CHAPTER I.

Produced by Pat Castevens and David Widger

THE CAXTONS

(Complete)

A FAMILY PICTURE

By Edward Bulwer Lytton

(Lord Lytton)

PREFACE.

If it be the good fortune of this work to possess any interest for the

Novel reader, that interest, perhaps, will be but little derived from

the customary elements of fiction. The plot is extremely slight, the

incidents are few, and with the exception of those which involve the

fate of Vivian, such as may be found in the records of ordinary life.

Regarded as a Novel, this attempt is an experiment somewhat apart from

the previous works of the author. It is the first of his writings in

which Humor has been employed, less for the purpose of satire than in

illustration of amiable characters; it is the first, too, in which man

has been viewed, less in his active relations with the world, than in

his repose at his own hearth,--in a word, the greater part of the canvas

has been devoted to the completion of a simple Family Picture. And thus,

in any appeal to the sympathies of the human heart, the common household

affections occupy the place of those livelier or larger passions

which usually (and not unjustly) arrogate the foreground in Romantic

composition.

In the Hero whose autobiography connects the different characters and

events of the work, it has been the Author’s intention to imply the

influences of Home upon the conduct and career of youth; and in the

ambition which estranges Pisistratus for a time from the sedentary

occupations in which the man of civilized life must usually serve his

apprenticeship to Fortune or to Fame, it is not designed to describe

the fever of Genius conscious of superior powers and aspiring to high

destinies, but the natural tendencies of a fresh and buoyant mind,

rather vigorous than contemplative, and in which the desire of action is

but the symptom of health.

Pisistratus in this respect (as he himself feels and implies) becomes

the specimen or type of a class the numbers of which are daily

increasing in the inevitable progress of modern civilization. He is

one too many in the midst of the crowd; he is the representative of the

exuberant energies of youth, turning, as with the instinct of nature for

space and development, from the Old World to the New. That which may be

called the interior meaning of the whole is sought to be completed by

the inference that, whatever our wanderings, our happiness will

always be found within a narrow compass, and amidst the objects more

immediately within our reach, but that we are seldom sensible of this

truth (hackneyed though it be in the Schools of all Philosophies) till

our researches have spread over a wider area. To insure the blessing of

repose, we require a brisker excitement than a few turns up and down our

room. Content is like that humor in the crystal, on which Claudian has

lavished the wonder of a child and the fancies of a Poet,--

“Vivis gemma tumescit aquis.”

E. B. L.

October, 1849.

THE CAXTONS.

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

“Sir--sir, it is a boy!”

“A boy,” said my father, looking up from his book, and evidently much

puzzled: “what is a boy?”

Now my father did not mean by that interrogatory to challenge

philosophical inquiry, nor to demand of the honest but unenlightened

woman who had just rushed into his study, a solution of that mystery,

physiological and psychological, which has puzzled so many curious

sages, and lies still involved in the question, “What is man?” For as we

need not look further than Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary to know that a boy

is “a male child,”--i.e., the male young of man,--so he who would go to

the depth of things, and know scientifically what is a boy, must be able

to ascertain “what is a man.” But for aught I know, my father may have

been satisfied with Buffon on that score, or he may have sided with

Monboddo. He may have agreed with Bishop Berkeley; he may have

contented himself with Professor Combe; he may have regarded the genus

spiritually, like Zeno, or materially, like Epicurus. Grant that boy is

the male young of man, and he would have had plenty of definitions to

choose from. He might have said, “Man is a stomach,--ergo, boy a male

young stomach. Man is a brain,--boy a male young brain. Man is a bundle

of habits,--boy a male young bundle of habits. Man is a machine,--boy

a male young machine. Man is a tail-less monkey,--boy a male young

tail-less monkey. Man is a combination of gases,--boy a male young

combination of gases. Man is an appearance,--boy a male young

appearance,” etc., etc., and etcetera, ad infinitum! And if none of

these definitions had entirely satisfied my father, I am perfectly

persuaded that he would never have come to Mrs. Primmins for a new one.

But it so happened that my father was at that moment engaged in the

important consideration whether the Iliad was written by one Homer, or

was rather a collection of sundry ballads, done into Greek by divers

hands, and finally selected, compiled, and reduced into a whole by a

Committee of Taste, under that elegant old tyrant Pisistratus; and the

sudden affirmation, “It is a boy,” did not seem to him pertinent to the

thread of the discussion. Therefore he asked, “What is a boy?” vaguely,

and, as it were, taken by surprise.

“Lord, sir!” said Mrs. Primmins, “what is a boy? Why, the baby!”

“The baby!” repeated my father, rising. “What, you don’t mean to say

that Mrs. Caxton is--eh?”

“Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Primmins, dropping a courtesy; “and as fine a

little rogue as ever I set eyes upon.”

“Poor dear woman,” said my father, with great compassion. “So soon,

too--so rapidly,” he resumed, in a tone of musing surprise. “Why, it is

but the other day we were married!”

“Bless my heart, sir,” said Mrs. Primmins, much scandalized, “it is ten

months and more.”

“Ten months!” said my father with a sigh. “Ten months! and I have not

finished fifty pages of my refutation of Wolfe’s monstrous theory! In

ten months a child! and I’ll be bound complete,--hands, feet, eyes,

ears, and nose!--and not like this poor Infant of Mind,” and my father

pathetically placed his hand on the treatise, “of which nothing is

formed and shaped, not even the first joint of the little finger! Why,

my wife is a precious woman! Well, keep her quiet. Heaven preserve her,

and send me strength--to support this blessing!”

“But your honor will look at the baby? Come, sir!” and Mrs. Primmins

laid hold of my father’s sleeve coaxingly.

“Look at it,--to be sure,” said my father, kindly; “look at it,

certainly: it is but fair to poor Mrs. Caxton, after taking so much

trouble, dear soul!”

Therewith my father, drawing his dressing-robe round him in more stately

folds, followed Mrs. Primmins upstairs into a room very carefully

darkened.

“How are you, my dear?” said my father, with compassionate tenderness,

as he groped his way to the bed.

A faint voice muttered: “Better now, and so happy!” And at the same

moment Mrs. Primmins pulled my father away, lifted a coverlid from a

small cradle, and holding a candle within an inch of an undeveloped

nose, cried emphatically, “There--bless it!”

“Of course, ma’am, I bless it,” said my father, rather peevishly. “It is

my duty to bless it--Bless It! And this, then, is the way we come into

the world!--red, very red,--blushing for all the follies we are destined

to commit.”

My father sat down on the nurse’s chair, the women grouped round him.

He continued to gaze on the contents of the cradle, and at length said,

musingly, “And Homer was once like this!”

At this moment--and no wonder, considering the propinquity of the

candle to his visual organs--Homer’s infant likeness commenced the first

untutored melodies of nature.

“Homer improved greatly in singing as he grew older,” observed Mr.

Squills, the accoucheur, who was engaged in some mysteries in a corner

of the room.

My father stopped his ears. “Little things can make a great noise,” said

he, philosophically; “and the smaller the thing; the greater noise it

can make.”

So saying, he crept on tiptoe to the bed, and clasping the pale hand

held out to him, whispered some words that no doubt charmed and soothed

the ear that heard them, for that pale hand was suddenly drawn from his

own and thrown tenderly round his neck. The sound of a gentle kiss was

heard through the stillness.

“Mr. Caxton, sir,” cried Mr. Squills, in rebuke, “you agitate my

patient; you must retire.”

My father raised his mild face, looked round apologetically, brushed his

eyes with the back of his hand, stole to the door, and vanished.

“I think,” said a kind gossip seated at the other side of my mother’s

bed, “I think, my dear, that Mr. Caxton might have shown more joy,--more

natural feeling, I may say,--at the sight of the baby: and Such a baby!

But all men are just the same, my dear,--brutes,--all brutes, depend

upon it!”

“Poor Austin!” sighed my mother, feebly; “how little you understand

him!”

“And now I shall clear the room,” said Mr. Squills. “Go to sleep, Mrs.

Caxton.”

“Mr. Squills,” exclaimed my mother, and the bed-curtains trembled, “pray

see that Mr. Caxton does not set himself on fire. And, Mr. Squills, tell

him not to be vexed and miss me,--I shall be down very soon,--sha’ n’t

I?”

“If you keep yourself easy, you will, ma’am.”

“Pray, say so. And, Primmins--”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Every one, I fear, is neglecting your master. Be sure,” and my mother’s

lips approached close to Mrs. Primmins’ ear, “be sure that you--air his

nightcap yourself.”

“Tender creatures those women,” soliloquized Mr. Squills as, after

clearing the room of all present save Mrs. Primmins and the nurse, he

took his way towards my father’s study. Encountering the footman in the

passage, “John,” said he, “take supper into your master’s room, and make

us some punch, will you,--stiffish!”

CHAPTER II.

“Mr. Caxton, how on earth did you ever come to marry?” asked Mr.

Squills, abruptly, with his feet on the hob, while stirring up his

punch.

That was a home question, which many men might reasonably resent; but my

father scarcely knew what resentment was.

“Squills,” said he, turning round from his books, and laying one finger

on the surgeon’s arm confidentially,--“Squills,” said he, “I myself

should be glad to know how I came to be married.”

Mr. Squills was a jovial, good-hearted man,--stout, fat, and with fine

teeth, that made his laugh pleasant to look at as well as to hear. Mr.

Squills, moreover, was a bit of a philosopher in his way,--studied human

nature in curing its diseases; and was accustomed to say that Mr. Caxton

was a better book in himself than all he had in his library. Mr. Squills

laughed, and rubbed his hands.

My father resumed thoughtfully, and in the tone of one who moralizes:--

“There are three great events in life, sir,--birth, marriage, and death.

None know how they are born, few know how they die; but I suspect that

many can account for the intermediate phenomenon--I cannot.”

“It was not for money, it must have been for love,” observed Mr.

Squills; “and your young wife is as pretty as she is good.”

“Ha!” said my father, “I remember.”

“Do you, sir?” exclaimed Squills, highly amused. “How was it?”

My father, as was often the case with him, protracted his reply, and

then seemed rather to commune with himself than to answer Mr. Squills.

“The kindest, the best of men,” he murmured,--“Abyssus Eruditionis.

And to think that he bestowed on me the only fortune he had to leave,

instead of to his own flesh and blood, Jack and Kitty,--all, at least,

that I could grasp, deficiente manu, of his Latin, his Greek, his

Orientals. What do I not owe to him?”

“To whom?” asked Squills. “Good Lord! what’s the man talking about?”

“Yes, sir,” said my father, rousing himself, “such was Giles Tibbets, M.

A., Sol Scientiarum, tutor to the humble scholar you address, and father

to poor Kitty. He left me his Elzevirs; he left me also his orphan

daughter.”

“Oh! as a wife--”

“No, as a ward. So she came to live in my house. I am sure there was no

harm in it. But my neighbors said there was, and the widow Weltraum

told me the girl’s character would suffer. What could I do?--Oh, yes, I

recollect all now! I married her, that my old friend’s child might have

a roof to her head, and come to no harm. You see I was forced to do her

that injury; for, after all, poor young creature, it was a sad lot

for her. A dull bookworm like me,--cochlea vitam agens, Mr.

Squills,--leading the life of a snail! But my shell was all I could

offer to my poor friend’s orphan.”

“Mr. Caxton, I honor you,” said Squills, emphatically, jumping up, and

spilling half a tumblerful of scalding punch over my father’s legs. “You

have a heart, sir; and I understand why your wife loves you. You seem a

cold man, but you have tears in your eyes at this moment.”

“I dare say I have,” said my father, rubbing his shins; “it was

boiling!”

“And your son will be a comfort to you both,” said Mr. Squills,

reseating himself, and, in his friendly emotion, wholly abstracted from

all consciousness of the suffering he had inflicted; “he will be a dove

of peace to your ark.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said my father, ruefully; “only those doves, when

they are small, are a very noisy sort of birds--non talium avium cantos

somnum reducent. However, it might have been worse. Leda had twins.”

“So had Mrs. Barnabas last week,” rejoined the accoucheur. “Who knows

what may be in store for you yet? Here’s a health to Master Caxton, and

lots of brothers and sisters to him.”

“Brothers and sisters! I am sure Mrs. Caxton will never think of such a

thing, sir,” said my father, almost indignantly; “she’s much too good a

wife to behave so. Once in a way it is all very well; but twice--and as

it is, not a paper in its place, nor a pen mended the last three days:

I, too, who can only write cuspide duriuscula,--and the baker coming

twice to me for his bill, too! The Ilithyiae, are troublesome deities,

Mr. Squills.”

“Who are the Ilithyiae?” asked the accoucheur.

“You ought to know,” answered my father, smiling,--“the female daemons

who presided over the Neogilos, or New-born. They take the name from

Juno. See Homer, Book XI. By the by, will my Neogilos be brought up like

Hector, or Astyanax--videlicet, nourished by its mother, or by a nurse?”

“Which do you prefer, Mr. Caxton?” asked Mr. Squills, breaking the sugar

in his tumbler. “In this I always deem it my duty to consult the wishes

of the gentleman.”

“A nurse by all means, then,” said my father. “And let her carry him upo

kolpo, next to her bosom. I know all that has been said about mothers

nursing their own infants, Mr. Squills; but poor Kitty is so sensitive

that I think a stout, healthy peasant woman will be the best for the

boy’s future nerves, and his mother’s nerves, present and future too.

Heigh-ho! I shall miss the dear woman very much. When will she be up,

Mr. Squills?”

“Oh, in less than a fortnight!”

“And then the Neogilos shall go to school,--upo kolpo,--the nurse with

him, and all will be right again,” said my father, with a look of sly,

mysterious humor which was peculiar to him.

“School! when he’s just born?”

“Can’t begin too soon,” said my father, positively; “that’s Helvetius’

opinion, and it is mine too!”

CHAPTER III.

That I was a very wonderful child, I take for granted; but nevertheless

it was not of my own knowledge that I came into possession of the

circumstances set down in my former chapters. But my father’s conduct

on the occasion of my birth made a notable impression upon all who

witnessed it; and Mr. Squills and Mrs. Primmins have related the facts

to me sufficiently often to make me as well acquainted with them as

those worthy witnesses themselves. I fancy I see my father before me, in

his dark-gray dressing-gown, and with his odd, half-sly, half-innocent

twitch of the mouth, and peculiar puzzling look, from two quiet,

abstracted, indolently handsome eyes, at the moment he agreed with

Helvetius on the propriety of sending me to school as soon as I was

born. Nobody knew exactly what to make of my father,--his wife excepted.

The people of Abdera sent for Hippocrates to cure the supposed insanity

of Democritus, “who at that time,” saith Hippocrates, dryly, “was

seriously engaged in philosophy.” That same people of Abdera would

certainly have found very alarming symptoms of madness in my poor

father; for, like Democritus, “he esteemed as nothing the things, great

or small, in which the rest of the world were employed.” Accordingly,

some set him down as a sage, some as a fool. The neighboring clergy

respected him as a scholar, “breathing libraries;” the ladies despised

him as an absent pedant who had no more gallantry than a stock or a

stone. The poor loved him for his charities, but laughed at him as a

weak sort of man, easily taken in. Yet the squires and farmers found

that, in their own matters of rural business, he had always a fund of

curious information to impart; and whoever, young or old, gentle or

simple, learned or ignorant, asked his advice, it was given with not

more humility than wisdom. In the common affairs of life he seemed

incapable of acting for himself; he left all to my mother; or, if taken

unawares, was pretty sure to be the dupe. But in those very affairs, if

another consulted him, his eye brightened, his brow cleared, the desire

of serving made him a new being,--cautious, profound, practical. Too

lazy or too languid where only his own interests were at stake, touch

his benevolence, and all the wheels of the clock-work felt the impetus

of the master-spring. No wonder that, to others, the nut of such

a character was hard to crack! But in the eyes of my poor mother,

Augustine (familiarly Austin) Caxton was the best and the greatest of

human beings; and she ought to have known him well, for she studied him

with her whole heart, knew every trick of his face, and, nine times out

of ten, divined what he was going to say before he opened his lips. Yet

certainly there were deeps in his nature which the plummet of her tender

woman’s wit had never sounded; and certainly it sometimes happened that,

even in his most domestic colloquialisms, my mother was in doubt whether

he was the simple, straightforward person he was mostly taken for.

There was, indeed, a kind of suppressed, subtle irony about him, too

unsubstantial to be popularly called humor, but dimly implying some sort

of jest, which he kept all to himself; and this was only noticeable when

he said something that sounded very grave, or appeared to the grave very

silly and irrational.

That I did not go to school--at least to what Mr. Squills understood by

the word “school”--quite so soon as intended, I need scarcely observe.

In fact, my mother managed so well--my nursery, by means of double

doors, was so placed out of hearing--that my father, for the most part,

was privileged, if he pleased, to forget my existence. He was once

vaguely recalled to it on the occasion of my christening. Now, my father

was a shy man, and he particularly hated all ceremonies and public

spectacles. He became uneasily aware that a great ceremony, in which he

might be called upon to play a prominent part, was at hand. Abstracted

as he was, and conveniently deaf at times, he had heard such significant

whispers about “taking advantage of the bishop’s being in the

neighborhood,” and “twelve new jelly-glasses being absolutely wanted,”

as to assure him that some deadly festivity was in the wind. And when

the question of godmother and godfather was fairly put to hire,

coupled with the remark that this was a fine opportunity to return the

civilities of the neighborhood, he felt that a strong effort at

escape was the only thing left. Accordingly, having, seemingly without

listening, heard the day fixed and seen, as they thought, without

observing, the chintz chairs in the best drawing-room uncovered (my

dear mother was the tidiest woman in the world), my father suddenly

discovered that there was to be a great book-sale, twenty miles off,

which would last four days, and attend it he must. My mother sighed;

but she never contradicted my father, even when he was wrong, as he

certainly was in this case. She only dropped a timid intimation that she

feared “it would look odd, and the world might misconstrue my father’s

absence,--had not she better put off the christening?”

“My dear,” answered my father, “it will be my duty, by and by, to

christen the boy,--a duty not done in a day. At present, I have no doubt

that the bishop will do very well without me. Let the day stand, or

if you put it off, upon my word and honor I believe that the wicked

auctioneer will put off the book-sale also. Of one thing I am quite

sure, that the sale and the christening will take place at the same

time.” There was no getting over this; but I am certain my dear mother

had much less heart than before in uncovering the chintz chairs in the

best drawing-room. Five years later this would not have happened. My

mother would have kissed my father and said, “Stay,” and he would have

stayed. But she was then very young and timid; and he, wild man, not of

the woods, but the cloisters, not yet civilized into the tractabilities

of home. In short, the post-chaise was ordered and the carpetbag packed.

“My love,” said my mother, the night before this Hegira, looking up

from her work, “my love, there is one thing you have quite forgot to

settle,--I beg pardon for disturbing you, but it is important!--baby’s

name: sha’ n’t we call him Augustine?”

“Augustine,” said my father, dreamily,--“why that name’s mine.”

“And you would like your boy’s to be the same?”

“No,” said my father, rousing himself. “Nobody would know which was

which. I should catch myself learning the Latin accidence, or playing at

marbles. I should never know my own identity, and Mrs. Primmins would be

giving me pap.”

My mother smiled; and putting her hand, which was a very pretty one, on

my father’s shoulder, and looking at him tenderly, she said: “There’s no

fear of mistaking you for any other, even your son, dearest. Still, if

you prefer another name, what shall it be?”

“Samuel,” said my father. “Dr. Parr’s name is Samuel.”

“La, my love! Samuel is the ugliest name--”

My father did not hear the exclamation; he was again deep in his books.

Presently he started up: “Barnes says Homer is Solomon. Read Omeros

backward, in the Hebrew manner--”

“Yes, my love,” interrupted my mother. “But baby’s Christian name?”

“Omeros--Soremo--Solemo--Solomo!”

“Solomo,--shocking!” said my mother.

“Shocking indeed,” echoed my father; “an outrage to common-sense.” Then,

after glancing again over his books, he broke out musingly: “But, after

all, it is nonsense to suppose that Homer was not settled till his

time.”

“Whose?” asked my mother, mechanically. My father lifted up his finger.

My mother continued, after a short pause., “Arthur is a pretty name.

Then there ‘s William--Henry--Charles--Robert. What shall it be, love?”

“Pisistratus!” said my father (who had hung fire till then), in a tone

of contempt,--“Pisistratus, indeed!”

“Pisistratus! a very fine name,” said my mother, joyfully,--“Pisistratus

Caxton. Thank you, my love: Pisistratus it shall be.”

“Do you contradict me? Do you side with Wolfe and Heyne and that

pragmatical fellow Vico? Do you mean to say that the Rhapsodists--”

“No, indeed,” interrupted my mother. “My dear, you frighten me.”

My father sighed, and threw himself back in his chair. My mother took

courage and resumed.

“Pisistratus is a long name too! Still, one could call him Sisty.”

“Siste, Viator,” muttered my father; “that’s trite!”

“No, Sisty by itself--short. Thank you, my dear.”

Four days afterwards, on his return from the book-sale, to my father’s

inexpressible bewilderment, he was informed that Pisistratus was

“growing the very image of him.”

When at length the good man was made thoroughly aware of the fact that

his son and heir boasted a name so memorable in history as that borne by

the enslaver of Athens and the disputed arranger of Homer,--and it was

asserted to be a name that he himself had suggested,--he was as angry as

so mild a man could be. “But it is infamous!” he exclaimed. “Pisistratus

christened! Pisistratus, who lived six hundred years before Christ

was born! Good heavens, madam! you have made me the father of an

Anachronism.”

My mother burst into tears. But the evil was irremediable. An

anachronism I was, and an anachronism I must continue to the end of the

chapter.

CHAPTER IV.

“Of course, sir, you will begin soon to educate your son yourself?” said

Mr. Squills.

“Of course, sir,” said my father, “you have read Martinus Scriblerus?”

“I don’t understand you, Mr. Caxton.”

“Then you have not read Martinus Scriblerus, Mr. Squills!”

“Consider that I have read it; and what then?”

“Why, then, Squills,” said my father, familiarly, “you would know

that though a scholar is often a fool, he is never a fool so supreme,

so superlative, as when he is defacing the first unsullied page of the

human history by entering into it the commonplaces of his own pedantry.

A scholar, sir,--at least one like me,--is of all persons the most

unfit to teach young children. A mother, sir,--a simple, natural, loving

mother,--is the infant’s true guide to knowledge.”

“Egad! Mr. Caxton,--in spite of Helvetius, whom you quoted the night the

boy was born,--egad! I believe you are right.”

“I am sure of it,” said my father,--“at least as sure as a poor mortal

can be of anything. I agree with Helvetius, the child should be educated

from its birth; but how? There is the rub: send him to school forthwith!

Certainly, he is at school already with the two great teachers,--Nature

and Love. Observe, that childhood and genius have the same master-organ

in common,--inquisitiveness. Let childhood have its way, and as it began

where genius begins, it may find what genius finds. A certain Greek

writer tells us of some man who, in order to save his bees a troublesome

flight to Hymettus, cut their wings, and placed before them the finest

flowers he could select. The poor bees made no honey. Now, sir, if I

were to teach my boy, I should be cutting his wings and giving him

the flowers he should find himself. Let us leave Nature alone for the

present, and Nature’s loving proxy, the watchful mother.”

Therewith my father pointed to his heir sprawling on the grass and

plucking daisies on the lawn, while the young mother’s voice rose

merrily, laughing at the child’s glee.

“I shall make but a poor bill out of your nursery, I see,” said Mr.

Squills.

Agreeably to these doctrines, strange in so learned a father, I thrived

and flourished, and learned to spell, and make pot-hooks, under the

joint care of my mother and Dame Primmins. This last was one of an old

race fast dying away,--the race of old, faithful servants; the race of

old, tale-telling nurses. She had reared my mother before me; but

her affection put out new flowers for the new generation. She was a

Devonshire woman; and Devonshire women, especially those who have passed

their youth near the sea-coast, are generally superstitious. She had a

wonderful budget of fables. Before I was six years old, I was erudite in

that primitive literature in which the legends of all nations are traced

to a common fountain,--Puss in Boots, Tom Thumb, Fortunio, Fortunatus,

Jack the Giant-Killer; tales, like proverbs, equally familiar, under

different versions, to the infant worshippers of Budh and the hardier

children of Thor. I may say, without vanity, that in an examination in

those venerable classics I could have taken honors!

My dear mother had some little misgivings as to the solid benefit to be

derived from such fantastic erudition, and timidly consulted my father

thereon.

“My love,” answered my father, in that tone of voice which always

puzzled even my mother to be sure whether he was in jest or earnest,

“in all these fables certain philosophers could easily discover symbolic

significations of the highest morality. I have myself written a treatise

to prove that Puss in Boots is an allegory upon the progress of the

human understanding, having its origin in the mystical schools of the

Egyptian priests, and evidently an illustration of the worship rendered

at Thebes and Memphis to those feline quadrupeds of which they make both

religious symbols and elaborate mummies.”

“My dear Austin,” said my mother, opening her blue eyes, “you don’t

think that Sisty will discover all those fine things in Puss in Boots!”

“My dear Kitty,” answered my father, “you don’t think, when you were

good enough to take up with me, that you found in me all the fine things

I have learned from books. You knew me only as a harmless creature who

was happy enough to please your fancy. By and by you discovered that

I was no worse for all the quartos that have transmigrated into ideas

within me,--ideas that are mysteries even to myself. If Sisty, as you

call the child (plague on that unlucky anachronism! which you do well to

abbreviate into a dissyllable),--if Sisty can’t discover all the wisdom

of Egypt in Puss in Boots, what then? Puss in Boots is harmless, and it

pleases his fancy. All that wakes curiosity is wisdom, if innocent; all

that pleases the fancy now, turns hereafter to love or to knowledge. And

so, my dear, go back to the nursery.”

But I should wrong thee, O best of fathers! if I suffered the reader to

suppose that because thou didst seem so indifferent to my birth, and

so careless as to my early teaching, therefore thou wert, at heart,

indifferent to thy troublesome Neogilos. As I grew older, I became more

sensibly aware that a father’s eye was upon me. I distinctly remember

one incident, that seems to me, in looking back, a crisis in my infant

life, as the first tangible link between my own heart and that calm

great soul.

My father was seated on the lawn before the house, his straw hat over

his eyes (it was summer), and his book on his lap. Suddenly a beautiful

delf blue-and-white flower-pot, which had been set on the window-sill

of an upper story, fell to the ground with a crash, and the fragments

spluttered up round my father’s legs. Sublime in his studies as

Archimedes in the siege, he continued to read,--_Impavidum ferient

ruinae!_

“Dear, dear!” cried my mother, who was at work in the porch, “my poor

flower-pot that I prized so much! Who could have done this? Primmins,

Primmins!”

Mrs. Primmins popped her head out of the fatal window, nodded to the

summons, and came down in a trice, pale and breathless.

“Oh!” said my mother, Mournfully, “I would rather have lost all the

plants in the greenhouse in the great blight last May,--I would rather

the best tea-set were broken! The poor geranium I reared myself, and the

dear, dear flower-pot which Mr. Caxton bought for me my last birthday!

That naughty child must have done this!”

Mrs. Primmins was dreadfully afraid of my father,--why, I know not,

except that very talkative social persons are usually afraid of

very silent shy ones. She cast a hasty glance at her master, who was

beginning to evince signs of attention, and cried promptly, “No, ma’am,

it was not the dear boy, bless his flesh, it was I!”

“You? How could you be so careless? and you knew how I prized them both.

Oh, Primmins!” Primmins began to sob.

“Don’t tell fibs, nursey,” said a small, shrill voice; and Master Sisty,

coming out of the house as bold as brass, continued rapidly--“don’t

scold Primmins, mamma: it was I who pushed out the flower-pot.”

“Hush!” said nurse, more frightened than ever, and looking aghast

towards my father, who had very deliberately taken off his hat, and was

regarding the scene with serious eyes wide awake. “Hush! And if he did

break it, ma’am, it was quite an accident; he was standing so, and he

never meant it. Did you, Master Sisty? Speak!” this in a whisper, “or Pa

will be so angry.”

“Well,” said my mother, “I suppose it was an accident; take care in

future, my child. You are sorry, I see, to have grieved me. There’s a

kiss; don’t fret.”

“No, mamma, you must not kiss me; I don’t deserve it. I pushed out the

flower-pot on purpose.”

“Ha! and why?” said my father, walking up.

Mrs. Primmins trembled like a leaf.

“For fun!” said I, hanging my head,--“just to see how you’d look, papa;

and that’s the truth of it. Now beat me, do beat me!”

My father threw his book fifty yards off, stooped down, and caught me to

his breast. “Boy,” he said, “you have done wrong: you shall repair it by

remembering all your life that your father blessed God for giving him a

son who spoke truth in spite of fear! Oh! Mrs. Primmins, the next fable

of this kind you try to teach him, and we part forever!”

From that time I first date the hour when I felt that I loved my father,

and knew that he loved me; from that time, too, he began to converse

with me. He would no longer, if he met me in the garden, pass by with a

smile and nod; he would stop, put his book in his pocket, and though his

talk was often above my comprehension, still somehow I felt happier

and better, and less of an infant, when I thought over it, and tried

to puzzle out the meaning; for he had a way of suggesting, not teaching,

putting things into my head, and then leaving them to work out their

own problems. I remember a special instance with respect to that same

flower-pot and geranium. Mr. Squills, who was a bachelor, and well-to-do

in the world, often made me little presents. Not long after the event

I have narrated, he gave me one far exceeding in value those usually

bestowed on children,--it was a beautiful large domino-box in cut ivory,

painted and gilt. This domino-box was my delight. I was never weary of

playing, at dominos with Mrs. Primmins, and I slept with the box under

my pillow.

“Ah!” said my father one day, when he found me ranging the ivory

parallelograms in the parlor, “ah! you like that better than all your

playthings, eh?”

“Oh, yes, papa!”

“You would be very sorry if your mamma were to throw that box out of the

window and break it for fun.” I looked beseechingly at my father, and

made no answer.

“But perhaps you would be very glad,” he resumed, “if suddenly one

of those good fairies you read of could change the domino-box into a

beautiful geranium in a beautiful blue-and-white flower-pot, and you

could have the pleasure of putting it on your mamma’s window-sill.”

“Indeed I would!” said I, half-crying.

“My dear boy, I believe you; but good wishes don’t mend bad actions:

good actions mend bad actions.”

So saying, he shut the door and went out. I cannot tell you how puzzled

I was to make out what my father meant by his aphorism. But I know that

I played at dominos no more that day. The next morning my father found

me seated by myself under a tree in the garden; he paused, and looked at

me with his grave bright eyes very steadily.

“My boy,” said he, “I am going to walk to ----,” a town about two miles

off: “will you come? And, by the by, fetch your domino-box. I should

like to show it to a person there.” I ran in for the box, and, not a

little proud of walking with my father upon the high-road, we set out.

“Papa,” said I by the way, “there are no fairies now.”

“What then, my child?”

“Why, how then can my domino-box be changed into a geranium and a

blue-and-white flower-pot?”

“My dear,” said my father, leaning his hand on my shoulder, “everybody

who is in earnest to be good, carries two fairies about with him,--one

here,” and he touched my heart, “and one here,” and he touched my

forehead.

“I don’t understand, papa.”

“I can wait till you do, Pisistratus. What a name!”

My father stopped at a nursery gardener’s, and after looking over the

flowers, paused before a large double geranium. “Ah! this is finer than

that which your mamma was so fond of. What is the cost, sir?”

“Only 7s. 6d.,” said the gardener.

My father buttoned up his pocket. “I can’t afford it to-day,” said he,

gently, and we walked out.

On entering the town, we stopped again at a china warehouse. “Have you

a flower-pot like that I bought some months ago? Ah! here is one, marked

3s. 6d. Yes, that is the price. Well; when your mamma’s birthday comes

again, we must buy her another. That is some months to wait. And we can

wait, Master Sisty. For truth, that blooms all the year round, is better

than a poor geranium; and a word that is never broken, is better than a

piece of delf.”

My head, which had drooped before, rose again; but the rush of joy at my

heart almost stifled me.

“I have called to pay your little bill,” said my father, entering the

shop of one of those fancy stationers common in country towns, and who

sell all kinds of pretty toys and knick-knacks. “And by the way,” he

added, as the smiling shopman looked over his books for the entry,

“I think my little boy here can show you a much handsomer specimen of

French workmanship than that work-box which you enticed Mrs. Caxton into

raffling for, last winter. Show your domino-box, my dear.”

I produced my treasure, and the shopman was liberal in his

commendations. “It is always well, my boy, to know what a thing is

worth, in case one wishes to part with it. If my young gentleman gets

tired of his plaything, what will you give him for it?”

“Why, sir,” said the shopman, “I fear we could not afford to give more

than eighteen shillings for it, unless the young gentleman took some of

these pretty things in exchange.”

“Eighteen shillings!” said my father; “you would give that sum! Well, my

boy, whenever you do grow tired of your box, you have my leave to sell

it.”

My father paid his bill and went out. I lingered behind a few moments,

and joined him at the end of the street.

“Papa, papa,” I cried, clapping my hands, “we can buy the geranium;

we can buy the flower-pot.” And I pulled a handful of silver from my

pockets.

“Did I not say right?” said my father, passing his handkerchief over his

eyes. “You have found the two fairies!”

Oh! how proud, how overjoyed I was when, after placing vase and flower

on the window-sill, I plucked my mother by the gown and made her follow

me to the spot.

“It is his doing and his money!” said my father; “good actions have

mended the bad.”

“What!” cried my mother, when she had learned all; “and your poor

domino-box that you were so fond of! We will go back to-morrow and buy

it back, if it costs us double.”

“Shall we buy it back, Pisistratus?” asked my father.

“Oh, no--no--no! It would spoil all,” I cried, burying my face on my

father’s breast.

“My wife,” said my father, solemnly, “this is my first lesson to our

child,--the sanctity and the happiness of self-sacrifice; undo not what

it should teach to his dying day.”

CHAPTER V.

When I was between my seventh and my eighth year, a change came over me,

which may perhaps be familiar to the notice of those parents who

boast the anxious blessing of an only child. The ordinary vivacity

of childhood forsook me; I became quiet, sedate, and thoughtful. The

absence of play-fellows of my own age, the companionship of mature

minds, alternated only by complete solitude, gave something precocious,

whether to my imagination or my reason. The wild fables muttered to

me by the old nurse in the summer twilight or over the winter’s

hearth,--the effort made by my struggling intellect to comprehend the

grave, sweet wisdom of my father’s suggested lessons,--tended to feed a

passion for revery, in which all my faculties strained and struggled, as

in the dreams that come when sleep is nearest waking. I had learned to

read with ease, and to write with some fluency, and I already began to

imitate, to reproduce. Strange tales akin to those I had gleaned from

fairy-land, rude songs modelled from such verse-books as fell into my

hands, began to mar the contents of marble-covered pages designed for

the less ambitious purposes of round text and multiplication. My mind

was yet more disturbed by the intensity of my home affections. My love

for both my parents had in it something morbid and painful. I often wept

to think how little I could do for those I loved so well. My fondest

fancies built up imaginary difficulties for them, which my arm was to

smooth. These feelings, thus cherished, made my nerves over-susceptible

and acute. Nature began to affect me powerfully; and, from that

affection rose a restless curiosity to analyze the charms that so

mysteriously moved me to joy or awe, to smiles or tears. I got my father

to explain to me the elements of astronomy; I extracted from Squills,

who was an ardent botanist, some of the mysteries in the life of

flowers. But music became my darling passion. My mother (though the

daughter of a great scholar,--a scholar at whose name my father raised

his hat if it happened to be on his head) possessed, I must own it

fairly, less book-learning than many a humble tradesman’s daughter can

boast in this more enlightened generation; but she had some natural

gifts which had ripened, Heaven knows how! into womanly accomplishments.

She drew with some elegance, and painted flowers to exquisite

perfection. She played on more than one instrument with more than

boarding-school skill; and though she sang in no language but her own,

few could hear her sweet voice without being deeply touched. Her music,

her songs, had a wondrous effect on me. Thus, altogether, a kind of

dreamy yet delightful melancholy seized upon my whole being; and this

was the more remarkable because contrary to my early temperament, which

was bold, active, and hilarious. The change in my character began to act

upon my form. From a robust and vigorous infant, I grew into a pale and

slender boy. I began to ail and mope. Mr. Squills was called in.

“Tonics!” said Mr. Squills; “and don’t let him sit over his book. Send

him out in the air; make him play. Come here, my boy: these organs are

growing too large;” and Mr. Squills, who was a phrenologist, placed his

hand on my forehead. “Gad, sir, here’s an ideality for you; and, bless

my soul, what a constructiveness!”

My father pushed aside his papers, and walked to and fro the room with

his hands behind him; but he did not say a word till Mr. Squills was

gone.

“My dear,” then said he to my mother, on whose breast I was leaning

my aching ideality--“my dear, Pisistratus must go to school in good

earnest.”

“Bless me, Austin!--at his age?”

“He is nearly eight years old.”

“But he is so forward.”

“It is for that reason he must go to school.”

“I don’t quite understand you, my love. I know he is getting past me;

but you who are so clever--”

My father took my mother’s hand: “We can teach him nothing now, Kitty.

We send him to school to be taught--”

“By some schoolmaster who knows much less than you do--”

“By little schoolboys, who will make him a boy again,” said my father,

almost sadly. “My dear, you remember that when our Kentish gardener

planted those filbert-trees, and when they were in their third year,

and you began to calculate on what they would bring in, you went out one

morning, and found he had cut them down to the ground. You were vexed,

and asked why. What did the gardener say? ‘To prevent their bearing

too soon.’ There is no want of fruitfulness here: put back the hour of

produce, that the plant may last.”

“Let me go to school,” said I, lifting my languid head and smiling on my

father. I understood him at once, and it was as if the voice of my life

itself answered him.

CHAPTER VI.

A year after the resolution thus come to, I was at home for the

holidays.

“I hope,” said my mother, “that they are doing Sisty justice. I do think

he is not nearly so quick a child as he was before he went to school. I

wish you would examine him, Austin.”

“I have examined him, my dear. It is just as I expected; and I am quite

satisfied.”

“What! you really think he has come on?” said my mother, joyfully.

“He does not care a button for botany now,” said Mr. Squills.

“And he used to be so fond of music, dear boy!” observed my mother, with

a sigh. “Good gracious, what noise is that?”

“Your son’s pop-gun against the window,” said my father. “It is lucky it

is only the window; it would have made a less deafening noise, though,

if it had been Mr. Squills’s head, as it was yesterday morning.”

“The left ear,” observed Squills; “and a very sharp blow it was too. Yet

you are satisfied, Mr. Caxton?”

“Yes; I think the boy is now as great a blockhead as most boys of his

age are,” observed my father with great complacency.

“Dear me, Austin,--a great blockhead?”

“What else did he go to school for?” asked my father.

And observing a certain dismay in the face of his female audience, and

a certain surprise in that of his male, he rose and stood on the

hearth, with one hand in his waistcoat, as was his wont when about to

philosophize in more detail than was usual to him.

“Mr. Squills,” said he, “you have had great experience in families.”

“As good a practice as any in the county,” said Mr. Squills, proudly;

“more than I can manage. I shall advertise for a partner.”

“And,” resumed my father, “you must have observed almost invariably that

in every family there is what father, mother, uncle, and aunt pronounce

to be one wonderful child.”

“One at least,” said Mr. Squills, smiling.

“It is easy,” continued my father, “to say this is parental partiality;

but it is not so. Examine that child as a stranger, and it will

startle yourself. You stand amazed at its eager curiosity, its quick

comprehension, its ready wit, its delicate perception. Often, too, you

will find some faculty strikingly developed. The child will have a turn

for mechanics, perhaps, and make you a model of a steamboat; or it will

have an ear tuned to verse, and will write you a poem like that it

has got by heart from ‘The Speaker;’ or it will take to botany (like

Pisistratus), with the old maid its aunt; or it will play a march on its

sister’s pianoforte. In short, even you, Squills, will declare that it

is really a wonderful child.”

“Upon my word,” said Mr. Squills, thoughtfully, “there’s a great deal

of truth in what you say. Little Tom Dobbs is a wonderful child; so is

Frank Stepington--and as for Johnny Styles, I must bring him here for

you to hear him prattle on Natural History, and see how well he handles

his pretty little microscope.”

“Heaven forbid!” said my father. “And now let me proceed. These

thaumata, or wonders, last till when, Mr. Squills?--last till the boy

goes to school; and then, somehow or other, the thaumata vanish into

thin air, like ghosts at the cockcrow. A year after the prodigy has been

at the academy, father and mother, uncle and aunt, plague you no more

with his doings and sayings: the extraordinary infant has become a very

ordinary little boy. Is it not so, Mr. Squills?”

“Indeed you are right, sir. How did you come to be so observant? You

never seem to--”

“Hush!” interrupted my father; and then, looking fondly at my mother’s

anxious face, he said soothingly: “Be comforted; this is wisely

ordained, and it is for the best.”

“It must be the fault of the school,” said my mother, shaking her head.

“It is the necessity of the school, and its virtue, my Kate. Let any

one of these wonderful children--wonderful as you thought Sisty

himself--stay at home, and you will see its head grow bigger and bigger,

and its body thinner and thinner--eh, Mr. Squills?--till the mind take

all nourishment from the frame, and the frame, in turn, stint or make

sickly the mind. You see that noble oak from the window. If the Chinese

had brought it up, it would have been a tree in miniature at five years

old, and at a hundred, you would have set it in a flowerpot on your

table, no bigger than it was at five,--a curiosity for its maturity at

one age; a show for its diminutiveness at the other. No! the ordeal for

talent is school; restore the stunted mannikin to the growing child, and

then let the child, if it can, healthily, hardily, naturally, work its

slow way up into greatness. If greatness be denied it, it will at least

be a man; and that is better than to be a little Johnny Styles all its

life,--an oak in a pill-box.”

At that moment I rushed into the room, glowing and panting, health on my

cheek, vigor in my limbs, all childhood at my heart. “Oh, mamma, I have

got up the kite--so high! Come and see! Do come, papa!”

“Certainly,” said my father; “only don’t cry so loud,--kites make no

noise in rising; yet, you see how they soar above the world. Come, Kate.

Where is my hat? Ah!--thank you, my boy.”

“Kitty,” said my father, looking at the kite, which, attached by its

string to the peg I had stuck into the ground, rested calm in the sky,

“never fear but what our kite shall fly as high; only, the human soul

has stronger instincts to mount upward than a few sheets of paper on

a framework of lath. But observe that to prevent its being lost in

the freedom of space,--we must attach it lightly to earth; and observe

again, my dear, that the higher it soars, the more string we must give

it.”

PART II.

CHAPTER I.

When I had reached the age of twelve, I had got to the head of the

preparatory school to which I had been sent. And having thus exhausted

all the oxygen of learning in that little receiver, my parents looked

out for a wider range for my inspirations. During the last two years in

which I had been at school, my love for study had returned; but it was

a vigorous, wakeful, undreamy love, stimulated by competition, and

animated by the practical desire to excel.

My father no longer sought to curb my intellectual aspirings. He had too

great a reverence for scholarship not to wish me to become a scholar if

possible; though he more than once said to me somewhat sadly, “Master

books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read.

One slave of the lamp is enough for a household; my servitude must not

be a hereditary bondage.”

My father looked round for a suitable academy; and the fame of Dr.

Herman’s “Philhellenic Institute” came to his ears.

Now, this Dr. Herman was the son of a German music-master who had

settled in England. He had completed his own education at the University

of Bonn; but finding learning too common a drug in that market to bring

the high price at which he valued his own, and having some theories as

to political freedom which attached him to England, he resolved upon

setting up a school, which he designed as an “Era in the History of the

Human Mind.” Dr. Herman was one of the earliest of those new-fashioned

authorities in education who have, more lately, spread pretty numerously

amongst us, and would have given, perhaps, a dangerous shake to the

foundations of our great classical seminaries, if those last had not

very wisely, though very cautiously, borrowed some of the more sensible

principles which lay mixed and adulterated amongst the crotchets and

chimeras of their innovating rivals and assailants.

Dr. Herman had written a great many learned works against every

pre-existing method of instruction; that which had made the greatest

noise was upon the infamous fiction of Spelling-Books: “A more lying,

roundabout, puzzle-headed delusion than that by which we confuse the

clear instincts of truth in our accursed systems of spelling, was never

concocted by the father of falsehood.” Such was the exordium of this

famous treatise. For instance, take the monosyllable Cat. What a brazen

forehead you must have when you say to an infant, c, a, t,--spell Cat:

that is, three sounds, forming a totally opposite compound,--opposite in

every detail, opposite in the whole,--compose a poor little monosyllable

which, if you would but say the simple truth, the child will learn to

spell merely by looking at it! How can three sounds, which run thus to

the ear, see-eh-tee, compose the sound cat? Don’t they rather compose

the sound see-eh-te, or ceaty? How can a system of education flourish

that begins by so monstrous a falsehood, which the sense of hearing

suffices to contradict? No wonder that the horn-book is the despair of

mothers! From this instance the reader will perceive that Dr. Herman,

in his theory of education, began at the beginning,--he took the

bull fairly by the horns. As for the rest, upon a broad principle of

eclecticism, he had combined together every new patent invention for

youthful idea-shooting. He had taken his trigger from Hofwyl; he had

bought his wadding from Hamilton; he had got his copper-caps from Bell

and Lancaster. The youthful idea,--he had rammed it tight! he had rammed

it loose! he had rammed it with pictorial illustrations! he had rammed

it with the monitorial system! he had rammed it in every conceivable

way, and with every imaginable ramrod! but I have mournful doubts

whether he shot the youthful idea an inch farther than it did under the

old mechanism of flint and steel! Nevertheless, as Dr. Herman really

did teach a great many things too much neglected at schools; as,

besides Latin and Greek, he taught a vast variety in that vague

infinite nowadays called “useful knowledge;” as he engaged lecturers

on chemistry, engineering, and natural history; as arithmetic and the

elements of physical science were enforced with zeal and care; as

all sorts of gymnastics were intermingled with the sports of the

playground,--so the youthful idea, if it did not go farther, spread its

shots in a wider direction, and a boy could not stay there five years

without learning something: which is more than can be said of all

schools! He learned at least to use his eyes and his ears and his limbs;

order, cleanliness, exercise, grew into habits; and the school pleased

the ladies and satisfied the gentlemen,--in a word, it thrived; and Dr.

Herman, at the time I speak of, numbered more than one hundred pupils.

Now, when the worthy man first commenced the task of tuition, he had

proclaimed the humanest abhorrence to the barbarous system of corporal

punishment. But alas! as his school increased in numbers, he had

proportionately recanted these honorable and anti-birchen ideas.

He had--reluctantly, perhaps, honestly, no doubt; but with full

determination--come to the conclusion that there are secret springs

which can only be detected by the twigs of the divining-rod; and having

discovered with what comparative ease the whole mechanism of his little

government could be carried on by the admission of the birch-regulator,

so, as he grew richer and lazier and fatter, the Philhellenic Institute

spun along as glibly as a top kept in vivacious movement by the

perpetual application of the lash.

I believe that the school did not suffer in reputation from this sad

apostasy on the part of the head-master; on the contrary, it seemed more

natural and English,--less outlandish and heretical. And it was at

the zenith of its renown when, one bright morning, with all my clothes

nicely mended, and a large plum-cake in my box, I was deposited at its

hospitable gates.

Amongst Dr. Herman’s various whimsicalities there was one to which he

had adhered with more fidelity than to the anti-corporal punishment

articles of his creed; and, in fact, it was upon this that he had

caused those imposing words, “Philhellenic Institute,” to blaze in gilt

capitals in front of his academy. He belonged to that illustrious class

of scholars who are now waging war on our popular mythologies, and

upsetting all the associations which the Etonians and Harrovians connect

with the household names of ancient history. In a word, he sought

to restore to scholastic purity the mutilated orthography of Greek

appellatives. He was extremely indignant that little boys should be

brought up to confound Zeus with Jupiter, Ares with Mars, Artemis

with Diana,--the Greek deities with the Roman; and so rigidly did he

inculcate the doctrine that these two sets of personages were to be

kept constantly contradistinguished from each other, that his

cross-examinations kept us in eternal confusion.

“Vat,” he would exclaim to some new boy fresh from some grammar-school

on the Etonian system--“Vat do you mean by dranslating Zeus Jupiter? Is

dat amatory, irascible, cloud-compelling god of Olympus, vid his eagle

and his aegis, in the smallest degree resembling de grave, formal, moral

Jupiter Optimus Maximus of the Roman Capitol?--a god, Master Simpkins,

who would have been perfectly shocked at the idea of running after

innocent Fraulein dressed up as a swan or a bull! I put dat question to

you vonce for all, Master Simpkins.” Master Simpkins took care to agree

with the Doctor. “And how could you,” resumed Dr. Herman majestically,

turning to some other criminal alumnus,--“how could you presume to

dranslate de Ares of Homer, sir, by the audacious vulgarism Mars?--Ares,

Master Jones, who roared as loud as ten thousand men when he was hurt;

or as you vill roar if I catch you calling him Mars again?--Ares, who

covered seven plectra of ground? Confound Ares, the manslayer, with the

Mars or Mavors whom de Romans stole from de Sabines!--Mars, de solemn

and calm protector of Rome! Master Jones, Master Jones, you ought to be

ashamed of yourself!” And then waxing enthusiastic, and warming more and

more into German gutturals and pronunciation, the good Doctor would lift

up his hands, with two great rings on his thumbs, and exclaim: “Und Du!

and dou, Aphrodite,--dou, whose bert de seasons velcomed! dou, who

didst put Atonis into a coffer, and den tid durn him into an

anemone! dou to be called Venus by dat snivel-nosed little Master

Budderfield!--Venus, who presided over Baumgartens and funerals and

nasty tinking sewers!--Venus Cloacina, O mein Gott! Come here, Master

Budderfield: I must flog you for dat; I must indeed, liddle boy!” As our

Philhellenic preceptor carried his archaeological purism into all Greek

proper names, it was not likely that my unhappy baptismal would escape.

The first time I signed my exercise I wrote “Pisistratus Caxton” in my

best round-hand. “And dey call your baba a scholar!” said the Doctor,

contemptuously. “Your name, sir, is Greek; and, as Greek, you vill

be dood enough to write it, vith vat you call an e and an

o,--P,e,i,s,i,s,t,r,a,t,o,s. Vat can you expect for to come to,

Master Caxton, if you don’t pay de care dat is proper to your own dood

name,--de e, and de o? Ach? let me see no more of your vile corruptions!

Mein Gott! Pi! ven de name is Pei!”

The next time I wrote home to my father, modestly implying that I

was short of cash, that a trap-bat would be acceptable, and that the

favorite goddess amongst the boys (whether Greek or Roman was very

immaterial) was Diva Moneta, I felt a glow of classical pride in signing

myself “your affectionate Peisistratos.” The next post brought a sad

damper to my scholastic exultation. The letter ran thus:--

My Dear Son,--I prefer my old acquaintances Thucydides and

Pisistratus to Thoukudides and Peisistratos. Horace is familiar to

me, but Horatius is only known to me as Cocles. Pisistratus can

play at trap-ball; but I find no authority in pure Greek to allow

me to suppose that that game was known to Peisistratos. I should

be too happy to send you a drachma or so, but I have no coins in my

possession current at Athens at the time when Pisistratus was spelt

Peisistratos.--Your affectionate father,

A. CAXTON.

Verily, here indeed was the first practical embarrassment produced

by that melancholy anachronism which my father had so prophetically

deplored. However, nothing like experience to prove the value of

compromise in this world. Peisistratos continued to write exercises, and

a second letter from Pisistratus was followed by the trap-bat.

CHAPTER II.

I was somewhere about sixteen when, on going home for the holidays, I

found my mother’s brother settled among the household Lares. Uncle

Jack, as he was familiarly called, was a light-hearted, plausible,

enthusiastic, talkative fellow, who had spent three small fortunes in

trying to make a large one.

Uncle Jack was a great speculator; but in all his speculations he

never affected to think of himself,--it was always the good of his

fellow-creatures that he had at heart, and in this ungrateful world

fellow-creatures are not to be relied upon! On coming of age, he

inherited L6,000, from his maternal grandfather. It seemed to him then

that his fellow-creatures were sadly imposed upon by their tailors.

Those ninth parts of humanity notoriously eked out their fractional

existence by asking nine times too much for the clothing which

civilization, and perhaps a change of climate, render more necessary to

us than to our predecessors, the Picts. Out of pure philanthropy, Uncle

Jack started a “Grand National Benevolent Clothing Company,” which

undertook to supply the public with inexpressibles of the best Saxon

cloth at 7s. 6d. a pair; coats, superfine, L1 18s.; and waistcoats at

so much per dozen,--they were all to be worked off by steam. Thus

the rascally tailors were to be put down, humanity clad, and the

philanthropists rewarded (but that was a secondary consideration) with a

clear return of thirty per cent. In spite of the evident charitableness

of this Christian design, and the irrefragable calculations upon

which it was based, this company died a victim to the ignorance and

unthankfulness of our fellow-creatures; and all that remained of Jack’s

L6,000, was a fifty-fourth share in a small steam-engine, a large

assortment of ready-made pantaloons, and the liabilities of the

directors.

Uncle Jack disappeared, and went on his travels. The same spirit of

philanthropy which characterized the speculations of his purse attended

the risks of his person. Uncle Jack had a natural leaning towards all

distressed communities: if any tribe, race, or nation was down in the

world, Uncle Jack threw himself plump into the scale to redress

the balance. Poles, Greeks (the last were then fighting the Turks),

Mexicans, Spaniards,--Uncle Jack thrust his nose into all their

squabbles! Heaven forbid I should mock thee, poor Uncle Jack, for those

generous predilections towards the unfortunate; only, whenever a nation

is in a misfortune, there is always a job going on! The Polish

cause, the Greek cause, the Mexican cause, and the Spanish cause are

necessarily mixed up with loans and subscriptions. These Continental

patriots, when they take up the sword with one hand, generally contrive

to thrust their other hand deep into their neighbor’s breeches’ pockets.

