Maria. Here’s the brave old man’s love, Bianca. That loves
the young man. The Woman’s Prize; or, The Tamer
Tamed.
“No, my dear Clarence, you have placed confidence in me, and it is now
my duty to return it; you have told me your history and origin, and I
will inform you of mine, but not yet. At present we will talk of you.
You have conferred upon me what our universal love of life makes us
regard as the greatest of human obligations; and though I can bear a
large burden of gratitude, yet I must throw off an atom or two in using
my little power in your behalf. Nor is this all: your history has also
given you another tie upon my heart, and, in granting you a legitimate
title to my good offices, removes any scruple you might otherwise have
had in accepting them.”
“I have just received this letter from Lord ----, the minister for
foreign affairs: you will see that he has appointed you to the office
of attache at ----. You will also oblige me by looking over this other
letter at your earliest convenience; the trifling sum which it contains
will be repeated every quarter; it will do very well for an attache:
when you are an ambassador, why, we must equip you by a mortgage on
Scarsdale; and now, my dear Clarence, tell me all about the Copperases.”
I need not say who was the speaker of the above sentences: sentences
apparently of a very agreeable nature; nevertheless, Clarence seemed to
think otherwise, for the tears gushed into his eyes, and he was unable
for several moments to reply.
“Come, my young friend,” said Talbot, kindly; “I have no near relations
among whom I can choose a son I like better than you, nor you any
at present from whom you might select a more desirable father:
consequently, you must let me look upon you as my own flesh and blood;
and, as I intend to be a very strict and peremptory father, I expect the
most silent and scrupulous obedience to my commands. My first parental
order to you is to put up those papers, and to say nothing more about
them; for I have a great deal to talk to you about upon other subjects.”
And by these and similar kind-hearted and delicate remonstrances, the
old man gained his point. From that moment Clarence looked upon him with
the grateful and venerating love of a son; and I question very much,
if Talbot had really been the father of our hero, whether he would have
liked so handsome a successor half so well.
The day after this arrangement, Clarence paid his debt to the Copperases
and removed to Talbot’s house. With this event commenced a new era in
his existence: he was no longer an outcast and a wanderer; out of alien
ties he had wrought the link of a close and even paternal friendship;
life, brilliant in its prospects and elevated in its ascent, opened
flatteringly before him; and the fortune and courage which had so
well provided for the present were the best omens and auguries for the
future.
One evening, when the opening autumn had made its approaches felt, and
Linden and his new parent were seated alone by a blazing fire, and had
come to a full pause in their conversation, Talbot, shading his face
with the friendly pages of the “Whitehall Evening Paper,” as if to
protect it from the heat, said,--
“I told you, the other day, that I would give you, at some early
opportunity, a brief sketch of my life. This confidence is due to you in
return for yours; and since you will soon leave me, and I am an old
man, whose life no prudent calculation can fix, I may as well choose the
present time to favour you with my confessions.”
Clarence expressed and looked his interest, and the old man thus
commenced,--
THE HISTORY OF A VAIN MAN.
I was the favourite of my parents, for I was quick at my lessons, and my
father said I inherited my genius from him; and comely in my person, and
my mother said that my good looks came from her. So the honest pair saw
in their eldest son the union of their own attractions, and thought they
were making much of themselves when they lavished their caresses upon
me. They had another son, poor Arthur,--I think I see him now! He was a
shy, quiet, subdued boy, of a very plain personal appearance. My father
and mother were vain, showy, ambitious people of the world, and they
were as ashamed of my brother as they were proud of myself. However, he
afterwards entered the army and distinguished himself highly. He died in
battle, leaving an only daughter, who married, as you know, a nobleman
of high rank. Her subsequent fate it is now needless to relate.
