality, that I suspect he could have lost
his way in his own garden. But the Captain was exquisitely alive to
external impressions--not a feature in the landscape escaped him. At
every fantastic gnarled pollard he halted to gaze; his eye followed
the lark soaring up from his feet; when a fresher air came from the
hill-top, his nostrils dilated, as if voluptuously to inhale its
delight. My father, with all his learning, and though his study had
been in the stores of all language, was very rarely eloquent. The
Captain had a glow and a passion in his words which, what with his
deep, tremulous voice, and animated gestures, gave something poetic to
half of what he uttered. In every sentence of Roland's, in every tone
of his voice, and every play of his face, there was some outbreak of
pride; but, unless you set him on his hobby of that great ancestor the
printer, my father had not as much pride as a homœopathist could
have put into a globule. He was not proud even of not being proud.
Chafe all his feathers, and still you could rouse but the dove. My
father was slow and mild, my uncle quick and fiery; my father
reasoned, my uncle imagined; my father was very seldom wrong, my uncle
never quite in the right; but, as my father once said of him, "Roland
beats about the bush till he sends out the very bird that we went to
search for. He is never in the wrong without suggesting to us what is
the right." All in my uncle was stern, rough, and angular; all in my
father was, sweet, polished, and rounded into a natural grace. My
uncle's character cast out a multiplicity of shadows like a Gothic
pile in a northern sky. My father stood serene in the light like a
Greek temple at mid-day in a southern clime. Their persons
corresponded with their natures. My uncle's high aquiline features,
bronzed hue, rapid fire of eye, and upper lip that always quivered,
were a notable contrast to my father's delicate profile, quiet,
abstracted gaze, and the steady sweetness that rested on his musing
smile. Roland's forehead was singularly high, and rose to a peak in
the summit where phrenologists place the organ of veneration, but it
was narrow, and deeply furrowed. Augustine's might be as high, but
then soft, silky hair waved carelessly over it--concealing its height,
but not its vast breadth--on which not a wrinkle was visible. And yet,
withal, there was a great family likeness between the two brothers.
When some softer sentiment subdued him, Roland caught the very look of
Augustine; when some high emotion animated my father, you might have
taken him for Roland. I have often thought since, in the greater
experience of mankind which life has afforded me, that if, in early
years, their destinies had been exchanged--if Roland had taken to
literature, and my father had been forced into action--that, strange
as it may seem, each would have had greater worldly success. For
Roland's passion and energy would have given immediate and forcible
effect to study; he might have been a historian or a poet. It is not
study alone that produces a writer; it is _intensity_. In the mind, as
in yonder chimney, to make the fire burn hot and quick, you must
narrow the draught. Whereas, had my father been forced into the
practical world, his calm depth of comprehension, his clearness of
reason, his general accuracy in such notions as he once entertained
and pondered over, joined to a temper that crosses and losses could
never ruffle, an utter freedom from vanity and self-love, from
prejudice and passion, might have made him a very wise and enlightened
counsellor in the great affairs of life--a lawyer, a diplomatist, a
statesman, for what I know, even a great general--if his tender
humanity had not stood in the way of his military mathematics.
But, as it was--with his slow pulse never stimulated by action, and
too little stirred by even scholarly ambition--my father's mind went
on widening and widening, till the circle was lost in the great ocean
of contemplation; and Roland's passionate energy, fretted into fever
by every let and hindrance, in the struggle with his kind--and
narrowed more and more as it was curbed in the channels of active
discipline and duty--missed its due career altogether; and, what might
have been the poet, contracted into the humourist.
Yet, who that had ever known ye, could have wished you other than ye
were--ye guileless, affectionate, honest, simple creatures? simple
both, in spite of all the learning of the one, all the prejudices,
whims, irritabilities, and crotchets of the other? There you are both
seated on the height of the old Roman camp, with a volume of the
Stratagems of Polyœnus, (or is it Frontinus?) open on my father's
lap; the sheep grazing in the furrows of the circumvallations; the
curious steer gazing at you where it halts in the space whence the
Roman cohorts glittered forth. And your boy biographer standing behind
you with folded arms; and, as the scholar read or the soldier pointed
his cane to each fancied post in the war, filling up the pastoral
landscape with the eagles of Agrippa and the scythed cars of Boadicea!