Uncle Jack went to Greece, thence he went to Spain, thence to Mexico.

No doubt he was of great service to those afflicted populations, for

he came back with unanswerable proof of their gratitude in the shape

of L3,000. Shortly after this appeared a prospectus of the “New, Grand,

National, Benevolent Insurance Company, for the Industrial Classes.”

This invaluable document, after setting forth the immense benefits

to society arising from habits of providence and the introduction of

insurance companies,--proving the infamous rate of premiums exacted

by the existent offices, and their inapplicability to the wants of the

honest artisan, and declaring that nothing but the purest intentions

of benefiting their fellow-creatures, and raising the moral tone of

society, had led the directors to institute a new society, founded on

the noblest principles and the most moderate calculations,--proceeded

to demonstrate that twenty-four and a half per cent was the smallest

possible return the shareholders could anticipate. The company began

under the fairest auspices; an archbishop was caught as president, on

the condition always that he should give nothing but his name to the

society. Uncle Jack--more euphoniously designated as “the celebrated

philanthropist, John Jones Tibbets, Esquire”--was honorary secretary,

and the capital stated at two millions. But such was the obtuseness

of the industrial classes, so little did they perceive the benefits

of subscribing one-and-ninepence a-week from the age of twenty-one to

fifty, in order to secure at the latter age the annuity of L18, that the

company dissolved into thin air, and with it dissolved also Uncle Jack’s

L3,000. Nothing more was then seen or heard of him for three years. So

obscure was his existence that on the death of an aunt, who left him

a small farm in Cornwall, it was necessary to advertise that “If John

Jones Tibbets, Esq., would apply to Messrs. Blunt & Tin, Lothbury,

between the hours of ten and four, he would hear of something to his

advantage.” But even as a conjurer declares that he will call the ace

of spades, and the ace of spades, that you thought you had safely under

your foot, turns up on the table,--so with this advertisement suddenly

turned up Uncle Jack. With inconceivable satisfaction did the new

landowner settle himself in his comfortable homestead. The farm, which

was about two hundred acres, was in the best possible condition, and

saving one or two chemical preparations, which cost Uncle Jack, upon the

most scientific principles, thirty acres of buckwheat, the ears of

which came up, poor things, all spotted and speckled as if they had been

inoculated with the small-pox, Uncle Jack for the first two years was

a thriving man. Unluckily, however, one day Uncle Jack discovered a

coal-mine in a beautiful field of Swedish turnips; in another week

the house was full of engineers and naturalists, and in another month

appeared; in my uncle’s best style, much improved by practice, a

prospectus of the “Grand National Anti-Monopoly Coal Company, instituted

on behalf of the poor householders of London, and against the Monster

Monopoly of the London Coal Wharves.

“A vein of the finest coal has been discovered on the estates of the

celebrated philanthropist, John Jones Tibbets, Esq. This new mine, the

Molly Wheel, having been satisfactorily tested by that eminent engineer,

Giles Compass, Esq., promises an inexhaustible field to the energies of

the benevolent and the wealth of the capitalist. It is calculated that

the best coals may be delivered, screened, at the mouth of the Thames

for 18s. per load, yielding a profit of not less than forty-eight per

cent to the shareholders. Shares L50, to be paid in five instalments.

Capital to be subscribed, one million. For shares, early application

must be made to Messrs. Blunt & Tin, solicitors, Lothbury.”

Here, then, was something tangible for fellow-creatures to go on: there

was land, there was a mine, there was coal, and there actually came

shareholders and capital. Uncle Jack was so persuaded that his fortune

was now to be made, and had, moreover, so great a desire to share the

glory of ruining the monster monopoly of the London wharves, that

he refused a very large offer to dispose of the property altogether,

remained chief shareholder, and removed to London, where he set up his

carriage and gave dinners to his fellow-directors. For no less than

three years did this company flourish, having submitted the entire

direction and working of the mines to that eminent engineer, Giles

Compass. Twenty per cent was paid regularly by that gentleman to the

shareholders, and the shares were at more than cent per cent, when one

bright morning Giles Compass, Esq., unexpectedly removed himself to

that wider field for genius like his, the United States; and it was

discovered that the mine had for more than a year run itself into

a great pit of water, and that Mr. Compass had been paying the

shareholders out of their own capital. My uncle had the satisfaction

this time of being ruined in very good company; three doctors of

divinity, two county members, a Scotch lord, and an East India director

were all in the same boat,--that boat which went down with the coal-mine

into the great water-pit!

It was just after this event that Uncle Jack, sanguine and light-hearted

as ever, suddenly recollected his sister, Mrs. Caxton, and not knowing

where else to dine, thought he would repose his limbs under my father’s

trabes citrea, which the ingenious W. S. Landor opines should be

translated “mahogany.” You never saw a more charming man than Uncle

Jack.

All plump people are more popular than thin people. There is something

jovial and pleasant in the sight of a round face! What conspiracy

could succeed when its head was a lean and hungry-looking fellow, like

Cassius? If the Roman patriots had had Uncle Jack amongst them, perhaps

they would never have furnished a tragedy to Shakspeare. Uncle Jack was

as plump as a partridge,--not unwieldy, not corpulent, not obese,

not vastus, which Cicero objects to in an orator, but every crevice

comfortably filled up. Like the ocean, “time wrote no wrinkles on his

glassy [or brassy] brow.” His natural lines were all upward curves, his

smile most ingratiating, his eye so frank, even his trick of rubbing his

clean, well-fed, English-looking hands, had something about it coaxing

and debonnaire, something that actually decoyed you into trusting your

money into hands so prepossessing. Indeed, to him might be fully applied

the expression--Sedem animce in extremis digitis habet,--“He had his

soul’s seat in his finger-ends.” The critics observe that few men have

ever united in equal perfection the imaginative with the scientific

faculties. “Happy he,” exclaims Schiller, “who combines the enthusiast’s

warmth with the worldly man’s light:” light and warmth, Uncle Jack

had them both. He was a perfect symphony of bewitching enthusiasm and

convincing calculation. Dicaeopolis in the “Aeharnenses,” in presenting

a gentleman called Nicharchus to the audience, observes: “He is small,

I confess, but, there is nothing lost in him: all is knave that is not

fool.” Parodying the equivocal compliment, I may say that though Uncle

Jack was no giant, there was nothing lost in him. Whatever was not

philanthropy was arithmetic, and whatever was not arithmetic was

philanthropy. He would have been equally dear to Howard and to Cocker.

Uncle Jack was comely too,--clear-skinned and florid, had a little

mouth, with good teeth, wore no whiskers, shaved his beard as close as

if it were one of his grand national companies; his hair, once somewhat

sandy, was now rather grayish, which increased the respectability of his

appearance; and he wore it flat at the sides and raised in a peak at the

top; his organs of constructiveness and ideality were pronounced by Mr.

Squills to be prodigious, and those freely developed bumps gave great

breadth to his forehead. Well-shaped, too, was Uncle Jack, about five

feet eight,--the proper height for an active man of business. He wore

a black coat; but to make the nap look the fresher, he had given it the

relief of gilt buttons, on--which were wrought a small crown and anchor;

at a distance this button looked like the king’s button, and gave him

the air of one who has a place about Court. He always wore a white

neckcloth without starch, a frill, and a diamond pin, which last

furnished him with observations upon certain mines of Mexico, which

he had a great, but hitherto unsatisfied, desire of seeing worked by a

grand National United Britons Company. His waistcoat of a morning was

pale buff--of an evening, embroidered velvet; wherewith were connected

sundry schemes of an “association for the improvement of native

manufactures.” His trousers, matutinally, were of the color vulgarly

called “blotting-paper;” and he never wore boots,--which, he said,

unfitted a man for exercise,--but short drab gaiters and square-toed

shoes. His watch-chain was garnished with a vast number of seals; each

seal, indeed, represented the device of some defunct company, and they

might be said to resemble the scalps of the slain worn by the

aboriginal Iroquois,--concerning whom, indeed, he had once entertained

philanthropic designs, compounded of conversion to Christianity on

the principles of the English Episcopal Church, and of an advantageous

exchange of beaver-skins for Bibles, brandy, and gunpowder.

That Uncle Jack should win my heart was no wonder; my mother’s he had

always won, from her earliest recollection of his having persuaded her

to let her great doll (a present from her godmother) be put up to a

raffle for the benefit of the chimney-sweepers. “So like him,--so

good!” she would often say pensively. “They paid sixpence apiece for the

raffle,--twenty tickets,--and the doll cost L2. Nobody was taken in, and

the doll, poor thing (it had such blue eyes!) went for a quarter of its

value. But Jack said nobody could guess what good the ten shillings did

to the chimney-sweepers.” Naturally enough, I say, my mother liked Uncle

Jack; but my father liked him quite as well,--and that was a strong

proof of my uncle’s powers of captivation. However, it is noticeable

that when some retired scholar is once interested in an active man of

the world, he is more inclined to admire him than others are. Sympathy

with such a companion gratifies at once his curiosity and his indolence;

he can travel with him, scheme with him, fight with him, go with him

through all the adventures of which his own books speak so eloquently,

and all the time never stir from his easy-chair. My father said “that it

was like listening to Ulysses to hear Uncle Jack!” Uncle Jack, too, had

been in Greece and Asia Minor, gone over the site of the siege of Troy,

eaten figs at Marathon, shot hares in the Peloponnesus, and drunk three

pints of brown stout at the top of the Great Pyramid.

Therefore, Uncle Jack was like a book of reference to my father. Verily

at times he looked on him as a book, and took him down after dinner

as he would a volume of Dodwell or Pausanias. In fact, I believe that

scholars who never move from their cells are not the less an eminently

curious, bustling, active race, rightly understood. Even as old Burton

saith of himself--“Though I live a collegiate student, and lead a

monastic life, sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world,

I hear and see what is done abroad, how others run, ride, turmoil, and

macerate themselves in town and country,”--which citation sufficeth to

show that scholars are naturally the most active men of the world; only

that while their heads plot with Augustus, fight with Julius, sail with

Columbus, and change the face of the globe with Alexander, Attila, or

Mahomet, there is a certain mysterious attraction, which our improved

knowledge of mesmerism will doubtless soon explain to the satisfaction

of science, between that extremer and antipodal part of the human frame,

called in the vulgate “the seat of honor,” and the stuffed leather of

an armed chair. Learning somehow or other sinks down to that part into

which it was first driven, and produces therein a leaden heaviness and

weight, which counteract those lively emotions of the brain that might

otherwise render students too mercurial and agile for the safety of

established order. I leave this conjecture to the consideration of

experimentalists in the physics.

I was still more delighted than my father with Uncle Jack. He was full

of amusing tricks, could conjure wonderfully, make a bunch of keys dance

a hornpipe, and if ever you gave him half-a-crown, he was sure to turn

it into a halfpenny.

He was only unsuccessful in turning my halfpennies into half-crowns.

We took long walks together, and in the midst of his most diverting

conversation my uncle was always an observer. He would stop to examine

the nature of the soil, fill my pockets (not his own) with great lumps

of clay, stones, and rubbish, to analyze when he got home, by the help

of some chemical apparatus he had borrowed from Mr. Squills. He would

stand an hour at a cottage door, admiring the little girls who were

straw-platting, and then walk into the nearest farmhouses, to suggest

the feasibility of “a national straw-plat association.” All this

fertility of intellect was, alas! wasted in that ingrata terra into

which Uncle Jack had fallen. No squire could be persuaded into the

belief that his mother-stone was pregnant with minerals; no farmer

talked into weaving straw-plat into a proprietary association. So, even

as an ogre, having devastated the surrounding country, begins to cast a

hungry eye on his own little ones, Uncle Jack’s mouth, long defrauded

of juicier and more legitimate morsels, began to water for a bite of my

innocent father.

CHAPTER III.

At this time we were living in what may be called a very respectable

style for people who made no pretence to ostentation. On the skirts of

a large village stood a square red-brick house, about the date of Queen

Anne. Upon the top of the house was a balustrade,--why, Heaven knows,

for nobody, except our great tom-cat, Ralph, ever walked upon the leads;

but so it was, and so it often is in houses from the time of Elizabeth,

yea, even to that of Victoria. This balustrade was divided by low piers,

on each of which was placed a round ball. The centre of the house was

distinguishable by an architrave in the shape of a triangle, under

which was a niche,--probably meant for a figure; but the figure was not

forthcoming. Below this was the window (encased with carved pilasters)

of my dear mother’s little sitting-room; and lower still, raised on a

flight of six steps, was a very handsome-looking door, with a projecting

porch. All the windows, with smallish panes and largish frames, were

relieved with stone copings; so that the house had an air of solidity

and well-to-do-ness about it,--nothing tricky on the one hand, nothing

decayed on the other. The house stood a little back from the garden

gates, which were large, and set between two piers surmounted with

vases. Many might object that in wet weather you had to walk some way to

your carriage; but we obviated that objection by not keeping a carriage.

To the right of the house the enclosure contained a little lawn, a

laurel hermitage, a square pond, a modest greenhouse, and half-a-dozen

plots of mignonette, heliotrope, roses, pinks, sweet-William, etc. To

the left spread the kitchen-garden, lying screened by espaliers yielding

the finest apples in the neighborhood, and divided by three winding

gravel-walks, of which the extremest was backed by a wall, whereon,

as it lay full south, peaches, pears, and nectarines sunned themselves

early into well-remembered flavor. This walk was appropriated to my

father. Book in hand, he would, on fine days, pace to and fro,

often stopping, dear man, to jot down a pencil-note, gesticulate, or

soliloquize. And there, when not in his study, my mother would be sure

to find him. In these deambulations, as he called them, he had generally

a companion so extraordinary that I expect to be met with a hillalu of

incredulous contempt when I specify it. Nevertheless I vow and protest

that it is strictly true, and no invention of an exaggerating romancer.

It happened one day that my mother had coaxed Mr. Caxton to walk with

her to market. By the way they passed a sward of green, on which sundry

little boys were engaged upon the lapidation of a lame duck. It seemed

that the duck was to have been taken to market, when it was discovered

not only to be lame, but dyspeptic,--perhaps some weed had disagreed

with its ganglionic apparatus, poor thing. However that be, the

good-wife had declared that the duck was good for nothing; and upon the

petition of her children, it had been consigned to them for a little

innocent amusement, and to keep them out of harm’s way. My mother

declared that she never before saw her lord and master roused to such

animation. He dispersed the urchins, released the duck, carried it

home, kept it in a basket by the fire, fed it and physicked it till it

recovered; and then it was consigned to the square pond. But lo! the

duck knew its benefactor; and whenever my father appeared outside his

door, it would catch sight of him, flap from the pond, gain the lawn,

and hobble after him (for it never quite recovered the use of its left

leg) till it reached the walk by the peaches; and there sometimes it

would sit, gravely watching its master’s deambulations, sometimes stroll

by his side, and, at all events, never leave him till, at his return

home, he fed it with his own hands; and, quacking her peaceful adieus,

the nymph then retired to her natural element.

With the exception of my mother’s favorite morning-room, the principal

sitting-rooms--that is, the study, the diningroom, and what was

emphatically called “the best drawing-room,” which was only occupied on

great occasions--looked south. Tall beeches, firs, poplars, and a few

oaks backed the house, and indeed surrounded it on all sides but the

south; so that it was well sheltered from the winter cold and the summer

heat. Our principal domestic, in dignity and station, was Mrs. Primmins,

who was waiting gentlewoman, housekeeper, and tyrannical dictatrix of

the whole establishment. Two other maids, a gardener, and a footman,

composed the rest of the serving household. Save a few pasture-fields,

which he let, my father was not troubled with land. His income was

derived from the interest of about L15,000, partly in the Three per

Cents, partly on mortgage; and what with my mother and Mrs. Primmins,

this income always yielded enough to satisfy my father’s single hobby

for books, pay for my education, and entertain our neighbors, rarely

indeed at dinner, but very often at tea. My dear mother boasted that our

society was very select. It consisted chiefly of the clergyman and his

family; two old maids who gave themselves great airs; a gentleman who

had been in the East India service, and who lived in a large white house

at the top of the hill; some half-a-dozen squires and their wives and

children; Mr. Squills, still a bachelor; and once a year cards were

exchanged--and dinners too--with certain aristocrats who inspired my

mother with a great deal of unnecessary awe, since she declared they

were the most good-natured, easy people in the world, and always stuck

their cards in the most conspicuous part of the looking-glass frame over

the chimney-piece of the best drawing-room. Thus you perceive that our

natural position was one highly creditable to us, proving the soundness

of our finances and the gentility of our pedigree,--of which last more

hereafter. At present I content myself with saying on that head that

even the proudest of the neighboring squirearchs always spoke of us as

a very ancient family. But all my father ever said, to evince pride of

ancestry, was in honor of William Caxton, citizen and printer in the

reign of Edward IV.,--Clarum et venerabile nomen! an ancestor a man of

letters might be justly vain of.

“Heus,” said my father, stopping short, and lifting his eyes from the

Colloquies of Erasmus, “salve multum, jucundissime.”

Uncle Jack was not much of a scholar, but he knew enough Latin to

answer, “Salve tantundem, mi frater.”

My father smiled approvingly. “I see you comprehend true urbanity, or

politeness, as we phrase it. There is an elegance in addressing the

husband of your sister as brother. Erasmus commends it in his opening

chapter, under the head of Salutandi formuloe. And indeed,” added my

father, thoughtfully, “there is no great difference between politeness

and affection. My author here observes that it is polite to express

salutation in certain minor distresses of nature. One should salute a

gentleman in yawning, salute him in hiccuping, salute him in sneezing,

salute him in coughing,--and that evidently because of your interest in

his health; for he may dislocate his jaw in yawning, and the hiccup is

often a symptom of grave disorder, and sneezing is perilous to the small

blood-vessels of the head, and coughing is either a tracheal, bronchial,

pulmonary, or ganglionic affection.”

“Very true. The Turks always salute in sneezing, and they are a

remarkably polite people,” said Uncle Jack. “But, my dear brother, I was

just looking with admiration at these apple-trees of yours. I never saw

finer. I am a great judge of apples. I find, in talking with my sister,

that you make very little profit by them. That’s a pity. One might

establish a cider orchard in this county. You can take your own fields

in hand; you can hire more, so as to make the whole, say a hundred

acres. You can plant a very extensive apple-orchard on a grand scale. I

have just run through the calculations; they are quite startling. Take

40 trees per acre--that’s the proper average--at 1s. 6d. per tree;

4,000 trees for 100 acres, L300; labor of digging, trenching, say L10

an acre,--total for 100 acres, L1,000. Pave the bottoms of the holes

to prevent the tap-root striking down into the bad soil,--oh! I am very

close and careful you see, in all minutiae; always was,--pave ‘em with

rubbish and stones, 6d. a hole; that for 4,000 trees the 100 acres is

L100. Add the rent of the land, at 30s. an acre,--L150. And how stands

the total?” Here Uncle Jack proceeded rapidly ticking off the items with

his fingers:--

“Trees........... 300

Labor........... 1,000

Paving holes.... 100

Rent............ 150

____

Total....... L1,550

“That’s your expense. Mark! Now to the profit. Orchards in Kent realize

L100 an acre, some even L150; but let’s be moderate, say only L50 an

acre, and your gross profit per year, from a capital of L1,550, will

be L5,000,--L5,000 a-year. Think of that, brother Caxton! Deduct 10 per

cent, or L500 a-year, for gardeners’ wages, manure, etc., and the net

product is L4,500. Your fortune’s made, man,--it is made; I wish you

joy!” And Uncle Jack rubbed his hands.

“Bless me, father,” said eagerly the young Pisistratus, who had

swallowed with ravished ears every syllable and figure of this inviting

calculation, “why, we should be as rich as Squire Rollick; and then, you

know, sir, you could keep a pack of fox-hounds.”

“And buy a large library,” added Uncle Jack, with more subtle knowledge

of human nature as to its appropriate temptations. “There’s my friend

the archbishop’s collection to be sold.”

Slowly recovering his breath, my father gently turned his eyes from one

to the other; and then, laying his left hand on my head, while with the

right he held up Erasmus rebukingly to Uncle Jack, said,--

“See how easily you can sow covetousness and avidity in the youthful

mind. Ah, brother!”

“You are too severe, sir. See how the dear boy hangs his head! Fie!

natural enthusiasm of his years,--‘gay hope by fancy fed,’ as the poet

says. Why, for that fine boy’s sake you ought not to lose so certain

an occasion of wealth, I may say, untold. For observe, you will form

a nursery of crabs; each year you go on grafting and enlarging your

plantation, renting,--nay, why not buying, more land? Gad, sir! in

twenty years you might cover half the county; but say you stop short at

2,000 acres, why the net profit is L90,000 a-year. A duke’s income,--a

duke’s; and going a-begging, as I may say.”

“But stop,” said I, modestly; “the trees don’t grow in a year. I know

when our last apple-tree was planted--it is five years ago--it was then

three years old, and it only bore one half-bushel last autumn.”

“What an intelligent lad it is! Good head there. Oh, he’ll do credit

to his great fortune, brother,” said Uncle Jack, approvingly. “True, my

boy. But in the mean while we could fill the ground, as they do in Kent,

with gooseberries and currants, or onions and cabbages. Nevertheless,

considering we are not great capitalists, I am afraid we must give up

a share of our profits to diminish our outlay. So harkye,

Pisistratus--look at him, brother, simple as he stands there, I think he

is born with a silver spoon in his mouth--harkye, now to the mysteries

of speculation. Your father shall quietly buy the land, and then,

presto! we will issue a prospectus and start a company. Associations can

wait five years for a return. Every year, meanwhile, increases the value

of the shares. Your father takes, we say, fifty shares at L50 each,

paying only an instalment of L2 a share. He sells 35 shares at cent per

cent. He keeps the remaining 15, and his fortune’s made all the same;

only it is not quite so large as if he had kept the whole concern in his

own hands. What say you now, brother Caxton? Visne edere pomum? as we

used to say at school.”

“I don’t want a shilling more than I have got,” said my father,

resolutely. “My wife would not love me better; my food would not nourish

me more; my boy would not, in all probability, be half so hardy, or a

tenth part so industrious; and--”

“But,” interrupted Uncle Jack, pertinaciously, and reserving his grand

argument for the last, “the good you would confer on the community; the

progress given to the natural productions of your country; the wholesome

beverage of cider brought within cheap reach of the laboring classes. If

it was only for your sake, should I have urged this question? Should I

now? Is it in my character? But for the sake of the public! mankind! of

our fellow-creatures! Why, sir, England could not get on if gentlemen

like you had not a little philanthropy and speculation.”

“Papae!” exclaimed my father; “to think that England can’t get on

without turning Austin Caxton into an apple-merchant! My dear Jack,

listen. You remind me of a colloquy in this book,--wait a bit, here it

is, ‘Pamphagus and Cocles.’ Cocles recognizes his friend, who had been

absent for many years, by his eminent and remarkable nose. Pamphagus

says, rather irritably, that he is not ashamed of his nose. ‘Ashamed of

it! no, indeed,’ says Cocles; ‘I never saw a nose that could be put to

so many uses!’ ‘Ha!’ says Pamphagus (whose curiosity is aroused), ‘uses!

what uses?’ Whereon (lepidissime frater!) Cocles, with eloquence as

rapid as yours, runs on with a countless list of the uses to which so

vast a development of the organ can be applied. ‘If the cellar was deep,

it could sniff up the wine like an elephant’s trunk; if the bellows were

missing, it could blow the fire; if the lamp was too glaring, it could

suffice for a shade; it would serve as a speaking-trumpet to a herald;

it could sound a signal of battle in the field; it would do for a wedge

in wood-cutting, a spade for digging, a scythe for mowing, an anchor in

sailing,’--till Painphagus cries out, ‘Lucky dog that I am! and I never

knew before what a useful piece of furniture I carried about with me.’”

My father paused and strove to whistle; but that effort of harmony

failed him, and he added, smiling, “So much for my apple-trees, brother

John. Leave them to their natural destination of filling tarts and

dumplings.”

Uncle Jack looked a little discomposed for a moment; but he then

laughed with his usual heartiness, and saw that he had not yet got to

my father’s blind side. I confess that my revered parent rose in my

estimation after that conference; and I began to see that a man may not

be quite without common sense, though he is a scholar. Indeed, whether

it was that Uncle Jack’s visit acted as a gentle stimulant to his

relaxed faculties, or that I, now grown older and wiser, began to

see his character more clearly, I date from those summer holidays the

commencement of that familiar and endearing intimacy which ever

after existed between my father and myself. Often I deserted the

more extensive rambles of Uncle Jack, or the greater allurements of a

cricket-match in the village, or a day’s fishing in Squire Rollick’s

preserves, for a quiet stroll with my father by the old peach

wall,--sometimes silent, indeed, and already musing over the future,

while he was busy with the past, but amply rewarded when, suspending his

lecture, he would pour forth hoards of varied learning, rendered amusing

by his quaint comments, and that Socratic satire which only fell short

of wit because it never passed into malice. At some moments, indeed, the

vein ran into eloquence; and with some fine heroic sentiment in his old

books, his stooping form rose erect, his eye flashed, and you saw that

he had not been originally formed and wholly meant for the obscure

seclusion in which his harmless days now wore contentedly away.

CHAPTER IV.

“Egad, sir, the county is going to the dogs! Our sentiments are not

represented in parliament or out of it. The ‘County Mercury’ has ratted,

and be hanged to it! and now we have not one newspaper in the whole

shire to express the sentiments of the respectable part of the

community!”

This speech was made on the occasion of one of the rare dinners given by

Mr. and Mrs. Caxton to the grandees of the neighborhood, and uttered by

no less a person than Squire Rollick, of Rollick Hall, chairman of the

quarter-sessions.

I confess that I (for I was permitted on that first occasion not only to

dine with the guests, but to outstay the ladies, in virtue of my growing

years and my promise to abstain from the decanters),--I confess, I say,

that I, poor innocent, was puzzled to conjecture what sudden interest in

the county newspaper could cause Uncle Jack to prick up his ears like a

warhorse at the sound of the drum and rush so incontinently across the

interval between Squire Rollick and himself. But the mind of that deep

and truly knowing man was not to be plumbed by a chit of my age. You

could not fish for the shy salmon in that pool with a crooked pin and

a bobbin, as you would for minnows; or, to indulge in a more worthy

illustration, you could not say of him, as Saint Gregory saith of the

streams of Jordan, “A lamb could wade easily through that ford.”

“Not a county newspaper to advocate the rights of--” here my uncle

stopped, as if at a loss, and whispered in my ear; “What are his

politics?” “Don’t know,” answered I. Uncle Jack intuitively took down

from his memory the phrase most readily at hand, and added, with a nasal

intonation, “the rights of our distressed fellow-creatures!”

My father scratched his eyebrow with his fore-finger, as he was apt to

do when doubtful; the rest of the company--a silent set--looked up.

“Fellow-creatures!” said Mr. Rollick,--“fellow-fiddlesticks!”

Uncle Jack was clearly in the wrong box. He drew out of it

cautiously,--“I mean,” said he, “our respectable fellow-creatures;” and

then suddenly it occurred to him that a “County Mercury” would naturally

represent the agricultural interest, and that if Mr. Rollick said

that the “‘County Mercury’ ought to be hanged,” he was one of those

politicians who had already begun to call the agricultural interest “a

Vampire.” Flushed with that fancied discovery, Uncle Jack rushed on,

intending to bear along with the stream, thus fortunately directed,

all the “rubbish” (1) subsequently shot into Covent Garden and Hall of

Commerce.

“Yes, respectable fellow-creatures, men of capital and enterprise! For

what are these country squires compared to our wealthy merchants? What

is this agricultural interest that professes to be the prop of the

land?”

“Professes!” cried Squire Rollick,--“it is the prop of the land; and as

for those manufacturing fellows who have bought up the ‘Mercury’--”

“Bought up the ‘Mercury,’ have they, the villains?” cried Uncle Jack,

interrupting the Squire, and now bursting into full scent. “Depend upon

it, sir, it is a part of a diabolical system of buying up,--which must

be exposed manfully. Yes, as I was saying, what is that agricultural

interest which they desire to ruin; which they declare to be so bloated;

which they call ‘a Vampire!’--they the true blood-suckers, the

venomous millocrats? Fellow-creatures, Sir! I may well call distressed

fellow-creatures the members of that much-suffering class of which you

yourself are an ornament. What can be more deserving of our best efforts

for relief than a country gentleman like yourself, we’ll say,--of a

nominal L5,000 a-year,--compelled to keep up an establishment, pay for

his fox-hounds, support the whole population by contributions to the

poor-rates, support the whole church by tithes; all justice, jails,

and prosecutions of the county-rates; all thoroughfares by the

highway-rates; ground down by mortgages, Jews, or jointures; having to

provide for younger children; enormous expenses for cutting his woods,

manuring his model farm, and fattening huge oxen till every pound of

flesh costs him five pounds sterling in oil-cake; and then the lawsuits

necessary to protect his rights,--plundered on all hands by poachers,

sheep-stealers, dog-stealers, churchwardens, overseers, gardeners,

gamekeepers, and that necessary rascal, his steward. If ever there was a

distressed fellow-creature in the world, it is a country gentleman with

a great estate.”

My father evidently thought this an exquisite piece of banter, for by

the corner of his mouth I saw that he chuckled inly.

Squire Rollick, who had interrupted the speech by sundry approving

exclamations, particularly at the mention of poor-rates, tithes,

county-rates, mortgages, and poachers, here pushed the bottle to Uncle

Jack, and said, civilly: “There’s a great deal of truth in what you say,

Mr. Tibbets. The agricultural interest is going to ruin; and when it

does, I would not give that for Old England!” and Mr. Rollick snapped

his finger and thumb. “But what is to be done,--done for the county?

There’s the rub.”

“I was just coming to that,” quoth Uncle Jack. “You say that you have

not a county paper that upholds your cause and denounces your enemies.”

“Not since the Whigs bought the ‘--shire Mercury.’”

“Why, good heavens! Mr. Rollick, how can you suppose that you will

have justice done you if at this time of day you neglect the Press?

The Press, sir--there it is--air we breathe! What you want is a great

national--no, not a national--A Provincial proprietary weekly journal,

supported liberally and steadily by that mighty party whose very

existence is at stake. Without such a paper you are gone, you are

dead,--extinct, defunct, buried alive; with such a paper,--well

conducted, well edited by a man of the world, of education, of practical

experience in agriculture and human nature, mines, corn, manure,

insurances, Acts of Parliament, cattle-shows, the state of parties, and

the best interests of society,--with such a man and such a paper, you

will carry all before you. But it must be done by subscription,

by association, by co-operation,--by a Grand Provincial Benevolent

Agricultural Anti-innovating Society.”

“Egad, sir, you are right!” said Mr. Rollick, slapping his thigh; “and

I’ll ride over to our Lord-Lieutenant to-morrow. His eldest son ought to

carry the county.”

“And he will, if you encourage the Press and set up a journal,” said

Uncle Jack, rubbing his hands, and then gently stretching them out and

drawing them gradually together, as if he were already enclosing in that

airy circle the unsuspecting guineas of the unborn association.

All happiness dwells more in the hope than the possession; and at that

moment I dare be sworn that Uncle Jack felt a livelier rapture circum

proecordia, warming his entrails, and diffusing throughout his whole

frame of five feet eight the prophetic glow of the Magna Diva Moneta,

than if he had enjoyed for ten years the actual possession of King

Croesus’s privy purse.

“I thought Uncle Jack was not a Tory,” said I to my father the next day.

My father, who cared nothing for politics, opened his eyes. “Are you a

Tory or a Whig, papa?”

“Um!” said my father, “there’s a great deal to be said on both sides

of the question. You see, my boy, that Mrs. Primmins has a great many

moulds for our butter-pats: sometimes they come up with a crown on them,

sometimes with the more popular impress of a cow. It is all very well

for those who dish up the butter to print it according to their taste

or in proof of their abilities; it is enough for us to butter our bread,

say grace, and pay for the dairy. Do you understand?”

“Not a bit, sir.”

“Your namesake Pisistratus was wiser than you, then,” said my father.

“And now let us feed the duck. Where’s your uncle?”

“He has borrowed Mr. Squills’s mare, sir, and gone with Squire Rollick

to the great lord they were talking of.”

“Oho!” said my father; “brother Jack is going to print his butter!”

And indeed Uncle Jack played his cards so well on this occasion, and set

before the Lord-Lieutenant, with whom he had a personal interview, so

fine a prospectus and so nice a calculation that before my holidays were

over, he was installed in a very handsome office in the county town,

with private apartments over it, and a salary of L500 a-year, for

advocating the cause of his distressed fellow-creatures, including

noblemen, squires, yeomanry, farmers, and all yearly subscribers in the

New Proprietary Agricultural Anti-Innovating--Shire Weekly Gazette. At

the head of his newspaper Uncle Jack caused to be engraved a crown,

supported by a flail and a crook, with the motto, “Pro rege et grege.”

And that was the way in which Uncle Jack printed his pats of butter.

(1) “We talked sad rubbish when we first began,” says Mr. Cobden, in one

of his speeches.

CHAPTER V.

I seemed to myself to have made a leap in life when I returned to

school. I no longer felt as a boy. Uncle Jack, out of his own purse, had

presented me with my first pair of Wellington boots; my mother had been

coaxed into allowing me a small tail to jackets hitherto tail-less; my

collars, which had been wont, spaniel-like, to flap and fall about my

neck, now, terrier-wise, stood erect and rampant, encompassed with a

circumvallation of whalebone, buckram, and black silk. I was, in truth,

nearly seventeen, and I gave myself the airs of a man. Now, be it

observed that that crisis in adolescent existence wherein we first pass

from Master Sisty into Mr. Pisistratus, or Pisistratus Caxton, Esq.;

wherein we arrogate, and with tacit concession from our elders, the

long-envied title of young man,--always seems a sudden and imprompt

upshooting and elevation. We do not mark the gradual preparations

thereto; we remember only one distinct period, in which all the

signs and symptoms burst and effloresced together,--Wellington boots,

coat-tail, cravat, down on the upper lip, thoughts on razors, reveries

on young ladies, and a new kind of sense of poetry.

I began now to read steadily, to understand what I did read, and to cast

some anxious looks towards the future, with vague notions that I had

a place to win in the world, and that nothing is to be won without

perseverance and labor; and so I went on till I was seventeen and at the

head of the school, when I received the two letters I subjoin.

1.--FROM AUGUSTINE CAXTON, Esq.

My Dear Son,--I have informed Dr. Herman that you will not return

to him after the approaching holidays. You are old enough now to

look forward to the embraces of our beloved Alma Mater, and I think

studious enough to hope for the honors she bestows on her worthier

sons. You are already entered at Trinity,--and in fancy I see my

youth return to me in your image. I see you wandering where the

Cam steals its way through those noble gardens; and, confusing you

with myself, I recall the old dreams that haunted me when the

chiming bells swung over the placid waters. Verum secretumque

Mouseion, quam multa dictatis, quam multa invenitis! There at that

illustrious college, unless the race has indeed degenerated, you

will measure yourself with young giants. You will see those who,

in the Law, the Church, the State, or the still cloisters of

Learning, are destined to become the eminent leaders of your age.

To rank amongst them you are not forbidden to aspire; he who in

youth “can scorn delights, and love laborious days,” should pitch

high his ambition.

Your Uncle Jack says he has done wonders with his newspaper; though

Mr. Rollick grumbles, and declares that it is full of theories, and

that it puzzles the farmers. Uncle Jack, in reply, contends that

he creates an audience, not addresses one, and sighs that his

genius is thrown away in a provincial town. In fact, he really is

a very clever man, and might do much in London, I dare say. He

often comes over to dine and sleep, returning the next morning.

His energy is wonderful--and contagious. Can you imagine that he

has actually stirred up the flame of my vanity, by constantly

poking at the bars? Metaphor apart, I find myself collecting all

my notes and commonplaces, and wondering to see how easily they

fall into method, and take shape in chapters and books. I cannot

help smiling when I add, that I fancy I am going to become an

author; and smiling more when I think that your Uncle Jack should

have provoked me into so egregious an ambition. However, I have

read some passages of my book to your mother, and she says, “it is

vastly fine,” which is encouraging. Your mother has great good

sense, though I don’t mean to say that she has much learning,--

which is a wonder, considering that Pic de la Mirandola was nothing

to her father. Yet he died, dear great man, and never printed a

line; while I--positively I blush to think of my temerity! Adieu,

my son; make the best of the time that remains with you at the

Philhellenic. A full mind is the true Pantheism, plena Jovis. It

is only in some corner of the brain which we leave empty that Vice

can obtain a lodging. When she knocks at your door, my son, be

able to say, “No room for your ladyship; pass on.” Your

affectionate father,

A. CAXTON.

2.--FROM Mrs. CAXTON.

My Dearest Sisty,--You are coming home! My heart is so full of

that thought that it seems to me as if I could not write anything

else. Dear child, you are coming home; you have done with school,

you have done with strangers,--you are our own, all our own son

again! You are mine again, as you were in the cradle, the nursery,

and the garden, Sisty, when we used to throw daisies at each other!

You will laugh at me so when I tell you that as soon as I heard you

were coming home for good, I crept away from the room, and went to

my drawer where I keep, you know, all my treasures. There was your

little cap that I worked myself, and your poor little nankeen

jacket that you were so proud to throw off--oh! and many other

relies of you when you were little Sisty, and I was not the cold,

formal “Mother” you call me now, but dear “Mamma.” I kissed them,

Sisty, and said, “My little child is coming back to me again!” So

foolish was I, I forgot all the long years that have passed, and

fancied I could carry you again in my arms, and that I should again

coax you to say “God bless papa.” Well, well! I write now between

laughing and crying. You cannot be what you were, but you are

still my own dear son,--your father’s son; dearer to me than all

the world,--except that father.

I am so glad, too, that you will come so soon,--come while your

father is really warm with his book, and while you can encourage

and keep him to it. For why should he not be great and famous?

Why should not all admire him as we do? You know how proud of him

I always was; but I do so long to let the world know why I was so

proud. And yet, after all, it is not only because he is so wise

and learned, but because he is so good, and has such a large, noble

heart. But the heart must appear in the book too, as well as the

learning. For though it is full of things I don’t understand,

every now and then there is something I do understand,--that seems

as if that heart spoke out to all the world.

Your uncle has undertaken to get it published, and your father is

going up to town with him about it, as soon as the first volume is

finished.

All are quite well except poor Mrs. Jones, who has the ague very

bad indeed; Primmins has made her wear a charm for it, and Mrs.

Jones actually declares she is already much better. One can’t deny

that there may be a great deal in such things, though it seems

quite against the reason. Indeed your father says, “Why not? A

charm must be accompanied by a strong wish on the part of the

charmer that it may succeed,--and what is magnetism but a wish?” I

don’t quite comprehend this; but, like all your father says, it has

more than meets the eye, I am quite sure.

Only three weeks to the holidays, and then no more school, Sisty,--

no more school! I shall have your room all done, freshly, and made

so pretty; they are coming about it to-morrow.

The duck is quite well, and I really don’t think it is quite as

lame as it was.

God bless you, dear, dear child. Your affectionate happy mother.

K.C.

The interval between these letters and the morning on which I was

to return home seemed to me like one of those long, restless, yet

half-dreamy days which in some infant malady I had passed in a sick-bed.

I went through my task-work mechanically, composed a Greek ode in

farewell to the Philhellenic, which Dr. Herman pronounced a chef

d’oeuvre, and my father, to whom I sent it in triumph, returned a letter

of false English with it, that parodied all my Hellenic barbarisms by

imitating them in my mother-tongue. However, I swallowed the leek, and

consoled myself with the pleasing recollection that, after spending six

years in learning to write bad Greek, I should never have any further

occasion to avail myself of so precious an accomplishment.

And so came the last day. Then alone, and in a kind of delighted

melancholy, I revisited each of the old haunts,--the robbers’ cave we

had dug one winter, and maintained, six of us, against all the police of

the little kingdom; the place near the pales where I had fought my first

battle; the old beech-stump on which I sat to read letters from home!

With my knife, rich in six blades (besides a cork-screw, a pen-picker,

and a button-hook), I carved my name in large capitals over my desk.

Then night came, and the bell rang, and we went to our rooms. And I

opened the window and looked out. I saw all the stars, and wondered

which was mine,--which should light to fame and fortune the manhood

about to commence. Hope and Ambition were high within me; and yet,

behind them stood Melancholy. Ah! who amongst you, readers, can now

summon back all those thoughts, sweet and sad,--all that untold,

half-conscious regret for the past,--all those vague longings for

the future, which made a poet of the dullest on the last night before

leaving boyhood and school forever?

PART III.

CHAPTER I.

It was a beautiful summer afternoon when the coach set me down at my

father’s gate. Mrs. Primmins herself ran out to welcome me; and I had

scarcely escaped from the warm clasp of her friendly hand before I was

in the arms of my mother.

As soon as that tenderest of parents was convinced that I was not

famished, seeing that I had dined two hours ago at Dr. Herman’s, she

led me gently across the garden towards the arbor. “You will find your

father so cheerful,” said she, wiping away a tear. “His brother is with

him.”

I stopped. His brother! Will the reader believe it? I had never heard

that he had a brother, so little were family affairs ever discussed in

my hearing.

“His brother!” said I. “Have I then an Uncle Caxton as well as an Uncle

Jack?”

“Yes, my love,” said my mother. And then she added, “Your father and he

were not such good friends as they ought to have been, and the Captain

has been abroad. However, thank Heaven! they are now quite reconciled.”

We had time for no more,--we were in the arbor. There, a table was

spread with wine and fruit,--the gentlemen were at their dessert; and

those gentlemen were my father, Uncle Jack, Mr. Squills, and--tall,

lean, buttoned-to-the-chin--an erect, martial, majestic, and imposing

personage, who seemed worthy of a place in my great ancestor’s “Boke of

Chivalrie.”

All rose as I entered; but my poor father, who was always slow in his

movements, had the last of me. Uncle Jack had left the very powerful

impression of his great seal-ring on my fingers; Mr. Squills had patted

me on the shoulder and pronounced me “wonderfully grown;” my new-found

relative had with great dignity said, “Nephew, your hand, sir,--I am

Captain de Caxton;” and even the tame duck had taken her beak from her

wing and rubbed it gently between my legs, which was her usual mode of

salutation, before my father placed his pale hand on my forehead, and

looking at me for a moment with unutterable sweetness, said, “More and

more like your mother,--God bless you!”

A chair had been kept vacant for me between my father and his brother.

I sat down in haste, and with a tingling color on my cheeks and a rising

at my throat, so much had the unusual kindness of my father’s greeting

affected me; and then there came over me a sense of my new position. I

was no longer a schoolboy at home for his brief holiday: I had returned

to the shelter of the roof-tree to become myself one of its supports. I

was at last a man, privileged to aid or solace those dear ones who had

ministered, as yet without return, to me. That is a very strange crisis

in our life when we come home for good. Home seems a different thing;

before, one has been but a sort of guest after all, only welcomed and

indulged, and little festivities held in honor of the released and

happy child. But to come home for good,--to have done with school and

boyhood,--is to be a guest, a child no more. It is to share the everyday

life of cares and duties; it is to enter into the confidences of home.

Is it not so? I could have buried my face in my hands and wept!

My father, with all his abstraction and all his simplicity, had a knack

now and then of penetrating at once to the heart. I verily believe he

read all that was passing in mine as easily as if it had been Greek. He

stole his arm gently round my waist and whispered, “Hush!” Then, lifting

his voice, he cried aloud, “Brother Roland, you must not let Jack have

the best of the argument.”

“Brother Austin,” replied the Captain, very formally, “Mr. Jack, if I

may take the liberty so to call him--”

“You may indeed,” cried Uncle Jack.

“Sir,” said the Captain, bowing, “it is a familiarity that does me

honor. I was about to say that Mr. Jack has retired from the field.”

“Far from it,” said Squills, dropping an effervescing powder into a

chemical mixture which he had been preparing with great attention,

composed of sherry and lemon-juice--“far from it. Mr. Tibbets--whose

organ of combativeness is finely developed, by the by--was saying--”

“That it is a rank sin and shame in the nineteenth century,” quoth Uncle

Jack, “that a man like my friend Captain Caxton--”

“De Caxton, sir--Mr. Jack.”

“De Caxton,--of the highest military talents, of the most illustrious

descent,--a hero sprung from heroes,--should have served so many years,

and with such distinction, in his Majesty’s service, and should now be

only a captain on half-pay. This, I say, comes of the infamous system of

purchase, which sets up the highest honors for sale, as they did in the

Roman empire--”

My father pricked up his ears; but Uncle jack pushed on before my father

could get ready the forces of his meditated interruption.

“A system which a little effort, a little union, can so easily

terminate. Yes, sir,” and Uncle Jack thumped the table, and two cherries

bobbed up and smote Captain de Caxton on the nose, “yes, sir, I will

undertake to say that I could put the army upon a very different

footing. If the poorer and more meritorious gentlemen, like Captain

de Caxton, would, as I was just observing, but unite in a grand

anti-aristocratic association, each paying a small sum quarterly, we

could realize a capital sufficient to out-purchase all these undeserving

individuals, and every man of merit should have his fair chance of

promotion.”

“Egad! sir,” said Squills, “there is something grand in that, eh,

Captain?”

“No, sir,” replied the Captain, quite seriously; “there is in monarchies

but one fountain of honor. It would be an interference with a soldier’s

first duty,--his respect for his sovereign.”

“On the contrary,” said Mr. Squills, “it would still be to the

sovereigns that one would owe the promotion.”

“Honor,” pursued the Captain, coloring up, and unheeding this witty

interruption, “is the reward of a soldier. What do I care that a young

jackanapes buys his colonelcy over my head? Sir, he does not buy from me

my wounds and my services. Sir, he does not buy from me the medal I

won at Waterloo. He is a rich man, and I am a poor man; he is

called--colonel, because he paid money for the name. That pleases him;

well and good. It would not please me; I had rather remain a captain,

and feel my dignity, not in my title, but in the services by which it

has been won. A beggarly, rascally association of stock-brokers, for

aught I know, buy me a company! I don’t want to be uncivil, or I would

say damn ‘em--Mr.--sir--Jack!”

A sort of thrill ran through the Captain’s audience; even Uncle Jack

seemed touched, for he stared very hard at the grim veteran, and said

nothing. The pause was awkward; Mr. Squills broke it. “I should like,”

quoth he, “to see your Waterloo medal,--you have it not about you?”

“Mr. Squills,” answered the Captain, “it lies next to my heart while I

live. It shall be buried in my coffin, and I shall rise with it, at the

word of command, on the day of the Grand Review!” So saying, the Captain

leisurely unbuttoned his coat, and detaching from a piece of striped

ribbon as ugly a specimen of the art of the silversmith (begging its

pardon) as ever rewarded merit at the expense of taste, placed the medal

on the table.

The medal passed round, without a word, from hand to hand.

“It is strange,” at last said my father, “how such trifles can be made

of such value,--how in one age a man sells his life for what in the

next age he would not give a button! A Greek esteemed beyond price a few

leaves of olive twisted into a circular shape and set upon his head,--a

very ridiculous head-gear we should now call it. An American Indian

prefers a decoration of human scalps, which, I apprehend, we should all

agree (save and except Mr. Squills, who is accustomed to such things)

to be a very disgusting addition to one’s personal attractions; and

my brother values this piece of silver, which may be worth about five

shillings, more than Jack does a gold mine, or I do the library of the

London Museum. A time will come when people will think that as idle a

decoration as leaves and scalps.”

“Brother,” said the Captain, “there is nothing strange in the matter. It

is as plain as a pike-staff to a man who understands the principles of

honor.”

“Possibly,” said my father, mildly. “I should like to hear what you have

to say upon honor. I am sure it would very much edify us all.”

CHAPTER II.

“Gentlemen,” began the Captain, at the distinct appeal thus made to

him,--“Gentlemen, God made the earth, but man made the garden. God made

man, but man re-creates himself.”

“True, by knowledge,” said my father.

“By industry,” said Uncle Jack.

“By the physical conditions of his body,” said Mr. Squills. “He could

not have made himself other than he was at first in the woods and wilds

if he had fins like a fish, or could only chatter gibberish like

a monkey. Hands and a tongue, sir,--these are the instruments of

progress.”

“Mr. Squills,” said my father, nodding, “Anaxagoras said very much the

same thing before you, touching the hands.”

“I cannot help that,” answered Mr. Squills; “one could not open one’s

lips, if one were bound to say what nobody else had said. But after all,

our superiority is less in our hands than the greatness, of our thumbs.”

“Albinus, ‘De Sceleto,’ and our own learned William Lawrence, have made

a similar remark,” again put in my father. “Hang it, sir!” exclaimed

Squills, “what business have you to know everything?”

“Everything! No; but thumbs furnish subjects of investigation to the

simplest understanding,” said my father, modestly.

“Gentlemen,” re-commenced my Uncle Roland, “thumbs and hands are given

to an Esquimaux, as well as to scholars and surgeons,--and what the

deuce are they the wiser for them? Sirs, you cannot reduce us thus into

mechanism. Look within. Man, I say, re-creates himself. How? By The

Principle Of Honor. His first desire is to excel some one else; his

first impulse is distinction above his fellows. Heaven places in his

soul, as if it were a compass, a needle that always points to one end;

namely, to honor in that which those around him consider honorable.

Therefore, as man at first is exposed to all dangers from wild beasts,

and from men as savage as himself, Courage becomes the first quality

mankind must honor: therefore the savage is courageous; therefore he

covets the praise for courage; therefore he decorates himself with the

skins of the beasts he has subdued, or the the scalps of the foes he has

slain. Sirs, don’t tell me that the skins and the scalps are only hide

and leather: they are trophies of honor. Don’t tell me that they are

ridiculous and disgusting: they become glorious as proofs that the

savage has emerged out of the first brute-like egotism, and attached

price to the praise which men never give except for works that secure or

advance their welfare. By and by, sirs, our savages discover that they

cannot live in safety amongst themselves unless they agree to speak the

truth to each other: therefore Truth becomes valued, and grows into a

principle of honor; so brother Austin will tell us that in the primitive

times truth was always the attribute of a hero.”

“Right,” said my father; “Homer emphatically assigns it to Achilles.”

“Out of truth comes the necessity for some kind of rude justice and law.

Therefore men, after courage in the warrior, and truth in all, begin

to attach honor to the elder, whom they intrust with preserving justice

amongst them. So, sirs, Law is born--”

“But the first lawgivers were priests,” quoth my father.

“Sirs, I am coming to that. Whence arises the desire of honor, but

from man’s necessity of excelling,--in other words, of improving

his faculties for the benefit of others; though, unconscious of that

consequence, man only strives for their praise? But that desire for

honor is unextinguishable, and man is naturally anxious to carry its

rewards beyond the grave. Therefore he who has slain most lions or

enemies, is naturally prone to believe that he shall have the best

hunting fields in the country beyond, and take the best place at the

banquet. Nature, in all its operations, impresses man with the idea of

an invisible Power; and the principle of honor that is, the desire of

praise and reward--makes him anxious for the approval which that Power

can bestow. Thence comes the first rude idea of Religion; and in the

death-hymn at the stake, the savage chants songs prophetic of the

distinctions he is about to receive. Society goes on; hamlets are built;

property is established. He who has more than another has more power

than another. Power is honored. Man covets the honor attached to the

power which is attached to possession. Thus the soil is cultivated; thus

the rafts are constructed; thus tribe trades with tribe; thus Commerce

is founded, and Civilization commenced. Sirs, all that seems least

connected with honor, as we approach the vulgar days of the present,

has its origin in honor, and is but an abuse of its principles. If

men nowadays are hucksters and traders, if even military honors are

purchased, and a rogue buys his way to a peerage, still all arises

from the desire for honor, which society, as it grows old, gives to the

outward signs of titles and gold, instead of, as once, to its inward

essentials,--courage, truth, justice, enterprise. Therefore I say, sirs,

that honor is the foundation of all improvement in mankind.”

“You have argued like a schoolman, brother,” said Mr. Caxton,

admiringly; “but still, as to this round piece of silver, don’t we go

back to the most barbarous ages in estimating so highly such things as

have no real value in themselves,--as could not give us one opportunity

for instructing our minds?”

“Could not pay for a pair of boots,” added Uncle Jack.

“Or,” said Mr. Squills, “save you one twinge of the cursed rheumatism

you have got for life from that night’s bivouac in the Portuguese

marshes,--to say nothing of the bullet in your cranium, and that

cork-leg, which must much diminish the salutary effects of your

constitutional walk.”

“Gentlemen,” resumed the Captain, nothing abashed, “in going back to

those barbarous ages, I go back to the true principles of honor. It is

precisely because this round piece of silver has no value in the market

that it is priceless, for thus it is only a proof of desert. Where would

be the sense of service in this medal, if it could buy back my leg,

or if I could bargain it away for forty thousand a year? No, sirs, its

value is this,--that when I wear it on my breast, men shall say, ‘That

formal old fellow is not so useless as he seems. He was one of those who

saved England and freed Europe.’ And even when I conceal it here,” and,

devoutly kissing the medal, Uncle Roland restored it to its ribbon and

its resting-place, “and no eye sees it, its value is yet greater in the

thought that my country has not degraded the old and true principles of

honor, by paying the soldier who fought for her in the same coin as

that in which you, Mr. Jack, sir, pay your bootmaker’s bill. No, no,

gentlemen. As courage was the first virtue that honor called forth, the

first virtue from which all safety and civilization proceed, so we do

right to keep that one virtue at least clear and unsullied from all

the money-making, mercenary, pay-me-in-cash abominations which are the

vices, not the virtues, of the civilization it has produced.”