Petted and pampered from my childhood, I grew up with a profound belief
in my own excellences, and a feverish and irritating desire to impress
every one who came in my way with the same idea. There is a sentence
in Sir William Temple, which I have often thought of with a painful
conviction of its truth: “A restlessness in men’s minds to be something
they are not, and to have something they have not, is the root of all
immorality.” [And of all good.--AUTHOR.] At school, I was confessedly
the cleverest boy in my remove; and, what I valued equally as much, I
was the best cricketer of the best eleven. Here, then, you will say
my vanity was satisfied,--no such thing! There was a boy who shared my
room, and was next me in the school; we were, therefore, always thrown
together. He was a great stupid, lubberly cub, equally ridiculed by the
masters and disliked by the boys. Will you believe that this individual
was the express and almost sole object of my envy? He was more than
my rival, he was my superior; and I hated him with all the unleavened
bitterness of my soul.
I have said he was my superior: it was in one thing. He could balance a
stick, nay, a cricket-bat, a poker, upon his chin, and I could not; you
laugh, and so can I now, but it was no subject of laughter to me
then. This circumstance, trifling as it may appear to you, poisoned my
enjoyment. The boy saw my envy, for I could not conceal it; and as all
fools are malicious, and most fools ostentatious, he took a particular
pride and pleasure in displaying his dexterity and showing off my
discontent. You can form no idea of the extent to which this petty
insolence vexed and disquieted me. Even in my sleep, the clumsy and
grinning features of this tormenting imp haunted me like a spectre:
my visions were nothing but chins and cricket-bats; walking-sticks,
sustaining themselves upon human excrescences, and pokers dancing a
hornpipe upon the tip of a nose. I assure you that I have spent hours in
secret seclusion, practising to rival my hated comrade, and my face--see
how one vanity quarrels with another--was little better than a mass of
bruises and discolorations.
I actually became so uncomfortable as to write home, and request to
leave the school. I was then about sixteen, and my indulgent father, in
granting my desire, told me that I was too old and too advanced in my
learning to go to any other academic establishment than the University.
The day before I left the school, I gave, as was usually the custom, a
breakfast to all my friends; the circumstance of my tormentor’s sharing
my room obliged me to invite him among the rest. However, I was in
high spirits, and being a universal favourite with my schoolfellows, I
succeeded in what was always to me an object of social ambition, and set
the table in a roar; yet, when our festival was nearly expired, and I
began to allude more particularly to my approaching departure, my
vanity was far more gratified, for my feelings were far more touched, by
observing the regret and receiving the good wishes of all my companions.
I still recall that hour as one of the proudest and happiest of my
life; but it had its immediate reverse. My evil demon put it into my
tormentor’s head to give me one last parting pang of jealousy. A large
umbrella happened accidentally to be in my room; Crompton--such was my
schoolfellow’s name--saw and seized it. “Look here, Talbot,” said he,
with his taunting and hideous sneer, “you can’t do this;” and placing
the point of the umbrella upon his forehead, just above the eyebrow, he
performed various antics round the room.
At that moment I was standing by the fireplace, and conversing with
two boys upon whom, above all others, I wished to leave a favourable
impression. My foolish soreness on this one subject had been often
remarked; and, as I turned in abrupt and awkward discomposure from the
exhibition, I observed my two schoolfellows smile and exchange looks.
I am not naturally passionate, and even at that age I had in ordinary
cases great self-command; but this observation, and the cause which led
to it, threw me off my guard. Whenever we are utterly under the command
of one feeling, we cannot be said to have our reason: at that instant
I literally believe I was beside myself. What! in the very flush of
the last triumph that that scene would ever afford me; amidst the last
regrets of my early friends, to whom I fondly hoped to bequeath a long
and brilliant remembrance, to be thus bearded by a contemptible rival,
and triumphed over by a pitiful yet insulting superiority; to close my
condolences with laughter; to have the final solemnity of my career
thus terminating in mockery; and ridicule substituted as an ultimate
reminiscence in the place of an admiring regret; all this, too, to be
effected by one so long hated, one whom I was the only being forbidden
the comparative happiness of despising? I could not brook it; the
insult, the insulter, were too revolting. As the unhappy buffoon
approached me, thrusting his distorted face towards mine, I seized and
pushed him aside, with a brief curse and a violent hand. The sharp
point of the umbrella slipped; my action gave it impetus and weight; it
penetrated his eye, and--spare me, spare me the rest. [This instance
of vanity, and indeed the whole of Talbot’s history, is literally from
facts.]