My Uncle Roland here came to a full stop; and, filling his glass, rose

and said solemnly: “A last bumper, gentlemen,--‘To the dead who died for

England!’”

CHAPTER III.

“Indeed, my dear, you must take it. You certainly have caught cold; you

sneezed three times together.”

“Yes, ma’am, because I would take a pinch of Uncle Roland’s snuff, just

to say that I had taken a pinch out of his box,--the honor of the thing,

you know.”

“Ah, my dear! what was that very clever remark you made at the same

time, which so pleased your father,--something about Jews and the

college?”

“Jews and--oh! pulverem Olympicum collegisse juvat, my dear

mother,--which means that it is a pleasure to take a pinch out of a

brave man’s snuff-box. I say, mother, put down the posset. Yes, I’ll

take it; I will, indeed. Now, then, sit here,--that’s right,--and tell

me all you know about this famous old Captain. Imprimis, he is older

than my father?”

“To be sure!” exclaimed my mother, indignantly. “He looks twenty years

older; but there is only five years’ real difference. Your father must

always look young.”

“And why does Uncle Roland put that absurd French de before his name;

and why were my father and he not good friends; and is he married; and

has he any children?”

Scene of this conference: my own little room, new papered on purpose for

my return for good,--trellis-work paper, flowers and birds, all so

fresh and so new and so clean and so gay, with my books ranged in neat

shelves, and a writing-table by the window; and, without the window,

shines the still summer moon. The window is a little open: you scent

the flowers and the new-mown hay. Past eleven; and the boy and his dear

mother are all alone.

“My dear, my dear, you ask so many questions at once!”

“Don’t answer them, then. Begin at the beginning, as Nurse Primmins does

with her fairy tales, ‘Once on a time.’

“Once on a time, then,” said my mother, kissing me between the

eyes,--“once on a time, my love, there was a certain clergyman in

Cumberland who had two sons; he had but a small living, and the boys

were to make their own way in the world. But close to the parsonage, on

the brow of a hill, rose an old ruin with one tower left, and this, with

half the country round it, had once belonged to the clergyman’s family;

but all had been sold,--all gone piece by piece, you see, my dear,

except the presentation to the living (what they call the advowson was

sold too), which had been secured to the last of the family. The elder

of these sons was your Uncle Roland; the younger was your father. Now

I believe the first quarrel arose from the absurdist thing possible,

as your father says; but Roland was exceedingly touchy on all things

connected with his ancestors. He was always poring over the old

pedigree, or wandering amongst the ruins, or reading books of

knight-errantry. Well, where this pedigree began, I know not, but it

seems that King Henry II. gave some lands in Cumberland to one Sir Adam

de Caxton; and from that time, you see, the pedigree went regularly

from father to son till Henry V. Then, apparently from the disorders

produced, as your father says, by the Wars of the Roses, there was a sad

blank left,--only one or two names, without dates or marriages, till the

time of Henry VII, except that in the reign of Edward IV. there was

one insertion of a William Caxton (named in a deed). Now in the village

church there was a beautiful brass monument to one Sir William de

Caxton, who had been killed at the battle of Bosworth, fighting for that

wicked king Richard III. And about the same time there lived, as you

know, the great printer, William Caxton. Well, your father, happening to

be in town on a visit to his aunt, took great trouble in hunting up all

the old papers he could find at the Heralds’ College; and, sure enough,

he was overjoyed to satisfy himself that he was descended, not from that

poor Sir William who had been killed in so bad a cause, but from the

great printer, who was from a younger branch of the same family, and

to whose descendants the estate came in the reign of Henry VIII. It was

upon this that your Uncle Roland quarrelled with him,--and, indeed, I

tremble to think that they may touch on that matter again.”

“Then, my dear mother, I must say my uncle was wrong there so far as

common-sense is concerned; but still, somehow or other, I can understand

it. Surely, this was not the only cause of estrangement?”

My mother looked down, and moved one hand gently over the other, which

was her way when embarrassed. “What was it, my own mother?” said I,

coaxingly.

“I believe--that is, I--I think that they were both attached to the same

young lady.”

“How! you don’t mean to say that my father was ever in love with any one

but you?”

“Yes, Sisty,--yes, and deeply! And,” added my mother, after a slight

pause, and with a very low sigh, “he never was in love with me; and what

is more, he had the frankness to tell me so!”

“And yet you--”

“Married him--yes!” said my mother, raising the softest and purest eyes

that ever lover could have wished to read his fate in; “yes, for the old

love was hopeless. I knew that I could make him happy. I knew that he

would love me at last, and he does so! My son, your father loves me!”

As she spoke, there came a blush, as innocent as virgin ever knew, to

my mother’s smooth cheek; and she looked so fair, so good, and still

so young all the while that you would have said that either Dusius, the

Teuton fiend, or Nock, the Scandinavian sea-imp, from whom the learned

assure us we derive our modern Daimones, “The Deuce,” and Old Nick, had

possessed my father, if he had not learned to love such a creature.

I pressed her hand to my lips; but my heart was too full tot speak for a

moment or so, and then I partially changed the subject.

“Well, and this rivalry estranged them more? And who was the lady?”

“Your father never told me, and I never asked,” said my mother, simply.

“But she was very different from me, I know. Very accomplished, very

beautiful, very highborn.”

“For all that, my father was a lucky man to escape her. Pass on. What

did the Captain do?”

“Why, about that time your grandfather died; and shortly after an aunt,

on the mother’s side, who was rich and saving, died, and unexpectedly

left each sixteen thousand pounds. Your uncle, with his share, bought

back, at an enormous price, the old castle and some land round it, which

they say does not bring him in three hundred a year. With the little

that remained, he purchased a commission in the army; and the brothers

met no more till last week, when Roland suddenly arrived.”

“He did not marry this accomplished young lady?”

“No! but he married another, and is a widower.”

“Why, he was as inconstant as my father, and I am sure without so good

an excuse. How was that?”

“I don’t know. He says nothing about it.”

“Has he any children?”

“Two, a son--By the by, you must never speak about him. Your uncle

briefly said, when I asked him what was his family, ‘A girl, ma’am. I

had a son, but--’

“‘He is dead,’ cried your father, in his kind, pitying voice.”

“‘Dead to me, brother; and you will never mention his name!’ You should

have seen how stern your uncle looked. I was terrified.”

“But the girl,--why did not he bring her here?”

“She is still in France, but he talks of going over for her; and we have

half promised to visit them both in Cumberland. But, bless me! is that

twelve? and the posset quite cold!”

“One word more, dearest mother,--one word. My father’s book,--is he

still going on with it?”

“Oh yes, indeed!” cried my mother, clasping her hands; “and he must read

it to you, as he does to me,--you will understand it so well. I have

always been so anxious that the world should know him, and be proud of

him as we are,--so--so anxious! For perhaps, Sisty, if he had married

that great lady, he would have roused himself, been more ambitious,--and

I could only make him happy, I could not make him great!”

“So he has listened to you at last?”

“To me?” said my mother, shaking her head and smiling gently. “No,

rather to your Uncle Jack, who, I am happy to say, has at length got a

proper hold over him.”

“A proper hold, my dear mother! Pray beware of Uncle Jack, or we shall

all be swept into a coal-mine, or explode with a grand national company

for making gunpowder out of tea-leaves!”

“Wicked child!” said my mother, laughing; and then, as she took up her

candle and lingered a moment while I wound my watch, she said, musingly:

“Yet Jack is very, very clever; and if for your sake we could make a

fortune, Sisty!”

“You frighten me out of my wits, mother! You are not in earnest?”

“And if my brother could be the means of raising him in the world--”

“Your brother would be enough to sink all the ships in the Channel,

ma’am,” said I, quite irreverently. I was shocked before the words were

well out of my mouth; and throwing my arms round my mother’s neck, I

kissed away the pain I had inflicted.

When I was left alone and in my own little crib, in which my slumber

had ever been so soft and easy, I might as well have been lying upon

cut straw. I tossed to and fro; I could not sleep. I rose, threw on my

dressing-gown, lighted my candle, and sat down by the table near the

window. First I thought of the unfinished outline of my father’s youth,

so suddenly sketched before me. I filled up the missing colors,

and fancied the picture explained all that had often perplexed my

conjectures. I comprehended, I suppose by some secret sympathy in my own

nature (for experience in mankind could have taught me little enough),

how an ardent, serious, inquiring mind, struggling into passion under

the load of knowledge, had, with that stimulus sadly and abruptly

withdrawn, sunk into the quiet of passive, aimless study. I comprehended

how, in the indolence of a happy but unimpassioned marriage, with a

companion so gentle, so provident and watchful, yet so little formed

to rouse and task and fire an intellect naturally calm and meditative,

years upon years had crept away in the learned idleness of a solitary

scholar. I comprehended, too, how gradually and slowly, as my father

entered that stage of middle life when all men are most prone to

ambition, the long-silenced whispers were heard again, and the mind, at

last escaping from the listless weight which a baffled and disappointed

heart had laid upon it, saw once more, fair as in youth, the only true

mistress of Genius,--Fame.

Oh! how I sympathized, too, in my mother’s gentle triumph. Looking over

the past, I could see, year after year, how she had stolen more and more

into my father’s heart of hearts; how what had been kindness had grown

into love; how custom and habit, and the countless links in the sweet

charities of home, had supplied that sympathy with the genial man which

had been missed at first by the lonely scholar.

Next I thought of the gray, eagle-eyed old soldier, with his ruined

tower and barren acres, and saw before me his proud, prejudiced,

chivalrous boyhood, gliding through the ruins or poring over the mouldy

pedigree. And this son, so disowned,--for what dark offence? An awe

crept over me. And this girl,--his ewe-lamb, his all,--was she fair? had

she blue eyes like my mother, or a high Roman nose and beetle brows like

Captain Roland? I mused and mused and mused; and the candle went out,

and the moonlight grew broader and stiller; till at last I was sailing

in a balloon with Uncle Jack, and had just tumbled into the Red Sea,

when the well-known voice of Nurse Primmins restored me to life with

a “God bless my heart! the boy has not been in bed all this ‘varsal

night!”

CHAPTER IV.

As soon as I was dressed I hastened downstairs, for I longed to revisit

my old haunts,--the little plot of garden I had sown with anemones and

cresses; the walk by the peach wall; the pond wherein I had angled for

roach and perch.

Entering the hall, I discovered my Uncle Roland in a great state

of embarrassment. The maid-servant was scrubbing the stones at the

hall-door; she was naturally plump,--and it is astonishing how much more

plump a female becomes when she is on all-fours! The maid-servant, then,

was scrubbing the stones, her face turned from the Captain; and the

Captain, evidently meditating a sortie, stood ruefully gazing at the

obstacle before him and hemming aloud. Alas, the maidservant was deaf!

I stopped, curious to see how Uncle Roland would extricate himself from

the dilemma.

Finding that his hems were in vain, my uncle made himself as small as

he could, and glided close to the left of the wall; at that instant the

maid turned abruptly round towards the right, and completely obstructed,

by this manoeuvre, the slight crevice through which hope had dawned

on her captive. My uncle stood stock-still,--and, to say the truth, he

could not have stirred an inch without coming into personal contact with

the rounded charms which blockaded his movements. My uncle took off

his hat and scratched his forehead in great perplexity. Presently, by

a slight turn of the flanks, the opposing party, while leaving him an

opportunity of return, entirely precluded all chance of egress in that

quarter. My uncle retreated in haste, and now presented himself to the

right wing of the enemy. He had scarcely done so, when, without looking

behind her, the blockading party shoved aside the pail that crippled the

range of her operations, and so placed it that it formed a formidable

barricade, which my uncle’s cork leg had no chance of surmounting.

Therewith Captain Roland lifted his eyes appealingly to Heaven, and I

heard him distinctly ejaculate--

“Would to Heaven she were a creature in breeches!”

But happily at this moment the maid-servant turned her head sharply

round, and seeing the Captain, rose in an instant, moved away the pail,

and dropped a frightened courtesy.

My uncle Roland touched his hat. “I beg you a thousand pardons, my good

girl,” said he; and, with a half bow, he slid into the open air.

“You have a soldier’s politeness, uncle,” said I, tucking my arm into

Captain Roland’s.

“Tush, my boy,” said he, smiling seriously, and coloring up to the

temples; “tush, say a gentleman’s! To us, sir, every woman is a lady, in

right of her sex.”

Now, I had often occasion later to recall that aphorism of my uncle’s;

and it served to explain to me how a man, so prejudiced on the score

of family pride, never seemed to consider it an offence in my father to

have married a woman whose pedigree was as brief as my dear mother’s.

Had she been a Montmorenci, my uncle could not have been more respectful

and gallant than he was to that meek descendant of the Tibbetses. He

held, indeed, which I never knew any other man, vain of family, approve

or support,--a doctrine deduced from the following syllogisms: First,

that birth was not valuable in itself, but as a transmission of certain

qualities which descent from a race of warriors should perpetuate;

namely, truth, courage, honor; secondly, that whereas from the woman’s

side we derive our more intellectual faculties, from the man’s we derive

our moral: a clever and witty man generally has a clever and witty

mother; a brave and honorable man, a brave and honorable father.

Therefore all the qualities which attention to race should perpetuate

are the manly qualities, traceable only from the father’s side. Again,

he held that while the aristocracy have higher and more chivalrous

notions, the people generally have shrewder and livelier ideas.

Therefore, to prevent gentlemen from degenerating into complete

dunderheads, an admixture with the people, provided always it was on

the female side, was not only excusable, but expedient; and, finally,

my uncle held that whereas a man is a rude, coarse, sensual animal, and

requires all manner of associations to dignify and refine him, women

are so naturally susceptible of everything beautiful in sentiment and

generous in purpose that she who is a true woman is a fit peer for

a king. Odd and preposterous notions, no doubt, and capable of much

controversy, so far as the doctrine of race (if that be any way tenable)

is concerned; but then the plain fact is that my Uncle Roland was as

eccentric and contradictory a gentleman--as--as--why, as you and I are,

if we once venture to think for ourselves.

“Well, sir, and what profession are you meant for?” asked my uncle. “Not

the army, I fear?”

“I have never thought of the subject, uncle.”

“Thank Heaven,” said Captain Roland, “we have never yet had a lawyer in

the family, nor a stockbroker, nor a tradesman--ahem!”

I saw that my great ancestor the printer suddenly rose up in that hem.

“Why, uncle, there are honorable men in all callings.”

“Certainly, sir. But in all callings honor is not the first principle of

action.”

“But it may be, sir, if a man of honor pursue it! There are some

soldiers who have been great rascals!”

My uncle looked posed, and his black brows met thoughtfully. “You are

right, boy, I dare say,” he answered, somewhat mildly. “But do you think

that it ought to give me as much pleasure to look on my old ruined tower

if I knew it had been bought by some herring-dealer, like the first

ancestor of the Poles, as I do now, when I know it was given to a knight

and gentleman (who traced his descent from an Anglo-Dane in the time of

King Alfred) for services done in Aquitaine and Gascony, by Henry the

Plantagenet? And do you mean to tell me that I should have been the same

man if I had not from a boy associated that old tower with all ideas of

what its owners were, and should be, as knights and gentlemen? Sir, you

would have made a different being of me if at the head of my

pedigree you had clapped a herring-dealer,--though, I dare say, the

herring-dealer might have been as good a man as ever the Anglo-Dane was,

God rest him!”

“And for the same reason I suppose, sir, that you think my father never

would have been quite the same being he is if he had not made that

notable discovery touching our descent from the great William Caxton,

the printer.”

My uncle bounded as if he had been shot,--bounded so incautiously,

considering the materials of which one leg was composed, that he would

have fallen into a strawberry-bed if I had not caught him by the arm.

“Why, you--you--you young jackanapes!” cried the Captain, shaking me off

as soon as he had regained his equilibrium. “You do not mean to inherit

that infamous crotchet my brother has got into his head? You do not mean

to exchange Sir William de Caxton, who fought and fell at Bosworth,

for the mechanic who sold black-letter pamphlets in the Sanctuary at

Westminster?”

“That depends on the evidence, uncle!”

“No, sir; like all noble truths, it depends upon faith. Men, nowadays,”

continued my uncle, with a look of ineffable disgust, “actually require

that truths should be proved.”

“It is a sad conceit on their part, no doubt, my dear uncle; but till a

truth is proved, how can we know that it is a truth?”

I thought that in that very sagacious question I had effectually caught

my uncle. Not I. He slipped through it like an eel.

“Sir,” said he, “whatever in Truth makes a man’s heart warmer and his

soul purer, is a belief, not a knowledge. Proof, sir, is a handcuff;

belief is a wing! Want proof as to an ancestor in the reign of King

Richard? Sir, you cannot even prove to the satisfaction of a logician

that you are the son of your own father. Sir, a religious man does not

want to reason about his religion; religion is not mathematics. Religion

is to be felt, not proved. There are a great many things in the religion

of a good man which are not in the catechism. Proof!” continued my

uncle, growing violent--“Proof, sir, is a low, vulgar, levelling,

rascally Jacobin; Belief is a loyal, generous, chivalrous gentleman! No,

no; prove what you please, you shall never rob me of one belief that has

made me--”

“The finest-hearted creature that ever talked nonsense,” said my father,

who came up, like Horace’s deity, at the right moment. “What is it you

must believe in, brother, no matter what the proof against you?”

My uncle was silent, and with great energy dug the point of his cane

into the gravel.

“He will not believe in our great ancestor the printer,” said I,

maliciously.

My father’s calm brow was overcast in a moment. “Brother,” said the

Captain, loftily, “you have a right to your own ideas; but you should

take care how they contaminate your child.”

“Contaminate!” said my father, and for the first time I saw an angry

sparkle flash from his eyes; but he checked himself on the instant.

“Change the word, my dear brother.”

“No, sir, I will not change it! To belie the records of the family!”

“Records! A brass plate in a village church against all the books of the

College of Arms!”

“To renounce your ancestor, a knight who died in the field!”

“For the worst cause that man ever fought for!”

“On behalf of his king!”

“Who had murdered his nephews!”

“A knight! with our crest on his helmet.”

“And no brains underneath it, or he would never have had them knocked

out for so bloody a villain!”

“A rascally, drudging, money-making printer!”

“The wise and glorious introducer of the art that has enlightened a

world. Prefer for an ancestor, to one whom scholar and sage never name

but in homage, a worthless, obscure, jolter-headed booby in mail, whose

only record to men is a brass plate in a church in a village!”

My uncle turned round perfectly livid. “Enough, sir! enough! I am

insulted sufficiently. I ought to have expected it. I wish you and your

son a very good day.”

My father stood aghast. The Captain was hobbling off to the iron gate;

in another moment he would have been out of our precincts. I ran up

and hung upon him. “Uncle, it is all my fault. Between you and me, I

am quite of your side; pray forgive us both. What could I have been

thinking of, to vex you so? And my father, whom your visit has made so

happy!” My uncle paused, feeling for the latch of the gate. My father

had now come up, and caught his hand. “What are all the printers that

ever lived, and all the books they ever printed, to one wrong to thy

fine heart, brother Roland? Shame on me! A bookman’s weak point, you

know! It is very true, I should never have taught the boy one thing to

give you pain, brother Roland,--though I don’t remember,” continued my

father, with a perplexed look, “that I ever did teach it him, either!

Pisistratus, as you value my blessing, respect as your ancestor Sir

William de Caxton, the hero of Bosworth. Come, come, brother!”

“I am an old fool,” said Uncle Roland, “whichever way we look at it. Ah,

you young dog, you are laughing at us both!”

“I have ordered breakfast on the lawn,” said my mother, coming out from

the porch, with her cheerful smile on her lips; “and I think the devil

will be done to your liking to-day, brother Roland.”

“We have had enough of the devil already, my love,” said my father,

wiping his forehead.

So, while the birds sang overhead or hopped familiarly across the sward

for the crumbs thrown forth to them, while the sun was still cool in the

east, and the leaves yet rustled with the sweet air of morning, we all

sat down to our table, with hearts as reconciled to each other, and as

peaceably disposed to thank God for the fair world around us, as if

the river had never run red through the field of Bosworth, and that

excellent Mr. Caxton had never set all mankind by the ears with an

irritating invention a thousand times more provocative of our combative

tendencies than the blast of the trumpet and the gleam of the banner!

CHAPTER V.

“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, first, it was a very long

walk, and my father detested long walks; secondly, it was the sacrifice

of a whole day’s labor 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 sturdily 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 homeopathist 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,--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, and 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 within the channels of active discipline and

duty, missed its due career altogether, and what might have been the

poet, contracted into the humorist.

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, seated

on the height of the old Roman camp, with a volume of the Stratagems

of Polyaenus (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 Agricola and the scythed cars of Boadicea!

CHAPTER VI.

“It is never the same two hours together in this country,” said my Uncle

Roland, as, after dinner, or rather after dessert, we joined my mother

in the drawing-room.

Indeed, a cold, drizzling rain had come on within the last two hours,

and though it was July, it was as chilly as if it had been October. My

mother whispered to me, and I went out; in ten minutes more, the logs

(for we live in a wooded country) blazed merrily in the grate. Why could

not my mother have rung the bell and ordered the servant to light a

fire? My dear reader, Captain Roland was poor, and he made a capital

virtue of economy!

The two brothers drew their chairs near to the hearth, my father at the

left, my uncle at the right; and I and my mother sat down to “Fox and

Geese.”

Coffee came in,--one cup for the Captain, for the rest of the party

avoided that exciting beverage. And on that cup was a picture of--His

Grace the Duke of Wellington!

During our visit to the Roman camp my mother had borrowed Mr. Squills’s

chaise and driven over to our market-town, for the express purpose of

greeting the Captain’s eyes with the face of his old chief.

My uncle changed color, rose, lifted my mother’s hand to his lips, and

sat himself down again in silence.

“I have heard,” said the Captain after a pause, “that the Marquis of

Hastings, who is every inch a soldier and a gentleman,--and that is

saying not a little, for he measures seventy-five inches from the

crown to the sole,--when he received Louis XVIII. (then an exile) at

Donnington, fitted up his apartments exactly like those his Majesty had

occupied at the Tuileries. It was a kingly attention (my Lord Hastings,

you know, is sprung from the Plantagenets),--a kingly attention to a

king. It cost some money and made some noise. A woman can show the same

royal delicacy of heart in this bit of porcelain, and so quietly that we

men all think it a matter of course, brother Austin.”

“You are such a worshipper of women, Roland, that it is melancholy to

see you single. You must marry again!”

My uncle first smiled, then frowned, and lastly sighed somewhat heavily.

“Your time will pass slowly in your old tower, poor brother,” continued

my father, “with only your little girl for a companion.”

“And the past!” said my uncle; “the past, that mighty world--”

“Do you still read your old books of chivalry,--Froissart and the

Chronicles, Palmerin of England, and Amadis of Gaul?”

“Why,” said my uncle, reddening, “I have tried to improve myself with

studies a little more substantial. And,” he added with a sly smile,

“there will be your great book for many a long winter to come.”

“Um!” said my father, bashfully.

“Do you know,” quoth my uncle, “that Dame Primmins is a very intelligent

woman,--full of fancy, and a capital story-teller?”

“Is not she, uncle?” cried I, leaving my fox in the corner. “Oh, if you

could hear her tell the tale of King Arthur and the Enchanted Lake, or

the Grim White Woman!”

“I have already heard her tell both,” said my uncle.

“The deuce you have, brother! My dear, we must look to this. These

captains are dangerous gentlemen in an orderly household. Pray, where

could you have had the opportunity of such private communications with

Mrs. Primmins?”

“Once,” said my uncle, readily, “when I went into her room, while she

mended my stock; and once--” He stopped short, and looked down.

“Once when? Out with it.”

“When she was warming my bed,” said my uncle, in a half-whisper.

“Dear!” said my mother, innocently, “that’s how the sheets came by that

bad hole in the middle. I thought it was the warming-pan.”

“I am quite shocked!” faltered my uncle.

“You well may be,” said my father. “A woman who has been heretofore

above all suspicion! But come,” he said, seeing that my uncle looked

sad, and was no doubt casting up the probable price of twice six

yards of holland, “but come, you were always a famous rhapsodist or

tale-teller yourself. Come, Roland, let us have some story of

your own,--something which your experience has left strong in your

impressions.”

“Let us first have the candles,” said my mother.

The candles were brought, the curtains let down; we all drew our chairs

to the hearth. But in the interval my uncle had sunk into a gloomy

revery; and when we called upon him to begin, he seemed to shake off

with effort some recollections of pain.

“You ask me,” he said, “to tell you some tale which my own experience

has left deeply marked in my impressions,--I will tell you one, apart

from my own life, but which has often haunted me. It is sad and strange,

ma’am.”

“Ma’am, brother?” said my mother, reproachfully, letting her small hand

drop upon that which, large and sunburnt, the Captain waved towards her

as he spoke.

“Austin, you have married an angel!” said my uncle; and he was,

I believe, the only brother-in-law who ever made so hazardous an

assertion.

CHAPTER VII. MY UNCLE ROLAND’S TALE.

“It was in Spain--no matter where or how--that it was my fortune to

take prisoner a French officer of the same rank that I then held,--a

lieutenant; and there was so much similarity in our sentiments that we

became intimate friends,--the most intimate friend I ever had, sister,

out of this dear circle. He was a rough soldier, whom the world had not

well treated; but he never railed at the world, and maintained that he

had had his deserts. Honor was his idol, and the sense of honor paid him

for the loss of all else.

“We were both at that time volunteers in a foreign service,--in that

worst of service, civil war,--he on one side, I the other, both,

perhaps, disappointed in the cause we had severally espoused. There was

something similar, too, in our domestic relationships. He had a son--a

boy--who was all in life to him, next to his country and his duty. I

too had then such a son, though of fewer years.” (The Captain paused

an instant; we exchanged glances, and a stifling sensation of pain and

suspense was felt by all his listeners.) “We were accustomed, brother,

to talk of these children, to picture their future, to compare our

hopes and dreams. We hoped and dreamed alike. A short time sufficed to

establish this confidence. My prisoner was sent to head-quarters, and

soon afterwards exchanged.

“We met no more till last year. Being then at Paris, I inquired for my

old friend, and learned that he was living at R--, a few miles from the

capital. I went to visit him. I found his house empty and deserted. That

very day he had been led to prison, charged with a terrible crime. I saw

him in that prison, and from his own lips learned his story. His son had

been brought up, as he fondly believed, in the habits and principles of

honorable men, and having finished his education, came to reside with

him at R--. The young man was accustomed to go frequently to Paris. A

young Frenchman loves pleasure, sister; and pleasure is found at Paris.

The father thought it natural, and stripped his age of some comforts to

supply luxuries to the son’s youth.

“Shortly after the young man’s arrival, my friend perceived that he was

robbed. Moneys kept in his bureau were abstracted, he knew not how, nor

could guess by whom. It must be done in the night. He concealed himself

and watched. He saw a stealthy figure glide in, he saw a false

key applied to the lock; he started forward, seized the felon, and

recognized his son. What should the father have done? I do not ask you,

sister! I ask these men: son and father, I ask you.”

“Expelled him the house,” cried I.

“Done his duty, and reformed the unhappy wretch,” said my father. “Nemo

repente turpissinus semper fait,--No man is wholly bad all at once.”

“The father did as you would have advised, brother. He kept the youth;

he remonstrated with him: he did more,--he gave him the key of the

bureau. ‘Take what I have to give,’ said he; ‘I would rather be a beggar

than know my son a thief.’”

“Right! And the youth repented, and became a good man?” exclaimed my

father.

Captain Roland shook his head. “The youth promised amendment, and seemed

penitent. He spoke of the temptations of Paris, the gaming-table, and

what not. He gave up his daily visits to the capital. He seemed to apply

to study. Shortly after this, the neighborhood was alarmed by reports

of night robberies on the road. Men, masked and armed, plundered

travellers, and even broke into houses.

“The police were on the alert. One night an old brother officer knocked

at my friend’s door. It was late; the veteran (he was a cripple, by the

way, like myself,--strange coincidence!) was in bed. He came down in

haste, when his servant woke, and told him that his old friend, wounded

and bleeding, sought an asylum under his roof. The wound, however, was

slight. The guest had been attacked and robbed on the road. The next

morning the proper authority of the town was sent for. The plundered

man described his loss,--some billets of five hundred francs in a

pocketbook, on which was embroidered his name and coronet (he was a

vicomte). The guest stayed to dinner. Late in the forenoon, the son

looked in. The guest started to see him; my friend noticed his paleness.

Shortly after, on pretence of faintness, the guest retired to his room,

and sent for his host. ‘My friend,’ said he, ‘can you do me a favor? Go

to the magistrate and recall the evidence I have given.’

“‘Impossible,’ said the host. ‘What crotchet is this?’

“The guest shuddered. ‘Peste!’ said he, ‘I do not wish in my old age to

be hard on others. Who knows how the robber may have been tempted, and

who knows what relations he may have,--honest men, whom his crime would

degrade forever! Good heavens! if detected, it is the galleys, the

galleys!’

“And what then? The robber knew what he braved. ‘But did his father know

it?’ cried the guest.

“A light broke upon my unhappy comrade in arms; he caught his friend by

the hand: ‘You turned pale at my son’s sight,--where did you ever see

him before? Speak!’

“‘Last night on the road to Paris. The mask slipped aside. Call back my

evidence!’

“‘You are mistaken,’ said my friend, calmly. ‘I saw my son in his bed,

and blessed him, before I went to my own.’

“‘I will believe you,’ said the guest; ‘and never shall my hasty

suspicion pass my lips,--but call back the evidence.’

“The guest returned to Paris before dusk. The father conversed with his

son on the subject of his studies; he followed him to his room, waited

till he was in bed, and was then about to retire, when the youth said,

‘Father, you have forgotten your blessing.’

“The father went back, laid his hand on the boy’s head and prayed. He

was credulous--fathers are so! He was persuaded that his friend had been

deceived. He retired to rest, and fell asleep. He woke suddenly in the

middle of the night, and felt (I here quote his words)--‘I felt,’

said he, ‘as if a voice had awakened me,--a voice that said, “Rise and

search.” I rose at once, struck a light, and went to my son’s room. The

door was locked. I knocked once, twice, thrice no answer. I dared not

call aloud, lest I should rouse the servants. I went down the stairs, I

opened the back-door, I passed to the stables. My own horse was there,

not my son’s. My horse neighed; it was old, like myself,--my old charger

at Mont St. Jean. I stole back, I crept into the shadow of the wall by

my son’s door, and extinguished my light. I felt as if I were a thief

myself.’”

“Brother,” interrupted my mother, under her breath; “speak in your own

words, not in this wretched father’s. I know not why, but it would shock

me less.”

The Captain nodded.

“Before daybreak, my friend heard the back-door open gently; a foot

ascended the stair, a key grated in the door of the room close at hand:

the father glided through the dark into that chamber behind his unseen

son.

“He heard the clink of the tinder-box; a light was struck; it

spread over the room, but he had time to place himself behind the

window-curtain which was close at hand. The figure before him stood

a moment or so motionless, and seemed to listen, for it turned to the

right, to the left, its visage covered with the black, hideous mask

which is worn in carnivals. Slowly the mask was removed. Could that be

his son’s face,--the son of a brave man? It was pale and ghastly with

scoundrel fears; the base drops stood on the brow; the eye was haggard

and bloodshot. He looked as a coward looks when death stands before him.

“The youth walked, or rather skulked, to the secretaire, unlocked it,

opened a secret drawer, placed within it the contents of his pockets

and his frightful mask; the father approached softly, looked over his

shoulder, and saw in the drawer the pocketbook embroidered with his

friend’s name. Meanwhile, the son took out his pistols, uncocked them

cautiously, and was about also to secrete them, when his father arrested

his arm. ‘Robber, the use of these is yet to come!’

“The son’s knees knocked together, an exclamation for mercy burst from

his lips; but when, recovering the mere shock of his dastard nerves,

he perceived it was not the gripe of some hireling of the law, but a

father’s hand that had clutched his arm, the vile audacity which knows

fear only from a bodily cause, none from the awe of shame, returned to

him.

“Tush, sir!’ he said, ‘waste not time in reproaches, for, I fear, the

gendarmes are on my track. It is well that you are here; you can swear

that I have spent the night at home. Unhand me, old man; I have these

witnesses still to secrete,’ and he pointed to the garments wet and

dabbled with the mud of the roads. He had scarcely spoken when the walls

shook; there was the heavy clatter of hoofs on the ringing pavement

without.

“‘They come!’ cried the son. ‘Off, dotard! save your son from the

galleys.’

“‘The galleys, the galleys!’ said the father, staggering back; ‘it is

true; he said--“the galleys!”’

“There was a loud knocking at the gate. The gendarmes surrounded the

house. ‘Open, in the name of the law!’ No answer came, no door was

opened. Some of the gendarmes rode to the rear of the house, in which

was placed the stable yard. From the window of the son’s room the father

saw the sudden blaze of torches, the shadowy forms of the men-hunters.

He heard the clatter of arms as they swung themselves from their horses.

He heard a voice cry, ‘Yes, this is the robber’s gray horse,--see, it

still reeks with sweat!’ And behind and in front, at either door, again

came the knocking, and again the shout, ‘Open, in the name of the law!’

“Then lights began to gleam from the casements of the neighboring

houses; then the space filled rapidly with curious wonderers startled

from their sleep: the world was astir, and the crowd came round to know

what crime or what shame had entered the old soldier’s home.

“Suddenly, within, there was heard the report of a fire-arm; and a

minute or so afterwards the front door was opened, and the soldier

appeared.

“‘Enter,’ he said to the gendarmes: ‘what would you?’

“‘We seek a robber who is within your walls.’

“I know it; mount and find him: I will lead the way.’

“He ascended the stairs; he threw open his son’s room: the officers of

justice poured in, and on the floor lay the robber’s corpse.

“They looked at each other in amazement. ‘Take what is left you,’ said

the father. ‘Take the dead man rescued from the galleys; take the living

man on whose hands rests the dead man’s blood!’

“I was present at my friend’s trial. The facts had become known

beforehand. He stood there with his gray hair, and his mutilated limbs,

and the deep scar on his visage, and the Cross of the Legion of Honor on

his breast; and when he had told his tale, he ended with these words: ‘I

have saved the son whom I reared for France from a doom that would have

spared the life to brand it with disgrace. Is this a crime? I give

you my life in exchange for my son’s disgrace. Does my country need a

victim? I have lived for my country’s glory, and I can die contented to

satisfy its laws, sure that, if you blame me, you will not despise; sure

that the hands that give me to the headsman will scatter flowers over my

grave. Thus I confess all. I, a soldier, look round amongst a nation of

soldiers; and in the name of the star which glitters on my breast I dare

the fathers of France to condemn me!’

“They acquitted the soldier,--at least they gave a verdict answering to

what in our courts is called ‘justifiable homicide.’ A shout rose in the

court which no ceremonial voice could still; the crowd would have borne

him in triumph to his house, but his look repelled such vanities. To his

house he returned indeed; and the day afterwards they found him dead,

beside the cradle in which his first prayer had been breathed over his

sinless child. Now, father and son, I ask you, do you condemn that man?”

CHAPTER VIII.

My father took three strides up and down the room, and then, halting on

his hearth, and facing his brother, he thus spoke: “I condemn his deed,

Roland! At best he was but a haughty egotist. I understand why Brutus

should slay his sons. By that sacrifice he saved his country! What did

this poor dupe of an exaggeration save? Nothing but his own name. He

could not lift the crime from his son’s soul, nor the dishonor from his

son’s memory. He could but gratify his own vain pride; and insensibly to

himself, his act was whispered to him by the fiend that ever whispers

to the heart of man, ‘Dread men’s opinions more than God’s law!’ Oh, my

dear brother! what minds like yours should guard against the most is

not the meanness of evil,--it is the evil that takes false nobility, by

garbing itself in the royal magnificence of good.” My uncle walked to

the window, opened it, looked out a moment, as if to draw in fresh air,

closed it gently, and came back again to his seat; but during the short

time the window had been left open, a moth flew in.

“Tales like these,” renewed my father, pityingly,--“whether told by some

great tragedian, or in thy simple style, my brother,--tales like these

have their uses: they penetrate the heart to make it wiser; but all

wisdom is meek, my Roland. They invite us to put the question to

ourselves that thou hast asked, ‘Can we condemn this man?’ and reason

answers as I have answered, ‘We pity the man, we condemn the deed.’

We--take care, my love! that moth will be in the candle. We--whisk!

whisk!” and my father stopped to drive away the moth. My uncle turned,

and taking his handkerchief from the lower part of his face, of which

he had wished to conceal the workings, he flapped away the moth from the

flame. My mother moved the candles from the moth.

I tried to catch the moth in my father’s straw-hat. The deuce was in the

moth! it baffled us all, now circling against the ceiling, now sweeping

down at the fatal lights. As if by a simultaneous impulse, my father

approached one candle, my uncle approached the other; and just as the

moth was wheeling round and round, irresolute which to choose for its

funeral pyre, both candles were put out. The fire had burned down low in

the grate, and in the sudden dimness my father’s soft, sweet voice came

forth, as if from an invisible being: “We leave ourselves in the dark

to save a moth from the flame, brother! Shall we do less for our

fellow-men? Extinguish, oh! humanely extinguish, the light of our reason

when the darkness more favors our mercy.” Before the lights were relit,

my uncle had left the room; his brother followed him. My mother and I

drew near to each other and talked in whispers.

PART IV.

CHAPTER I.

I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning,

day comes to him with a virgin’s love, full of bloom and purity and

freshness. The youth of Nature is contagious, like the gladness of a

happy child. I doubt if any man can be called “old” so long as he is

an early riser and an early walker. And oh, youth!--take my word of

it--youth in dressing-gown and slippers, dawdling over breakfast at

noon, is a very decrepit, ghastly image of that youth which sees the

sun blush over the mountains, and the dews sparkle upon blossoming

hedgerows.

Passing by my father’s study, I was surprised to see the windows

unclosed; surprised more, on looking in, to see him bending over his

books,--for I had never before known him study till after the morning

meal. Students are not usually early risers, for students, alas!

whatever their age, are rarely young. Yes, the Great Book must be

getting on in serious earnest. It was no longer dalliance with learning;

this was work.

I passed through the gates into the road. A few of the cottages were

giving signs of returning life, but it was not yet the hour for labor,

and no “Good morning, sir,” greeted me on the road. Suddenly at a turn,

which an over-hanging beech-tree had before concealed, I came full upon

my Uncle Roland.

“What! you, sir? So early? Hark, the clock is striking five!”

“Not later! I have walked well for a lame man. It must be more than four

miles to--and back.”

“You have been to--? Not on business? No soul would be up.”

“Yes, at inns there is always some one up. Hostlers never sleep! I have

been to order my humble chaise and pair. I leave you today, nephew.”

“Ah, uncle, we have offended you! It was my folly, that cursed print--”

“Pooh!” said my uncle, quickly. “Offended me, boy? I defy you!” and he

pressed my hand roughly.

“Yet this sudden determination! It was but yesterday, at the Roman Camp,

that you planned an excursion with my father, to C------ Castle.”

“Never depend upon a whimsical man. I must be in London tonight.”

“And return to-morrow?”

“I know not when,” said my uncle, gloomily; and he was silent for some

moments. At length, leaning less lightly on my arm, he continued: “Young

man, you have pleased me. I love that open, saucy brow of yours, on

which Nature has written ‘Trust me.’ I love those clear eyes, that look

one manfully in the face. I must know more of you--much of you. You must

come and see me some day or other in your ancestors’ ruined keep.”

“Come! that I will. And you shall show me the old tower--”

“And the traces of the outworks!” cried my uncle, flourishing his stick.

“And the pedigree--”

“Ay, and your great-great-grandfather’s armor, which he wore at Marston

Moor--”

“Yes, and the brass plate in the church, uncle.”

“The deuce is in the boy! Come here, come here: I’ve three minds to

break your head, sir!”

“It is a pity somebody had not broken the rascally printer’s, before he

had the impudence to disgrace us by having a family, uncle.”

Captain Roland tried hard to frown, but he could not. “Pshaw!” said he,

stopping, and taking snuff. “The world of the dead is wide; why should

the ghosts jostle us?”

“We can never escape the ghosts, uncle. They haunt us always. We cannot

think or act, but the soul of some man, who has lived before, points the

way. The dead never die, especially since--”

“Since what, boy? You speak well.”

“Since our great ancestor introduced printing,” said I, majestically.

My uncle whistled “Malbrouk s’en va-t-en guerre.”

I had not the heart to plague him further.

“Peace!” said I, creeping cautiously within the circle of the stick.

“No! I forewarn you--”

“Peace! and describe to me my little cousin, your pretty daughter,--for

pretty I am sure she is.”

“Peace,” said my uncle, smiling. “But you must come and judge for

yourself.”

CHAPTER II.

Uncle Roland was gone. Before he went, he was closeted for an hour with

my father, who then accompanied him to the gate; and we all crowded

round him as he stepped into his chaise. When the Captain was gone, I

tried to sound my father as to the cause of so sudden a departure. But

my father was impenetrable in all that related to his brother’s secrets.

Whether or not the Captain had ever confided to him the cause of his

displeasure with his son,--a mystery which much haunted me,--my father

was mute on that score both to my mother and myself. For two or three

days, however, Mr. Caxton was evidently unsettled. He did not even take

to his Great Work, but walked much alone, or accompanied only by the

duck, and without even a book in his hand. But by degrees the scholarly

habits returned to him; my mother mended his pens, and the work went on.

For my part, left much to myself, especially in the mornings, I began to

muse restlessly over the future. Ungrateful that I was, the happiness of

home ceased to content me. I heard afar the roar of the great world, and

roved impatient by the shore.

At length, one evening, my father, with some modest hums and ha’s, and

an unaffected blush on his fair forehead, gratified a prayer frequently

urged on him, and read me some portions of the Great Work. I cannot

express the feelings this lecture created,--they were something akin

to awe. For the design of this book was so immense, and towards its

execution a learning so vast and various had administered, that it

seemed to me as if a spirit had opened to me a new world, which had

always been before my feet, but which my own human blindness had

hitherto concealed from me. The unspeakable patience with which all

these materials had been collected, year after year; the ease with which

now, by the calm power of genius, they seemed of themselves to fall

into harmony and system; the unconscious humility with which the scholar

exposed the stores of a laborious life,--all combined to rebuke my

own restlessness and ambition, while they filled me with a pride in my

father which saved my wounded egotism from a pang. Here, indeed, was one

of those books which embrace an existence; like the Dictionary of Bayle,

or the History of Gibbon, or the “Fasti Hellenici” of Clinton, it was

a book to which thousands of books had contributed, only to make the

originality of the single mind more bold and clear. Into the furnace all

vessels of gold, of all ages, had been cast; but from the mould came the

new coin, with its single stamp. And, happily, the subject of the work

did not forbid to the writer the indulgence of his naive, peculiar irony

of humor, so quiet, yet so profound. My father’s book was the “History

of Human Error.” It was, therefore, the moral history of mankind,

told with truth and earnestness, yet with an arch, unmalignant smile.

Sometimes, indeed, the smile drew tears. But in all true humor lies its

germ, pathos. Oh! by the goddess Moria, or Folly, but he was at home in

his theme. He viewed man first in the savage state, preferring in this

the positive accounts of voyagers and travellers to the vague myths

of antiquity and the dreams of speculators on our pristine state. From

Australia and Abyssinia he drew pictures of mortality unadorned, as

lively as if he had lived amongst Bushmen and savages all his life.

Then he crossed over the Atlantic, and brought before you the American

Indian, with his noble nature, struggling into the dawn of civilization,

when Friend Penn cheated him out of his birthright, and the Anglo-Saxon

drove him back into darkness. He showed both analogy and contrast

between this specimen of our kind and others equally apart from the

extremes of the savage state and the cultured,--the Arab in his tent,

the Teuton in his forests, the Greenlander in his boat, the Finn in his

reindeer car. Up sprang the rude gods of the North and the resuscitated

Druidism, passing from its earliest templeless belief into the later

corruptions of crommell and idol. Up sprang, by their side, the Saturn

of the Phoenicians, the mystic Budh of India, the elementary deities of

the Pelasgian, the Naith and Serapis of Egypt, the Ormuzd of Persia, the

Bel of Babylon, the winged genii of the graceful Etruria. How nature and

life shaped the religion; how the religion shaped the manners; how, and

by what influences, some tribes were formed for progress; how others

were destined to remain stationary, or be swallowed up in war and

slavery by their brethren,--was told with a precision clear and strong

as the voice of Fate. Not only an antiquarian and philologist, but an

anatomist and philosopher, my father brought to bear on all these grave

points the various speculations involved in the distinction of races.

He showed how race in perfection is produced, up to a certain point, by

admixture; how all mixed races have been the most intelligent; how, in

proportion as local circumstance and religious faith permitted the

early fusion of different tribes, races improved and quickened into the

refinements of civilization. He tracked the progress and dispersion

of the Hellenes from their mythical cradle in Thessaly, and showed how

those who settled near the sea-shores, and were compelled into

commerce and intercourse with strangers, gave to Greece her marvellous

accomplishments in arts and letters,--the flowers of the ancient world.

How others, like the Spartans; dwelling evermore in a camp, on guard

against their neighbors, and rigidly preserving their Dorian purity of

extraction, contributed neither artists, nor poets, nor philosophers to

the golden treasure-house of mind. He took the old race of the Celts,

Cimry, or Cimmerians. He compared the Celt who, as in Wales, the Scotch

Highlands, in Bretagne, and in uncomprehended Ireland, retains his old

characteristics and purity of breed, with the Celt whose blood, mixed by

a thousand channels, dictates from Paris the manners and revolutions

of the world. He compared the Norman, in his ancient Scandinavian home,

with that wonder of intelligence and chivalry into which he grew, fused

imperceptibly with the Frank, the Goth, and the Anglo-Saxon. He compared

the Saxon, stationary in the land of Horsa, with the colonist and

civilizers of the globe as he becomes when he knows not through what

channels--French, Flemish, Danish, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish--he draws

his sanguine blood. And out from all these speculations, to which I do

such hurried and scanty justice, he drew the blessed truth, that carries

hope to the land of the Caffre, the but of the Bushman,--that there is

nothing in the flattened skull and the ebon aspect that rejects God’s

law, improvement; that by the same principle which raises the dog,

the lowest of the animals in its savage state, to the highest after

man--viz., admixture of race--you can elevate into nations of majesty

and power the outcasts of humanity, now your compassion or your scorn.

But when my father got into the marrow of his theme; when, quitting

these preliminary discussions, he fell pounce amongst the would-be

wisdom of the wise; when he dealt with civilization itself, its schools,

and porticos, and academies; when he bared the absurdities couched

beneath the colleges of the Egyptians and the Symposia of the Greeks;

when he showed that, even in their own favorite pursuit of metaphysics,

the Greeks were children, and in their own more practical region of

politics, the Romans were visionaries and bunglers; when, following the

stream of error through the Middle Ages, he quoted the puerilities of

Agrippa, the crudities of Cardan, and passed, with his calm smile,

into the salons of the chattering wits of Paris in the eighteenth

century,--oh! then his irony was that of Lucian, sweetened by the gentle

spirit of Erasmus. For not even here was my father’s satire of the

cheerless and Mephistophelian school. From this record of error he drew

forth the grandeurs of truth. He showed how earnest men never think

in vain, though their thoughts may be errors. He proved how, in vast

cycles, age after age, the human mind marches on, like the ocean,

receding here, but there advancing; how from the speculations of the

Greek sprang all true philosophy; how from the institutions of the Roman

rose all durable systems of government; how from the robust follies

of the North came the glory of chivalry, and the modern delicacies of

honor, and the sweet, harmonizing influences of woman. He tracked the

ancestry of our Sidneys and Bayards from the Hengists, Genserics,

and Attilas. Full of all curious and quaint anecdote, of original

illustration, of those niceties of learning which spring from a taste

cultivated to the last exquisite polish, the book amused and allured

and charmed; and erudition lost its pedantry, now in the simplicity of

Montaigne, now in the penetration of La Bruyere. He lived in each time

of which he wrote, and the time lived again in him. Ah! what a writer

of romances he would have been if--if what? If he had had as sad an

experience of men’s passions as he had the happy intuition into their

humors. But he who would see the mirror of the shore must look where

it is cast on the river, not the ocean. The narrow stream reflects the

gnarled tree and the pausing herd and the village spire and the romance

of the landscape. But the sea reflects only the vast outline of the

headland and the lights of the eternal heaven.

CHAPTER III.

“It is Lombard Street to a China orange,” quoth Uncle Jack.

“Are the odds in favor of fame against failure so great? You do not

speak, I fear, from experience, brother Jack,” answered my father, as he

stooped down to tickle the duck under the left ear.

“But Jack Tibbets is not Augustine Caxton. Jack Tibbets is not a

scholar, a genius, a wond--”

“Stop!” cried my father.

“After all,” said Mr. Squills, “though I am no flatterer, Mr. Tibbets

is not so far out. That part of your book which compares the crania or

skulls of the different races is superb. Lawrence or Dr. Prichard could

not have done the thing more neatly. Such a book must not be lost to the

world; and I agree with Mr. Tibbets that you should publish as soon as

possible.”

“It is one thing to write, and another to publish,” said my father,

irresolutely. “When one considers all the great men who have published;

when one thinks one is going to intrude one’s self audaciously into the

company of Aristotle and Bacon, of Locke, of Herder, of all the grave

philosophers who bend over Nature with brows weighty with thought,--one

may well pause and--”

“Pooh!” interrupted Uncle Jack, “science is not a club, it is an ocean;

it is open to the cock-boat as the frigate. One man carries across it

a freightage of ingots, another may fish there for herrings. Who can

exhaust the sea, who say to Intellect, ‘The deeps of philosophy are

preoccupied’?”

“Admirable!” cried Squills.

“So it is really your advice, my friends,” said my father, who seemed

struck by Uncle Jack’s eloquent illustrations, “that I should desert my

household gods, remove to London, since my own library ceases to supply

my wants, take lodgings near the British Museum, and finish off one

volume, at least, incontinently.”

“It is a duty you owe to your country,” said Uncle Jack, solemnly.

“And to yourself,” urged Squills. “One must attend to the natural

evacuations of the brain. Ah! you may smile, sir, but I have observed

that if a man has much in his head, he must give it vent, or it

oppresses him; the whole system goes wrong. From being abstracted, he

grows stupefied. The weight of the pressure affects the nerves. I would

not even guarantee you from a stroke of paralysis.”

“Oh, Austin!” cried my mother tenderly, and throwing her arms round my

father’s neck.

“Come, sir, you are conquered,” said I.

“And what is to become of you, Sisty?” asked my father. “Do you go with

us, and unsettle your mind for the university?”

“My uncle has invited me to his castle; and in the mean while I will

stay here, fag hard, and take care of the duck.”

“All alone?” said my mother.

“No. All alone! Why, Uncle Jack will come here as often as ever, I

hope.”

Uncle Jack shook his head.

“No, my boy, I must go to town with your father. You don’t understand

these things. I shall see the booksellers for him. I know how these

gentlemen are to be dealt with. I shall prepare the literary circles for

the appearance of the book. In short, it is a sacrifice of interest,

I know; my Journal will suffer. But friendship and my country’s good

before all things.”

“Dear Jack!” said my mother, affectionately.

“I cannot suffer it,” cried my father. “You are making a good

income. You are doing well where you are, and as to seeing the

booksellers,--why, when the work is ready, you can come to town for a

week, and settle that affair.”

“Poor dear Austin,” said Uncle Jack, with an air of superiority and

compassion. “A week! Sir, the advent of a book that is to succeed

requires the preparation of months. Pshaw! I am no genius, but I am a

practical man. I know what’s what. Leave me alone.”

But my father continued obstinate, and Uncle Jack at last ceased to

urge the matter. The journey to fame and London was now settled, but my

father would not hear of my staying behind.

No, Pisistratus must needs go also to town and see the world; the duck

would take care of itself.

CHAPTER IV.

We had taken the precaution to send, the day before, to secure our due

complement of places--four in all, including one for Mrs. Primmins--in,

or upon, the fast family coach called the “Sun,” which had lately been

set up for the special convenience of the neighborhood.

This luminary, rising in a town about seven miles distant from us,

described at first a very erratic orbit amidst the contiguous villages

before it finally struck into the high-road of enlightenment, and thence

performed its journey, in the full eyes of man, at the majestic pace of

six miles and a half an hour. My father with his pockets full of books,

and a quarto of “Gebelin on the Primitive World,” for light reading,

under his arm; my mother with a little basket containing sandwiches, and

biscuits of her own baking; Mrs. Primmins, with a new umbrella purchased

for the occasion, and a bird-cage containing a canary endeared to

her not more by song than age and a severe pip through which she had

successfully nursed it; and I myself,--waited at the gates to welcome

the celestial visitor. The gardener, with a wheel-barrow full of boxes

and portmanteaus, stood a little in the van; and the footman, who was

to follow when lodgings had been found, had gone to a rising eminence to

watch the dawning of the expected “Sun,” and apprise us of its approach

by the concerted signal of a handkerchief fixed to a stick.

The quaint old house looked at us mournfully from all its deserted

windows. The litter before its threshold and in its open hall; wisps of

straw or hay that had been used for packing; baskets and boxes that had

been examined and rejected; others, corded and piled, reserved to follow

with the footman; and the two heated and hurried serving-women left

behind, standing halfway between house and garden-gate, whispering to

each other, and looking as if they had not slept for weeks,--gave to a

scene, usually so trim and orderly, an aspect of pathetic abandonment

and desolation. The Genius of the place seemed to reproach us. I felt

the omens were against us, and turned my earnest gaze from the haunts

behind with a sigh, as the coach now drew up with all its grandeur. An

important personage, who, despite the heat of the day, was enveloped

in a vast superfluity of belcher, in the midst of which galloped a gilt

fox, and who rejoiced in the name of “guard,” descended to inform us

politely that only three places, two inside and one out, were at our

disposal, the rest having been pre-engaged a fortnight before our orders

were received.

Now, as I knew that Mrs. Primmins was indispensable to the comforts of

my honored parents (the more so as she had once lived in London, and

knew all its ways), I suggested that she should take the outside seat,

and that I should perform the journey on foot,--a primitive mode of

transport which has its charms to a young man with stout limbs and gay

spirits. The guard’s outstretched arm left my mother little time to

oppose this proposition, to which my father assented with a silent

squeeze of the hand. And having promised to join them at a family hotel

near the Strand, to which Mr. Squills had recommended them as peculiarly

genteel and quiet, and waved my last farewell to my poor mother, who

continued to stretch her meek face out of the window till the coach was

whirled off in a cloud like one of the Homeric heroes, I turned

within, to put up a few necessary articles in a small knapsack which I

remembered to have seen in the lumber-room, and which had appertained

to my maternal grandfather; and with that on my shoulder, and a strong

staff in my hand, I set off towards the great city at as brisk a pace as

if I were only bound to the next village. Accordingly, about noon I was

both tired and hungry; and seeing by the wayside one of those pretty

inns yet peculiar to England, but which, thanks to the railways, will

soon be amongst the things before the Flood, I sat down at a table under

some clipped limes, unbuckled my knapsack, and ordered my simple fare

with the dignity of one who, for the first time in his life, bespeaks

his own dinner and pays for it out of his own pocket.

While engaged on a rasher of bacon and a tankard of what the landlord

called “No mistake,” two pedestrians, passing the same road which I

had traversed, paused, cast a simultaneous look at my occupation, and

induced no doubt by its allurements, seated themselves under the same

lime-trees, though at the farther end of the table. I surveyed the

new-comers with the curiosity natural to my years.

The elder of the two might have attained the age of thirty, though

sundry deep lines, and hues formerly florid and now faded, speaking of

fatigue, care, or dissipation, might have made him look somewhat older

than he was. There was nothing very prepossessing in his appearance. He

was dressed with a pretension ill suited to the costume appropriate to

a foot-traveller. His coat was pinched and padded; two enormous pins,

connected by a chain, decorated a very stiff stock of blue satin dotted

with yellow stars; his hands were cased in very dingy gloves which had

once been straw-colored, and the said hands played with a whalebone

cane surmounted by a formidable knob, which gave it the appearance of

a “life-preserver.” As he took off a white napless hat, which he

wiped with great care and affection with the sleeve of his right arm,

a profusion of stiff curls instantly betrayed the art of man. Like

my landlord’s ale, in that wig there was “no mistake;” it was brought

(after the fashion of the wigs we see in the popular effigies of George

IV. in his youth), low over his fore-head, and was raised at the top.

The wig had been oiled, and the oil had imbibed no small quantity of

dust; oil and dust had alike left their impression on the forehead and

cheeks of the wig’s proprietor. For the rest, the expression of his face

was somewhat impudent and reckless, but not without a certain drollery

in the corners of his eyes.

The younger man was apparently about my own age,--a year or two older,

perhaps, judging rather from his set and sinewy frame than his boyish

countenance. And this last, boyish as it was, could not fail to command

the attention even of the most careless observer. It had not only the

darkness, but the character of the gipsy face, with large, brilliant

eyes, raven hair, long and wavy, but not curling; the features were

aquiline, but delicate, and when he spoke he showed teeth dazzling

as pearls. It was impossible not to admire the singular beauty of

the countenance; and yet it had that expression, at once stealthy and

fierce, which war with society has stamped upon the lineaments of the

race of which it reminded me. But, withal, there was somewhat of the air

of a gentleman in this young wayfarer. His dress consisted of a black

velveteen shooting-jacket, or rather short frock, with a broad leathern

strap at the waist, loose white trousers, and a foraging cap, which

he threw carelessly on the table as he wiped his brow. Turning round

impatiently, and with some haughtiness, from his companion, he surveyed

me with a quick, observant flash of his piercing eyes, and then

stretched himself at length on the bench, and appeared either to dose or

muse, till, in obedience to his companion’s orders, the board was spread

with all the cold meats the larder could supply.

“Beef!” said his companion, screwing a pinchbeck glass into his right

eye. “Beef,--mottled, cowey; humph! Lamb,--oldish, rawish, muttony;

humph! Pie,--stalish. Veal?--no, pork. Ah! what will you have?”

“Help yourself,” replied the young man peevishly, as he sat up, looked

disdainfully at the viands, and, after a long pause, tasted first

one, then the other, with many shrugs of the shoulders and muttered

exclamations of discontent. Suddenly he looked up, and called for

brandy; and to my surprise, and I fear admiration, he drank nearly half

a tumblerful of that poison undiluted, with a composure that spoke of

habitual use.

“Wrong!” said his companion, drawing the bottle to himself, and mixing

the alcohol in careful proportions with water. “Wrong! coats of stomach

soon wear out with that kind of clothes-brush. Better stick to the

‘yeasty foam,’ as sweet Will says. That young gentleman sets you a

good example,” and therewith the speaker nodded at me familiarly.

Inexperienced as I was, I surmised at once that it was his intention to

make acquaintance with the neighbor thus saluted. I was not deceived.

“Anything to tempt you, sir?” asked this social personage after a short

pause, and describing a semicircle with the point of his knife.

“I thank you, sir, but I have dined.”

“What then? ‘Break out into a second course of mischief,’ as the Swan

recommends,--Swan of Avon, sir! No? ‘Well, then, I charge you with this

cup of sack.’ Are you going far, if I may take the liberty to ask?”

“To London.”

“Oh!” said the traveller, while his young companion lifted his eyes; and

I was again struck with their remarkable penetration and brilliancy.

“London is the best place in the world for a lad of spirit. See life

there,--‘glass of fashion and mould of form.’ Fond of the play, sir?”

“I never saw one.”

“Possible!” cried the gentleman, dropping the handle of his knife,

and bringing up the point horizontally; “then, young man,” he added

solemnly, “you have,--but I won’t say what you have to see. I won’t

say,--no, not if you could cover this table with golden guineas, and

exclaim, with the generous ardor so engaging in youth, ‘Mr. Peacock,

these are yours if you will only say what I have to see!’”

I laughed outright. May I be forgiven for the boast, but I had the

reputation at school of a pleasant laugh. The young man’s face grew dark

at the sound; he pushed back his plate and sighed.

“Why,” continued his friend, “my companion here, who, I suppose, is

about your own age, he could tell you what a play is,--he could tell

you what life is. He has viewed the manners of the town; ‘perused the

traders,’ as the Swan poetically remarks. Have you not, my lad, eh?”

Thus directly appealed to, the boy looked up with a smile of scorn on

his lips,--

“Yes, I know what life is, and I say that life, like poverty, has

strange bed-fellows. Ask me what life is now, and I say a melodrama; ask

me what it is twenty years hence, and I shall say--”

“A farce?” put in his comrade.

“No, a tragedy,--or comedy as Moliere wrote it.”

“And how is that?” I asked, interested and somewhat surprised at the

tone of my contemporary.

“Where the play ends in the triumph of the wittiest rogue. My friend

here has no chance!”

“‘Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley,’ hem--yes, Hal Peacock may be witty,

but he is no rogue.”

“This was not exactly my meaning,” said the boy, dryly.

“‘A fico for your meaning,’ as the Swan says.--Hallo, you sir! Bully

Host, clear the table--fresh tumblers--hot water--sugar--lemon--and--The

bottle’s out! Smoke, sir?” and Mr. Peacock offered me a cigar.

Upon my refusal, he carefully twirled round a very uninviting specimen

of some fabulous havanna, moistened it all over, as a boa-constrictor

may do the ox he prepares for deglutition, bit off one end, and lighting

the other from a little machine for that purpose which he drew from

his pocket, he was soon absorbed in a vigorous effort (which the

damp inherent in the weed long resisted) to poison the surrounding

atmosphere. Therewith the young gentleman, either from emulation or

in self-defence, extracted from his own pouch a cigar-case of notable

elegance,--being of velvet, embroidered apparently by some fair hand,

for “From Juliet” was very legibly worked thereon,--selected a cigar of

better appearance than that in favor with his comrade, and seemed quite

as familiar with the tobacco as he had been with the brandy.

“Fast, sir, fast lad that,” quoth Mr. Peacock, in the short gasps

which his resolute struggle with his uninviting victim alone permitted;

“nothing but [puff, puff] your true [suck, suck] syl--syl--sylva--does

for him. Out, by the Lord! the ‘jaws of darkness have devoured it up;’”

and again Mr. Peacock applied to his phosphoric machine. This time

patience and perseverance succeeded, and the heart of the cigar

responded by a dull red spark (leaving the sides wholly untouched) to

the indefatigable ardor of its wooer.

This feat accomplished, Mr. Peacock exclaimed triumphantly: “And now,

what say you, my lads, to a game at cards? Three of us,--whist and

a dummy; nothing better, eh?” As he spoke, he produced from his

coat-pocket a red silk handkerchief, a bunch of keys, a nightcap, a

tooth-brush, a piece of shaving-soap, four lumps of sugar, the remains

of a bun, a razor, and a pack of cards. Selecting the last, and

returning its motley accompaniments to the abyss whence they had

emerged, he turned up, with a jerk of his thumb and finger, the knave

of clubs, and placing it on the top of the rest, slapped the cards

emphatically on the table.

“You are very good, but I don’t know whist,” said I.

“Not know whist--not been to a play--not smoke! Then pray tell me, young

man,” said he majestically, and with a frown, “what on earth you do

know.”

Much consternated by this direct appeal, and greatly ashamed of

my ignorance of the cardinal points of erudition in Mr. Peacock’s

estimation, I hung my head and looked down.

“That is right,” renewed Mr. Peacock, more benignly; “you have the

ingenuous shame of youth. It is promising, sir; ‘lowliness is young

ambition’s ladder,’ as the Swan says. Mount the first step, and learn

whist,--sixpenny points to begin with.”

Notwithstanding any newness in actual life, I had had the good fortune

to learn a little of the way before me, by those much-slandered guides

called novels,--works which are often to the inner world what maps are

to the outer; and sundry recollections of “Gil Blas” and the “Vicar of

Wakefield” came athwart me. I had no wish to emulate the worthy Moses,

and felt that I might not have even the shagreen spectacles to boast of

in my negotiations with this new Mr. Jenkinson. Accordingly, shaking

my head, I called for my bill. As I took out my purse,--knit by my

mother,--with one gold piece in one corner, and sundry silver ones in

the other, I saw that the eyes of Mr. Peacock twinkled.

“Poor spirit, sir! poor spirit, young man! ‘This avarice sticks deep,’

as the Swan beautifully observes. ‘Nothing venture, nothing have.’”

“Nothing have, nothing venture,” I returned, plucking up spirit.

“Nothing have! Young sir, do you doubt my solidity--my capital--my

‘golden joys’?”

“Sir, I spoke of myself. I am not rich enough to gamble.”

“Gamble!” exclaimed Mr. Peacock, in virtuous indignation--“gamble! what

do you mean, sir? You insult me!” and he rose threateningly, and slapped

his white hat on his wig. “Pshaw! let him alone, Hal,” said the boy,

contemptuously. “Sir, if he is impertinent, thrash him.” (This was to

me.) “Impertinent! thrash!” exclaimed Mr. Peacock, waxing very red; but

catching the sneer on his companion’s lip, he sat down, and subsided

into sullen silence.

Meanwhile I paid my bill. This duty--rarely a cheerful one--performed,

I looked round for my knapsack, and perceived that it was in the

boy’s hands. He was very coolly reading the address, which, in case

of accidents, I prudently placed on it: “Pisistratus Caxton,

Esq.,--Hotel,--Street, Strand.”

I took my knapsack from him, more surprised at such a breach of good

manners in a young gentleman who knew life so well, than I should have

been at a similar error on the part of Mr. Peacock. He made no apology,

but nodded farewell, and stretched himself at full length on the bench.

Mr. Peacock, now absorbed in a game of patience, vouchsafed no return

to my parting salutation, and in another moment I was alone on the

high-road. My thoughts turned long upon the young man I had left; mixed

with a sort of instinctive compassionate foreboding of an ill future for

one with such habits and in such companionship, I felt an involuntary

admiration, less even for his good looks than his ease, audacity, and

the careless superiority he assumed over a comrade so much older than

himself.

The day twas far gone when I saw the spires of a town at which I

intended to rest for the night. The horn of a coach behind made me turn

my head, and as the vehicle passed me, I saw on the outside Mr. Peacock,

still struggling with a cigar,--it could scarcely be the same,--and

his young friend stretched on the roof amongst the luggage, leaning his

handsome head on his hand, and apparently unobservant both of me and

every one else.

CHAPTER V.

I am apt--judging egotistically, perhaps, from my own experience--to

measure a young man’s chance of what is termed practical success in

life by what may seem at first two very vulgar qualities; viz., his

inquisitiveness and his animal vivacity. A curiosity which springs

forward to examine everything new to his information; a nervous

activity, approaching to restlessness, which rarely allows bodily

fatigue to interfere with some object in view,--constitute, in my mind,

very profitable stock-in-hand to begin the world with.

Tired as I was, after I had performed my ablutions and refreshed

myself in the little coffee-room of the inn at which I put up, with the

pedestrian’s best beverage, familiar and oft calumniated tea, I could

not resist the temptation of the broad, bustling street, which, lighted

with gas, shone on me through the dim windows of the coffee-room. I had

never before seen a large town, and the contrast of lamp-lit, busy night

in the streets, with sober, deserted night in the lanes and fields,

struck me forcibly.

I sauntered out, therefore, jostling and jostled, now gazing at the

windows, now hurried along the tide of life, till I found myself before

a cookshop, round which clustered a small knot of housewives, citizens,

and hungry-looking children. While contemplating this group, and

marvelling how it comes to pass that the staple business of earth’s

majority is how, when, and where to eat, my ear was struck with “‘In

Troy there lies the scene,’ as the illustrious Will remarks.”

Looking round, I perceived Mr. Peacock pointing his stick towards an

open doorway next to the cookshop, the hall beyond which was lighted

with gas, while painted in black letters on a pane of glass over the

door was the word “Billiards.”

Suiting the action to the word, the speaker plunged at once into the

aperture, and vanished. The boy-companion was following more slowly,

when his eye caught mine. A slight blush came over his dark cheek; he

stopped, and leaning against the door-jambs, gazed on me hard and long

before he said: “Well met again, sir! You find it hard to amuse yourself

in this dull place; the nights are long out of London.”

“Oh!” said I, ingenuously, “everything here amuses me,--the lights, the

shops, the crowd; but, then, to me everything is new.”

The youth came from his lounging-place and moved on, as if inviting

me to walk; while he answered, rather with bitter sullenness than the

melancholy his words expressed,--

“One thing, at least, cannot be new to you,--it is an old truth with us

before we leave the nursery: ‘Whatever is worth having must be bought;’

ergo, he who cannot buy, has nothing worth having.”

“I don’t think,” said I, wisely, “that the things best worth having can

be bought at all. You see that poor dropsical jeweller standing before

his shop-door: his shop is the finest in the street, and I dare say he

would be very glad to give it to you or me in return for our good health

and strong legs. Oh, no! I think with my father: ‘All that are worth

having are given to all,’--that is, Nature and labor.”

“Your father says that; and you go by what your father says? Of course,

all fathers have preached that, and many other good doctrines, since

Adam preached to Cain; but I don’t see that the fathers have found their

sons very credulous listeners.”

“So much the worse for the sons,” said I, bluntly. “Nature,” continued

my new acquaintance, without attending to my ejaculation,--“Nature

indeed does give us much, and Nature also orders each of us how to use

her gifts. If Nature give you the propensity to drudge, you will drudge;

if she give me the ambition to rise, and the contempt for work, I may

rise,--but I certainly shall not work.”

“Oh,” said I, “you agree with Squills, I suppose, and fancy we are all

guided by the bumps on our foreheads?”

“And the blood in our veins, and our mothers’ milk. We inherit other

things besides gout and consumption. So you always do as your father

tells you! Good boy!”

I was piqued. Why we should be ashamed of being taunted for goodness,

I never could understand; but certainly I felt humbled. However, I

answered sturdily: “If you had as good a father as I have, you would not

think it so very extraordinary to do as he tells you.”

“Ah! so he is a very good father, is he? He must have a great trust in

your sobriety and steadiness to let you wander about the world as he

does.”

“I am going to join him in London.”

“In London! Oh, does he live there?”

“He is going to live there for some time.”

“Then perhaps we may meet. I too am going to town.”

“Oh, we shall be sure to meet there!” said I, with frank gladness; for

my interest in the young man was not diminished by his conversation,

however much I disliked the sentiments it expressed.

The lad laughed, and his laugh was peculiar,--it was low, musical, but

hollow and artificial.

“Sure to meet! London is a large place: where shall you be found?”

I gave him, without scruple, the address of the hotel at which I

expected to find my father, although his deliberate inspection of my

knapsack must already have apprised him of that address. He listened

attentively, and repeated it twice over, as if to impress it on his

memory; and we both walked on in silence, till, turning up a small

passage, we suddenly found ourselves in a large churchyard,--a flagged

path stretched diagonally across it towards the market-place, on

which it bordered. In this churchyard, upon a gravestone, sat a young

Savoyard; his hurdy-gurdy, or whatever else his instrument might be

called, was on his lap; and he was gnawing his crust and feeding some

poor little white mice (standing on their hind legs on the hurdy-gurdy)

as merrily as if he had chosen the gayest resting-place in the world.

We both stopped. The Savoyard, seeing us, put his arch head on one side,

showed all his white teeth in that happy smile so peculiar to his race,

and in which poverty seems to beg so blithely, and gave the handle of

his instrument a turn. “Poor child!” said I.

“Aha, you pity him! but why? According to your rule, Mr. Caxton, he is

not so much to be pitied; the dropsical jeweller would give him as much

for his limbs and health as for ours! How is it--answer me, son of so

wise a father--that no one pities the dropsical jeweller, and all pity

the healthy Savoyard? It is, sir, because there is a stern truth which

is stronger than all Spartan lessons,--Poverty is the master-ill of the

world. Look round. Does poverty leave its signs over the graves? Look

at that large tomb fenced round; read that long inscription:

‘Virtue’--‘best of husbands’--‘affectionate father’--‘inconsolable

grief’--‘sleeps in the joyful hope,’ etc. Do you suppose these stoneless

mounds hide no dust of what were men just as good? But no epitaph tells

their virtues, bespeaks their wifes’ grief, or promises joyful hope to

them!”

“Does it matter? Does God care for the epitaph and tombstone?”

“Datemi qualche cosa!” said the Savoyard, in his touching patois, still

smiling, and holding out his little hand; therein I dropped a small

coin. The boy evinced his gratitude by a new turn of the hurdy-gurdy.

“That is not labor,” said my companion; “and had you found him at work,

you had given him nothing. I, too, have my instrument to play upon, and

my mice to see after. Adieu!”

He waved his hand, and strode irreverently over the graves back in the

direction we had come.

I stood before the fine tomb with its fine epitaph: the Savoyard looked

at me wistfully.

CHAPTER VI.

The Savoyard looked at me wistfully. I wished to enter into conversation

with him. That was not easy. However, I began.

Pisistratus.--“You must be often hungry enough, my poor boy. Do the mice

feed you?”

Savoyard puts his head on one side, shakes it, and strokes his mice.

Pisistratus.--“You are very fond of the mice; they are your only friends,

I fear.”

Savoyard evidently understanding Pisistratus, rubs his face gently

against the mice, then puts them softly down on a grave, and gives a

turn to the hurdy-gurdy. The mice play unconcernedly over the grave.

Pisistratus, pointing first to the beasts, then to the

instrument.--“Which do you like best, the mice or the hurdygurdy?”

Savoyard shows his teeth--considers--stretches himself on the

grass--plays with the mice--and answers volubly. Pisistratus, by the help

of Latin comprehending that the Savoyard says that the mice are alive,

and the hurdy-gurdy is not.--“Yes, a live friend is better than a dead

one. Mortua est hurdy-gurda!”

Savoyard shakes his head vehemently.--“No--no, Eccellenza, non e morta!”

and strikes up a lively air on the slandered instrument. The Savoyard’s

face brightens--he looks happy; the mice run from the grave into his

bosom. Pisistratus, affected, and putting the question in Latin.--“Have

you a father?”

Savoyard with his face overcast.--“No, Eccellenza!” then pausing

a little, he says briskly, “Si, si!” and plays a solemn air on the

hurdy-gurdy--stops--rests one hand on the instrument, and raises the

other to heaven.

Pisistratus understands: the father is like the hurdygurdy, at once

dead and living. The mere form is a dead thing, but the music lives.

Pisistratus drops another small piece of silver on the ground, and turns

away.

God help and God bless thee, Savoyard! Thou hast done Pisistratus all

the good in the world. Thou hast corrected the hard wisdom of the young

gentleman in the velveteen jacket; Pisistratus is a better lad for

having stopped to listen to thee.

I regained the entrance to the churchyard, I looked back; there sat the

Savoyard still amidst men’s graves, but under God’s sky. He was still

looking at me wistfully; and when he caught my eye, he pressed his hand

to his heart and smiled. God help and God bless thee, young Savoyard!

PART V.

CHAPTER I.

In setting off the next morning, the Boots, whose heart I had won by an

extra sixpence for calling me betimes, good-naturedly informed me that I

might save a mile of the journey, and have a very pleasant walk into the

bargain, if I took the footpath through a gentleman’s park, the lodge of

which I should see about seven miles from the town.

“And the grounds are showed too,” said the Boots, “if so be you has a

mind to stay and see ‘em. But don’t you go to the gardener,--he’ll want

half a crown; there’s an old ‘oman at the lodge who will show you all

that’s worth seeing--the walks and the big cascade--for a tizzy. You may

make use of my name,” he added proudly,--“Bob, boots at the ‘Lion.’ She

be a _h_aunt o’ mine, and she minds them that come from me perticklerly.”

Not doubting that the purest philanthropy actuated these counsels, I

thanked my shock-headed friend, and asked carelessly to whom the park

belonged.

“To Muster Trevanion, the great parliament man,” answered the Boots.

“You has heard o’ him, I guess, sir?”

I shook my head, surprised every hour more and more to find how very

little there was in it.

“They takes in the ‘Moderate Man’s Journal’ at the ‘Lamb:’ and they say

in the tap there that he’s one of the cleverest chaps in the House o’

Commons,” continued the Boots, in a confidential whisper. “But we takes

in the ‘People’s Thunderbolt’ at the ‘Lion,’ and we knows better

this Muster Trevanion: he is but a trimmer,--milk and water,--no

horator,--not the right sort; you understand?” Perfectly satisfied

that I understood nothing about it, I smiled, and said, “Oh, yes!” and

slipping on my knapsack, commenced my adventures, the Boots bawling

after me, “Mind, sir, you tells haunt I sent you!”

The town was only languidly putting forth symptoms of returning life as

I strode through the streets; a pale, sickly, unwholesome look on the

face of the slothful Phoebus had succeeded the feverish hectic of the

past night; the artisans whom I met glided by me haggard and dejected;

a few early shops were alone open; one or two drunken men, emerging from

the lanes, sallied homeward with broken pipes in their mouths; bills,

with large capitals, calling attention to “Best family teas at 4s. a

pound;” “The arrival of Mr. Sloinan’s caravan of wild beasts;” and

Dr. Do’em’s “Paracelsian Pills of Immortality,” stared out dull and

uncheering from the walls of tenantless, dilapidated houses in that

chill sunrise which favors no illusion. I was glad when I had left the

town behind me, and saw the reapers in the corn-fields, and heard

the chirp of the birds. I arrived at the lodge of which the Boots

had spoken,--a pretty rustic building half-concealed by a belt of

plantations, with two large iron gates for the owner’s friends, and a

small turn-stile for the public, who, by some strange neglect on his

part, or sad want of interest with the neighboring magistrates, had

still preserved a right to cross the rich man’s domains and look on his

grandeur, limited to compliance with a reasonable request, mildly stated

on the notice-board, “to keep to the paths.” As it was not yet eight

o’clock, I had plenty of time before me to see the grounds; and

profiting by the economical hint of the Boots, I entered the lodge and

inquired for the old lady who was haunt to Mr. Bob. A young woman, who

was busied in preparing breakfast, nodded with great civility to this

request, and hastening to a bundle of clothes which I then perceived

in the corner, she cried, “Grandmother, here’s a gentleman to see the

cascade.”

The bundle of clothes then turned round and exhibited a human

countenance, which lighted up with great intelligence as the

granddaughter, turning to me, said with simplicity. “She’s old, honest

cretur, but she still likes to earn a sixpence, sir;” and taking a

crutch-staff in her hand, while her granddaughter put a neat bonnet

on her head, this industrious gentlewoman sallied out at a pace which

surprised me.

I attempted to enter into conversation with my guide; but she did not

seem much inclined to be sociable, and the beauty of the glades and

groves which now spread before my eyes reconciled me to silence.

I have seen many fine places since then, but I do not remember to have

seen a landscape more beautiful in its peculiar English character than

that which I now gazed on. It had none of the feudal characteristics of

ancient parks, with giant oaks, fantastic pollards, glens covered with

fern, and deer grouped upon the slopes; on the contrary, in spite of

some fine trees, chiefly beech, the impression conveyed was, that it

was a new place,--a made place. You might see ridges on the lawns which

showed where hedges had been removed; the pastures were parcelled out in

divisions by new wire fences; young plantations, planned with exquisite

taste, but without the venerable formality of avenues and quin-cunxes,

by which you know the parks that date from Elizabeth and James,

diversified the rich extent of verdure; instead of deer, were

short-horned cattle of the finest breed, sheep that would have won the

prize at an agricultural show. Everywhere there was the evidence of

improvement, energy, capital, but capital clearly not employed for the

mere purpose of return. The ornamental was too conspicuously predominant

amidst the lucrative not to say eloquently: “The owner is willing to

make the most of his land, but not the most of his money.”

But the old woman’s eagerness to earn sixpence had impressed me

unfavorably as to the character of the master. “Here,” thought I, “are

all the signs of riches; and yet this poor old woman, living on the very

threshold of opulence, is in want of a sixpence.”

These surmises, in the indulgence of which I piqued myself on my

penetration, were strengthened into convictions by the few sentences

which I succeeded at last in eliciting from the old woman.

“Mr. Trevanion must be a rich man?” said I. “Oh, ay, rich eno’!”

grumbled my guide.

“And,” said I, surveying the extent of shrubbery or dressed ground

through which our way wound, now emerging into lawns and glades, now

belted by rare garden-trees, now (as every inequality of the ground

was turned to advantage in the landscape) sinking into the dell, now

climbing up the slopes, and now confining the view to some object of

graceful art or enchanting Nature,--“and,” said I, “he must employ many

hands here: plenty of work, eh?”

“Ay, ay! I don’t say that he don’t find work for those who want it. But

it ain’t the same place it wor in my day.”

“You remember it in other hands, then?”

“Ay, ay! When the Hogtons had it, honest folk! My good man was the

gardener,--none of those set-up fine gentlemen who can’t put hand to a

spade.”

Poor faithful old woman!

I began to hate the unknown proprietor. Here clearly was some mushroom

usurper who had bought out the old simple, hospitable family, neglected

its ancient servants, left them to earn tizzies by showing waterfalls,

and insulted their eyes by his selfish wealth.

“There’s the water all spilt,--it warn’t so in my day,” said the guide.

A rivulet, whose murmur I had long heard, now stole suddenly into view,

and gave to the scene the crowning charm. As, relapsing into silence, we

tracked its sylvan course, under dripping chestnuts and shady limes, the

house itself emerged on the opposite side,--a modern building of white

stone, with the noblest Corinthian portico I ever saw in this country.

“A fine house indeed,” said I. “Is Mr. Trevanion here much?”

“Ay, ay! I don’t mean to say that he goes away altogether, but it ain’t

as it wor in my day, when the Hogtons lived here all the year round in

their warm house,--not that one.”

Good old woman, and these poor banished Hogtons, thought I,--hateful

parvenu! I was pleased when a curve in the shrubberies shut out the

house from view, though in reality bringing us nearer to it. And the

boasted cascade, whose roar I had heard for some moments, came in sight.

Amidst the Alps, such a waterfall would have been insignificant, but

contrasting ground highly dressed, with no other bold features, its

effect was striking, and even grand. The banks were here narrowed and

compressed; rocks, partly natural, partly no doubt artificial, gave a

rough aspect to the margin; and the cascade fell from a considerable

height into rapid waters, which my guide mumbled out were “mortal deep.”

“There wor a madman leapt over where you be standing,” said the old

woman, “two years ago last June.”

“A madman! why,” said I, observing, with an eye practised in the

gymnasium of the Hellenic Institute, the narrow space of the banks over

the gulf,--“why, my good lady, it need not be a madman to perform that

leap.”

And so saying, with one of those sudden impulses which it would be wrong

to ascribe to the noble quality of courage, I drew back a few steps, and

cleared the abyss. But when from the other side I looked back at what I

had done, and saw that failure had been death, a sickness came over me,

and I felt as if I would not have releapt the gulf to become lord of the

domain.

“And how am I to get back?” said I, in a forlorn voice to the old woman,

who stood staring at me on the other side. “Ah! I see there is a bridge

below.”

“But you can’t go over the bridge, there’s a gate on it; master keeps

the key himself. You are in the private grounds now. Dear, dear! the

squire would be so angry if he knew. You must go back; and they’ll see

you from the house! Dear me! dear, dear! What shall I do? Can’t you leap

back again?”

Moved by these piteous exclamations, and not wishing to subject the

poor old lady to the wrath of a master evidently an unfeeling tyrant, I

resolved to pluck up courage and releap the dangerous abyss.

“Oh, yes, never fear,” said I, therefore. “What’s been done once ought

to be done twice, if needful. Just get out of my way, will you?”

And I receded several paces over a ground much too rough to favor my run

for a spring. But my heart knocked against my ribs. I felt that impulse

can do wonders where preparation fails.

“You had best be quick, then,” said the old woman.

Horrid old woman! I began to esteem her less. I set my teeth, and was

about to rush on, when a voice close beside me said,--

“Stay, young man; I will let you through the gate.”

I turned round sharply, and saw close by my side, in great wonder that

I had not seen him before, a man, whose homely (but not working) dress

seemed to intimate his station as that of the head-gardener, of whom my

guide had spoken. He was seated on a stone under a chestnut-tree, with

an ugly cur at his feet, who snarled at me as I turned.

“Thank you, my man,” said I, joyfully. “I confess frankly that I was

very much afraid of that leap.”

“Ho! Yet you said, what can be done once can be done twice.”

“I did not say it could be done, but ought to be done.”

“Humph! That’s better put.”

Here the man rose; the dog came and smelt my legs, and then, as if

satisfied with my respectability, wagged the stump of his tail.

I looked across the waterfall for the old woman, and to my surprise saw

her hobbling back as fast as she could. “Ah!” said I, laughing, “the

poor old thing is afraid you’ll tell her master,--for you’re the head

gardener, I suppose? But I am the only person to blame. Pray say that,

if you mention the circumstance at all!” and I drew out half a crown,

which I proffered to my new conductor.

He put back the money with a low “Humph! not amiss.” Then, in a louder

voice, “No occasion to bribe me, young man; I saw it all.”

“I fear your master is rather hard to the poor Hogtons’ old servants.”

“Is he? Oh! humph! my master. Mr. Trevanion you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I dare say people say so. This is the way.” And he led me down a

little glen away from the fall. Everybody must have observed that after

he has incurred or escaped a great danger, his spirits rise wonderfully;

he is in a state of pleasing excitement. So it was with me. I talked to

the gardener a coeur ouvert, as the French say; and I did not observe

that his short monosyllables in rejoinder all served to draw out my

little history,--my journey, its destination, my schooling under Dr.

Herman, and my father’s Great Book. I was only made somewhat suddenly

aware of the familiarity that had sprung up between us when, just as,

having performed a circuitous meander, we regained the stream and stood

before an iron gate set in an arch of rock-work, my companion said

simply: “And your name, young gentleman? What’s your name?”

I hesitated a moment; but having heard that such communications were

usually made by the visitors of show places, I answered: “Oh! a very

venerable one, if your master is what they call a bibliomaniac--Caxton.”

“Caxton!” cried the gardener, with some vivacity; “there is a Cumberland

family of that name--”

“That’s mine; and my Uncle Roland is the head of that family.”

“And you are the son of Augustine Caxton?”

“I am. You have heard of my dear father, then?”

“We will not pass by the gate now. Follow me,--this way;” and my guide,

turning abruptly round, strode up a narrow path, and the house stood a

hundred yards before me ere I recovered my surprise.

“Pardon me,” said I, “but where are we going, my good friend?”

“Good friend, good friend! Well said, sir. You are going amongst good

friends. I was at college with your father; I loved him well. I knew a

little of your uncle too. My name is Trevanion.”

Blind young fool that I was! The moment my guide told his name, I

was struck with amazement at my unaccountable mistake. The small,

insignificant figure took instant dignity; the homely dress, of rough

dark broadcloth, was the natural and becoming dishabille of a country

gentleman in his own demesnes. Even the ugly cur became a Scotch terrier

of the rarest breed.

My guide smiled good-naturedly at my stupor; and patting me on the

shoulder, said,--

“It is the gardener you must apologize to, not me. He is a very handsome

fellow, six feet high.”

I had not found my tongue before we had ascended a broad flight of

stairs under the portico, passed a spacious hall adorned with statues

and fragrant with large orange-trees, and, entering a small room hung

with pictures, in which were arranged all the appliances for breakfast,

my companion said to a lady, who rose from behind the tea-urn: “My dear

Ellinor, I introduce to you the son of our old friend Augustine Caxton.

Make him stay with us as long as he can. Young gentleman, in Lady

Ellinor Trevanion think that you see one whom you ought to know well;

family friendships should descend.”

My host said these last words in an imposing tone, and then pounced on

a letter-bag on the table, drew forth an immense heap of letters

and newspapers, threw himself into an armchair, and seemed perfectly

forgetful of my existence.

The lady stood a moment in mute surprise, and I saw that she changed

color from pale to red, and red to pale, before she came forward with

the enchanting grace of unaffected kindness, took me by the hand, drew

me to a seat next to her own, and asked so cordially after my father, my

uncle, my whole family, that in five minutes I felt myself at home. Lady

Ellinor listened with a smile (though with moistened eyes, which she

wiped every now and then) to my artless details. At length she said,--

“Have you never heard your father speak of me,--I mean of us; of the

Trevanions?”

“Never,” said I, bluntly; “and that would puzzle me, only my dear

father, you know, is not a great talker.”

“Indeed! he was very animated when I knew him,” said Lady Ellinor; and

she turned her head and sighed.

At this moment there entered a young lady so fresh, so blooming, so

lovely that every other thought vanished out of my head at once. She

came in singing, as gay as a bird, and seeming to my adoring sight quite

as native to the skies.

“Fanny,” said Lady Ellinor, “shake hands with Mr. Caxton, the son of

one whom I have not seen since I was little older than you, but whom I

remember as if it were but yesterday.”

Miss Fanny blushed and smiled, and held out her hand with an easy

frankness which I in vain endeavored to imitate. During breakfast, Mr.

Trevanion continued to read his letters and glance over the papers, with

an occasional ejaculation of “Pish!” “Stuff!” between the intervals in

which he mechanically swallowed his tea, or some small morsels of dry

toast. Then rising with a suddenness which characterized his movements,

he stood on his hearth for a few moments buried in thought; and now that

a large-brimmed hat was removed from his brow, and the abruptness of

his first movement, with the sedateness of his after pause, arrested my

curious attention, I was more than ever ashamed of my mistake. It was a

careworn, eager, and yet musing countenance, hollow-eyed and with deep

lines; but it was one of those faces which take dignity and refinement

from that mental cultivation which distinguishes the true aristocrat,

namely, the highly educated, acutely intelligent man. Very handsome

might that face have been in youth, for the features, though small, were

exquisitely defined; the brow, partially bald, was noble and massive,

and there was almost feminine delicacy in the curve of the lip. The

whole expression of the face was commanding, but sad. Often, as

my experience of life increased, have I thought to trace upon that

expressive visage the history of energetic ambition curbed by a

fastidious philosophy and a scrupulous conscience; but then all that I

could see was a vague, dissatisfied melancholy, which dejected me I knew

not why.

Presently Trevanion returned to the table, collected his letters, moved

slowly towards the door, and vanished.

His wife’s eyes followed him tenderly. Those eyes reminded me of my

mother’s, as I verily believe did all eyes that expressed affection.

I crept nearer to her, and longed to press the white hand that lay so

listless before me.

“Will you walk out with us?” said Miss Trevanion, turning to me. I

bowed, and in a few minutes I found myself alone. While the ladies left

me, for their shawls and bonnets, I took up the newspapers which Mr.

Trevanion had thrown on the table, by way of something to do. My eye was

caught by his own name; it occurred often, and in all the papers. There

was contemptuous abuse in one, high eulogy in another; but one passage

in a journal that seemed to aim at impartiality, struck me so much as

to remain in my memory; and I am sure that I can still quote the sense,

though not the exact words. The paragraph ran somewhat thus:--

“In the present state of parties, our contemporaries have not

unnaturally devoted much space to the claims or demerits of Mr.

Trevanion. It is a name that stands unquestionably high in the House

of Commons; but, as unquestionably, it commands little sympathy in

the country. Mr. Trevanion is essentially and emphatically a member of

parliament. He is a close and ready debater; he is an admirable chairman

in committees. Though never in office, his long experience of public

life, his gratuitous attention to public business, have ranked him high

among those practical politicians from whom ministers are selected. A

man of spotless character and excellent intentions, no doubt, he must

be considered; and in him any cabinet would gain an honest and a useful

member. There ends all we can say in his praise. As a speaker, he wants

the fire and enthusiasm which engage the popular sympathies. He has the

ear of the House, not the heart of the country. An oracle on subjects

of mere business, in the great questions of policy he is comparatively

a failure. He never embraces any party heartily; he never espouses any

question as if wholly in earnest. The moderation on which he is said

to pique himself often exhibits itself in fastidious crotchets and an

attempt at philosophical originality of candor which has long obtained

him, with his enemies, the reputation of a trimmer. Such a man

circumstances may throw into temporary power; but can he command lasting

influence? No. Let Mr. Trevanion remain in what Nature and position

assign as his proper post,--that of an upright, independent, able member

of parliament; conciliating sensible men on both sides, when party runs

into extremes. He is undone as a cabinet minister. His scruples would

break up any government; and his want of decision--when, as in all human

affairs, some errors must be conceded to obtain a great good--would

shipwreck his own fame.”

I had just got to the end of this paragraph when the ladies returned.

My hostess observed the newspaper in my hand, and said, with a

constrained smile, “Some attack on Mr. Trevanion, I suppose?”

“No,” said I, awkwardly; for perhaps the paragraph that appeared to me

so impartial, was the most galling attack of all,--“No, not exactly.”

“I never read the papers now,--at least what are called the

leading articles; it is too painful. And once they gave me so much

pleasure,--that was when the career began, and before the fame was

made.”

Here Lady Ellinor opened the window which admitted on the lawn, and in

a few moments we were in that part of the pleasure-grounds which the

family reserved from the public curiosity. We passed by rare shrubs and

strange flowers, long ranges of conservatories, in which bloomed and

lived all the marvellous vegetation of Africa and the Indies.

“Mr. Trevanion is fond of flowers?” said I.

The fair Fanny laughed. “I don’t think he knows one from another.”

“Nor I either,” said I,--“that is, when I fairly lose sight of a rose or

a hollyhock.”

“The farm will interest you more,” said Lady Ellinor.

We came to farm buildings recently erected, and no doubt on the

most improved principle. Lady Ellinor pointed out to me machines and

contrivances of the newest fashion for abridging labor and perfecting

the mechanical operations of agriculture.

“Ah! then Mr. Trevanion is fond of farming?” The pretty Fanny laughed

again.

“My father is one of the great oracles in agriculture, one of the great

patrons of all its improvements; but as for being fond of farming, I

doubt if he knows his own fields when he rides through them.”

We returned to the house; and Miss Trevanion, whose frank kindness

had already made too deep an impression upon the youthful heart of

Pisistratus the Second, offered to show me the picture-gallery. The

collection was confined to the works of English artists; and Miss

Trevanion pointed out to me the main attractions of the gallery.

“Well, at least Mr. Trevanion is fond of pictures?”

“Wrong again,” said Fanny, shaking her arched head. “My father is said

to be an admirable judge; but he only buys pictures from a sense of

duty,--to encourage our own painters. A picture once bought, I am not

sure that he ever looks at it again.”

“What does he then--” I stopped short, for I felt my meditated question

was ill-bred.

“What does he like then? you were about to say. Why, I have known him,

of course, since I could know anything; but I have never yet discovered

what my father does like. No,--not even politics; though he lives for

politics alone. You look puzzled; you will know him better some day, I

hope; but you will never solve the mystery--what Mr. Trevanion likes.”

“You are wrong,” said Lady Ellinor, who had followed us into the

room, unheard by us. “I can tell you what your father does more than

like,--what he loves and serves every hour of his noble life,--justice,

beneficence, honor, and his country. A man who loves these may be

excused for indifference to the last geranium or the newest plough, or

even (though that offends you more, Fanny) the freshest masterpiece by

Lanseer, or the latest fashion honored by Miss Trevanion.”

“Mamma!” said Fanny, and the tears sprang to her eyes. But Lady Ellinor

looked to me sublime as she spoke, her eyes kindled, her breast heaved.

The wife taking the husband’s part against the child, and comprehending

so well what the child felt not, despite its experience of every day,

and what the world would never know, despite all the vigilance of its

praise and its blame, was a picture, to my taste, finer than any in the

collection.

Her face softened as she saw the tears in Fanny’s bright hazel eyes; she

held out her hand, which her child kissed tenderly; and whispering, “‘T

is not the giddy word you must go by, mamma, or there will be something

to forgive every minute,” Miss Trevanion glided from the room.

“Have you a sister?” asked Lady Ellinor.

“No.”

“And Trevanion has no son,” she said, mournfully. The blood rushed to my

cheeks. Oh, young fool again! We were both silent, when the door opened,

and Mr. Trevanion entered. “Humph!” said he, smiling as he saw me,--and

his smile was charming, though rare. “Humph, young sir, I came to seek

for you,--I have been rude, I fear; pardon it. That thought has only

just occurred to me, so I left my Blue Books, and my amanuensis hard

at work on them, to ask you to come out for half an hour,--just half an

hour, it is all I can give you: a deputation at one! You dine and sleep

here, of course?”

“Ah, sir, my mother will be so uneasy if I am not in town to-night!”

“Pooh!” said the member; “I’ll send an express.”

“Oh, no indeed; thank you.”

“Why not?”

I hesitated. “You see, sir, that my father and mother are both new to

London; and though I am new too, yet they may want me,--I may be of

use.” Lady Ellinor put her hand on my head and sleeked down my hair as I

spoke.

“Right, young man, right; you will do in the world, wrong as that is.

I don’t mean that you’ll succeed, as the rogues say,--that’s another

question; but if you don’t rise, you’ll not fall. Now put on your hat

and come with me; we’ll walk to the lodge,--you will be in time for a

coach.”

I took my leave of Lady Ellinor, and longed to say something about

“compliments to Miss Fanny;” but the words stuck in my throat, and my

host seemed impatient.

“We must see you soon again,” said Lady Ellinor, kindly, as she followed

us to the door.

Mr. Trevanion walked on briskly and in silence, one hand in his bosom,

the other swinging carelessly a thick walkingstick.

“But I must go round by the bridge,” said I, “for I forgot my knapsack.

I threw it off when I made my leap, and the old lady certainly never

took charge of it.”

“Come, then, this way. How old are you?”

“Seventeen and a half.”

“You know Latin and Greek as they know them at schools, I suppose?”

“I think I know them pretty well, sir.”

“Does your father say so?”

“Why, my father is fastidious; however, he owns that he is satisfied on

the whole.”

“So am I, then. Mathematics?”

“A little.”

“Good.”

Here the conversation dropped for some time. I had found and restrapped

the knapsack, and we were near the lodge, when Mr. Trevanion said

abruptly, “Talk, my young friend, talk; I like to hear you talk,--it

refreshes me. Nobody has talked naturally to me these last ten years.”

The request was a complete damper to my ingenuous eloquence; I could not

have talked naturally now for the life of me.

“I made a mistake, I see,” said my companion, good-humoredly, noticing

my embarrassment. “Here we are at the lodge. The coach will be by in

five minutes: you can spend that time in hearing the old woman praise

the Hogtons and abuse me. And hark you, sir, never care three straws for

praise or blame,--leather and prunella! Praise and blame are here!”

and he struck his hand upon his breast with almost passionate emphasis.

“Take a specimen. These Hogtons were the bane of the place,--uneducated

and miserly; their land a wilderness, their village a pig-sty. I come,

with capital and intelligence; I redeem the soil, I banish pauperism,

I civilize all around me: no merit in me, I am but a type of capital

guided by education,--a machine. And yet the old woman is not the only

one who will hint to you that the Hogtons were angels, and myself the

usual antithesis to angels. And what is more, sir, because that old

woman, who has ten shillings a week from me, sets her heart upon earning

her sixpences,--and I give her that privileged luxury,--every visitor

she talks to goes away with the idea that I, the rich Mr. Trevanion, let

her starve on what she can pick up from the sightseers. Now, does

that signify a jot? Good-by! Tell your father his old friend must see

him,--profit by his calm wisdom; his old friend is a fool sometimes,

and sad at heart. When you are settled, send me a line to St. James’s

Square, to say where you are. Humph! that’s enough.”

Mr. Trevanion wrung my hand, and strode off.

I did not wait for the coach, but proceeded towards the turn-stile,

where the old woman (who had either seen, or scented from a distance

that tizzy of which I was the impersonation),--

“Hushed in grim repose, did wait her morning prey.”

My opinions as to her sufferings and the virtues of the departed Hogtons

somewhat modified, I contented myself with dropping into her open palm

the exact sum virtually agreed on. But that palm still remained open,

and the fingers of the other clawed hold of me as I stood, impounded in

the curve of the turn-stile, like a cork in a patent corkscrew.

“And threepence for nephy Bob,” said the old lady.

“Threepence for nephew Bob, and why?”

“It is his parquisites when he recommends a gentleman. You would not

have me pay out of my own earnings; for he will have it, or he’ll ruin

my bizziness. Poor folk must be paid for their trouble.”

Obdurate to this appeal, and mentally consigning Bob to a master whose

feet would be all the handsomer for boots, I threaded the stile and

escaped.

Towards evening I reached London. Who ever saw London for the first time

and was not disappointed? Those long suburbs melting indefinably

away into the capital forbid all surprise. The gradual is a great

disenchanter. I thought it prudent to take a hackney-coach, and so

jolted my way to the Hotel, the door of which was in a small street out

of the Strand, though the greater part of the building faced that noisy

thoroughfare. I found my father in a state of great discomfort in a

little room, which he paced up and down like a lion new caught in his

cage. My poor mother was full of complaints: for the first time in her

life, I found her indisputably crossish. It was an ill time to relate my

adventures.

I had enough to do to listen. They had all day been hunting for lodgings

in vain. My father’s pocket had been picked of a new India handkerchief.

Primmins, who ought to know London so well, knew nothing about it, and

declared it was turned topsy-turvy, and all the streets had changed

names. The new silk umbrella, left for five minutes unguarded in the

hall, had been exchanged for an old gingham with three holes in it.

It was not till my mother remembered that if she did not see herself

that my bed was well aired I should certainly lose the use of my limbs,

and therefore disappeared with Primmins and a pert chambermaid, who

seemed to think we gave more trouble than we were worth, that I told my

father of my new acquaintance with Mr. Trevanion.

He did not seem to listen to me till I got to the name “Trevanion.” He

then became very pale, and sat down quietly. “Go on,” said he, observing

I stopped to look at him.

When I had told all, and given him the kind messages with which I had

been charged by husband and wife, he smiled faintly; and then, shading

his face with his hand, he seemed to muse, not cheerfully, perhaps, for

I heard him sigh once or twice.

“And Ellinor,” said he at last, without looking up,--“Lady Ellinor, I

mean; she is very--very--”

“Very what, sir?”

“Very handsome still?”

“Handsome! Yes, handsome, certainly; but I thought more of her manner

than her face. And then Fanny, Miss Fanny, is so young!”

“Ah!” said my father, murmuring in Greek the celebrated lines of which

Pope’s translation is familiar to all,--

“‘Like leaves on trees, the race of man is found,

Now green in youth, now withering on the ground.’

“Well, so they wish to see me. Did Ellinor--Lady Ellinor--say that, or

her--her husband?”

“Her husband, certainly; Lady Ellinor rather implied than said it.”

“We shall see,” said my father. “Open the window; this room is

stifling.”

I opened the window, which looked on the Strand. The noise, the voices,

the trampling feet, the rolling wheels, became loudly audible. My father

leaned out for some moments, and I stood by his side. He turned to me

with a serene face. “Every ant on the hill,” said he, “carries its load,

and its home is but made by the burden that it bears. How happy am I!

how I should bless God! How light my burden! how secure my home!”

My mother came in as he ceased. He went up to her, put his arm round her

waist and kissed her. Such caresses with him had not lost their tender

charm by custom: my mother’s brow, before somewhat ruffled, grew smooth

on the instant. Yet she lifted her eyes to his in soft surprise.

“I was but thinking,” said my father, apologetically, “how much I owed

you, and how much I love you!”

CHAPTER II.

And now behold us, three days after my arrival, settled in all the state

and grandeur of our own house in Russell Street, Bloomsbury, the library

of the Museum close at hand. My father spends his mornings in those lata

silentia, as Virgil calls the world beyond the grave. And a world beyond

the grave we may well call that land of the ghosts,--a book collection.

“Pisistratus,” said my father one evening, as he arranged his notes

before him and rubbed his spectacles, “Pisistratus, a great library is

an awful place! There, are interred all the remains of men since the

Flood.”

“It is a burial-place!” quoth my Uncle Roland, who had that day found us

out.

“It is an Heraclea!” said my father.

“Please, not such hard words,” said the Captain, shaking his head.

“Heraclea was the city of necromancers, in which they raised the dead.

Do want to speak to Cicero?--I invoke him. Do I want to chat in the

Athenian market-place, and hear news two thousand years old?--I write

down my charm on a slip of paper, and a grave magician calls me up

Aristophanes. And we owe all this to our ancest--”

“Ancestors who wrote books; thank you.”

Here Roland offered his snuff-box to my father, who, abhorring snuff,

benignly imbibed a pinch, and sneezed five times in consequence,--an

excuse for Uncle Roland to say, which he did five times, with great

unction, “God bless you, brother Austin!”

As soon as my father had recovered himself, he proceeded, with tears

in his eyes, but calm as before the interruption--for he was of the

philosophy of the Stoics,--

“But it is not that which is awful. It is the presuming to vie with

these ‘spirits elect;’ to say to them, ‘Make way,--I too claim place

with the chosen. I too would confer with the living, centuries after the

death that consumes my dust. I too--’ Ah, Pisistratus! I wish Uncle Jack

had been at Jericho before he had brought me up to London and placed me

in the midst of those rulers of the world!”

I was busy, while my father spoke, in making some pendent shelves for

these “spirits elect;” for my mother, always provident where my father’s

comforts were concerned, had foreseen the necessity of some such

accommodation in a hired lodging-house, and had not only carefully

brought up to town my little box of tools, but gone out herself that

morning to buy the raw materials. Checking the plane in its progress

over the smooth deal, “My dear father,” said I, “if at the Philhellenic

Institute I had looked with as much awe as you do on the big fellows

that had gone before me, I should have stayed, to all eternity, the lag

of the Infant Division.”

“Pisistratus, you are as great an agitator as your namesake,” cried my

father, smiling. “And so, a fig for the big fellows!”

And now my mother entered in her pretty evening cap, all smiles and

good humor, having just arranged a room for Uncle Roland, concluded

advantageous negotiations with the laundress, held high council with

Mrs. Primmins on the best mode of defeating the extortions of London

tradesmen, and, pleased with herself and all the world, she kissed my

father’s forehead as it bent over his notes, and came to the tea-table,

which only waited its presiding deity. My Uncle Roland, with his usual

gallantry, started up, kettle in hand (our own urn--for we had one--not

being yet unpacked), and having performed with soldier-like method the

chivalrous office thus volunteered, he joined me at my employment, and

said,--

“There is a better steel for the hands of a well-born lad than a

carpenter’s plane.”

“Aha! Uncle--that depends--”

“Depends! What on?”

“On the use one makes of it. Peter the Great was better employed in

making ships than Charles XII. in cutting throats.”

“Poor Charles XII.!” said my uncle, sighing pathetically; “a very brave

fellow!”

“Pity he did not like the ladies a little better!”

“No man is perfect!” said my uncle, sententiously. “But, seriously, you

are now the male hope of the family; you are now--” My uncle stopped, and

his face darkened. I saw that he thought of his son,--that mysterious

son! And looking at him tenderly, I observed that his deep lines had

grown deeper, his iron-gray hair more gray. There was the trace of

recent suffering on his face; and though he had not spoken to us a word

of the business on which he had left us, it required no penetration to

perceive that it had come to no successful issue.