The old man bent down, and paused for a few moments before he resumed.
Crompton lost his eye, but my punishment was as severe as his. People
who are very vain are usually equally susceptible, and they who feel
one thing acutely will so feel another. For years, ay, for many years
afterwards, the recollection of my folly goaded me with the bitterest
and most unceasing remorse. Had I committed murder, my conscience could
scarce have afflicted me more severely. I did not regain my self-esteem
till I had somewhat repaired the injury I had done. Long after that
time Crompton was in prison, in great and overwhelming distress. I
impoverished myself to release him; I sustained him and his family till
fortune rendered my assistance no longer necessary; and no triumphs were
ever more sweet to me than the sacrifice I was forced to submit to, in
order to restore him to prosperity.
It is natural to hope that this accident had at least the effect of
curing me of my fault; but it requires philosophy in yourself, or your
advisers, to render remorse of future avail. How could I amend my
fault, when I was not even aware of it? Smarting under the effects,
I investigated not the cause, and I attributed to irascibility and
vindictiveness what had a deeper and more dangerous origin.
At college, in spite of all my advantages of birth, fortune, health, and
intellectual acquirements, I had many things besides the one enemy of
remorse to corrode my tranquillity of mind. I was sure to find some one
to excel me in something, and this was enough to embitter my peace. Our
living Goldsmith is my favourite poet, and I perhaps insensibly
venerate the genius the more because I find something congenial in the
infirmities of the man. I can fully credit the anecdotes recorded
of him. I, too, could once have been jealous of a puppet handling a
spontoon; I, too, could once have been miserable if two ladies at the
theatre were more the objects of attention than myself! You, Clarence,
will not despise me for this confession; those who knew me less would.
Fools! there is no man so great as not to have some littleness more
predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often
only the playthings, of our follies! smile, but it is mournfully, in
looking back to that day. Though rich, high-born, and good-looking, I
possessed not one of these three qualities in that eminence which could
alone satisfy my love of superiority and desire of effect. I knew this
somewhat humiliating truth, for, though vain, I was not conceited.
Vanity, indeed, is the very antidote to conceit; for while the former
makes us all nerve to the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly
satisfied with its opinion of itself.
I knew this truth, and as Pope, if he could not be the greatest of
poets, resolved to be the most correct, so I strove, since I could not
be the handsomest, the wealthiest, and the noblest of my contemporaries,
to excel them, at least, in the grace and consummateness of manner; and
in this after incredible pains, after diligent apprenticeship in the
world and intense study in the closet, I at last flattered myself that
I had succeeded. Of all success, while we are yet in the flush of youth
and its capacities of enjoyment, I can imagine none more intoxicating or
gratifying than the success of society, and I had certainly some years
of its triumph and eclat. I was courted, followed, flattered, and sought
by the most envied and fastidious circles in England and even in Paris;
for society, so indifferent to those who disdain it, overwhelms with
its gratitude--profuse though brief--those who devote themselves to its
amusement. The victim to sameness and ennui, it offers, like the pallid
and luxurious Roman, a reward for a new pleasure: and as long as our
industry or talent can afford the pleasure, the reward is ours. At
that time, then, I reaped the full harvest of my exertions: the
disappointment and vexation were of later date.
I now come to the great era of my life,--Love. Among my acquaintance was
Lady Mary Walden, a widow of high birth, and noble though not powerful
connections. She lived about twenty miles from London in a beautiful
retreat; and, though not rich, her jointure, rendered ample by economy,
enabled her to indulge her love of society. Her house was always as
full as its size would permit, and I was among the most welcome of its
visitors. She had an only daughter: even now, through the dim mists of
years, that beautiful and fairy form rises still and shining before me,
undimmed by sorrow, unfaded by time. Caroline Walden was the object
of general admiration, and her mother, who attributed the avidity with
which her invitations were accepted by all the wits and fine gentlemen
of the day to the charms of her own conversation, little suspected the
face and wit of her daughter to be the magnet of attraction. I had no
idea at that time of marriage, still less could I have entertained such
a notion, unless the step had greatly exalted my rank and prospects.
The poor and powerless Caroline Walden was therefore the last person
for whom I had what the jargon of mothers term “serious intentions.”
However, I was struck with her exceeding loveliness and amused by the
vivacity of her manners; moreover, my vanity was excited by the hope
of distancing all my competitors for the smiles of the young beauty.
Accordingly I laid myself out to please, and neglected none of those
subtle and almost secret attentions which, of all flatteries, are the
most delicate and successful; and I succeeded. Caroline loved me with
all the earnestness and devotion which characterize the love of woman.
It never occurred to her that I was only trifling with those affections
which it seemed so ardently my intention to win. She knew that my
fortune was large enough to dispense with the necessity of fortune with
my wife, and in birth she would have equalled men of greater pretensions
to myself; added to this, long adulation had made her sensible though
not vain of her attractions, and she listened with a credulous ear to
the insinuated flatteries I was so well accustomed to instil.
Never shall I forget--no, though I double my present years--the shock,
the wildness of despair with which she first detected the selfishness
of my homage; with which she saw that I had only mocked her trusting
simplicity; and that while she had been lavishing the richest treasures
of her heart before the burning altars of Love, my idol had been Vanity
and my offerings deceit. She tore herself from the profanation of my
grasp; she shrouded herself from my presence. All interviews with me
were rejected; all my letters returned to me unopened; and though, in
the repentance of my heart, I entreated, I urged her to accept vows that
were no longer insincere, her pride became her punishment, as well as
my own. In a moment of bitter and desperate feeling; she accepted the
offers of another, and made the marriage bond a fatal and irrevocable
barrier to our reconciliation and union.
Oh, how I now cursed my infatuation! how passionately I recalled the
past! how coldly I turned from the hollow and false world, to whose
service I had sacrificed my happiness, to muse and madden over the
prospects I had destroyed and the loving and noble heart I had rejected!
Alas! after all, what is so ungrateful as that world for which we
renounce so much? Its votaries resemble the Gymnosophists of old, and
while they profess to make their chief end pleasure, we can only learn
that they expose themselves to every torture and every pain!
Lord Merton, the man whom Caroline now called husband, was among the
wealthiest and most dissipated of his order; and two years after our
separation I met once more with the victim of my unworthiness, blazing
in “the full front” of courtly splendour, the leader of its gayeties and
the cynosure of her followers. Intimate with the same society, we were
perpetually cast together, and Caroline was proud of displaying the
indifference towards me, which, if she felt not, she had at least learnt
artfully to assume. This indifference was her ruin. The depths of my
evil passion were again sounded and aroused, and I resolved yet to
humble the pride and conquer the coldness which galled to the very quick
the morbid acuteness of my self-love. I again attached myself to her
train; I bowed myself to the very dust before her. What to me were
her chilling reply and disdainful civilities?---only still stronger
excitements to persevere.
I spare you and myself the gradual progress of my schemes. A woman may
recover her first passion, it is true; but then she must replace it with
another. That other was denied to Caroline: she had not even children
to engross her thoughts and to occupy her affections; and the gay world,
which to many becomes an object, was to her only an escape.
Clarence, my triumph came! Lady Walden (who had never known our secret)
invited me to her house: Caroline was there. In the same spot where we
had so often stood before, and in which her earliest affections were
insensibly breathed away, in that same spot I drew from her colourless
and trembling lips the confession of her weakness, the restored and
pervading power of my remembrance.