My uncle resumed: “Time out of mind, every generation of our house has

given one soldier to his country. I look round now: only one branch is

budding yet on the old tree; and--”

“Ah! uncle. But what would they say? Do you think I should not like to

be a soldier? Don’t tempt me!”

My uncle had recourse to his snuff-box; and at that

moment--unfortunately, perhaps, for the laurels that might otherwise

have wreathed the brows of Pisistratus of England--private conversation

was stopped by the sudden and noisy entrance of Uncle Jack. No

apparition could have been more unexpected.

“Here I am, my dear friends. How d’ye do; how are you all? Captain de

Caxton, yours heartily. Yes, I am released, thank Heaven! I have given

up the drudgery of that pitiful provincial paper. I was not made for it.

An ocean in a tea cup! I was indeed! Little, sordid, narrow interests;

and I, whose heart embraces all humanity,--you might as well turn a

circle into an isolated triangle.”

“Isosceles!” said my father, sighing as he pushed aside his notes, and

very slowly becoming aware of the eloquence that destroyed all chance

of further progress that night in the Great Book. “‘Isosceles’ triangle,

Jack Tibbets, not ‘isolated.”’

“‘Isosceles’ or ‘isolated,’ it is all one,” said Uncle Jack, as he

rapidly performed three evolutions, by no means consistent with

his favorite theory of “the greatest happiness of the greatest

number,”--first, he emptied into the cup which he took from my mother’s

hands half the thrifty contents of a London cream-jug; secondly, he

reduced the circle of a muffin, by the abstraction of three triangles,

to as nearly an isosceles as possible; and thirdly, striding towards

the fire, lighted in consideration of Captain de Caxton, and hooking his

coat-tails under his arms while he sipped his tea, he permitted

another circle peculiar to humanity wholly to eclipse the luminary it

approached.

“‘Isolated’ or ‘isosceles,’ it is all the same thing. Man is made for

his fellow-creatures. I had long been disgusted with the interference of

those selfish Squirearchs. Your departure decided me. I have concluded

negotiations with a London firm of spirit and capital and extended views

of philanthropy. On Saturday last I retired from the service of the

oligarchy.

“I am now in my true capacity of protector of the million. My prospectus

is printed,--here it is in my pocket. Another cup of tea, sister;

a little more cream, and another muffin. Shall I ring?” Having

disembarrassed himself of his cup and saucer, Uncle Jack then drew forth

from his pocket a damp sheet of printed paper. In large capitals stood

out “The Anti-Monopoly Gazette; or Popular Champion.” He waved it

triumphantly before my father’s eyes.

“Pisistratus,” said my father, “look here. This is the way your Uncle

Jack now prints his pats of butter,--a cap of liberty growing out of an

open book! Good, Jack! good! good!”

“It is Jacobinical!” exclaimed the Captain.

“Very likely,” said my father; “but knowledge and freedom are the best

devices in the world to print upon pats of butter intended for the

market.”

“Pats of butter! I don’t understand,” said Uncle Jack. “The less you

understand, the better will the butter sell, Jack,” said my father,

settling back to his notes.

CHAPTER III.

Uncle Jack had made up his mind to lodge with us, and my mother found

some difficulty in inducing him to comprehend that there was no bed to

spare.

“That’s unlucky,” said he. “I had no sooner arrived in town than I was

pestered with invitations; but I refused them all, and kept myself for

you.”

“So kind in you, so like you!” said my mother; “but you see--”

“Well, then, I must be off and find a room. Don’t fret; you know I

can breakfast and dine with you all the same,--that is, when my other

friends will let me. I shall be dreadfully persecuted.” So saying, Uncle

Jack repocketed his prospectus and wished us good-night.

The clock had struck eleven, my mother had retired, when my father

looked up from his books and returned his spectacles to their case.

I had finished my work, and was seated over the fire, thinking now of

Fanny Trevanion’s hazel eyes, now, with a heart that beat as high at the

thought, of campaigns, battle-fields, laurels, and glory; while, with

his arms folded on his breast and his head drooping, Uncle Roland gazed

into the low clear embers. My father cast his eyes round the room,

and after surveying his brother for some moments he said, almost in a

whisper,--

“My son has seen the Trevanions. They remember us, Roland.”

The Captain sprang to his feet and began whistling,--a habit with him

when he was much disturbed.

“And Trevanion wishes to see us. Pisistratus promised to give him our

address: shall he do so, Roland?”

“If you like it,” answered the Captain, in a military attitude, and

drawing himself up till he looked seven feet high.

“I should like it,” said my father, mildly. “Twenty years since we met.”

“More than twenty,” said my uncle, with a stern smile; “and the season

was--the fall of the leaf!”

“Man renews the fibre and material of his body every seven years,” said

my father; “in three times seven years he has time to renew the inner

man. Can two passengers in yonder street be more unlike each other than

the soul is to the soul after an interval of twenty years? Brother,

the plough does not pass over the soil in vain, nor care over the human

heart. New crops change the character of the land; and the plough must

go deep indeed before it stirs up the mother stone.”

“Let us see Trevanion,” cried my uncle; then, turning to me, he said

abruptly, “What family has he?”

“One daughter.”

“No son?”

“No.”

“That must vex the poor, foolish, ambitious man. Oho! you admire this

Mr. Trevanion much, eh? Yes, that fire of manner, his fine words, and

bold thoughts, were made to dazzle youth.”

“Fine words, my dear uncle,--fire! I should have said, in hearing Mr.

Trevanion, that his style of conversation was so homely you would wonder

how he could have won such fame as a public speaker.”

“Indeed!”

“The plough has passed there,” said my father.

“But not the plough of care: rich, famous, Ellinor his wife, and no

son!”

“It is because his heart is sometimes sad that he would see us.”

Roland stared first at my father, next at me. “Then,” quoth my uncle,

heartily, “in God’s name, let him come. I can shake him by the hand, as

I would a brother soldier. Poor Trevanion! Write to him at once, Sisty.”

I sat down and obeyed. When I had sealed my letter, I looked up, and

saw that Roland was lighting his bed-candle at my father’s table; and my

father, taking his hand, said something to him in a low voice. I guessed

it related to his son, for he shook his head, and answered in a

stern, hollow voice, “Renew grief if you please; not shame. On that

subject--silence!”

CHAPTER IV.

Left to myself in the earlier part of the day, I wandered, wistful and

lonely, through the vast wilderness of London. By degrees I familiarized

myself with that populous solitude; I ceased to pine for the green

fields. That active energy all around, at first saddening, became soon

exhilarating, and at last contagious. To an industrious mind, nothing is

so catching as industry. I began to grow weary of my golden holiday of

unlaborious childhood, to sigh for toil, to look around me for a career.

The University, which I had before anticipated with pleasure, seemed now

to fade into a dull monastic prospect; after having trod the streets of

London, to wander through cloisters was to go back in life. Day by day,

my mind grew sensibly within me; it came out from the rosy twilight of

boyhood,--it felt the doom of Cain under the broad sun of man.

Uncle Jack soon became absorbed in his new speculation for the good of

the human race, and, except at meals (whereat, to do him justice, he

was punctual enough, though he did not keep us in ignorance of the

sacrifices he made, and the invitations he refused, for our sake), we

seldom saw him. The Captain, too, generally vanished after breakfast,

seldom dined with us, and it was often late before he returned. He

had the latch-key of the house, and let himself in when he pleased.

Sometimes (for his chamber was next to mine) his step on the stairs

awoke me; and sometimes I heard him pace his room with perturbed

strides, or fancied that I caught a low groan. He became every day more

care-worn in appearance, and every day the hair seemed more gray. Yet

he talked to us all easily and cheerfully; and I thought that I was the

only one in the house who perceived the gnawing pangs over which the

stout old Spartan drew the decorous cloak.

Pity, blended with admiration, made me curious to learn how these absent

days, that brought night so disturbed, were consumed. I felt that, if I

could master the Captain’s secret, I might win the right both to comfort

and to aid.

I resolved at length, after many conscientious scruples, to endeavor to

satisfy a curiosity excused by its motives.

Accordingly, one morning, after watching him from the house, I stole in

his track, and followed him at a distance.

And this was the outline of his day: he set off at first with a firm

stride, despite his lameness, his gaunt figure erect, the soldierly

chest well thrown out from the threadbare but speckless coat. First he

took his way towards the purlieus of Leicester Square; several times,

to and fro, did he pace the isthmus that leads from Piccadilly into

that reservoir of foreigners, and the lanes and courts that start thence

towards St. Martin’s. After an hour or two so passed, the step became

more slow; and often the sleek, napless hat was lifted up, and the brow

wiped. At length he bent his way towards the two great theatres, paused

before the play-bills, as if deliberating seriously on the chances of

entertainment they severally proffered, wandered slowly through the

small streets that surround those temples of the Muse, and finally

emerged into the Strand. There he rested himself for an hour at a small

cook-shop; and as I passed the window and glanced within, I could see

him seated before the simple dinner, which he scarcely touched, and

poring over the advertisement columns of the “Times.” The “Times”

finished, and a few morsels distastefully swallowed, the Captain put

down his shilling in silence, receiving his pence in exchange, and I

had just time to slip aside as he reappeared at the threshold. He looked

round as he lingered,--but I took care he should not detect me,--and

then struck off towards the more fashionable quarters of the town.

It was now the afternoon, and, though not yet the season, the streets

swarmed with life. As he came into Waterloo Place, a slight but muscular

figure buttoned up across the breast like his own cantered by on a

handsome bay horse; every eye was on that figure. Uncle Roland stopped

short, and lifted his hand to his hat; the rider touched his own with

his forefinger, and cantered on; Uncle Roland turned round and gazed.

“Who,” I asked of a shop-boy just before me, also staring with all his

eyes, “who is that gentleman on horseback?”

“Why, the Duke to be sure,” said the boy, contemptuously.

“The Duke?”

“Wellington, stu-pid!”

“Thank you,” said I, meekly. Uncle Roland had moved on into Regent

Street, but with a brisker step: the sight of the old chief had done the

old soldier good. Here again he paced to and fro; till I, watching him

from the other side of the way, was ready to drop with fatigue, stout

walker though I was. But the Captain’s day was not half done. He took

out his watch, put it to his ear, and then, replacing it, passed into

Bond Street, and thence into Hyde Park. There, evidently wearied out,

he leaned against the rails, near the bronze statue, in an attitude that

spoke despondency. I seated myself on the grass near the statue, and

gazed at him: the park was empty compared with the streets, but still

there were some equestrian idlers, and many foot-loungers. My uncle’s

eye turned wistfully on each: once or twice, some gentleman of a

military aspect (which I had already learned to detect) stopped, looked

at him, approached, and spoke; but the Captain seemed as if ashamed of

such greetings. He answered shortly, and turned again.

The day waned,--evening came on; the Captain again looked at his watch,

shook his head, and made his way to a bench, where he sat perfectly

motionless, his hat over his brows, his arms folded, till up rose the

moon. I had tasted nothing since breakfast, I was famished; but I still

kept my post like an old Roman sentinel.

At length the Captain rose, and re-entered Piccadilly; but how different

his mien and bearing!--languid, stooping; his chest sunk, his head

inclined; his limbs dragging one after the other; his lameness painfully

perceptible. What a contrast in the broken invalid at night from the

stalwart veteran of the morning!

How I longed to spring forward to offer my arm! but I did not dare.

The Captain stopped near a cab-stand. He put his hand in his pocket, he

drew out his purse, he passed his fingers over the net-work; the purse

slipped again into the pocket, and as if with a heroic effort, my uncle

drew up his head and walked on sturdily.

“Where next?” thought I. “Surely home! No, he is pitiless!”

The Captain stopped not till he arrived at one of the small theatres in

the Strand; then he read the bill, and asked if half price was begun.

“Just begun,” was the answer, and the Captain entered. I also took a

ticket and followed. Passing by the open doors of a refreshment-room,

I fortified myself with some biscuits and soda-water; and in another

minute, for the first time in my life, I beheld a play. But the play did

not fascinate me. It was the middle of some jocular after piece; roars

of laughter resounded round me. I could detect nothing to laugh at,

and sending my keen eyes into every corner, I perceived at last, in the

uppermost tier, one face as saturnine as my own.--Eureka! It was the

Captain’s! “Why should he go to a play if he enjoys it so little?”

thought I; “better have spent a shilling on a cab, poor old fellow!”

But soon came smart-looking men, and still smarter-looking ladies,

around the solitary corner of the poor Captain. He grew fidgety--he

rose--he vanished. I left my place, and stood without the box to watch

for him. Downstairs he stumped,--I recoiled into the shade; and

after standing a moment or two, as in doubt, he entered boldly the

refreshment-room or saloon.

Now, since I had left that saloon it had become crowded, and I slipped

in unobserved. Strange was it, grotesque yet pathetic, to mark the old

soldier in the midst of that gay swarm. He towered above all like a

Homeric hero, a head taller than the tallest; and his appearance was so

remarkable that it invited the instant attention of the fair. I, in my

simplicity, thought it was the natural tenderness of that amiable and

penetrating sex, ever quick to detect trouble and anxious to relieve it,

which induced three ladies in silk attire--one having a hat and plume,

the other two with a profusion of ringlets--to leave a little knot

of gentlemen--with whom they were conversing, and to plant themselves

before my uncle. I advanced through the press to hear what passed.

“You are looking for some one, I’m sure,” quoth one familiarly, tapping

his arm with her fan.

The Captain started. “Ma’am, you are not wrong,” said he.

“Can I do as well?” said one of those compassionate angels, with

heavenly sweetness.

“You are very kind, I thank you; no, no, ma’am,” said the Captain with

his best bow.

“Do take a glass of negus,” said another, as her friend gave way to her.

“You seem tired, and so am I. Here, this way;” and she took hold of his

arm to lead him to the table. The Captain shook his head mournfully; and

then, as if suddenly aware of the nature of the attentions so lavished

on him, he looked down upon these fair Armidas with a look of such

mild reproach, such sweet compassion,--not shaking off the hand, in

his chivalrous devotion to the sex, which extended even to all its

outcasts,--that each bold eye felt abashed. The hand was timidly and

involuntarily withdrawn from the arm, and my uncle passed his way.

He threaded the crowd, passed out at the farther door, and I, guessing

his intention, was in waiting for his steps in the street.

“Now home at last, thank Heaven!” thought I. Mistaken still! My uncle

went first towards that popular haunt which I have since discovered is

called “the Shades;” but he soon re-emerged, and finally he knocked at

the door of a private house in one of the streets out of St. James’s. It

was opened jealously, and closed as he entered, leaving me without. What

could this house be? As I stood and watched, some other men approached:

again the low single knock, again the jealous opening and the stealthy

entrance.

A policeman passed and re-passed me. “Don’t be tempted, young man,” said

he, looking hard at me: “take my advice, and go home.”

“What is that house, then?” said I, with a sort of shudder at this

ominous warning.

“Oh! you know.”

“Not I. I am new to London.”

“It is a hell,” said the policeman, satisfied, by my frank manner, that

I spoke the truth.

“God bless me,--a what? I could not have heard you rightly!”

“A hell,--a gambling-house!”

“Oh!” and I moved on. Could Captain Roland, the rigid, the thrifty,

the penurious, be a gambler? The light broke on me at once: the unhappy

father sought his son! I leaned against the post, and tried hard not to

sob.

By and by, I heard the door open; the Captain came out and took the way

homeward. I ran on before, and got in first, to the inexpressible relief

both of father and mother, who had not seen me since breakfast, and who

were in equal consternation at my absence. I submitted to be scolded

with a good grace. “I had been sight-seeing, and lost my way;” begged

for some supper, and slunk to bed; and five minutes afterwards the

Captain’s jaded step came wearily up the stairs.

PART VI.

CHAPTER I.

“I don’t know that,” said my father.

What is it my father does not know? My father does not know that

“happiness is our being’s end and aim.”

And pertinent to what does my father reply, by words so sceptical, to an

assertion so seldom disputed?

Reader, Mr. Trevanion has been half an hour seated in our little

drawing-room. He has received two cups of tea from my mother’s fair

hand; he has made himself at home. With Mr. Trevanion has come another

friend of my father’s, whom he has not seen since he left college,--Sir

Sedley Beaudesert.

Now, you must understand that it is a warm night, a little after nine

o’clock,--a night between departing summer and approaching autumn. The

windows are open; we have a balcony, which my mother has taken care to

fill with flowers; the air, though we are in London, is sweet and

fresh; the street quiet, except that an occasional carriage or hackney

cabriolet rolls rapidly by; a few stealthy passengers pass to and fro

noiselessly on their way homeward. We are on classic ground,--near that

old and venerable Museum, the dark monastic pile which the taste of the

age had spared then,--and the quiet of the temple seems to hallow the

precincts. Captain Roland is seated by the fire-place, and though there

is no fire, he is shading his face with a hand-screen; my father and Mr.

Trevanion have drawn their chairs close to each other in the middle of

the room; Sir Sedley Beaudesert leans against the wall near the window,

and behind my mother, who looks prettier and more pleased than usual

since her Austin has his old friends about him; and I, leaning my elbow

on the table and my chin upon my hand, am gazing with great admiration

on Sir Sedley Beaudesert.

Oh, rare specimen of a race fast decaying,--specimen of the true fine

gentleman, ere the word “dandy” was known, and before “exquisite” became

a noun substantive,--let me here pause to describe thee! Sir Sedley

Beaudesert was the contemporary of Trevanion and my father; but

without affecting to be young, he still seemed so. Dress, tone, look,

manner,--all were young; yet all had a certain dignity which does not

belong to youth. At the age of five and twenty he had won what would

have been fame to a French marquis of the old regime; namely, the

reputation of being “the most charming man of his day,”--the most

popular of our sex, the most favored, my dear lady-reader, by yours. It

is a mistake, I believe, to suppose that it does not require talent to

become the fashion,--at all events, Sir Sedley was the fashion, and he

had talent.

He had travelled much, he had read much,--especially in memoirs,

history, and belles-lettres,--he made verses with grace and a

certain originality of easy wit and courtly sentiment, he conversed

delightfully, he was polished and urbane in manner, he was brave

and honorable in conduct; in words he could flatter, in deeds he was

sincere.

Sir Sedley Beaudesert had never married. Whatever his years, he was

still young enough in looks to be married for love. He was high-born,

he was rich, he was, as I have said, popular; yet on his fair features

there was an expression of melancholy, and on that forehead--pure from

the lines of ambition, and free from the weight of study--there was the

shadow of unmistakable regret.

“I don’t know that,” said my father; “I have never yet found in life

one man who made happiness his end and aim. One wants to gain a fortune,

another to spend it; one to get a place, another to build a name: but

they all know very well that it is not happiness they search for. No

Utilitarian was ever actuated by self-interest, poor man, when he

sat down to scribble his unpopular crotchets to prove self-interest

universal. And as to that notable distinction between self-interest

vulgar and self-interest enlightened, the more the self-interest is

enlightened, the less we are influenced by it. If you tell the young man

who has just written a fine book or made a fine speech that he will not

be any happier if he attain to the fame of Milton or the power of

Pitt, and that, for the sake of his own happiness, he had much better

cultivate a farm, live in the country, and postpone to the last the

days of dyspepsia and gout, he will answer you fairly, ‘I am quite as

sensible of that as you are. But I am not thinking whether or not I

shall be happy. I have made up my mind to be, if I can, a great author

or a prime minister.’ So it is with all the active sons of the world.

To push on is the law of Nature. And you can no more say to men and to

nations than to children: ‘Sit still, and don’t wear out your shoes!’”

“Then,” said Trevanion, “if I tell you I am not happy, your only answer

is that I obey an inevitable law.”

“No, I don’t say that it is an inevitable law that man should not be

happy; but it is an inevitable law that a man, in spite of himself,

should live for something higher than his own happiness. He cannot live

in himself or for himself, however egotistical he may try to be. Every

desire he has links him with others. Man is not a machine,--he is a part

of one.”

“True, brother, he is a soldier, not an army,” said Captain Roland.

“Life is a drama, not a monologue,” pursued my father. “‘Drama’ is

derived from a Greek verb signifying ‘to do.’ Every actor in the drama

has something to do, which helps on the progress of the whole: that is

the object for which the author created him. Do your part, and let the

Great Play get on.”

“Ah!” said Trevanion, briskly, “but to do the part is the difficulty.

Every actor helps to the catastrophe, and yet must do his part without

knowing how all is to end. Shall he help the curtain to fall on a

tragedy or a comedy? Come, I will tell you the one secret of my public

life, that which explains all its failure (for, in spite of my position,

I have failed) and its regrets,--I want Conviction!”

“Exactly,” said my father; “because to every question there are two

sides, and you look at them both.”

“You have said it,” answered Trevanion, smiling also. “For public life

a man should be one-sided: he must act with a party; and a party insists

that the shield is silver, when, if it will take the trouble to turn the

corner, it will see that the reverse of the shield is gold. Woe to the

man who makes that discovery alone, while his party are still swearing

the shield is silver, and that not once in his life, but every night!

“You have said quite enough to convince me that you ought not to belong

to a party, but not enough to convince me why you should not be happy,”

said my father.

“Do you remember,” said Sir Sedley Beaudesert, “an anecdote of the first

Duke of Portland? He had a gallery in the great stable of his villa in

Holland, where a concert was given once a week, to cheer and amuse his

horses! I have no doubt the horses thrived all the better for it. What

Trevanion wants is a concert once a week. With him it is always saddle

and spur. Yet, after all, who would not envy him? If life be a drama,

his name stands high in the play-bill, and is printed in capitals on the

walls.”

“Envy me!” said Trevanion,--“Me! No, you are the enviable man,--you, who

have only one grief in the world, and that so absurd a one that I will

make you blush by disclosing it. Hear, O sage Austin! O sturdy Roland!

Olivares was haunted by a spectre, and Sedley Beaudesert by the dread of

old age!”

“Well,” said my mother, seriously, “I do think it requires a great sense

of religion, or at all events children of one’s own, in whom one is

young again, to reconcile oneself to becoming old.”

“My dear ma’am,” said Sir Sedley, who had slightly colored at

Trevanion’s charge, but had now recovered his easy self-possession,

“you have spoken so admirably that you give me courage to confess my

weakness. I do dread to be old. All the joys of my life have been the

joys of youth. I have had so exquisite a pleasure in the mere sense of

living that old age, as it comes near, terrifies me by its dull eyes and

gray hairs. I have lived the life of a butterfly. Summer is over, and I

see my flowers withering; and my wings are chilled by the first airs of

winter. Yes, I envy Trevanion; for in public life no man is ever young,

and while he can work he is never old.”

“My dear Beaudesert,” said my father, “when Saint Amable, patron

saint of Riom, in Auvergne, went to Rome, the sun waited upon him as a

servant, carried his cloak and gloves for him in the heat, and kept off

the rain, if the weather changed, like an umbrella. You want to put the

sun to the same use. You are quite right; but then, you see, you must

first be a saint before you can be sure of the sun as a servant.”

Sir Sedley smiled charmingly; but the smile changed to a sigh as he

added, “I don’t think I should much mind being a saint, if the sun would

be my sentinel instead of my courier. I want nothing of him but to stand

still. You see he moved even for Saint Amable. My dear madam, you and I

understand each other; and it is a very hard thing to grow old, do what

one will to keep young.”

“What say you, Roland, of these two malcontents?” asked my father. The

Captain turned uneasily in his chair, for the rheumatism was gnawing his

shoulder, and sharp pains were shooting through his mutilated limb.

“I say,” answered Roland, “that these men are wearied with marching from

Brentford to Windsor,--that they have never known the bivouac and the

battle.”

Both the grumblers turned their eyes to the veteran: the eyes rested

first on the furrowed, care-worn lines in his eagle face; then they fell

on the stiff outstretched cork limb; and then they turned away.

Meanwhile my mother had softly risen, and under pretence of looking for

her work on the table near him, bent over the old soldier and pressed

his hand.

“Gentlemen,” said my father, “I don’t think my brother ever heard of

Nichocorus, the Greek comic writer; yet he has illustrated him very

ably. Saith Nichocorus, ‘The best cure for drunkenness is a sudden

calamity.’ For chronic drunkenness, a continued course of real

misfortune must be very salutary!”

No answer came from the two complainants; and my father took up a great

book.

CHAPTER II.

“Mr friends,” said my father, looking up from his book, and addressing

himself to his two visitors, “I know of one thing, milder than calamity,

that would do you both a great deal of good.”

“What is that?” asked Sir Sedley.

“A saffron bag, worn at the pit of the stomach!”

“Austin, my dear,” said my mother, reprovingly.

My father did not heed the interruption, but continued gravely: “Nothing

is better for the spirits! Roland is in no want of saffron, because he

is a warrior; and the desire of fighting and the hope of victory infuse

such a heat into the spirits as is profitable for long life, and keeps

up the system.”

“Tut!” said Trevanion.

“But gentlemen in your predicament must have recourse to artificial

means. Nitre in broth, for instance,--about three grains to ten (cattle

fed upon nitre grow fat); or earthy odors,--such as exist in cucumbers

and cabbage. A certain great lord had a clod of fresh earth, laid in a

napkin, put under his nose every morning after sleep. Light anointing of

the head with oil, mixed with roses and salt, is not bad but, upon the

whole, I prescribe the saffron bag at the--”

“Sisty, my dear, will you look for my scissors?” said my mother.

“What nonsense are you talking! Question! question!” cried Mr.

Trevanion.

“Nonsense!” exclaimed my father, opening his eyes: “I am giving you

the advice of Lord Bacon. You want conviction: conviction comes from

passion; passion from the spirits; spirits from a saffron bag. You,

Beaudesert, on the other hand, want to keep youth. He keeps youth

longest, who lives longest. Nothing more conduces to longevity than a

saffron bag, provided always it is worn at the--”

“Sisty, my thimble!” said my mother.

“You laugh at us justly,” said Beaudesert, smiling; “and the same

remedy, I dare say, would cure us both.”

“Yes,” said my father, “there is no doubt of that. In the pit of the

stomach is that great central web of nerves called the ganglions; thence

they affect the head and the heart. Mr. Squills proved that to us,

Sisty.”

“Yes,” said I; “but I never heard Mr. Squills talk of a saffron bag.”

“Oh, foolish boy! it is not the saffron bag, it is the belief in the

saffron bag. Apply Belief to the centre of the nerves, and all will go

well,” said my father.

CHAPTER III.

“But it is a devil of a thing to have too nice a conscience!” quoth the

member of parliament.

“And it is not an angel of a thing to lose one’s front teeth!” sighed

the fine gentleman.

Therewith my father rose, and putting his hand into his waistcoat, more

suo, delivered his famous Sermon Upon The Connection Between Faith And

Purpose.

Famous it was in our domestic circle, but as yet it has not gone beyond;

and since the reader, I am sure, does not turn to the Caxton Memoirs

with the expectation of finding sermons, so to that circle let its fame

be circumscribed. All I shall say about it is that it was a very fine

sermon, and that it proved indisputably--to me at least--the salubrious

effects of a saffron bag applied to the great centre of the nervous

system. But the wise Ali saith that “a fool doth not know what maketh

him look little, neither will he hearken to him that adviseth him.” I

cannot assert that my father’s friends were fools, but they certainly

came under this definition of Folly.

CHAPTER IV.

For therewith arose, not conviction, but discussion; Trevanion was

logical, Beaudesert sentimental. My father held firm to the saffron bag.

When James the First dedicated to the Duke of Buckingham his meditation

on the Lord’s Prayer, he gave a very sensible reason for selecting his

Grace for that honor; “For,” saith the king, “it is made upon a very

short and plain prayer, and, therefore, the fitter for a courtier, for

courtiers are for the most part thought neither to have lust nor leisure

to say long prayers, liking best courte messe et long disner.” I suppose

it was for a similar reason that my father persisted in dedicating to

the member of parliament and the fine gentleman “this short and plaine”

morality of his,--to wit, the saffron bag. He was evidently persuaded,

if he could once get them to apply that, it was all that was needful;

that they had neither lust nor leisure for longer instructions. And

this saffron bag,--it came down with such a whack, at every round in

the argument! You would have thought my father one of the old plebeian

combatants in the popular ordeal, who, forbidden to use sword and lance,

fought with a sand-bag tied to a flail: a very stunning weapon it

was when filled only with sand; but a bag filled with saffron, it was

irresistible! Though my father had two to one against him, they

could not stand such a deuce of a weapon. And after tats and pishes

innumerable from Mr. Trevanion, and sundry bland grimaces from Sir

Sedley Beaudesert, they fairly gave in, though they would not own they

were beaten.

“Enough,” said the member, “I see that you don’t comprehend me; I must

continue to move by my own impulse.”

My father’s pet book was the Colloquies of Erasmus; he was wont to say

that those Colloquies furnished life with illustrations in every page.

Out of the Colloquies of Erasmus he now answered the member.

“Rabirius, wanting his servant Syrus to get up,” quoth my father, “cried

out to him to move. ‘I do move,’ said Syrus. ‘I see you move,’ replied

Rabirius, ‘but you move nothing.’ To return to the saffron bag--”

“Confound the saffron bag!” cried Trevanion, in a rage; and then

softening his look as he drew on his gloves, he turned to my mother and

said, with more politeness than was natural to, or at least customary

with, him,--

“By the way, my dear Mrs. Caxton, I should tell you that Lady Ellinor

comes to town to-morrow on purpose to call on you. We shall be here some

little time, Austin; and though London is so empty, there are still some

persons of note to whom I should like to introduce you and yours--”

“Nay,” said my father; “your world and my world are not the same. Books

for me, and men for you. Neither Kitty nor I can change our habits, even

for friendship: she has a great piece of work to finish, and so have I.

Mountains cannot stir, especially when in labor; but Mahomet can come to

the mountain as often as he likes.”

Mr. Trevanion insisted, and Sir Sedley Beaudesert mildly put in his

own claims; both boasted acquaintance with literary men whom my father

would, at all events, be pleased to meet. My father doubted whether he

could meet any literary men more eloquent than Cicero, or more amusing

than Aristophanes; and observed that if such did exist, he would rather

meet them in their books than in a drawing-room. In fine, he was

immovable; and so also, with less argument, was Captain Roland.

Then Mr. Trevanion turned to me.

“Your son, at all events, should see something of the world.”

My mother’s soft eye sparkled.

“My dear friend, I thank you,” said my father, touched; “and Pisistratus

and I will talk it over.”

Our guests had departed. All four of us gathered to the open window, and

enjoyed in silence the cool air and the moonlight.

“Austin,” said my mother at last, “I fear it is for my sake that you

refuse going amongst your old friends: you knew I should be frightened

by such fine people, and--”

“And we have been happy for more than eighteen years without them,

Kitty! My poor friends are not happy, and we are. To leave well alone

is a golden rule worth all in Pythagoras. The ladies of Bubastis, my

dear,--a place in Egypt where the cat was worshipped,--always kept

rigidly aloof from the gentlemen in Athribis, who adored the shrew-mice.

Cats are domestic animals, your shrew-mice are sad gadabouts: you can’t

find a better model, any Kitty, than the ladies of Bubastis!”

“How Trevanion is altered!” said Roland, musingly,--“he who was so

lively and ardent!”

“He ran too fast up-hill at first, and has been out of breath ever

since,” said my father.

“And Lady Ellinor,” said Roland, hesitatingly, “shall you see her

to-morrow?”

“Yes!” said my father, calmly.

As Captain Roland spoke, something in the tone of his question seemed to

flash a conviction on my mother’s heart, the woman there was quick; she

drew back, turning pale even in the moonlight, and fixed her eyes on

my father, while I felt her hand, which had clasped mine, tremble

convulsively.

I understood her. Yes, this Lady Ellinor was the early rival whose name

till then she had not known. She fixed her eyes on my father; and at his

tranquil tone and quiet look she breathed more freely, and, sliding

her hand from mine, rested it fondly on his shoulder. A few moments

afterwards, I and Captain Roland found ourselves standing alone by the

window.

“You are young, nephew,” said the Captain, “and you have the name of a

fallen family to raise. Your father does well not to reject for you

that opening into the great world which Trevanion offers. As for me, my

business in London seems over: I cannot find what I came to seek. I have

sent for my daughter; when she arrives I shall return to my old tower,

and the man and the ruin will crumble away together.”

“Tush, uncle! I must work hard and get money; and then we will repair

the old tower and buy back the old estate. My father shall sell the red

brick house; we will fit him up a library in the keep; and we will all

live united, in peace, and in state, as grand as our ancestors before

us.”

While I thus spoke, my uncle’s eyes were fixed upon a corner of

the street, where a figure, half in shade, half in moonlight, stood

motionless. “Ah!” said I, following his eye, “I have observed that man

two or three times pass up and down the street on the other side of the

way and turn his head towards our window. Our guests were with us then,

and my father in full discourse, or I should have--”

Before I could finish the sentence my uncle, stifling an exclamation,

broke away, hurried out of the room, stumped down the stairs, and was in

the street, while I was yet rooted to the spot with surprise. I remained

at the window, and my eye rested on the figure. I saw the Captain, with

his bare head and his gray hair, cross the street; the figure started,

turned the corner, and fled.

Then I followed my uncle, and arrived in time to save him from falling;

he leant his head on my breast, and I heard him murmur: “It is he--it is

he! He has watched us!--he repents!”

CHAPTER V.

The next day Lady Ellinor called; but, to my great disappointment,

without Fanny.

Whether or not some joy at the incident of the previous night had

served to rejuvenate my uncle, I know not, but he looked to me ten years

younger when Lady Ellinor entered. How carefully the buttoned-up coat

was brushed; how new and glossy was the black stock! The poor Captain

was restored to his pride, and mighty proud he looked! with a glow on

his cheek and a fire in his eye, his head thrown back, and his whole air

composed, severe, Mavortian, and majestic, as if awaiting the charge of

the French cuirassiers at the head of his detachment.

My father, on the contrary, was as usual (till dinner, when he always

dressed punctiliously, out of respect to his Kitty), in his easy

morning-gown and slippers; and nothing but a certain compression in his

lips, which had lasted all the morning, evinced his anticipation of the

visit, or the emotion it caused him.

Lady Ellinor behaved beautifully. She could not conceal a certain

nervous trepidation when she first took the hand my father extended; and

in touching rebuke of the Captain’s stately bow, she held out to him the

hand left disengaged, with a look which brought Roland at once to her

side. It was a desertion of his colors to which nothing, short of Ney’s

shameful conduct at Napoleon’s return from Elba, affords a parallel

in history. Then, without waiting for introduction, and before a

word indeed was said, Lady Ellinor came to my mother so cordially,

so caressingly; she threw into her smile, voice, manner, such winning

sweetness,--that I, intimately learned in my poor mother’s simple,

loving heart, wondered how she refrained from throwing her arms round

Lady Ellinor’s neck and kissing her outright. It must have been a great

conquest over herself not to do it! My turn came next; and talking to me

and about me soon set all parties at their ease,--at least apparently.

What was said, I cannot remember; I do not think one of us could. But an

hour slipped away, and there was no gap in the conversation.

With curious interest, and a survey I strove to make impartial, I

compared Lady Ellinor with my mother; and I comprehended the fascination

which the high-born lady must, in their earlier youth, have exercised

over both brothers, so dis-similar to each other. For charm was the

characteristic of Lady Ellinor,--a charm indefinable. It was not the

mere grace of refined breeding, though that went a great way, it was

a charm that seemed to spring from natural sympathy. Whomsoever she

addressed, that person appeared for the moment to engage all her

attention, to interest her whole mind. She had a gift of conversation

very peculiar. She made what she said like a continuation of what was

said to her. She seemed as if she had entered into your thoughts, and

talked them aloud. Her mind was evidently cultivated with great care,

but she was perfectly void of pedantry. A hint, an allusion, sufficed

to show how much she knew, to one well instructed, without mortifying

or perplexing the ignorant. Yes, there probably was the only woman my

father had ever met who could be the companion to his mind, walk through

the garden of knowledge by his side, and trim the flowers while he

cleared the vistas. On the other hand, there was an inborn nobility in

Lady Ellinor’s sentiments that must have struck the most susceptible

chord in Roland’s nature, and the sentiments took eloquence from the

look, the mien, the sweet dignity of the very turn of the head. Yes, she

must have been a fitting Oriana to a young Amadis. It was not hard to

see that Lady Ellinor was ambitious, that she had a love of fame for

fame itself, that she was proud, that she set value (and that morbidly)

on the world’s opinion. This was perceptible when she spoke of her

husband, even of her daughter. It seemed to me as if she valued the

intellect of the one, the beauty of the other, by the gauge of the

social distinction it conferred. She took measure of the gift as I was

taught at Dr. Herman’s to take measure of the height of a tower,--by the

length of the shadow it cast upon the ground.

My dear father, with such a wife you would never have lived eighteen

years shivering on the edge of a Great Book!

My dear uncle, with such a wife you would never have been contented with

a cork leg and a Waterloo medal! And I understand why Mr. Trevanion,

“eager and ardent,” as ye say he was in youth, with a heart bent on the

practical success of life, won the hand of the heiress. Well, you see

Mr. Trevanion has contrived not to be happy! By the side of my

listening, admiring mother, with her blue eyes moist and her coral lips

apart, Lady Ellinor looks faded. Was she ever as pretty as my mother is

now? Never. But she was much handsomer. What delicacy in the outline,

and yet how decided, in spite of the delicacy! The eyebrow so defined;

the profile slightly aquiline, so clearly cut, with the curved nostril,

which, if physiognomists are right, shows sensibility so keen; and the

classic lip that, but for the neighboring dimple, would be so haughty.

But wear and tear are in that face. The nervous, excitable temper has

helped the fret and cark of ambitious life. My dear uncle, I know not

yet your private life; but as for my father, I am sure that though he

might have done more on earth, he would have been less fit for heaven,

if he had married Lady Ellinor.

At last this visit--dreaded, I am sure, by three of the party--was over,

but not before I had promised to dine at the Trevanions’ that day.

When we were again alone, my father threw off a long breath, and looking

round him cheerfully, said, “Since Pisistratus deserts us, let us

console ourselves for his absence; send for brother Jack, and all four

go down to Richmond to drink tea.”

“Thank you, Austin,” said Roland; “but I don’t want it, I assure you.”

“Upon your honor?” said my father, in a half whisper.

“Upon my honor.”

“Nor I either. So, my dear Kitty, Roland and I will take a walk, and be

back in time to see if that young Anachronism looks as handsome as his

new London-made clothes will allow him. Properly speaking, he ought to

go with an apple in his hand, and a dove in his bosom. But now I think

of it, that was luckily not the fashion with the Athenians till the time

of Alcibiades!”

CHAPTER VI.

You may judge of the effect that my dinner at Mr. Trevanion’s, with a

long conversation after it with Lady Ellinor, made upon my mind when,

on my return home, after having satisfied all questions of parental

curiosity, I said nervously, and looking down: “My dear father, I should

like very much, if you have no objection--to--to--”

“What, my dear?” asked my father, kindly.

“Accept an offer Lady Ellinor has made me on the part of Mr. Trevanion.

He wants a secretary. He is kind enough to excuse my inexperience, and

declares I shall do very well, and can soon get into his ways. Lady

Ellinor says,” I continued with dignity, “that it will be a great

opening in public life for me; and at all events, my dear father, I

shall see much of the world, and learn what I really think will be more

useful to me than anything they will teach me at college.”

My mother looked anxiously at my father. “It will indeed be a great

thing for Sisty,” said she, timidly; and then, taking courage, she

added--“and that is just the sort of life he is formed for.”

“Hem!” said my uncle.

My father rubbed his spectacles thoughtfully, and replied, after a long

pause,--

“You may be right, Kitty: I don’t think Pisistratus is meant for study;

action will suit him better. But what does this office lead to?”

“Public employment, sir,” said I, boldly; “the service of my country.”

“If that be the case,” quoth Roland, “have not a word to say. But I

should have thought that for a lad of spirit, a descendant of the old De

Caxtons, the army would have--”

“The army!” exclaimed my mother, clasping her hands, and looking

involuntarily at my uncle’s cork leg.

“The army!” repeated my father, peevishly. “Bless my soul, Roland, you

seem to think man is made for nothing else but to be shot at! You would

not like the army, Pisistratus?”

“Why, sir, not if it pained you and my dear mother; otherwise, indeed--”

“Papae!” said my father, interrupting me. “This all comes of your giving

the boy that ambitious, uncomfortable name, Mrs. Caxton; what could a

Pisistratus be but the plague of one’s life? That idea of serving his

country is Pisistratus ipsissimus all over. If ever I have another son

(Dii meliora!) he has only got to be called Eratostratus, and then he

will be burning down St. Paul’s,--which I believe was, by the way, first

made out of the stones of a temple to Diana. Of the two, certainly,

you had better serve your country with a goose-quill than by poking a

bayonet into the ribs of some unfortunate Indian; I don’t think

there are any other people whom the service of one’s country makes it

necessary to kill just at present, eh, Roland?”

“It is a very fine field, India,” said my uncle, sententiously; “it is

the nursery of captains.”

“Is it? Those plants take up a good deal of ground, then, that might be

more profitably cultivated. And, indeed, considering that the tallest

captains in the world will be ultimately set into a box not above seven

feet at the longest, it is astonishing what a quantity of room that

species of arbor mortis takes in the growing! However, Pisistratus, to

return to your request, I will think it over, and talk to Trevanion.”

“Or rather to Lady Ellinor,” said I, imprudently: my mother slightly

shivered, and took her hand from mine. I felt cut to the heart by the

slip of my own tongue.

“That, I think, your mother could do best,” said my father, dryly, “if

she wants to be quite convinced that somebody will see that your shirts

are aired. For I suppose they mean you to lodge at Trevanion’s.”

“Oh, no!” cried my mother; “he might as well go to college then. I

thought he was to stay with us,--only go in the morning, but, of course,

sleep here.”

“If I know anything of Trevanion,” said my father, “his secretary will

be expected to do without sleep. Poor boy! you don’t know what it is

you desire. And yet, at your age, I--” my father stopped short. “No!” he

renewed abruptly, after a long silence, and as if soliloquizing,--“no;

man is never wrong while he lives for others. The philosopher who

contemplates from the rock is a less noble image than the sailor who

struggles with the storm. Why should there be two of us? And could he be

an alter ego, even if I wished it? Impossible!” My father turned on his

chair, and laying the left leg on the right knee, said smilingly, as

he bent down to look me full in the face: “But, Pisistratus, will you

promise me always to wear the saffron bag?”

CHAPTER VII.

I now make a long stride in my narrative. I am domesticated with the

Trevanions. A very short conversation with the statesman sufficed to

decide my father; and the pith of it lay in this single sentence uttered

by Trevanion: “I promise you one thing,--he shall never be idle!”

Looking back, I am convinced that my father was right, and that he

understood my character, and the temptations to which I was most prone,

when he consented to let me resign college and enter thus prematurely

on the world of men. I was naturally so joyous that I should have made

college life a holiday, and then, in repentance, worked myself into a

phthisis.

And my father, too, was right that though I could study, I was not meant

for a student.

After all, the thing was an experiment. I had time to spare; if the

experiment failed, a year’s delay would not necessarily be a year’s

loss.

I am ensconced, then, at Mr. Trevanion’s; I have been there some months.

It is late in the winter; Parliament and the season have commenced. I

work hard,--Heaven knows, harder than I should have worked at college.

Take a day for sample.

Trevanion gets up at eight o’clock, and in all weathers rides an

hour before breakfast; at nine he takes that meal in his wife’s

dressing-room; at half-past nine he comes into his study. By that

time he expects to find done by his secretary the work I am about to

describe.

On coming home,--or rather before going to bed, which is usually after

three o’clock,--it is Mr. Trevanion’s habit to leave on the table of the

said study a list of directions for the secretary. The following, which

I take at random from many I have preserved, may show their multifarious

nature:--

1. Look out in the Reports (Committee, House of Lords) for the last

seven years all that is said about the growth of flax; mark the

passages for me.

2. Do, do. “Irish Emigration.”

3. Hunt out second volume of Kames’s “History of Man,” passage

containing Reid’s Logic,--don’t know where the book is!

4. How does the line beginning Lumina conjurent, inter something,

end? Is it in Grey? See.

5. Fracastorius writes: Quantum hoe infecit vitium, quot adiverit

urbes. Query, ought it not, in strict grammar, to be injecerit,

instead of infecit? If you don’t know, write to father.

6. Write the four letters in full from the notes I leave; i. e.,

about the Ecclesiastical Courts.

7. Look out Population Returns: strike average of last five years

(between mortality and births) in Devonshire and Lancashire.

8. Answer these six begging letters “No,”--civilly.

9. The other six, to constituents, “that I have no interest with

Government.”

10. See, if you have time, whether any of the new books on the

round table are not trash.

11. I want to know All about Indian corn.

12. Longinus says something, somewhere, in regret for uncongenial

pursuits (public life, I suppose): what is it? N. B. Longinus is

not in my London catalogue, but is here, I know,--I think in a box

in the lumber-room.

13. Set right the calculation I leave on the poor-rates. I have

made a blunder somewhere, etc.

Certainly my father knew Mr. Trevanion; he never expected a secretary to

sleep! To get through the work required of me by half-past nine, I get

up by candle-light. At half-past nine I am still hunting for Longinus,

when Mr. Trevanion comes in with a bundle of letters.

Answers to half the said letters fall to my share. Directions

verbal,--in a species of short-hand talk. While I write, Mr.

Trevanion reads the newspapers, examines what I have done, makes

notes therefrom,--some for Parliament, some for conversation, some for

correspondence,--skims over the Parliamentary papers of the morning, and

jots down directions for extracting, abridging, and comparing them with

others, perhaps twenty years old. At eleven he walks down to a Committee

of the House of Commons,--leaving me plenty to do,--till half-past

three, when he returns. At four, Fanny puts her head into the room--and

I lose mine. Four days in the week Mr. Trevanion then disappears for the

rest of the day; dines at Bellamy’s or a club; expects me at the House

at eight o’clock, in case he thinks of something, wants a fact or

a quotation. He then releases me,--generally with a fresh list of

instructions. But I have my holidays, nevertheless. On Wednesdays and

Saturdays Mr. Trevanion gives dinners, and I meet the most eminent men

of the day, on both sides; for Trevanion is on both sides himself,--or

no side at all, which comes to the same thing. On Tuesdays Lady Ellinor

gives me a ticket for the Opera, and I get there at least in time for

the ballet. I have already invitations enough to balls and soirees,

for I am regarded as an only son of great expectations. I am treated as

becomes a Caxton who has the right, if he pleases, to put a De

before his name. I have grown very smart. I have taken a passion for

dress,--natural to eighteen. I like everything I do, and every one about

me. I am over head and ears in love with Fanny Trevanion, who breaks my

heart, nevertheless; for she flirts with two peers, a life-guardsman,

three old members of Parliament, Sir Sedley Beaudesert, one ambassador

and all his attaches and positively (the audacious minx!) with a bishop,

in full wig and apron, who, people say, means to marry again.

Pisistratus has lost color and flesh. His mother says he is very much

improved,--that he takes to be the natural effect produced by Stultz and

Hoby. Uncle Jack says he is “fined down.” His father looks at him and

writes to Trevanion,--

“Dear T.--I refused a salary for my son. Give him a horse, and two

hours a day to ride it. Yours, A. C.”

The next day I am master of a pretty bay mare, and riding by the side of

Fanny Trevanion. Alas! alas!

CHAPTER VIII.

I have not mentioned my Uncle Roland. He is gone--abroad--to fetch his

daughter. He has stayed longer than was expected. Does he seek his son

still,--there as here? My father has finished the first portion of

his work, in two great volumes. Uncle Jack, who for some time has been

looking melancholy, and who now seldom stirs out, except on Sundays (on

which days we all meet at my father’s and dine together),--Uncle Jack,

I say, has undertaken to sell it.

“Don’t be over-sanguine,” says Uncle Jack, as he locks up the MS. in two

red boxes with a slit in the lids, which belonged to one of the defunct

companies. “Don’t be over-sanguine as to the price. These publishers

never venture much on a first experiment. They must be talked even into

looking at the book.”

“Oh!” said my father, “if they will publish it at all, and at their own

risk, I should not stand out for any other terms. ‘Nothing great,’ said

Dryden, ‘ever came from a venal pen!’”

“An uncommonly foolish observation of Dryden’s,” returned Uncle Jack;

“he ought to have known better.”

“So he did,” said I, “for he used his pen to fill his pockets, poor

man!”

“But the pen was not venal, Master Anachronism,” said my father. “A

baker is not to be called venal if he sells his loaves, he is venal if

he sells himself; Dryden only sold his loaves.”

“And we must sell yours,” said Uncle Jack, emphatically. “A thousand

pounds a volume will be about the mark, eh?”

“A thousand pounds a volume!” cried my father. “Gibbon, I fancy, did not

receive more.”

“Very likely; Gibbon had not an Uncle Jack to look after his interests,”

said Mr. Tibbets, laughing, and rubbing those smooth hands of his. “No!

two thousand pounds the two volumes,--a sacrifice, but still I recommend

moderation.”

“I should be happy indeed if the book brought in anything,” said my

father, evidently fascinated; “for that young gentleman is rather

expensive. And you, my dear Jack,--perhaps half the sum may be of use to

you!”

“To me! my dear brother,” cried Uncle Jack “to me! Why when my new

speculation has succeeded, I shall be a millionnaire!”

“Have you a new speculation, uncle?” said I, anxiously. “What is it?”

“Mum!” said my uncle, putting his finger to his lip, and looking all

round the room; “Mum! Mum!”

Pisistratus.--“A Grand National Company for blowing up both Houses of

Parliament!”

Mr. Caxton.--“Upon my life, I hope something newer than that; for they,

to judge by the newspapers, don’t want brother Jack’s assistance to blow

up each other!”

Uncle Jack (mysteriously).--“Newspapers! you don’t often read a

newspaper, Austin Caxton!”

Mr. Caxton.--“Granted, John Tibbets!”

Uncle Jack.--“But if my speculation make you read a newspaper every

day?”

Mr. Caxton (astounded).--“Make me read a newspaper every day!”

Uncle Jack (warming, and expanding his hands to the fire).--“As big as

the ‘Times’!”

Mr. Caxton (uneasily).--“Jack, you alarm me!”

Uncle Jack.--“And make you write in it too,--a leader!”

Mr. Caxton, pushing back his chair, seizes the only weapon at his

command, and hurls at Uncle Jack a great sentence of Greek,--“... a

quotation in Greek...” (1)

Uncle Jack (nothing daunted).--“Ay, and put as much Greek as you like

into it!”

Mr. Caxton (relieved and softening). “My dear Jack, you are a great man;

let us hear you!”

Then Uncle Jack began. Now, perhaps my readers may have remarked that

this illustrious speculator was really fortunate in his ideas. His

speculations in themselves always had something sound in the kernel,

considering how barren they were in the fruit; and this it was that made

him so dangerous. The idea Uncle Jack had now got hold of will, I am

convinced, make a man’s fortune one of these days; and I relate it with

a sigh, in thinking how much has gone out of the family. Know, then,

it was nothing less than setting up a daily paper, on the plan of the

“Times,” but devoted entirely to Art, Literature, and Science,--Mental

Progress, in short; I say on the plan of the “Times,” for it was to

imitate the mighty machinery of that diurnal illuminator. It was to be

the Literary Salmoneus of the Political Jupiter, and rattle its thunder

over the bridge of knowledge. It was to have correspondents in all parts

of the globe; everything that related to the chronicle of the mind, from

the labor of the missionary in the South Sea Islands, or the research of

a traveller in pursuit of that mirage called Timbuctoo, to the last new

novel at Paris, or the last great emendation of a Greek particle at a

German university, was to find a place in this focus of light. It was

to amuse, to instruct, to interest,--there was nothing it was not to do.

Not a man in the whole reading public, not only of the three kingdoms,

not only of the British empire, but under the cope of heaven, that it

was not to touch somewhere, in head, in heart, or in pocket. The most

crotchety member of the intellectual community might find his own hobby

in those stables.

“Think,” cried Uncle Jack,--“think of the march of mind; think of the

passion for cheap knowledge; think how little quarterly, monthly, weekly

journals can keep pace with the main wants of the age! As well have a

weekly journal on politics as a weekly journal on all the matters still

more interesting than politics to the mass of the public. My ‘Literary

Times’ once started, people will wonder how they had ever lived without

it! Sir, they have not lived without it,--they have vegetated; they have

lived in holes and caves, like the Troggledikes.”

“Troglodytes,” said my father, mildly,--“from _trogle_, ‘a cave,’ and

_dumi_, ‘to go under.’ They lived in Ethiopia, and had their wives in

common.”

“As to the last point, I don’t say that the public, poor creatures, are

as bad as that,” said Uncle Jack, candidly; “but no simile holds good in

all its points. And the public are no less Troggledummies, or whatever

you call them, compared with what they will be when living under the

full light of my ‘Literary Times.’ Sir, it will be a revolution in the

world. It will bring literature out of the clouds into the parlor, the

cottage, the kitchen. The idlest dandy, the finest fine lady, will find

something to her taste; the busiest man of the mart and counter will

find some acquisition to his practical knowledge. The practical man will

see the progress of divinity, medicine, nay, even law. Sir, the Indian

will read me under the banyan; I shall be in the seraglios of the East;

and over my sheets the American Indian will smoke the calumet of peace.

We shall reduce politics to its proper level in the affairs of life;

raise literature to its due place in the thoughts and business of

men. It is a grand thought, and my heart swells with pride while I

contemplate it!”

“My dear Jack,” said my father, seriously, and rising with emotion, “it

is a grand thought, and I honor you for it. You are quite right,--it

would be a revolution! It would educate mankind insensibly. Upon my

life, I should be proud to write a leader, or a paragraph. Jack, you

will immortalize yourself!”

“I believe I shall,” said Uncle Jack, modestly; “but I have not said a

word yet on the greatest attraction of all.”

“Ah! and that?”

“The Advertisements!” cried my uncle, spreading his hands, with all

the fingers at angles, like the threads of a spider’s wed. “The

advertisements--oh, think of them!--a perfect El Dorado. The

advertisements, sir, on the most moderate calculation, will bring us

in L50,000 a year. My dear Pisistratus, I shall never marry; you are my

heir. Embrace me!”

So saying, my Uncle Jack threw himself upon me, and squeezed out of

breath the prudential demur that was rising to my lips.

My poor mother, between laughing and sobbing, faltered out:

“And it is my brother who will pay back to his son all--all he gave up

for me!”

While my father walked to and fro the room, more excited than ever I

saw him before, muttering, “A sad, useless dog I have been hitherto! I

should like to serve the world! I should indeed!”

Uncle Jack had fairly done it this time. He had found out the only

bait in the world to catch so shy a carp as my father,--haeret lethalis

arundo. I saw that the deadly hook was within an inch of my father’s

nose, and that he was gazing at it with a fixed determination to

swallow.

But if it amused my father? Boy that I was, I saw no further. I must own

I myself was dazzled, and, perhaps with childlike malice, delighted at

the perturbation of my betters. The young carp was pleased to see the

waters so playfully in movement when the old carp waved his tail and

swayed himself on his fins.

“Mum!” said Uncle Jack, releasing me; “not a word to Mr. Trevanion, to

any one.”

“But why?”

“Why? God bless my soul. Why? If my scheme gets wind, do you suppose

some one will not clap on sail to be before me? You frighten me out of

my senses. Promise me faithfully to be silent as the grave.”

“I should like to hear Trevanion’s opinion too.”

“As well hear the town-crier! Sir, I have trusted to your honor. Sir, at

the domestic hearth all secrets are sacred. Sir, I--”

“My dear Uncle Jack, you have said quite enough. Not a word will I

breathe!”

“I’m sure you may trust him, Jack,” said my mother.

“And I do trust him,--with wealth untold,” replied my uncle. “May I ask

you for a little water--with a trifle of brandy in it--and a biscuit, or

indeed a sandwich. This talking makes me quite hungry.”

My eye fell upon Uncle Jack as he spoke. Poor Uncle Jack, he had grown

thin!

(1) “Some were so barbarous as to eat their own species.” The sentence

refers to the Scythians, and is in Strabo. I mention the authority, for

Strabo is not an author that any man engaged on a less work than the

“History of Human Error” is expected to have by heart.

PART VII.

CHAPTER I.

Saith Dr. Luther, “When I saw Dr. Gode begin to tell his puddings

hanging in the chimney, I told him he would not live long!”

I wish I had copied that passage from “The Table Talk” in large round

hand, and set it before my father at breakfast, the morn preceding that

fatal eve in which Uncle Jack persuaded him to tell his puddings.

Yet, now I think of it, Uncle Jack hung the puddings in the chimney, but

he did not persuade my father to tell them.

Beyond a vague surmise that half the suspended “tomacula” would furnish

a breakfast to Uncle Jack, and that the youthful appetite of Pisistratus

would despatch the rest, my father did not give a thought to the

nutritious properties of the puddings,--in other words, to the two

thousand pounds which, thanks to Mr. Tibbets, dangled down the chimney.

So far as the Great Work was concerned, my father only cared for its

publication, not its profits. I will not say that he might not hunger

for praise, but I am quite sure that he did not care a button for

pudding. Nevertheless, it was an infaust and sinister augury for Austin

Caxton, the very appearance, the very suspension and danglement of any

puddings whatsoever, right over his ingle-nook, when those puddings were

made by the sleek hands of Uncle Jack! None of the puddings which he,

poor man, had all his life been stringing, whether from his own

chimneys or the chimneys of other people, had turned out to be real

puddings,--they had always been the eidola, the erscheinungen, the

phantoms and semblances of puddings.

I question if Uncle Jack knew much about Democritus of Abdera. But he

was certainly tainted with the philosophy of that fanciful sage. He

peopled the air with images of colossal stature which impressed all

his dreams and divinations, and from whose influences came his very

sensations and thoughts. His whole being, asleep or waking, was thus but

the reflection of great phantom puddings!

As soon as Mr. Tibbets had possessed himself of the two volumes of the

“History of Human Error,” he had necessarily established that hold upon

my father which hitherto those lubricate hands of his had failed to

effect. He had found what he had so long sighed for in vain,--his point

d’appui, wherein to fix the Archimedean screw. He fixed it tight in the

“History of Human Error,” and moved the Caxtonian world.

A day or two after the conversation recorded in my last chapter, I saw

Uncle Jack coming out of the mahogany doors of my father’s banker; and

from that time there seemed no reason why Mr. Tibbets should not visit

his relations on weekdays as well as Sundays. Not a day, indeed, passed

but what he held long conversations with my father. He had much to

report of his interviews with the publishers. In these conversations he

naturally recurred to that grand idea of the “Literary Times,” which had

so dazzled my poor father’s imagination; and, having heated the iron,

Uncle Jack was too knowing a man not to strike while it was hot.

When I think of the simplicity my wise father exhibited in this crisis

of his life, I must own that I am less moved by pity than admiration for

that poor great-hearted student. We have seen that out of the learned

indolence of twenty years, the ambition which is the instinct of a man

of genius had emerged; the serious preparation of the Great Book for the

perusal of the world had insensibly restored the claims of that noisy

world on the silent individual. And therewith came a noble remorse that

he had hitherto done so little for his species. Was it enough to write

quartos upon the past history of Human Error? Was it not his duty, when

the occasion was fairly presented, to enter upon that present, daily,

hourly war with Error, which is the sworn chivalry of Knowledge? Saint

George did not dissect dead dragons, he fought the live one. And London,

with that magnetic atmosphere which in great capitals fills the breath

of life with stimulating particles, had its share in quickening the slow

pulse of the student. In the country he read but his old authors, and

lived with them through the gone ages. In the city, my father, during

the intervals of repose from the Great Book, and still more now that

the Great Book had come to a pause, inspected the literature of his own

time. It had a prodigious effect upon him. He was unlike the ordinary

run of scholars, and, indeed, of readers, for that matter, who, in their

superstitious homage to the dead, are always willing enough to sacrifice

the living. He did justice to the marvellous fertility of intellect

which characterizes the authorship of the present age. By the present

age, I do not only mean the present day, I commence with the century.

“What,” said my father one day in dispute with Trevanion, “what

characterizes the literature of our time is its human interest. It is

true that we do not see scholars addressing scholars, but men addressing

men,--not that scholars are fewer, but that the reading public is more

large. Authors in all ages address themselves to what interests

their readers; the same things do not interest a vast community which

interested half a score of monks or book-worms. The literary polis was

once an oligarchy, it is now a republic. It is the general brilliancy of

the atmosphere which prevents your noticing the size of any particular

star. Do you not see that with the cultivation of the masses has

awakened the Literature of the affections? Every sentiment finds

an expositor, every feeling an oracle. Like Epimenides, I have been

sleeping in a cave; and, waking, I see those whom I left children are

bearded men, and towns have sprung up in the landscapes which I left as

solitary wastes.”

Thence the reader may perceive the causes of the change which had come

over my father. As Robert Hall says, I think of Dr. Kippis. “He had laid

so many books at the top of his head that the brains could not move.”

But the electricity had now penetrated the heart, and the quickened

vigor of that noble organ enabled the brain to stir. Meanwhile, I leave

my father to these influences, and to the continuous conversations of

Uncle Jack, and proceed with the thread of my own egotism.

Thanks to Mr. Trevanion, my habits were not those which favor

friendships with the idle, but I formed some acquaintances amongst young

men a few years older than myself, who held subordinate situations in

the public offices, or were keeping their terms for the Bar. There was

no want of ability amongst these gentlemen, but they had not yet settled

into the stern prose of life. Their busy hours only made them more

disposed to enjoy the hours of relaxation. And when we got together, a

very gay, light-hearted set we were! We had neither money enough to

be very extravagant, nor leisure enough to be very dissipated; but

we amused ourselves notwithstanding. My new friends were wonderfully

erudite in all matters connected with the theatres. From an opera to a

ballet, from “Hamlet” to the last farce from the French, they had

the literature of the stage at the finger-ends of their straw-colored

gloves. They had a pretty large acquaintance with actors and actresses,

and were perfect Walpoladi in the minor scandals of the day. To do

them justice, however, they were not indifferent to the more masculine

knowledge necessary in “this wrong world.” They talked as familiarly of

the real actors of life as of the sham ones. They could adjust to a hair

the rival pretensions of contending statesmen. They did not profess to

be deep in the mysteries of foreign cabinets (with the exception of one

young gentleman connected with the Foreign Office, who prided himself on

knowing exactly what the Russians meant to do with India--when they

got it); but, to make amends, the majority of them had penetrated the

closest secrets of our own. It is true that, according to a proper

subdivision of labor, each took some particular member of the government

for his special observation; just as the most skilful surgeons, however

profoundly versed in the general structure of our frame, rest their

anatomical fame on the light they throw on particular parts of it,--one

man taking the brain, another the duodenum, a third the spinal cord,

while a fourth, perhaps, is a master of all the symptoms indicated by a

pensile finger. Accordingly, one of my friends appropriated to himself

the Home Department; another the Colonies; and a third, whom we all

regarded as a future Talleyrand (or a De Retz at least), had devoted

himself to the special study of Sir Robert Peel, and knew, by the way in

which that profound and inscrutable statesman threw open his coat, every

thought that was passing in his breast! Whether lawyers or officials,

they all had a great idea of themselves,--high notions of what they were

to be, rather than what they were to do, some day. As the king of modern

fine gentlemen said to himself, in paraphrase of Voltaire, “They had

letters in their pockets addressed to Posterity,--which the chances

were, however, that they might forget to deliver.” Somewhat “priggish”

most of them might be; but, on the whole, they were far more interesting

than mere idle men of pleasure. There was about them, as features of a

general family likeness, a redundant activity of life, a gay exuberance

of ambition, a light-hearted earnestness when at work, a schoolboy’s

enjoyment of the hours of play.

A great contrast to these young men was Sir Sedley Beaudesert, who was

pointedly kind to me, and whose bachelor’s house was always open to me

after noon: Sir Sedley was visible to no one but his valet before that

hour. A perfect bachelor’s house it was, too, with its windows opening

on the Park, and sofas nicked into the windows, on which you might loll

at your ease, like the philosopher in Lucretius,--

“Despicere unde queas alios, passimque videre Errare,”--

and see the gay crowds ride to and fro Rotten Row, without the fatigue

of joining them, especially if the wind was in the east.

There was no affectation of costliness about the rooms, but a wonderful

accumulation of comfort. Every patent chair that proffered a variety in

the art of lounging found its place there; and near every chair a little

table, on which you might deposit your book or your coffee-cup, without

the trouble of moving more than your hand. In winter, nothing warmer

than the quilted curtains and Axminster carpets can be conceived; in

summer, nothing airier and cooler than the muslin draperies and the

Indian mattings. And I defy a man to know to what perfection dinner may

be brought, unless he had dined with Sir Sedley Beaudesert. Certainly,

if that distinguished personage had but been an egotist, he had been the

happiest of men. But, unfortunately for him, he was singularly amiable

and kind-hearted. He had the bonne digestion, but not the other

requisite for worldly felicity,--the _mauvais coeur_. He felt a sincere

pity for every one else who lived in rooms without patent chairs and

little coffee-tables, whose windows did not look on the Park, with sofas

niched into their recesses. As Henry IV. wished every man to have his

pot au feu, so Sir Sedley Beaudesert, if he could have had his way,

would have every man served with an early cucumber for his fish, and

a caraffe of iced water by the side of his bread and cheese. He thus

evinced on politics a naive simplicity which delightfully contrasted his

acuteness on matters of taste. I remember his saying, in a discussion on

the Beer Bill, “The poor ought not to be allowed to drink beer, it is

so particularly rheumatic! The best drink in hard work is dry

champagne,--not _mousseux_; I found that out when I used to shoot on the

moors.”

Indolent as Sir Sedley was, he had contrived to open an extraordinary

number of drains on his wealth.

First, as a landed proprietor there was no end to applications from

distressed farmers, aged poor, benefit societies, and poachers he

had thrown out of employment by giving up his preserves to please his

tenants.

Next, as a man of pleasure the whole race of womankind had legitimate

demands on him. From a distressed duchess whose picture lay perdu under

a secret spring of his snuff-box, to a decayed laundress to whom he

might have paid a compliment on the perfect involutions of a frill, it

was quite sufficient to be a daughter of Eve to establish a just claim

on Sir Sedley’s inheritance from Adam.

Again, as an amateur of art and a respectful servant of every muse,

all whom the public had failed to patronize,--painter, actor, poet,

musician,--turned, like dying sunflowers to the sun, towards the pitying

smile of Sir Sedley Beaudesert. Add to these the general miscellaneous

multitude who “had heard of Sir Sedley’s high character for

benevolence,” and one may well suppose what a very costly reputation

he had set up. In fact, though Sir Sedley could not spend on what might

fairly be called “himself” a fifth part of his very handsome income, I

have no doubt that he found it difficult to make both ends meet at the

close of the year. That he did so, he owed perhaps to two rules which

his philosophy had peremptorily adopted. He never made debts, and he

never gambled. For both these admirable aberrations from the ordinary

routine of fine gentlemen I believe he was indebted to the softness of

his disposition. He had a great compassion for a wretch who was dunned.

“Poor fellow!” he would say, “it must be so painful to him to pass

his life in saying ‘No.’” So little did he know about that class of

promisers,--as if a man dunned ever said ‘No’! As Beau Brummell, when

asked if he was fond of vegetables, owned that he had once eat a pea, so

Sir Sedley Beaudesert owned that he had once played high at piquet. “I

was so unlucky as to win,” said he, referring to that indiscretion, “and

I shall never forget the anguish on the face of the man who paid me.

Unless I could always lose, it would be a perfect purgatory to play.”

Now nothing could be more different in their kinds of benevolence than

Sir Sedley and Mr. Trevanion. Mr. Trevanion had a great contempt for

individual charity. He rarely put his hand into his purse,--he drew a

great check on his bankers. Was a congregation without a church, or a

village without a school, or a river without a bridge, Mr. Trevanion

set to work on calculations, found out the exact sum required by an

algebraic x--y, and paid it as he would have paid his butcher. It must

be owned that the distress of a man whom he allowed to be deserving, did

not appeal to him in vain. But it is astonishing how little he spent

in that way; for it was hard indeed to convince Mr. Trevanion that a

deserving man ever was in such distress as to want charity.

That Trevanion, nevertheless, did infinitely more real good than Sir

Sedley, I believe; but he did it as a mental operation,--by no means as

an impulse from the heart. I am sorry to say that the main difference

was this,--distress always seemed to accumulate round Sir Sedley, and

vanish from the presence of Trevanion. Where the last came, with his

busy, active, searching mind, energy woke, improvement sprang up. Where

the first came, with his warm, kind heart, a kind of torpor spread under

its rays; people lay down and basked in the liberal sunshine. Nature in

one broke forth like a brisk, sturdy winter; in the other like a lazy

Italian summer. Winter is an excellent invigorator, no doubt, but we all

love summer better.

Now, it is a proof how lovable Sir Sedley was, that I loved him, and yet

was jealous of him. Of all the satellites round my fair Cynthia, Fanny

Trevanion, I dreaded most this amiable luminary. It was in vain for me

to say, with the insolence of youth, that Sir Sedley Beaudesert was

of the same age as Fanny’s father; to see them together, he might have

passed for Trevanion’s son. No one amongst the younger generation was

half so handsome as Sedley Beaudesert. He might be eclipsed at first

sight by the showy effect of more redundant locks and more brilliant

bloom; but he had but to speak, to smile, in order to throw a whole

cohort of dandies into the shade. It was the expression of his

countenance that was so bewitching; there was something so kindly in its

easy candor, its benign good-nature. And he understood women so well! He

flattered their foibles so insensibly; he commanded their affection with

so gracious a dignity. Above all, what with his accomplishments, his

peculiar reputation, his long celibacy, and the soft melancholy of

his sentiments, he always contrived to interest them. There was not a

charming woman by whom this charming man did not seem just on the

point of being caught! It was like the sight of a splendid trout in

a transparent stream, sailing pensively to and fro your fly, in a

will-and-a-won’t sort of a way. Such a trout! it would be a thousand

pities to leave him, when evidently so well disposed! That trout,

fair maid or gentle widow, would have kept you whipping the stream and

dragging the fly--from morning to dewy eve. Certainly I don’t wish

worse to my bitterest foe of five and twenty than such a rival as Sedley

Beaudesert at seven and forty.

Fanny, indeed, perplexed me horribly. Sometimes I fancied she liked me;

but the fancy scarce thrilled me with delight before it vanished in the

frost of a careless look or the cold beam of a sarcastic laugh. Spoiled

darling of the world as she was, she seemed so innocent in her exuberant

happiness that one forgot all her faults in that atmosphere of joy which

she diffused around her. And despite her pretty insolence, she had so

kind a woman’s heart below the surface! When she once saw that she had

pained you, she was so soft, so winning, so humble, till she had healed

the wound. But then, if she saw she had pleased you too much, the little

witch was never easy till she had plagued you again. As heiress to so

rich a father, or rather perhaps mother (for the fortune came from

Lady Ellinor), she was naturally surrounded with admirers not wholly

disinterested. She did right to plague them; but Me! Poor boy that I

was, why should I seem more disinterested than others; how should

she perceive all that lay hid in my young deep heart? Was I not in

all worldly pretensions the least worthy of her admirers, and might I

not seem, therefore, the most mercenary,--I, who never thought of her

fortune, or if that thought did come across me, it was to make me start

and turn pale? And then it vanished at her first glance, as a ghost from

the dawn. How hard it is to convince youth, that sees all the world of

the future before it, and covers that future with golden palaces, of the

inequalities of life! In my fantastic and sublime romance I looked

out into that Great Beyond, saw myself orator, statesman, minister,

ambassador,--Heaven knows what,--laying laurels, which I mistook for

rent-rolls, at Fanny’s feet.

Whatever Fanny might have discovered as to the state of my heart,

it seemed an abyss not worth prying into by either Trevanion or Lady

Ellinor. The first, indeed, as may be supposed, was too busy to think of

such trifles. And Lady Ellinor treated me as a mere boy,--almost like a

boy of her own, she was so kind to me. But she did not notice much the

things that lay immediately around her. In brilliant conversation with

poets, wits, and statesmen, in sympathy with the toils of her husband

or proud schemes for his aggrandizement, Lady Ellinor lived a life of

excitement. Those large, eager, shining eyes of hers, bright with some

feverish discontent, looked far abroad, as if for new worlds to conquer;

the world at her feet escaped from her vision. She loved her daughter,

she was proud of her, trusted in her with a superb repose; she did not

watch over her. Lady Ellinor stood alone on a mountain and amidst a

cloud.

CHAPTER II.

One day the Trevanions had all gone into the country on a visit to a

retired minister distantly related to Lady Ellinor, and who was one of

the few persons Trevanion himself condescended to consult. I had almost

a holiday. I went to call on Sir Sedley Beaudesert. I had always longed

to sound him on one subject, and had never dared. This time I resolved

to pluck up courage.

“Ah, my young friend!” said he, rising from the contemplation of a

villanous picture by a young artist, which he had just benevolently

purchased, “I was thinking of you this morning.--Wait a moment, Summers

[this to the valet]. Be so good as to take this picture; let it be

packed up and go down into the country. It is a sort of picture,”

he added, turning to me, “that requires a large house. I have an old

gallery with little casements that let in no light. It is astonishing

how convenient I have found it!” As soon as the picture was gone, Sir

Sedley drew a long breath, as if relieved, and resumed more gayly,--

“Yes, I was thinking of you; and if you will forgive any interference

in your affairs,--from your father’s old friend,--I should be greatly

honored by your permission to ask Trevanion what he supposes is to be

the ultimate benefit of the horrible labor he inflicts upon you.”

“But, my dear Sir Sedley, I like the labors; I am perfectly contented.”

“Not to remain always secretary to one who, if there were no business to

be done among men, would set about teaching the ants to build hills upon

better architectural principles! My dear sir, Trevanion is an awful man,

a stupendous man, one catches fatigue if one is in the same room

with him three minutes! At your age,--an age that ought to be so

happy,”--continued Sir Sedley, with a compassion perfectly angelically

“it is sad to see so little enjoyment!”

“But, Sir Sedley, I assure you that you are mistaken, I thoroughly enjoy

myself; and have I not heard even you confess that one may be idle and

not happy?”

“I did not confess that till I was on the wrong side of forty!” said Sir

Sedley, with a slight shade on his brow. “Nobody would ever think you

were on the wrong side of forty!” said I, with artful flattery, winding

into my subject. “Miss Trevanion, for instance?”

I paused. Sir Sedley looked hard at me, from his bright dark-blue eyes.

“Well, Miss Trevanion for instance?”

“Miss Trevanion, who has all the best-looking fellows in London round

her, evidently prefers you to any of them.”

I said this with a great gulp. I was obstinately bent on plumbing the

depth of my own fears.

Sir Sedley rose; he laid his hand kindly on mine, and said, “Do not let

Fanny Trevanion torment you even more than her father does!”

“I don’t understand you, Sir Sedley.”

“But if I understand you, that is more to the purpose. A girl like Miss

Trevanion is cruel till she discovers she has a heart. It is not safe to

risk one’s own with any woman till she has ceased to be a coquette. My

dear young friend, if you took life less in earnest, I should spare you

the pain of these hints. Some men sow flowers, some plant trees: you are

planting a tree under which you will soon find that no flower will grow.

Well and good, if the tree could last to bear fruit and give shade;

but beware lest you have to tear it up one day or other; for then--What

then? Why, you will find your whole life plucked away with its roots!”

Sir Sedley said these last words with so serious an emphasis that I

was startled from the confusion I had felt at the former part of his

address. He paused long, tapped his snuff-box, inhaled a pinch slowly,

and continued, with his more accustomed sprightliness,--

“Go as much as you can into the world. Again I say, ‘Enjoy yourself.’

And again I ask, what is all this labor to do for you? On some men,

far less eminent than Trevanion, it would impose a duty to aid you in a

practical career, to secure you a public employment; not so on him. He

would not mortgage an inch of his independence by asking a favor from a

minister. He so thinks occupation the delight of life that he occupies

you out of pure affection. He does not trouble his head about your

future. He supposes your father will provide for that, and does not

consider that meanwhile your work leads to nothing! Think over all this.

I have now bored you enough.”

I was bewildered; I was dumb. These practical men of the world, how they

take us by surprise! Here had I come to sound Sir Sedley, and here was I

plumbed, gauged, measured, turned inside out, without having got an inch

beyond the surface of that smiling, debonnaire, unruffled ease. Yet,

with his invariable delicacy, in spite of all this horrible frankness,

Sir Sedley had not said a word to wound what he might think the more

sensitive part of my amour propre,--not a word as to the inadequacy of

my pretensions to think seriously of Fanny Trevanion. Had we been the

Celadon and Chloe of a country village, he could not have regarded us

as more equal, so far as the world went. And for the rest, he rather

insinuated that poor Fanny, the great heiress, was not worthy of me,

than that I was not worthy of Fanny.

I felt that there was no wisdom in stammering and blushing out denials

and equivocations; so I stretched my hand to Sir Sedley, took up my hat,

and went. Instinctively I bent my way to my father’s house. I had not

been there for many days. Not only had I had a great deal to do in the

way of business, but I am ashamed to say that pleasure itself had so

entangled my leisure hours, and Miss Trevanion especially so absorbed

them, that, without even uneasy foreboding, I had left my father

fluttering his wings more feebly and feebly in the web of Uncle

Jack. When I arrived in Russell Street I found the fly and the spider

cheek-by-jowl together. Uncle Jack sprang up at my entrance and cried,

“Congratulate your father. Congratulate him!--no; congratulate the

world!”

“What, uncle!” said I, with a dismal effort at sympathizing liveliness,

“is the ‘Literary Times’ launched at last?”

“Oh! that is all settled,--settled long since. Here’s a specimen of the

type we have chosen for the leaders.” And Uncle Jack, whose pocket was

never without a wet sheet of some kind or other, drew forth a steaming

papyral monster, which in point of size was to the political “Times”

as a mammoth may be to an elephant. “That is all settled. We are only

preparing our contributors, and shall put out our programme next week or

the week after. No, Pisistratus, I mean the Great Work.”

“My dear father, I am so glad. What! it is really sold, then?”

“Hum!” said my father.

“Sold!” burst forth Uncle Jack. “Sold,--no, sir, we would not sell it!

No; if all the booksellers fell down on their knees to us, as they will

some day, that book should not be sold! Sir, that book is a revolution;

it is an era; it is the emancipator of genius from mercenary

thraldom,--That Book!”

I looked inquiringly from uncle to father, and mentally retracted my

congratulations. Then Mr. Caxton, slightly blushing, and shyly rubbing

his spectacles, said, “You see, Pisistratus, that though poor Jack has

devoted uncommon pains to induce the publishers to recognize the merit

he has discovered in the ‘History of Human Error,’ he has failed to do

so.”

“Not a bit of it; they all acknowledge its miraculous learning, its--”

“Very true; but they don’t think it will sell, and therefore most

selfishly refuse to buy it. One bookseller, indeed, offered to treat for

it if I would leave out all about the Hottentots and Caffres, the Greek

philosophers and Egyptian priests, and confining myself solely to polite

society, entitle the work ‘Anecdotes of the Courts of Europe, Ancient

and Modern.’”

“The--wretch!” groaned Uncle Jack.

“Another thought it might be cut up into little essays, leaving out

the quotations, entitled ‘Men and Manners.’ A third was kind enough to

observe that though this kind of work was quite unsalable, yet, as I

appeared to have some historical information, he should be happy to

undertake an historical romance from my graphic pen,’--that was the

phrase, was it not, Jack?”

Jack was too full to speak.

“Provided I would introduce a proper love-plot, and make it into three

volumes post octavo, twenty-three lines in a page, neither more nor

less. One honest fellow at last was found who seemed to me a very

respectable and indeed enterprising person. And after going through a

list of calculations, which showed that no possible profit could arise,

he generously offered to give me half of those no-profits, provided I

would guarantee half the very visible expenses. I was just meditating

the prudence of accepting this proposal, when your uncle was seized

with a sublime idea, which has whisked up my book in a whirlwind of

expectation.”

“And that idea?” said I, despondently.

“That idea,” quoth Uncle Jack, recovering himself, “is simply and

shortly this. From time immemorial, authors have been the prey of the

publishers. Sir, authors have lived in garrets, nay, have been choked in

the street by an unexpected crumb of bread, like the man who wrote the

play, poor fellow!”

“Otway,” said my father. “The story is not true,--no matter.”

“Milton, sir, as everybody knows, sold ‘Paradise Lost’ for ten

pounds,--ten pounds, Sir! In short, instances of a like nature are too

numerous to quote.--But the booksellers, sir, they are leviathans; they

roll in seas of gold; they subsist upon authors as vampires upon little

children. But at last endurance has reached its limit; the fiat has gone

forth; the tocsin of liberty has resounded: authors have burst their

fetters. And we have just inaugurated the institution of ‘The Grand

Anti-Publisher Confederate Authors’ Society,’ by which, Pisistratus, by

which, mark you, every author is to be his own publisher; that is, every

author who joins the society. No more submission of immortal works

to mercenary calculators, to sordid tastes; no more hard bargains and

broken hearts; no more crumbs of bread choking great tragic poets in the

streets; no more Paradises Lost sold at L10 a-piece! The author brings

his book to a select committee appointed for the purpose,--men of

delicacy, education, and refinement, authors themselves; they read it,

the society publish; and after a modest deduction, which goes towards

the funds of the society, the treasurer hands over the profits to the

author.”

“So that, in fact, uncle, every author who can’t find a publisher

anywhere else will of course come to the society. The fraternity will be

numerous.”

“It will indeed.”

“And the speculation--ruinous.”

“Ruinous, why?”

“Because in all mercantile negotiations it is ruinous to invest capital

in supplies which fail of demand. You undertake to publish books that

booksellers will not publish: why? Because booksellers can’t sell

them. It’s just probable that you’ll not sell them any better than the

booksellers. Ergo, the more your business, the larger your deficit; and

the more numerous your society, the more disastrous your condition. Q.

E. D.”

“Pooh! The select committee will decide what books are to be published.”

“Then where the deuce is the advantage to the authors? I would as lief

submit; my work to a publisher as I would to a select committee of

authors. At all events, the publisher is not my rival; and I suspect he

is the best judge, after all, of a book,--as an accoucheur ought to be

of a baby.”

“Upon my word, nephew, you pay a bad compliment to your father’s Great

Work, which the booksellers will have nothing to do with.”

That was artfully said, and I was posed; when Mr. Caxton observed, with

an apologetic smile,--

“The fact is, my dear Pisistratus, that I want my book published without

diminishing the little fortune I keep for you some day. Uncle Jack

starts a society so to publish it. Health and long life to Uncle Jack’s

society! One can’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Here my mother entered, rosy from a shopping expedition with Mrs.

Primmins; and in her joy at hearing that I could stay to dinner, all

else was forgotten. By a wonder, which I did not regret, Uncle Jack

really was engaged to dine out. He had other irons in the fire besides

the “Literary Times” and the “Confederate Authors’ Society;” he was deep

in a scheme for making house-tops of felt (which, under other hands,

has, I believe, since succeeded); and he had found a rich man (I suppose

a hatter) who seemed well inclined to the project, and had actually

asked him to dine and expound his views.

CHAPTER III.

Here we three are seated round the open window--after dinner--familiar

as in the old happy time--and my mother is talking low, that she may not

disturb my father, who seems in thought--

Cr-cr-crrr-cr-cr! I feel it--I have it. Where! What! Where!

Knock it down; brush it off! For Heaven’s sake, see to it!

Crrrr-crrrrr--there--here--in my hair--in my sleeve--in my ear--cr-cr.

I say solemnly, and on the word of a Christian, that as I sat down to

begin this chapter, being somewhat in a brown study, the pen insensibly

slipped from my hand, and leaning back in my chair, I fell to gazing in

the fire. It is the end of June, and a remarkably cold evening, even for

that time of year. And while I was so gazing I felt something crawling

just by the nape of the neck, ma’am. Instinctively and mechanically, and

still musing, I put my hand there, and drew forth What? That what it is

which perplexes me. It was a thing--a dark thing--a much bigger thing

than I had expected. And the sight took me so by surprise that I gave my

hand a violent shake, and the thing went--where I know not. The what and

the where are the knotty points in the whole question! No sooner had

it gone than I was seized with repentance not to have examined it more

closely; not to have ascertained what the creature was. It might have

been an earwig,--a very large, motherly earwig; an earwig far gone in

that way in which earwigs wish to be who love their lords. I have a

profound horror of earwigs; I firmly believe that they do get into the

ear. That is a subject on which it is useless to argue with me upon

philosophical grounds. I have a vivid recollection of a story told me

by Mrs. Primmins,--how a lady for many years suffered under the most

excruciating headaches; how, as the tombstones say, “physicians were in

vain;” how she died; and how her head was opened, and how such a nest of

earwigs, ma’am, such a nest! Earwigs are the prolifickest things, and

so fond of their offspring! They sit on their eggs like hens, and the

young, as soon as they are born, creep under them for protection,--quite

touchingly! Imagine such an establishment domesticated at one’s

tympanum!

But the creature was certainly larger than an earwig. It might have

been one of that genus in the family of Forficulidae called

Labidoura,--monsters whose antennae have thirty joints! There is

a species of this creature in England--but to the great grief of

naturalists, and to the great honor of Providence, very rarely

found--infinitely larger than the common earwig, or Forfaculida

auriculana. Could it have been an early hornet? It had certainly a black

head and great feelers. I have a greater horror of hornets, if possible,

than I have of earwigs. Two hornets will kill a man, and three a

carriage-horse sixteen hands high. However, the creature was gone. Yes,

but where? Where had I so rashly thrown it? It might have got into a

fold of my dressing-gown or into my slippers, or, in short, anywhere,

in the various recesses for earwigs and hornets which a gentleman’s

habiliments afford. I satisfy myself at last as far as I can, seeing

that I am not alone in the room, that it is not upon me. I look upon

the carpet, the rug, the chair under the fender. It is non inventus.

I barbarously hope it is frizzing behind that great black coal in the

grate. I pluck up courage; I prudently remove to the other end of the

room. I take up my pen, I begin my chapter,--very nicely, too, I

think upon the whole. I am just getting into my subject,

when--cr-cr-er-cr-er--crawl--crawl--crawl creep--creep--creep. Exactly,

my dear ma’am, in the same place it was before! Oh, by the Powers! I

forgot all my scientific regrets at not having scrutinized its genus

before, whether Forficulida or Labidoura. I made a desperate lunge with

both hands,--something between thrust and cut, ma’am. The beast is gone.

Yes, but, again, where? I say that where is a very horrible question.

Having come twice, in spite of all my precautions--and exactly on the

same spot, too--it shows a confirmed disposition to habituate itself

to its quarters, to effect a parochial settlement upon me; there is

something awful and preternatural in it. I assure you that there is not

a part of me that has not gone cr-cr-cr!--that has not crept, crawled,

and forficulated ever since; and I put it to you what sort of a chapter

I can make after such a--My good little girl, will you just take the

candle and look carefully under the table? that’s a dear! Yes, my

love, very black indeed, with two horns, and inclined to be corpulent.

Gentlemen and ladies who have cultivated an acquaintance with the

Phoenician language are aware that Beelzebub, examined etymologically

and entomologically, is nothing more nor less than Baalzebub, “the

Jupiter-fly,” an emblem of the Destroying Attribute, which attribute,

indeed, is found in all the insect tribes more or less. Wherefore,

as--Mr. Payne Knight, in his “Inquiry into Symbolical Languages,” hath

observed, the Egyptian priests shaved their whole bodies, even to their

eyebrows, lest unaware they should harbor any of the minor Zebubs of the

great Baal. If I were the least bit more persuaded that that black cr-cr

were about me still, and that the sacrifice of my eyebrows would deprive

him of shelter, by the souls of the Ptolemies I would,--and I will too!

Ring the bell, my little dear! John, my--my cigar-box! There is not a

cr in the world that can abide the fumes of the havana! Pshaw! sir, I am

not the only man who lets his first thoughts upon cold steel end, like

this chapter, in--Pff--pff--pff!

CHAPTER IV.

Everything in this world is of use, even a black thing crawling over the

nape of one’s neck! Grim unknown, I shall make of thee--a simile!

I think, ma’am, you will allow that if an incident such as I have

described had befallen yourself, and you had a proper and lady-like

horror of earwigs (however motherly and fond of their offspring), and

also of early hornets,--and indeed of all unknown things of the insect

tribe with black heads and two great horns, or feelers, or forceps,

just by your ear,--I think, ma’am, you will allow that you would find it

difficult to settle back to your former placidity of mood and innocent

stitch-work. You would feel a something that grated on your nerves and

cr’d-cr’d “all over you like,” as the children say. And the worst is,

that you would be ashamed to say it. You would feel obliged to look

pleased and join in the conversation, and not fidget too much, nor

always be shaking your flounces and looking into a dark corner of your

apron. Thus it is with many other things in life besides black insects.

One has a secret care, an abstraction, a something between the memory

and the feeling, of a dark crawling cr which one has never dared to

analyze. So I sat by my mother, trying to smile and talk as in the old

time, but longing to move about, and look around, and escape to my own

solitude, and take the clothes off my mind, and see what it was that had

so troubled and terrified me; for trouble and terror were upon me. And

my mother, who was always (Heaven bless her!) inquisitive enough in all

that concerned her darling Anachronism, was especially inquisitive that

evening. She made me say where I had been, and what I had done, and how

I had spent my time; and Fanny Trevanion (whom she had seen, by the way,

three or four times, and whom she thought the prettiest person in the

world), oh, she must know exactly what I thought of Fanny Trevanion!

And all this while my father seemed in thought; and so, with my arm

over my mother’s chair, and my hand in hers, I answered my mother’s

questions, sometimes by a stammer, sometimes by a violent effort at

volubility; when at some interrogatory that went tingling right to my

heart I turned uneasily, and there were my father’s eyes fixed on mine,

fixed as they had been when, and none knew why, I pined and languished,

and my father said, “He must go to school;” fixed with quiet, watchful

tenderness. Ah, no! his thoughts had not been on the Great Work; he had

been deep in the pages of that less worthy one for which he had yet more

an author’s paternal care. I met those eyes and yearned to throw myself

on his heart and tell him all. Tell him what? Ma’am, I no more knew what

to tell him than I know what that black thing was which has so worried

me all this blessed evening!

“Pisistratus,” said my father, softly, “I fear you have forgotten the

saffron bag.”

“No, indeed, sir,” said I, smiling.

“He,” resumed my father, “he who wears the saffron bag has more

cheerful, settled spirits than you seem to have, my poor boy.”

“My dear Austin, his spirits are very good, I think,” said my mother,

anxiously.

My father shook his head; then he took two or three turns about the

room.

“Shall I ring for candles, sir? It is getting dark; you will wish to

read.”

“No, Pisistratus, it is you who shall read; and this hour of twilight

best suits the book I am about to open to you.”

So saying, he drew a chair between me and my mother and seated himself

gravely, looking down a long time in silence, then turning his eyes to

each of us alternately.

“My dear wife,” said he, at length, almost solemnly, “I am going to

speak of myself as I was before I knew you.”

Even in the twilight I saw that my mother’s countenance changed.

“You have respected my secrets, Katherine, tenderly, honestly. Now the

time is come when I can tell them to you and to our son.”

CHAPTER V.

MY FATHER’S FIRST LOVE.

“I lost my mother early; my father--a good man, but who was so indolent

that he rarely stirred from his chair, and who often passed whole days

without speaking, like an Indian dervish--left Roland and myself to

educate ourselves much according to our own tastes. Roland shot and

hunted and fished, read all the poetry and books of chivalry to be found

in my father’s collection, which was rich in such matters, and made

a great many copies of the old pedigree,--the only thing in which my

father ever evinced much vital interest. Early in life I conceived a

passion for graver studies, and by good luck I found a tutor in Mr.

Tibbets, who, but for his modesty, Kitty, would have rivalled Porson. He

was a second Budaeus for industry,--and, by the way, he said exactly the

same thing that Budaeus did, namely, ‘That the only lost day in his life

was that in which he was married; for on that day he had only had

six hours for reading’! Under such a master I could not fail to be a

scholar. I came from the university with such distinction as led me to

look sanguinely on my career in the world.

“I returned to my father’s quiet rectory to pause and consider what path

I should take to fame. The rectory was just at the foot of the hill,

on the brow of which were the ruins of the castle Roland has since

purchased. And though I did not feel for the ruins the same romantic

veneration as my dear brother (for my day-dreams were more colored by

classic than feudal recollections), I yet loved to climb the hill, book

in hand, and built my castles in the air midst the wrecks of that which

time had shattered on the earth.

“One day, entering the old weed-grown court, I saw a lady seated on my

favorite spot, sketching the ruins. The lady was young, more beautiful

than any woman I had yet seen,--at least to my eyes. In a word, I was

fascinated, and as the trite phrase goes, ‘spell-bound.’ I seated myself

at a little distance, and contemplated her without desiring to speak.

By and by, from another part of the ruins, which were then uninhabited,

came a tall, imposing elderly gentleman with a benignant aspect, and

a little dog. The dog ran up to me barking. This drew the attention of

both lady and gentleman to me. The gentleman approached, called off

the dog, and apologized with much politeness. Surveying me somewhat

curiously, he then began to ask questions about the old place and the

family it had belonged to, with the name and antecedents of which he

was well acquainted. By degrees it came out that I was the descendant

of that family, and the younger son of the humble rector who was now its

representative. The gentleman then introduced himself to me as the Earl

of Rainsforth, the principal proprietor in the neighborhood, but who had

so rarely visited the country during my childhood and earlier youth that

I had never before seen him. His only son, however, a young man of great

promise, had been at the same college with me in my first year at the

University. The young lord was a reading man and a scholar, and we had

become slightly acquainted when he left for his travels.

“Now, on hearing my name Lord Rainsforth took my hand cordially, and

leading me to his daughter, said, ‘Think, Ellinor, how fortunate!--this

is the Mr. Caxton whom your brother so often spoke of.’

“In short, my dear Pisistratus, the ice was broken, the acquaintance

made; and Lord Rainsforth, saying he was come to atone for his long

absence from the county, and to reside at Compton the greater part of

the year, pressed me to visit him. I did so. Lord Rainsforth’s liking to

me increased; I went there often.”

My father paused, and seeing my mother had fixed her eyes upon him with

a sort of mournful earnestness, and had pressed her hands very tightly

together, he bent down and kissed her forehead.

“There is no cause, my child!” said he. It was the only time I ever

heard him address my mother so parentally. But then I never heard him

before so grave and solemn,--not a quotation, too; it was incredible:

it was not my father speaking, it was another man. “Yes, I went there

often. Lord Rainsforth was a remarkable person. Shyness that was wholly

without pride (which is rare), and a love for quiet literary pursuits,

had prevented his taking that personal part in public life for which he

was richly qualified; but his reputation for sense and honor, and his

personal popularity, had given him no inconsiderable influence even, I

believe, in the formation of cabinets, and he had once been prevailed

upon to fill a high diplomatic situation abroad, in which I have

no doubt that he was as miserable as a good man can be under any

infliction. He was now pleased to retire from the world, and look at it

through the loopholes of retreat. Lord Rainsforth had a great respect

for talent, and a warm interest in such of the young as seemed to him to

possess it. By talent, indeed, his family had risen, and were strikingly

characterized. His ancestor, the first peer, had been a distinguished

lawyer; his father had been celebrated for scientific attainments; his

children, Ellinor and Lord Pendarvis, were highly accomplished. Thus

the family identified themselves with the aristocracy of intellect, and

seemed unconscious of their claims to the lower aristocracy of rank. You

must bear this in mind throughout my story.

“Lady Ellinor shared her father’s tastes and habits of thought (she was

not then an heiress). Lord Rainsforth talked to me of my career. It was

a time when the French Revolution had made statesmen look round with

some anxiety to strengthen the existing order of things, by alliance

with all in the rising generation who evinced such ability as might

influence their contemporaries.

“University distinction is, or was formerly, among the popular passports

to public life. By degrees, Lord Rainsforth liked me so well as to

suggest to me a seat in the House of Commons. A member of Parliament

might rise to anything, and Lord Rainsforth had sufficient influence to

effect my return. Dazzling prospect this to a young scholar fresh from

Thucydides, and with Demosthenes fresh at his tongue’s end! My dear boy,

I was not then, you see, quite what I am now: in a word, I loved Ellinor

Compton, and therefore I was ambitious. You know how ambitious she

is still. But I could not mould my ambition to hers. I could not

contemplate entering the senate of my country as a dependent on a party

or a patron,--as a man who must make his fortune there; as a man who,

in every vote, must consider how much nearer he advanced himself to

emolument. I was not even certain that Lord Rainsforth’s views on

politics were the same as mine would be. How could the politics of an

experienced man of the world be those of an ardent young student? But

had they been identical, I felt that I could not so creep into equality

with a patron’s daughter. No! I was ready to abandon my own more

scholastic predilections, to strain every energy at the Bar, to carve

or force my own way to fortune; and if I arrived at independence,

then,--what then? Why, the right to speak of love and aim at power. This

was not the view of Ellinor Compton. The law seemed to her a tedious,

needless drudgery; there was nothing in it to captivate her imagination.

She listened to me with that charm which she yet retains, and by which

she seems to identify herself with those who speak to her. She would

turn to me with a pleading look when her father dilated on the

brilliant prospects of a parliamentary success; for he (not having

gained it, yet having lived with those who had) overvalued it, and

seemed ever to wish to enjoy it through some other. But when I, in turn,

spoke of independence, of the Bar, Ellinor’s face grew overcast. The

world,--the world was with her, and the ambition of the world, which is

always for power or effect! A part of the house lay exposed to the east

wind. ‘Plant half-way down the hill,’ said I one day. ‘Plant!’ cried

Lady Ellinor,--‘it will be twenty years before the trees grow up. No,

my dear father, build a wall and cover it with creepers!’ That was an

illustration of her whole character. She could not wait till trees had

time to grow; a dead wall would be so much more quickly thrown up, and

parasite creepers would give it a prettier effect. Nevertheless, she was

a grand and noble creature. And I--in love! Not so discouraged as you

may suppose; for Lord Rainsforth often hinted encouragement which even

I could scarcely misconstrue. Not caring for rank, and not wishing

for fortune beyond competence for his daughter, he saw in me all he

required,--a gentleman of ancient birth, and one in whom his own active

mind could prosecute that kind of mental ambition which overflowed

in him, and yet had never had its vent. And Ellinor!--Heaven forbid I

should say she loved me, but something made me think she could do so.

Under these notions, suppressing all my hopes, I made a bold effort

to master the influences round me and to adopt that career I thought

worthiest of us all. I went to London to read for the Bar.”

“The Bar! is it possible?” cried I. My father smiled sadly.

“Everything seemed possible to me then. I read some months. I began to

see my way even in that short time,--began to comprehend what would be

the difficulties before me, and to feel there was that within me which

could master them. I took a holiday and returned to Cumberland. I found

Roland there on my return. Always of a roving, adventurous temper,

though he had not then entered the army, he had, for more than two

years, been wandering over Great Britain and Ireland on foot. It was

a young knight-errant whom I embraced, and who overwhelmed me with

reproaches that I should be reading for the law. There had never been a

lawyer in the family! It was about that time, I think, that I petrified

him with the discovery of the printer! I knew not exactly wherefore,

whether from jealousy, fear, foreboding, but it certainly was a pain

that seized me when I learned from Roland that he had become intimate

at Compton Hall. Roland and Lord Rainsforth had met at the house of

a neighboring gentleman, and Lord Rainsforth had welcomed his

acquaintance, at first, perhaps, for my sake, afterwards for his own.

“I could not for the life of me,” continued my father, “ask Roland if he

admired Ellinor; but when I found that he did not put that question to

me, I trembled!

“We went to Compton together, speaking little by the way. We stayed

there some days.”

My father here thrust his hand into his waistcoat. All men have their

little ways, which denote much; and when my father thrust his hand into

his waistcoat, it was always a sign of some mental effort,--he was going

to prove or to argue, to moralize or to preach. Therefore, though I

was listening before with all my ears, I believe I had, speaking

magnetically and mesmerically, an extra pair of ears, a new sense

supplied to me, when my father put his hand into his waistcoat.

CHAPTER VI.

“There is not a mystical creation, type, symbol, or poetical invention

for meanings abtruse, recondite, and incomprehensible which is not

represented by the female gender,” said my father, having his hand quite

buried in his waistcoat. “For instance, the Sphinx and Isis, whose veil

no man had ever lifted, were both ladies, Kitty! And so was Persephone,

who must be always either in heaven or hell; and Hecate, who was one

thing by night and another by day. The Sibyls were females, and so

were the Gorgons, the Harpies, the Furies, the Fates, and the Teutonic

Valkyrs, Nornies, and Hela herself; in short, all representations of

ideas obscure, inscrutable, and portentous, are nouns feminine.”

Heaven bless my father! Augustine Caxton was himself again! I began to

fear that the story had slipped away from him, lost in that labyrinth of

learning. But luckily, as he paused for breath, his look fell on those

limpid blue eyes of my mother, and that honest open brow of hers,

which had certainly nothing in common with Sphinxes, Fates, Furies, or

Valkyrs; and whether his heart smote him, or his reason made him

own that he had fallen into a very disingenuous and unsound train

of assertion, I know not, but his front relaxed, and with a smile he

resumed: “Ellinor was the last person in the world to deceive any one

willingly. Did she deceive me and Roland, that we both, though not

conceited men, fancied that, if we had dared to speak openly of love,

we had not so dared in vain; or do you think, Kitty, that a woman really

can love (not much, perhaps, but somewhat) two or three, or half a

dozen, at a time?”

“Impossible!” cried my mother. “And as for this Lady Ellinor, I am

shocked at her--I don’t know what to call it!”

“Nor I either, my dear,” said my father, slowly taking his hand from his

waistcoat, as if the effort were too much for him, and the problem were

insoluble. “But this, begging your pardon, I do think, that before a

young woman does really, truly, and cordially centre her affections

on one object, she suffers fancy, imagination, the desire of power,

curiosity, or Heaven knows what, to stimulate, even to her own mind,

pale reflections of the luminary not yet risen,--parhelia that precede

the sun. Don’t judge of Roland as you see him now, Pisistratus,--grim,

and gray, and formal: imagine a nature soaring high amongst daring

thoughts, or exuberant with the nameless poetry of youthful life, with

a frame matchless for bounding elasticity, an eye bright with haughty

fire, a heart from which noble sentiments sprang like sparks from an

anvil. Lady Ellinor had an ardent, inquisitive imagination. This bold,

fiery nature must have moved her interest. On the other hand, she had

an instructed, full, and eager mind. Am I vain if I say, now after

the lapse of so many years, that in my mind her intellect felt

companionship? When a woman loves and marries and settles, why then she

becomes a one whole, a completed being. But a girl like Ellinor has in

her many women. Various herself, all varieties please her. I do believe

that if either of us had spoken the word boldly, Lady Ellinor would have

shrunk back to her own heart, examined it, tasked it, and given a frank

and generous answer; and he who had spoken first might have had the

better chance not to receive a ‘No.’ But neither of us spoke. And

perhaps she was rather curious to know if she had made an impression,

than anxious to create it. It was not that she willingly deceived us,

but her whole atmosphere was delusion. Mists come before the sunrise.

However this be, Roland and I were not long in detecting each other. And

hence arose, first coldness, then jealousy, then quarrel.”

“Oh, my father, your love must have been indeed powerful to have made a

breach between the hearts of two such brothers!”

“Yes,” said my father, “it was amidst the old ruins of the castle, there

where I had first seen Ellinor, that, winding my arm round Roland’s neck

as I found him seated amongst the weeds and stones, his face buried in

his hands,--it was there that I said, ‘Brother, we both love this woman!

My nature is the calmer of the two, I shall feel the loss less. Brother,

shake hands! and God speed you, for I go!’”

“Austin!” murmured my mother, sinking her head on my father’s breast.

“And therewith we quarrelled. For it was Roland who insisted, while the

tears rolled down his eyes and he stamped his foot on the ground, that

he was the intruder, the interloper; that he had no hope; that he had

been a fool and a madman; and that it was for him to go! Now, while we

were disputing, and words began to run high, my father’s old servant

entered the desolate place with a note from Lady Ellinor to me, asking

for the loan of some book I had praised. Roland saw the handwriting, and

while I turned the note over and over irresolutely, before I broke the

seal, he vanished.

“He did not return to my father’s house. We did not know what had become

of him. But I, thinking over that impulsive, volcanic nature, took quick

alarm. And I went in search of him; came on his track at last; and after

many days found him in a miserable cottage amongst the most dreary of

the dreary wastes which form so large a part of Cumberland. He was

so altered I scarcely knew him. To be brief, we came at last to a

compromise. We would go back to Compton. This suspense was intolerable.

One of us at least should take courage and learn his fate. But who

should speak first? We drew lots, and the lot fell on me.

“And now that I was really to pass the Rubicon, now that I was to impart

that secret hope which had animated me so long, been to me a new life,

what were my sensations? My dear boy, depend on it that that age is the

happiest when such feelings as I felt then can agitate us no more; they

are mistakes in the serene order of that majestic life which Heaven

meant for thoughtful man. Our souls should be as stars on earth, not

as meteors and tortured comets. What could I offer to Ellinor, to her

father? What but a future of patient labor? And in either answer what

alternative of misery,--my own existence shattered, or Roland’s noble

heart!

“Well, we went to Compton. In our former visits we had been almost the

only guests. Lord Rainsforth did not much affect the intercourse of

country squires, less educated then than now; and in excuse for Ellinor

and for us, we were almost the only men of our own age she had seen

in that large dull house. But now the London season had broken up,

the house was filled; there was no longer that familiar and constant

approach to the mistress of the Hall which had made us like one family.

Great ladies, fine people were round her; a look, a smile, a passing

word were as much as I had a right to expect. And the talk, too, how

different! Before I could speak on books,--I was at home there! Roland

could pour forth his dreams, his chivalrous love for the past, his bold

defiance of the unknown future. And Ellinor, cultivated and fanciful,

could sympathize with both. And her father, scholar and gentleman, could

sympathize too. But now--”

CHAPTER VII.

“It is no use in the world,” said my father, “to know all the languages

expounded in grammars and splintered up into lexicons, if we don’t learn

the language of the world. It is a talk apart, Kitty,” cried my father,

warming up. “It is an Anaglyph,--a spoken anaglyph, my dear! If all the

hieroglyphs of the Egyptians had been A B C to you, still, if you did

not know the anaglyph, you would know nothing of the true mysteries of

the priests. (1)

“Neither Roland nor I knew one symbol letter of the anaglyph. Talk,

talk, talk on persons we never heard of, things we never cared for. All

we thought of importance, puerile or pedantic trifles; all we thought so

trite and childish, the grand momentous business of life! If you found a

little schoolboy on his half-holiday fishing for minnows with a crooked

pin, and you began to tell him of all the wonders of the deep, the

laws of the tides, and the antediluvian relies of iguanodon and

ichthyosaurus; nay, if you spoke but of pearl fisheries and coral-banks,

or water-kelpies and naiads,--would not the little boy cry out

peevishly, ‘Don’t tease me with all that nonsense; let me fish in peace

for my minnows!’ I think the little boy is right after his own way: it

was to fish for minnows that he came out, poor child, not to hear about

iguanodons and water-kelpies.