But Caroline was a proud and virtuous woman: even while her heart
betrayed her, her mind resisted; and in the very avowal of her
unconquered attachment, she renounced and discarded me forever. I was
not an ungenerous though a vain man; but my generosity was wayward,
tainted, and imperfect. I could have borne the separation; I could have
severed myself from her; I could have flown to the uttermost parts of
the earth; I could have hoarded there my secret yet unextinguished
love, and never disturbed her quiet by a murmur: but then the fiat of
separation must have come from me! My vanity could not bear that her
lips should reject me, that my part was not to be the nobility of
sacrifice, but the submission of resignation. However, my better
feelings were aroused, and though I could not stifle I concealed my
selfish repinings. We parted: she returned to town; I buried myself in
the country; and, amidst the literary studies to which, though by fits
and starts, I was passionately devoted, I endeavoured to forget my
ominous and guilty love.
But I was then too closely bound to the world not to be perpetually
reminded of its events. My retreat was thronged with occasional
migrators from London; my books were mingled with the news and scandal
of the day. All spoke to me of Lady Merton; not as I loved to picture
her to myself, pale and sorrowful, and brooding over my image; but gay,
dissipated, the dispenser of smiles, the prototype of joy. I contrasted
this account of her with the melancholy and gloom of my own feelings,
and I resented her seeming happiness as an insult to myself.
In this angry and fretful mood I returned to London. My empire was
soon resumed; and now, Linden, comes the most sickening part of my
confessions. Vanity is a growing and insatiable disease: what seems to
its desires as wealth to-day, to-morrow it rejects as poverty. I was at
first contented to know that I was beloved; by degrees, slow, yet sure,
I desired that others should know it also. I longed to display my power
over the celebrated and courted Lady Merton; and to put the last crown
to my reputation and importance. The envy of others is the food of
our own self-love. Oh, you know not, you dream not, of the galling
mortifications to which a proud woman, whose love commands her pride,
is subjected! I imposed upon Caroline the most humiliating, the most
painful trials; I would allow her to see none but those I pleased; to
go to no place where I withheld my consent; and I hesitated not to exert
and testify my power over her affections, in proportion to the publicity
of the opportunity.
Yet, with all this littleness, would you believe that I loved Caroline
with the most ardent and engrossing passion? I have paused behind her,
in order to kiss the ground she trod on; I have stayed whole nights
beneath her window, to catch one glimpse of her passing form, even
though I had spent hours of the daytime in her society; and, though my
love burned and consumed me like a fire, I would not breathe a single
wish against her innocence, or take advantage of my power to accomplish
what I knew from her virtue and pride no atonement could possibly repay.
Such are the inconsistencies of the heart, and such, while they prevent
our perfection, redeem us from the utterness of vice! Never, even in
my wildest days, was I blind to the glory of virtue, yet never, till
my latest years, have I enjoyed the faculty to avail myself of my
perception. I resembled the mole, which by Boyle is supposed to possess
the idea of light, but to be unable to comprehend the objects on which
it shines.
Among the varieties of my prevailing sin, was a weakness common enough
to worldly men. While I ostentatiously played off the love I had excited
I could not bear to show the love I felt. In our country, and perhaps,
though in a less degree, in all other highly artificial states,
enthusiasm or even feeling of any kind is ridiculous; and I could not
endure the thought that my treasured and secret affections should be
dragged from their retreat to be cavilled and carped at by--
“Every beardless, vain comparative.”
This weakness brought on the catastrophe of my love; for, mark me,
Clarence, it is through our weaknesses that our vices are punished!
One night I went to a masquerade; and, while I was sitting in a remote
corner, three of my acquaintances, whom I recognized, though they knew
it not, approached and rallied me upon my romantic attachment to Lady
Merton. One of them was a woman of a malicious and sarcastic wit; the
other two were men whom I disliked, because their pretensions interfered
with mine; they were diners-out and anecdote-mongers. Stung to the
quick by their sarcasms and laughter, I replied in a train of mingled
arrogance and jest; at last I spoke slightingly of the person in
question; and these profane and false lips dared not only to disown the
faintest love to that being who was more to me than all on earth, but
even to speak of herself with ridicule and her affection with disdain.