“So the company fished for minnows, and not a word could we say about

our pearl-fisheries and coral-banks! And as for fishing for minnows

ourselves, my dear boy, we should have been less bewildered if you had

asked us to fish for a mermaid! Do you see, now, one reason why I

have let you go thus early into the world? Well, but amongst these

minnow-fishers there was one who fished with an air that made the

minnows look larger than salmons.

“Trevanion had been at Cambridge with me. We were even intimate. He was

a young man like myself, with his way to make in the world. Poor as I,

of a family upon a par with mine, old enough, but decayed. There was,

however, this difference between us: he had connections in the great

world; I had none. Like me, his chief pecuniary resource was a college

fellowship. Now, Trevanion had established a high reputation at the

University; but less as a scholar, though a pretty fair one, than as

a man to rise in life. Every faculty he had was an energy. He aimed at

everything: lost some things, gained others. He was a great speaker in

a debating society, a member of some politico-economical club. He was an

eternal talker,--brilliant, various, paradoxical, florid; different

from what he is now, for, dreading fancy, his career since has been one

effort to curb it. But all his mind attached itself to something that we

Englishmen call solid; it was a large mind,--not, my dear Kitty, like a

fine whale sailing through knowledge from the pleasure of sailing,

but like a polypus, that puts forth all its feelers for the purpose of

catching hold of something. Trevanion had gone at once to London from

the University; his reputation and his talk dazzled his connections,

not unjustly. They made an effort, they got him into Parliament; he had

spoken, he had succeeded. He came to Compton in the flush of his virgin

fame. I cannot convey to you who know him now--with his careworn face

and abrupt, dry manner, reduced by perpetual gladiatorship to the skin

and bone of his former self--what that man was when he first stepped

into the arena of life.

“You see, my listeners, that you have to recollect that we middle-aged

folks were young then; that is to say, we were as different from what we

are now as the green bough of summer is from the dry wood out of which

we make a ship or a gatepost. Neither man nor wood comes to the uses of

life till the green leaves are stripped and the sap gone. And then the

uses of life transform us into strange things with other names: the tree

is a tree no more, it is a gate or a ship; the youth is a youth no more,

but a one-legged soldier, a hollow-eyed statesman, a scholar spectacled

and slippered! When Micyllus”--here the hand slides into the waistcoat

again--“when Micyllus,” said my father, “asked the cock that had once

been Pythagoras(2) if the affair of Troy was really as Homer told it,

the cock replied scornfully, ‘How could Homer know anything about it?

At that time he was a camel in Bactria.’ Pisistratus, according to the

doctrine of metempsychosis you might have been a Bactrian camel when

that which to my life was the siege of Troy saw Roland and Trevanion

before the walls.

“Handsome you can see that Trevanion has been: but the beauty of his

countenance then was in its perpetual play, its intellectual eagerness;

and his conversation was so discursive, so various, so animated, and

above all so full of the things of the day! If he had been a priest of

Serapis for fifty years he could not have known the anaglyph better.

Therefore he filled up every crevice and pore of that hollow society

with his broken, inquisitive, petulant light; therefore he was admired,

talked of, listened to, and everybody said, ‘Trevanion is a rising man.’

“Yet I did not do him then the justice I have done since; for we

students and abstract thinkers are apt too much, in our first youth, to

look to the depth, of a man’s mind or knowledge, and not enough to the

surface it may cover. There may be more water in a flowing stream only

four feet deep, and certainly more force and more health, than in a

sullen pool thirty yards to the bottom. I did not do Trevanion justice;

I did not see how naturally he realized Lady Ellinor’s ideal. I have

said that she was like many women in one. Trevanion was a thousand men

in one. He had learning to please her mind, eloquence to dazzle her

fancy, beauty to please her eye, reputation precisely of the kind

to allure her vanity, honor and conscientious purpose to satisfy her

judgment; and, above all, he was ambitious,--ambitious not as I, not as

Roland was, but ambitious as Ellinor was; ambitious, not to realize some

grand ideal in the silent heart, but to grasp the practical, positive

substances that lay without.

“Ellinor was a child of the great world, and so was he.

“I saw not all this, nor did Roland; and Trevanion seemed to pay no

particular court to Ellinor.

“But the time approached when I ought to speak. The house began to thin.

Lord Rainsforth had leisure to resume his easy conferences with me; and

one day, walking in his garden, he gave me the opportunity,--for I need

not say, Pisistratus,” said my father, looking at me earnestly, “that

before any man of honor, if of inferior worldly pretensions, will open

his heart seriously to the daughter, it is his duty to speak first to

the parent, whose confidence has imposed that trust.” I bowed my head

and colored.

“I know not how it was,” continued my father, “but Lord Rainsforth

turned the conversation on Ellinor. After speaking of his expectations

in his son, who was returning home, he said, ‘But he will of course

enter public life,--will, I trust, soon marry, have a separate

establishment, and I shall see but little of him. My Ellinor! I cannot

bear the thought of parting wholly with her. And that, to say the

selfish truth, is one reason why I have never wished her to marry a rich

man, and so leave me forever. I could hope that she will give herself to

one who may be contented to reside at least great part of the year with

me, who may bless me with another son, not steal from me a daughter.

I do not mean that he should waste his life in the country; his

occupations would probably lead him to London. I care not where my house

is,--all I want is to keep my home. You know,’ he added, with a smile

that I thought meaning, ‘how often I have implied to you that I have

no vulgar ambition for Ellinor. Her portion must be very small, for my

estate is strictly entailed, and I have lived too much up to my income

all my life to hope to save much now. But her tastes do not require

expense, and while I live, at least, there need be no change. She can

only prefer a man whose talents, congenial to hers, will win their own

career, and ere I die that career may be made.’ Lord Rainsforth

paused; and then--how, in what words I know not, but out all burst!--my

long-suppressed, timid, anxious, doubtful, fearful love. The strange

energy it had given to a nature till then so retiring and calm! My

recent devotion to the law; my confidence that, with such a prize,

I could succeed,--it was but a transfer of labor from one study to

another. Labor could conquer all things, and custom sweeten them in the

conquest. The Bar was a less brilliant career than the senate. But the

first aim of the poor man should be independence. In short, Pisistratus,

wretched egotist that I was, I forgot Roland in that moment; and I spoke

as one who felt his life was in his words.

“Lord Rainsforth looked at me, when I had done, with a countenance full

of affection, but it was not cheerful.

“‘My dear Caxton,’ said he, tremulously, ‘I own that I once wished

this,--wished it from the hour I knew you; but why did you so long--I

never suspected that--nor, I am sure, did Ellinor.’ He stopped short,

and added quickly: ‘However, go and speak, as you have spoken to me, to

Ellinor. Go; it may not yet be too late. And yet--but go.’

“‘Too late!’--what meant those words? Lord Rainsforth had turned hastily

down another walk, and left me alone, to ponder over an answer which

concealed a riddle. Slowly I took my way towards the house and sought

Lady Ellinor, half hoping, half dreading to find her alone. There was a

little room communicating with a conservatory, where she usually sat in

the morning. Thither I took my course. That room,--I see it still!--the

walls covered with pictures from her own hand, many were sketches of the

haunts we had visited together; the simple ornaments, womanly but not

effeminate; the very books on the table, that had been made familiar by

dear associations. Yes, there the Tasso, in which we had read together

the episode of Clorinda; there the Aeschylus in which I translated to

her the ‘Prometheus.’ Pedantries these might seem to some, pedantries,

perhaps, they were; but they were proofs of that congeniality which had

knit the man of books to the daughter of the world. That room, it was

the home of my heart.

“Such, in my vanity of spirit, methought would be the air round a home

to come. I looked about me, troubled and confused, and, halting timidly,

I saw Ellinor before me, leaning her face on her hand, her cheek more

flushed than usual, and tears in her eyes. I approached in silence, and

as I drew my chair to the table, my eye fell on a glove on the floor. It

was a man’s glove. Do you know,” said my father, “that once, when I was

very young, I saw a Dutch picture called ‘The Glove,’ and the subject

was of murder? There was a weed-grown, marshy pool, a desolate, dismal

landscape, that of itself inspired thoughts of ill deeds and terror. And

two men, as if walking by chance, came to this pool; the finger of one

pointed to a blood-stained glove, and the eyes of both were fixed on

each other, as if there were no need of words. That glove told its tale.

The picture had long haunted me in my boyhood, but it never gave me so

uneasy and fearful a feeling as did that real glove upon the floor. Why?

My dear Pisistratus, the theory of forebodings involves one of those

questions on which we may ask ‘why’ forever. More chilled than I had

been in speaking to her father, I took heart at last, and spoke to

Ellinor.”

My father stopped short; the moon had risen, and was shining full into

the room and on his face. And by that light the face was changed; young

emotions had brought back youth,--my father looked a young man. But what

pain was there! If the memory alone could raise what, after all, was but

the ghost of suffering, what had been its living reality! Involuntarily

I seized his hand; my father pressed it convulsively, and said with a

deep breath: “It was too late; Trevanion was Lady Ellinor’s accepted,

plighted, happy lover. My dear Katherine, I do not envy him now; look

up, sweet wife, look up!”

(1). The anaglyph was peculiar to the Egyptian priests; the hieroglyph

generally known to the well educated.

(2). Lucian, The Dream of Micyllus.

CHAPTER VIII.

“Ellinor (let me do her justice) was shocked at my silent emotion. No

human lip could utter more tender sympathy, more noble self-reproach;

but that was no balm to my wound. So I left the house; so I never

returned to the law; so all impetus, all motive for exertion, seemed

taken from my being; so I went back into books. And so a moping,

despondent, worthless mourner might I have been to the end of my days,

but that Heaven, in its mercy, sent thy mother, Pisistratus, across

my path; and day and night I bless God and her, for I have been, and

am--oh, indeed, I am a happy man!”

My mother threw herself on my father’s breast, sobbing violently, and

then turned from the room without a word; my father’s eye, swimming in

tears, followed her; and then, after pacing the room for some moments

in silence, he came up to me, and leaning his arm on my shoulder,

whispered, “Can you guess why I have now told you all this, my son?”

“Yes, partly: thank you, father,” I faltered, and sat down, for I felt

faint.

“Some sons,” said my father, seating himself beside me, “would find in

their father’s follies and errors an excuse for their own; not so will

you, Pisistratus.”

“I see no folly, no error, sir; only nature and sorrow.”

“Pause ere you thus think,” said my father. “Great was the folly and

great the error of indulging imagination that has no basis, of linking

the whole usefulness of my life to the will of a human creature like

myself. Heaven did not design the passion of love to be this tyrant;

nor is it so with the mass and multitude of human life. We dreamers,

solitary students like me, or half-poets like poor Roland, make our own

disease. How many years, even after I had regained serenity, as

your mother gave me a home long not appreciated, have I wasted! The

mainstring of my existence was snapped; I took no note of time. And

therefore now, you see, late in life, Nemesis wakes. I look back with

regret at powers neglected, opportunities gone. Galvanically I brace up

energies half-palsied by disuse; and you see me, rather than rest quiet

and good for nothing, talked into what, I dare say, are sad follies, by

an Uncle Jack! And now I behold Ellinor again; and I say in wonder: ‘All

this--all this--all this agony, all this torpor, for that, haggard

face, that worldly spirit!’ So is it ever in life: mortal things fade;

immortal things spring more freshly with every step to the tomb.

“Ah!” continued my father, with a sigh, “it would not have been so if at

your age I had found out the secret of the saffron bag!”

CHAPTER IX.

“And Roland, sir,” said I, “how did he take it?”

“With all the indignation of a proud, unreasonable man; more indignant,

poor fellow, for me than himself. And so did he wound and gall me by

what he said of Ellinor, and so did he rage against me because I would

not share his rage, that again we quarrelled. We parted, and did not

meet for many years. We came into sudden possession of our little

fortunes. His he devoted (as you may know) to the purchase of the old

ruins and the commission in the army, which had always been his

dream; and so went his way, wrathful. My share gave me an excuse for

indolence,--it satisfied all my wants; and when my old tutor died, and

his young child became my ward, and, somehow or other, from my ward my

wife, it allowed me to resign my fellowship and live amongst my books,

still as a book myself. One comfort, somewhat before my marriage, I

had conceived; and that, too, Roland has since said was comfort to

him,--Ellinor became an heiress. Her poor brother died, and all of the

estate that did not pass in the male line devolved on her. That fortune

made a gulf between us almost as wide as her marriage. For Ellinor poor

and portionless, in spite of her rank, I could have worked, striven,

slaved; but Ellinor rich! it would have crushed me. This was a comfort.

But still, still the past,--that perpetual aching sense of something

that had seemed the essential of life withdrawn from life evermore,

evermore! What was left was not sorrow,--it was a void. Had I lived more

with men, and less with dreams and books, I should have made my nature

large enough to bear the loss of a single passion. But in solitude

we shrink up. No plant so much as man needs the sun and the air.

I comprehend now why most of our best and wisest men have lived in

capitals; and therefore again I say, that one scholar in a family is

enough. Confiding in your sound heart and strong honor, I turn you

thus betimes on the world. Have I done wrong? Prove that I have not, my

child. Do you know what a very good man has said? Listen and follow my

precept, not example.

“The state of the world is such, and so much depends on action, that

everything seems to say aloud to every man, ‘Do something--do it--do

it!’”

I was profoundly touched, and I rose refreshed and hopeful, when

suddenly the door opened, and who or what in the world should come

in--But certainly he, she, it, or they shall not come into this chapter!

On that point I am resolved. No, my dear young lady, I am extremely

flattered, I feel for your curiosity; but really not a peep,--not one!

And yet--Well, then, if you will have it, and look so coaxingly--Who

or what, I say, should come in abrupt, unexpected--taking away one’s

breath, not giving one time to say, “By your leave, or with your leave,”

but making one’s mouth stand open with surprise, and one’s eyes fix in a

big round stupid stare--but--

PART VIII.

CHAPTER I.

There entered, in the front drawing-room of my father’s house in Russell

Street, an Elf, clad in white,--small, delicate, with curls of jet

over her shoulders; with eyes so large and so lustrous that they shone

through the room as no eyes merely human could possibly shine. The Elf

approached, and stood facing us. The sight was so unexpected and the

apparition so strange that we remained for some moments in startled

silence. At length my father, as the bolder and wiser man of the two,

and the more fitted to deal with the eerie things of another world, had

the audacity to step close up to the little creature, and, bending down

to examine its face, said, “What do you want, my pretty child?”

Pretty child! Was it only a pretty child after all? Alas! it would be

well if all we mistake for fairies at the first glance could resolve

themselves only into pretty children.

“Come,” answered the child, with a foreign accent, and taking my father

by the lappet of his coat, “come, poor papa is so ill! I am frightened!

come, and save him.”

“Certainly,” exclaimed my father, quickly. “Where’s my hat, Sisty?

Certainly, my child; we will go and save papa.”

“But who is papa?” asked Pisistratus,--a question that would never have

occurred to my father. He never asked who or what the sick papas of poor

children were when the children pulled him by the lappet of his coat.

“Who is papa?”

The child looked hard at me, and the big tears rolled from those large,

luminous eyes, but quite silently. At this moment a full-grown figure

filled up the threshold, and emerging from the shadow, presented to us

the aspect of a stout, well-favored young woman. She dropped a courtesy,

and then said, mincingly,--

“Oh, miss, you ought to have waited for me, and not alarmed the

gentlefolks by running upstairs in that way! If you please, sir, I was

settling with the cabman, and he was so imperent,--them low fellows

always are, when they have only us poor women to deal with, sir, and--”

“But what is the matter?” cried I, for my father had taken the child in

his arms soothingly, and she was now weeping on his breast.

“Why, you see, sir [another courtesy], the gent only arrived last night

at our hotel, sir,--the Lamb, close by Lunnun Bridge,--and he was taken

ill, and he’s not quite in his right mind like; so we sent for

the doctor, and the doctor looked at the brass plate on the gent’s

carpet-bag, sir, and then he looked into the ‘Court Guide,’ and he said,

‘There is a Mr. Caxton in Great Russell Street,--is he any relation?’

and this young lady said, ‘That’s my papa’s brother, and we were going

there.’ And so, sir, as the Boots was out, I got into a cab, and miss

would come with me, and--”

“Roland--Roland ill! Quick, quick, quick!” cried my father, and with the

child still in his arms he ran down the stairs. I followed with his hat,

which of course he had forgotten. A cab, by good luck, was passing our

very door; but the chambermaid would not let us enter it till she had

satisfied herself that it was not the same she had dismissed. This

preliminary investigation completed, we entered and drove to the Lamb.

The chambermaid, who sat opposite, passed the time in ineffectual

overtures to relieve my father of the little girl,--who still clung

nestling to his breast,--in a long epic, much broken into episodes, of

the causes which had led to her dismissal of the late cabman, who, to

swell his fare, had thought proper to take a “circumbendibus!”--and

with occasional tugs at her cap, and smoothings down of her gown, and

apologies for being such a figure, especially when her eyes rested on my

satin cravat, or drooped on my shining boots.

Arrived at the Lamb, the chambermaid, with conscious dignity, led us up

a large staircase, which seemed interminable. As she mounted the

region above the third story, she paused to take breath and inform us,

apologetically, that the house was full, but that if the “gent” stayed

over Friday, he would be moved into No. 54, “with a look-out and a

chimbly.” My little cousin now slipped from my father’s arms, and,

running up the stairs, beckoned to us to follow. We did so, and were led

to a door, at which the child stopped and listened; then, taking off her

shoes, she stole in on tiptoe. We entered after her.

By the light of a single candle we saw my poor uncle’s face; it was

flushed with fever, and the eyes had that bright, vacant stare which it

is so terrible to meet. Less terrible is it to find the body wasted, the

features sharp with the great life-struggle, than to look on the face

from which the mind is gone,--the eyes in which there is no recognition.

Such a sight is a startling shock to that unconscious habitual

materialism with which we are apt familiarly to regard those we love;

for in thus missing the mind, the heart, the affection that sprang to

ours, we are suddenly made aware that it was the something within the

form, and not the form itself, that was so dear to us. The form itself

is still, perhaps, little altered; but that lip which smiles no

welcome, that eye which wanders over us as strangers, that ear which

distinguishes no more our voices,--the friend we sought is not there!

Even our own love is chilled back; grows a kind of vague, superstitious

terror. Yes, it was not the matter, still present to us, which had

conciliated all those subtle, nameless sentiments which are classed and

fused in the word “affection;” it was the airy, intangible, electric

something, the absence of which now appals us.

I stood speechless; my father crept on, and took the hand that returned

no pressure. The child only did not seem to share our emotions, but,

clambering on the bed, laid her cheek on the breast, and was still.

“Pisistratus,” whispered my father at last, and I stole near, hushing my

breath,--“Pisistratus, if your mother were here!”

I nodded; the same thought had struck us both. His deep wisdom, my

active youth, both felt their nothingness then and there. In the sick

chamber both turned helplessly to miss the woman.

So I stole out, descended the stairs, and stood in the open air in a

sort of stunned amaze. Then the tramp of feet, and the roll of wheels,

and the great London roar, revived me. That contagion of practical life

which lulls the heart and stimulates the brain,--what an intellectual

mystery there is in its common atmosphere! In another moment I had

singled out, like an inspiration, from a long file of those ministrants

of our Trivia, the cab of the lightest shape and with the strongest

horse, and was on my way, not to my mother’s, but to Dr. M--H--,

Manchester Square, whom I knew as the medical adviser to the Trevanions.

Fortunately, that kind and able physician was at home, and he promised

to be with the sufferer before I myself could join him. I then drove to

Russell Street, and broke to my mother, as cautiously as I could, the

intelligence with which I was charged.

When we arrived at the Lamb, we found the doctor already writing his

prescription and injunctions: the activity of the treatment announced

the clanger. I flew for the surgeon who had been before called in. Happy

those who are strange to that indescribable silent bustle which the

sick-room at times presents,--that conflict which seems almost hand

to hand between life and death,--when all the poor, unresisting,

unconscious frame is given up to the war against its terrible enemy the

dark blood flowing, flowing; the hand on the pulse, the hushed suspense,

every look on the physician’s bended brow; then the sinapisms to the

feet, and the ice to the head; and now and then, through the lull of the

low whispers, the incoherent voice of the sufferer,--babbling, perhaps,

of green fields and fairyland, while your hearts are breaking! Then, at

length, the sleep,--in that sleep, perhaps, the crisis,--the breathless

watch, the slow waking, the first sane words, the old smile again, only

fainter, your gushing tears, your low “Thank God! thank God!”

Picture all this! It is past; Roland has spoken, his sense has returned;

my mother is leaning over him; his child’s small hands are clasped round

his neck; the surgeon, who has been there six hours, has taken up his

hat, and smiles gayly as he nods farewell; and my father is leaning

against the wall, his face covered with his hands.

CHAPTER II.

All this had been so sudden that, to use the trite phrase,--for no other

is so expressive,--it was like a dream. I felt an absolute, an imperious

want of solitude, of the open air. The swell of gratitude almost stifled

me; the room did not seem large enough for my big heart. In early youth,

if we find it difficult to control our feelings, so we find it difficult

to vent them in the presence of others. On the spring side of twenty,

if anything affects us, we rush to lock ourselves up in our room, or get

away into the streets or the fields; in our earlier years we are still

the savages of Nature, and we do as the poor brute does: the wounded

stag leaves the herd, and if there is anything on a dog’s faithful

heart, he slinks away into a corner.

Accordingly, I stole out of the hotel and wandered through the streets,

which were quite deserted. It was about the first hour of dawn,--the

most comfortless hour there is, especially in London! But I only felt

freshness in the raw air, and soothing in the desolate stillness. The

love my uncle inspired was very remarkable in its nature; it was not

like that quiet affection with which those advanced in life must usually

content themselves, but connected with the more vivid interest that

youth awakens. There was in him still so much of viva, city and fire, in

his errors and crotchets so much of the self-delusion of youth, that

one could scarce fancy him other than young. Those Quixotic, exaggerated

notions of honor, that romance of sentiment which no hardship, care,

grief, disappointment, could wear away (singular in a period when, at

two and twenty, young men declare themselves blases!), seemed to leave

him all the charm of boyhood. A season in London had made me more a man

of the world, older in heart than he was. Then, the sorrow that gnawed

him with such silent sternness. No, Captain Roland was one of those men

who seize hold of your thoughts, who mix themselves up with your

lives. The idea that Roland should die,--die with the load at his heart

unlightened,--was one that seemed to take a spring out of the wheels of

nature, all object out of the aims of life,--of my life at least. For I

had made it one of the ends of my existence to bring back the son to

the father, and restore the smile, that must have been gay once, to the

downward curve of that iron lip. But Roland was now out of danger; and

yet, like one who has escaped shipwreck, I trembled to look back on the

danger past: the voice of the devouring deep still boomed in my ears.

While rapt in my reveries, I stopped mechanically to hear a clock

strike--four; and, looking round, I perceived that I had wandered from

the heart of the City, and was in one of the streets that lead out of

the Strand. Immediately before me, on the doorsteps of a large shop

whose closed shutters were as obstinate a stillness as if they had

guarded the secrets of seventeen centuries in a street in Pompeii,

reclined a form fast asleep, the arm propped on the hard stone

supporting the head, and the limbs uneasily strewn over the stairs.

The dress of the slumberer was travel-stained, tattered, yet with

the remains of a certain pretence; an air of faded, shabby, penniless

gentility made poverty more painful, because it seemed to indicate

unfitness to grapple with it. The face of this person was hollow and

pale, but its expression, even in sleep, was fierce and hard. I drew

near and nearer; I recognized the countenance, the regular features, the

raven hair, even a peculiar gracefulness of posture: the young man whom

I had met at the inn by the way-side, and who had left me alone with

the Savoyard and his mice in the churchyard, was before me. I remained

behind the shadow of one of the columns of the porch, leaning against

the area rails, and irresolute whether or not so slight an acquaintance

justified me in waking the sleeper, when a policeman, suddenly emerging

from an angle in the street, terminated my deliberations with the

decision of his practical profession; for he laid hold of the young

man’s arm and shook it roughly: “You must not lie here; get up and go

home!” The sleeper woke with a quick start, rubbed his eyes, looked

round, and fixed them upon the policeman so haughtily that that

discriminating functionary probably thought that it was not from sheer

necessity that so improper a couch had been selected, and with an air

of greater respect he said, “You have been drinking, young man,--can you

find your way home?”

“Yes,” said the youth, resettling himself, “you see I have found it!”

“By the Lord Harry!” muttered the policeman, “if he ben’t going to sleep

again. Come, come, walk on; or I must walk you off.”

My old acquaintance turned round. “Policeman,” said he, with a strange

sort of smile, “what do you think this lodging is worth,--I don’t say

for the night, for you see that is over, but for the next two hours? The

lodging is primitive, but it suits me; I should think a shilling would

be a fair price for it, eh?”

“You love your joke, sir,” said the policeman, with a brow much relaxed,

and opening his hand mechanically.

“Say a shilling, then; it is a bargain! I hire it of you upon credit.

Good night, and call me at six o’clock.”

With that the young man settled himself so resolutely, and the

policeman’s face exhibited such bewilderment, that I burst out laughing,

and came from my hiding-place.

The policeman looked at me. “Do you know this--this--”

“This gentleman?” said I, gravely. “Yes, you may leave him to me;” and I

slipped the price of the lodging into the policeman’s hand. He looked

at the shilling, he looked at me, he looked up the street and down the

street, shook his head, and walked off. I then approached the youth,

touched him, and said: “Can you remember me, sir; and what have you done

with Mr. Peacock?”

Stranger (after a pause).--“I remember you; your name is Caxton.”

Pisistratus.--“And yours?”

Stranger.--“Poor devil, if you ask my pockets,--pockets, which are the

symbols of man; Dare-devil, if you ask my heart. [Surveying me from head

to foot.] The world seems to have smiled on you, Mr. Caxton! Are you not

ashamed to speak to a wretch lying on the stones? but, to be sure, no

one sees you.”

Pisistratus (sententiously).--“Had I lived in the last century, I might

have found Samuel Johnson lying on the stones.”

Stranger (rising).--“You have spoilt my sleep: you had a right, since

you paid for the lodging. Let me walk with you a few paces; you need not

fear, I do not pick pockets--yet!”

Pisistratus.--“You say the world has smiled on me; I fear it has frowned

on you. I don’t say ‘courage,’ for you seem to have enough of that; but

I say ‘patience,’ which is the rarer quality of the two.”

Stranger.--“Hem! [again looking at me keenly.] Why is it that you stop

to speak to me,--one of whom you know nothing, or worse than nothing?”

Pisistratus.--“Because I have often thought of you; because you interest

me; because--pardon me--I would help you if I can,--that is, if you want

help.”

Stranger.--“Want? I am one want! I want sleep, I want food; I want the

patience you recommend,--patience to starve and rot. I have travelled

from Paris to Boulogne on foot, with twelve sous in my pocket. Out of

those twelve sous in my pocket I saved four; with the four I went to a

billiard-room at Boulogne: I won just enough to pay my passage and buy

three rolls. You see I only require capital in order to make a fortune.

If with four sous I can win ten francs in a night, what could I win with

a capital of four sovereigns, and in the course of a year? That is

an application of the Rule of Three which my head aches too much to

calculate just at present. Well, those three rolls have lasted me three

days; the last crumb went for supper last night. Therefore, take care

how you offer me money (for that is what men mean by help). You see I

have no option but to take it. But I warn you, don’t expect gratitude; I

have none in me!”

Pisistratus.--“You are not so bad as you paint yourself. I would do

something more for you, if I can, than lend you the little I have to

offer. Will you be frank with me?”

Stranger.--“That depends; I have been frank enough hitherto, I think.”

Pisistratus.--“True; so I proceed without scruple. Don’t tell me your

name or your condition, if you object to such confidence; but tell me

if you have relations to whom you can apply? You shake your head.

Well, then, are you willing to work for yourself, or is it only at the

billiard-table--pardon me--that you can try to make four sous produce

ten francs?”

Stranger (musing).--“I understand you. I have never worked yet,--I abhor

work. But I have no objection to try if it is in me.”

Pisistratus.--“It is in you. A man who can walk from Paris to Boulogne

with twelve sous in his pocket and save four for a purpose; who can

stake those four on the cool confidence in his own skill, even at

billiards; who can subsist for three days on three rolls; and who, on

the fourth day, can wake from the stones of a capital with an eye and

a spirit as proud as yours,--has in him all the requisites to subdue

fortune.”

Stranger.--“Do you work--you?”

Pisistratus.--“Yes--and hard.”

Stranger.--“I am ready to work, then.”

Pisistratus.--“Good. Now, what can you do?”

Stranger (with his odd smile).--“Many things useful. I can split

a bullet on a penknife; I know the secret tierce of Coulon, the

fencing-master; I can speak two languages (besides English) like a

native, even to their slang; I know every game in the cards; I can act

comedy, tragedy, farce; I can drink down Bacchus himself; I can make any

woman I please in love with me,--that is, any woman good for nothing.

Can I earn a handsome livelihood out of all this,--wear kid gloves and

set up a cabriolet? You see my wishes are modest!”

Pisistratus.--“You speak two languages, you say, like a native,--French,

I suppose, is one of them?”

Stranger.--“Yes.”

Pisistratus.--“Will you teach it?”

Stranger (haughtily). “No. Je suis gentilhomme, which means more or

less than a gentleman. Gentilhomme means well born, because free born;

teachers are slaves!”

Pisistratus (unconsciously imitating Mr. Trevanion).--“Stuff!”

Stranger (looks angry, and then laughs).--“Very true; stilts don’t suit

shoes like these! But I cannot teach. Heaven help those I should teach!

Anything else?”

Pisistratus.--“Anything else!--you leave me a wide margin. You know

French thoroughly,--to write as well as speak? That is much. Give me

some address where I can find you,--or will you call on me?”

Stranger.--“No! Any evening at dusk I will meet you. I have no address

to give, and I cannot show these rags at another man’s door.”

Pisistratus.--“At nine in the evening, then, and here in the Strand,

on Thursday next. I may then have found some thing that will suit you.

Meanwhile--” slides his purse into the Stranger’s hand. N. B.--Purse not

very full.

Stranger, with the air of one conferring a favor, pockets the purse; and

there is something so striking in the very absence of all emotion at so

accidental a rescue from starvation that Pisistratus exclaims,--

“I don’t know why I should have taken this fancy to you, Mr. Dare-devil,

if that be the name that pleases you best. The wood you are made of

seems cross-grained, and full of knots; and yet, in the hands of a

skilful carver, I think it would be worth much.”

Stranger (startled).--“Do you? Do you? None, I believe, ever thought

that before. But the same wood, I suppose, that makes the gibbet could

make the mast of a man-of-war. I tell you, however, why you have taken

this fancy to me,--the strong sympathize with the strong. You, too,

could subdue fortune!”

Pisistratus.--“Stop! If so, if there is congeniality between us, then

liking should be reciprocal. Come, say that; for half my chance of

helping you is in my power to touch your heart.”

Stranger (evidently softened).--“If I were as great a rogue as I ought

to be, my answer would be easy enough. As it is, I delay it. Adieu.--On

Thursday.”

Stranger vanishes in the labyrinth of alleys round Leicester Square.

CHAPTER III.

On my return to the Lamb, I found that my uncle was in a soft sleep; and

after a morning visit from the surgeon, and his assurance that the

fever was fast subsiding, and all cause for alarm was gone, I thought it

necessary to go back to Trevanion’s house and explain the reason for

my night’s absence. But the family had not returned from the country.

Trevanion himself came up for a few hours in the afternoon, and seemed

to feel much for my poor uncle’s illness. Though, as usual, very busy,

he accompanied me to the Lamb to see my father and cheer him up. Roland

still continued to mend, as the surgeon phrased it; and as we went back

to St. James’s Square, Trevanion had the consideration to release me

from my oar in his galley for the next few days. My mind, relieved from

my anxiety for Roland, now turned to my new friend. It had not been

without an object that I had questioned the young man as to his

knowledge of French. Trevanion had a large correspondence in foreign

countries which was carried on in that language; and here I could be but

of little help to him. He himself, though he spoke and wrote French with

fluency and grammatical correctness, wanted that intimate knowledge

of the most delicate and diplomatic of all languages to satisfy his

classical purism.

For Trevanion was a terrible word-weigher. His taste was the plague of

my life and his own. His prepared speeches (or rather perorations) were

the most finished pieces of cold diction that could be conceived under

the marble portico of the Stoics,--so filed and turned, trimmed and

tamed, that they never admitted a sentence that could warm the heart, or

one that could offend the ear. He had so great a horror of a vulgarism

that, like Canning, he would have made a periphrasis of a couple of

lines to avoid using the word “cat.” It was only in extempore speaking

that a ray of his real genius could indiscreetly betray itself. One may

judge what labor such a super-refinement of taste would inflict upon a

man writing in a language not his own to some distinguished statesman

or some literary institution,--knowing that language just well enough

to recognize all the native elegances he failed to attain. Trevanion at

that very moment was employed upon a statistical document intended as

a communication to a Society at Copenhagen of which he was all honorary

member. It had been for three weeks the torment of the whole house,

especially of poor Fanny (whose French was the best at our joint

disposal). But Trevanion had found her phraseology too mincing, too

effeminate, too much that of the boudoir. Here, then, was an opportunity

to introduce my new friend and test the capacities that I fancied he

possessed. I therefore, though with some hesitation, led the subject to

“Remarks on the Mineral Treasures of Great Britain and Ireland” (such

was the title of the work intended to enlighten the savants of Denmark);

and by certain ingenious circumlocutions, known to all able applicants,

I introduced my acquaintance with a young gentleman who possessed the

most familiar and intimate knowledge of French, and who might be of use

in revising the manuscript. I knew enough of Trevanion to feel that

I could not reveal the circumstances under which I had formed that

acquaintance, for he was much too practical a man not to have been

frightened out of his wits at the idea of submitting so classical

a performance to so disreputable a scapegrace. As it was, however,

Trevanion, whose mind at that moment was full of a thousand other

things, caught at my suggestion, with very little cross-questioning on

the subject, and before he left London consigned the manuscript to my

charge.

“My friend is poor,” said I, timidly.

“Oh! as to that,” cried Trevanion, hastily, “if it be a matter of

charity, I put my purse in your hands; but don’t put my manuscript in

his! If it be a matter of business, it is another affair; and I must

judge of his work before I can say how much it is worth,--perhaps

nothing!”

So ungracious was this excellent man in his very virtues!

“Nay,” said I, “it is a matter of business, and so we will consider it.”

“In that case,” said Trevanion, concluding the matter and buttoning

his pockets, “if I dislike his work,--nothing; if I like it,--twenty

guineas. Where are the evening papers?” and in another moment the member

of Parliament had forgotten the statist, and was pishing and tutting

over the “Globe” or the “Sun.”

On Thursday my uncle was well enough to be moved into our house; and on

the same evening I went forth to keep my appointment with the stranger.

The clock struck nine as we met. The palm of punctuality might be

divided between us. He had profited by the interval, since our last

meeting, to repair the more obvious deficiencies of his wardrobe; and

though there was something still wild, dissolute, outlandish, about his

whole appearance, yet in the elastic energy of his step and the resolute

assurance of his bearing there was that which Nature gives to her own

aristocracy: for, as far as my observation goes, what has been called

the “grand air” (and which is wholly distinct from the polish of manner

or the urbane grace of high breeding) is always accompanied, and perhaps

produced, by two qualities,--courage, and the desire of command. It is

more common to a half-savage nature than to one wholly civilized. The

Arab has it, so has the American Indian; and I suspect that it was more

frequent among the knights and barons of the Middle Ages than it is

among the polished gentlemen of the modern drawing-room.

We shook hands, and walked on a few moments in silence; at length thus

commenced the Stranger,--

“You have found it more difficult, I fear, than you imagined, to make

the empty sack stand upright. Considering that at least one third of

those born to work cannot find it, why should I?”

Pisistratus.--“I am hard-hearted enough to believe that work never fails

to those who seek it in good earnest. It was said of some man, famous

for keeping his word, that ‘if he had promised you an acorn, and all the

oaks in England failed to produce one, he would have sent to Norway for

an acorn.’ If I wanted work, and there was none to be had in the Old

World, I would find my way to the New. But to the point: I have found

something for you, which I do not think your taste will oppose, and

which may open to you the means of an honorable independence. But I

cannot well explain it in the streets: where shall we go?”

Stranger (after some hesitation).--“I have a lodging near here which I

need not blush to take you to,--I mean, that it is not among rogues and

castaways.”

Pisistratus (much pleased, and taking the stranger’s arm).--“Come,

then.”

Pisistratus and the stranger pass over Waterloo Bridge and pause before

a small house of respectable appearance. Stranger admits them both with

a latch-key, leads the way to the third story, strikes a light, and does

the honors to a small chamber, clean and orderly. Pisistratus explains

the task to be done, and opens the manuscript. The stranger draws his

chair deliberately towards the light and runs his eye rapidly over the

pages. Pisistratus trembles to see him pause before a long array of

figures and calculations. Certainly it does not look inviting; but,

pshaw! it is scarcely a part of the task, which limits itself to the

mere correction of words.

Stranger (briefly).--“There must be a mistake here--stay!--I see--” (He

turns back a few pages and corrects with rapid precision an error in a

somewhat complicated and abstruse calculation.)

Pisistratus (surprised).--“You seem a notable arithmetician.”

Stranger.--“Did I not tell you that I was skilful in all games of

mingled skill and chance? It requires an arithmetical head for that:

a first-rate card-player is a financier spoilt. I am certain that you

never could find a man fortunate on the turf or at the gaining-table who

had not an excellent head for figures. Well, this French is good enough,

apparently; there are but a few idioms, here and there, that, strictly

speaking, are more English than French. But the whole is a work scarce

worth paying for!”

Pisistratus.--“The work of the head fetches a price not proportioned to

the quantity, but the quality. When shall I call for this?”

Stranger.--“To-morrow.” (And he puts the manuscript away in a drawer.)

We then conversed on various matters for nearly an hour; and my

impression of this young man’s natural ability was confirmed and

heightened. But it was an ability as wrong and perverse in its

directions or instincts as a French novelist’s. He seemed to have, to

a high degree, the harder portion of the reasoning faculty, but to be

almost wholly without that arch beautifier of character, that sweet

purifier of mere intellect,--the imagination; for though we are too much

taught to be on our guard against imagination, I hold it, with Captain

Roland, to be the divinest kind of reason we possess, and the one that

leads us the least astray. In youth, indeed, it occasions errors, but

they are not of a sordid or debasing nature. Newton says that one

final effect of the comets is to recruit the seas and the planets by

a condensation of the vapors and exhalations therein; and so even the

erratic flashes of an imagination really healthful and vigorous deepen

our knowledge and brighten our lights; they recruit our seas and our

stars. Of such flashes my new friend was as innocent as the sternest

matter-of-fact person could desire. Fancies he had in profusion, and

very bad ones; but of imagination not a scintilla! His mind was one

of those which live in a prison of logic, and cannot, or will not, see

beyond the bars. Duch a nature is at once positive and sceptical. This

boy had thought proper to decide at once on the numberless complexities

of the social world from his own harsh experience.

With him the whole system was a war and a cheat. If the universe were

entirely composed of knaves, he would be sure to have made his way. Now

this bias of mind, alike shrewd and unamiable, might be safe enough if

accompanied by a lethargic temper; but it threatened to become terrible

and dangerous in one who, in default of imagination, possessed abundance

of passion: and this was the case with the young outcast. Passion, in

him, comprehended many of the worst emotions which militate against

human happiness. You could not contradict him but you raised quick

choler; you could not speak of wealth, but the cheek paled with gnawing

envy. The astonishing natural advantages of this poor boy his beauty,

his readiness, the daring spirit that breathed around him like a fiery

atmosphere--had raised his constitutional self-confidence into an

arrogance that turned his very claims to admiration into prejudices

against him. Irascible, envious, arrogant,--bad enough, but not the

worst, for these salient angles were all varnished over with a cold,

repellent cynicism,--his passions vented themselves in sneers. There

seemed in him no moral susceptibility, and, what was more remarkable in

a proud nature, little or nothing of the true point of honor. He had,

to a morbid excess, that desire to rise which is vulgarly called

“ambition,” but no apparent wish for fame or esteem or the love of his

species; only the hard wish to succeed, not shine, not serve,--succeed,

that he might have the right to despise a world which galled his

self-conceit, and enjoy the pleasures which the redundant nervous

life in him seemed to crave. Such were the more patent attributes of a

character that, ominous as it was, yet interested me, and yet appeared

to me to be redeemable,--nay, to have in it the rude elements of a

certain greatness. Ought we not to make something great out of a youth,

under twenty, who has, in the highest degree, quickness to conceive

and courage to execute? On the other hand, all faculties that can

make greatness, contain those that can attain goodness. In the savage

Scandinavian or the ruthless Frank lay the germs of a Sidney or a

Bayard. What would the best of us be if he were suddenly placed at war

with the whole world? And this fierce spirit was at war with the whole

world,--a war self-sought, perhaps, but it was war not the less. You

must surround the savage with peace, if you want the virtues of peace.

I cannot say that it was in a single interview and conference that I

came to these convictions; but I am rather summing up the impressions

which I received as I saw more of this person, whose destiny I presumed

to take under my charge.

In going away, I said, “But at all events you have a name in your

lodgings: whom am I to ask for when I call tomorrow?”

“Oh! you may know my name now,” said he smiling, “it is Vivian,--Francis

Vivian.”

CHAPTER IV.

I remember one morning, when a boy, loitering by an old wall to watch

the operations of a garden spider whose web seemed to be in great

request. When I first stopped, she was engaged very quietly with a fly

of the domestic species, whom she managed with ease and dignity. But

just when she was most interested in that absorbing employment came a

couple of May-flies, and then a gnat, and then a blue-bottle,--all at

different angles of the web. Never was a poor spider so distracted

by her good fortune! She evidently did not know which godsend to take

first. The aboriginal victim being released, she slid half-way

towards the May-flies; then one of her eight eyes caught sight of the

blue-bottle, and she shot off in that direction,--when the hum of the

gnat again diverted her; and in the middle of this perplexity, pounce

came a young wasp in a violent passion! Then the spider evidently lost

her presence of mind; she became clean demented; and after standing,

stupid and stock-still, in the middle of her meshes for a minute or two,

she ran off to her hole as fast as she could run, and left her guests to

shift for themselves. I confess that I am somewhat in the dilemma of

the attractive and amiable insect I have just described. I got on well

enough while I had only my domestic fly to see after. But now that there

is something fluttering at every end of my net (and especially since the

advent of that passionate young wasp, who is fuming and buzzing in the

nearest corner), I am fairly at a loss which I should first grapple

with; and alas! unlike the spider, I have no hole where I can hide

myself, and let the web do the weaver’s work. But I will imitate the

spider as far as I can; and while the rest hum and struggle away their

impatient, unnoticed hour, I will retreat into the inner labyrinth of my

own life.

The illness of my uncle and my renewed acquaintance with Vivian had

naturally sufficed to draw my thoughts from the rash and unpropitious

love I had conceived for Fanny Trevanion. During the absence of the

family from London (and they stayed some time longer than had been

expected), I had leisure, however, to recall my father’s touching

history, and the moral it had so obviously preached to me; and I formed

so many good resolutions that it was with an untrembling hand that I

welcomed Miss Trevanion at last to London, and with a firm heart that I

avoided, as much as possible, the fatal charm of her society. The slow

convalescence of my uncle gave me a just excuse to discontinue our

rides. What time Trevanion spared me, it was natural that I should spend

with my family. I went to no balls nor parties; I even absented myself

from Trevanion’s periodical dinners. Miss Trevanion at first rallied me

on my seclusion, with her usual lively malice. But I continued worthily

to complete my martyrdom. I took care that no reproachful look at the

gayety that wrung my soul should betray my secret. Then Fanny seemed

either hurt or disdainful, and avoided altogether entering her father’s

study; all at once, she changed her tactics, and was seized with a

strange desire for knowledge, which brought her into the room to look

for a book, or ask a question, ten times a day. I was proof to all.

But, to speak truth, I was profoundly wretched. Looking back now, I

am dismayed at the remembrance of my own sufferings: my health became

seriously affected; I dreaded alike the trial of the day and the anguish

of the night. My only distractions were in my visits to Vivian and my

escape to the dear circle of home. And that home was my safeguard and

preservative in that crisis of my life; its atmosphere of unpretended

honor and serene virtue strengthened all my resolutions; it braced me

for my struggles against the strongest passion which youth admits, and

counteracted the evil vapors of that air in which Vivian’s envenomed

spirit breathed and moved. Without the influence of such a home, if

I had succeeded in the conduct that probity enjoined towards those in

whose house I was a trusted guest, I do not think I could have resisted

the contagion of that malign and morbid bitterness against fate and

the world which love, thwarted by fortune, is too inclined of itself

to conceive, and in the expression of which Vivian was not without the

eloquence that belongs to earnestness, whether in truth or falsehood.

But, somehow or other, I never left the little room that contained the

grand suffering in the face of the veteran soldier, whose lip, often

quivering with anguish, was never heard to murmur, and the tranquil

wisdom which had succeeded my father’s early trials (trials like my

own), and the loving smile on my mother’s tender face, and the innocent

childhood of Blanche (by which name the Elf had familiarized herself to

us), whom I already loved as a sister,--without feeling that those four

walls contained enough to sweeten the world, had it been filled to its

capacious brim with gall and hyssop.

Trevanion had been more than satisfied with Vivian’s performance, he had

been struck with it; for though the corrections in the mere phraseology

had been very limited, they went beyond verbal amendments,--they

suggested such words as improved the thoughts; and besides that notable

correction of an arithmetical error which Trevanion’s mind was formed to

over-appreciate, one or two brief annotations on the margin were boldly

hazarded, prompting some stronger link in a chain of reasoning, or

indicating the necessity for some further evidence in the assertion of

a statement. And all this from the mere natural and naked logic of an

acute mind, unaided by the smallest knowledge of the subject treated

of! Trevanion threw quite enough work into Vivian’s hands, and at

a remuneration sufficiently liberal to realize my promise of an

independence. And more than once he asked me to introduce to him my

friend. But this I continued to elude,--Heaven knows, not from jealousy,

but simply because I feared that Vivian’s manner and way of talk would

singularly displease one who detested presumption, and understood no

eccentricities but his own.

Still, Vivian, whose industry was of a strong wing, but only for short

flights, had not enough to employ more than a few hours of the day, and

I dreaded lest he should, from very idleness, fall back into old habits

and re-seek old friendships. His cynical candor allowed that both were

sufficiently disreputable to justify grave apprehensions of such a

result; accordingly, I contrived to find leisure in my evenings to

lessen his ennui, by accompanying him in rambles through the gas-lit

streets, or occasionally, for an hour or so, to one of the theatres.

Vivian’s first care, on finding himself rich enough, had been bestowed

on his person; and those two faculties of observation and imitation

which minds so ready always eminently possess, had enabled him to

achieve that graceful neatness of costume peculiar to the English

gentleman. For the first few days of his metamorphosis traces indeed of

a constitutional love of show or vulgar companionship were noticeable;

but one by one they disappeared. First went a gaudy neckcloth, with

collars turned down; then a pair of spurs vanished; and lastly a

diabolical instrument that he called a cane--but which, by means of a

running bullet, could serve as a bludgeon at one end, and concealed a

dagger in the other--subsided into the ordinary walking-stick adapted

to our peaceable metropolis. A similar change, though in a less degree,

gradually took place in his manner and his conversation. He grew less

abrupt in the one, and more calm, perhaps more cheerful, in the other.

It was evident that he was not insensible to the elevated pleasure of

providing for himself by praiseworthy exertion, of feeling for the first

time that his intellect was of use to him creditably.

A new world, though still dim--seen through mist and fog--began to dawn

upon him.

Such is the vanity of us poor mortals that my interest in Vivian was

probably increased, and my aversion to much in him materially softened,

by observing that I had gained a sort of ascendancy over his savage

nature. When we had first met by the roadside, and afterwards conversed

in the churchyard, the ascendancy was certainly not on my side. But I

now came from a larger sphere of society than that in which he had yet

moved. I had seen and listened to the first men in England. What had

then dazzled me only, now moved my pity. On the other hand, his active

mind could not but observe the change in me; and whether from envy or

a better feeling, he was willing to learn from me how to eclipse me and

resume his earlier superiority,--not to be superior chafed him. Thus

he listened to me with docility when I pointed out the books which

connected themselves with the various subjects incidental to the

miscellaneous matters on which he was employed. Though he had less of

the literary turn of mind than any one equally clever I had ever met,

and had read little, considering the quantity of thought he had acquired

and the show he made of the few works with which he had voluntarily

made himself familiar, he yet resolutely sat himself down to study; and

though it was clearly against the grain, I augured the more favorably

from tokens of a determination to do what was at the present irksome for

a purpose in the future. Yet whether I should have approved the purpose

had I thoroughly understood it, is another question. There were abysses,

both in his past life and in his character, which I could not penetrate.

There was in him both a reckless frankness and a vigilant reserve: his

frankness was apparent in his talk on all matters immediately before us,

in the utter absence of all effort to make himself seem better than he

was. His reserve was equally shown in the ingenious evasion of every

species of confidence that could admit me into such secrets of his life

as he chose to conceal where he had been born, reared, and educated; how

he came to be thrown on his own resources; how he had contrived, how he

had subsisted, were all matters on which he had seemed to take an oath

to Harpocrates, the god of silence. And yet he was full of anecdotes of

what he had seen, of strange companions whom he never named, but with

whom he had been thrown. And, to do him justice, I remarked that though

his precocious experience seemed to have been gathered from the holes

and corners, the sewers and drains of life, and though he seemed wholly

without dislike to dishonesty, and to regard virtue or vice with as

serene an indifference as some grand poet who views them both merely

as ministrants to his art, yet he never betrayed any positive breach

of honesty in himself. He could laugh over the story of some ingenious

fraud that he had witnessed, and seem insensible to its turpitude; but

he spoke of it in the tone of an approving witness, not of an actual

accomplice. As we grew more intimate, he felt gradually, however, that

pudor, or instinctive shame, which the contact with minds habituated

to the distinctions between wrong and right unconsciously produces, and

such stories ceased. He never but once mentioned his family, and that

was in the following odd and abrupt manner:--

“Ah!” cried he one day, stopping suddenly before a print-shop, “how that

reminds me of my dear, dear mother.”

“Which?” said I, eagerly, puzzled between an engraving of Raffaelle’s

“Madonna” and another of “The Brigand’s Wife.”

Vivian did not satisfy my curiosity, but drew me on in spite of my

reluctance.

“You loved your mother, then?” said I, after a pause. “Yes, as a whelp

may a tigress.”

“That’s a strange comparison.”

“Or a bull-dog may the prize-fighter, his master! Do you like that

better?”

“Not much; is it a comparison your mother would like?”

“Like? She is dead!” said he, rather falteringly.

I pressed his arm closer to mine.

“I understand you,” said he, with his cynic, repellent smile. “But you

do wrong to feel for my loss. I feel for it; but no one who cares for me

should sympathize with my grief.”

“Why?”

“Because my mother was not what the world would call a good woman. I did

not love her the less for that. And now let us change the subject.”

“Nay; since you have said so much, Vivian, let me coax you to say on. Is

not your father living?”

“Is not the Monument standing?”

“I suppose so; what of that?”

“Why, it matters very little to either of us; and my question answers

yours.”

I could not get on after this, and I never did get on a step further. I

must own that if Vivian did not impart his confidence liberally, neither

did he seek confidence inquisitively from me. He listened with interest

if I spoke of Trevanion (for I told him frankly of my connection with

that personage, though you may be sure that I said nothing of Fanny),

and of the brilliant world that my residence with one so distinguished

opened to me. But if ever, in the fulness of my heart, I began to speak

of my parents, of my home, he evinced either so impertinent an ennui

or assumed so chilling a sneer that I usually hurried away from him, as

well as the subject, in indignant disgust. Once especially, when I asked

him to let me introduce him to my father,--a point on which I was really

anxious, for I thought it impossible but that the devil within him would

be softened by that contact,--he said, with his low, scornful laugh,--

“My dear Caxton, when I was a child I was so bored with ‘Telemachus’

that, in order to endure it, I turned it into travesty.”

“Well?”

“Are you not afraid that the same wicked disposition might make a

caricature of your Ulysses?”

I did not see Mr. Vivian for three days after that speech; and I should

not have seen him then, only we met, by accident, under the Colonnade

of the Opera-House. Vivian was leaning against one of the columns, and

watching the long procession which swept to the only temple in vogue

that Art has retained in the English Babel. Coaches and chariots

blazoned with arms and coronets, cabriolets (the brougham had not then

replaced them) of sober hue but exquisite appointment, with gigantic

horses and pigmy “tigers,” dashed on, and rolled off before him. Fair

women and gay dresses, stars and ribbons, the rank and the beauty of the

patrician world,--passed him by. And I could not resist the compassion

with which this lonely, friendless, eager, discontented spirit inspired

me, gazing on that gorgeous existence in which it fancied itself formed

to shine, with the ardor of desire and the despair of exclusion. By one

glimpse of that dark countenance, I read what was passing within the yet

darker heart. The emotion might not be amiable, nor the thoughts wise,

yet were they unnatural? I had experienced something of them,--not at

the sight of gay-dressed people, of wealth and idleness, pleasure and

fashion, but when, at the doors of Parliament, men who have won noble

names, and whose word had weight on the destinies of glorious England,

brushed heedlessly by to their grand arena; or when, amidst the holiday

crowd of ignoble pomp, I had heard the murmur of fame buzz and gather

round some lordly laborer in art or letters: that contrast between glory

so near and yet so far, and one’s own obscurity, of course I had felt

it,--who has not? Alas! many a youth not fated to be a Themistocles will

yet feel that the trophies of a Miltiades will not suffer him to sleep!