In the midst of this, I turned and beheld, within hearing, a figure
which I knew upon the moment. O Heaven! the burning shame and agony of
that glance! It raised its mask--I saw that blanched cheek, and that
trembling lip! I knew that the iron had indeed entered into her soul.
Clarence, I never beheld her again alive. Within a week from that time
she was a corpse. She had borne much, suffered much, and murmured not;
but this shock pressed too hard, came too home, and from the hand of
him for whom she would have sacrificed all! I stood by her in death;
I beheld my work; and I turned away, a wanderer and a pilgrim upon the
face of the earth. Verily, I have had my reward.
The old man paused, in great emotion; and Clarence, who could offer
him no consolation, did not break the silence. In a few minutes Talbot
continued--
From that time the smile of woman was nothing to me: I seemed to grow
old in a single day. Life lost to me all its objects. A dreary and
desert blank stretched itself before me: the sounds of creation had only
in my ears one voice; the past, the future, one image. I left my country
for twenty years, and lived an idle and hopeless man in the various
courts of the Continent.
At the age of fifty I returned to England; the wounds of the past had
not disappeared, but they were scarred over; and I longed, like the rest
of my species, to have an object in view. At that age, if we have seen
much of mankind and possess the talents to profit by our knowledge, we
must be one of two sects,--a politician or a philosopher. My time was
not yet arrived for the latter, so I resolved to become the former; but
this was denied me, for my vanity had assumed a different shape. It is
true that I cared no longer for the reputation women can bestow; but I
was eager for the applause of men, and I did not like the long labour
necessary to attain it. I wished to make a short road to my object, and
I eagerly followed every turn but the right one, in the hopes of its
leading me sooner to my goal.
The great characteristic of a vain man in contradistinction to an
ambitious man, his eternal obstacle to a high and honourable fame, is
this: he requires for any expenditure of trouble too speedy a reward;
he cannot wait for years, and climb, step by step, to a lofty object;
whatever he attempts, he must seize at a single grasp. Added to this, he
is incapable of an exclusive attention to one end; the universality of
his cravings is not contented, unless it devours all; and thus he is
perpetually doomed to fritter away his energies by grasping at the
trifling baubles within his reach, and in gathering the worthless fruit
which a single sun can mature.
This, then, was my fault, and the cause of my failure. I could not give
myself up to finance, nor puzzle through the intricacies of commerce:
even the common parliamentary drudgeries of constant attendance and
late hours were insupportable to me; and so after two or three “splendid
orations,” as my friends termed them, I was satisfied with the puffs of
the pamphleteers and closed my political career. I was now, then, the
wit and the conversationalist. With my fluency of speech and variety
of information, these were easy distinctions; and the popularity of a
dinner-table or the approbation of a literary coterie consoled me for
the more public and more durable applause I had resigned.
But even this gratification did not last long. I fell ill; and the
friends who gathered round the wit fled from the valetudinarian. This
disgusted me, and when I was sufficiently recovered I again returned to
the Continent. But I had a fit of misanthropy and solitude upon me, and
so it was not to courts and cities, the scenes of former gayeties,
that I repaired; on the contrary, I hired a house by one of the most
sequestered of the Swiss lakes, and, avoiding the living, I surrendered
myself without interruption or control to commune with the dead. I
surrounded myself with books and pored with a curious and searching eye
into those works which treat particularly upon “man.” My passions were
over, my love of pleasure and society was dried up, and I had now
no longer the obstacles which forbid us to be wise; I unlearned
the precepts my manhood had acquired, and in my old age I commenced
philosopher; Religion lent me her aid, and by her holy lamp my studies
were conned and my hermitage illumined.