So I went up to Vivian and laid my hand on his shoulder.

“Ah!” said he, more gently than usual, “I am glad to see you, and to

apologize,--I offended you the other day. But you would not get very

gracious answers from souls in purgatory if you talked to them of the

happiness of heaven. Never speak to me about homes and fathers! Enough!

I see you forgive me. Why are you not going to the opera? You can.”

“And you too, if you so please. A ticket is shamefully dear, to be sure;

still, if you are fond of music, it is a luxury you can afford.”

“Oh! you flatter me if you fancy the prudence of saving withholds me. I

did go the other night, but I shall not go again. Music!--when you go to

the opera, is it for the music?”

“Only partially, I own; the lights, the scene, the pageant, attract me

quite as much. But I do not think the opera a very profitable pleasure

for either of us. For rich idle people, I dare say, it may be as

innocent an amusement as any other, but I find it a sad enervator.”

“And I just the reverse,--a horrible stimulant! Caxton, do you know

that, ungracious as it will sound to you, I am growing impatient of

this ‘honorable independence’? What does it lead to? Board, clothes, and

lodging,--can it ever bring me anything more?”

“At first, Vivian, you limited your aspirations to kid gloves and a

cabriolet: it has brought the kid gloves already; by and by it will

bring the cabriolet!”

“Our wishes grow by what they feed on. You live in the great world,

you can have excitement if you please it; I want excitement, I want the

world, I want room for my mind, man! Do you understand me?”

“Perfectly, and sympathize with you, my poor Vivian; but it will all

come. Patience! as I preached to you while dawn rose so comfortless over

the streets of London. You are not losing time. Fill your mind; read,

study, fit yourself for ambition. Why wish to fly till you have got your

wings? Live in books now; after all, they are splendid palaces, and open

to us all, rich and poor.”

“Books, books! Ah! you are the son of a book-man. It is not by books

that men get on in the world, and enjoy life in the mean while.”

“I don’t know that; but, my good fellow, you want to do both,--get on

in the world as fast as labor can, and enjoy life as pleasantly as

indolence may. You want to live like the butterfly, and yet have all the

honey of the bee; and, what is the very deuce of the whole, even as the

butterfly, you ask every flower to grow up in a moment; and, as a

bee, the whole hive must be stored in a quarter of an hour! Patience,

patience, patience!”

Vivian sighed a fierce sigh. “I suppose,” said he, after an unquiet

pause, “that the vagrant and the outlaw are strong in me, for I long

to run back to my old existence, which was all action, and therefore

allowed no thought.”

While he thus said, we had wandered round the Colonnade, and were in

that narrow passage in which is situated the more private entrance to

the opera: close by the doors of that entrance, two or three young men

were lounging. As Vivian ceased, the voice of one of these loungers came

laughingly to our ears.

“Oh!” it said, apparently in answer to some question, “I have a much

quicker way to fortune than that: I mean to marry an heiress!”

Vivian started, and looked at the speaker. He was a very good-looking

fellow. Vivian continued to look at him, and deliberately, from head to

foot; he then turned away with a satisfied and thoughtful smile.

“Certainly,” said I, gravely (construing the smile), “you are right

there: you are even better-looking than that heiress-hunter!”

Vivian colored; but before he could answer, one of the loungers, as

the group recovered from the gay laugh which their companion’s easy

coxcombry had excited, said,--

“Then, by the way, if you want an heiress, here comes one of the

greatest in England; but instead of being a younger son, with three good

lives between you and an Irish peerage, one ought to be an earl at least

to aspire to--Fanny Trevanion!”

The name thrilled through me, I felt myself tremble; and looking up, I

saw Lady Ellinor and Miss Trevanion, as they hurried from their carriage

towards the entrance of the opera. They both recognized me, and Fanny

cried,--

“You here! How fortunate! You must see us into the box, even if you run

away the moment after.”

“But I am not dressed for the opera,” said I, embarrassed.

“And why not?” asked Miss Trevanion; then, dropping her voice, she

added, “why do you desert us so wilfully?” and, leaning her hand on my

arm, I was drawn irresistibly into the lobby. The young loungers at the

door made way for us, and eyed me, no doubt, with envy.

“Nay!” said I, affecting to laugh, as I saw Miss Trevanion waited for my

reply. “You forget how little time I have for such amusements now, and

my uncle--”

“Oh, but mamma and I have been to see your uncle to-day, and he is

nearly well,--is he not, mamma? I cannot tell you how I like and admire

him. He is just what I fancy a Douglas of the old day. But mamma is

impatient. Well, you must dine with us to-morrow, promise! Not adieu,

but au revoir,” and Fanny glided to her mother’s arm. Lady Ellinor,

always kind and courteous to me, had good-naturedly lingered till this

dialogue, or rather monologue, was over.

On returning to the passage, I found Vivian walking to and fro; he

had lighted his cigar, and was smoking energetically. “So this great

heiress,” said he, smiling, “who, as far as I could see,--under her

hood,--seems no less fair than rich, is the daughter, I presume, of the

Mr. Trevanion, whose effusions you so kindly submit to me. He is very

rich, then! You never said so, yet I ought to have known it; but you see

I know nothing of your beau monde,--not even that Miss Trevanion is one

of the greatest heiresses in England.”

“Yes, Mr. Trevanion is rich,” said I, repressing a sigh, “--very rich.”

“And you are his secretary! My dear friend, you may well offer me

patience, for a large stock of yours will, I hope, be superfluous to

you.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Yet you heard that young gentleman, as well as myself and you are in

the same house as the heiress.”

“Vivian!”

“Well, what have I said so monstrous?”

“Pooh! since you refer to that young gentleman, you heard, too, what

his companion told him, ‘one ought to be an earl, at least, to aspire to

Fanny Trevanion!’”

“Tut! as well say that one ought to be a millionnaire to aspire to a

million! Yet I believe those who make millions generally begin with

pence.”

“That belief should be a comfort and encouragement to you, Vivian. And

now, good-night; I have much to do.”

“Good-night, then,” said Vivian, and we parted.

I made my way to Mr. Trevanion’s house and to the study. There was a

formidable arrear of business waiting for me, and I sat down to it at

first resolutely; but by degrees I found my thoughts wandering from the

eternal blue-books, and the pen slipped from my hand in the midst of an

extract from a Report on Sierra Leone. My pulse beat loud and quick; I

was in that state of nervous fever which only emotion can occasion. The

sweet voice of Fanny rang in my ears; her eyes, as I had last met them,

unusually gentle, almost beseeching, gazed upon me wherever I turned;

and then, as in mockery, I heard again those words,--“One ought to be

an earl at least to aspire to-” Oh! did I aspire? Was I vain fool so

frantic, household traitor so consummate? No, no! Then what did I under

the same roof? Why stay to imbibe this sweet poison that was corroding

the very springs of my life? At that self-question, which, had I been

but a year or two older, I should have asked long before, a mortal

terror seized me; the blood rushed from my heart and left me cold, icy

cold. To leave the house, leave Fanny! Never again to see those eyes,

never to hear that voice! Better die of the sweet poison than of the

desolate exile! I rose, I opened the windows; I walked to and fro the

room; I could decide nothing, think of nothing; all my mind was in an

uproar. With a violent effort at self-mastery, I approached the table

again. I resolved to force myself to my task, if it were only to

re-collect my faculties and enable them to bear my own torture. I turned

over the books impatiently, when lo! buried amongst them, what met

my eye? Archly, yet reproachfully,--the face of Fanny herself! Her

miniature was there. It had been, I knew, taken a few days before by a

young artist whom Trevanion patronized. I suppose he had carried it into

his study to examine it, and so left it there carelessly. The painter

had seized her peculiar expression, her ineffable smile,--so charming,

so malicious; even her favorite posture,--the small head turned over the

rounded Hebe-like shoulder; the eye glancing up from under the hair. I

know not what change in my madness came over me; but I sank on my knees,

and, kissing the miniature again and again, burst into tears. Such

tears! I did not hear the door open, I did not see the shadow steal ever

the floor; a light hand rested on my shoulder, trembling as it rested--I

started. Fanny herself was bending over me!

“What is the matter?” she asked tenderly. “What has happened? Your

uncle--your family--all well? Why are you weeping?”

I could not answer; but I kept my hands clasped over the miniature, that

she might not see what they contained.

“Will you not answer? Am I not your friend,--almost your sister? Come,

shall I call mamma?”

“Yes--yes; go--go.”

“No, I will not go yet. What have you there? What are you hiding?”

And innocently, and sister-like, those hands took mine; and so--and

so--the picture became visible! There was a dead silence. I looked up

through my tears. Fanny had recoiled some steps, and her cheek was very

flushed, her eyes downcast. I felt as if I had committed a crime, as

if dishonor clung to me; and yet I repressed--yes, thank Heaven! I

repressed the cry that swelled from my heart and rushed to my lips:

“Pity me, for I love you!” I repressed it, and only a groan escaped

me,--the wail of my lost happiness! Then, rising, I laid the miniature

on the table, and said, in a voice that I believe was firm,--

“Miss Trevanion, you have been as kind as a sister to me, and therefore

I was bidding a brother’s farewell to your likeness; it is so like

you--this!”

“Farewell!” echoed Fanny, still not looking up.

“Farewell--sister! There, I have boldly said the word; for--for--” I

hurried to the door, and, there turning, added, with what I meant to be

a smile,--“for they say at home that I--I am not well; too much for me

this; you know, mothers will be foolish; and--and--I am to speak to your

father to-morrow; and--good-night! God bless you, Miss Trevanion!”

PART IX.

CHAPTER I.

And my father pushed aside his books.

O young reader, whoever thou art,--or reader at least who hast been

young,--canst thou not remember some time when, with thy wild troubles

and sorrows as yet borne in secret, thou hast come back from that hard,

stern world which opens on thee when thou puttest thy foot out of the

threshold of home,--come back to the four quiet walls wherein thine

elders sit in peace,--and seen, with a sort of sad amaze, how calm and

undisturbed all is there? That generation which has gone before thee in

the path of the passions,--the generation of thy parents (not so many

years, perchance, remote from thine own),--how immovably far off, in

its still repose, it seems from thy turbulent youth! It has in it a

stillness as of a classic age, antique as the statues of the Greeks.

That tranquil monotony of routine into which those lives that preceded

thee have merged; the occupations that they have found sufficing

for their happiness, by the fireside, in the arm-chair and corner

appropriated to each,--how strangely they contrast thine own feverish

excitement! And they make room for thee, and bid thee welcome, and then

resettle to their hushed pursuits as if nothing had happened! Nothing

had happened! while in thy heart, perhaps, the whole world seems to have

shot from its axis, all the elements to be at war! And you sit down,

crushed by that quiet happiness which you can share no more, and smile

mechanically, and look into the fire; and, ten to one, you say nothing

till the time comes for bed, and you take up your candle and creep

miserably to your lonely room.

Now, it=f in a stage-coach in the depth of winter, when three passengers

are warm and snug, a fourth, all besnowed and frozen, descends from

the outside and takes place amongst them, straightway all the three

passengers shift their places, uneasily pull up their cloak collars,

re-arrange their “comforters,” feel indignantly a sensible loss of

caloric: the intruder has at least made a sensation. But if you had all

the snows of the Grampians in your heart, you might enter unnoticed;

take care not to tread on the toes of your opposite neighbor, and not

a soul is disturbed, not a “comforter” stirs an inch. I had not slept a

wink, I had not even lain down all that night,--the night in which I

had said farewell to Fanny Trevanion; and the next morning, when the sun

rose, I wandered out,--where I know not: I have a dim recollection of

long, gray, solitary streets; of the river, that seemed flowing in dull,

sullen silence, away, far away, into some invisible eternity; trees and

turf, and the gay voices of children. I must have gone from one end

of the great Babel to the other; for my memory only became clear and

distinct when I knocked, somewhere before noon, at the door of my

father’s house, and, passing heavily up the stairs, came into the

drawing-room, which was the rendezvous of the little family; for since

we had been in London, my father had ceased to have his study apart, and

contented himself with what he called “a corner,”--a corner wide enough

to contain two tables and a dumb-waiter, with chairs _a discretion_ all

littered with books. On the opposite side of this capacious corner

sat my uncle, now nearly convalescent, and he was jotting down, in his

stiff, military hand, certain figures in a little red account-book; for

you know already that my Uncle Roland was, in his expenses, the most

methodical of men.

My father’s face was more benign than usual, for before him lay a

proof,--the first proof of his first work--his one work--the Great Book!

Yes! it had positively found a press. And the first proof of your first

work--ask any author what that is! My mother was out, with the faithful

Mrs. Primmins, shopping or marketing, no doubt; so, while the brothers

were thus engaged, it was natural that my entrance should not make as

much noise as if it had been a bomb, or a singer, or a clap of thunder,

or the last “great novel of the season,” or anything else that made a

noise in those days. For what makes a noise now,--now, when the most

astonishing thing of all is our easy familiarity with things astounding;

when we say, listlessly, “Another revolution at Paris,” or, “By the by,

there is the deuce to do at Vienna!” when De Joinville is catching

fish in the ponds at Claremont, and you hardly turn back to look at

Metternich on the pier at Brighton!

My uncle nodded and growled indistinctly; my father put aside his

books,--“you have told us that already.”

Sir, you are very much mistaken; it was not then that he put aside his

books, for he was not then engaged in them,--he was reading his proof.

And he smiled, and pointed to it (the proof I mean) pathetically,

and with a kind of humor, as much as to say: “What can you expect,

Pisistratus? My new baby in short clothes--or long primer, which is all

the same thing!”

I took a chair between the two, and looked first at one, then at the

other. Heaven forgive me!--I felt a rebellious, ungrateful spite against

both. The bitterness of my soul must have been deep indeed to have

overflowed in that direction, but it did. The grief of youth is an

abominable egotist, and that is the truth. I got up from my chair and

walked towards the window; it was open, and outside the window was Mrs.

Primmins’s canary, in its cage. London air had agreed with it, and it

was singing lustily. Now, when the canary saw me standing opposite to

its cage, and regarding it seriously, and, I have no doubt, with a very

sombre aspect, the creature stopped short, and hung its head on one

side, looking at me obliquely and suspiciously. Finding that I did it

no harm, it began to hazard a few broken notes, timidly and

interrogatively, as it were, pausing between each; and at length, as

I made no reply, it evidently thought it had solved the doubt, and

ascertained that I was more to be pitied than feared,--for it stole

gradually into so soft and silvery a strain that, I verily believe,

it did it on purpose to comfort me!--me, its old friend, whom it had

unjustly suspected. Never did any music touch me so home as did that

long, plaintive cadence. And when the bird ceased, it perched itself

close to the bars of the cage, and looked at me steadily with its

bright, intelligent eyes. I felt mine water, and I turned back and stood

in the centre of the room, irresolute what to do, where to go. My father

had done with the proof, and was deep in his folios. Roland had

clasped his red account-book, restored it to his pocket, wiped his

pen carefully, and now watched me from under his great beetle-brows.

Suddenly he rose, and stamping on the hearth with his cork leg,

exclaimed, “Look up from those cursed books, brother Austin! What is

there in your son’s face? Construe that, if you can!”

CHAPTER II.

And my father pushed aside his books and rose hastily. He took off his

spectacles and rubbed them mechanically, but he said nothing, and my

uncle, staring at him for a moment, in surprise at his silence, burst

out,--

“Oh! I see; he has been getting into some scrape, and you are angry.

Fie! young blood will have its way, Austin, it will. I don’t blame that;

it is only when--Come here, Sisty. Zounds! man, come here.”

My father gently brushed off the Captain’s hand, and advancing towards

me, opened his arms. The next moment I was sobbing on his breast.

“But what is the matter?” cried Captain Roland. “Will nobody say what

is the matter? Money, I suppose, money, you confounded extravagant young

dog. Luckily you have got an uncle who has more than he knows what to

do with. How much? Fifty?--a hundred?--two hundred? How can I write the

check if you’ll not speak?”

“Hush, brother! it is no money you can give that will set this right.

My poor boy! Have I guessed truly? Did I guess truly the other evening

when--”

“Yes, sir, yes! I have been so wretched. But I am better now,--I can

tell you all.”

My uncle moved slowly towards the door; his fine sense of delicacy made

him think that even he was out of place in the confidence between son

and father.

“No, uncle,” I said, holding out my hand to him, “stay. You too can

advise me,--strengthen me. I have kept my honor yet; help me to keep it

still.”

At the sound of the word “honor,” Captain Roland stood mute, and raised

his head quickly.

So I told all,--incoherently enough at first, but clearly and manfully

as I went on. Now I know that it is not the custom of lovers to confide

in fathers and uncles. Judging by those mirrors of life, plays and

novels, they choose better,--valets and chambermaids, and friends whom

they have picked up in the street, as I had picked up poor Francis

Vivian: to these they make clean breasts of their troubles. But fathers

and uncles,--to them they are close, impregnable, “buttoned to the

chin.” The Caxtons were an eccentric family, and never did anything like

other people. When I had ended, I lifted up my eyes and said pleadingly,

“Now tell me, is there no hope--none?”

“Why should there be none?” cried Captain Roland, hastily--“the De

Caxtons are as good a family as the Trevanions; and as for yourself,

all I will say is, that the young lady might choose worse for her own

happiness.”

I wrung my uncle’s hand, and turned to my father in anxious fear, for

I knew that, in spite of his secluded habits, few men ever formed a

sounder judgment on worldly matters, when he was fairly drawn to look

at them. A thing wonderful is that plain wisdom which scholars and

poets often have for others, though they rarely deign to use it for

themselves. And how on earth do they get at it? I looked at my father,

and the vague hope Roland had excited fell as I looked.

“Brother,” said he, slowly, and shaking his head, “the world, which

gives codes and laws to those who live in it, does not care much for a

pedigree, unless it goes with a title-deed to estates.”

“Trevanion was not richer than Pisistratus when he married Lady

Ellinor,” said my uncle.

“True, but Lady Ellinor was not then an heiress; and her father

viewed these matters as no other peer in England perhaps would. As for

Trevanion himself, I dare say he has no prejudices about station, but he

is strong in common-sense. He values himself on being a practical man.

It would be folly to talk to him of love, and the affections of youth.

He would see in the son of Austin Caxton, living on the interest of some

fifteen or sixteen thousand pounds, such a match for his daughter as no

prudent man in his position could approve. And as for Lady Ellinor--”

“She owes us much, Austin!” exclaimed Roland, his face darkening.

“Lady Ellinor is now what, if we had known her better, she promised

always to be,--the ambitious, brilliant, scheming woman of the world. Is

it not so, Pisistratus?”

I said nothing,--I felt too much.

“And does the girl like you? But I think it is clear she does!”

exclaimed Roland. “Fate, fate; it has been a fatal family to us! Zounds!

Austin, it was your fault. Why did you let him go there?”

“My son is now a man,--at least in heart, if not in years: can man

be shut from danger and trial? They found me in the old parsonage,

brother!” said my father, mildly.

My uncle walked, or rather stumped, three times up and down the room;

and he then stopped short, folded his arms, and came to a decision,--

“If the girl likes you, your duty is doubly clear: you can’t take

advantage of it. You have done right to leave the house, for the

temptation might be too strong.”

“But what excuse shall I make to Mr. Trevanion?” said I, feebly; “what

story can I invent? So careless as he is while he trusts, so penetrating

if he once suspects, he will see through all my subterfuges, and--and--”

“It is as plain as a pikestaff,” said my uncle, abruptly, “and there

need be no subterfuge in the matter. ‘I must leave you, Mr. Trevanion.’

‘Why?’ says he. ‘Don’t ask me.’ He insists. ‘Well then, sir, if you must

know, I love your daughter. I have nothing, she is a great heiress. You

will not approve of that love, and therefore I leave you!’ That is the

course that becomes an English gentleman. Eh, Austin?”

“You are never wrong when your instincts speak, Roland,” said my father.

“Can you say this, Pisistratus, or shall I say it for you?”

“Let him say it himself,” said Roland, “and let him judge himself of the

answer. He is young, he is clever, he may make a figure in the world.

Trevanion may answer, ‘Win the lady after you have won the laurel, like

the knights of old.’ At all events you will hear the worst.”

“I will go,” said I, firmly; and I took my hat and left the room. As I

was passing the landing-place, a light step stole down the upper flight

of stairs, and a little hand seized my own. I turned quickly, and met

the full, dark, seriously sweet eyes of my cousin Blanche.

“Don’t go away yet, Sisty,” said she, coaxingly. “I have been waiting

for you, for I heard your voice, and did not like to come in and disturb

you.”

“And why did you wait for me, my little Blanche?”

“Why! only to see you. But your eyes are red. Oh, cousin!” and before I

was aware of her childish impulse, she had sprung to my neck and kissed

me. Now Blanche was not like most children, and was very sparing of

her caresses. So it was out of the deeps of a kind heart that that

kiss came. I returned it without a word; and putting her down gently,

descended the stairs, and was in the streets. But I had not got far

before I heard my father’s voice; and he came up, and hooking his

arm into mine, said, “Are there not two of us that suffer? Let us be

together!” I pressed his arm, and we walked on in silence. But when

we were near Trevanion’s house, I said hesitatingly, “Would it not be

better, sir, that I went in alone? If there is to be an explanation

between Mr. Trevanion and myself, would it not seem as if your presence

implied either a request to him that would lower us both, or a doubt of

me that--”

“You will go in alone, of course; I will wait for you--”

“Not in the streets--oh, no! father,” cried I, touched inexpressibly.

For all this was so unlike my father’s habits that I felt remorse to

have so communicated my young griefs to the calm dignity of his serene

life.

“My son, you do not know how I love you; I have only known it myself

lately. Look you, I am living in you now, my first-born; not in my other

son,--the Great Book: I must have my way. Go in; that is the door, is it

not?”

I pressed my father’s hand, and I felt then, that while that hand could

reply to mine, even the loss of Fanny Trevanion could not leave the

world a blank. How much we have before us in life, while we retain

our parents! How much to strive and to hope for! what a motive in the

conquest of our sorrow, that they may not sorrow with us!

CHAPTER III.

I entered Trevanion’s study. It was an hour in which he was rarely at

home, but I had not thought of that; and I saw without surprise that,

contrary to his custom, he was in his arm-chair, reading one of his

favorite classic authors, instead of being in some committee-room of the

House of Commons.

“A pretty fellow you are,” said he, looking up, “to leave me all

the morning, without rhyme or reason! And my committee is

postponed,--chairman ill. People who get ill should not go into the

House of Commons. So here I am looking into Propertius: Parr is

right; not so elegant a writer as Tibullus. But what the deuce are

you about?--why don’t you sit down? Humph! you look grave; you have

something to say,--say it!”

And, putting down Propertius, the acute, sharp face of Trevanion

instantly became earnest and attentive.

“My dear Mr. Trevanion,” said I, with as much steadiness as I could

assume, “you have been most kind to me; and out of my own family there

is no man I love and respect more.”

Trevanion.--“Humph! What’s all this? [In an undertone]--Am I going to be

taken in?”

Pisistratus.--“Do not think me ungrateful, then, when I say I come to

resign my office,--to leave the house where I have been so happy.”

Trevanion.--“Leave the house! Pooh! I have over-tasked you. I will be

more merciful in future. You must forgive a political economist; it is

the fault of my sect to look upon men as machines.”

Pisistratus (smiling faintly).--“No, indeed; that is not it! I have

nothing to complain of, nothing I could wish altered; could I stay.”

Trevanion (examining me thoughtfully).--“And does your father approve of

your leaving me thus?”

Pisistratus.--“Yes, fully.”

Trevanion (musing a moment).--“I see, he would send you to the

University, make you a book-worm like himself. Pooh! that will not do;

you will never become wholly a man of books,--it is not in you. Young

man, though I may seem careless, I read characters, when I please it,

pretty quickly. You do wrong to leave me; you are made for the great

world,--I can open to you a high career. I wish to do so! Lady Ellinor

wishes it,--nay, insists on it,--for your father’s sake as well as

yours. I never ask a favor from ministers, and I never will. But” (here

Trevanion rose suddenly, and with an erect mien and a quick gesture

of his arm he added)--“but a minister can dispose as he pleases of his

patronage. Look you, it is a secret yet, and I trust to your honor.

But before the year is out, I must be in the Cabinet. Stay with me; I

guarantee your fortunes,--three months ago I would not have said that.

By and by I will open Parliament for you,--you are not of age yet; work

till then. And now sit down and write my letters,--a sad arrear!”

“My dear, dear Mr. Trevanion!” said I, so affected that I could scarcely

speak, and seizing his hand, which I pressed between both mine, “I

dare not thank you,--I cannot! But you don’t know my heart: it is not

ambition. No! if I could but stay here on the same terms forever--here,”

looking ruefully on that spot where Fanny had stood the night before.

“But it is impossible! If you knew all, you would be the first to bid me

go!”

“You are in debt,” said the man of the world, coldly. “Bad, very

bad--still--”

“No, sir; no! worse.”

“Hardly possible to be worse, young man--hardly! But, just as you will;

you leave me, and will not say why. Goodby. Why do you linger? Shake

hands, and go!”

“I cannot leave you thus; I--I--sir, the truth shall out. I am rash and

mad enough not to see Miss Trevanion without forgetting that I am poor,

and--”

“Ha!” interrupted Trevanion, softly, and growing pale, “this is a

misfortune, indeed! And I, who talked of reading characters! Truly,

truly, we would-be practical men are fools--fools! And you have made

love to my daughter!”

“Sir? Mr. Trevanion!--no--never, never so base! In your house, trusted

by you,--how could you think it? I dared, it may be, to love,--at

all events, to feel that I could not be insensible to a temptation too

strong for me. But to say it to your heiress,--to ask love in return: I

would as soon have broken open your desk! Frankly I tell you my folly:

it is a folly, not a disgrace.”

Trevanion came up to me abruptly as I leaned against the bookcase, and,

grasping my hand with a cordial kindness, said, “Pardon me! You have

behaved as your father’s son should--I envy him such a son! Now, listen

to me: I cannot give you my daughter--”

“Believe me, sir; I never--”

“Tut, listen! I cannot give you my daughter. I say nothing of

inequality,--all gentlemen are equal; and if not, any impertinent

affectation of superiority, in such a case, would come ill from one who

owes his own fortune to his wife! But, as it is, I have a stake in the

world, won not by fortune only, but the labor of a life, the suppression

of half my nature,--the drudging, squaring, taming down all that made

the glory and joy of my youth,--to be that hard, matter-of-fact

thing which the English world expect in a statesman! This station has

gradually opened into its natural result,--power! I tell you I shall

soon have high office in the administration; I hope to render great

services to England,--for we English politicians, whatever the mob and

the Press say of us, are not selfish place-hunters. I refused office, as

high as I look for now, ten years ago. We believe in our opinions, and

we hail the power that may carry them into effect. In this cabinet I

shall have enemies. Oh, don’t think we leave jealousy behind us, at the

doors of Downing Street! I shall be one of a minority. I know well what

must happen: like all men in power, I must strengthen myself by other

heads and hands than my own. My daughter shall bring to me the alliance

of that house in England which is most necessary to me. My life falls to

the ground, like a child’s pyramid of cards, if I waste--I do not say on

you, but on men of ten times your fortune (whatever that be)--the means

of strength which are at my disposal in the hand of Fanny Trevanion.

To this end I have looked, but to this end her mother has schemed;

for these household matters are within a man’s hopes, but belong to

a woman’s policy. So much for us. But to you, my dear and frank and

high-souled young friend; to you, if I were not Fanny’s father, if I

were your nearest relation, and Fanny could be had for the asking, with

all her princely dower (for it is princely),--to you I should say, fly

from a load upon the heart, on the genius, the energy, the pride, and

the spirit, which not one man in ten thousand can bear; fly from the

curse of owing everything to a wife! It is a reversal of all natural

position, it is a blow to all the manhood within us. You know not what

it is; I do! My wife’s fortune came not till after marriage,--so far, so

well; it saved my reputation from the charge of fortune-hunting. But, I

tell you fairly, that if it had never come at all, I should be a prouder

and a greater and a happier man than I have ever been, or ever can be,

with all its advantages: it has been a millstone round my neck. And yet

Ellinor has never breathed a word that could wound my pride. Would her

daughter be as forbearing? Much as I love Fanny, I doubt if she has the

great heart of her mother. You look incredulous,--naturally. Oh, you

think I shall sacrifice my child’s happiness to a politician’s ambition.

Folly of youth! Fanny would be wretched with you. She might not think so

now; she would five years hence! Fanny will make an admirable duchess,

countess, great lady; but wife to a man who owes all to her! No, no;

don’t dream it! I shall not sacrifice her happiness, depend on it. I

speak plainly, as man to man,--man of the world to a man just entering

it,--but still man to man! What say you?”

“I will think over all you tell me. I know that you are speaking to me

most generously,--as a father would. Now let me go, and may God keep you

and yours!”

“Go,--I return your blessing; go! I don’t insult you now with offers of

service; but remember, you have a right to command them,--in all ways,

in all times. Stop! take this comfort away with you,--a sorry comfort

now, a great one hereafter. In a position that might have moved anger,

scorn, pity, you have made a barren-hearted man honor and admire you.

You, a boy, have made me, with my gray hairs, think better of the whole

world; tell your father that.”

I closed the door and stole out softly, softly. But when I got into

the hall, Fanny suddenly opened the door of the breakfast parlor, and

seemed, by her look, her gesture, to invite me in. Her face was very

pale, and there were traces of tears on the heavy lids.

I stood still a moment, and my heart beat violently. I then muttered

something inarticulately, and, bowing low, hastened to the door.

I thought, but my ears might deceive me, that I heard my name

pronounced; but fortunately the tall porter started from his newspaper

and his leathern chair, and the entrance stood open. I joined my father.

“It’s all over,” said I, with a resolute smile. “And now, my dear

father, I feel how grateful I should be for all that your lessons--your

life--have taught me; for, believe me, I am not unhappy.”

CHAPTER IV.

We came back to my father’s house, and on the stairs we met my mother,

whom Roland’s grave looks and her Austin’s strange absence had alarmed.

My father quietly led the way to a little room which my mother had

appropriated to Blanche and herself, and then, placing my hand in that

which had helped his own steps from the stony path down the quiet vales

of life, he said to me: “Nature gives you here the soother;” and so

saying, he left the room.

And it was true, O my mother! that in thy simple, loving breast nature

did place the deep wells of comfort! We come to men for philosophy,--to

women for consolation. And the thousand weaknesses and regrets, the

sharp sands of the minutiae that make up sorrow,--all these, which

I could have betrayed to no man (not even to him, the dearest and

tenderest of all men), I showed without shame to thee! And thy tears,

that fell on my cheek, had the balm of Araby; and my heart at length lay

lulled and soothed under thy moist, gentle eyes.

I made an effort, and joined the little circle at dinner; and I felt

grateful that no violent attempt was made to raise my spirits,--nothing

but affection, more subdued and soft and tranquil. Even little Blanche,

as if by the intuition of sympathy, ceased her babble, and seemed to

hush her footstep as she crept to my side. But after dinner, when we had

reassembled in the drawing-room, and the lights shone bright, and the

curtains were let down, and only the quick roll of some passing wheels

reminded us that there was a world without, my father began to talk. He

had laid aside all his work, the younger but less perishable child was

forgotten, and my father began to talk.

“It is,” said he, musingly, “a well-known thing that particular drugs

or herbs suit the body according to its particular diseases. When we are

ill, we don’t open our medicine-chest at random, and take out any powder

or phial that comes to hand. The skilful doctor is he who adjusts the

dose to the malady.”

“Of that there can be no doubt,” quoth Captain Roland. “I remember a

notable instance of the justice of what you say. When I was in Spain,

both my horse and I fell ill at the same time: a dose was sent for each;

and by some infernal mistake, I swallowed the horse’s physic, and the

horse, poor thing, swallowed mine!”

“And what was the result?” asked my father.

“The horse died!” answered Roland, mournfully, “a valuable beast, bright

bay, with a star!”

“And you?”

“Why, the doctor said it ought to have killed me; but it took a great

deal more than a paltry bottle of physic to kill a man in my regiment.”

“Nevertheless, we arrive at the same conclusion,” pursued my father,--“I

with my theory, you with your experience,--that the physic we take must

not be chosen haphazard, and that a mistake in the bottle may kill a

horse. But when we come to the medicine for the mind, how little do we

think of the golden rule which common-sense applies to the body!”

“Anan,” said the Captain, “what medicine is there for the mind?

Shakspeare has said something on that subject, which, if I recollect

right, implies that there is no ministering to a mind diseased.”

“I think not, brother; he only said physic (meaning boluses and black

draughts) would not do it. And Shakspeare was the last man to find fault

with his own art; for, verily, he has been a great physician to the

mind.”

“Ah! I take you now, brother,--books again! So you think when a man

breaks his heart or loses his fortune or his daughter (Blanche, child,

come here), that you have only to clap a plaster of print on the sore

place, and all is well. I wish you would find me such a cure.”

“Will you try it?”

“If it is not Greek,” said my uncle.

CHAPTER V.

My Father’s Crotchet On The Hygienic Chemistry Of Books.

“If,” said my father,--and here his hand was deep in his waistcoat,--“if

we accept the authority of Diodorus as to the inscription on the great

Egyptian library--and I don’t see why Diodorus should not be as near the

mark as any one else?” added my father interrogatively, turning round.

My mother thought herself the person addressed, and nodded her gracious

assent to the authority of Diodorus. His opinion thus fortified, my

father continued,--“If, I say, we accept the authority of Diodorus, the

inscription on the Egyptian library was: ‘The Medicine of the Mind.’

Now, that phrase has become notoriously trite and hackneyed, and people

repeat vaguely that books are the medicine of the mind. Yes; but to

apply the medicine is the thing!”

“So you have told us at least twice before, brother,” quoth the Captain,

bluffly. “And what Diodorus has to do with it, I know no more than the

man of the moon.”

“I shall never get on at this rate,” said my father, in a tone between

reproach and entreaty.

“Be good children, Roland and Blanche both,” said my mother, stopping

from her work and holding up her needle threateningly,--and indeed

inflicting a slight puncture upon the Captain’s shoulder.

“‘Rem acu tetigisti,’ my dear,” said my father, borrowing Cicero’s pun

on the occasion. (1) “And now we shall go upon velvet. I say, then,

that books, taken indiscriminately, are no cure to the diseases and

afflictions of the mind. There is a world of science necessary in the

taking them. I have known some people in great sorrow fly to a novel,

or the last light book in fashion. One might as well take a rose-draught

for the plague! Light reading does not do when the heart is really

heavy. I am told that Goethe, when he lost his son, took to study a

science that was new to him. Ah! Goethe was a physician who knew what he

was about. In a great grief like that you cannot tickle and divert the

mind, you must wrench it away, abstract, absorb,--bury it in an abyss,

hurry it into a labyrinth. Therefore, for the irremediable sorrows of

middle life and old age I recommend a strict chronic course of science

and hard reasoning,--counter-irritation. Bring the brain to act upon the

heart! If science is too much against the grain (for we have not all

got mathematical heads), something in the reach of the humblest

understanding, but sufficiently searching to the highest,--a new

language, Greek, Arabic, Scandinavian, Chinese, or Welsh! For the

loss of fortune, the dose should be applied less directly to the

understanding,--I would administer something elegant and cordial. For as

the heart is crushed and lacerated by a loss in the affections, so it

is rather the head that aches and suffers by the loss of money. Here we

find the higher class of poets a very valuable remedy. For observe that

poets of the grander and more comprehensive kind of genius have in them

two separate men, quite distinct from each other,--the imaginative man,

and the practical, circumstantial man; and it is the happy mixture

of these that suits diseases of the mind, half imaginative and half

practical. There is Homer, now lost with the gods, now at home with the

homeliest, the very ‘poet of circumstance,’ as Gray has finely called

him; and yet with imagination enough to seduce and coax the dullest into

forgetting, for a while, that little spot on his desk which his banker’s

book can cover. There is Virgil, far below him, indeed,--‘Virgil the

wise, Whose verse walks highest, but not flies,’ as Cowley expresses it.

But Virgil still has genius enough to be two men,--to lead you into the

fields, not only to listen to the pastoral reed and to hear the

bees hum, but to note how you can make the most of the glebe and the

vineyard. There is Horace, charming man of the world, who will condole

with you feelingly on the loss of your fortune, and by no means

undervalue the good things of this life, but who will yet show you

that a man may be happy with a vile modicum or parva rura. There is

Shakspeare, who, above all poets, is the mysterious dual of hard sense

and empyreal fancy,--and a great many more, whom I need not name, but

who, if you take to them gently and quietly, will not, like your mere

philosopher, your unreasonable Stoic, tell you that you have lost

nothing, but who will insensibly steal you out of this world, with its

losses and crosses, and slip you into another world before you know

where you are!--a world where you are just as welcome, though you carry

no more earth of your lost acres with you than covers the sole of your

shoe. Then, for hypochondria and satiety, what is better than a brisk

alterative course of travels,--especially early, out-of-the-way,

marvellous, legendary travels! How they freshen up the spirits! How

they take you out of the humdrum yawning state you are in. See, with

Herodotus, young Greece spring up into life, or note with him how

already the wondrous old Orient world is crumbling into giant decay; or

go with Carpini and Rubruquis to Tartary, meet ‘the carts of Zagathai

laden with houses, and think that a great city is travelling towards

you.’ (2) Gaze on that vast wild empire of the Tartar, where the

descendants of Jenghis ‘multiply and disperse over the immense waste

desert, which is as boundless as the ocean.’ Sail with the early

Northern discoverers, and penetrate to the heart of winter, among

sea-serpents and bears and tusked morses with the faces of men. Then,

what think you of Columbus, and the stern soul of Cortes, and the

kingdom of Mexico, and the strange gold city of the Peruvians, with that

audacious brute Pizarro; and the Polynesians, just for all the world

like the Ancient Britons; and the American Indians and the South-Sea

Islanders? How petulant and young and adventurous and frisky your

hypochondriac must get upon a regimen like that! Then, for that vice of

the mind which I call sectarianism,--not in the religious sense of the

word, but little, narrow prejudices, that make you hate your next-door

neighbor because he has his eggs roasted when you have yours boiled;

and gossiping and prying into people’s affairs, and backbiting, and

thinking heaven and earth are coming together if some broom touch a

cobweb that you have let grow over the window-sill of your brains what

like a large and generous, mildly aperient (I beg your pardon, my dear)

course of history! How it clears away all the fumes of the head,--better

than the hellebore with which the old leeches of the Middle Ages

purged the cerebellum! There, amidst all that great whirl and sturmbad

(storm-bath), as the Germans say, of kingdoms and empires, and races and

ages, how your mind enlarges beyond that little feverish animosity to

John Styles, or that unfortunate prepossession of yours that all the

world is interested in your grievances against Tom Stokes and his wife!

“I can only touch, you see, on a few ingredients in this magnificent

pharmacy; its resources are boundless, but require the nicest

discretion. I remember to have cured a disconsolate widower, who

obstinately refused every other medicament, by a strict course of

geology. I dipped him deep into gneiss and mica schist. Amidst the

first strata I suffered the watery action to expend itself upon cooling,

crystallized masses; and by the time I had got him into the tertiary

period, amongst the transition chalks of Maestricht and the conchiferous

marls of Gosau, he was ready for a new wife. Kitty, my dear, it is no

laughing matter! I made no less notable a cure of a young scholar at

Cambridge who was meant for the church, when he suddenly caught a cold

fit of freethinking, with great shiverings, from wading out of his depth

in Spinoza. None of the divines, whom I first tried, did him the least

good in that state; so I turned over a new leaf, and doctored him gently

upon the chapters of faith in Abraham Tucker’s book (you should read it,

Sisty); then I threw in strong doses of Fichte; after that I put him

on the Scotch metaphysicians, with plunge-baths into certain German

transcendentalists; and having convinced him that faith is not an

unphilosophical state of mind, and that he might believe without

compromising his understanding,--for he was mightily conceited on that

score,--I threw in my divines, which he was now fit to digest; and his

theological constitution, since then, has become so robust that he has

eaten up two livings and a deanery! In fact, I have a plan for a library

that, instead of heading its compartments, ‘Philology, Natural Science,

Poetry,’ etc., one shall head them according to the diseases for which

they are severally good, bodily and mental,--up from a dire calamity or

the pangs of the gout, down to a fit of the spleen or a slight catarrh;

for which last your light reading comes in with a whey-posset and

barley-water. But,” continued my father, more gravely, “when some one

sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania;

when you think because Heaven has denied you this or that on which you

had set your heart that all your life must be a blank,--oh! then diet

yourself well on biography, the biography of good and great men. See

how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page,

perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own; and how triumphantly

the life sails on beyond it! You thought the wing was broken! Tut, tut,

it was but a bruised feather! See what life leaves behind it when all is

done!--a summary of positive facts far out of the region of sorrow

and suffering, linking themselves with the being of the world. Yes,

biography is the medicine here! Roland, you said you would try my

prescription,--here it is;” and my father took up a book and reached it

to the Captain.

My uncle looked over it,--“Life of the Reverend Robert Hall.”

“Brother, he was a Dissenter; and, thank Heaven! I am a Church-and-State

man to the backbone!”

“Robert Hall was a brave man and a true soldier under the Great

Commander,” said my father, artfully.

The Captain mechanically carried his forefinger to his forehead in

military fashion, and saluted the book respectfully.

“I have another copy for you, Pisistratus,--that is mine which I have

lent Roland. This, which I bought for you to-day, you will keep.”

“Thank you, sir,” said I listlessly, not seeing what great good the

“Life of Robert Hall” could do me, or why the same medicine should suit

the old weather-beaten uncle and the nephew yet in his teens.

“I have said nothing,” resumed my father, slightly bowing his broad

temples, “of the Book of books, for that is the _lignum vitae_, the

cardinal medicine for all. These are but the subsidiaries; for as you

may remember, my dear Kitty, that I have said before,--we can never keep

the system quite right unless we place just in the centre of the great

ganglionic system, whence the nerves carry its influence gently and

smoothly through the whole frame, The Saffron Bag!”

(1) Cicero’s joke on a senator who was the son of a tailor: “Thou hast

touched the thing sharply” (or with a needle, acu).

(2) Rubruquis, sect. xii.

CHAPTER VI.

After breakfast the next morning I took my hat to go out when my father,

looking at me, and seeing by my countenance that I had not slept, said

gently,--

“My dear Pisistratus, you have not tried my medicine yet.”

“What medicine, sir?”

“Robert Hall.”

“No, indeed, not yet,” said I, smiling.

“Do so, my son, before you go out; depend on it you will enjoy your walk

more.”

I confess that it was with some reluctance I obeyed. I went back to my

own room and sat resolutely down to my task. Are there any of you, my

readers, who have not read the “Life of Robert Hall?” If so, in the

words of the great Captain Cuttle, “When found, make a note of

it.” Never mind what your theological opinion is,--Episcopalian,

Presbyterian, Baptist, Paedobaptist, Independent, Quaker, Unitarian,

Philosopher, Freethinker,--send for Robert Hall! Yea, if there exists

yet on earth descendants of the arch-heretics which made such a noise in

their day,--men who believe, with Saturninus, that the world was made by

seven angels; or with Basilides, that there are as many heavens as there

are days in the year; or with the Nicolaitanes, that men ought to have

their wives in common (plenty of that sect still, especially in the

Red Republic); or with their successors, the Gnostics, who believed in

Jaldaboath; or with the Carpacratians, that the world was made by the

devil; or with the Cerinthians and Ebionites and Nazarites (which last

discovered that the name of Noah’s wife was Ouria, and that she set

the ark on fire); or with the Valentinians, who taught that there were

thirty AEones, ages or worlds, born out of Profundity (Bathos), male,

and Silence, female; or with the Marcites, Colarbasii, and Heracleonites

(who still kept up that bother about AEones, Mr. Profundity and Mrs.

Silence); or with the Ophites, who are said to have worshipped the

serpent; or the Cainites, who ingeniously found out a reason for

honoring Judas, because he foresaw what good would come to men by

betraying our Saviour; or with the Sethites, who made Seth a part of

the divine substance; or with the Archonticks, Ascothyctae, Cerdonians,

Marcionites, the disciples of Apelles, and Severus (the last was a

teetotaller, and said wine was begot by Satan!), or of Tatian, who

thought all the descendants of Adam were irretrievably damned except

themselves (some of those Tatiani are certainly extant!), or the

Cataphrygians, who were also called Tascodragitae, because they thrust

their forefingers up their nostrils to show their devotion; or the

Pepuzians, Quintilians, and Artotyrites; or--But no matter. If I go

through all the follies of men in search of the truth, I shall never get

to the end of my chapter or back to Robert Hall; whatever, then, thou

art, orthodox or heterodox, send for the “Life of Robert Hall.” It is

the life of a man that it does good to manhood itself to contemplate.

I had finished the biography, which is not long, and was musing over it,

when I heard the Captain’s cork-leg upon the stairs. I opened the door

for him, and he entered, book in hand, as I also, book in hand, stood

ready to receive him.

“Well, sir,” said Roland, seating himself, “has the prescription done

you any good?”

“Yes, uncle,--great.”

“And me too. By Jupiter, Sisty, that same Hall was a fine fellow! I

wonder if the medicine has gone through the same channels in both? Tell

me, first, how it has affected you.”

“Imprimis, then, my dear uncle, I fancy that a book like this must do

good to all who live in the world in the ordinary manner, by admitting

us into a circle of life of which I suspect we think but little. Here

is a man connecting himself directly with a heavenly purpose, and

cultivating considerable faculties to that one end; seeking to

accomplish his soul as far as he can, that he may do most good on earth,

and take a higher existence up to heaven; a man intent upon a sublime

and spiritual duty: in short, living as it were in it, and so filled

with the consciousness of immortality, and so strong in the link

between God and man, that, without any affected stoicism, without

being insensible to pain,--rather, perhaps, from a nervous temperament,

acutely feeling it,--he yet has a happiness wholly independent of it. It

is impossible not to be thrilled with an admiration that elevates while

it awes you, in reading that solemn ‘Dedication of himself to God.’ This

offering of ‘soul and body, time, health, reputation, talents,’ to the

divine and invisible Principle of Good, calls us suddenly to contemplate

the selfishness of our own views and hopes, and awakens us from the

egotism that exacts all and resigns nothing.

“But this book has mostly struck upon the chord in my own heart in that

characteristic which my father indicated as belonging to all biography.

Here is a life of remarkable fulness, great study, great thought, and

great action; and yet,” said I, coloring, “how small a place those

feelings which have tyrannized over me and made all else seem blank and

void, hold in that life! It is not as if the man were a cold and hard

ascetic; it is easy to see in him, not only remarkable tenderness and

warm affections, but strong self-will, and the passion of all vigorous

natures. Yes; I understand better now what existence in a true man

should be.”

“All that is very well said,” quoth the Captain, “but it did not strike

me. What I have seen in this book is courage. Here is a poor creature

rolling on the carpet with agony; from childhood to death tortured by a

mysterious incurable malady,--a malady that is described as ‘an internal

apparatus of torture;’ and who does, by his heroism, more than bear

it,--he puts it out of power to affect him; and though (here is the

passage) ‘his appointment by day and by night was incessant pain, yet

high enjoyment was, notwithstanding, the law of his existence.’ Robert

Hall reads me a lesson,--me, an old soldier, who thought myself above

taking lessons,--in courage, at least. And as I came to that passage

when, in the sharp paroxysms before death, he says, ‘I have not

complained, have I, sir? And I won’t complain!’--when I came to that

passage I started up and cried, ‘Roland de Caxton, thou hast been a

coward! and, an thou hadst had thy deserts, thou hadst been cashiered,

broken, and drummed out of the regiment long ago!’”

“After all, then, my father was not so wrong,--he placed his guns right,

and fired a good shot.”

“He must have been from six to nine degrees above the crest of the

parapet,” said my uncle thoughtfully, “which, I take it, is the best

elevation, both for shot and shells in enfilading a work.”

“What say you then, Captain,--up with our knapsacks, and on with the

march?”

“Right about--face!” cried my uncle, as erect as a column.

“No looking back, if we can help it.”

“Full in the front of the enemy. ‘Up, Guards, and at ‘em!’”

“‘England expects every man to do his duty!’”

“Cypress or laurel!” cried my uncle, waving the book over his head.

CHAPTER VII.

I went out, and to see Francis Vivian; for on leaving Mr. Trevanion I

was not without anxiety for my new friend’s future provision. But Vivian

was from home, and I strolled from his lodgings into the suburbs on the

other side of the river, and began to meditate seriously on the best

course now to pursue. In quitting my present occupations I resigned

prospects far more brilliant and fortunes far more rapid than I could

ever hope to realize in any other entrance into life. But I felt the

necessity, if I desired to keep steadfast to that more healthful frame

of mind I had obtained, of some manly and continuous labor, some earnest

employment. My thoughts flew back to the university; and the quiet

of its cloisters--which, until I had been blinded by the glare of the

London world, and grief had somewhat dulled the edge of my quick desires

and hopes, had seemed to me cheerless and unfaltering--took an inviting

aspect. It presented what I needed most,--a new scene, a new arena, a

partial return into boyhood; repose for passions prematurely raised;

activity for the reasoning powers in fresh directions. I had not lost my

time in London: I had kept up, if not studies purely classical, at least

the habits of application; I had sharpened my general comprehension and

augmented my resources. Accordingly, when I returned home, I resolved to

speak to my father. But I found he had forestalled me; and on entering,

my mother drew me upstairs into her room, with a smile kindled by my

smile, and told me that she and her Austin had been thinking that it

was best that I should leave London as soon as possible; that my father

found he could now dispense with the library of the Museum for some

months; that the time for which they had taken their lodgings would be

up in a few days: that the summer was far advanced, town odious, the

country beautiful,--in a word, we were to go home. There I could prepare

myself for Cambridge till the long vacation was over; and, my mother

added hesitatingly, and with a prefatory caution to spare my health,

that my father, whose income could ill afford the requisite allowance to

me, counted on my soon lightening his burden by getting a scholarship.

I felt how much provident kindness there was in all this,--even in that

hint of a scholarship, which was meant to rouse my faculties and spur

me, by affectionate incentives, to a new ambition. I was not less

delighted than grateful.

“But poor Roland,” said I, “and little Blanche,--will they come with

us?”

“I fear not,” said my mother; “for Roland is anxious to get back to his

tower, and in a day or two he will be well enough to move.”

“Do you not think, my dear mother, that, somehow or other, this lost son

of his had something to do with Roland’s illness,--that the illness was

as much mental as physical?”

“I have no doubt of it, Sisty. What a sad, bad heart that young man must

have!”

“My uncle seems to have abandoned all hope of finding him in London;

otherwise, ill as he has been, I am sure we could not have kept him at

home. So he goes back to the old tower. Poor man, he must be dull enough

there! We must contrive to pay him a visit. Does Blanche ever speak of

her brother?”

“No; for it seems they were not brought up much together,--at all

events, she does not remember him. How lovely she is! Her mother must

surely have been very handsome.”

“She is a pretty child, certainly, though in a strange style of

beauty,--such immense eyes!--and affectionate, and loves Roland as she

ought.”

And here the conversation dropped.

Our plans being thus decided, it was necessary that I should lose no

time in seeing Vivian and making some arrangement for the future. His

manner had lost so much of its abruptness that I thought I could venture

to recommend him personally to Trevanion; and I knew, after what had

passed, that Trevanion would make a point to oblige me. I resolved to

consult my father about it. As yet I had either never found or never

made the opportunity to talk to my father on the subject, he had been so

occupied; and if he had proposed to see my new friend, what answer could

I have made, in the teeth of Vivian’s cynic objections? However, as we

were now going away, that last consideration ceased to be of importance;

and, for the first, the student had not yet entirely settled back to his

books. I therefore watched the time when my father walked down to the

Museum, and, slipping my arm in his, I told him, briefly and rapidly, as

we went along, how I had formed this strange acquaintance, and how I was

now situated. The story did not interest my father quite so much as I

expected, and he did not understand all the complexities of Vivian’s

character,--how could he?--for he answered briefly, “I should think

that, for a young man apparently without a sixpence, and whose education

seems so imperfect, any resource in Trevanion must be most temporary and

uncertain. Speak to your Uncle Jack: he can find him some place, I have

no doubt,--perhaps a readership in a printer’s office, or a reporter’s

place on some journal, if he is fit for it. But if you want to steady

him, let it be something regular.”

Therewith my father dismissed the matter and vanished through the gates

of the Museum. Readership to a printer, reportership on a journal, for

a young gentleman with the high notions and arrogant vanity of Francis

Vivian,--his ambition already soaring far beyond kid gloves and a

cabriolet! The idea was hopeless; and, perplexed and doubtful, I took my

way to Vivian’s lodgings. I found him at home and unemployed, standing

by his window with folded arms, and in a state of such revery that he

was not aware of my entrance till I had touched him on the shoulder.

“Ha!” said he then, with one of his short, quick, impatient sighs, “I

thought you had given me up and forgotten me; but you look pale and

harassed. I could almost think you had grown thinner within the last few

days.”

“Oh! never mind me, Vivian; I have come to speak of yourself. I have

left Trevanion; it is settled that I should go to the University, and we

all quit town in a few days.”

“In a few days!--all! Who are ‘all’?”

“My family,--father, mother, uncle, cousin, and myself. But, my dear

fellow, now let us think seriously what is best to be done for you. I

can present you to Trevanion.”

“Ha!”

“But Trevanion is a hard, though an excellent man, and, moreover, as he

is always changing the subjects that engross him, in a month or so he

may have nothing to give you. You said you would work,--will you consent

not to complain if the work cannot be done in kid gloves? Young men who

have risen high in the world have begun, it is well known, as reporters

to the press. It is a situation of respectability, and in request, and