There are certain characters which in the world are evil, and in
seclusion are good: Rousseau, whom I knew well, is one of them. These
persons are of a morbid sensitiveness, which is perpetually galled by
collision with others. In short, they are under the dominion of VANITY;
and that vanity, never satisfied and always restless in the various
competitions of society, produces “envy, hatred, malice, and
all uncharitableness!” but, in solitude, the good and benevolent
dispositions with which our self-love no longer interferes have room to
expand and ripen without being cramped by opposing interests: this will
account for many seeming discrepancies in character. There are also
some men in whom old age supplies the place of solitude, and Rousseau’s
antagonist and mental antipodes, Voltaire, is of this order. The pert,
the malignant, the arrogant, the lampooning author in his youth and
manhood, has become in his old age the mild, the benevolent, and the
venerable philosopher. Nothing is more absurd than to receive the
characters of great men so implicitly upon the word of a biographer;
and nothing can be less surprising than our eternal disputes upon
individuals: for no man throughout life is the same being, and each
season of our existence contradicts the characteristics of the last.
And now in my solitude and my old age, a new spirit entered within me:
the game in which I had engaged so vehemently was over for me; and I
joined to my experience as a player my coolness as a spectator; I no
longer struggled with my species, and I began insensibly to love them.
I established schools and founded charities; and, in secret but active
services to mankind, I employed my exertions and lavished my desires.
From this amendment I date the peace of mind and elasticity which I now
enjoy; and in my later years the happiness which I pursued in my youth
and maturity so hotly, yet so ineffectually, has flown unsolicited to my
breast.
About five years ago I came again to England, with the intention of
breathing my last in the country which gave me birth. I retired to
my family home; I endeavoured to divert myself in agricultural
improvements, and my rental was consumed in speculation. This did not
please me long: I sought society,--society in Yorkshire! You may
imagine the result: I was out of my element; the mere distance from
the metropolis, from all genial companionship, sickened me with a vague
feeling of desertion and solitude; for the first time in my life I
felt my age and my celibacy. Once more I returned to town, a complaint
attacked my lungs, the physicians recommended the air of this
neighbourhood, and I chose the residence I now inhabit. Without being
exactly in London, I can command its advantages, and obtain society as
a recreation without buying it by restraint. I am not fond of new faces
nor any longer covetous of show; my old servant therefore contented me:
for the future, I shall, however, to satisfy your fears, remove to
a safer habitation, and obtain a more numerous guard. It is, at all
events, a happiness to me that Fate, in casting me here and exposing me
to something of danger, has raised up in you a friend for my old age,
and selected from this great universe of strangers one being to convince
my heart that it has not outlived affection. My tale is done; may you
profit by its moral!
When Talbot said that our characters were undergoing a perpetual change
he should have made this reservation,--the one ruling passion remains
to the last; it may be modified, but it never departs; and it is these
modifications which do, for the most part, shape out the channels of our
change; or as Helvetius has beautifully expressed it, “we resemble those
vessels which the waves still carry towards the south, when the north
wind has ceased to blow;” but in our old age, this passion, having
little to feed on, becomes sometimes dormant and inert, and then our
good qualities rise, as it were from an incubus, and have their sway.
Yet these cases are not common, and Talbot was a remarkable instance,
for he was a remarkable man. His mind had not slept while the age
advanced, and thus it had swelled as it were from the bondage of
its earlier passions and prejudices. But little did he think, in the
blindness of self-delusion,--though it was so obvious to Clarence,
that he could have smiled if he had not rather inclined to weep at the
frailties of human nature,--little did he think that the vanity which
had cost him so much remained “a monarch still,” undeposed alike by
his philosophy, his religion, or his remorse; and that, debarred
by circumstances from all wider and more dangerous fields, it still
lavished itself upon trifles unworthy of his powers and puerilities
dishonouring his age. Folly is a courtesan whom we ourselves seek,
whose favours we solicit at an enormous price, and who, like Lais,
finds philosophers at her door scarcely less frequently than the rest of
mankind!